backgrounds in a way that would be rare today. One hears people wonder about the collapse of parental authority. Was it deliberately engineered as the right-wing press would have us believe? Or did it just happen because it was right for the time, like the internal combustion engine or penicillin? Either way, it has vanished from whole chunks of our society, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.
At any rate, to resume, that spring there was a drinks party in the Fellows’ Quadrangle to which I’d been invited for some reason. I cannot now say if it was an official function or a private bash, but anyway there we all were, feeling clever and chosen, and probably still enjoying the college’s reputation for being ‘rather smart.’ How pitiful such mini-vanities seem, viewed from the tired vale of the middle years, but I don’t believe there was much harm in us, really. We thought we were grown up, which we weren’t, and posh, which we weren’t very, and that people would be glad to know us. I say this although, after my painful youth, I still preserved that all too familiar blend of pride and terror, that is so characteristic of the late teens, when nose-in-air snobbery goes hand in hand with social paranoia. Presumably it was this contradictory mixture that made me so vulnerable to attack.
Oddly enough, I can recall the precise moment when Damian entered my life. It was fitting because I was talking to Serena when he appeared, so we both met him together, simultaneously, on the instant, a detail that seems much more curious on reflection than when I was living it. I don’t know why she was there. She was never a college groupie. Perhaps she was staying with someone nearby and had been brought. At any rate I won’t find the answer now. I didn’t know Serena at all well then, not as I would later, but we’d met. This is a distinction lost on the modern world, where people who have shaken hands and nodded a greeting will tell you they ‘know’ each other. Sometimes they will go further and assert, without any more to go on, that so-and-so is ‘a friend of mine.’ If it should suit the other party they will endorse this fiction and, in that endorsement, sort of make it true. When it is not true. Forty years ago we were, I think, more aware of the degree of a relationship. Which was just as well with someone as far beyond my reach as Serena.
Lady Serena Gresham, as she was born, did not appear to suffer from the marbling of self-doubt that afflicted the rest of us and this made her stand out among us from the start. I could describe her as ‘unusually confident,’ but this would be misleading, as the phrase suggests some bright and brash self-marketeer, the very last description she would merit. It just never occurred to her to worry much about who or what she was. She never questioned whether people would like her, nor picked at the thing when they did. She was, one might say nowadays, at peace with herself and, in the teenage years, then as now, it made her special. Her gentle remoteness, a kind of floating, almost underwater quality, took possession of me from the first time I saw her and many years would pass before she did not pop into my defenceless brain at least once every half an hour. I know now that the main reason she seemed remote was because she wasn’t interested in me, or in most of us for that matter, but then it was pure magic. I would say it was her dreamy unattainability, more than her beauty or birth or privileges, though these were mighty, that gave her the position she enjoyed. And I know I am not alone in thinking of 1968 as the Year of Serena. Even as early as the spring, I felt myself lucky to be talking to her.
As I have said, her privileges were great, if not unique, as a member of the select, surviving rump of the Old World. At that time, self-made fortunes were usually much smaller than they would be decades later and the very rich, at least those people who ‘lived rich,’ still tended mostly to be those who had been even richer thirty years before. It was an odd era for them, poor devils. So many families had gone to the wall in the post-war years. Friends they had dined and danced and hunted with before 1939 had tumbled down in the wreckage of their kind and it would not be long before most of the fallen had been engulfed by the upper middle class, never to regain their lost status. Even among those who had kept the faith, still in their houses, still shooting their own pheasants, there were many who gloomily subscribed to the philosophy of apres moi le deluge, and regularly vans would chug away, out through the gates towards the London auction houses, bearing the treasures that had been centuries in the assembling, so the family could stay warm and have something decent to wear for one more winter.
But Serena was not afflicted by these pressures. She and the rest of the Greshams were part of the Chosen (very) Few and lived much as they had always lived. Perhaps there were only two footmen where once there had been six. Perhaps the chef had to manage on his own and I do not believe Serena or her sisters enjoyed the services of a lady’s maid. But otherwise not much had altered since the early 1880s, apart from their hemlines and being allowed to dine in restaurants.
Her father was the ninth Earl of Claremont, a mellow, even charming, title and when I knew him, as I would do later, he was himself a mellow and charming man, never cross because he had never been crossed and so, like his daughter, very easy to be with. He too lived in a benign mist, although, unlike Serena, he was not a creature of myth, a lovely naiad eluding her swain. His vagueness was more akin to Mr Pastry. Either way, he never had much grasp of hard reality. Indeed, at times it felt as if the family’s soothing title had generated a placid sense of unquestioning acceptance in the dynasty, for which I now think, looking back, they were to be envied. I did not at that time believe that loving came easily to any of them, certainly not ‘being in love,’ which would have involved far too much disruption, with its horrid, sticky threats of indigestion and broken sleep, but they did not hate or quarrel either.
Not that acceptance of their lot was very difficult. By dint of judicious investment and far-sighted marriage, the family had more than survived the rocky seas of the twentieth century thus far, with large estates in Yorkshire, a castle somewhere in Ireland, which I never saw, and a house on Millionaires’ Row, the private road running parallel to Kensington Palace, which was then considered quite something. These days, eastern potentates and people who own football clubs seem to have snapped up those vast edifices and made them private again, but at that time they had mostly fallen into embassies, one by one, with scarcely a family left. Except, of course, for the Claremonts, who occupied number 37, a lovely 1830s stone wedding cake, a shade too near Notting Hill.
As if this were not enough, Serena was also very beautiful, with thick, russet hair and a complexion lifted straight from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Her features added to her gift of serenity, of real grace, which is an unlikely word to use of a girl of eighteen, but in her case a truthful one. I do not know exactly what we talked about, either at that party in Cambridge or at the many gatherings and house parties where we would meet over the next two years, sometimes art, I think, or maybe history. She was never much of a gossip. This was not a tribute to her kindness so much as to her lack of interest in other people’s lives. Nor would there have been talk of a career, although she is not to blame for that. Even in the late Sixties, serious professional ambition would have marked her out uncomfortably among her contemporaries. That said, I was never bored in her company, not least because I must have been in love with her even then, long before I would acknowledge the fact, but the hopelessness implicit in loving such a star would have been all too obvious to that bundle of insecurities I call my unconscious mind and I shied away from certain failure. As anyone would.
‘Can I talk to you?’ said a deep, pleasant voice, just as I was approaching the punchline of a story. We looked up to find we had been joined by Damian Baxter. And we were glad of it which, to me now, is the strangest detail of all. ‘I don’t know anyone here,’ he added with a smile that would have melted Greenland. My impressions of Damian have been so overlaid by what came after that it is hard for me to dredge up my early feelings, but there’s no doubt that he was wonderfully attractive in those days, to men, women and children alike. Apart from anything else, he was so handsome, in a healthy, open-air sort of way, very handsome really, with bright, almost unnervingly blue eyes and thick, dark, wavy hair, worn long and in curls, as we all wore it then. He was fit, too, and muscular but without being sporty, or, worse, hearty, at all. He was just redolent of both health and intelligence, an unusual combination in my experience, and he looked as if he slept ten hours every night and had never tasted alcohol. Neither of which would be borne out by the facts.
‘Well, now you know us,’ said Serena and held out her hand.
I need hardly say that of course he knew exactly who we were. Or rather, who she was. He gave himself away
