Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

me briskly. 'Are you dreading it?' There were four other girls in the room and, counting Lucy, all five were dressed entirely in white, a survival of the custom of wearing white for a girl's first presentation at Court before the war. It had not, of course, been continued in the last period of Royal Presentation, which had taken the form of garden parties, and the girls would then wear pretty, summer dresses and wide-brimmed hats, but with the end of that and the installation of Queen Charlotte's as the official start of the Season, the white rule had been revived. They wore long, white gloves, too, but instead of the Prince of Wales feathers that decorate the heads of both mothers and daughters in all those pre-war photographs by Van Dyck or Lenare, this year, at least, white flowers were worn in the hair, tiaras not being considered proper for unmarried girls. Lady Dalton, I was pleased to see, sported rather a good one, which flashed its fire round the room as she walked towards me, smiling pleasantly.
    'You are kind to come,' she said, holding out her own gloved hand.
    'You're very kind to ask me.'
    'Lord knows what we'd have done if you'd said no,' added a bluff, soldier type, whom I took, correctly, to be Sir Marmaduke. 'Flag down a bus and just collar someone, I suppose.' One often suspects that a late invitation signifies that a certain scraping of the barrel has gone on. But it is a little depressing to be told it.
    'Pay no attention,' said his wife firmly and led me away to where the other young stood. The party was more of an age mixture than usual as most of the mothers and fathers of the girls, if not the boys, were to be with us for the evening, so I met a couple of pleasant enough bankers and their wives, together with a rather pretty, Italian woman, Mrs Wakefield, married to Lady Dalton's cousin, who'd come up from Shropshire to begin the launch of her youngest daughter, Carla. We moved on to the girls themselves. Among them was a plain and russet-faced character, Candida Finch, whom I'd already met. To be honest, I had found her a bit uphill, but we were programmed in those days to make conversation with anybody nearby and so I fell into the small talk demanded of me without much hardship, naming mutual acquaintances, reminding her that we had both been at this drinks party and that one, although we had never spoken more than a few words to each other before now. She nodded and answered, civilly enough but, as always with her, too loudly, too aggressively and, every now and then, with a sudden, stentorian laugh that made you jump out of your skin. Of course, now I can see that she was very angry at what had happened to her life, but one can be so blind and so heartless in youth. I looked at the grown ups sipping their cocktails at the other end of the room.
    'Is your mother here?'
    She shook her head. 'My mother's dead. She died when I was a child.' This was, of course, rather more than I had bargained for and her voice, as she said it, was raw. I muttered vaguely about being sorry and how I must have muddled her with someone else as I thought I'd seen a photograph of them together in a magazine. This time she spoke with considerably more authority. 'You mean my step mother. No. She is not here. Thank God .' There was no mistaking the tone and the expletive at the end was presumably intended to bring me, and anyone standing near us, up to date with the way things were between them. I wonder sometimes why people can be so anxious to share their unsatisfactory domestic situation with strangers. It must be because it is often the only arena where they have the power to say what they think of the people concerned and there is some satisfaction in that. Anyway, I grasped the situation. It was not, after all, a very unusual one.
    As I later learned, Candida's was a sad story. Her mother had been the sister of Serena Gresham's mother, Lady Claremont, making the girls first cousins, but Mrs Finch had died in her