‘Any ideas for the two thirty?’ said Damian and I woke up.

‘Don’t ask me,’ I said. ‘I only ever bet on names that remind me of something else entirely.’

‘Wildest Dreams,’ said Serena, speaking into my hidden longings. ‘Fletcher gave me a list and he was sure about Wildest Dreams. Then he says You’ll Be Lucky for the Gold Cup.’ Was there no horse running whose name did not encapsulate the hopelessness of my desires?

‘Who’s Fletcher?’ asked Damian.

‘Our groom at Gresham.’ It was as if that simple sentence, carrying as it did in the few words it was made of the absolute divide between her life and his, flung him away from her side.

‘Joanna Langley’s waving at us.’ He pulled his arm off Serena’s flank, and started to walk across the grass towards the group centred on Joanna’s miniskirted and lustrous form. I took his place, with Minna still loitering rather discontentedly on my other side.

‘Did you see that nonsense at the gate?’ Minna was squinting into the sun to get a clearer view of them.

‘No, but I heard about it.’ Serena smiled. ‘It sounded quite funny but I don’t really see the point.’

‘She’ll be all over the papers tomorrow,’ I said.

I must have sounded like a complete idiot. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But what does she want from it? What does she get out of it?’

‘Fame?’

‘But fame for doing what? Taking off her trousers? It might make her famous for being famous but what’s the point of that?’ Serena was bewildered by the choice that Joanna had made at the gate that morning, and as far as I recall, Minna and I just nodded and agreed with her. Perhaps it was what we both thought, or if it wasn’t, it was what we all knew we were supposed to think.

The idea of being famous for being famous, a phrase we often used, was a risible and pejorative dismissal in those distant days, but the concept was, of course, a harbinger of our own time. The current fame mania is often mistakenly described as the Cult of Celebrity, but this at least is not new. There were always famous people and they were always interesting to the public. Nor, as again the argument goes today, were they all famous for doing wonderful things. There have always been well-known rakes and showgirls and criminals and worthless stowaways among the great, but as a rule they developed personalities that justified their stardom. What is genuinely new is the Cult of Non-Celebrity, the celebration as if they were famous of men and women who are perfectly ordinary. The oxymoron of the unknown celebrity really is a modern innovation. Maybe it was a sense of this coming fashion, this dawning interest in fame for fame’s sake that would inevitably open the gates of Valhalla wider, that prompted the likes of Mrs Langley to exploit its possibilities. But there was a confusion at the core of her planning and that was in her intended audience. She was playing to the wrong gallery. The upper classes have never been attracted by fame. At least, they may sometimes enjoy famous visitors to their galaxy, but they do not see it as an appropriate attribute among their own kind. Even now, they don’t need it to stand out in the crowd, and they do not, as a rule, see the point of it for any other reason. Maybe the modern heirs will occasionally employ these vulgar methods to promote their interests, but there still remains a moral obligation, even among this younger, savvier group, to pretend that publicity is invariably demeaning and worthless.

Joanna herself understood this fundamental truth, which her mother had not grasped. She saw that the more she became a darling of the press, the more she was invited on to Top of the Pops, or whatever it was in those days, the less welcome she would be in the world to which her mother was so wrong-headedly anxious for her to belong. I am afraid that poor, misguided Mrs Langley genuinely believed that her beautiful daughter was improving her chances of an eligible husband, and a place in Society, by these shenanigans when, in fact, she was diminishing them to the point of invisibility.

I learned this from a conversation I had with Joanna that same day, when I decided to take up her invitation and make my way to the Langleys’ box. This decision came after a slight altercation with Minna, and in the end she went off alone to meet her father for tea while I retreated to the door in the wall, guarded like all the Enclosure entrances by those charming chaps in their obligatory bowler hats. My disagreement with Minna cannot have been sinister as I had dinner with them all later that evening, but perhaps it contributed to the end of our mini-romance. I have never been very good at people who cannot step out of their own setting even for a moment, whatever that setting might be.

Once through the door, I was suddenly propelled into the middle of the other Ascot and in some ways flung forward into the future, into our present day. Toughs in shiny suits, or with no jacket at all, jostled past with their women gaily, if sometimes surprisingly, adorned as I pushed on towards the covered escalator that would take me up to the floor where the boxes could be found in this different and even uglier stand. Here and there, dotted about in the crowd, there were fellow Enclosure members battling their way to and fro, and there was some joshing, wolf whistles and the like, to mark the difference in our costumes. This rapids-running element of journeying from the Enclosure to the boxes would in fact continue until the end of fashionable Ascot, but it grew a little less friendly as the years went on. Various politicians of every hue saw class warfare as so important a weapon in manipulating public opinion that they could not resist inflaming it. Even today, we are constantly encouraged to believe in a capitalist economy, but to despise and revile those who profit from it. It is an odd philosophical position, to say the least, a dysfunctional theory that has contributed to a largely dysfunctional society, but as I say, in the 1960s it was only just starting. Breaking down class barriers was still seen as a happy thing then, so the jokes at one’s expense were, on the whole, good-natured.

The boxes at Ascot have always occupied a kind of limbo position when it comes to the whole event. There are boxes set aside for major trainers and owners, and of course I do not mean these. Their usefulness is logical and credible, but those people were always present at Ascot as part of the racing fraternity and never because of fashion. They will continue to be at the meetings, long after the beau monde has moved on. But for those who only went to Ascot for the fun and frolic, a day out with some horses in the background, the boxes were always faintly unconvincing. To start with it was not necessary to get an Enclosure badge to rent or visit one, and in the old days, when the authorities exerted some control over whom they admitted to the Enclosure, the boxes could become the haven of the socially not-quites, those divorced actresses and grinning, motor dealers who were snubbed by the Old Guard.

The second problem was that most of them were simply minute. You went through a door in a concrete gallery, to be admitted to an itsy-bitsy entrance hall, with a little kitchenette from a 1950s caravan on one side. This led into the space for dining and generally living it up, which was roughly the size of a hotel bathroom, and beyond was the balcony, where two people could just about stand side by side on two or three steps. All in all, the average box was about as capacious and gracious as a lift in Selfridges. But to the mighty ones who are socially insecure, a much larger group than many people realise, they offered a chance to enjoy the race meeting on their own terms, in a place which might be modest but where they were king, instead of spending the day detecting sneers and slights in the behaviour of the Enclosure crowd that surrounded them. I would guess this was the appeal for Joanna’s father, and that Alfred Langley was prepared to accompany his wife and daughter, but only on the condition that he could have a box to hide in for most of the day.