Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect

‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But there are all sorts of things they can do now.’ One mouthed these clichés at the time, they were as routine as ‘How do you do?’ but one never thought they contained a grain of truth. She gave a routine nod and we danced on.

For some reason, an innocent one I am certain, Terry or more probably her mother had decided to cut a cake at the peak of the evening. This was not generally done. As I have observed, in those pre-don’t-drink-and-drive days, we ate before we arrived and we did not generally eat again until the breakfast was served towards the end of the dance. There might occasionally be some sort of speech and a toast, although by no means always, at a mid point in the festivities, but this usually consisted of some old uncle just standing and saying what a marvellous girl so-and-so was, and we would all raise our glasses and that was that. There were dangers involved in this departure from the norm, but quite honestly, when there was no speech, which was usually the case, there were times when the proceedings fell a bit flat. We arrived, we drank, we danced, we went home and there had never been what my mother would refer to as ‘A Moment’ in the evening that really registered. The father of the deb in question would have the bitter knowledge that he had paid out thousands upon thousands for a night that no one would remember. On the other hand the danger of a speech and a toast is always that it may in some way feel rather naff. At least, when the occasion is not a wedding or something where speeches are generally expected. Anyway, on this particular evening, perhaps because neither Terry nor Verena was absolutely at ease with the rules, they decided to have cake and a toast, as if it had indeed been the wedding it was not.

I gather people wandering throughout the waxworks were summoned by a kind of tannoy, which would obviously have been installed in that building anyway for crowd control, but by then Lucy and I were back in the Hall of Kings, seated rather wearily at a table with Georgina Waddilove and Richard Tremayne, an unlikely couple if you like, overlooked by some of the duller members of the Hanoverian dynasty, one of whom was responsible for Richard’s predecessor, the first Duke of Trent, in what I suspect must have been an uncharacteristic night of merriment. I have forgotten why Richard was with us, probably because he was tired and couldn’t find anywhere else to sit. At all events Jeff Vitkov, who had come over from New York especially for the ball and was obviously determined to make his mark, took the microphone from the band singer and announced that he was going to propose a toast to his ‘young and beautiful daughter, and her even younger and more beautiful mother.’ This is the kind of thing that makes the English cringe, of course, and we were only just recovering when he added that we were all going to eat some genuine, American brownies, to mark the ‘debut,’ ugh, of a ‘genuine, American girl.’ Quite apart from the toe-curling sentimentality of all this, to most of us in those days ‘Brownies’ meant young Girl Guides, just as ‘Cubs’ meant young Boy Scouts, so there was a certain amount of hilarity released by the announcement that we were going to eat some, but we listened on as Jeff praised his daughter, Terry, who then seized the microphone for herself, paying tearful tribute to her wonderful ‘Pop and Mom,’ which made us freeze even more solidly in our chairs. Taking up a large knife, she sort of slid it through a mound of the brownies in question, and after that a mass of waitresses appeared, carrying decorated trays full of the little sticky brown cakes we now all know so well but didn’t then. I hate chocolate and I remember so did Georgina, so, alone at our table, we didn’t eat any, but they must have been good, because more or less everyone else did, and across the room I could see Damian absolutely piling in.

The events that followed a little while later seemed to start almost as a rumour, a sense of strangeness spreading through the gathering, before anyone was aware of the source. I recall that I was dancing with Minna Bunting, although our little walkout was over by that stage, and there was suddenly the sound of someone being violently sick. Which, then, was very startling. People on the dance floor began to look at each other, as there were more odd sounds, men and women started to scream with laughter, not ordinary amused laughter, but a shrill cackling like a witches’ coven at work. In what seemed like no time at all we could hear shouting and singing and yelling and crying coming from every corner. I looked at my partner to share my puzzlement, but even she didn’t look too clever. ‘I feel incredibly ill,’ she muttered and walked off the floor without another word. I hurried after her, but at the edge she suddenly clutched her head and ran off somewhere, presumably to a distant but welcoming cloakroom. Somehow the dancers themselves had maintained a kind of order, but once we had left them, the crowd filling the rest of the rooms and swirling around us felt slightly – or, before long, very – mad. One of the mothers rushed past me, with her bosom hanging out of her dress and I saw Annabella Warren, Andrew Summersby’s sister, screaming and lying flat out, with her skirt hitched above her midriff, displaying some thoroughly unusual-looking underwear, possibly recycled by her nanny. Not far away a young man in the corner was in the process of pulling his shirt over his head. In the mêlée I had soon lost sight of Minna, but someone caught my arm.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Georgina was by my side, her impressive bulk providing me with something to shelter behind. A girl tripped and fell, spreadeagled at our feet, laughing.

‘Come on, everybody! Clap your hands!’ The voice, amplified by the microphone, was only too familiar. We turned and registered that the boy undressing was now revealed as none other than Master Baxter, who had shed the rest of his clothes, and was cavorting wildly round the stage in his underpants and looking in grave danger of losing even those.

By now the ballroom was bedlam. Some people must have escaped at the first signs of trouble, with that marvellous instinct that the British upper classes generally display in such a situation, but those who were not at the exits already were finding it increasingly hard to get to them. Suddenly I caught sight of Terry, in the midst of the demented crowd. Her hair had collapsed and a separate arrangement of ringlets had detached itself from her head and somehow got caught on a zip or hook fastener behind her neck, leaving a kind of mane to sweep down her back, making her look faintly feral as she attempted to claw her way through the ranks of her guests. I reached across a weeping man with his regurgitated dinner down his front and caught her wrist, pulling her through the crowd towards us. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’

‘Somebody spiked the brownies. They were full of hash.’

‘What?’ Is it to be believed that the word was not immediately familiar to me? Or was it just the shock of discovery blocking my concentration?

‘Hash. Marijuana. Dope.’ Terry was altogether more at home with the topic, if angrier than Genghis Khan.

‘Why? Who would do such a thing?’

‘Someone who wanted to ruin my party and pretend to themselves it was a joke.’ This was, I have no doubt, a completely accurate diagnosis. She was rich, she was good-looking, she was an outsider. That was more than enough to ensure enmity in several quarters, although this seemed an unusually unpleasant way of demonstrating it. Then again, the perpetrator may not have been aware of the level of mayhem that would ensue from their jolly prank. We were not all experts then.

‘You seem OK.’

‘I’m OK because I’m on a diet.’ She said it snappily and it was almost funny, if we had not been in the middle of such desolation. At that moment a weeping Verena Vitkov claimed her daughter from the other side. Someone had trodden on her dress, and it had torn away from a seam at the waist, leaving not her legs but her roll-on exposed, which was of course much worse.