Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  ‘You see we are very pro-Europe in this house.’ The voice startled me and I looked up to see a tiny figure standing at the far end of the hall, looking more like a boy scout on bob-a-job week than a princess in late middle age. Of course, I knew it was Dagmar because her stature meant it had to be, but I could not at first find her in the face I was presented with. Her hair was grey, though as flat and lank as it had always been, and at last I recognised her wobbling, tremulous, anxious lips, but not much else of her youthful appearance had survived. Her eyes were still huge, but sadder now and, despite our luxurious setting, it seemed to me that for her, life had been a bumpy ride. We kissed, a little gauchely, two strangers pecking at each other’s cheeks, before she led me into the main drawing room, a fine, light chamber, but again with a synthetic air. It was the perfect mixture of Colefax chintz and antiques, Georgian this time, beautifully chosen as individual items but with no coherence as a whole. There was more of the splendid, European parade on the walls.

  I indicated a couple of them. ‘I don’t remember you having all these in Trevor Square. Or were they in storage?’ We knew, without saying, that they formed no part of the provenance of Squire William de Holman.

  She shook her head. ‘Neither.’ Now, at last, she was beginning to come back to me. The moist half-open mouth had firmed up a bit, but she still had that odd, discordant, tearful note in her voice, a faint, sad scrape of the vocal cords grinding together, that reminded me of the girl she had once been. ‘William has scouts in all the auction houses, and whenever there is a picture coming up with the faintest connection to me he bids for it.’ She did not elaborate on quite what this told us about her husband. No more did I.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Choosing some wine for lunch. He won’t be long.’

  She poured me a drink from a supply concealed in a large, carved, rococo cupboard in the corner which I saw, to my amusement, contained a small sink, and we talked. Dagmar was more aware of what I had been doing with 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.’

  ‘Which was a long time ago.’

  This seemed needlessly ungallant. ‘There are plenty of people living in exile who look to her brother for leadership.’ />
  ‘Oh, I see. You think we’ll all attend Feodor’s coronation? I hope he can get the time off work.’ He laughed suddenly, with a kind of sneer in the sound, as he brought his face round to Dagmar’s, that she might fully register his contempt. It was intolerable. ‘I’m afraid I find all that stuff is just an excuse for a few snobs to bow and curtsey and gee up their dinner parties.’ He shook his head slowly, as if he were making a reasonable point. ‘They should pay more attention to what’s going on around them today.’ He sipped his drink to punctuate the finality of his argument. In other words there could be no further discussion on the subject.

  I turned to Dagmar. ‘Do you agree?’

  She took a breath. ‘Well-’

  ‘Of course she agrees. Now, when’s lunch?’ I saw then that the real burden of William’s song was that for years he had endured being treated as Dagmar’s moment of madness, the shaming mèsalliance that had overtaken the Moravian dynasty, and now he didn’t have to put up with it any more. Things had changed. Today, he was the one with the money, he was the one with the power and weren’t we going to know about it. Worse than this, having triumphed, he could no longer tolerate Dagmar having any sort of position of her own. She must have no value at all other than as his wife, no podium where she might shine independent of his glory. In short, he was a bully. I understood now why the Grand Duchess’s approval had been equivocal.

  Luncheon was a curious event, providing as it did an endless series of opportunities for Dagmar to be publicly humiliated. ‘What on earth is this?’ ‘Is it supposed to taste burnt?’ ‘Why are we eating with nursery cutlery?’ ‘Those flowers deserve a decent burial.’ ‘Shouldn’t there be a sauce with this or did you ask for it to be dry?’ If I had been Dagmar, I would have stood up, broken a large plate over his head and left him forever. And that was before we got to the pudding. But I know only too well that this kind of wife-battering, for that is what we were dealing with, destroys the will to resist and, to my sorrow, she simply took it. She even gave credence to his complaints by apologising for shortcomings that were entirely fictional. ‘I am sorry. It should be hotter than this,’ she would say. Or, ‘You’re right. I should have asked them to seal it first.’ The limit came when William took a bite of the little crêpes Suzette that had been brought in and spat it back onto his plate. ‘Jesus!’ he shouted at the top of his voice. ‘What the hell is this made of? Soap?’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’ I spoke carefully. ‘It’s delicious.’

  ‘Not where I come from.’ He gave a merry laugh, as if we were all enjoying a jolly joke.

  ‘And where do you come from, exactly?’ I said. ‘I forget.’ I stared at him and he held my gaze for a second. Behind his head the housekeeper glanced quickly at a maid who had been helping to serve to check if she’d registered this exchange. I could see them silently acknowledge that they both had. In fact, they were nearly smiling. However, whether or not it was entertaining for the staff to witness the tyrant brought low, it was snobbish and self-defeating of me to do it. William, red in the face with fury, was on the brink of ordering me out of the house, which would have rendered my journey completely pointless. Mercifully, he was never one to allow his anger to undo him. Years of tricky negotiations in the City had made him cleverer than that. And I would guess the thought of the story going round London, coming from someone who was perhaps better known than he (not richer, not more successful, just a little better known) was something he was not prepared to risk. Of course, my chief crime in his eyes wasn’t that I had been rude to him and failed to take his part. It was that I seemed to find his wife more congenial and more interesting than he was, which was even worse than my reminding him of the long journey he had traversed since we first met. I knew he made a point of editing every visitor who entered the house, so presumably this kind of challenge seldom, if ever, happened. He was out of practice when it came to being contradicted.

  With a deep and deliberately audible breath, he put down his napkin, painstakingly rumpled, and smiled. ‘The awful thing is I have to run. Will you excuse me?’ I saw, to my amusement, he was trying to be ‘gracious.’ It was not in his gift. ‘I’m at home on Fridays, but it doesn’t mean I don’t have to work. If only it did. Dagmar will see you off. Won’t you, my darling? It’s been such a treat to catch up again.’ I smiled and thanked him, as if I had not just been instructed to leave, and we both pretended everything was fine. Then he was gone. Dagmar and I stared at each other, her little, crumpled face and narrow shoulders suddenly making her look like a picture of some starving child in war-torn Berlin. Or Edith Piaf. Towards the end.

  ‘Do you feel like a walk after that?’ she said. ‘I don’t blame you if you want to get away. I won’t be offended.’

  ‘Hasn’t he just told me to get off his land?’

  She made a little pout. ‘So?’

  ‘Don’t make him angry on my behalf.’

  ‘He’s always angry. What’s the difference?’

  The gardens at Bellingham had been tidied, replanted and restored to an approximation of their Edwardian appearance, with a large walled garden and separate ‘rooms’ containing statues surrounded by box hedges or roses in neat and tidy beds. It was all very nice, but the park was something more. Survivors of the original build, the giant oak trees, ancient and venerable, gave the whole place a sober beauty, a gravitas lacking in the quaint gardens or the newly refurbished interior. I looked around. ‘You’re very lucky.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘In this, anyway.’

  She also stared about her, admiring the stately trees and the roll of the hills surrounding us. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I am lucky in this.’ We walked on for a bit. ‘How was he?’ she said suddenly, out of the blue. I did not immediately understand her. ‘Damian. You told me you’d seen him recently.’

  ‘Not very well, I’m afraid.’

  She nodded. ‘I heard that. I was hoping you’d tell me it wasn’t true.’

  ‘Well, it is.’ Again, we were silent as we crested a shallow slope with a wonderful view across the park towards the house.

  ‘Did you know I was mad about him?’ she said.

  I was becoming used to surprises. ‘I knew you’d had a bit of a walkout. But I didn’t know it was the Real Thing.’

  ‘Well, it was. For me, anyway.’

  ‘Then you were very discreet.’

  She chuckled sadly. ‘There wasn’t much to be discreet about.’

  ‘He talked of you the other day,’ I said.

  At this, her colour altered before my gaze and she raised a hand to her cheek. ‘Did he?’ she whispered. ‘Did he really?’ It was very touching.

  I could see we were at last approaching the discussion I had come for, but I wanted to progress it carefully. ‘He just mentioned that you and he had been out together a few times, which I hadn’t known before.’

  Released by the knowledge that somehow she was still alive in Damian’s imagination, her words came pouring out. ‘I would have married him, you know.’ I stopped. This was astonishing. We seemed to have gone from nought to a hundred miles an hour in less than two minutes. Damian had given the impression of a one-night stand, but, for Dagmar it was Tristan and Isolde. How often it seems a pair of lovers can be engaged in two entirely different relationships.

  She caught my expression and nodded vigorously, as if I were going to contradict her. It was an extraordinary transformation and the first time I had ever seen her take the lead in anything approaching an argument. ‘I’d have done it if he’d asked me. I would!’

  I raised my arms in surrender. ‘I believe you,’ I said.

  Which made her smile and relax again, knowing by my action I was friend not foe. ‘My mother would have thrown herself out of an upper window, of course, but I was ready for her. And I wasn’t as mad as all that. I knew he’d do well. That was what I loved about him. He was part of the world that was coming.’ She glanced at me. ‘Not the world we thought was coming, all that peace and lo
ve and flowers-in-your-hair. Not that. The real world that crept secretly towards us through the seventies and arrived with a bang in the eighties. The ambition, the rapacity, I knew that another rich oligarchy would be back in place before I died and I was sure Damian would belong to it.’

  A strange feature of growing older is the discovery that everyone who was young alongside you was just as incapable of expressing their thoughts as you yourself were. Somehow, in youth, most of us think that we are misunderstood but everyone else is stupid. I realised, with some sorrow, that I could have been much, much friendlier with Dagmar than I had been, if I’d only realised what was going on inside her little head. ‘So, what happened? You couldn’t convince your mother?’