my life than I anticipated and she must have noticed how flattered I was when she spoke of one particular novel that had barely broken the surface of the water. I thanked her. She gave a little smile. ‘I like to keep up with the news of the people I knew then.’
‘More than with the people themselves?’
She shrugged lightly. ‘Friendships are based on shared experience. I don’t know what we would all have in common now. William isn’t very… nostalgic for that time in his life. He prefers what happened later.’ Which did not surprise me. If I were him, so would I. ‘Do you see anyone from those days?’ I told her I’d visited Lucy. ‘Heavens, you are having a time of it. How is she?’
‘All right. Her husband’s got another business. I’m not sure how well it’s doing.’
She nodded. ‘Philip Rawnsley-Price. The one man we were all on the run from and Lucy Dalton ends up marrying him. How peculiar time is. I imagine he’s quite different now?’
‘Not different enough,’ I said ungenerously and we laughed. ‘I’ve seen Damian Baxter, too. Quite recently. Do you remember him?’
This time she let out a kind of giggling gasp that brought the old Dagmar I had known completely back into the room. ‘Do I remember him?’ she said. ‘How could I forget him when our names have been linked ever since?’ My mind running, as it was, on another track, this remark amazed me. Had I entirely missed a romance that everyone else knew about?
‘Really?’
She did a double take. Clearly she was puzzled by my slowness. ‘You remember my party? When he flattened Andrew Summersby? And added about two thousand pounds to the bill? Which was quite a lot of money then, I can tell you.’ But she was not made angry at the recollection. Quite the reverse. I could see that.
‘Of course I remember. I also remember your attempts to pretend he’d been invited. I rather loved you for that.’
She nodded. ‘It was hopeless, of course.’ She smiled like a naughty, little elf at the thought of her long-ago gallantry. ‘My mother was still living in some fantasy kingdom in her own head. She thought if she allowed one young man, who had behaved perfectly all evening, to stay on without an invitation, somehow Rome would fall. Needless to say, her intransigence made us ridiculous.’
‘You weren’t ridiculous.’
She flushed with pleasure. ‘No? I hope not.’
‘How is your mother? I was always so terrified of her.’
‘You wouldn’t be now.’
‘She’s alive, then?’
‘Yes. She’s alive. We might see her if you’ve time for a walk after lunch.’
I nodded. ‘I’d like that.’ There was a lull and I could hear the sound of a bee trapped somewhere against a window, that familiar buzzing thump. Not for the first time I was struck by the strangeness of this kind of talk, with people you once knew well and now do not know at all. ‘She must be pleased with the way things turned out for you.’ In saying this I was perfectly sincere. The Grand Duchess had been so determined on a sensational marriage for her daughter that William Holman must have been a crushing disappointment, however necessary he was at the time. Little did either she, or we, know that he would deliver a way of life that would far outshine the promises of the eldest sons on offer in 1968.
She looked at me pensively. ‘Yes and no,’ she muttered.
Before I could comment further, William strode into the room, right hand extended towards me. He was better- looking than I remembered him, tall and thin, and his greying hair giving him a sort of blond, youthful appearance. ‘How nice to see you,’ he said and I noticed that, unusually after such a time, his voice was more changed than his face. It had become important, as if he were addressing the boardroom of a corporation, or a village hall full of grateful tenants. ‘How are you?’ We shook hands and exchanged the usual platitudes about Long Time No See, while Dagmar fetched him a drink. He looked down as he took it. ‘Isn’t there any lemon?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Why not?’ Given that I was more or less a stranger to him, despite our protestations of delight in each other’s company, William’s tone to his spouse was oddly and uncomfortably severe.
‘They must have forgotten to buy any.’ She spoke as if she were locked in a cell with a potentially violent felon and was trying to attract the attention of the guards.
‘They? Who are “they”? You mean “you.” You have forgotten to ask them to buy any.’ He sighed wearily, saddened by the pathetic mediocrity of his wife’s abilities. ‘Oh well. Never mind.’ He sipped the drink, wrinkled his nose with displeasure and turned back to me. ‘So, what brings you here?’
I explained about the charity, since I was not, naturally, about to go into the true reason. He looked at me with that face of faux concern that people use when listening to hard luck stories in the street. ‘Of course, this is a marvellous cause, as I said to Dagmar when I first heard about it, and I admire you terrifically for getting involved…’
‘But?’
‘But I don’t think it’s one for us.’ He paused, expecting me to come in and say that of course I understood, but I waited, without comment, until he felt sufficiently wrong-footed to elucidate. ‘I don’t want Dagmar to be held captive by all that. Obviously, the position of her family was a very interesting one, but it’s finished. She’s Lady Holman now. There’s no need for her to cash in on some bogus title from the past, when she has a perfectly good one in the modern world. This kind of thing, vital as it might be,’ he gave a smile but it did not reach his eyes, ‘seems to me to take her backwards, not forwards.’
I turned to Dagmar for a comment, but she was silent. ‘I don’t see her position as bogus,’ I said. ‘She’s a member of a ruling house.’
‘An ex-ruling house.’
‘They were on the throne until three years before she was born.’
