Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect

We were passing the stable block, which was a few hundred yards away from the main house. It was much later, perhaps mid-eighteenth century, and the wall of the yard ended in a rather handsome lodge, built for some trusty steward or perhaps a madly superior coachman. Before we’d gone a few more steps the front door opened and an old woman came out with a wave. She was wearing the tweeds and scarf of a standard County mother. ‘Dagmar told me you were coming,’ she called over the grass separating us. ‘I wanted to come out and say hello.’

I stared at the wrinkled, bony creature walking towards me. Could this really be the majestic Grand Duchess of my youth? Or had her head been transplanted on to another’s body? Where was the weight, in every sense? Where were the charisma and the fear she had inspired? Vanished entirely. She approached and I bowed. ‘Ma’am,’ I murmured, but she shook her head and pulled me towards her for a dry kiss on both my cheeks.

‘Never mind all that,’ she said gaily and slipped her arm through mine. This simple action in itself was a marker of how much had vanished from the world in the years since we last met. My sentimental side approved it as a friendly and relaxing alteration. But, all things considered, I suspect that more had been lost than gained for both of us. She looked across at her daughter. ‘Is Simon here yet? He told me he was trying to be with you for lunch.’

‘Obviously he couldn’t get away. He won’t be long.’ Dagmar smiled at her mother, this cosy, easy pensioner who had stolen the identity of the warlord of my early years. ‘We’ve been talking about Damian Baxter.’

‘Damian Baxter.’ The Grand Duchess rolled her eyes to heaven, then smiled at me. ‘If you knew the rows we had over that young man.’

‘So I gather.’

‘And now he’s richer than anyone living. So I suppose he’s had the last laugh.’ She paused. ‘But anyway, whatever she’s told you, it wasn’t my fault that it didn’t happen. Not in the end. You can’t blame me.’

‘Whose fault was it?’

‘His. Damian’s.’ Her voice had the finality of the Lutine Bell. ‘We all thought he was a climber, an adventurer, a man on the make. And so he was, in his own fashion.’ She turned back to me to wave a pointed finger at my nose. ‘And you brought him among us. How we mothers used to curse you for it.’ She laughed merrily. ‘But you see…’ Suddenly her tone was becoming almost dreamy as she clambered back through the lost decades, searching for the right words. ‘He wasn’t after what we had. Not really. I didn’t see that at the time. He wanted to experience it, to witness it, but only as a traveller from another land. He didn’t want to live in the past where he had no position. He wanted to live in the future where he could be anything he wished. And he was quite right. It was where he belonged.’ She looked back at her daughter, now walking behind us. ‘Dagmar had nothing useful to give him that would make life easier there.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Maybe if he’d loved her it would have been different. But without love, there wasn’t enough in it to tempt him.’

I was struck by Damian’s journey in that year of years. At the start he had been thrilled by his first invitation from Fat Georgina. By the end he had turned down the hand of a perfectly genuine princess. Not many can say that. There was a noise of footsteps, and around a laurel-sheltered corner of the drive William came almost goose-stepping towards us in a gleaming new Barbour and spotless Hunter gumboots. He caught sight of me and frowned. By his reckoning I should have been safely back on the road by then. ‘Here’s William,’ I said brightly. His mother-in-law looked at him with disdain and in silence. ‘It must have been a relief that he stepped up to the mark when Dagmar needed him.’ Obviously, I had spoken without thinking.

She turned a freezing fish eye upon me. ‘I do not understand you,’ she said coldly. It felt like the return of an old friend.

‘I meant if Dagmar was anxious to marry.’

‘She was not “anxious” to marry. She just felt that it was time.’ Having settled this, the Grand Duchess relaxed and, after her brief outing, vanished back inside the chipper, little pensioner. ‘William wanted what Dagmar could bring him. Damian did not. That’s all there was to it.’ She glanced in my direction. ‘I know you didn’t like him by the end.’ I said nothing to contradict her. ‘Dagmar told me about that business in Portugal.’ Someone told everyone, I thought wryly. ‘But it blinded you to what he was and what he could be. By the time Damian left our life, even I could see he was an unusual man.’ I wonder now if she wasn’t enjoying herself, discussing these events with someone who had been there when they were all taking place. Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing, and in all probability we would not meet again. I had provided her with an unexpected chance to make sense of those years and those distant decisions. I would guess they were not much talked of in the usual way of things and she wanted to make the best use of me. I cannot otherwise explain her next comment. ‘William never had Damian’s imagination,’ she said. ‘Nor his confidence in what the future would bring. Whatever his faults, Damian Baxter was a visionary in his way. William was just a tedious, vulgar social climber.’

‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t love your daughter.’ I saw no reason why we couldn’t give him the benefit of some doubt.

But she shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She made him feel important, that’s all. That’s why he resents her now. He can’t bear the thought that he ever needed her to flatter his little ego.’ I said nothing. Not because I disapproved of her disloyalty. If anything, I was honoured by the trust implicit in her indiscretion. But I had nothing I felt I could usefully add. She looked at me and laughed. ‘I can’t stand him, really. I don’t think Dagmar can, but we never talk of it.’

‘There’s no point. Unless she’s going to do something about him.’

She nodded. The rightness of this comment made her sad. In fact, the whole conversation had taken her into a strange, uncharted territory and I could see a light coating of glycerine beginning to make her eyes shine. ‘The thing is, I don’t know how we’d all manage. He’d find some way to give her nothing if they separate, some shyster lawyer would savage her claims and then what?’ She sighed wearily, a hard worker in life’s vineyard who deserved more rest than she was getting. There was the distant noise of an engine and her eyes looked up to find it. ‘It’s Simon, at last. Good.’ The distraction had pulled her back from the cliff edge. She was probably already regretting what she had revealed.

A gleaming car of some foreign make was spinning down the drive towards us. As I watched it, I felt a sudden surge of longing. Let this man be Damian’s son, I thought. Please. I cared about it in a way I had not cared with Lucy. In their scatterbrained way, the Rawnsley-Prices would shake out some sort of future, juggling Philip’s demented schemes, surviving on luck and others’ charity, but here, today, I felt as if I had been visiting old friends trapped in some hideous, third world prison for a crime they did not commit. Like all her kind, the old Grand Duchess was more frightened of poverty than it was worth. It would only be comparative poverty, genteel poverty, after all, but at a distance even that seemed unacceptable to her. I suppose she felt she had seen enough change and we must surely forgive her for that. This is always a delicate subject where the British upper classes and most Royalty are concerned, if they are facing poverty when they are used to living well. Most of them dread not only the coming discomfort but the loss of face that attends the loss of income, and they will submit to almost any humiliation rather than have to reduce their circumstance in public. Of course, there is another smaller group among them that doesn’t give a damn either way. They are the lucky ones.