the poorer for it.
The Great Room at Grosvenor House was an appropriate setting for the formal opening race of the Season. It twinkled with that now distinctive, self-important, 1960s, sub-deco glamour, so memorably christened ‘Euro- Splendour’ by Stephen Poliakoff. One came through the hall of the hotel on to a kind of gallery, where a wide, aluminium-balustered staircase within the room itself led down towards the gleaming floor below. At the sight of it I was suddenly glad that I had come. It was early June, and a warm night, too warm for the boys’ comfort, really, as our tails in those days were made from woollen cloth, but there is something about a party on a warm summer night that always seems to promise much. Usually more than it delivers.
Some years later, before the end of it all, the Season would have to take account of the exam year and cater for career girls sitting their A levels and the like, but not then. For such a consideration to have been raised by anyone in 1968 would have been regarded as quirky, eccentric and very middle class. Looking back, I realise there was hardly a parent there who thought their daughters’ future would be anything more than an extended repeat of their own present. How can they have been so secure in their expectations? Didn’t it occur to them that more change might be on its way? After all, their generation had lived through enough of it to push the world off its axis.
I stood for a moment against the balustrade. There was something very seductive about looking down from above on a ballroom apparently filled with flower-decked swans. At that moment, whatever the rights and wrongs of the ritual, I confess I was happy to be part of it, as Lucy and I descended together, smiling and nodding in the way one does. From across the room, Serena gave me a slight wave, which was gratifying. ‘Whose table is she on?’ I asked.
Lucy followed my gaze. She did not need to be told whom we were discussing. ‘Her mother’s. She’s the one in blue. The couple talking at the end look like the Marlboroughs and I’m pretty sure the fat one next to Lord Claremont is a princess of Denmark. I seem to remember she’s one of Serena’s godmothers.’ I decided not to push in.
Lucy stopped. ‘There’s your friend, making hay while the sun shines.’ A few yards ahead of us Damian was joking merrily with Joanna Langley.
I wasn’t going to let her get away with that. ‘Your friend, too, I gather,’ I said sharply, which earned me an apologetic glance.
Watching the gossiping couple, somewhat sourly, was the tragic figure of Georgina Waddilove. Pitiful Georgina. The style that was so becoming to almost all the others did not show her to much advantage and she resembled nothing more than an enormous, white blancmange. The flowers sewn on to a mountain of artificial ringlets battened to her head looked like scraps of torn paper caught in a tree. I walked up to where Damian was standing. ‘Have you brought your stuff here?’
Damian nodded. ‘It’s all in the cloakroom.’ He smiled at Joanna. ‘He’s putting me up for the night.’
‘Don’t your parents have a place in London?’ By such questions Joanna would occasionally give herself away. At least she would signify that she was not a founder member of this set-up. I am confident, even at this distance, that there was no malice in her, far from it, but she had not learned to spare someone’s feelings by avoiding any subject that might prove delicate. This was partly because, despite her great expectations, she was not really interested in money. If the reason Damian’s parents did not have a London home was because they could not afford one, she would not have thought any the less of them for that. Which is to say she was possessed of a larger generosity of spirit than most of us. Damian, as usual, was unfazed.
‘No, they haven’t,’ he said, without further qualification. I had not yet noticed it in him, but he never gave out any information about himself unless asked a direct question. Even then it was carefully rationed.
‘I think we’d better sit down.’ Georgina had clearly had just about enough of Damian’s being cornered by Miss Langley, as she would have put it.
I smiled at the object of her irritation. ‘Are you in this party?’
‘With my mother? Of course not.’ Joanna shook her head, laughing, and I found myself watching the movement of her lips. To me, her beauty had a mesmerising perfection, as if one were standing close to a celluloid icon projected on to an invisible screen. ‘You don’t think she would have missed out on the chance of hosting a dinner of her own?’ She nodded at a point further up the room and I could see an eager, bustling, little woman, wearing a good deal of jewellery, who was staring anxiously in our direction. ‘Better go.’ She sauntered away.
‘I suppose you’re going, too,’ said Damian, ‘Think of me.’ The last was added in an annoying half-whisper, just audible enough for Georgina to have caught it, although I am not sure that she did.
‘You didn’t have to be in this group. You could have had my seat if you hadn’t taken the first offer.’ I made no attempt to prevent Lucy hearing this, nor had I intended to, so Damian was able to direct his answer at her.
‘To quote Madame Greffulhe: “Que j’ai jamais su.”’ Lucy laughed. But by now people really were starting to sit down, and so we set out on the journey back to her mother’s table.
‘Who’s Madame WhatNot?’ I asked.
‘Marcel Proust used to go to her parties, when he was young. Years later, they asked her what it was like having such a genius in her salon, and she replied: “Que j’ai jamais su!”’
‘If only I’d known.’
‘Precisely.’
I was silent, wondering how Damian knew these things. How did he know Lucy knew them? I learned later it was one of his gifts. Like a squirrel, he would seek out and store any unlikely tidbit, in this case the startling news that Lucy Dalton read Proust, and he would save it for a time when it could be used to create an instant, magic bond that would exclude the others present, making him and whoever his target might be into a cosy club of two. I have seen the trick employed by others, but seldom to such effect. He never misjudged the moment. Lucy smiled. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re surprised.’
‘I am a bit.’ I looked around at the chattering, giggling throng, pulling their chairs up to the tables with their shining, white cloths. ‘I doubt that most of this lot read Proust.’
‘If they did, they wouldn’t tell you. The men here will exaggerate what they know. The women will conceal it.’ I hope these words would not be true now, but I’m afraid they were true then.
She enjoyed my wrong-footed silence, until I was the one to break it. ‘I thought you didn’t like him,’ I said, which seemed a non sequitur, but wasn’t.
