‘Have you enjoyed yourself?’ I asked.

She thought for a moment. ‘These things are such milestones,’ she said, which was an odd answer really, even if it was true. These events were rites of passage to my generation and we did not much question their validity. It may seem strange in our aggressively anti-formal age but then we saw the point of ritual. The girls came out, the men came of age. The former happened when the girl was eighteen, the latter when the man was twenty-one. This was because the upper classes entirely ignored the government’s altering the age of seniority to eighteen for many years, if indeed they recognise it now. These events were a marking of adulthood. After they had been observed you were a fully fledged member of the club, and your membership would continue to be parsed by ceremony: Weddings and christenings, parties for our offspring, more weddings and finally funerals. These were the Big Moments by which we steered our course through life. That’s gone now. There are seemingly no obligatory events. The only thing that really marks an aristocratic upbringing apart from a middle-class one today is that the upper classes still marry before giving birth. Or, when they don’t, it is exceptional. Apart from that many of the traditions that once distinguished them as a tribe seem largely to have melted into the sand.

The song came to an end and Serena was claimed by her departing guests, while I wandered off through the house, reluctant, even now, to call it a day. I left the dancing and crossed the anteroom, where a girl in pink was asleep on a rather pretty sofa, before poking through the half-open door into the Tapestry Drawing Room which lay beyond. At first I thought it was empty. There were only a few lamps lit and the room was engulfed in gloom. The Empress Catherine’s clock caught the eye as one lamp was so placed to make the glass on the face shine, but otherwise it was clearly a room that had done its work for the day. Then I saw that it was not in fact empty, but that one chair beneath a vast tapestry reaching to the cornice was occupied and the sitter was none other than Damian Baxter. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Serena told me you wanted to ask me something.’

He looked up. ‘Yes. I wondered whether you could give me a lift home tomorrow, if you’re driving straight down. I know you’re leaving early.’

I was interested by this, because I had never heard Damian speak of his home before. ‘Where is home?’ I said.

‘Northampton. I imagine you’ll drive straight past it. Unless you’re not going back to London at all.’

‘Of course I’ll take you. I’ll pick you up at about nine.’

That seemed to be the end of it. Mission accomplished. He stood. ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ he said. There was something curiously unembroidered about his manner, which I had come to see as endlessly calculated. But not tonight.

‘What did you think of the party?’

‘Amazing.’

‘And did you have a good time?’

‘So-so,’ he said.

As promised, I arrived back at the abbey at approximately nine the following morning. The door was standing open so I just went in. As I had expected, the house party might still have been in their rooms, but the place was a whirl of activity. A great house on the day after a party is always rather evocative. Servants were wandering about, collecting missed glasses and things, and carrying furniture back to their proper places. The table was being assembled at one end of the dining room, while the huge carpet was unrolled in front of me, and when I asked after the house party’s breakfast I was nodded through to the little dining room beyond it, a simple room, if not as little as all that, enlivened by some paintings of racehorses, with their riders in the Gresham colours. Lady Claremont had broken her usual rule and there were three tables, a bit jammed in, set for about twenty-four. Damian was alone, finishing off a piece of toast. He stood as I entered. ‘My case is already in the hall.’

‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to anyone?’

‘They’re all asleep and I said goodbye last night.’ So, without further ado, we loaded up his bag and left. He didn’t say anything much as we drove along, beyond a few directions, until we were back on the Al heading south. Then, at last, he did speak. ‘I’m not going to do that again,’ he said.

‘We’re none of us going to do much more of it. I think I’ve only got another two dances and a few charity things, then it’s over.’

‘I’m not even going to them. I’ve had enough. I should do some work, anyway, before I forget what it is I’m supposed to be studying.’

I looked at him. There was something resolute and glum about him, which was new. ‘Did anything happen last night?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You seem rather disenchanted.’

‘If I am disenchanted, it has nothing to do with last night. It’s the whole bloody, self-indulgent, boring thing. I’ve had enough of it.’

‘Which of course is your privilege.’

After that, we drove more or less in silence until at last we reached Northampton. It is not a town I know, but Damian took me safely to a row of perfectly respectable semi-detached 1930s villas, all built of brick with tiles hung above the waistline, and each with a name on the gate. The one we stopped outside was called ‘Sunnyside.’ As we were unloading, the door opened and a middle-aged couple came out, the man in a rather loud jersey and worsted slacks, and the women in a grey skirt with a cardigan over her shoulders, held in place by a shiny chain. The man came forward to take the case. ‘This is my father,’ said Damian and he introduced me. I shook hands and said hello.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr Baxter.

‘How do you do,’ I said in return, deliberately blocking his cheerful welcome by not answering in kind, with what I foolishly imagined, in my youthful fatuity, to be good breeding.

‘Won’t you come in?’ said Mrs Baxter. ‘Would you like a coffee?’ But I didn’t go in and I didn’t have any coffee. I regret it now, that refusal of their hospitality. My excuse was that I had an appointment in London at three o’clock and I wasn’t sure I’d make it as it was. I told myself it was important, and perhaps it was, but I regret it now. And even if I couldn’t bring myself to say it, I was pleased to meet them. They were nice, decent people; the mother went out of her way to be polite and the father was, I think, a clever man. I learned later that he was the manager of a shoe factory with a special interest in opera and it saddened me in a way that I had not met them before. That they had not been included in any of the year’s frolics, not even at the university. Looking back, I realise it was a key moment for me, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, in that it was one of the first instances when I came to appreciate the insidious poison of snobbery, the tyranny of it, the meaningless values that made me reject their friendly overtures, that had made Damian hide these two, pleasant, intelligent people because he was ashamed of them.

On the morning in question, I realise now, Damian was making a kind of statement of apology, of non-shame, by bringing me here. He had hidden them behind a barrier because he did not want me to judge him, to look down on him, on the basis of his parents, with whom there was nothing wrong at all, and in this he was right. We would have looked down on him. I blush to write it and I liked them when I met them, but we would have done, without any moral justification whatever. He had wanted to move into a different world and he felt part of that would be shedding his background. He’d managed the transition, but on this particular morning I think he was ashamed of his ambition, ashamed of rejecting his own past. The truth is we should all have been ashamed in having played along with it without question. At any rate, with avowals to meet again the following Monday at Cambridge we parted and I got back into my car.