Past Imperfect

by Julian Fellowes

  ‘That wasn’t the reason. She would have given in if I’d screamed loudly enough. After all, in the end she let me marry William who had no background at all, just because she thought he might make money.’

  ‘What was it, then?’

  She sighed, still sorry. ‘He didn’t want it.’ She frowned, anxious to qualify her statement. ‘I mean he liked me a bit and he was quite amused by all the… stuff. But he never fancied me. Not really.’ Of course, the sad truth was that none of us had fancied her. Not, at any rate, what Nanny would describe as in that way, she was too much of a waif, too much the loveless, pitiful child, but at her words I was struck with a wave of pity for our younger selves, bursting with unrequited love, as all we plain ones had been. Aching to tell, somehow believing that if only the object of our passions could be brought to understand the force of our love, they would yield to it, yet knowing all the time that this is not so and they would not.

  Dagmar hadn’t finished. ‘There was a moment when I thought I could have him. At one particular point I thought I could promise him everything he was doing the Season to get. Social…’ She hesitated. She had been so carried away that it had led her into territory that made her awkward. Her timid diffidence came flooding back. ‘You know… social whatever… I thought he might want it enough to take me as part of the deal.’ She looked across. ‘I suppose that sounds very desperate.’

  ‘It sounds very determined. I’m surprised it didn’t work.’ I was. Whether he found her attractive or not, I would have thought the Damian Baxter of those years would have leaped at the chance of a princess bride.

  Now it was her turn to look at me pityingly. ‘You never understood him. Even before that terrible dinner in Portugal. You thought he wanted everything you had. More than you had. Which he did, in a way. But at some moment during the year we spent together he realised he only wanted it on his own terms or not at all.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what you admire in men. William certainly has it on his own terms.’ Which could have been cruel but she did not take it as such.

  Instead, she shook her head to mark the difference in her mind between the two men. ‘William is a little man. He married me to be a big man. Then, when he had made his own money and bought a knighthood, and generally became, as he thought, big, he didn’t want me to be big as well any more. He wanted me to be little, so he could be even bigger.’ I cannot tell you how sad these words were, as I listened to her far-back, 1950s Valerie Hobson voice issuing from her minute frame. She looked so breakable. ‘He thinks as long as he ridicules my birth and criticises my appearance, and yawns whenever I open my mouth, he can demonstrate that I am the one who needs him and not the other way round.’

  ‘He still buys portraits of your ancestors.’

  ‘He doesn’t have much choice. If we waited for his to come up we’d have to live with bare walls.’ It was nice to hear her being waspish.

  ‘Why don’t you leave him?’ It is hard to explain quite why, but this was not as intrusive a question at the time as it seems on the page.

  She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t entirely know. For a long time it was the children, but they’re not children now. So I don’t know.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Three. Simon’s the eldest. He’s thirty-seven, working in the City. Gone.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Not yet. I used to wonder if he might be gay. I wouldn’t mind, but I don’t think he is. I suspect it’s more that he’s been put off the institution by his parents’ example. Then there’s Clarissa, who’s happily married to a successful and very nice paediatrician, I’m glad to say, even if William doesn’t approve.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He would have preferred a stupid peer to a clever doctor.’ She sighed. ‘And finally our youngest, Richard, who’s only twenty-four and starting out in corporate entertainment.’ She paused, reflecting on her own words. ‘Don’t the young have funny jobs now?’

  ‘Not like our day.’

  She looked at me. ‘Well, you went into a funny job. None of us thought you’d make a living. Did you realise that?’

  ‘I suspected it. Just as I always expected you to do something surprising.’ I only said this to cheer her up, but in a way it may have been true. To me, she had been a bit of a wild card, so retiring, so minor key, with her giggles and her long silences, that I used sometimes to have a sense that there was a completely different person living inside this shy and weeny head, even if I never investigated it at the time. I half expected the day to come when she’d break loose. Somehow it didn’t seem possible that she would just slide into that Sloane life of buying school uniforms and cooking for the freezer in some provincial Aga kitchen.

  Obviously, Dagmar found the idea of herself as a career girl rather flattering. ‘Really? Very few of us did anything very spectacular. Rebecca Dawnay composes film music now and didn’t Carla Wakefield open a restaurant in Paris? Or am I muddling her with someone?’ She was combing her brain, ‘I know one of the London editors is a former deb, but I forget which one…’ she sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s about it.

  ‘Even so.’ I had quite recovered from my initial bewilderment at her unfamiliar appearance. Now Dagmar looked like herself again and it brought the memories rushing back. ‘Do you remember in Portugal, on the first night? When we took a picnic to that haunted castle on the hill and talked about life? You sounded like someone plotting a break-out. I expect you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘No, I haven’t forgotten.’ She stopped walking, as if to punctuate her sentence. ‘I think you’re right and I was planning something of the kind. But I got pregnant.’ We had all known this, of course, in the unspoken way such news was received in those distant days, so I didn’t comment. ‘William asked me to marry him and, whatever you think of him now, I was pretty relieved at the time I can tell you. Anyway, then Simon arrived and that was that.’

  We were nearly back at the house by this time and I needed some answers. ‘When did you give up on Damian?’

  Her muscles tensed and her face took on the look of a nervous chipmunk. I realised the question, or at least the return to 1968, was not at all easy for her, but there was no way round it. I waited while she composed her reply. ‘I gave up on him when he didn’t propose to me and William did.’ She hesitated. ‘The truth is, though I hardly know how to say it,’ she blushed again, but clearly she had decided that she was too far in to back out now, ‘either of them could have been the baby’s father. I was going out with William at the time, but Damian and I slept together on the night we arrived in Estoril. I remember it very well because it was the last time that I thought I just might get him. Then, later that same night, he told me it wasn’t going to happen. Ever. That he was fond of me, but…’ She shrugged and suddenly the lonely, heartbroken girl of forty years before was there, walking beside us in the park. ‘After that, when my period was late, I knew that it was either William or the abortion clinic. It’s odd to think of it, given how William behaves to me now, but I cannot describe my relief when he did pop the question.’

  ‘I’m sure.’ I was.

  She gave a sudden shiver. ‘I should have worn a jersey,’ she said. And then, with a shy glance. ‘I don’t know why I told you all that.’

  ‘Because I was interested,’ I said. Actually, this is quite true. Especially in England. Very few Englishmen ever ask women anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbours on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So if a man does express any curiosity about the woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

  We were passing the stable block, which was a few hundred yards away from the main house. It was much later, perhaps mid-eighteenth century, and the wall of the yard ended in a rather handsome lodge, built for some trusty steward or perhaps a madly superior coachman. Before we’d gone a few more steps
the front door opened and an old woman came out with a wave. She was wearing the tweeds and scarf of a standard County mother. ‘Dagmar told me you were coming,’ she called over the grass separating us. ‘I wanted to come out and say hello.’

  I stared at the wrinkled, bony creature walking towards me. Could this really be the majestic Grand Duchess of my youth? Or had her head been transplanted on to another’s body? Where was the weight, in every sense? Where were the charisma and the fear she had inspired? Vanished entirely. She approached and I bowed. ‘Ma’am,’ I murmured, but she shook her head and pulled me towards her for a dry kiss on both my cheeks.

  ‘Never mind all that,’ she said gaily and slipped her arm through mine. This simple action in itself was a marker of how much had vanished from the world in the years since we last met. My sentimental side approved it as a friendly and relaxing alteration. But, all things considered, I suspect that more had been lost than gained for both of us. She looked across at her daughter. ‘Is Simon here yet? He told me he was trying to be with you for lunch.’

  ‘Obviously he couldn’t get away. He won’t be long.’ Dagmar smiled at her mother, this cosy, easy pensioner who had stolen the identity of the warlord of my early years. ‘We’ve been talking about Damian Baxter.’

  ‘Damian Baxter.’ The Grand Duchess rolled her eyes to heaven, then smiled at me. ‘If you knew the rows we had over that young man.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘And now he’s richer than anyone living. So I suppose he’s had the last laugh.’ She paused. ‘But anyway, whatever she’s told you, it wasn’t my fault that it didn’t happen. Not in the end. You can’t blame me.’

  ‘Whose fault was it?’

  ‘His. Damian’s.’ Her voice had the finality of the Lutine Bell. ‘We all thought he was a climber, an adventurer, a man on the make. And so he was, in his own fashion.’ She turned back to me to wave a pointed finger at my nose. ‘And you brought him among us. How we mothers used to curse you for it.’ She laughed merrily. ‘But you see…’ Suddenly her tone was becoming almost dreamy as she clambered back through the lost decades, searching for the right words. ‘He wasn’t after what we had. Not really. I didn’t see that at the time. He wanted to experience it, to witness it, but only as a traveller from another land. He didn’t want to live in the past where he had no position. He wanted to live in the future where he could be anything he wished. And he was quite right. It was where he belonged.’ She looked back at her daughter, now walking behind us. ‘Dagmar had nothing useful to give him that would make life easier there.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Maybe if he’d loved her it would have been different. But without love, there wasn’t enough in it to tempt him.’

  I was struck by Damian’s journey in that year of years. At the start he had been thrilled by his first invitation from Fat Georgina. By the end he had turned down the hand of a perfectly genuine princess. Not many can say that. There was a noise of footsteps, and around a laurel-sheltered corner of the drive William came almost goose-stepping towards us in a gleaming new Barbour and spotless Hunter gumboots. He caught sight of me and frowned. By his reckoning I should have been safely back on the road by then. ‘Here’s William,’ I said brightly. His motherin-law looked at him with disdain and in silence. ‘It must have been a relief that he stepped up to the mark when Dagmar needed him.’ Obviously, I had spoken without thinking.

  She turned a freezing fish eye upon me. ‘I do not understand you,’ she said coldly. It felt like the return of an old friend.

  ‘I meant if Dagmar was anxious to marry.’

  ‘She was not “anxious” to marry. She just felt that it was time.’ Having settled this, the Grand Duchess relaxed and, after her brief outing, vanished back inside the chipper, little pensioner. ‘William wanted what Dagmar could bring him. Damian did not. That’s all there was to it.’ She glanced in my direction. ‘I know you didn’t like him by the end.’ I said nothing to contradict her. ‘Dagmar told me about that business in Portugal.’ Someone told everyone, I thought wryly. ‘But it blinded you to what he was and what he could be. By the time Damian left our life, even I could see he was an unusual man.’ I wonder now if she wasn’t enjoying herself, discussing these events with someone who had been there when they were all taking place. Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing, and in all probability we would not meet again. I had provided her with an unexpected chance to make sense of those years and those distant decisions. I would guess they were not much talked of in the usual way of things and she wanted to make the best use of me. I cannot otherwise explain her next comment. ‘William never had Damian’s imagination,’ she said. ‘Nor his confidence in what the future would bring. Whatever his faults, Damian Baxter was a visionary in his way. William was just a tedious, vulgar social climber.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he didn’t love your daughter.’ I saw no reason why we couldn’t give him the benefit of some doubt.

  But she shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. She made him feel important, that’s all. That’s why he resents her now. He can’t bear the thought that he ever needed her to flatter his little ego.’ I said nothing. Not because I disapproved of her disloyalty. If anything, I was honoured by the trust implicit in her indiscretion. But I had nothing I felt I could usefully add. She looked at me and laughed. ‘I can’t stand him, really. I don’t think Dagmar can, but we never talk of it.’

  ‘There’s no point. Unless she’s going to do something about him.’

  She nodded. The rightness of this comment made her sad. In fact, the whole conversation had taken her into a strange, uncharted territory and I could see a light coating of glycerine beginning to make her eyes shine. ‘The thing is, I don’t know how we’d all manage. He’d find some way to give her nothing if they separate, some shyster lawyer would savage her claims and then what?’ She sighed wearily, a hard worker in life’s vineyard who deserved more rest than she was getting. There was the distant noise of an engine and her eyes looked up to find it. ‘It’s Simon, at last. Good.’ The distraction had pulled her back from the cliff edge. She was probably already regretting what she had revealed.

  A gleaming car of some foreign make was spinning down the drive towards us. As I watched it, I felt a sudden surge of longing. Let this man be Damian’s son, I thought. Please. I cared about it in a way I had not cared with Lucy. In their scatterbrained way, the Rawnsley-Prices would shake out some sort of future, juggling Philip’s demented schemes, surviving on luck and others’ charity, but here, today, I felt as if I had been visiting old friends trapped in some hideous, third world prison for a crime they did not commit. Like all her kind, the old Grand Duchess was more frightened of poverty than it was worth. It would only be comparative poverty, genteel poverty, after all, but at a distance even that seemed unacceptable to her. I suppose she felt she had seen enough change and we must surely forgive her for that. This is always a delicate subject where the British upper classes and most Royalty are concerned, if they are facing poverty when they are used to living well. Most of them dread not only the coming discomfort but the loss of face that attends the loss of income, and they will submit to almost any humiliation rather than have to reduce their circumstance in public. Of course, there is another smaller group among them that doesn’t give a damn either way. They are the lucky ones.

  I thought again of the delivery from suffering that might be coming down the drive towards us. A quick DNA test and they would all be free of this horrible despot and their miserable existence. Dagmar and her mother and the other children would escape into a new land, where they would do just as they liked, and William would sit alone at his table, grumbling and fuming and insulting his servants to the end of his days. I wondered how we were going to get Simon to agree to a test. Would he worry about William’s feelings? Did William have feelings? Dagmar had dropped back to stand by me. Her mother and her husband were a little way i
n front of us, waiting for the car as it drew nearer. ‘It’s been so lovely seeing you again,’ I said. ‘And your much-mellowed mama.’ I wanted her to think of me as a friend. Because I was one.

  She acknowledged my words with a quick smile, but then grew serious. Clearly, she’d deliberately manoeuvred a last moment with me out of earshot of the others. ‘I hope you won’t pay too much attention to what I was saying before. I can’t think what came over me. It was just self-pity.’

  ‘I won’t mention it to anyone.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The crease of worry faded away. On the sweep before the house the shiny car had stopped and a man in his late thirties climbed out. He turned with a wave to face us.

  And in that moment Dagmar’s fate was sealed, as all my fantasies of playing Superman to this lost family came crashing down. But for their ages, he could have been William’s identical twin. There wasn’t a trace of his mother in him. Eyes, nose, mouth, hair, head, figure, manner, gait, they were like two peas in a pod. Dagmar saw me looking at him and smiled. ‘As you can see, he was William’s son after all.’

  ‘Clearly.’ We had reached my car by this stage and I opened the door.

  ‘So everything worked out for the best,’ she said.

  ‘Of course it did. It often does, despite what they tell us on television,’ I replied, climbing into the vehicle, taking her better, happier future with me. For a moment it seemed she was going to say something more, but then she thought better of it. So I said it for her. ‘I’ll give your love to Damian when I see him.’

  She smiled. I had guessed right. ‘Please do. My best love.’ She looked round. ‘Are you sure you won’t stay and say hello to Simon?’

  ‘Better not. I’m late and he’ll be tired. I shall just enjoy you as a loving family group while I drive past.’ Dagmar nodded, with a certain irony in her expression. I know she was glad to see the back of me that day and no wonder. I had committed the sin of reminding her of a happier time. Worse, I had made her admit to truths about her present life that she preferred to keep buried even from herself. I had my reasons, but it was cruel all the same.