I outlined a little of this to Damian as we ate. He was fascinated by every detail, like an anthropologist who has long proclaimed a theory as an article of faith, but only recently begun to discover any real evidence of its truth. I suspect that Serena was the first completely genuine aristocrat he had ever met and, perhaps to his relief, he found her to be entirely undisappointing. She was in truth exactly what people reading historical novels, bought from a railway bookshop before a long and boring journey, imagine aristocratic heroines to be, both in her serene beauty and in her cool, almost cold, detachment. Despite what they themselves might like to think, there are few aristocrats who conform very satisfactorily to the imagined prototype and it was Damian’s good fortune, or bad, that he should have begun his social career with one who did so perfectly. It was clear that for him there was something wonderfully satisfactory in the encounter. Of course, had he been less fortunate in his introduction to that world he might have been luckier in the way things turned out.
‘So how do you get on to the list for these tea parties?’ he asked.
The thing was, I liked him. It feels odd to write those words and there have been times when I have quite forgotten it, but I did. He was fun and entertaining and good-looking, always a recommendation for anyone where I’m concerned, and he had that quality, now dignified with the New Age term of Positive Energy, but which then simply indicated someone who would never wear you out. Years later, a friend would describe her world to me as being peopled entirely by radiators and drains. If so, then Damian was King Radiator. He warmed the company he was in. He could make people want to help him, which alchemy he practised, most successfully, on me.
As it happened, in this instance I could not deliver what Damian was asking for, as he had really missed the tea parties. These little informal gatherings were very much a preliminary weeding process, when the girls would seek out their playmates for the coming year within the overall group, and by the time of our Cambridge dinner the gangs were formed and the cocktail parties had already begun, although, as I told him, the first I was due to attend was not in fact a deb party as such, but one of a series given by Peter Townend, the Season’s Master of the Ceremonies, at his London flat. It may seem strange to a student of these rites to learn that for the last twenty or thirty years of their existence they were entirely managed by an unknown northerner of no birth and modest means, but the fact remains that they were. Naturally, Damian had heard the name and almost immediately, with his hound-like scent for quarry, he asked if he might tag along, and I agreed. This was distinctly risky on my part as Townend was jealous of his powers and privileges, and to turn up casually with a hanger-on, was to risk devaluing the invitation, which he would certainly not take kindly. Nevertheless, I did it and so, a week or two later, when I parked my battered green mini without difficulty in Chelsea Manor Street, Damian Baxter was sitting beside me in the passenger seat.
I say Peter was jealous of his role and so he was, but he was entitled to be. From a modest background, with which he was perfectly content, and after a career in journalism and editing where his speciality was genealogy, he had one day discovered his personal vocation would be to keep the Season alive, when Her Majesty’s decision to end Presentation in 1958 had seemed to condemn the whole institution to immediate execution. We know now that it was instead destined to die a lingering death, and maybe simple decapitation might have been preferable, but nobody knows the future and at that time it seemed that Peter, single-handedly, had won it an indefinite reprieve. The Monarch would play no further part in it, of course, which knocked the point and the stuffing out of it for many, but it would still have a purpose in bringing together the offspring of like-minded parents, and this was the responsibility he took on. He had no hope of reward. He did it solely for the honour of the thing, which in my book makes it praiseworthy, whatever one’s opinion of the end product. Year by year he would comb the stud books, Peerage and Gentry, writing to the mothers of daughters, interviewing their sons, all to buy another few months for the whole business. Can this really have been only forty years ago? you may ask in amazement. The answer’s yes.
Peter’s own gatherings were not to select or encourage the girls. That had all been done some time before. No, they were basically to audition those young men who had come to his attention as possible escorts and dancing partners for the parties to come. Having been vetted, their names would either be underscored or crossed off the lists that were distributed to the anxious waiting mothers, who would assume that the cads and seducers, the alcoholics and the gamblers and those who were NSIT (not safe in taxis) would all have been excised from the names presented. They should have been, of course, but it was not entirely plain sailing,
We moved on into the crowded, main room, I hesitate to call it the drawing room, since it had many functions, but that was where we found Peter, his characteristic cowlick of hair falling over his crumpled, pug-like face. He pointed at Damian. ‘Who he?’ he said in a loud and overtly hostile voice.
‘May I introduce Damian Baxter?’ I said.
‘I never invited him,’ said Peter, quite unrelenting. ‘What’s he doing here?’ Peter had, as I have said, made a decision not to pass himself off as a product of the system he so admired and in a moment like this I understood why. Since he had not posited himself as an elegant gentleman, he did not feel any need to be polite if it did not suit him. In short, he never disguised his feelings, and over the years I came both to like and to admire him for it. Of course, his words may read as if his anger was directed towards the unwelcome guest, when it was instead entirely meant for me. I was the one who had broken the rules. In the face of this attack I’m afraid I foundered. It seems odd, certainly to the man I am today, but I know I was suddenly anxious at the thought of all those treats, which I had planned for and which were in his gift, slipping away. It might have been less troublesome if they had.
‘Don’t blame him,’ said Damian, seeing the problem and moving quickly in beside us. ‘Blame me. I very much wanted to meet you, Mr Townend, and when I heard he was coming here I forced him to bring me. It’s entirely my fault.’
Peter stared at him. ‘That’s my cue to say you’re welcome, I suppose.’
His tone could not have been less hospitable but Damian, as ever, was unfazed. ‘It’s your cue to ask me to leave if you wish. And of course I will.’ He paused, a trace of anxiety playing across his even features.
‘Very smooth,’ said Peter in his curious, ambiguous, almost petulant way. He nodded towards a bewildered Spaniard holding a tray. ‘You can have a drink if you like.’ I do not at all believe he was won over by Damian’s charm, then or later. I would say he simply recognised a fellow player who might be possessed of great skill and was reluctant to make an enemy of him on their first encounter. As Damian moved away, Peter turned back to me. ‘Who is he? And where did he pick you up?’ This in itself was curiously phrased.
‘Cambridge. I met him at a party in my college. As to who he is,’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t know much about him, really.’
‘Nor will you.’
