She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t entirely know. For a long time it was the children, but they’re not children now. So I don’t know.’

‘How many are there?’

‘Three. Simon’s the eldest. He’s thirty-seven, working in the City. Gone.’

‘Married?’

‘Not yet. I used to wonder if he might be gay. I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t think he is. I suspect it’s more that he’s been put off the institution by his parents’ example. Then there’s Clarissa, who’s happily married to a successful and very nice paediatrician, I’m glad to say, even if William doesn’t approve.’

‘Why not?’

‘He would have preferred a stupid peer to a clever doctor.’ She sighed. ‘And finally our youngest, Richard, who’s only twenty-four and starting out in corporate entertainment.’ She paused, reflecting on her own words. ‘Don’t the young have funny jobs now?’

‘Not like our day.’

She looked at me. ‘Well, you went into a funny job. None of us thought you’d make a living. Did you realise that?’

‘I suspected it. Just as I always expected you to do something surprising.’ I only said this to cheer her up, but in a way it may have been true. To me, she had been a bit of a wild card, so retiring, so minor key, with her giggles and her long silences, that I used sometimes to have a sense that there was a completely different person living inside this shy and weeny head, even if I never investigated it at the time. I half expected the day to come when she’d break loose. Somehow it didn’t seem possible that she would just slide into that Sloane life of buying school uniforms and cooking for the freezer in some provincial Aga kitchen.

Obviously, Dagmar found the idea of herself as a career girl rather flattering. ‘Really? Very few of us did anything very spectacular. Rebecca Dawnay composes film music now and didn’t Carla Wakefield open a restaurant in Paris? Or am I muddling her with someone?’ She was combing her brain, ‘I know one of the London editors is a former deb, but I forget which one…’ she sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s about it.

‘Even so.’ I had quite recovered from my initial bewilderment at her unfamiliar appearance. Now Dagmar looked like herself again and it brought the memories rushing back. ‘Do you remember in Portugal, on the first night? When we took a picnic to that haunted castle on the hill and talked about life? You sounded like someone plotting a break-out. I expect you’ve forgotten.’

‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’ She stopped walking, as if to punctuate her sentence. ‘I think you’re right and I was planning something of the kind. But I got pregnant.’ We had all known this, of course, in the unspoken way such news was received in those distant days, so I didn’t comment. ‘William asked me to marry him and, whatever you think of him now, I was pretty relieved at the time I can tell you. Anyway, then Simon arrived and that was that.’

We were nearly back at the house by this time and I needed some answers. ‘When did you give up on Damian?’

Her muscles tensed and her face took on the look of a nervous chipmunk. I realised the question, or at least the return to 1968, was not at all easy for her, but there was no way round it. I waited while she composed her reply. ‘I gave up on him when he didn’t propose to me and William did.’ She hesitated. ‘The truth is, though I hardly know how to say it,’ she blushed again, but clearly she had decided that she was too far in to back out now, ‘either of them could have been the baby’s father. I was going out with William at the time, but Damian and I slept together on the night we arrived in Estoril. I remember it very well because it was the last time that I thought I just might get him. Then, later that same night, he told me it wasn’t going to happen. Ever. That he was fond of me, but…’ She shrugged and suddenly the lonely, heartbroken girl of forty years before was there, walking beside us in the park. ‘After that, when my period was late, I knew that it was either William or the abortion clinic. It’s odd to think of it, given how William behaves to me now, but I cannot describe my relief when he did pop the question.’

‘I’m sure.’ I was.

She gave a sudden shiver. ‘I should have worn a jersey,’ she said. And then, with a shy glance. ‘I don’t know why I told you all that.’

‘Because I was interested,’ I said. Actually, this is quite true. Especially in England. Very few Englishmen ever ask women anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbours on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So if a man does express any curiosity about the woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

We were passing the stable block, which was a few hundred yards away from the main house. It was much later, perhaps mid-eighteenth century, and the wall of the yard ended in a rather handsome lodge, built for some trusty steward or perhaps a madly superior coachman. Before we’d gone a few more steps the front door opened and an old woman came out with a wave. She was wearing the tweeds and scarf of a standard County mother. ‘Dagmar told me you were coming,’ she called over the grass separating us. ‘I wanted to come out and say hello.’

I stared at the wrinkled, bony creature walking towards me. Could this really be the majestic Grand Duchess of my youth? Or had her head been transplanted on to another’s body? Where was the weight, in every sense? Where were the charisma and the fear she had inspired? Vanished entirely. She approached and I bowed. ‘Ma’am,’ I murmured, but she shook her head and pulled me towards her for a dry kiss on both my cheeks.

‘Never mind all that,’ she said gaily and slipped her arm through mine. This simple action in itself was a marker of how much had vanished from the world in the years since we last met. My sentimental side approved it as a friendly and relaxing alteration. But, all things considered, I suspect that more had been lost than gained for both of us. She looked across at her daughter. ‘Is Simon here yet? He told me he was trying to be with you for lunch.’

‘Obviously he couldn’t get away. He won’t be long.’ Dagmar smiled at her mother, this cosy, easy pensioner who had stolen the identity of the warlord of my early years. ‘We’ve been talking about Damian Baxter.’

‘Damian Baxter.’ The Grand Duchess rolled her eyes to heaven, then smiled at me. ‘If you knew the rows we had over that young man.’

‘So I gather.’

‘And now he’s richer than anyone living. So I suppose he’s had the last laugh.’ She paused. ‘But anyway, whatever she’s told you, it wasn’t my fault that it didn’t happen. Not in the end. You can’t blame me.’

‘Whose fault was it?’

‘His. Damian’s.’ Her voice had the finality of the Lutine Bell. ‘We all thought he was a climber, an adventurer, a man on the make. And so he was, in his own fashion.’ She turned back to me to wave a pointed finger at my nose. ‘And you brought him among us. How we mothers used to curse you for it.’ She laughed merrily. ‘But you see…’ Suddenly her tone was becoming almost dreamy as she clambered back through the lost decades, searching for the right words. ‘He wasn’t after what we had. Not really. I didn’t see that at the time. He wanted to experience it, to witness it, but only as a traveller from another land. He didn’t want to live in the past where he had no position. He wanted to live in the future where he could be anything he wished. And he was quite right. It was where he belonged.’ She looked back at her daughter, now walking behind us. ‘Dagmar had nothing useful to give him that would make life easier there.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Maybe if he’d loved her it would have been different. But without love, there wasn’t enough in it to tempt him.’

I was struck by Damian’s journey in that year of years. At the start he had been thrilled by his first invitation from Fat Georgina. By the end he had turned down the hand of a perfectly genuine princess. Not many can say that. There was a noise of footsteps, and around a laurel-sheltered corner of the drive William came almost goose-stepping towards us in a gleaming new Barbour and spotless Hunter gumboots. He caught sight of me and frowned. By his reckoning I should have been safely back on the road by then. ‘Here’s William,’ I said brightly. His mother-in-law looked at him with disdain and in silence. ‘It must have been a relief that he stepped up to the mark when Dagmar needed him.’ Obviously, I had spoken without thinking.