Julian Fellowes - Past Imperfect

‘Anyway, I wondered if it was all part of Damian’s search.’

My heart stopped. What had I said to her? Had I been so surprised by her presence at Gresham that I’d given it all away? Could I have? What had I told her? My thoughts were flying about like a crowd of ravens with nowhere to settle. I couldn’t seem to remember anything about that evening, yet I thought I’d remembered every moment. ‘Search?’ I said, feeling this was the best way to flush out information.

‘You said Damian wanted you to look up some of his old friends. You told me when we met up that time in Yorkshire. I wondered if Candida was one of them, since she couldn’t think of any other reason you’d want to see her again.’

‘She’s rather hard on herself. I can think of lots of reasons.’

‘But was it? Is it?’

‘As a matter of fact yes, it is. I thought I’d buy her lunch and get her news. That’s all he wants, really.’

‘Well, I’ve got a much better idea. She’s coming down here next weekend, so I wondered if you could join her. Join us. We’d love it.’

My despair at my own stupidity was suddenly and totally replaced by a chorus of angels’ wings. ‘That’s incredibly kind. Do you mean it?’

‘Absolutely. Come on Friday, for dinner. And you can leave at some stage on Sunday afternoon.’

‘As long as we’ve got that settled.’

She laughed. ‘Andrew always needs to know he’ll have the house back by dinner on Sunday.’

I’ll bet he does, I thought, the mannerless toad. ‘What about clothes?’

‘He wears a smoking jacket but no tie on Saturday night. Apart from that we’ll be in rags the whole time.’

‘Well, if you’re sure…’

‘Completely sure. I’ll e-mail you directions. We’re very easy to find, but you might as well have them, if you’ll give me your address.’

So I did. And it was settled. I wondered if I ought to ring Candida, but I never heard back from her, so presumably Serena had filled her in.

After this conversation I sat at the desk for several minutes, quite unable to resolve exactly what I was thinking. Naturally, as I have observed, the invitation had set off a peal of chiming, silver bells in my heart, ringing and singing with joy at the prospect of two whole days when I might look upon her face to my heart’s content. But there is also the old proverb that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and now that I was faced with a real prospect of having the Blessed Serena back in my life, paradoxically, I wasn’t completely convinced it was a good idea. Of course, all this was Damian’s fault. It was Damian’s fault she had left my life thirty-eight years before. At least I dated the beginning of the end from that dinner. Now it was Damian’s fault she had come back. That she had been, would always be, the love of my life, was clearly established, to my satisfaction anyway, and, if I was honest with myself, it was her return to my conscious mind that had spelled curtains for poor Bridget, as I had more or less told my father. The reminder of what love is, of what it could be, made the thin facsimile that I had been living feel rather pointless.

But then Serena was content with the way her life was, and if she wasn’t she would never leave her husband, of that I was quite sure, and if she did it wouldn’t be for me, and if it would I had nothing comparable to offer her, and… so on. I was equally certain she was not the type for any extra-marital activity, and if even this too were wrong, I would certainly not be her chosen co-adulterer. I knew well enough that while maturity and some success had transformed me into a marriage possibility for various, lonely divorcees who were not quite clear as to how they would finance their latter years, still I was not the sort of man who tempts a girl to sin. I had neither the looks nor the chops.

No, the future that was on offer, or at least a possibility since nothing at all was yet on offer, would simply be as a friend, a walker, a companion. The literate ally that fashionable women married to fools or workaholics sometimes need to buy them lunch or carry their coat at the theatre, who might join a party at the villa in Amalfi and make the other guests laugh. Did I want this? I had done enough of it in the past, of course, and sung for my supper a thousand times and more, but did I want it with the added twist of pain? To sit and watch the woman I would have died for, as she chattered on about a weekend in Trouville or a play at the Almeida or her latest purchases? No. A man has his pride, I thought, my mind clearly still running on empty. I would go for the weekend. I had anyway to question Candida, or that was my excuse, but that would finish it. I was nearly at the end of the quest that had taken me through my old stamping ground of long ago. But once the search was done, Candida’s child would get the money and Damian would die, and I would go home and write my books again, and say hello to Serena when I saw her at Christie’s Summer Party. And it would be enough to know that she was well. Or so I vowed.

Waverly Park sounds a little more romantic than it is. The original seat of the Earls of Belton, Mellingburgh Castle, left the family when the senior line died out in an heiress during the 1890s and is now buried beneath the station car park in Milton Keynes, for much of which its walls supplied the hardcore. But the title had jumped sideways to a junior branch and they celebrated its arrival with marriage to a well-endowed American and the purchase of Waverly in Dorset, not far from the Jurassic coast. The estate had shrunk, after both wars and then again quite recently as when old Lord Belton died it turned out his provisions had been drawn up quite wrongly, making it impossible to prevent half the estate being divided between Andrew’s siblings. I believe there was an expectation that they would gamely hand this back to their older brother, but as so often with these things, it didn’t happen. To make matters worse, the sister, Annabella, had turned out a gambler and she sold her share within three years of getting it, leaving a gaping hole in the centre of the farms, and the other son, Eustace, married to an even worse bully than his mother, had divided his between four daughters, none of whom would stay long term. I was told later that the whole mess had occurred because Lady Belton insisted on using the son of a cousin as their lawyer, instead of someone who knew what they were doing. I cannot swear to the truth of this, but it sounds very likely. The net result was that Andrew was left with far too little land to support the house, a situation exacerbated by his almost chemical lack of brainpower, which ensured that no outside income would come to his aid. Serena may have had something to look forward to from her father, but families like the Greshams do not stay rich by enriching all the siblings and it would never have been much.

The house itself was a fairly large but unremarkable pile. There had been a dwelling there since the 1660s but all that remained of this period was the cantilevered staircase, the nicest thing to look at in the place. The entire building had been enveloped twice, well in the 1750s and badly in the 1900s, by the newly arrived and gleeful Beltons. A burst of optimism in the late 1940s on the part of Andrew’s grandfather had swept away the service wing, relocated the kitchens to the site of a former morning room and converted the great hall to a library. The effect of this was to pull the entrance round the corner, away from the main portico, so the existing front door led one through a sort of tunnel towards the stairs, arriving at them from the back, at a slightly peculiar angle. It never works to fight a house’s architecture and Waverly was no exception to the rule. The rooms had been tossed this way and that in the changeover, swapping their roles as they went, ending with dining rooms full of sofas and drawing rooms stuffed with tables and chairs. Huge fireplaces found themselves warming tiny studies, and dainty bedroom detailing adorned the walls of a semi-ballroom. None of which was improved by the timing of the work, during those post-war years when building materials were rationed, so almost everything had been contrived from plywood and painted plaster. Not all of it was bad. The loss of the hall was hopeless and dislocated the whole ground floor, but the library that replaced it was a great success, and the breakfast room was pretty, if too small. In truth, the house had a lost, bewildered feel, like a private home too quickly changed to a hotel, where the rooms have not been allowed a period of adjustment to get used to their new jobs. Naturally, Andrew thought it a palace and every visitor as lucky as a peasant from Nan Cheng allowed entry for a few, sacred moments to the glories of the Forbidden City.