She looked a little miffed, perhaps because it sounded as if I were reproaching her, which I truly wasn’t. ‘You never pressed your case very hard,’ she said at last. She was apparently attempting at least to share the blame for our non-romance.
‘Because I knew that if I did, our friendship would become untenable and I would drop out of your life. It was fun for you to have me dying for love, as long as it never became embarrassing and I never put you on the spot. You could have had me any day you wished, with a crook of your finger, which you were fully aware of. But you never wanted me, except as a courtier worshipping at your shrine. And I was happy. If that was the best that was on offer, I was glad to oblige.’
She made a slight expression of horror at this perfectly honest account. ‘Did you know all that, then?’
I shook my head. ‘No. Except possibly instinctively. But I know it now.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You make me sound like such a bitch.’
But this wasn’t right and I was anxious for her to know I didn’t think it. ‘Not at all. It worked well for a long time. I was your parfit knight and you were la belle dame sans merci. It’s an arrangement that has been perfectly serviceable for hundreds of years, after all. It only went wrong because of Portugal and that wasn’t your fault. It became embarrassing after that evening, so we dropped out of each other’s lives, but it would only have happened sooner if I’d made a pass.’
She thought for a time, as we walked on again in silence. There was a rustle of movement in the undergrowth and the distinctive red of a fox’s coat flashed through the browns and greens for a moment. As if recognising him, she spoke, ‘Damian has much to answer for.’
‘The interesting thing is I think he would agree with you.’
The others were closing in on us now and soon the conversation would become general again. But before they reached where we were standing Serena spoke softly. ‘I hope you don’t hate me.’
Her voice was gentle and, I think, sincere, and when I turned towards her, she was smiling. I don’t think she meant it as a serious enquiry, but she was apologising for wounding me in those lost years, when heart pain could be so sharp and was so easily administered. I looked at her and for the millionth time wondered at every feature. A tiny crumb of something from lunch was clinging to the corner of her mouth and I imagined a life where I would have the right to lick it off. ‘What do you think?’ I said.
Dinner that night was the main event of the weekend and I dutifully bathed, putting on evening trousers, a shirt with no tie, reluctantly, and a smoking jacket. I went downstairs feeling rather cheery but, once in the drawing room, things got heavier with the inclusion among the guests for the evening of Andrew’s mother, the now Dowager Countess, who lived not in the real dower house, a smart Georgian villa on the edge of the park, which was let to an American banker, but in a cottage in the village formerly reserved for the head keeper. She was standing stiffly by the chimneypiece when I came in. Lady Belton was a lot older, naturally, than when I had last seen her, but age had done little to soothe her incipient madness. She still stared out of those pale-blue, Dutch-doll eyes, and her hair was dyed to an approximation of the Italianate black it had once been. Nor had her sense of style made much of a leap forward. She wore a curious outfit, a kind of long, khaki nightgown with an uneven neckline. I’m not sure what effect she was aiming at, but it can’t have been what she achieved. Her jewellery, I need hardly say, was excellent.
Serena introduced me, observing that her mother-in-law must remember me from the old days. Lady Belton ignored this. ‘How do you do,’ she said, extending her bony, knuckled hand. Is there anything more annoying than people saying how do you do when you have met them a thousand times? If there is, I would like to know what it might be. I had a recent instance where I was greeted as a stranger by a woman I’d known since childhood, who had grown famous in the interim. Every time I met her for literally years, she would lean forward gracefully and make no sign that we had ever seen each other before. Finally I resolved that if she tried it one more time I would let her have it. But something of my resolve must have shown in my face and all bullies are equipped with an antenna that tells them when the bullying must stop. She read my eyes and held out her hand. ‘How lovely to see you again,’ she said.
Serena had moved off to get me a drink, so I was left alone with the old besom. ‘It’s so nice to catch up with Andrew and Serena after all these years,’ I said feebly by way of an opener.
‘Do you know Lord Belton?’ she replied, without a glimmer of a smile. Presumably this was to show me that I should have referred to him by his proper rank. There was a bowl of avocado dip quite near us on a side table, and just for a second I had an almost irresistible urge to pick it up and squish it into her face.
Instead, I opened my mouth to say ‘Yes, I know them and I know you too, you silly, old bat.’ But there’s no point, is there? She would only have hidden behind my ‘terrible rudeness’ and never have recognised her own. I didn’t draw her at dinner, hallelujah, and instead I watched pityingly as Hugh Purbrick battled through her silences, trying to engage her with talk of people she must have met but of whom she denied all knowledge, or on topics in which she made it clear she had no interest. In short, she gave him no quarter.
The young are often told, or were in the days when I was a child, that parvenus and other rank outsiders may on occasion be rude, but real ladies and gentlemen are never anything but perfectly polite. This is, of course, complete rubbish. The rude, like the polite, may be found at every level of society, but there is a particular kind of rudeness, when it rests on empty snobbery, on an assumption of superiority made by people who have nothing superior about them, who have nothing about them at all, in fact, that is unique to the upper classes and very hard to swallow. Old Lady Belton was a classic example, a walking mass of bogus values, a hollow gourd, a cause for revolution. I had disliked her when I was young, but now, after forty years to think about it, I saw her as worse than simply unpleasant and foolish. Rather, I recognised her as someone who would be almost evil if she weren’t so stupid, as the very reason for her children’s empty lives. There is much that makes me nostalgic for the England of my youth, much that I think has been lost to our detriment, but sometimes one must recognise where it was wrong and why it had to change. Where the upper classes are concerned, Lady Belton was that reason made flesh. She was an embodiment of all that was bad about the old system and of absolutely none of its virtues. I do not like to hate but I confess that, seeing her again, I almost hated her. I hated her for what she represented and because, ultimately, I blamed her for Andrew’s worthlessness. If I were to be merciful where he is concerned, and I find it hard, I would acknowledge that with a mother like the one he had he never stood a chance. Between them, these two pointless people had wasted my Serena’s life. Andrew was in fact Lady Belton’s other neighbour at dinner that night, since she had been placed, in accordance with precedence, on his right. They did not exchange one word from soup to nuts. Neither could be judged a loser by it.
Afterwards, some of the party made up a table for bridge and a few of them sneaked off to watch a late film on television in some chaotic children’s cubbyhole where Andrew had banished ‘the foul machine,’ so after the locals had gone home and the rest of the house party had taken themselves off to bed, I found myself with Candida in a corner of the library, hugging a glass of whisky, gossiping as the fire died. Serena had looked in and made us free with the tray of drinks but she was taken up with settling the others, and for me it was enough just to see her operating her existence, charting her course through the commitments that made her days real. And I was pleased to be left alone with Candida, since it meant that I was able to continue my investigations. I had told Candida about finding the picture in my room the night before, but now we were alone we fell to discussing that party of so long ago, how it went and how it ended. I reminded her that I had driven Damian home in rather a glump, and that it marked the finish of his career as a deb’s delight. ‘Poor Damian,’ she said. ‘I’ve never felt sorrier for anybody.’