Obviously, all of the above became comprehensible when Lucy was delivered of a baby girl early the following year. I saw the couple for a bit after that, kitchen suppers with other girls like her and boys like me, but long before the Sloane Ranger Handbook had given that tribe a name and an identity. In my day they were just the girls in pearls and we were the chinless wonders. But I never thought much of Philip, even after the dancing was done and we had all begun to grow up a little. He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance and in the end life gently separated us. Besides, they had enthusiastically embraced the Sixties (which, as we know, largely took place during the Seventies) and like many others had to find ways of dealing with the disappointment that set in once it had become clear that the Age of Aquarius was not going to happen after all. They moved out of London while Philip went through a series of jobs or, as he would put it, careers, the last of which, I now learned, was some sort of farm shop that he and Lucy had opened in Kent. By that stage catering, ‘hospitality,’ sportswear and, I think, a variation of property development had all played their part, so it was hard to feel optimistic in the long term and I was curious to learn if the number on the list still worked, when I rang her for the first time in, I should imagine, at least thirty years. But Lucy answered and, after our initial joshing, I explained that I was going to be in her neighbourhood the following week and I thought it would be fun to look in and catch up. There was a slight silence at the proposal. Then she spoke again. ‘Of course. How lovely. What day were you thinking of?’
‘Up to you. I’ll fit my other stuff round whenever you’re free.’ Which was unfair of me, but I suspected that if I had been specific it would have been the one day she couldn’t manage. This way there was no alternative but to give in gracefully.
‘Don’t expect much to eat. I’m no better in the kitchen than when we last met.’
‘I just want to see where you live.’
‘I’m flattered.’ She didn’t sound very flattered but even so, the Thursday after that, I found myself bowling through the Kent lanes on my way to Peckham Bush.
I followed the directions, through the centre and out the other side, until eventually I turned into a gap between two high hedges and drove down a bumpy track into a former farmyard. Large signs pointed me to a brightly lit shop and showed me to a car park with a surfeit of empty spaces, but the old, red-tiled farmhouse lay a little beyond this commercial centre, so I stopped outside that instead. I wasn’t out of the car before Lucy emerged. ‘Well, hello,’ she said. We had not seen each other, as I have explained, for many years, and it is only by such long gaps that we can chart the cruelty of time as well as, in this case, disappointment.
Things were not always so for her. In what I now see was the restrained manner of the days of our youth, she had been a modest darling of the media in her way, an early ‘It Girl,’ a precursor of the celebrity culture that was soon to overwhelm us. The point was that, unlike most of the girls, she had embraced the trendy Swinging Sixties to quite a degree, if not so fiercely as to frighten the mothers. She wore miniskirts that were slightly shorter and eyeliner that was slightly blacker, and she would give quotes to make journalists laugh. She would praise ‘those darling train robbers’ or declare Che Guevara the world’s sexiest martyr. Once she was asked for her happiest moment and she replied it was when P. J. Proby split his jeans which made a headline in the Evening Standard. It was soft rebellion, drawing-room subversion, an endorsement of every value that would destroy her kind, but done with a cheeky grin. It played well and raised her profile and, during the Season, there had been model shoots and photographs on those feature pages in the Tatler, that read today like a message from the Land that Time Forgot: ‘This Year’s Debs,’ ‘Fashions to Watch,’ ‘The Young Trend Setters,’ and so on. Lord Lichfield asked to take her picture and was accepted, and I distinctly recall some now forgotten television ‘personality’ (a concept so new as to be barely dry) inviting her on to his show. She declined, of course, at the insistence of her mother, but even the request had given her a certain cachet.
Of all this fun and bubble there remained not a trace in the sad, tired face before me. She still wore her shoulder-length hair loose, but the bounce had gone, and it was lank, thin and greying. Her clothes, which had once been racy, were now just old: old jeans, old shirt, old scuffed shoes. They covered her nakedness and that was all. Even her make-up was no more than a tired acknowledgement that she was female. She nodded towards the house. ‘Come in.’
After this beginning it was almost a relief to see that time had not converted her to domesticity. In fact, it looked as if a terrorist bomb had just exploded in the hall, blowing every possession of the family into a new and illogical place. There is a kind of messy house that cannot quite be explained by the laziness of the occupants; where a sort of anger, a protest against the values of the world, seems to be involved in its brand of farrago, and I would pay Lucy the compliment of thinking this was one of them. The whole place seemed to have been decorated in the very worst years of the 1970s, with bold, depressing designs in brown and orange, framed posters of over-praised films and a good deal of cane and Indian weave. The kitchen was predictably pine-slatted with terracotta, tiled surfaces, the grouting blackened with filth. Its walls were lined with lots of shelves supporting a jumble of non-matching mugs, pictures of the children, ornaments won at long-ago fairs, pages of magazines torn out for some lost reason. And dirt. Lucy looked around, seeing it all with fresh eyes, as one does when a stranger arrives. ‘Jesus. I’m afraid we’re in rather a pickle. Let me give you a drink and we’ll get out of here.’ She fished about in the large refrigerator, found a huge, half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio and, grabbing two cloudy, furry-looking glasses from beneath the sink, led the way into what must have been the parlour of the farmer’s wife who lived here once, so tidily, before the world turned upside down.
If anything, the drab, disintegrating chaos was even more dispiriting than in the other rooms I had passed through, with tired, crocheted rugs strewn over the lumpy, disconnected chairs and sofas, and a bookshelf made from planks of wood and bricks. Quite a nice portrait of a young woman in the 1890s hung skew-whiff above the chimneypiece, making an improbable status statement from another time and another place. Two invitations and a bill were jammed into its chipped frame. Lucy followed my eyes. ‘My mother gave me that. She thought it might help make the room more normal.’ She leant forward and straightened it.
‘Who is it?’
‘My great-grandmother, I think. I’m not sure.’ For a second I thought of that earlier Lady Dalton, coming in from riding, dressing for luncheon, deadheading the roses. What would she make of her role in this dustbin?