It was the holidays that made up for everything. I made friends with a Scottish girl, Susan Duff, who liked the same open-air things as I did. She too was an only child, and her parents were glad to have me to keep her company. So there was Scotland in the summer and skiing in the winter and spring—all over Europe, in Switzerland, Austria, Italy—and we stuck to each other through the finishing school and at the end we even “came out” together, and Aunt Florence produced five hundred pounds as my contribution to an idiotic joint dance at the Hyde Park Hotel, and I got on the same “list” and went the rounds of similar idiotic dances at which the young men seemed to me rude and spotty and totally unmasculine compared with the young Canadians I had known. (But I may have been wrong because one of the spottiest of them rode in the Grand National that year and finished the course!)
And then I met Derek.
By now I was seventeen and a half, and Susan and I were living in a tiny three-room fiat in Old Church Street just off the King’s Road. It was the end of June, and there wasn’t much more of our famous “season” to go and we decided to give a party for the few people we had met and actually liked. The family across the landing were going abroad on holiday, and they said we could have their flat in exchange for keeping an eye on it while they were away. We were both of us just about broke with “keeping up with the Joneses” at all these balls, and I cabled Aunt Florence and got a hundred pounds out of her, and Susan scraped up fifty, and we decided to do it really well. We were going to ask about thirty people and we guessed that only twenty would come. We bought eighteen bottles of champagne—pink because it sounded more exciting—a ten-pound tin of caviar, two rather cheap tins of foie gras that looked all right when it was sliced up, and lots of garlicky things from Soho. We made a lot of brown bread-and-butter sandwiches with watercress and smoked salmon, and added some sort of Christmasy things like Elvas plums and chocolates—a stupid idea: no one ate any of them—and, by the time we had spread the whole lot out on a door taken off its hinges and covered with a gleaming tablecloth to make it seem like a buffet, it looked like a real grown-up feast.
The party was a great success, almost too much of a success. All the thirty came, and some of them brought others, and there was a real squash with people sitting on the stairs and even one man on the john with a girl on his lap. The noise and the heat were terrific. Perhaps after all we weren’t such squares as we had thought, or perhaps people really like squares so long as they are true squares and don’t pretend. Anyway, of course the worst happened and we ran out of drink! I was standing by the table when some wag drained the last bottle of champagne and shouted in a strangled voice, “Water! Water! Or we’ll never see England again.” I got nervous and said stupidly, “Well, there just isn’t any more,” when a tall young man standing against the wall said, “Of course there is. You’ve forgotten the cellar,” and he took me by the elbow and shoved me out of the room and down the stairs. “Come on,” he said firmly. “Can’t spoil a good party. We’ll get some more from the pub.”
Well, we went to the pub and got two bottles of gin and an armful of bitter lemon, and he insisted on paying for the gin so I paid for the lemon. He was rather tight in a pleasant way and explained that he’d been to another party before ours and that he’d been brought by a young married couple called Norman, who were friends of Susan’s. He said his name was Derek Mallaby, but I didn’t pay much attention as I was so anxious to get the drink back to the party. There were cheers as we came back up the stairs, but in fact the party had passed its peak and from then on people drifted away until there was nothing left but the usual hard core of particular friends, and characters who had nowhere to go for dinner. Then they too slowly broke up, including the Normans, who looked very nice and told Derek Mallaby that he would find the key under the mat, and Susan was suggesting that we go to the Popotte across the way, a place I didn’t care for, when Derek Mallaby came and lifted my hair away from my ear and whispered rather hoarsely into it would I go slumming with him? So I said yes, largely, I think, because he was tall and because he had taken charge when I was stuck.