By the time I’d concluded my ruminations the tide of the party had separated us. Tarquin, having listened to the exchange with glee, could not decide whether to turn our hostess’s ribbing into a way to belittle me and thereby derive some fun from my failed romance of long ago, or whether the mere fact that I had been to Gresham sufficiently often for Lady Claremont even to be aware that I was in love with her daughter and to welcome me now as an old friend entitled me to special handling. I left him to his indecisive review. Across the room, Jennifer had unearthed somebody they actually knew and seemed to be chatting quite merrily, and Bridget, as usual making a virtue of being out of her depth, was sulking, so I was essentially alone again in this, the haunting, painful setting of my earlier self.
Clutching my glass, nodding and smiling, I pushed back through the crush into the oval anteroom. We had passed through it quickly on our way in but, as I remembered so well, it was a lovely place, not huge but delicate and inviting, upholstered in a light and feminine chintz, and filled with light and feminine things. In this house it served as the boudoir and Lady Claremont’s desk sat against one wall, a beautifully carved bureau plat, its surface littered with papers and letters and lists of things-to-do. I looked idly at a set of small Flemish paintings depicting the five senses, painted by David Teniers the younger some time in the 1650s. I had always admired them and I greeted them now like old friends. How delicate they were, how fine the detail, how strange that, since the paint first dried, not one, not two, but twenty generations had been born, had planned, had dreamed, had coped with disappointment and had died. I wandered over to the dining-room doors. They were closed but I turned the handle and pushed one open, startling a maid who was finishing laying the table. ‘More than fourteen for breakfast?’ I smiled to show that I came in peace.
She relaxed a little, answering in a rich, warm Yorkshire accent, ‘We’re nineteen tomorrow. And that’s with two of the ladies staying in bed.’
‘I remember the rule was always that fourteen or under ate breakfast in the small dining room. More than that and it was laid in here.’
I had succeeded in catching her attention. In fact, she was quite curious. She looked at me more closely. ‘Did you used to stay here, then?’
‘I did. At one time. It’s reassuring to know that nothing’s changed.’ Actually, this was true. It was reassuring to find so much was still the same here, in this isolated appendix of my life, when almost everything had changed elsewhere. Although I later learned there was an element of illusion in this and that the estate, along with the country, had taken a downturn during the Seventies, successfully reversed from the mid-Eighties onwards in the hands of a new and gifted manager.
In fact, this happy story was true for many families I had known before their temporary fall. It should have been true for all of them, really, had not too many succumbed to that most dangerous of modern fashions among the born-rich, the desire to prove, to themselves and to everyone else, that their money is a reflection of their own brains and talent. The advantage of this is that it obviates the need to feel grateful to their forebears, or obliged to respect their successful, self-made acquaintance, who might otherwise demand some kind of moral superiority over those whose enviable position owes all to the efforts of others. The disadvantage, of course, is that it is not true. In denial of which, rich but silly aristocrats up and down the land will blithely launch into schemes they do not understand and investments that have no real worth, on the word of advisors without either judgement or merit, until their ignorance inevitably overturns them. I could name at least twenty men of my acquaintance who would be worth many millions more than they are if they had never left their bedrooms and come downstairs. And more than a few who began with everything and ended up with literally almost nothing. In this field I suspect that women, more pragmatic as a rule and less needy of self-worth when it comes to having a ‘head for business,’ have generally proved more sensible. Certainly, Lady Claremont would never have allowed her dearly loved spouse to get his hands on the wheel, or even near it, when it came to steering the Gresham inheritance.
‘Mummy shouldn’t have said that. I hope she hasn’t driven you in here.’ Her voice could always unnerve me. ‘If you were even a bit in love with me I find it tremendously flattering.’ That Serena should be so near to me was a joy, that she should have heard her mother’s words was a nightmare, so it was with mixed emotions that I turned to find her looking at me through the door from the middle of the anteroom.
‘At the time, I always rather hoped no one had guessed.’
‘I didn’t at the beginning.’
‘Until Portugal.’
‘Before. But never mind.’ Unsurprisingly, she didn’t want to be drawn into that one. ‘Of course, Mummy told me afterwards that she knew when you first stayed here, but I suppose one’s mother is bound to be more aware of these things.’
‘Yours is.’ We both smiled. ‘It was kind of her not to bring up the whole Estoril thing, seeing it was the last time I saw them.’
‘Was it really?’
‘I might have glimpsed them across the room at a summer party at Christie’s or something, but I haven’t spoken to them properly between that night and this.’
She shrugged gently. ‘Well, it was ages ago.’ I wondered at her. As I have already mentioned, I had run into Serena occasionally over the years, so there was no four-decade gap to be leaped, but the sight of her was always an amazement. To start with, she seemed to have aged one year for every ten that the rest of us had gone through. In fact, she was hardly changed at all. A few fine lines at the sides of her eyes, a shallow crease by her mouth, her hair a slightly paler colour, nothing more. ‘Are you all here for the weekend?’
‘Most of us. Mummy made it a three-line whip. In case the whole thing went belly-up and we had to save the show. But the organisers were much better this year than last.’
‘Is Mary with you? And Rupert?’
‘Mary is. She was in the hall when I last saw her. Poor old Rupert’s in Washington. He’s been posted there for the last three years.’
‘Washington? What an honour.’
‘An honour and a bore. We’re aching for him to get something in Paris or Dublin or anywhere he can get home from for the weekend.’
‘What about Peniston? Have you brought him with you?’ Serena had two children. The elder, Mary, whom I was doubtless about to see again after many years, was now married to the first secretary in the Washington embassy, Rupert Wintour, and was well on her way to being an ambassadress. When a child, she was ordinary in every way, and horribly like her father to look at, so I confess I suspected her husband’s motives when I first heard about the marriage. His father, Sir Something Wintour, was an entrepreneur and his mother a former beautician, so the eldest child of an earl seemed like a suspiciously welcome choice, but once I had met him I felt I’d been unjust to Rupert. He was quite a bright spark. Serena’s other child was the essential boy, Peniston, a little younger than his sister, whom I had seen occasionally in their house in Lansdowne Crescent, just as our friendship was petering out.
‘Peniston’s here but he arrived under his own steam, since he’s married and has children of his own. These days I’m a grandmother three times over.’
‘I need proof.’
She smiled pleasantly, used to compliments. ‘Helena’s come with William and the boys. You must say hello. And Anthony. I’m not sure where Venetia’s got to. Mummy says she’s in New York, but I got a card last week from Singapore. You know what she’s like.’ She rolled her eyes ceilingwards, with a tolerant laugh. There were three girls, starting with Serena herself and a brother who was, of course, heir to the kingdom. Helena, the second Gresham sister, had married an amiable landowning banking baronet in a neighbouring county, a union that had satisfied her mother, if it did not send her into ecstasies. However the youngest sister, Venetia, had defied the family by accepting the proposal of a pop impresario, an episode I remember only too well. The Claremonts had absolutely refused to countenance it at first. But to everyone’s surprise, since she was not seen as particularly strong or rebellious, Venetia had stuck to her guns and in the end they caved in rather than endure the scandal of a wedding without their presence. As my own father used to say, ‘Never provide material for a story.’ Venetia was the winner in the end. Her husband made an immense fortune in the music industry and now she was richer than, or at least as rich as, any of them but the family exacted its revenge by continuing to patronise her, as if her life had been a trivial and wasteful mass of nothing, up to the present day.