Joanna shook her head. ‘That isn’t me. I’m not saying I disapprove of it but it’s not me. Sitting on committees, cutting ribbons, hosting a bring-and-buy sale to get funds for the new X-ray machine at the local hospital. I mean-’ she broke off, clearly afraid she had offended me. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I think all that’s very good. But I just couldn’t do it.’
‘And your mother wants you to.’
She shook her head. ‘Actually, I don’t think she’s got that far. She just wants me to have a big, posh wedding, with lots of pictures in the Tatler. She hasn’t thought beyond that.’
‘Then why don’t you think beyond it for her? Maybe it isn’t charity work for you, or standard charity work. Maybe you could get involved with a special school, or local government. All sorts of causes will want you once you have a bit of social muscle. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sure it’s achievable.’ I had a mental image of the Tremayne brother up in the box above us, happy to marry her, without condition, to get the loot. ‘Maybe, if you think of the possibilities you might come round to the idea.’ What interests me now, thinking back to this fruitless, pompous and patronising advice, is that it didn’t occur to me to suggest that she pursue a career instead of this worthless and really rather immoral plan. Why not? There were working women then, and quite a lot of them. Perhaps it just didn’t seem a likely outcome for anyone in my gang, or were we so far out to sea that we had lost sight of land? Whatever the reason, in this, as in so many things, I would turn out to be entirely wrong.
‘You sound like Damian,’ she said, taking me by surprise.
‘Do I?’
‘Yeah. He’s always telling me to capitalise on my looks. To “go for it,” when I don’t know what I’m supposed to go for.’
‘I wasn’t aware that you knew him so well.’ Was I fated to be a grudging camp follower, staggering along in Damian’s trail?
‘Well, I do.’ She looked at me with a cool stare that told me everything. And as I returned her gaze I thought of Damian’s hand, earlier that very day, resting lightly on Serena Gresham’s pelvis, and I wondered what I had done wrong in an earlier life that I should be obliged to hear, in the span of a single afternoon, that Damian had wormed his way into the affections, if not the beds, of these women, both dream goddesses for me in their different ways; that, in short, my toy, my own invention, my action doll was apparently getting all the action. That months, or even weeks, after I had let him into the henhouse, this fox was ruling my roost. Joanna must have seen some of this in my troubled brow. ‘Do you like him?’ she asked.
I realised that this was a proper question and one that I had not addressed until now, and should have. But I chose to answer as if it were neither of these things. ‘I’m the one who introduced him to all of you.’
‘I know that, but you never sound now as if you like him.’
Was this the moment that I realised I didn’t? If so, I did not face it for quite a while after. ‘Of course I like him.’
‘Because I don’t think you’ve got much in common. He wants to get on, but he doesn’t want to fit in, but not like you and not in the way you mean. You think he’ll take advantage of the whole thing and keep in with these people, that he’ll end up marrying Lady Penelope La-dida and send his children to Eton, but you’re wrong. He can’t stand you all, really. He’s ready to break out and say goodbye to the lot of you.’ There was clearly something in the notion that excited her.
Was this news? I can’t pretend I was surprised. ‘Then perhaps you should break out together. You seem rather well suited.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘All toffee-nosed and self-important. You sound like a berk.’ Naturally, this silenced me for the next few minutes, while she continued, ‘Anyway, Damian and I, we’re not well-suited, not deep down. I thought we might be for a bit, but we’re not.’
‘You both seem to me to be very up to the minute.’ For some reason I couldn’t stop sounding like the stupid-berk-plonker she’d described. To quote my mother against myself, I was just jealous.
But the comment made her more thoughtful than indignant. ‘He does want to be part of today’s world,’ she admitted, ‘like I do. But he wants to dominate it. He wants to bully it, to take over, to push people like you around in it and be the big, bad cheese.’
‘And you don’t? Not even as a great lady, dispensing warmth and wisdom from the house at the end of the drive?’
Again, she shook her head. ‘You keep going on about that, but it’s not me. And I don’t want to be on television either. Nor married to some big-business boss with a modern flat in Mayfair and a villa in the South of France.’ The world she described so accurately in that single phrase was, of course, one she knew well and presumably also despised, along with County Society, the peerage and Damian’s imaginative vision of himself as a City whizz-kid, which was impressively ahead of its time.
‘There must be something that you do want,’ I said.
Joanna laughed again, mirthlessly. ‘Nothing I’ll find pursuing this game.’ She thought for a while. ‘I don’t mean to be rude’ – always a precursor to rudeness of the most offensive sort – ‘but you lot are all completely divorced from what’s going on around you. Damian’s right about that. You’re just not part of the Sixties at all. The fashions. The music…’ She paused, shaking her head slowly, dizzy with wonder at our irrelevance.
I felt a little indignant. ‘We play the music.’
She sighed. ‘Yes, you play the music and you dance to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but you’re still in evening dress and you’re still in some ballroom or marquee, with hot breakfast being served from two o’clock onwards by a line of footmen. That’s not what they’re singing about. That’s not what’s happening.’
‘I don’t suppose it is.’
‘The world’s changing. And I want to change with it.’
‘Darling!’ I knew Damian’s voice well enough not to need to turn round.
‘Talk of the devil,’ said Joanna.
Which I completed: ‘And there he is.’
Damian came lazily down the steps towards us and enfolded her in a hug when he drew level. ‘Come and cheer us up. You’ve spent long enough with droopy-drawers. He’ll start to think he’s in with a chance and then there’ll be no controlling him.’ He winked at me, as if inviting me to share the joke, which had, of course, as we both knew been intended as an insult. Initially, at the start of the Season he had felt the need to defer to me a little, just to make sure that I was still on side, but the need for that was long gone. He was the master now.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll come. But only if you give me a certainty for the next race.’ She smiled and started back up the steps towards the door of the box where her fan club hovered.
Damian smiled back at her, his arm still round her waist. ‘There’s only one certainty for you. And that is me.’
And with a shared laugh they were inside and lost to view.
I have often thought since of my conversation with Joanna on that bright summer’s day in our privileged seats above the crowded racetrack. It was perhaps in some ways my closest encounter with the elephant trap of Sixties fantasy, that would swallow so many of my contemporaries in the following decade. Things were changing, it is true. The post-war depression had been shaken off and the economy was booming, and many old values were being rejected. But they would be back, most of them. Not perhaps white tie or taking houses in Frinton for the summer, but certainly those that governed ambition and rapacity and greed and the lust for power. There would be fifteen years or so of chaos, then most of the old rules would be resurrected. Until now, when there is a richer elite buying houses in Belgravia than at any time since the Edwardians. But these were not the changes that Joanna and her ilk expected.