Past Imperfect

A successful but embittered narrator is summoned by Damian Baxter, an old enemy who is dying without an acknowledged heir. Damian has received an anonymous letter claiming that he fathered a child during the 1968 London Season, and he asks the narrator to identify the mother and find the child before his fortune is distributed.

The investigation takes the narrator back through a circle of former debutantes, country houses and social ambitions that once defined their youth. As he revisits old relationships and compares their lives with the promises of the late 1960s, he reconstructs Damian’s rise, the hostility between them and the concealed consequences of that summer. The search becomes an assessment of class, memory and the decline of the society they expected to inherit.