Serena introduced me, observing that her motherin-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.’
This was an unexpected comment, since I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Why?’
My query was clearly as much of a surprise to her as her statement had been to me. ‘Because of the whole drama,’ she replied, as if this must be quite obvious.
‘What drama?’
She gave me a quizzical look, as if I might be teasing and leading her on, but my gaze was as innocent as a newborn child’s. ‘How amazing,’ she said. ‘Did he really never tell you?’
Then I asked and I listened.
Candida knew Damian well, long before that night. She had flirted with him in her frightening way, she had danced with him, even, I suspected as she talked, slept with him and generally befriended him as the season had progressed. And she had managed to get him included in the Gresham house party, without drawing attention to Serena, and-
‘But I don’t understand. Why did you? I thought you fancied him yourself.’ I remembered that other, different Candida rolling her eyes at Queen Charlotte’s Ball and almost shuddered.
She shook her head. ‘That was all finished long before. And by that time he and Serena were in love with each other.’ Again she spoke as if I must surely have had some suspicion of these things at the very least, and it was precious of me to pretend that I did not. ‘That is, I thought they were in love with each other. Serena was in love with him.’
‘I don’t believe it.’ Of course, I didn’t want to believe it and in truth I hadn’t seen much evidence. They’d kissed. But if we were supposed to be in love with everyone we’d ever kissed…
She shrugged as if to say believe what you like, I am telling you the truth. ‘She wanted to marry him, absurd as that sounds, and as you know, she was eighteen at the time and Damian was nineteen and still at university, so they needed her parents’ consent.’
‘Why? When did the law change?’
‘At the beginning of 1970. It was still twenty-one in Sixty-eight.’
‘But the Claremonts would never have given their consent if he’d been the Duke of Gloucester.’
‘Yes, they would. They did. They pushed her into marrying Andrew the following year, and she was still only nineteen.’ Which was true. ‘Anyway, Serena had got it into her head that if they could only get to know Damian they would fall for him and in time give their permission, which obviously I can now see was a hopeless idea.’
‘Worse than hopeless. Insane.’
My intervention was not soothing to her. ‘Yes. Well, as I say, I know that now, but at the time I had convinced myself, or Serena had convinced me, that it might work. It wasn’t that she wanted to plunge into obscurity with him. She was sure that Damian would do incredibly well in his career and history has, after all, proved her right a thousand times over.’