Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect

‘Does she?’ I couldn’t help myself. Aren’t we sad, sometimes? The odd thing was, and I remember this quite clearly, I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted him to give.

Damian shrugged as he helped himself to butter. ‘If I know, I dare say she does.’

‘What about you?’

My question was oddly phrased and he looked up. ‘What do you mean?’

Of course, the fact was I wanted to hit him. Right there, smack, in the middle of his face, with a great, heavy, wounding punch that would send him over backwards, with any luck cracking his head against the stove as he fell. I’ve often wondered what it must be like to live in a rougher world from the one I have always occupied, in a hit-now-ask-questions-later kind of society. One’s always supposed to say how ghastly violence is, and of course it is ghastly, but there must be compensations. ‘Are you serious about her?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘Don’t be so fucking pompous.’

‘I just meant-’

‘You meant you are so jealous your face hurts, and you’re only assuming a poncy, pseudo-uncle pose so you can patronise me and put me down, and show me I’m a ridiculous interloper, out of my mind for daring to dream so far above my reach.’ He put a bit more marmalade on to his toast and bit into it. Of course, I had to admit that every one of his words was documentary truth. If kicking him to death would have made Serena love me, I would have done it there and then. Biff, boff, bang. Instead, I opted for underhand fighting. ‘I thought she was going out with Andrew Summersby now.’ I was not without a trick or two of my own.

Damian looked up, sharply. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘He seemed very proprietorial when he came looking for her after you’d gone. Then they went off together.’

He gave a slightly annoyed grin. ‘Andrew was at the dinner she had to go to and it is true that right now her parents think she’s going out with him. Since Andrew seems to share this delusion, she couldn’t be bothered to have it out with him tonight. No doubt, she soon will.’

I thought about this. It sounded to me as if Serena and Andrew were indeed an item, a thought that sickened me, and Damian was trying, for my benefit, to exaggerate his chances with her, when all he had managed was one kiss. We may have been more innocent then, but one kiss didn’t mean much. ‘Are you going to her dance?’ I said.

‘Can you ask? I’m staying at Gresham for it.’

I have never been a very confident person, although I do not really know why this is so. It is true that I was not good-looking when I was young, but I was quite clever and I seemed to get about. My parents loved me, I have no doubt of that, and I’ve always had a lot of friends. Nor were girlfriends an insuperable problem, if a few may have been on the lookout for something better. I even got on well with my sister before her marriage. Yet with all this, I was not confident and I had to admire Damian for that reason. No castle walls could apparently keep him out and I envied him for it. Even at that moment, when I wished him in chains, his feet encased in blocks of concrete, at the bottom of the sea. Even as I imagined his thick hair waving as the tides pushed it to and fro, fishes swimming across his staring, sightless eyes, in some way, malgrè moi, I felt admiration. ‘Has Lady Claremont invited you?’

‘Not yet, but she will. Candida and Serena are sorting it out between them. Serena’s going to tell her mother that Candida fancies me.’ He looked at me as he said it. As an alibi this was perfectly sensible and Lady Claremont would believe it, since Candida fancied everything male that moved, but as well as this there was a meaning in his words which I could see he had not thought through properly before he spoke them. Their echo in the room annoyed him. Because his speech meant that if Lady Claremont had even a whiff of this man’s interest in her daughter he would not be welcome in her house. ‘It’s OK,’ he said in answer to my unspoken query. ‘I understand that type. I know I can make her like me.’ Obviously he did not understand Lady Claremont’s type, nor that of her husband, nor that of any of their world, largely because those people were not then, and are not now, interested in being understood by the likes of Damian Baxter. As a matter of fact I think Lady Claremont might well have liked him under different circumstances. She might have enjoyed his humour and his self-belief, she might even have allowed him into their circle as one of those token Real World Members that such households go in for. But that is all.

I am not an Englishman who hates Los Angeles. I’m not like those actors and directors who insist that every day spent there is drudgery, that it’s all so ‘false’ they cannot besmirch their souls for one more minute and that they shout with joy when the ’plane takes off from LAX. I suppose some of them may be telling the truth, but I would guess not many. More usually, they are just ashamed of their desire for the rewards that only Hollywood will bring, and they disparage the place and all its works in the hope that they will not lose caste among their soulful brethren back in Blighty. I had only been once before the trip in question, many years before, when I was seeking fame and fortune in a fairly disorientated way, but I have visited a few times recently and I always enjoy myself when I am there. It is a resolutely upbeat place and after a long unbroken stretch of British pessimism, it feels good sometimes to look on the sunny side of life. I know the natives take this to extremes. But still, there is something about the up, Up, UP!ness of it all that is a tonic to sad spirits and I am always pleased to be there.

In the forty years that separated my youthful friendship with Terry Vitkov and this, our re-encounter, she had enjoyed what is known as a chequered career. Even her time in London had not gone according to plan. She and her mother had done quite well, all things considered, but Terry had not ended up a viscountess presiding over twenty bedrooms in a house open to the public, which had unquestionably been the target, and they must have been disappointed. Looking back, I think the difficulty may have been that the Vitkovs as a group had made the common mistake of confusing a large salary with having money. A salary may enable you to live well while it’s coming in, very well, but it does not alter the reality of your position and no one knows this better than the British upper class. Just as television fame, while it continues, feels like film stardom but seldom survives the cancellation of the series. Naturally, none of this would have mattered if a nice young man had fallen in love with Terry, but she was an abrasive personality, with her big features and her big teeth, loud in laughter, short on humour, and with a kind of unconcealed greed that was rather off-putting even to the worldly. In short she did not land her fish. There was a moment when she might have had an army major who was probably in line to get a baronetcy from an ageing uncle (although the latter was unmarried and these things are never certain), but the young officer took fright and fell back into the arms of a judge’s daughter from Rutland. In some ways he might have been better off with Terry, as she would at least have filled the house with people who could talk, but how long would she have stood it, that life of rainy walks and discussing horses over plates of summer pudding, once the title had arrived? So, if the path the Major took was duller, it was also probably smoother for him in the long run.

I last saw her, I am fairly sure, around the time of the party in Estoril, but not because she was there. In fact, she was annoyed that she had failed to secure an invitation. If only I had been so lucky. She may already have been pregnant then, but if so, none of us knew it, only that she had a plain but eager American millionaire pursuing her, divorced but not too old, whom she subsequently married in time for the baby’s birth. The millionaire’s name was Greg Something and he had been working in Eastern Europe at the time. After leaving there they had returned together to sun-drenched California where he pursued a career with Merrill Lynch and we’d lost them. I never really knew him but I liked him and, judging by our few meetings, I would have said he was far better suited to her than any of her English beaux, and if I had given it a moment’s thought, I would have hoped for many years of bliss before Abraham saw fit to part them. Unfortunately, or so the story goes, Terry, a decade further down the line, attempted to cash him in for a much richer banker from Connecticut, before the latter dumped her for a model and left her high and dry, her first husband having made his escape while the going was good and settled down in North Virginia with his second family.