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greatest fear was that I too would succumb to the fatal lure of the valedictory dinner.
    Luke’s letters offered me a glimpse of a world from which I felt that I must remain forever excluded. Having basked in his reflected glamour at Cambridge, I now did so at one remove, demanding location reports ‘for the boys’ like an ageing pop fan requesting an autograph ‘for his daughter’. He responded with characteristic generosity, the very length of his letters attesting to the depth of my need. Re-reading them for the first time in years, I am struck by their exuberance, their candour, their delight in words. He failed to keep my replies, which, I suspect, is a sign of the relative weight that we attached to our friendship – although it may simply denote my greater commitment to preserving the past.
    Needless to say, Felicity was not such an assiduous correspondent . I received a single postcard from her during the entire shoot. Depicting a group of bronzed Berliners performing handstands by a lake, it presented more of a challenge than a greeting. The letter which, according to Luke she had promised me in Cannes, never arrived. Even so, as soon as her casting was assured, our Edinburgh estrangement was set aside. In the autumn of 1976, when Luke was away in Munich, she rang me regularly at the school, although her ever more unlikely guises (my sister, my mother, Barbara Castle, Margot Fonteyn) tried the authorities’ already limited patience. On one memorable occasion she drove down for a visit, boosting my credibility with the boys while exhausting my credit with the Headmaster.
    The truth was that she had lost interest in me. Returning to school, in whatever capacity, offended her never-look-back ethos. At Cambridge, I had been puzzled by her failure to maintain contact with a single one of her Benenden 12 contemporaries. I long presumed that her schooldays must have been miserable until, much later, one of her classmates informed me that, on the contrary, she had been among the most popular girls in her year. A clean slate was essential to the pursuit of fresh experience, for which she possessed a voracious appetite. In any case, I was no longer of use to her. At university, I provided a necessary balance – even ballast – in her relationship with Luke. Once she met Wolfram Meier, she preferred to cast that role elsewhere.
    Reading Luke’s letters alongside Geraldine Mortimer’s journal, I am conscious of a marked difference in perspective. What is less clear is how much this is a function of their individual temperaments and how much of a genuine ambiguity in the incidents that they record. Luke, as he freely concedes, had little time for politics whereas Geraldine was not just a political animal but a political predator – hence the far greater space that she devotes to the hostage crisis engulfing Germany. Felicity’s own interest in that crisis is self-evident. What remains at issue is whether she was driven by a genuine commitment or whether it was simply her latest – and, in the event, last – pose.
    To my mind, an equally vexed issue is what could have led her to abandon Luke, although I am aware that my concern cannot be divorced from the Derby and Derby fantasies to which, against all logic, I continue to cling. To have jilted Luke, once the pinnacle of my desire, now the lost hope of my youth, strikes me as doubly perverse. Nothing in his letters pains – or, indeed, shames – me more than his assumption that I will share his disgust at her attempt to thrust him on Meier, unless it is his related assumption that I shared his outrage at her attempt to thrust him on me. It is one of the greatest ironies in a narrative crammed with them that, while Unity pimped boys for her friend Brian Howard, forty years on it was the actor playing Brian whom the actress playing Unity pimped for her friend.
    In the absence of any direct testimony, we can only speculate on Felicity’s feelings for Wolfram Meier.