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paranoia. Presumably it was this contradictory mixture that made me so vulnerable to attack.
    Oddly enough, I can recall the precise moment when Damian entered my life. It was fitting because I was talking to Serena when he appeared, so we both met him together, simultaneously, on the instant, a detail that seems much more curious on reflection than when I was living it. I don't know why she was there. She was never a college groupie. Perhaps she was staying with someone nearby and had been brought. At any rate I won't find the answer now. I didn't know Serena at all well then, not as I would later, but we'd met. This is a distinction lost on the modern world, where people who have shaken hands and nodded a greeting will tell you they 'know' each other. Sometimes they will go further and assert, without any more to go on, that so-and-so is 'a friend of mine.' If it should suit the other party they will endorse this fiction and, in that endorsement, sort of make it true. When it is not true. Forty years ago we were, I think, more aware of the degree of a relationship. Which was just as well with someone as far beyond my reach as Serena.
    Lady Serena Gresham, as she was born, did not appear to suffer from the marbling of self-doubt that afflicted the rest of us and this made her stand out among us from the start. I could describe her as 'unusually confident,' but this would be misleading, as the phrase suggests some bright and brash self-marketeer, the very last description she would merit. It just never occurred to her to worry much about who or what she was. She never questioned whether people would like her, nor picked at the thing when they did. She was, one might say nowadays, at peace with herself and, in the teenage years, then as now, it made her special. Her gentle remoteness, a kind of floating, almost underwater quality, took possession of me from the first time I saw her and many years would pass before she did not pop into my defenceless brain at least once every half an hour. I know now that the main reason she seemed remote was because she wasn't interested in me, or in most of us for that matter, but then it was pure magic. I would say it was her dreamy unattainability, more than her beauty or birth or privileges, though these were mighty, that gave her the position she enjoyed. And I know I am not alone in thinking of 1968 as the Year of Serena. Even as early as the spring, I felt myself lucky to be talking to her.
    As I have said, her privileges were great, if not unique, as a member of the select, surviving rump of the Old World. At that time, self-made fortunes were usually much smaller than they would be decades later and the very rich, at least those people who 'lived rich,' still tended mostly to be those who had been even richer thirty years before. It was an odd era for them, poor devils. So many families had gone to the wall in the post-war years. Friends they had dined and danced and hunted with before 1939 had tumbled down in the wreckage of their kind and it would not be long before most of the fallen had been engulfed by the upper middle class, never to regain their lost status. Even among those who had kept the faith, still in their houses, still shooting their own pheasants, there were many who gloomily subscribed to the philosophy of apres moi le deluge , and regularly vans would chug away, out through the gates towards the London auction houses, bearing the treasures that had been centuries in the assembling, so the family could stay warm and have something decent to wear for one more winter.
    But Serena was not afflicted by these pressures. She and the rest of the Greshams were part of the Chosen (very) Few and lived much as they had always lived. Perhaps there were only two footmen where once there had been six. Perhaps the chef had to manage on his own and I do not believe Serena or her sisters enjoyed the services of a lady's maid. But otherwise not much had altered since the early 1880s,