Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect

She blushed slightly, not an angry red, but with a soft, warm pink diffused evenly across her features, like someone caught unawares in the dawn light. ‘It’s not really private. That was just to make them shove off.’ I smiled. ‘But I was sorry you saw all that nonsense at the gate. I don’t want you to think badly of me.’ Again the direct simplicity of her appeal was both flattering and tremendously disarming.

‘I couldn’t think badly of you,’ I replied, which was no more than the truth. ‘And anyway, I am fairly sure the world will be reading about it tomorrow morning, so I will, if anything, feel rather bucked to have been an eyewitness.’

I’m afraid this had not made things better. ‘My mum thinks it all helps. To be in the news. To have everyone going on about me. She thinks it makes me…’ She hesitated, searching for the right word, ‘interesting.’ Whatever word she had chosen this was clearly a question and a request for help, even if it was not phrased as such.

I attempted to look encouraging and not judgemental. ‘To quote Oscar Wilde, the only one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’

She gave a perfunctory laugh, more as a polite recognition that I had said something supposedly funny than because she found it amusing. Then, after a moment, she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that before, but you don’t believe it, do you? None of you do.’

The trouble was this was true, really, but I didn’t want to be a killjoy, certainly not to kill her joy. Still, she was asking my opinion so I strove to be as honest as I could be. ‘It depends entirely what you want to come out of it. What are you striving for? What is your goal?’

She thought for a moment. ‘That’s the point. I don’t know.’

‘Then why are you doing the Season? What did you hope to gain when you began?’

‘I don’t know that either.’ She spoke with all the hopelessness of a rabbit caught in a snare.

I understand that, theoretically, Joanna should have been freer than this. Her father was a self-made man, so she had not been brought up within the armed enclave, but in other ways her restrictions were even more severe. It was perhaps the last era when the aristocracy had the power to admit the new rich, or to refuse them entry. Later, when the posh way of life was back in fashion and the dream of joining it began again, the recent rich had far more muscle to push in whether the old world wanted them or not, but in the late Sixties the ex-Ruling Class still maintained considerable sway. I distinctly remember one friend of my mother’s threatening a foolish youth, who had made a mess of her flat, uninvited. ‘One more example of this kind of behaviour,’ hissed the exasperated matron, ‘and I will slam the door of every London drawing room in your face!’ It was a meaningful threat because, then, it was a real one. In 1968 she could still have delivered. By 1988 those same doors were swinging free. Of course, today they are off their hinges.

To employ a phrase not actually in use for twenty years after this, I decided to cut to the chase. ‘It is not complicated,’ I said. ‘If your mother and you are hoping for a grand marriage to come out of this year, you and she are going the wrong way about it. If you want to be famous and go on television or marry a film producer or a car manufacturer who is looking for a bit of glamour to invigorate his life, you’re probably doing exactly the right thing.’

She looked at me. ‘It’s silly, really.’ She sighed. ‘You’re right. My mum wants me to be Lady Snotty. That’s what she dreams of night and day. That’s why it’s so sad that she thinks all this stuff is helping when I know, much better than she does, that it isn’t.’

‘Then make her listen. With a little backtracking, I’m sure you can still manage what she’s after and it wouldn’t be so reprehensible. As Lady Snotty, as you put it, with your other very considerable advantages you could do a great deal of good if you were so minded.’ I know I sounded like a bogus prelate from Hymns on Sunday, but at the time I couldn’t quite see what else to say. I even think I believed I was telling the truth.

Joanna shook her head. ‘That isn’t me. I’m not saying I disapprove of it but it’s not me. Sitting on committees, cutting ribbons, hosting a bring-and-buy sale to get funds for the new X-ray machine at the local hospital. I mean-’ she broke off, clearly afraid she had offended me. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I think all that’s very good. But I just couldn’t do it.’

‘And your mother wants you to.’

She shook her head. ‘Actually, I don’t think she’s got that far. She just wants me to have a big, posh wedding, with lots of pictures in the Tatler. She hasn’t thought beyond that.’

‘Then why don’t you think beyond it for her? Maybe it isn’t charity work for you, or standard charity work. Maybe you could get involved with a special school, or local government. All sorts of causes will want you once you have a bit of social muscle. What I’m trying to say is that I’m sure it’s achievable.’ I had a mental image of the Tremayne brother up in the box above us, happy to marry her, without condition, to get the loot. ‘Maybe, if you think of the possibilities you might come round to the idea.’ What interests me now, thinking back to this fruitless, pompous and patronising advice, is that it didn’t occur to me to suggest that she pursue a career instead of this worthless and really rather immoral plan. Why not? There were working women then, and quite a lot of them. Perhaps it just didn’t seem a likely outcome for anyone in my gang, or were we so far out to sea that we had lost sight of land? Whatever the reason, in this, as in so many things, I would turn out to be entirely wrong.

‘You sound like Damian,’ she said, taking me by surprise.

‘Do I?’

‘Yeah. He’s always telling me to capitalise on my looks. To “go for it,” when I don’t know what I’m supposed to go for.’

‘I wasn’t aware that you knew him so well.’ Was I fated to be a grudging camp follower, staggering along in Damian’s trail?

‘Well, I do.’ She looked at me with a cool stare that told me everything. And as I returned her gaze I thought of Damian’s hand, earlier that very day, resting lightly on Serena Gresham’s pelvis, and I wondered what I had done wrong in an earlier life that I should be obliged to hear, in the span of a single afternoon, that Damian had wormed his way into the affections, if not the beds, of these women, both dream goddesses for me in their different ways; that, in short, my toy, my own invention, my action doll was apparently getting all the action. That months, or even weeks, after I had let him into the henhouse, this fox was ruling my roost. Joanna must have seen some of this in my troubled brow. ‘Do you like him?’ she asked.

I realised that this was a proper question and one that I had not addressed until now, and should have. But I chose to answer as if it were neither of these things. ‘I’m the one who introduced him to all of you.’

‘I know that, but you never sound now as if you like him.’

Was this the moment that I realised I didn’t? If so, I did not face it for quite a while after. ‘Of course I like him.’

‘Because I don’t think you’ve got much in common. He wants to get on, but he doesn’t want to fit in, but not like you and not in the way you mean. You think he’ll take advantage of the whole thing and keep in with these people, that he’ll end up marrying Lady Penelope La-dida and send his children to Eton, but you’re wrong. He can’t stand you all, really. He’s ready to break out and say goodbye to the lot of you.’ There was clearly something in the notion that excited her.