With a deep and deliberately audible breath, he put down his napkin, painstakingly rumpled, and smiled. ‘The awful thing is I have to run. Will you excuse me?’ I saw, to my amusement, he was trying to be ‘gracious.’ It was not in his gift. ‘I’m at home on Fridays, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have to work. If only it did. Dagmar will see you off. Won’t you, my darling? It’s been such a treat to catch up again.’ I smiled and thanked him, as if I had not just been instructed to leave, and we both pretended everything was fine. Then he was gone. Dagmar and I stared at each other, her little, crumpled face and narrow shoulders suddenly making her look like a picture of some starving child in war-torn Berlin. Or Edith Piaf. Towards the end.

‘Do you feel like a walk after that?’ she said. ‘I don’t blame you if you want to get away. I won’t be offended.’

‘Hasn’t he just told me to get off his land?’

She made a little pout. ‘So?’

‘Don’t make him angry on my behalf.’

‘He’s always angry. What’s the difference?’

The gardens at Bellingham had been tidied, replanted and restored to an approximation of their Edwardian appearance, with a large walled garden and separate ‘rooms’ containing statues surrounded by box hedges or roses in neat and tidy beds. It was all very nice, but the park was something more. Survivors of the original build, the giant oak trees, ancient and venerable, gave the whole place a sober beauty, a gravitas lacking in the quaint gardens or the newly refurbished interior. I looked around. ‘You’re very lucky.’

‘Am I?’

‘In this, anyway.’

She also stared about her, admiring the stately trees and the roll of the hills surrounding us. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am lucky in this.’ We walked on for a bit. ‘How was he?’ she said suddenly, out of the blue. I did not immediately understand her. ‘Damian. You told me you’d seen him recently.’

‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’

She nodded. ‘I heard that. I was hoping you’d tell me it wasn’t true.’

‘Well, it is.’ Again, we were silent as we crested a shallow slope with a wonderful view across the park towards the house.

‘Did you know I was mad about him?’ she said.

I was becoming used to surprises. ‘I knew you’d had a bit of a walkout. But I didn’t know it was the Real Thing.’

‘Well, it was. For me, anyway.’

‘Then you were very discreet.’

She chuckled sadly. ‘There wasn’t much to be discreet about.’

‘He talked of you the other day,’ I said.

At this, her colour altered before my gaze and she raised a hand to her cheek. ‘Did he?’ she whispered. ‘Did he really?’ It was very touching.

I could see we were at last approaching the discussion I had come for, but I wanted to progress it carefully. ‘He just mentioned that you and he had been out together a few times, which I hadn’t known before.’

Released by the knowledge that somehow she was still alive in Damian’s imagination, her words came pouring out. ‘I would have married him, you know.’ I stopped. This was astonishing. We seemed to have gone from nought to a hundred miles an hour in less than two minutes. Damian had given the impression of a one- night stand, but, for Dagmar it was Tristan and Isolde. How often it seems a pair of lovers can be engaged in two entirely different relationships.

She caught my expression and nodded vigorously, as if I were going to contradict her. It was an extraordinary transformation and the first time I had ever seen her take the lead in anything approaching an argument. ‘I’d have done it if he’d asked me. I would!’

I raised my arms in surrender. ‘I believe you,’ I said.

Which made her smile and relax again, knowing by my action I was friend not foe. ‘My mother would have thrown herself out of an upper window, of course, but I was ready for her. And I wasn’t as mad as all that. I knew he’d do well. That was what I loved about him. He was part of the world that was coming.’ She glanced at me. ‘Not the world we thought was coming, all that peace and love and flowers-in-your-hair. Not that. The real world that crept secretly towards us through the seventies and arrived with a bang in the eighties. The ambition, the rapacity, I knew that another rich oligarchy would be back in place before I died and I was sure Damian would belong to it.’

A strange feature of growing older is the discovery that everyone who was young alongside you was just as incapable of expressing their thoughts as you yourself were. Somehow, in youth, most of us think that we are misunderstood but everyone else is stupid. I realised, with some sorrow, that I could have been much, much friendlier with Dagmar than I had been, if I’d only realised what was going on inside her little head. ‘So, what happened? You couldn’t convince your mother?’

‘That wasn’t the reason. She would have given in if I’d screamed loudly enough. After all, in the end she let me marry William who had no background at all, just because she thought he might make money.’

‘What was it, then?’

She sighed, still sorry. ‘He didn’t want it.’ She frowned, anxious to qualify her statement. ‘I mean he liked me a bit and he was quite amused by all the… stuff. But he never fancied me. Not really.’ Of course, the sad truth was that none of us had fancied her. Not, at any rate, what Nanny would describe as in that way, she was too much of a waif, too much the loveless, pitiful child, but at her words I was struck with a wave of pity for our younger selves, bursting with unrequited love, as all we plain ones had been. Aching to tell, somehow believing that if only the object of our passions could be brought to understand the force of our love, they would yield to it, yet knowing all the time that this is not so and they would not.

Dagmar hadn’t finished. ‘There was a moment when I thought I could have him. At one particular point I thought I could promise him everything he was doing the Season to get. Social…’ She hesitated. She had been so carried away that it had led her into territory that made her awkward. Her timid diffidence came flooding back. ‘You know… social whatever… I thought he might want it enough to take me as part of the deal.’ She looked across. ‘I suppose that sounds very desperate.’

‘It sounds very determined. I’m surprised it didn’t work.’ I was. Whether he found her attractive or not, I would have thought the Damian Baxter of those years would have leaped at the chance of a princess bride.

Now it was her turn to look at me pityingly. ‘You never understood him. Even before that terrible dinner in Portugal. You thought he wanted everything you had. More than you had. Which he did, in a way. But at some moment during the year we spent together he realised he only wanted it on his own terms or not at all.’

‘Perhaps that’s what you admire in men. William certainly has it on his own terms.’ Which could have been cruel but she did not take it as such.

Instead, she shook her head to mark the difference in her mind between the two men. ‘William is a little man. He married me to be a big man. Then, when he had made his own money and bought a knighthood, and generally became, as he thought, big, he didn’t want me to be big as well any more. He wanted me to be little, so he could be even bigger.’ I cannot tell you how sad these words were, as I listened to her far-back, 1950s Valerie Hobson voice issuing from her minute frame. She looked so breakable. ‘He thinks as long as he ridicules my birth and criticises my appearance, and yawns whenever I open my mouth, he can demonstrate that I am the one who needs him and not the other way round.’

‘He still buys portraits of your ancestors.’

‘He doesn’t have much choice. If we waited for his to come up we’d have to live with bare walls.’ It was nice to hear her being waspish.

‘Why don’t you leave him?’ It is hard to explain quite why, but this was not as intrusive a question at the time as it seems on the page.