somehow protects one from the reality that what you are witnessing is true, that all these terrible things did happen, but then there was a counter-impetus, to make it as real as possible and the result was curiously haunting, even remembered now, after so long.
At last, in the very centre of the chamber we came upon a dingy curtain with an instruction not to pull it open without preparing well. I think it was forbidden to anyone under sixteen or something similarly enticing. It was the curtain that fascinated me. It was old, threadbare and dirty, like a curtain in a garden shed to hide the weedkillers from sight, and in a way this made it much more sinister than some self-advertising veil of scarlet satin. ‘Shall we?’ I said.
‘You do it. I don’t want to look.’ Lucy turned away but did not, of course, move. People say things like this, not because they intend not to look but because they do not wish to take any responsibility for the horrors that will be revealed. It is a way of enjoying base pleasures while retaining their superiority.
I pulled back the curtain. The shock was immediate and stark. Even if it was not prompted by the young woman who was hanging from an iron hook that had penetrated her vitals and on which she was apparently writhing in vivid, screaming agony. This, I could handle. What almost made me cry out in pain was the sight of Damian holding Serena in a fierce embrace and quite obviously plunging his tongue so far into her mouth that she must have had trouble breathing. Although I cannot pretend that she looked, even to me, as if she were resisting his advances. Far from it. She clawed at his back, she ran her fingers through his hair, she squeezed her body against his, until she seemed to be attempting somehow to crush the pair of them into one single being. ‘No wonder the curtain carried a warning,’ said Lucy and they froze, then looked across at us. I desperately searched for a phrase that would contain my rage at Damian, my disappointment in Serena and my contempt for the new morality all at once. It was too ambitious. I might have been able to make up a combination word in German, but English has its limitations.
‘You’re busy,’ I said. Which didn’t exactly hit the mark I was aiming at.
They had broken apart by now and Serena was straightening herself up. Her body language told so clearly that she was longing to ask both of us, Lucy and me, not to say anything, but of course she felt the request would be demeaning. ‘We won’t say anything,’ I said.
‘I don’t care if you do,’ she replied with immense relief.
Damian, meanwhile, was carrying on with his usual insouciance. ‘I’ll see you later on.’ He gave Serena a swift hug and wiped the lipstick off his mouth with a handkerchief, which he replaced in his pocket. Without a word to us he slipped through the curtain and was gone.
The sound of an O. C. Smith record, which was much in demand that summer, Hickory Holler’s Tramp, suddenly filled the space, making an odd cultural contrast with all those severed heads and murderers and the luckless victim swinging on her hook, but the three of us still stood there. Until there was a noise and the unwelcome face of Andrew Summersby poked round the curtain. ‘There you are,’ he said, ignoring us, ‘I’ve been looking everywhere.’ He took in our grotesque, waxen companion. ‘Ooh er.’ He laughed. ‘Someone’s going to wake up with indigestion.’ And he gave the figure a push, as if she were in a child’s swing. The hideous thing moved slowly back and forth at the end of its rope.
‘Let’s dance,’ said Lucy, and without another word to Serena we left her to the noble dullard, and made our way to a dark little dance floor in the shadow of a guillotine, on to which a French aristocrat in a jacket of cheap-looking wrinkled velveteen, was being strapped by two burly revolutionaries. From a draped alcove to one side the entire Royal Family of France looked on serenely.
‘Are you all right?’ To my bewilderment, Lucy appeared to be on the edge of tears. I couldn’t imagine why.
She was irritated by the enquiry. ‘Of course I am,’ she said sharply, bobbing fiercely in time to the music for a bit. Then she looked up at me apologetically. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I had some bad news just as I was leaving home and it suddenly came back.’ I looked suitably solicitous. ‘An aunt of mine, my mother’s sister. She’s got cancer.’ This was quite clever of her, I can see now. At the time I am writing of, the English had just about begun to move on from referring to cancer as ‘a long illness bravely borne,’ but there was still something dread in the word, still something, if not exactly shameful, at least to be avoided at all costs. In those days the diagnosis was generally considered a death sentence, and when one heard of people taking treatments one almost despised them for not being able to face the truth, although I suppose logic tells us some of them must have survived, mustn’t they? Anyway, the point is it wasn’t at all like today, when you really do have a reasonable shot, if not quite as reasonable in every case as non-medicos tend to assume. For Lucy to say the word at all was bound to distract me. Still, looking back, I admit I am slightly embarrassed that I completely believed her explanation.
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘But there are all sorts of things they can do now.’ One mouthed these cliches at the time, they were as routine as ‘How do you do?’ but one never thought they contained a grain of truth. She gave a routine nod and we danced on.
For some reason, an innocent one I am certain, Terry or more probably her mother had decided to cut a cake at the peak of the evening. This was not generally done. As I have observed, in those pre-don’t-drink-and-drive days, we ate before we arrived and we did not generally eat again until the breakfast was served towards the end of the dance. There might occasionally be some sort of speech and a toast, although by no means always, at a mid point in the festivities, but this usually consisted of some old uncle just standing and saying what a marvellous girl so- and-so was, and we would all raise our glasses and that was that. There were dangers involved in this departure from the norm, but quite honestly, when there was no speech, which was usually the case, there were times when the proceedings fell a bit flat. We arrived, we drank, we danced, we went home and there had never been what my mother would refer to as ‘A Moment’ in the evening that really registered. The father of the deb in question would have the bitter knowledge that he had paid out thousands upon thousands for a night that no one would remember. On the other hand the danger of a speech and a toast is always that it may in some way feel rather naff. At least, when the occasion is not a wedding or something where speeches are generally expected. Anyway, on this particular evening, perhaps because neither Terry nor Verena was absolutely at ease with the rules, they decided to have cake and a toast, as if it had indeed been the wedding it was not.
I gather people wandering throughout the waxworks were summoned by a kind of tannoy, which would obviously have been installed in that building anyway for crowd control, but by then Lucy and I were back in the Hall of Kings, seated rather wearily at a table with Georgina Waddilove and Richard Tremayne, an unlikely couple if you like, overlooked by some of the duller members of the Hanoverian dynasty, one of whom was responsible for Richard’s predecessor, the first Duke of Trent, in what I suspect must have been an uncharacteristic night of merriment. I have forgotten why Richard was with us, probably because he was tired and couldn’t find anywhere else to sit. At all events Jeff Vitkov, who had come over from New York especially for the ball and was obviously determined to make his mark, took the microphone from the band singer and announced that he was going to propose a toast to his ‘young and beautiful daughter, and her even younger and more beautiful mother.’ This is the kind of thing that makes the English cringe, of course, and we were only just recovering when he added that we were all going to eat some genuine, American brownies, to mark the ‘debut,’ ugh, of a ‘genuine, American girl.’ Quite apart from the toe-curling sentimentality of all this, to most of us in those days ‘Brownies’ meant young Girl Guides, just as ‘Cubs’ meant young Boy Scouts, so there was a certain amount of hilarity released by the announcement that we were going to eat some, but we listened on as Jeff praised his daughter, Terry, who then seized the microphone for herself, paying tearful tribute to her wonderful ‘Pop and Mom,’ which made us freeze
