I do not know if you can still hire the waxworks for a private party. Not just a room, or a special chamber set aside for ‘entertaining,’ but the whole edifice and all it holds. I doubt it, or if you can, I imagine the price would be prohibitive to all save the super-rich, but forty years ago you could. There was less danger in it for them, of course, than there would be today. Apart from any other reason we were a more law-abiding lot. We took more care. Crime, as it might touch the middle and upper classes, was rare. People may groan when they hear that houses in the country were not locked, but they weren’t. Not if one had just gone shopping. In central London we walked home alone at night without a qualm. Shoplifting was not considered cool by anyone. It was just stealing. I don’t think mugging was sufficiently common even to qualify for a special name. And again, as I said, we were much less drunk. This did not mean, of course, that every party went without mishap.

I dined very well on the night of Terry’s ball because my hosts for the dinner beforehand, had forgotten all about it. I turned up at the door of a rather smart house in Montpelier Square, joined on the step as I waited for the occupants to respond to my ring of the bell by Lucy Dalton and a man I hardly knew, who later became the head of Schroder’s, or some such spangled operation, although you couldn’t have told his future held such promise then. The three of us stood, shifting our weight from foot to foot, until the door was at last opened by Mrs Northbrook (for that was her name), who stood there in jeans and a jersey, with a gin and tonic in her other hand. At the sight of us the blood drained from her face and we were greeted with the telling words, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s not tonight!’ The result of this was that Mr Northbrook was summoned with a scream and had to book a table for ten at an excellent place just across from Harrods, in that funny little triangle which I think used to have a grass bit in front of it, or have I made that up? As we waited, we all sat in their pretty, untidy and unready drawing room, swilling down some rather good Pouilly Fumé, which Laura Northbrook (we had moved on since the doorstep moment) had providentially found in the fridge before she joined her husband upstairs to struggle into their clothes. After such a welcome they could hardly stint with these frightful strangers wished upon them and the result was one of the best dinners I had eaten all year.

Our group was therefore in a jolly and convivial mood when we arrived at the famous entrance at about eleven that night. I suppose there must have been bouncers or someone similar to admit us, but, as I’ve already said, I have no solid memory of cards to be taken, or lists to be ticked off. The main party space had been arranged in what was then, and maybe is now, known as the Hall of Kings. The wax images of England’s Royalty had been moved back into a circle round the dance floor, cleared at the centre, but the figures were still sufficiently spaced apart for us to be able to stroll among them and photographs would later appear in the press – though not in the Tatler, which had originally been the plan – of debs and their escorts apparently standing next to Henry VIII or Queen Caroline of Anspach. I was myself snapped with a girl I knew from my Hampshire years after my father’s retirement from the diplomatic. It never, mercifully, appeared in print, but for some reason now forgotten I still have a copy of the picture. We look as if we’re talking to a startled and offended Princess Margaret.

As we know, every waxwork ever made appears to be either under sedation, or recently arrested for criminal assault and in this respect almost uniquely, the last four decades have seen little change. Except perhaps in their subject matter. We certainly all knew far more history then, that is the whole nation did, not just the privileged, the educational establishment having not yet broken the link between teaching and the imparting of knowledge; so figures like Wellington and Disraeli and Gordon of Khartoum still had a resonance that spread far beyond the elite, the only group today who might have heard of them. Nor, when it came to waxworks, was there the modern, pusillanimous terror of causing offence and I can bear witness that the Chamber of Horrors in those days was really horrible. That night it had been set aside for a discothèque, and when Lucy and I went downstairs to explore it was quite clear the authorities were a long way from worrying about whether or not someone might get hit by a falling basket of nasturtiums or a stray conker.

There were stone pillars dividing the space and at the top of each, on a little ledge, was a severed head, disfigured with some hideous atrocity. Eyes hung out of sockets, flaps of skin revealed whitened bone, one even had an iron bar thrust right through it, causing the face to look very surprised, as well it might. A long glass case held miniature examples of every torture known to man, some quite new to me, and we walked slowly down it, wondering at human cruelty. Then there were the serial killers, although I don’t believe that term was yet in use, but we certainly had them, if by some other title. George Smith, who drowned several unfortunate brides, presided over a bathtub which, we were told, was the actual one in which he had perpetrated his crimes, Dr Hawley Crippen was there and John Haig, who had met his chief victim in the Onslow Court Hotel, which I knew well since it was just down the street from where my grandmother used to live. Haig selected Mrs Durand-Deacon from among the diners in the restaurant and worked his way into her affections before he took her off to the country somewhere and plunged her into a vat of acid. Lucy and I stood, silenced by the sight of these drab and ordinary men who had caused such untold misery. Today these displays tend to have a comic, even camp, element to them which somehow protects one from the reality that what you are witnessing is true, that all these terrible things did happen, but then there was a counter-impetus, to make it as real as possible and the result was curiously haunting, even remembered now, after so long.

At last, in the very centre of the chamber we came upon a dingy curtain with an instruction not to pull it open without preparing well. I think it was forbidden to anyone under sixteen or something similarly enticing. It was the curtain that fascinated me. It was old, threadbare and dirty, like a curtain in a garden shed to hide the weedkillers from sight, and in a way this made it much more sinister than some self-advertising veil of scarlet satin. ‘Shall we?’ I said.

‘You do it. I don’t want to look.’ Lucy turned away but did not, of course, move. People say things like this, not because they intend not to look but because they do not wish to take any responsibility for the horrors that will be revealed. It is a way of enjoying base pleasures while retaining their superiority.

I pulled back the curtain. The shock was immediate and stark. Even if it was not prompted by the young woman who was hanging from an iron hook that had penetrated her vitals and on which she was apparently writhing in vivid, screaming agony. This, I could handle. What almost made me cry out in pain was the sight of Damian holding Serena in a fierce embrace and quite obviously plunging his tongue so far into her mouth that she must have had trouble breathing. Although I cannot pretend that she looked, even to me, as if she were resisting his advances. Far from it. She clawed at his back, she ran her fingers through his hair, she squeezed her body against his, until she seemed to be attempting somehow to crush the pair of them into one single being. ‘No wonder the curtain carried a warning,’ said Lucy and they froze, then looked across at us. I desperately searched for a phrase that would contain my rage at Damian, my disappointment in Serena and my contempt for the new morality all at once. It was too ambitious. I might have been able to make up a combination word in German, but English has its limitations.