Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes Page A

say you're welcome, I suppose.'
    His tone could not have been less hospitable but Damian, as ever, was unfazed. 'It's your cue to ask me to leave if you wish. And of course I will.' He paused, a trace of anxiety playing across his even features.
    'Very smooth,' said Peter in his curious, ambiguous, almost petulant way. He nodded towards a bewildered Spaniard holding a tray. 'You can have a drink if you like.' I do not at all believe he was won over by Damian's charm, then or later. I would say he simply recognised a fellow player who might be possessed of great skill and was reluctant to make an enemy of him on their first encounter. As Damian moved away, Peter turned back to me. 'Who is he? And where did he pick you up?' This in itself was curiously phrased.
    'Cambridge. I met him at a party in my college. As to who he is,' I hesitated. 'I don't know much about him, really.'
    'Nor will you.'
    I felt rather defensive. 'He's very nice.' I wasn't quite sure how or why I'd been cast as protector, but apparently I had. 'And I thought you might like him, too.'
    Peter followed Damian with his eyes, as he took a drink and started to chat up a wretched overweight girl with a lantern jaw, who was hovering nervously on the edge of the proceedings. 'He's an operator,' he said and turned to greet some new arrivals.
    If he was an operator, the operation bore fruit almost immediately. This would not have surprised me much further on in our acquaintance, as by then I would have known that Damian would never be so idle as to waste an opportunity. He was always a worker. His worst enemy would concede that. In fact, he just did. Damian had, after all, made it into Peter's sanctum without any guarantee of a return engagement. There was no time to be lost.
    The awkward lantern-jawed girl, whom I now recognised gazing up at Damian as he showered her with charm, went by the name of Georgina Waddilove. She was the daughter of a city banker and an American heiress. Quite how Damian had selected her for his opening salvo I am not entirely sure. Perhaps it was just a warrior's sense of where the wall might most easily be breached and which girl was the most vulnerable to attack. Georgina was a melancholy character. To anyone who was interested, and there were not many, this could be traced to her mother who, with an imprecise knowledge of England and after a courtship conducted entirely during her husband's posting in New York after the war, had been under the illusion at the time of her wedding that she was marrying into a much higher caste than was in fact the case. When they did return to England, in late 1950, with two little boys and a baby daughter, she had arrived in her new country with confident expectations of stalking at Balmoral and foursome suppers at Chatsworth and Stratfieldsaye. What she discovered, however, was that her husband's friends and family came, almost exclusively, from the same prosperous, professional money-people that she had played tennis with in the Hamptons since her girlhood. Her husband, Norman (and perhaps the name should have given her a clue), had not consciously meant to deceive her but, like many Englishmen of his type, particularly when abroad, he had fallen into the habit of suggesting that he came from a smarter background than he did and, far away in New York, this was only too easy. After spending nine years there he came almost to believe his own fiction. He would talk so freely of Princess Margaret or the Westminsters or Lady Pamela Berry, that he would probably have been as surprised as his listeners to discover that everything he knew of these people he had gleaned from the pages of the Daily Express.
    The net result of this disappointment was not, however, divorce. Anne Waddilove had her children to think about and divorce in the 1950s still exacted a high social price. Norman had made quite a lot of money, so instead she resolved to use it to correct for her offspring the deficiencies and