Lady Dalton nodded. ‘It’s going to be so very interesting, seeing which directions you all go in.’ With that the music ended and I walked her back to the table. She was a nice woman and we were friendly for as long as our paths were to cross, but from that moment she had entirely lost interest in me.
Some time around one in the morning the band leader approached the microphone, instructing us to take our partners for the gallop, and by this sign we knew the evening was nearly done. As always, surveying the modern generation, it seems perfectly incredible that we, who were after all simultaneously participating in the swinging sixties, still ended a good many parties with this period romp, but we did. Unlike the Scottish reels that were also part of most of the parties, the gallop was only ever the last dance of the event and it was really just an excuse to show how drunk you were. You seized some luckless girl and raced back and forth across the floor, bumping around, vaguely in time to some loud, rum-ti-tum music, falling over, shouting and generally demonstrating that you were a very good sport. Needless to say there was a rather desperate quality to it, even a sort of lonely sadness, as one watched those shrieking girls up from the country, their ringlets collapsing, their dresses frequently torn, their make-up vanishing beneath a sheen of red jowls and sweat. At any rate for good or ill we, the merrymakers of 1968, danced it and with that, Queen Charlotte’s Ball was over for another year.
My parents’ flat was to be found on the ground floor of a tall house in Wetherby Gardens, a street that runs between South Kensington and Earl’s Court. In those days this was roughly like passing from heaven into hell and it was an important detail to my mother that the flat was considerably nearer the former than the latter. Now, naturally, either end would command a price beyond rubies. Again, much like the Daltons’ London home, the former dining room of the Victorian family for whom it was built had been carved into drawing room, hall and, in our case, kitchen. What had presumably been some sort of library had become a small, dark and rather poky place to eat in, and what must have been a charming morning room, overlooking the small garden attached to the flat and, beyond it, the very large communal garden shared by the block, had been split into two bedrooms, with some unsatisfactory jiggling of the paper wall to get one half of a double door and a reasonable proportion of window into each. Like so many of their generation, my parents were curiously accepting about their accommodation. When, later, in the Seventies and Eighties, we all started pulling down walls and moving bathrooms and converting attics, they watched in semi-horrified wonder, my father, particularly, believing that if God had wanted that shelf in a different place He would have arranged it and who was he to interfere with Providence? It’s odd, really, when one thinks how their eighteenth-and nineteenth-century ancestors thought nothing of pulling down ancient family houses to build something more voguish in their place. Maybe it had something to do with rationing or making do during the war.
I was already in bed and asleep when I was summoned back to the surface by the repeated ringing of the doorbell. For a while this took the form of a church bell being rung, for some strange reason, by William Ewart Gladstone, but then I woke up and the ringing continued.
Damian was hugely apologetic. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have asked for a key. Then I thought you’d probably be going on with the rest of us.’
‘Where?’
He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Round and about. We looked into the Garrison for a drink and then we went to get a sandwich and a cup of coffee from that hut on the other side of Chelsea Bridge.’ As it happens, we would do this quite often as the year wore on, boys and girls in evening dress, queuing at dawn behind the bikers for a bacon butty from the little wooden kiosk in the shadow of the great power station. They were nice people, those motorcycle men, and friendly as a rule, amused rather than affronted by our pampered appearance. I wish them well.
‘Was that the end of it?’
Damian smiled. ‘Not quite. We wound up at the Claremonts’ house.’
‘On Millionaire’s Row.’
‘Next to Kensington Palace.’
I nodded. ‘That’s the one,’ I said. How cool and ordered he looked. He could have been about to go out, rather than coming in after what could only be described as a long night. ‘You have been busy. How did you manage that?’
He shrugged again. ‘Serena suggested it and I didn’t see why not.’ ‘Did you wake up her parents?’
‘Not the mother. Her dad came down and asked us not to make too much noise.’ He looked round the drawing room vaguely.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Just one, maybe. If you’ll join me.’
I poured out two glasses of whisky and water. ‘Do you want any ice?’ ‘Not for me.’ He was learning fast.
‘What happened to Georgina? Was she with you?’
He could barely suppress a laugh. ‘No, thank the Lord. We didn’t even have to lie. They were dropping off Lady Belton and Andrew at their flat, and Mrs Waddilove wouldn’t let Georgina escape.’
There was something slightly unsatisfactory in this. ‘Poor Georgina. I’m afraid she’s a bit in love with you.’
This time he did laugh. ‘There are many who must carry that burden.’ It seemed to me, in that moment, that to have this kind of self-confidence at the age we then were must be a kind of Paradise. He mistook the envy in my eyes for a trace of disapproval and hurried to reassure me. ‘Come on. I chummed her to Queen Charlotte’s. I’ll always be friendly when we meet. You can’t expect me to marry her because she was the first to ask me to her party.’
Which, of course, I could not and would not. ‘Just be nice to her,’ I said. Then I took him down the passage and showed him into what was usually my own, cramped bedroom. But my parents were in the country and I had chosen to sleep in theirs. ‘Was it what you expected?’ I asked, as we were about to close our respective doors. ‘Or did you disapprove?’
‘I don’t know what I expected.’ Damian thought for a moment. ‘And I’m in no position to disapprove of anything.’ He paused. ‘One thing I do notice and even perhaps envy.’ I waited. ‘You all belong to something, even if it’s hard to define quite what. Contrary to myth, you don’t necessarily all know each other and you certainly don’t all like each other. But you do have some sort of group identity, which I don’t share.’
‘Perhaps you will.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I won’t. But I don’t think I’d want to. Not for much longer, anyway. I have a suspicion that before we’re finished I’ll be the one who belongs to something. And you won’t.’
Which, of course, is exactly what happened.
FOUR
I cannot tell you with any real exactitude whether it made me laugh or cry when I heard, late in 1970, that Lucy Dalton was going to marry Philip Rawnsley-Price. I do remember it came as something of a shock. It was not only his awkward and unsubtle courtship, of her and every other girl who would stop to listen, that made him so unsatisfactory a character. He was born unsatisfactory. He had one of those flat faces, like a carnival mask that had been dropped in the road and run over by a heavy lorry. His skin was sallow, verging on olive, but this did not, as it might have, give him an exotic quality. Rather, he resembled an ailing Mediterranean lift attendant, with round, moist eyes resting in a pool of wrinkles, two fried eggs in fat. After what seemed a very short engagement I was invited to the wedding and I went, but it was a restrained and slightly bewildering affair. Lady Dalton was not her usual, cheery self, as she kissed and handed us down the line, and while all the usual forms were observed – the ancient village church, the marquee on the lawn, the plates of unappetising nibbles, the rather good champagne – none of it seemed to be celebrated with much brio. Even the speeches were pretty formulaic, the only memorable bit being when Lucy’s aged uncle forgot what he was doing and addressed us as ‘fellow members,’ though quite what he thought we were fellow members of was never revealed.