been spending like a sailor for a quarter of a century, this could not have been as easy as it was once, but she had bitten off the mouthful and she fully intended to chew it. I am happy to say I was on the list to be invited.
The inspiration for the party was the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, that famous 1815 gathering, given in Brussels on the very eve of Waterloo, and it was held at the Dorchester in Park Lane. Today, one thinks of the hotel as the haunt of film stars and merchants from the East, but in those days it played quite a major part in what was still referred to as ‘Society.’ On the night in question we came in, I think, by the ballroom entrance at the side, situated on Park Lane itself, and the theme of the evening was quite clear the moment one stepped inside, into that long, rather low, hall. Liveried footmen stood to attention, all modern signs, ‘Exit’ and the like, had been hidden behind greenery and there were candles everywhere. None of these last details would be legal today, of course, but nobody cared then. In truth, the party seemed to have taken over most of the ground floor of the hotel. It can’t have, really, can it? But that’s what it felt like on the night. Of course, we didn’t arrive much before eleven, having eaten our dinners elsewhere, and the champagne that greeted us, held out by the whitewigged flunkeys, was not by any means the first drink of the evening. One has to remember that in the late 1960s, while nobody suggested that it was a good idea to drive a car when plastered, it was still long before such considerations had begun to shape our social life. ‘Which of you is drinking tonight?’ would have bewildered the couple arriving at a dinner, since the answer would invariably have been ‘both.’ For this reason no hostess scrupled to ask various friends to provide dinners for her guests before a ball.
Later in the Season, when more dances were given in the country, this would entail putting them up for the night, and essentially meant throwing a house party for strangers, who would drunkenly rattle around the countryside in their cars at all hours. But in London the thing was more easily managed. Sometimes you were flattered to receive an invitation to join the dinner provided by the parents of the deb of the evening, but this didn’t happen (to me, anyway) all that often and usually a pleasant little postcard would drop through the letter box, saying that the writer believed you were going to the dance being given for So-and-So and she would be ‘terribly pleased if you would dine here first.’ At the end of which dinner, fairly far gone or at least merry, we would cheerfully climb into our vehicles and head off for the location of the party proper. This system had obvious advantages. The bonus for the young was that the dances went on forever, because they didn’t really get going much before eleven. While the benefit for the old was plain economy. The parents of the girl in question usually had to hire the place, at least in London, and even in the country marquees would be expected unless the house was vast. Then there was the music, as well as a pretty good breakfast at the end of the event, but by adopting this system the hosts were spared the additional burden of dinner and wines for three or four hundred young and hungry people. No wonder the custom cheered the fathers up no end.
Having taken in the thoroughness of the arrangements, I made my way into the ballroom and here the illusion was impressive. At that time it was customary for a limited number of the older generation to be invited to these gatherings. They would be drawn from the godparents of the debutante, as well as from the relatives and close friends of her parents, and as a rule they would fringe the proceedings, chatting in some other drawing room, watching the children dancing, occasionally venturing on to the floor to demonstrate an adapted foxtrot or quickstep, before retiring fairly early for the night. They were not expected to participate as full guests since, as we all know, the sight of dancing parents is torture for the young and always was. All this was especially true of costume parties, which are rather a bore for anyone out of their thirties, and the adults would simply arrive in evening dress, occasionally with some gay little gesture, worn as a brooch or a hair ornament. None of which applied to this particular event. I do not know if it was respect for the Grand Duchess or terror (probably the latter), but every single attendee, old and young, was in costume. As a particularly witty detail, or possibly after an instruction from on high, several of the mothers and fathers had deliberately chosen outfits of a slightly earlier date than those worn by their offspring. Men in wigs and ruffles, women in high-piled, powdered hair and beauty spots, from the 1780s or ’90s, gave us all the sense that we were indeed back in the Regency and this was the older generation of the day, frowning and disapproving of modern youth. It always amuses me that this particular era, redolent as it is of Versailles and Queen Marie-Antoinette, is such a favourite costume theme with toffs. They seem to have forgotten that it did not as a whole turn out well for the privileged classes, so many of whom would leave their heads, and no doubt wigs, in the basket below the guillotine.
‘What have you come as?’ Lucy was dressed in a Jane Austen, white frock, high-waisted and pure, with a ribbon round her throat and her artificial ringlets sewn with tiny, white silk roses. She looked artful rather than innocent, but charming nonetheless.
‘I’m a hussar,’ I replied slightly indignantly, ‘I should have thought it was obvious.’
‘The trousers are wrong.’
‘Thank you for that.’ The trousers were wrong, as it happens, but the rest of the outfit was perfect, bright scarlet, heavily braided, with a fur-edged jacket slung between my left shoulder and my right armpit. I thought I looked fabulous. ‘They’re only wrong for 1815. They would be right by 1850. Anyway, it was the best I could manage. It was too late to find anything in London, so I had to raid the costume store of Windsor Rep.’
‘It looks like it.’ She stopped and stared round the room, which was beginning to fill up. ‘Where was your dinner?’
‘Chester Row. The Harington-Stanleys.’
‘Any good?’
‘Well, the food was like a shooting lunch that had been brought up to London in a rusty cake tin, but it was quite fun apart from that. What about you?’
She grimaced. ‘Mrs Vitkov. With a group to meet her daughter, Terry. At that new French place in Lower Sloane Street.’
‘The Gavroche?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Lucky you.’
She gave me what used to be called an old-fashioned look. ‘Have you met Terry Vitkov?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Where are they from? The Balkans?’
‘Cincinnati. And believe me, Miss Terry is a piece of work.’ She stopped and nodded with a tight smile. ‘Careful. That’s her.’ I turned to look. I could see at once that we needn’t have worried and that Terry Vitkov was quite happy to be the subject of our discussion. She looked as if she were more than used to being the centre of attention. She was a good-looking girl. Indeed, she would have been very good-looking if it were not for a certain prominence of nose and chin, faintly suggesting a Man-in-the-Moon profile, which, combined with the intensity of her piercing and heavily made up eyes, gave her the air of a prisoner on the run, desperately searching the room for
