Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes Read Free Book Online

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 later that evening, when we ended up squashed into a corner table in a dubious and rather cramped restaurant off Magdalene Street. We had picked up a couple of other students when the drinks party disbanded but Serena was not with us. It would have been unusual if she had been. It was rare for her to drift into that kind of easily accessible arrangement. She usually had a good, if unspecified, reason for not joining in.
    The waiter brought the obligatory, steaming plates of boeuf bourgignon , with its glutinous and shiny sauce, that seemed to be our staple fare. This is not a criticism of the eaterie in question, more an acknowledgement of how and what we ate then, but I must not be ungrateful. Mounds of glazed stew, with rough red wine, was a big leg up, considering what had been on offer ten years before. There is, and should be, worthwhile debate about the merits of the changes the last four decades have brought to our society, but there can be few who do not welcome the improvement of English food, at least until the raw fish and general undercooking that arrived with the celebrity chefs of the new century. There is no doubt about it that when I was a child the food available to the general British public was simply pitiful, consisting largely of tasteless school dinners, with vegetables that had been boiling since the war. Occasionally, you might find something better on offer in a private house, but even smart restaurants served fussy, dainty platefuls, decorated with horrible rosettes of green mayonnaise and the like, that were more trouble in the eating than they were ever worth. So when the bistros began to arrive, with their check tablecloths and melting candles pushed into the necks of green wine bottles, we were glad of them. A decade later they had become a joke, but then they were our salvation.
    'Have you ever been to Serena's house in Yorkshire?' Damian asked. The other two looked puzzled, as well they might, since there had been no mention of Yorkshire or of the Claremont dynasty at any part of the conversation.
    This should have set off a thousand flashing bells, but, like the fool I was, I made nothing of it. I simply answered the question. 'Once, but just for a charity thing a couple of years ago.'
    'What's it like?'
    I thought for a moment. I hadn't retained any very precise image. 'A Georgian pile. Very grand. But pretty.'
    'And big?'
    'Oh, yes, big. Not Blenheim. But big.'
    'I suppose you've always known each other?' Again, as I would come to recognise, this was a clue, had I the sense to read it. From long before that evening Damian had a fiercely romantic view of the golden group from which he felt excluded, but which he was determined to enter. Although, looking back, even in 1968 it was a slightly odd ambition, especially for someone like Damian Baxter. Not that there weren't plenty who shared it (and plenty who still do), but Damian was a modern creature, motivated, ambitious, strong - and if I say it of him it must be true. He was always going to find a place in the new society that was coming. Why did he want to bother with the fading glories of the blue bloods, those sad walking history books, when, for so many of those families, as with the potato, the best was already in the ground? Personally, I think he must have been cut dead at some gathering in youth, in front of a girl he fancied perhaps, snubbed, ignored and insulted by a drunken toff, until he fell into the cliche'd but very real goal of: ' I'll show you! Just you wait! ' It has, after all, been the spur of many great careers since the Conquest. But if this was the case, I never knew the incident that triggered it. Only that by the time we met, he had developed a personal mythology about the British aristocracy. He saw all its members as