Snobs: A Novel Page 11

  They danced in silence for a while with Charles occasionally nodding to various acquaintances on the floor. Edith gratefully recognised two girls from her deb season and flashed brilliant smiles at them. Taking in the identity of her partner, they waved back, allowing her to feel less invisible. By the time they returned to the table, she was beginning to feel that she was really having quite a jolly time.

  Henry and Jane had not moved and as they approached, Jane jumped up and seized Charles's hand. 'It's time you danced with me. Henry hates dancing. Come on.' She led Charles back to the floor, leaving Edith alone with her porcine husband.

  He smiled vaguely. 'She always says that. I don't really hate dancing at all. Would you like to give it a go?'

  Edith shook her head. 'Not unless you're dying to, if you don't mind. I'm exhausted.' The thought of being pressed into that pillow of blubber made her shudder.

  He nodded philosophically. Being turned down was obviously not a new experience. 'Do you know Charlie well?'

  'No. We just met in the country and then again at Ascot and here I am.'

  'Where in the country? Who with?' He perked up a bit at the chance of some more Name Exchange.

  'With the Eastons. In Sussex. David and Isabel. Do you know them?' She knew very well he would not. She was right.

  'I've known Charlie all my life.'

  Edith fished idly in her brain for an answer. 'I don't think I've known anybody all my life. Except my parents,' she added with a laugh.

  Henry did not laugh back. 'Oh,' he said.

  She tried again. 'Who are Eric and Caroline?'

  'Caroline's his sister. I've known her all my life too.' He nodded gently to himself, pleased with these long associations.

  'Eric's this chap she's just married.'

  'I gather you haven't known him all your life.'

  'Never saw him before the wedding.'

  'Is he nice?'

  'I really couldn't tell you.' Obviously Caroline was guilty of some hideous impropriety in Henry's eyes. Some horrible miscegenation had taken place in this coupling of strangers. Edith felt that she herself was hovering at the borders of a solecism by even talking about the interloper.

  'Where is Royton?'

  This time Henry's face registered surprise rather than distaste. For her not to know where Royton was must surely indicate that she was an eccentric. 'Norfolk.'

  'Is it lovely?' Edith was beginning to feel as if she was turning over huge clods of ploughed earth in her effort to keep Henry entertained.

  He shrugged and looked round for the bottle to help himself to another glass. 'People seem to think so.'

  Edith opened her mouth to try again and then shut it. Not for the last time she was struck by the tyranny of the socially inept. Endless effort is harnessed to a sluggish and boring conversation simply to preserve these dullards from a sense of their inadequacy. The irony being that they are quite impervious to their own shortcomings. If Henry had even noticed things were at all heavy going he would unhesitatingly have blamed it on Edith and the fact that she didn't know anyone interesting. Before the silence had become oppressive Charles and Jane returned and the remainder of the time was spent gossiping about more people that Edith had never met.

  'What a lovely evening,' she said, as the car stopped outside her parents' flat. Charles made no attempt to park it so he clearly knew the night would contain no sexual epilogue.

  'I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm sorry we got rather lumbered.'

  'Don't be. I liked them,' she lied.

  'Did you?' He seemed a bit anxious. 'I'm glad.'

  'Henry was telling me about Royton.'

  He nodded, back on home territory. 'Yes, they're next door to me up there. That's really why I know them.'

  'I thought they were cousins.'

  'Well, they are. From a marriage in about eighteen thirty. But I know them because they live next door.'

  'It sounds lovely.'

  'It is. I'm not sure how good old Henry is at managing it but it is charming. Anyway, there's pots of money so I suppose it doesn't matter too much.' It was easy to see that Charles thought he was terrifically good at managing Broughton.

  They stared at each other for a moment. Edith realised that she rather wanted him to kiss her. Partly because she wanted to be sure she'd been a success, and partly because she just wanted to kiss him. He leaned forward awkwardly and pressed his mouth against hers. His lips were hard and firmly shut. He sat back. Ah, she thought. More Philip than George. Oh well. What she said was, 'Good night and thank you again. I have so enjoyed it.'

  'Good,' he said, and he got out of the car and escorted her across the road to the front door, but he made no attempt to kiss her again as he said good night, nor was there any mention of the next time they would meet. It would be fair to say that, up to that moment, she had not been aware of wanting much more from the evening than the reassurance that Charles found her attractive, liked her company and wanted to see more of her. But now that the ending was proving rather flat, she was filled with a feeling of disappointment, with the sense of a chance lost. This had been a great opportunity and she had blown it without fully understanding why. On the whole, it was with a sense of failure that she crept quietly into her room, trying not to wake the mother who was lying staring at the ceiling two doors down.

  She need not have been downcast. She did not know Charles and had misinterpreted his reticence. Because he was generally seen as a prize, she thought he must share this image of himself but this was not so. He felt that it was he, not Edith, on whom the responsibility for the evening lay. He was shy (not rude-shy, really shy) and so, while he could not quite express it, he was very pleased that she had appeared to have enjoyed being with him. In fact, as Charles pushed the key into the lock of his parents' flat in Cadogan Square, it was with a warm sense of an evening well spent. He liked Edith very much. More than he could remember liking any girl. With the respect for hypocrisy that is the due of a hypocritical society, he admired her all the more for pretending to like the Cumnors when it was plain that they, or at least Jane, had been bestial to her all evening.

  He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  The Uckfields' London flat occupied the ground and first floors of one of those tall, Edwardian Dutch, red brick houses that surround the exclusive, if not exactly bewitching square. It was a pleasant enough place, furnished with that delicately balanced mixture of the comfortable and the grand that his mother had learned from John Fowler and proceeded to make her own. The pictures, from the B-list of the family's collection, were carefully chosen to suggest hereditary importance without overpowering the spaces. The hangings, the ornaments, the very tables and chairs proclaimed the rank of the family but in a modest way. 'This is where we visit,' the artefacts seemed to say, 'but it is not who we are.' Just as no member of the family, not even Caroline, who lived there solidly for four years before her marriage, would ever refer to the place as 'home'. Home was Broughton. 'I'll be in the flat next week', 'I'm going up to the flat', 'Why don't we meet at the flat?' were all very well, but 'I must get home', even at the end of a long London dinner, could only ever mean that the Broughton in question was driving down to Sussex that night. These people may own a house in Chester Square and rent a small cottage in Derbyshire, but you may be pretty sure that 'home' is the one with the grass growing round it. And if no such hide-away exists, then they will make it plain that it is essential to their well-being to escape the smoke and pavements and fly to their rural friends as often as they can, thereby suggesting that while they may spend their lives walking on tarmac or behind a city desk, they will always be country people at heart. It is rare to find an aristocrat who is happier in London — at least, it is rare to find one who admits it.

  Charles had his own flat, a jumble of modest rooms on a third floor in Eaton Place but he didn't usually bother with it.

  Cadogan Square was nicer and more comfortable, and he could pick up any post there and bring it down with
out a fuss. But perhaps because Broughton was after all the product of many generations' taste, he was always aware of the imprint of his mother whenever he visited her London base. The family's real London headquarters, Broughton House, had been in St James's Square, but it had taken a direct hit in the Blitz and so they were spared the agonising decision of most of their relations as to whether or not it was sensible to abandon the town house at the end of the war. Charles's grandparents had acquired a rather dank flat in Albert Hall Mansions, which his mother had rejected out of hand and it was she who selected and therefore entirely created this apartment as an appropriate setting for the charity work and the entertaining that demanded her presence in the capital from time to time.

  As he sat down with a late-night glass of whisky, Charles thought about his mother. He looked at the prettily framed sketch of the seven-year-old Lady Harriet Trevane (as Lady Uckfield was born). It was by Annigoni and was placed on a small régence table near the drawing-room chimneypiece. Even as a girl, with a hair-ribbon drooping down among her charcoaled curls, he could detect the familiar, unflinching, cat-like stare. He might as well face facts. His mother would not like Edith.

  That he knew. If Edith had been presented to his mother as the wife of a friend she might have liked her — if she had taken the smallest notice of her — but Edith would not be welcomed as Charles's girlfriend. Still less, should such a thing ever come to pass, would she be encouraged as Lady Uckfield's ultimate successor, as the one to whom his mother must entrust the house, the position, the very county she had worked so hard on and for so long.

  This is not to say that Charles was without sympathy for his mama. On the contrary, he loved her very much and he felt he was right to do so. He saw beyond her public image of studied perfection and he liked what he found there. It pleased Lady Uckfield always to give the impression that everything in life had been handed to her on a plate. This was no truer for her than it is for the rest of the human race but she preferred to be on the receiving end of envy rather than pity and all her life had chosen, in the words of the song, to pack up her troubles in her old kit bag and smile. As a rule, this was not too onerous a choice, since she found her own problems as dull as she found everybody else's, but Charles respected this philosophy and he liked her for it. He did not perhaps fully appreciate the extent to which, in her concerted assumption of the 'brave face', she was only being loyal to the tenets of her kind.

  The upper classes are not, as a whole, a complaining lot. As a group they would generally rather not 'go on about it'. A brisk walk and a stiff drink are their chosen methods of recovery whether struck in the heart or the wallet. Much has been written in the tabloid press about their coldness but it is not lack of feeling that marks them apart, rather it is lack of expression of feeling. Naturally they do not see this as a failing in themselves and nor do they admire public emotion in others. They are genuinely bewildered by working-class grief, those bereaved mothers being dragged sobbing and supported into church, those soldiers' widows photographed weeping over 'his last letter'. The very word 'counsellor' sends a shudder of disgust down any truly well-bred spine. What they do not appreciate, of course, is that these tragedies, national and domestic, the war casualties, the random killings, the pile-ups on the M3, offer most ordinary bereaved what is probably their only chance of fleeting celebrity. For once in their lives they can appease that very human craving for some prominence, some public recognition of their plight. The upper classes do not understand this hunger because they do not share it. They are born prominent.

  The one arena of his mother's struggles that Charles really knew about was Lady Uckfield's war with his grandmother, the dowager marchioness, who had not been an easy mother-in-law. She was the tall, bony, long-nosed daughter of a duke and so not at all impressed with the pretty little brunette her son had brought home with him. Old Lady Uckfield had been Queen Mary to her daughter-in-law's Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and the relationship was never warm. Even after her husband's demise and well into Charles's conscious years, the dowager's behaviour continued unchecked and she was still attempting to countermand orders with the housekeeper, instruct the gardeners directly and cancel groceries with a view to replacing them with more 'suitable' items to the day of her largely unlamented death.

  That these attempts were not successful, that her power was broken was a direct result of the one real fight between them, the thought of which always made Charles smile. Soon after her dethronement as chatelaine of Broughton, his grandmother had interfered with a new re-hang of the pictures in the saloon while Lady Uckfield was in London. On her return, Lady Uckfield's discovery that her scheme had been abandoned made her so angry that, for the only time in recorded history, she, in modern parlance, lost it. This resulted in a fully fledged screaming match, surely unique in the history of the room in question — at least since the more rollicking days of the eighteenth century. To the enraptured delight of the listening servants, Lady Uckfield denounced her mother-in-law as an ill-mannered, ill-bred, interfering old bitch. 'Ill-bred?' shrieked the dowager, selecting from the list of insults the only one to pierce her carapace. 'Ill-bred!' and she stalked from the house, determined never to darken its doors again. His mother had told Charles many times that she regretted the incident and it was certainly a relief to her that old Lady Uckfield, having made her point, did eventually return to Broughton for the customary festivals but, even so, the battle had achieved its purpose. Thenceforth the young Marchioness was in charge, and the house, the estate and the village were under no illusions about it.

  For these and many other reasons, simple and complicated, Charles admired his mother and the disciplines she lived by.

  He even admired the way she lived with her husband's stupidity without ever referring to the fact or showing her exasperation.

  He knew that he, himself, while not quite as slow as his father, was not quick. His mother had guided him well without making him too conscious of his shortcomings but he was aware of them all the same. Because of all this, he would have loved to please her when it came to his choice of a mate. He would have been delighted to arrive at some Scottish stalking party, at some London ball, and find exactly the woman his mother wanted for him. It should have been easy. There must surely have been some peer's daughter, from the old, familiar world Lady Uckfield knew and trusted, who was smart and sharp (for his mother was not a fan of the dowdy, county lady with her wispy hair and her charity shop skirts), and this girl would have made him laugh and he would have felt proud of her and safe, and her arrival would have transformed things.

  But, try as he might to find her, somehow she had never turned up. There were nice young women who had done their best but… never quite the one. This was probably because Charles had a central, guiding belief. Like himself, it was simple but it was strong. Namely, that if he could only marry for love, if he could just find the partner who would stimulate him in mind (for he did value the albeit limited activities of his mind) and body, then the life that was mapped out for him would be a good and rewarding one. If, however, he married suitably but misguidedly, then there could be no redemption possible. He did not believe in divorce (not at least for the head of the Broughtons) and therefore, once unhappily married, he would remain so to the grave. He was, in short, much more than he knew, a thoroughly moral, straightforward fellow. Which made it all the more disturbing to him that here was a real possibility of his being drawn to a woman who, while not being ludicrously unsuitable, while not being a pop queen or a drug-running trapeze artist, was nevertheless not what his mother was hoping for.

  It was therefore with a hint of melancholy in his heart that, a couple of days later, Charles telephoned Edith and asked her out again.

  FOUR

  To my amusement, it was not long before the fact that Edith and Charles were going about together had begun to attract attention. Gossip columns without a story for the day picked up on it and those tiresome articles in Tatler or Harpers about what up-to-the-minu
te people eat at weekends or wear in Paris or do for Christmas started to include Edith as Charles's paramour. The fascination with celebrities was in full swing at that time and since, by definition, there are never enough genuine celebrities to supply the market — even in a much less greedy era than the 1990s — journalists are forced to drag out their tired 'It Girls' and ex-television presenters to fill the gaps. It was ironically Edith's very ordinariness that played into this.

  Someone saw her as a latter-day Cinderella, the working girl suddenly transported into Dreamland, and wrote an article in one of the Sundays entitled 'The Lavery Discovery', featuring several large and highly coloured photographs. After that, she caught on. At first she was annoyed at being continually described as climbing the social ladder but, gradually, as the original reason for the press interest faded beneath a welter of fashion articles and award ceremonies and invitations onto afternoon television, Edith came to enjoy the attention. The seductive element in being pursued by newshounds is that inevitably one starts to feel that if so many people are interested in one's life, one's life must ergo be interesting and Edith wanted to believe this quite as much as anyone else. Of course, inevitably I suppose, it was not long before she began to lose touch with the fact that she was becoming famous for being famous and nothing more. I was at a charity lunch once when she was invited to give some tabloid award and I remember her saying afterwards how ghastly the other presenters were, all sports commentators and fashion gurus, and why on earth had they been invited? I pointed out that even a lowly sports commentator has earned his or her own celebrity in a way Edith had not. She smiled but I could see she rather resented me for saying it.

  She had started at a perilously early stage to believe her own publicity.

  These photo-shoots and column inches meant that, slightly mysteriously, she had begun to dress better or more expensively than before. I'm not quite sure how she managed this as I don't think Charles was forking out at that point.