I need hardly say that of course he knew exactly who we were. Or rather, who she was. He gave himself away later that evening, when we ended up squashed into a corner table in a dubious and rather cramped restaurant off Magdalene Street. We had picked up a couple of other students when the drinks party disbanded but Serena was not with us. It would have been unusual if she had been. It was rare for her to drift into that kind of easily accessible arrangement. She usually had a good, if unspecified, reason for not joining in.
The waiter brought the obligatory, steaming plates of boeuf bourgignon, with its glutinous and shiny sauce, that seemed to be our staple fare. This is not a criticism of the eaterie in question, more an acknowledgement of how and what we ate then, but I must not be ungrateful. Mounds of glazed stew, with rough red wine, was a big leg up, considering what had been on offer ten years before. There is, and should be, worthwhile debate about the merits of the changes the last four decades have brought to our society, but there can be few who do not welcome the improvement of English food, at least until the raw fish and general undercooking that arrived with the celebrity chefs of the new century. There is no doubt about it that when I was a child the food available to the general British public was simply pitiful, consisting largely of tasteless school dinners, with vegetables that had been boiling since the war. Occasionally, you might find something better on offer in a private house, but even smart restaurants served fussy, dainty platefuls, decorated with horrible rosettes of green mayonnaise and the like, that were more trouble in the eating than they were ever worth. So when the bistros began to arrive, with their check tablecloths and melting candles pushed into the necks of green wine bottles, we were glad of them. A decade later they had become a joke, but then they were our salvation.
‘Have you ever been to Serena’s house in Yorkshire?’ Damian asked. The other two looked puzzled, as well they might, since there had been no mention of Yorkshire or of the Claremont dynasty at any part of the conversation.
This should have set off a thousand flashing bells, but, like the fool I was, I made nothing of it. I simply answered the question. ‘Once, but just for a charity thing a couple of years ago.’
‘What’s it like?’
I thought for a moment. I hadn’t retained any very precise image. ‘A Georgian pile. Very grand. But pretty.’
‘And big?’
‘Oh, yes, big. Not Blenheim. But big.’
‘I suppose you’ve always known each other?’ Again, as I would come to recognise, this was a clue, had I the sense to read it. From long before that evening Damian had a fiercely romantic view of the golden group from which he felt excluded, but which he was determined to enter. Although, looking back, even in 1968 it was a slightly odd ambition, especially for someone like Damian Baxter. Not that there weren’t plenty who shared it (and plenty who still do), but Damian was a modern creature, motivated, ambitious, strong – and if I say it of him it must be true. He was always going to find a place in the new society that was coming. Why did he want to bother with the fading glories of the blue bloods, those sad walking history books, when, for so many of those families, as with the potato, the best was already in the ground? Personally, I think he must have been cut dead at some gathering in youth, in front of a girl he fancied perhaps, snubbed, ignored and insulted by a drunken toff, until he fell into the cliché’d but very real goal of: ‘I’ll show you! Just you wait!’ It has, after all, been the spur of many great careers since the Conquest. But if this was the case, I never knew the incident that triggered it. Only that by the time we met, he had developed a personal mythology about the British aristocracy. He saw all its members as bonded together from birth, a tiny, tight club, hostile to newcomers, loyal to the point of reckless dishonesty when defending their own. There was some truth in this, of course, a good deal of truth in terms of attitude, but we were no longer living under a Whig oligarchy of a few thousand families. By the 1960s the catchment area, certainly for what remained of London Society, was far wider than he seemed aware of and the variety of types within it was much greater. Anyway, people are people, whoever they may be, and no world is as neat as he would have it.
‘No. I haven’t known her long at all, not properly. I might have met her a few times over the years, at this and that, but we only really talked for the first time at a tea party in Eaton Square a month or two ago.’
He seemed amused. ‘A tea party?’ It did sound rather quaint.
The tea party had, in fact, been given by a girl called Miranda Houghton at her parents’ flat on the north side of Eaton Square. Miranda was the god-daughter of my aunt or of some friend of my mother’s, I forget which. Like Serena, I’d seen her from time to time but without either of us making much of an impact; still, it qualified me for her guest list when the whole business began. These parties were one of the early rituals of the Season, even if, when recording it, one feels like an obscure archivist preserving for posterity the lost traditions of the Inuits. The girls would be encouraged to invite other would-be debutantes to tea, usually at their parents’ London homes, thereby forging useful friendships and associations for the larks to come. Their mothers would obtain lists of who else was doing the whole thing from the unofficial but widely recognised leader, Peter Townend, who would supply them free of charge and gladly, to those he considered worthy, in his gallant but doomed attempt to stave off the modern world for as long as might conceivably be possible. Later these same mothers would require of him other lists of supposedly eligible men and he would produce these too, although they were required more for drinks parties and dances than the teas, where men were few and normally, as in the case of me and Miranda, actually knew the hostess. Very little, if any, tea was provided or drunk at these gatherings and in my experience the atmosphere was always slightly strange, as each new arrival hesitantly picked their way across the floor. But all the same we went to them, me included. So I suppose we were committed to the coming experience from comparatively early on, whatever we might afterwards pretend.
I was sitting in the corner, talking about hunting to a rather dull girl with freckles, when Serena Gresham came in and I could tell at once, from the faintest frisson that went through the assembled company, that she had already earned a reputation as a star. This was all the better managed as no one could have been less presumptuous or more softly spoken than she. Happily for me, I was near the last remaining empty chair. I waved to her and, after taking a second to remember who I was, she crossed the room and joined me. It is interesting to me now that Serena should have conformed to all this. Twenty years later, when the Season had become the preserve of exhibitionists and the daughters of parvenu mothers on the make, she would not have dreamed of it. I suppose it is a tribute to the fact that even someone as seemingly untrammelled as Serena would still, in those dead days, do as she was told.
‘How do you know Miranda?’ I asked.
‘I don’t, really,’ was her answer. ‘We met when we were both staying with some cousins of mine in Rutland.’ One of Serena’s gifts was always to answer every question quickly and easily, without a trace of mystery, but without imparting any information.
I nodded. ‘So, will you be doing the whole deb thing?’
I do not wish to exaggerate my own importance, but I’m not convinced that before this she had fully faced the extent of the undertaking. She thought for a moment, frowning. ‘I don’t know.’ She seemed to be looking into some invisible crystal ball, hovering in mid-air. ‘We’ll have to see,’ she added and, in doing so, gave me a sense of her half-membership of the human race that was at the heart of her charm, a kind of emotional platform ticket that would allow her to withdraw at any moment from the experience on hand. I was entranced by her.