‘And did you have a good time?’
‘So-so,’ he said.
As promised, I arrived back at the abbey at approximately nine the following morning. The door was standing open so I just went in. As I had expected, the house party might still have been in their rooms, but the place was a whirl of activity. A great house on the day after a party is always rather evocative. Servants were wandering about, collecting missed glasses and things, and carrying furniture back to their proper places. The table was being assembled at one end of the dining room, while the huge carpet was unrolled in front of me, and when I asked after the house party’s breakfast I was nodded through to the little dining room beyond it, a simple room, if not as little as all that, enlivened by some paintings of racehorses, with their riders in the Gresham colours. Lady Claremont had broken her usual rule and there were three tables, a bit jammed in, set for about twenty-four. Damian was alone, finishing off a piece of toast. He stood as I entered. ‘My case is already in the hall.’
‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to anyone?’
‘They’re all asleep and I said goodbye last night.’ So, without further ado, we loaded up his bag and left. He didn’t say anything much as we drove along, beyond a few directions, until we were back on the Al heading south. Then, at last, he did speak. ‘I’m not going to do that again,’ he said.
‘We’re none of us going to do much more of it. I think I’ve only got another two dances and a few charity things, then it’s over.’
‘I’m not even going to them. I’ve had enough. I should do some work, anyway, before I forget what it is I’m supposed to be studying.’
I looked at him. There was something resolute and glum about him, which was new. ‘Did anything happen last night?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You seem rather disenchanted.’
‘If I am disenchanted, it has nothing to do with last night. It’s the whole bloody, self-indulgent, boring thing. I’ve had enough of it.’
‘Which of course is your privilege.’
After that, we drove more or less in silence until at last we reached Northampton. It is not a town I know, but Damian took me safely to a row of perfectly respectable semi-detached 1930s villas, all built of brick with tiles hung above the waistline, and each with a name on the gate. The one we stopped outside was called ‘Sunnyside.’ As we were unloading, the door opened and a middle-aged couple came out, the man in a rather loud jersey and worsted slacks, and the women in a grey skirt with a cardigan over her shoulders, held in place by a shiny chain. The man came forward to take the case. ‘This is my father,’ said Damian and he introduced me. I shook hands and said hello.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr Baxter.
‘How do you do,’ I said in return, deliberately blocking his cheerful welcome by not answering in kind, with what I foolishly imagined, in my youthful fatuity, to be good breeding.
‘Won’t you come in?’ said Mrs Baxter. ‘Would you like a coffee?’ But I didn’t go in and I didn’t have any coffee. I regret it now, that refusal of their hospitality. My excuse was that I had an appointment in London at three o’clock and I wasn’t sure I’d make it as it was. I told myself it was important, and perhaps it was, but I regret it now. And even if I couldn’t bring myself to say it, I was pleased to meet them. They were nice, decent people; the mother went out of her way to be polite and the father was, I think, a clever man. I learned later that he was the manager of a shoe factory with a special interest in opera and it saddened me in a way that I had not met them before. That they had not been included in any of the year’s frolics, not even at the university. Looking back, I realise it was a key moment for me, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, in that it was one of the first instances when I came to appreciate the insidious poison of snobbery, the tyranny of it, the meaningless values that made me reject their friendly overtures, that had made Damian hide these two, pleasant, intelligent people because he was ashamed of them.
On the morning in question, I realise now, Damian was making a kind of statement of apology, of non-shame, by bringing me here. He had hidden them behind a barrier because he did not want me to judge him, to look down on him, on the basis of his parents, with whom there was nothing wrong at all, and in this he was right. We would have looked down on him. I blush to write it and I liked them when I met them, but we would have done, without any moral justification whatever. He had wanted to move into a different world and he felt part of that would be shedding his background. He’d managed the transition, but on this particular morning I think he was ashamed of his ambition, ashamed of rejecting his own past. The truth is we should all have been ashamed in having played along with it without question. At any rate, with avowals to meet again the following Monday at Cambridge we parted and I got back into my car.
We did meet again, of course, several times, but we did not meet alone for the rest of my time at university. Essentially my friendship with Damian Baxter ended on that day, the morning after Serena Gresham’s dance, and I cannot pretend I was sorry, even if my feelings for him were less savage then than they would be when we did next find ourselves under the same roof. But that was a couple of years later, when we were out in the world, and quite a different story.
FOURTEEN
The weekend passed pleasantly enough. We ate, we talked, we slept, we walked. Sophie Jamieson turned out to share my interest in French history and the Purbricks were great friends of some cousins of mine who lived near them, so it all went very smoothly in the way of these things. I must say Andrew had not improved with the years. Having inherited the earldom and the savaged remnant that the family lawyer’s depredations had left of the estate, it was as if the last vestiges of self-knowledge or self-doubt had been flung to the four winds. He was king, and a very angry king at that, raging at the gardeners and the cook and his wife about almost everything. Serena took it all in her stride but once, when I was on my way downstairs before dinner on Friday evening, I found him haranguing her in the hall about a frame that should have been mended or something. I caught her eye as I was on my way to the library door and she did not look away but raised her eyebrows slightly, which he would not have seen and which I took as more or less the greatest compliment an English toff can pay: to include you in their private, family dramas.
After lunch on Saturday, when we’d finished drinking our cups of coffee in the drawing room, Serena proposed a walk by the river and most of us stuck up our hands to join her. ‘You’ll need boots,’ she said, but there were masses
