But Peter had been tucking into his excellent claret for quite a while by this time and clearly some sort of dam within him had at last given way. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I always enjoy it. Every time you produce it. Which is more or less every time anyone is unlucky enough to dine in this house.’ At which moment, with slightly unfortunate timing, one of the maids arrived at Lady Gregson’s left, which placed her next to Peter’s chair. She was holding a platter of what looked like white cheesecake. ‘Oh God, darling.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Not this again.’
‘I love cheesecake.’ Lady Gregson’s tone was now becoming harder, as if she, sensing a whiff of rebellion, were determined to impose order on the gathering whether we liked it or not. She was the kind of woman who would have been very useful at Lucknow.
‘What about the strawberries?’ Peter was now staring straight at his wife.
‘We’re having cheesecake.’ Billie’s voice had all the animation of the Speaking Clock. ‘I didn’t think we’d want the strawberries.’
‘But I bought them for tonight.’
‘Very well.’ There was a quality of tension in the air that reminded me of one of those films, so popular in that era, about the threat of nuclear war, a universal obsession of the time. The Big Scene was always centred on whether or not the President of Somewhere was going to press the button and start it. Having let the moment resonate, Billie spoke again: ‘Mrs Carter, please fetch the strawberries.’
The poor woman didn’t know what to make of this. She looked at her employer as if she couldn’t be serious. ‘But they’re-’
Billie cut her off with a raised palm, nodding her head like a fatal signal from a Roman emperor. ‘Just bring the strawberries, please, Mrs Carter.’
Of course, there are times when this sort of thing comes as a relief. As most of us know, there is nothing that will cheer a dreary dinner party more than a quarrel between a husband and wife. But this incident seemed to have acquired an intensity that made it slightly inappropriate as guest-pleasing fare. It was all too raw and real. At least we did not have long to wait for the next act. In the interim the rest of the company had taken the disputed cheesecake, but nobody had begun to eat. I saw Sam give a quick wink to Carina and, on my left, Terry’s chair was beginning to shake with smothered giggles. Apart from these slight diversions we just sat there, divining that, in the words of the comic routine, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Mrs Carter reentered the room and went to Lady Gregson’s side with a bowl of strawberries, but as she began to help herself it was absolutely clear to everyone present that the fruit was completely frozen, like steel bullets, and had just been removed from the freezer. The wretched woman dug in the spoon and put them on to her plate, where they fell with a metallic noise like large ball bearings. Mrs Carter moved to Peter, who carefully spooned out a big, rattling helping. Clatter, clatter, clatter, they sounded as he heaped them on to his plate. On went Mrs Carter to the next guest and the next, no one was passed by, no one dared refuse, so the hard, little marbles fell noisily on to every plate in the room. Even mine, although I cannot now think why we didn’t just refuse them, as one might refuse anything in the normal way of things. With a puzzled look Mrs Carter retired to the kitchen and then began the business of eating these granite chips. By this time you may be sure there was no conversation in the room, nor anything remotely approaching it. Just ten people trying to eat small round pieces of stone. At one stage the General seemed to get one lodged in his windpipe and threw his head up sharply, like a tethered beast, and no sooner were we past this hazard than the land-owner’s wife, Mrs Towneley, bit down with a fearsome crack and reached for her mouth with a cry that she’d broken a tooth. Even this did not elicit a Governor’s Pardon from our hosts. Still we crunched on, particularly Peter who bit and chewed and sucked and smiled, as if it were the most delicious confection imaginable. ‘You seem to be enjoying them,’ said Lady Gregson, whose destiny that night was to make everything worse, just when she sought to do the opposite.
‘It’s such a treat to eat something unusual,’ said Peter. ‘At any rate in this house.’ He spoke loudly and clearly into the silent crunching room. Inevitably, all eyes turned to his wife.
For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to respond. But she did. ‘You fucking bastard,’ said Billie, reverting to her standard vocabulary when enraged, although actually this time she spoke quite softly and the words were rather effective despite their lack of originality. Next, she stood and, leaning forward, picked up the bowl holding the remainder of the icy inedibles. With a gesture like throwing a bucket of water on to a fire, she flung what was left of the frozen fruit at Peter, in the process spraying the rest of us, as well as the table and the floor, with sharp, bouncing, painful little missiles. She finished by lobbing the bowl at him which missed since he ducked and shattered against an attractive George IV wine cooler in the corner. In the pause that followed you could hear only breathing.
‘Shall we get our coats?’ said Lady Gregson brightly. ‘How many cars are we taking to the dance?’ In a commendable effort to bring matters to a conclusion she stood, pushed back her chair, stepped on a frozen strawberry and fell completely flat, cracking her head on the edge of the table as she went down, and with her evening frock riding up to show a rather grubby petticoat and a ladder in her right stocking, although that might have been a product of the moment. She lay totally motionless, stretched out on the floor, and for a second I wondered if she were dead. I suspect the others did too, since nobody moved or spoke, and for a time we were enveloped in a positively prehistoric silence. Then a low groan ameliorated this worry at least.
‘I don’t think we all need to drive, do you, darling?’ said Peter, also standing, and the dinner party was at an end.
All of which goes to explain why I ended up in bed with Terry that night. We stayed together when we finally got to the dance, as it felt odd not to be with someone who had witnessed the previous events of the evening. Sam Hoare and Carina seemed to be similarly motivated and were soon dancing. In fact, they began a romance that was to take them through marriage, three children and a famously unpleasant divorce, when Sam ran off with the daughter of an Italian car manufacturer in 1985. At any rate, from our house party that only left Terry for me and I wasn’t sorry. From then, somehow, as the night progressed it all seemed to become inevitable, in the way these things can and do. We jigged away while the music was brisk, but when the lights lowered at around one in the morning, and the DJ put on Honey, a sickeningly sentimental hit of the day, one of those ballads about dead loved ones, we moved into each other’s arms without a question and began the slow, rhythmic clinch that passed for dancing in the last phase of these events.
In a way those mordant, melodic dirges were one of the hallmarks of the period, although the fashion for them has entirely faded long before now. It was an odd phenomenon, when you think of it, songs about husbands, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, all being killed in car crashes and train smashes, by cancer and, above all, on motorbikes, the last scenario combining several pet crazes of the time. I suppose there must have been something in their facile, tear-soaked emotionalism that chimed with our largely false sense of trailblazing and ‘release.’ They ranged from the tuneful and robust Tell Laura I Love Her to those like Terry or Teenangel and, while we’re on the subject, Honey, which were soppy beyond endurance, but the stand-out example, the exception that proved the rule, a song which, like the more recent Dancing Queen, must have been performed in more bathrooms than any other hit of the day, was definitely The Leader of the Pack by the Shangri Las. There is a verse in it, which has always fascinated me: ‘One day my Dad said “find someone new”/ I had to tell my Jimmie we’re through/ He stood there and he asked me why/ All I could do was cry/ I’m sorry I hurt you, the Leader of the Pack.’ No prize for guessing who’s in charge here: Dad. This tough leather biker boy with his shining wheels, this girl in the grip of passion, both know better than to argue when Dad puts his foot down. ‘Find someone new! Now!’ ‘OK, Dad. Whatever you say.’ What would the lyric be changed to were it rerecorded today? ‘I had to tell my Dad to get stuffed’? I cannot think of another vignette that tells of the collapse of our family structure and our discipline as a society more economically yet more vividly. No wonder so much of the world laughs at us.