‘Really?’

She did a double take. Clearly she was puzzled by my slowness. ‘You remember my party? When he flattened Andrew Summersby? And added about two thousand pounds to the bill? Which was quite a lot of money then, I can tell you.’ But she was not made angry at the recollection. Quite the reverse. I could see that.

‘Of course I remember. I also remember your attempts to pretend he’d been invited. I rather loved you for that.’

She nodded. ‘It was hopeless, of course.’ She smiled like a naughty, little elf at the thought of her long-ago gallantry. ‘My mother was still living in some fantasy kingdom in her own head. She thought if she allowed one young man, who had behaved perfectly all evening, to stay on without an invitation, somehow Rome would fall. Needless to say, her intransigence made us ridiculous.’

‘You weren’t ridiculous.’

She flushed with pleasure. ‘No? I hope not.’

‘How is your mother? I was always so terrified of her.’

‘You wouldn’t be now.’

‘She’s alive, then?’

‘Yes. She’s alive. We might see her if you’ve time for a walk after lunch.’

I nodded. ‘I’d like that.’ There was a lull and I could hear the sound of a bee trapped somewhere against a window, that familiar buzzing thump. Not for the first time I was struck by the strangeness of this kind of talk, with people you once knew well and now do not know at all. ‘She must be pleased with the way things turned out for you.’ In saying this I was perfectly sincere. The Grand Duchess had been so determined on a sensational marriage for her daughter that William Holman must have been a crushing disappointment, however necessary he was at the time. Little did either she, or we, know that he would deliver a way of life that would far outshine the promises of the eldest sons on offer in 1968.

She looked at me pensively. ‘Yes and no,’ she muttered.

Before I could comment further, William strode into the room, right hand extended towards me. He was better-looking than I remembered him, tall and thin, and his greying hair giving him a sort of blond, youthful appearance. ‘How nice to see you,’ he said and I noticed that, unusually after such a time, his voice was more changed than his face. It had become important, as if he were addressing the boardroom of a corporation, or a village hall full of grateful tenants. ‘How are you?’ We shook hands and exchanged the usual platitudes about Long Time No See, while Dagmar fetched him a drink. He looked down as he took it. ‘Isn’t there any lemon?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘Why not?’ Given that I was more or less a stranger to him, despite our protestations of delight in each other’s company, William’s tone to his spouse was oddly and uncomfortably severe.

‘They must have forgotten to buy any.’ She spoke as if she were locked in a cell with a potentially violent felon and was trying to attract the attention of the guards.

‘They? Who are “they”? You mean “you.” You have forgotten to ask them to buy any.’ He sighed wearily, saddened by the pathetic mediocrity of his wife’s abilities. ‘Oh well. Never mind.’ He sipped the drink, wrinkled his nose with displeasure and turned back to me. ‘So, what brings you here?’

I explained about the charity, since I was not, naturally, about to go into the true reason. He looked at me with that face of faux concern that people use when listening to hard luck stories in the street. ‘Of course, this is a marvellous cause, as I said to Dagmar when I first heard about it, and I admire you terrifically for getting involved…’

‘But?’

‘But I don’t think it’s one for us.’ He paused, expecting me to come in and say that of course I understood, but I waited, without comment, until he felt sufficiently wrong-footed to elucidate. ‘I don’t want Dagmar to be held captive by all that. Obviously, the position of her family was a very interesting one, but it’s finished. She’s Lady Holman now. There’s no need for her to cash in on some bogus title from the past, when she has a perfectly good one in the modern world. This kind of thing, vital as it might be,’ he gave a smile but it did not reach his eyes, ‘seems to me to take her backwards, not forwards.’

I turned to Dagmar for a comment, but she was silent. ‘I don’t see her position as bogus,’ I said. ‘She’s a member of a ruling house.’

‘An ex-ruling house.’

‘They were on the throne until three years before she was born.’

‘Which was a long time ago.’

This seemed needlessly ungallant. ‘There are plenty of people living in exile who look to her brother for leadership.’

‘Oh, I see. You think we’ll all attend Feodor’s coronation? I hope he can get the time off work.’ He laughed suddenly, with a kind of sneer in the sound, as he brought his face round to Dagmar’s, that she might fully register his contempt. It was intolerable. ‘I’m afraid I find all that stuff is just an excuse for a few snobs to bow and curtsey and gee up their dinner parties.’ He shook his head slowly, as if he were making a reasonable point. ‘They should pay more attention to what’s going on around them today.’ He sipped his drink to punctuate the finality of his argument. In other words there could be no further discussion on the subject.

I turned to Dagmar. ‘Do you agree?’

She took a breath. ‘Well-’

‘Of course she agrees. Now, when’s lunch?’ I saw then that the real burden of William’s song was that for years he had endured being treated as Dagmar’s moment of madness, the shaming mèsalliance that had overtaken the Moravian dynasty, and now he didn’t have to put up with it any more. Things had changed. Today, he was the one with the money, he was the one with the power and weren’t we going to know about it. Worse than this, having triumphed, he could no longer tolerate Dagmar having any sort of position of her own. She must have no value at all other than as his wife, no podium where she might shine independent of his glory. In short, he was a bully. I understood now why the Grand Duchess’s approval had been equivocal.

Luncheon was a curious event, providing as it did an endless series of opportunities for Dagmar to be publicly humiliated. ‘What on earth is this?’ ‘Is it supposed to taste burnt?’ ‘Why are we eating with nursery cutlery?’ ‘Those flowers deserve a decent burial.’ ‘Shouldn’t there be a sauce with this or did you ask for it to be dry?’ If I had been Dagmar, I would have stood up, broken a large plate over his head and left him forever. And that was before we got to the pudding. But I know only too well that this kind of wife-battering, for that is what we were dealing with, destroys the will to resist and, to my sorrow, she simply took it. She even gave credence to his complaints by apologising for shortcomings that were entirely fictional. ‘I am sorry. It should be hotter than this,’ she would say. Or, ‘You’re right. I should have asked them to seal it first.’ The limit came when William took a bite of the little crêpes Suzette that had been brought in and spat it back onto his plate. ‘Jesus!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘What the hell is this made of? Soap?’

‘I don’t understand you.’ I spoke carefully. ‘It’s delicious.’

‘Not where I come from.’ He gave a merry laugh, as if we were all enjoying a jolly joke.

‘And where do you come from, exactly?’ I said. ‘I forget.’ I stared at him and he held my gaze for a second. Behind his head the housekeeper glanced quickly at a maid who had been helping to serve to check if she’d registered this exchange. I could see them silently acknowledge that they both had. In fact, they were nearly smiling. However, whether or not it was entertaining for the staff to witness the tyrant brought low, it was snobbish and self-defeating of me to do it. William, red in the face with fury, was on the brink of ordering me out of the house, which would have rendered my journey completely pointless. Mercifully, he was never one to allow his anger to undo him. Years of tricky negotiations in the City had made him cleverer than that. And I would guess the thought of the story going round London, coming from someone who was perhaps better known than he (not richer, not more successful, just a little better known) was something he was not prepared to risk. Of course, my chief crime in his eyes wasn’t that I had been rude to him and failed to take his part. It was that I seemed to find his wife more congenial and more interesting than he was, which was even worse than my reminding him of the long journey he had traversed since we first met. I knew he made a point of editing every visitor who entered the house, so presumably this kind of challenge seldom, if ever, happened. He was out of practice when it came to being contradicted.