Until this point he’d been hovering at the back of the proceedings, but now he strode forward. ‘Come on,’ he said, laying hold of Damian by the upper arm, rather like someone making a citizen’s arrest, which I suppose he was doing, and attempting to guide him away.
In one swift move, and to the amazement of us all, Damian again got free, this time with a thousand times more fury than he had vented on the hotel employee when the man had tried something similar. ‘Take your hand off me this instant,’ he snarled. ‘You stupid, ridiculous oaf!’ Obviously, Andrew was not expecting anything of this sort when he had first decided to betray the uninvited guest, least of all from someone whom he judged to be far beneath him in God’s scheme of things. Andrew unquestionably was an oaf, and a very stupid one, but few people would then have called him such to his face and he was quite unprepared for it. To be honest, I think he just wanted to have a go at Serena or one of the other girls who had been hovering around Damian all evening and he’d got jealous. I’m quite sure nobody was sorrier than he that the whole situation seemed to be spiralling out of control.
He was dressed, like some of the others, as a Death’s Head hussar, with tight, in his case unbecoming, trousers, and a coat slung across his back, all of which may have fatally impeded his movement, but he couldn’t back out now. He lunged forward, making a second attempt to grip the miscreant’s arm. Once more, Damian was too quick for him, stepping back in a sort of pirouette, like Errol Flynn in a Warner Brothers romance, and before anyone could stop him he had swung the full force of his right fist into a punch that met Andrew’s nose with a loud and sickening crunch. Several of the girls screamed, particularly the nearest, one Lydia Maybury, whose white, organza frock, charmingly cut on the bias and embroidered with lilies of the valley, was copiously sprayed with a mixture of gore and snot from Andrew’s smashed proboscis. He himself looked so startled, so astonished by the unbelievable course events had taken, as if the sea itself had suddenly come rushing in through the ballroom windows, that he stood for a moment in a trance, staring through sightless eyes, stock still, blood spouting from his nostrils, before staggering backwards. Watching this, but paralysed with a kind of ecstatic horror, none of us thought to catch and save him, and instead he collapsed full length on to the breakfast buffet, pushing it over as he fell, showering himself and the bystanders with hot plates and sausages and jugs of orange juice and bacon and toast and burners and scrambled eggs and mustard and cutlery and all. The crash was like the Fall of Troy, echoing through the hotel passages, frightening the horses, wakening the dead. It was succeeded by complete and total silence. We all stood there, rabbits caught in the headlights, stunned, amazed, hypnotised, watching the bloody, breakfast-decorated body of the fallen Viscount. Even Dagmar was as still and as silent as a statue.
Then Damian, with one of those gestures that made me forgive him more, and for longer, than I should have done, took hold of the Grand Duchess’s hand, hanging limply by her side as she stood witness to the ruin of a party that had cost a large percentage of her annual income. ‘Please forgive me for making such a mess, Ma’am,’ he raised her unresisting hand to his lips, holding it there for a second, with exquisite elegance, ‘and thank you so much for what, until now, has been an enchanting evening.’ So saying he released her fingers, bowed crisply from the neck like a lifelong courtier, and strode out of the chamber.
I need hardly add that once the story had gone round London, and with the sole exception of the ball given by Lady Belton for Andrew’s sister, Annabella, before very long Damian had received invitations to every other major event of that Season. This was not because of any increased approval on the part of the mothers, all of whom were more terrified than ever that Damian Baxter would ensnare one of their sacred children.
It was at the absolute and unbending insistence of the girls themselves.
SIX
The Grand Duchess had been right to make her investment, even if things did not quite turn out as she had wished. In 1968 the family had just enough money and just enough status for Dagmar to have landed a big – or a biggish – fish. That she did not, I attributed at the time to her setting her sights too high and thereby missing whatever chance there might have been of something decent. As I would discover, I was not completely right in this analysis, but I suspect that even so, like many of rank or fortune, Dagmar had grown up with unrealistic expectations. To begin with she had no clear idea of how pallid she really was. She could always assemble (then, anyway) a crowd who would conceal her shyness from herself and she did not seem to appreciate that she would have to make more of the running if things were to go her way. All this the Grand Duchess knew and, in the nicest possible way, she tried to encourage her daughter to make what hay she could before the sun went in completely, but like most young women, Dagmar did not listen to her mother when her mother said things she did not want to hear.
Part of the problem lay in her curious inability to flirt. Faced by a man, she would alternate between nervous giggling or complete silence, her huge semi-tearful eyes wide open, fixed on her partner, while he would flounder in his desperate attempts to find some topic, any topic, that would elicit a vocal response. There wasn’t one. Eventually this helplessness provoked a protective instinct in me, and while I never exactly fancied Dagmar, I began to dislike anyone who made fun of her or, as I once heard, imitated her sad, little laugh. Once, I had to take her away from Annabel’s when her date excused himself to go to the loo, before apparently running up the steps back to street level and jumping into a taxi. She cried on the way home and of course I had to love her a little bit after that.
To correct a popular misconception, I must point out that by my time the London Season was no longer, as it had once been, much of a marriage market. The idea was more to launch your young into a suitable world where they would thenceforth live and in due course find friends, and after a few years a husband or wife. Few mothers wanted this achieved before their sons and daughters had reached their middle twenties at the earliest, but Dagmar’s case was different, as the Grand Duchess knew. They were selling a product in what promised to be a falling market and there was no time to be lost. We all thought at one point she had a reasonable chance of Robert Strickland, the grandson and eventual heir to a 1910 barony, awarded to a Royal gynaecologist after a tricky but successful birth. Robert didn’t have much money and there was neither land nor house, but there was something and he was a kind fellow, if hardly the life and soul of the party. He worked in a merchant bank and had the supreme merit, certainly where the Grand Duchess was concerned, of being slightly deaf. Unfortunately, just as he was coming to the boil Dagmar fluffed it, Robert interpreting her nervous giggle as a lack of interest in his hinted-at proposal, and it was not repeated. By the end of that summer he was happily engaged to the daughter of a Colonel in the Irish Guards. There would be no other opportunities at that level.
Even so, everyone was a little taken aback to read in the gossip columns in the late autumn of 1970 that she was engaged to William Holman, the only child of an aggressive parvenu from Virginia Water. When I knew him William was about to be ‘something in the City,’ an all-purpose phrase beloved of our mothers. He had been a hanger-on at some of the dances in our year, wearing and saying inappropriate, desperate things, according to our youthful, shallow, snobbish yard-sticks, and was not taken seriously by anyone. I suppose, looking back, he was quite clever and perhaps he did seem to be going somewhere. It just wasn’t evident to us that it was somewhere very nice. I missed the wedding. I think I had double booked it with a weekend in Toulouse. But apparently it was perfectly all right, if a bit rushed. They were married in an Orthodox church in Bayswater and the reception was held at the Hyde Park Hotel. The groom’s parents looked ecstatic and the bride’s were at least resigned. In the last analysis Princess Dagmar of Moravia was married, and to a man who could pay the bill for dinner and manage something more than a basement flat. As the Grand Duchess might have remarked, and probably did in the privacy of her bathroom, it was better than nothing. She was also presumably aware that there were other factors at work, rendering the ceremony welcome. Six months later the Princess was delivered of a son, a healthy boy and not noticeably premature.