Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect

Candida approached, perhaps to offer sympathy, but before she could speak, I took her to one side. ‘I’ll leave tomorrow.’ I spoke in a low voice, because I didn’t want to become a cause cèlèbre, and, worst of all, have others feel obliged to take my side. ‘First thing.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘No. I must. I introduced him to everyone. He’s my fault. I can’t stay. Not after that.’ I was grateful for her attempt at support, but it was true. I couldn’t stay among these people for a minute longer than I had to. Andrew Summersby came alongside and Candida appealed to him to persuade me not to go. He shook his head. ‘I should think it’s the only course open to him,’ he said in his most ferociously pompous manner. It was lucky the maids had removed the knife.

Candida did not argue any more that night. ‘Well, sleep on it,’ she said. ‘See how you feel in the morning. We all know he was talking rubbish.’ I smiled and kissed her, and slipped away to my room.

Knowing Candida better now, I think it’s possible she had genuinely dismissed the charges against me but I did not believe it then. And later that night, when I was bathed and smelling a bit less like a welk stall in Bermondsey Market, I asked myself was Damian truly talking rubbish? In some ways I think he was. Most of all in what he said about Serena. Certainly every word was deliberately chosen to damage me irretrievably among those people. To finish me with them. As he was going to vanish from their sight, so, he vowed, would I. It was a cruel attack, and I am sure the best part of it for him was that it would ruin and diminish me in front of her. He wanted to make my love seem a petty and paltry affectation, a device to get invited to dinner, instead of the engine that turned my life.

Even so, it was not quite all rubbish. The funny thing was that there were times when I had envied Damian. I envied his power among these men and women. I had known many of them all my life but within a matter of weeks of their meeting him he had more power over them than I had ever achieved. He was handsome, of course, and charismatic and I was neither, but finally it wasn’t that. Newcomer as he was, he did not allow them to dictate the rules of the game, but I… maybe I did. Had I not given more leeway to the jokes of Lord Claremont and his ilk than I would have done to those of a social inferior? Did I not pretend, by never arguing, that the fatuities I’d listened to after dinner in a series of great and splendid dining rooms were interesting comments? I had sat up late with fools and laughed and nodded and flattered their fathomless self-importance without revealing a trace of my real feelings. Would I have bothered with Dagmar were she not a princess? Did I not maintain civilities with someone like Andrew, a man I despised and would have actively disliked even if Serena had never been born? Would I have given him the little respect that I did if there weren’t a faint impulse within me to bow down before his position? I’m not sure. Were my mother alive and able to read this, she would say it was all nonsense, that I was brought up to be polite and why should I be criticised for that. One part of me thinks she would be right, but another…

At all events the evening finished me in that world for many years. Damian was gone from their sight, but so, to a large extent, was I. With a few, a very few, exceptions, I dropped out of their round, at first because of embarrassment, but later in disgust with my own self. Even Serena seemed to back away from me or so I thought. For a time I would still drop by occasionally, once or twice in a year, to see her or to see the children or, I suppose, because I could not stay away but I felt that the shadow of that evening was always with us, that something had died, and at last I accepted it and severed all connection.

Of course, today I am older and kinder and, looking back, I judge that I treated myself harshly. I do not think Serena was responsible for my exile. Nor do I blame any of the others because I think I did it to punish myself and I was wrong. The truth is that Damian spoke that night out of anger and a desire for revenge, although I am still not quite sure why I was the target for such heavy, apparently unprovoked blows. It may simply be that he blamed me for pulling him into the unholy mess in the first place. If so, with the wisdom of hindsight, I’m inclined to think he had a point.

I rang Damian when I got back from Waverly and told him everything I’d learned. And I voiced a thought I hated to find in my brain. ‘This is a silly question, but you’re sure it’s not Serena?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Because I know now there’s so much more to your story than I’d seen.’

‘I’m glad, but no, it’s not. I wish it were in a way, but it can’t be.’ I could hear that he really was pleased to hear that I’d come some way towards understanding what that year had been for him. ‘I last slept with Serena in the autumn of 1968. She married in the spring of 1969 and there was no baby in between. I only saw her one more time after her dance, and that was for the evening in Portugal when she wasn’t staying in the villa and she had her dreary husband, silly parents, horrible in-laws and a baby girl in tow. Besides, even if I’d muddled all the dates it would have to be that child, Mary, who I hear is still the spitting image of her ghastly daddy Andrew.’ All of which was true. The missing mother was not Serena Belton.

‘Then it’s Candida. It must be.’

‘Did you talk to her about me?’

‘A bit. She mentioned that you’d gone out together, but it was quite early on in the Season.’

‘Yes. But we never fell out. We were always friends and we picked up again when it was finished, just once or twice, for old times’ sake. I know you weren’t all that keen on Candida, but I liked her.’

I was very interested by this. With all these women he seemed to have been so much more aware of them, so much more clear-sighted as to their true natures, than I had been. ‘She did imply there was a little hanky-panky when the year was over. Is that when the baby might have begun?’

‘No, it wasn’t then. That was finished a long time before the holiday.’ There was a short silence at the other end of the line. ‘She came to me, after that dinner, when everyone was asleep. I woke in the night and she was with me, naked in my bed, and we made love. Then, when I woke up in the morning she was gone.’

‘Did you see her the next day, before you took off?’

‘Nobody had surfaced when I went. I just called a taxi and disappeared. But she left a note in my room, for me to find, so we parted on good terms.’

‘Did you meet up afterwards? In London?’

‘I never saw any of them again. Including you.’

‘No.’ I too had gone to the airport at dawn, but somehow we managed to avoid each other. On my part consciously. And no, like all of us I had not seen Damian from that day until my summons.

He interrupted my thoughts. ‘That is, I did see Joanna. Just once, but we know it wasn’t her.’

‘And Terry.’

He was puzzled for a second, and then he nodded and smiled. ‘You’re right. I’d remembered it as being before we left. But you’re right. It was when we got back. Poor old Terry.’

‘What did the note say? From Candida?’

‘“I still love you” and she signed it with that funny scrawl of hers. I was very touched. I don’t think I have ever been unhappier than I was that night.’

‘Which goes for everyone who was there.’

‘I used to pray that I would never be so unhappy again. Since I have minutes left, I can presumably be confident of achieving that at least.’ He chuckled softly at the hideous memory. At least, I say he chuckled, but the sound was more like the rattling of old and disused pipes in a condemned building. ‘I lay on my bed, listening to you talking outside and everyone leaving, and I wished I were dead. For a while I thought they were going to send for the police.’