Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect

The man had garnered all the necessary information and made off to put it into practice. ‘What changed you?’ I asked and he did not need to be reminded of the meaning of the question.

He thought for a moment. ‘Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing? In those days I felt I’d come from nothing, which was obviously not true, as everyone comes from something. I also felt I knew nothing, which was truer but not completely true either, and consequently I felt I had to present myself as the man who knows everything, who is in touch with the universe, embodying the zeitgeist. I imagined that I looked like a giant controlling his destiny and not a saddo with a dye job.’ He smiled at the memory and shook his head. ‘Those jackets, alone. What was that?’ I couldn’t help laughing with him. ‘And there you have the reason for why I hated all of you lot.’ Which was an unexpected change of direction.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I felt you were so much more in charge than I was.’

‘We weren’t.’

‘No, I can see that now. But your contempt for me, and everything about me, made me think you were.’

This made me sorrowful. Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy? ‘I hope we weren’t as bad as that. I hate the word contempt.’

He nodded. ‘Of course, you’re much nicer these days. I knew you would be. Anyone with any brains, gets nicer as they get older. But we were all angry then.’

‘You seem to have harnessed your anger to great effect.’

‘Someone once said to me that when young and clever men are angry, they either explode or achieve great things.’

The weird coincidence of the words made me sit up. ‘How funny. A friend of mine said that about another chap I know, not long ago. Do you remember Serena Gresham?’

‘I remember everyone at that dinner.’ I raised my eyebrows to acknowledge that this must indeed be the case for all the guests who were present. But he hadn’t finished. ‘Actually, I remember her more than that. She was quite friendly with Joanna, even after she’d dropped out to run off with me. It was Serena who warned me not to explode.’

I was simultaneously impressed at Serena’s generosity of vision in going on with Joanna and Kieran when most of the girls had dropped them and slightly disappointed, as one always is, at the realisation that what had seemed a bon mot fashioned expressly for one’s own ears is in fact just a slogan for the speaker. ‘When she said it to me she was talking about Damian Baxter, another member of the Portuguese Dinner Club.’

‘The founder member.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘In a way, Damian Baxter and I were the two graduates of that year’s output from the University of Life.’

Of course they would know each other, these Masters of the Universe. Damian had told me Kieran avoided him and I was curious as to whether this was really true. ‘I suppose you must run into each other from time to time, at gatherings of the Great and the Good,’ I said.

‘Not really.’ And there was my answer.

‘That evening will obviously be with us to the end.’

He smiled, with a slight shrug. ‘Damian isn’t a friend of mine, but not because of that.’

Naturally I wanted to know the reason but I felt it might have an uncomfortable bearing on what I intended to discover before we parted and it didn’t seem quite the right time to open that can of worms. ‘He’s certainly kept his success less secret than you have.’ In saying this I found that I already admired Kieran very much. There is always something good in knowing you admire someone without reservation. I enjoyed giving him his due. Particularly as it justified my disapproval of someone I had always disliked.

He shook his head. ‘Damian hasn’t courted fame. He simply let it happen. I have spent who knows how much money keeping my name out of everything. Which is the more vain and self-important response?’

‘Why did it matter to you?’

He thought for a moment. ‘A mixture. Part of me believed it was very grown up to avoid a public profile and part of me had had enough. I did quite a lot of first-nighting and glad-handing and the rest of it during my days as a pseudo-posh dressmaker. It was moderately necessary then, though not as necessary as I pretended. But for a property developer, fame gives you nothing that you need and plenty you don’t want.’ The waiter had arrived with a clutch of appropriate equipment and Kieran waited until the man had finished arming us for the delights to come. ‘Fame has its uses. The jumping of queues on to aeroplanes and into hospitals. It gives you good tables in restaurants that were full before you rang. You get theatre seats and tickets for the opera, and even invitations from people you are genuinely interested to know. But money gives you all these things without the hassle. You’re not besieged to open this and support that, because nobody knows who you are and it wouldn’t help if you did. The newspapers don’t comb your background and interview your school friends to see if you kissed someone behind the bicycle shed in 1963. I don’t have to put up with any of that. I get requests for large donations and I give some. That’s all that is expected of me.’

‘Were you surprised when you made money? I mean, proper money?’ This seems an odd question to ask of a slight acquaintance after a forty-year gap. I can only tell you it didn’t feel odd at the time to either of us.

‘Everyone who is very successful will tell you that the initial response is entirely schizoid. One part of you thinks: All this for me? There must be some mistake! And the other greets immense, good fortune with: What on earth took you so long?’

‘I suppose self-belief is a key ingredient.’

He nodded. ‘So they tell us. But it’s never quite enough to prepare you for what’s happening. I made a lot of money when I sold the shops, but even so, when I did the sums for the projected profit on the first development I thought I’d put in too many noughts. I couldn’t believe it would generate so much. But it did. Then there was more and more and more and more. And everything changed.’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Oh, but I did. In those early years I went completely crazy. I was a jackass, a micro-manager to a truly demented degree. My home, my clothes, my cars, everything had to be just so. Looking back, I think I must have been imitating some notion of how posh people behaved but I got it completely wrong. I kept complaining in restaurants, and insisting on different shades of towel and different kinds of water in hotels. I wouldn’t go to the telephone when people I knew rang.’ He paused, bewildered, trying to understand his own remembered lunacy.

‘Why not?’

‘I thought that important people didn’t. It was crazy. Even the President of the United States goes to the telephone if he knows the person at the other end, but I wouldn’t. I had armies of assistants, working from sheaves of messages, with endless lists doled out to all and sundry. And I cancelled; boy, did I cancel. Last-minute duck-out. That was me.’

‘I’ve never really understood why people do that.’ I haven’t. And yet it is an increasingly common phenomenon among the would-be great.

He sucked at his lip. ‘Nor me, really. I think I felt trapped the moment I’d agreed to do anything, because the coming event, whatever it was, wouldn’t be under my control. Then, as it drew nearer I would begin to panic, and on the day I’d decide I couldn’t possibly go, usually for some nonsensical and irrelevant reason, and all the people I paid to kiss my arse would tell me that my host or hostess would understand, so I’d chuck.’

‘When did that end?’

‘When I’d been dropped by everybody. I still thought I was a sought-after guest, until one day I realised I was only ever asked to celebrity stunts, but never to where anything interesting was happening. Politicians, performers, writers, even thinkers, I wasn’t invited to meet them any more. I was just too unreliable.’