possibility of any disagreement. ‘I have a committee meeting in here at ten tomorrow morning, and there is no guarantee he’ll be up and about by then.’
‘No,’ I said. And together we dragged Damian down the passage, depositing him on a folded eiderdown with some blankets on top.
‘Where are the rest of his clothes?’ asked my mother. I looked at her blankly. ‘His shirt and so on.’
‘At Madame Tussaud’s, I suppose.’
‘From where he had better not reclaim them.’ Her voice was, I thought, unnecessarily severe. ‘He could have got you all into a great deal of trouble.’
‘That’s rather unfair,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’ But my mother paid no attention to my attempted defence. She was only displaying the behaviour that I have since discovered was absolutely endemic to her and to many like her. When they approve of someone in their children’s lives, and when it is because of the social position of said individual, they will never admit it and will find endless excuses for no matter what bad behaviour. But when, instead, they disapprove, again for social rather than more meaningful reasons, rather than concede this, everything else about the unwanted friend must be condemned. This falls into the same category as when they give directions. If it is desirable that you should attend an event, it is ‘easy-peasy, straight down the M4 and you’re there,’ but when they do not believe you should go, the same journey becomes ‘quite endless. You trudge down the M4 forever and when you get off it there’s an absolute maze of roads and villages to be negotiated. It’s not worth it.’ My mother was not a snob in any normal sense, she would have been shocked at the notion that she might be, but that didn’t stop her being offended when she felt I had been ‘latched on to’ (her phrase), and this is what she felt about Damian. There was some truth in her analysis, of course.
Damian woke in the early hours of the following morning, I would guess at around three. I know this because he woke me, too, by whispering ‘are you awake?’ into my ear, until I was. He was completely sober. ‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘Is there anything to eat?’
‘Couldn’t it wait? You’ll have breakfast in a minute.’
‘I’m afraid it just can’t. I can go and look for myself if you like.’
This seemed like a worse option, so I pulled myself to my feet, pulled on a dressing gown over my pyjamas, all of which garments date the incident, since, like almost every other male, I have abandoned traditional nightwear at some point during the subsequent decades, and I set off through the flat, with Damian following. With difficulty I persuaded him against a fry-up, and he settled for a bowl of cereal followed by some toast and tea. I joined him in the last, as we sat hunched over the tiny kitchen table. He started to laugh. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘The whole evening. Lord only knows what they’ll put in the papers.’
‘Not us, which is the main thing. Poor Terry.’ Nobody seemed to feel at all sorry for the ruin and waste inflicted on our hostess. I felt it was time someone did.
But Damian shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about her. She’ll get a big story out of it. It’ll probably be the defining moment of the Season before she’s finished.’
‘Perhaps it is.’
‘Perhaps.’ Looking back, that party did come to represent a moment for a lot of us, when the past, present and future fused together in some kind of crazy way. When the anti-authority, destabilising counterculture, which would win eventually (although not in the way we all then thought), swept in through the doors of our safe little, nearly- pre- 1939 world and carried us off with it. Damian put another piece of plastic bread in the toaster. ‘I don’t know why I’m so hungry. Does hash make you hungry?’
‘I’m not really the person to ask.’
He looked at me, hesitating and then deciding to speak. ‘I’m afraid you got quite a shock when you pulled back that curtain.’ I was silent, not exactly through indignation or a sense of being wronged. I just couldn’t imagine what I could say that would convey the right message, because I didn’t know what the right message might be. He nodded as if I’d spoken. ‘I know you’re keen on her.’
‘Does she?’ I couldn’t help myself. Aren’t we sad, sometimes? The odd thing was, and I remember this quite clearly, I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted him to give.
Damian shrugged as he helped himself to butter. ‘If I know, I dare say she does.’
‘What about you?’
My question was oddly phrased and he looked up. ‘What do you mean?’
Of course, the fact was I wanted to hit him. Right there, smack, in the middle of his face, with a great, heavy, wounding punch that would send him over backwards, with any luck cracking his head against the stove as he fell. I’ve often wondered what it must be like to live in a rougher world from the one I have always occupied, in a hit- now-ask-questions-later kind of society. One’s always supposed to say how ghastly violence is, and of course it is ghastly, but there must be compensations. ‘Are you serious about her?’ I asked.
He laughed. ‘Don’t be so fucking pompous.’
‘I just meant-’
‘You meant you are so jealous your face hurts, and you’re only assuming a poncy, pseudo-uncle pose so you can patronise me and put me down, and show me I’m a ridiculous interloper, out of my mind for daring to dream so far above my reach.’ He put a bit more marmalade on to his toast and bit into it. Of course, I had to admit that every one of his words was documentary truth. If kicking him to death would have made Serena love me, I would have done it there and then. Biff, boff, bang. Instead, I opted for underhand fighting. ‘I thought she was going out with Andrew Summersby now.’ I was not without a trick or two of my own.
Damian looked up, sharply. ‘Why do you think that?’
‘He seemed very proprietorial when he came looking for her after you’d gone. Then they went off together.’
He gave a slightly annoyed grin. ‘Andrew was at the dinner she had to go to and it is true that right now her parents think she’s going out with him. Since Andrew seems to share this delusion, she couldn’t be bothered to have it out with him tonight. No doubt, she soon will.’
I thought about this. It sounded to me as if Serena and Andrew were indeed an item, a thought that sickened
