Free Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes Page A

not fascinating. We'd met when we found ourselves in the same party for a charity ball the year before and so, when the Season started and we discovered we were both to be part of it, we naturally gravitated towards each other as one is drawn to any friendly, familiar face in a new and faintly challenging environment. To be honest, I believe I might have been rather keen on her if I had been more careful at the start, but as it was I missed my chance if there was one, by allowing us to become friends - almost invariably the antidote to any real thoughts of romance.
    'Who is this fellow you've wished on us all?' she said, steering wildly to avoid another merry prang from Lord Richard.
    'I don't know that I've wished him on anybody.'
    'Oh, but you have. I saw four girls writing down his address before he'd been here twenty minutes. I assume he's not sponsored by Mr Townend?'
    'Hardly. I took him along to one of Peter's things last week and I thought for a moment we were going to be thrown out.'
    'Why did you "take him along?" Why have you become his promoter? '
    'I don't think I knew that I had.'
    She looked at me with a rather pitying smile.
    Probably it was a half-subconscious desire to bury my lie to Georgina by making it true that prompted me to organise a group for dinner as the party began to thin out, and later that evening about eight of us were climbing down the treacherous basement stairs of Haddy's, then a popular spot on a corner of the Old Brompton Road, where one could dine after a fashion as well as dance the night away, and all for about thirty shillings a head. We often used to spend whole evenings there, eating, talking, dancing, although it is hard to imagine what the modern equivalent of this sort of place might be, since to manage all three in a single location seems impossible now, given the ferocious, really savage, volume that music is played at today anywhere one might be expected to dance. I suppose it must have begun to get louder in the discotheques after I had ceased to go to them, but I was not aware of the new fashion until perfectly normal people in their forties and fifties adopted it and started to give parties that must rank among the worst in history. Often I hear the notion of the nightclub, where you sat and chatted while the music played, spoken of as belonging to the generation before mine, men and women in evening clothes sitting around the Mirabelle in the 1930s and '40s, dancing to Snake Hips Johnson and his orchestra while they sipped White Ladies, but like so many truisms this is not true. The opportunity to eat, talk and dance was available to us and I enjoyed it.
    Haddy's did not really qualify as a nightclub. It was more for people who couldn't afford to go to proper nightclubs. These places, Haddy's, Angelique's, the Garrison, forgotten names now but full every night then, provided a simple service, but as with all successful innovations they filled a need. The dinner would belong to the recently arrived style of paysanne cooking, but this predictable repast would be combined with the comparatively new invention of dancing, publicly, not to a band but to records, presided over by some sort of disc jockey, a job description then only in its infancy. The wine was rarely more than plonk, certainly when we young ones were paying, but the bonus was that the owners did not expect to sell the table much more than once throughout the evening. Having eaten, we sat drinking and banging on about what preoccupied our adolescent troubled minds into the small hours, night after night, without, as far as I remember, the smallest problem with the management. They cannot really have been businessmen, I'm afraid. No wonder their establishments did not stand the test of time.
    That particular evening, for some strange reason, Serena Gresham had joined us among the rest, tagging along when I told her where we were going. I was surprised because usually she would listen politely to the plan, make a