Snobs: A Novel Read online

  We must have dawdled, as the others were all at the steps, which were fast filling up, and waved to us to join them. A distant roar announced that the carriages were on the way and the footmen or stewards or whatever they are rushed forward to open the gates from the course. Edith nudged me and nodded towards Isabel as the first coach carrying Her Majesty and some dusky premier of an oil-rich state swept through the entrance. Like the other men I took my hat off with a perfectly genuine enthusiasm but I could not ignore the look on Isabel's face. It was the glazed, ecstatic expression of a rabbit before a cobra. She was hypnotised, enraptured. To be included in the Ascot house-party, Isabel, like Pervaneh in Hassan, would have faced the Procession of Protracted Death. Or at least she would have considered it. It only goes to show, I suppose, that for all the educated classes' contempt of mass star-worship, they themselves are just as susceptible to fantasy when it is presented in a palatable form.

  Actually, the procession that year was a bit disappointing. The Prince of Wales, Isabel's paradigm of perfection, was not there and nor were any of the other princes. The only junior Royal was Zara Phillips, brightly attired in revealing beachwear.

  Edith had been murmuring irreverent criticisms in my ear, much to the annoyance of Isabel and a woman with blue hair standing next to her, so, rather than continue to spoil their fun, we turned to go when I heard a voice right behind me: 'Hello, how are you?' I looked round and found myself face to face with Charles Broughton. This time there was no awkwardness over names, the best part of the Enclosure being that everyone has to wear a badge with their name written on it. There you will find no fumbling of introductions or pretending that people have already met. Just a cursory glance at the lapel or bosom of the unknown one and all is well. Would that such labelling were compulsory at all social gatherings. Charles's badge proclaimed 'The Earl Broughton' in the distinctive, round handwriting of the well-bred girls of the Ascot Office.

  'Hello,' I said. 'You remember Edith Lavery?' I had employed the correct English usage for presenting a person whom one is fairly certain will have been forgotten, but in this instance I was wrong.

  'Certainly I do. You're the safe one who lives in London.'

  'Well, I hope I'm not as safe as all that.' Edith smiled and, either on her own initiative or on Charles's invitation, took his arm.

  The Eastons and the Rattrays were bearing down on us and I could almost see the whites of their eyes when I suggested a visit to the paddock. It seems hard and probably reveals a deep insecurity in me but I felt embarrassed for poor old Isabel in her eagerness, and David's ambition looked nearly malevolent in its intensity. Mercifully, Charles, who was after all quite a polite fellow, nodded a greeting to Isabel that dismissed her but showed at least that he was aware they had been introduced.

  David, seething, hung back and the three of us headed off towards the paddock where the horses were being paraded before the first race.

  Predictably Charles turned out to know quite a lot about horses and before long he was happily engaged in informed chatter on fetlocks and form, none of which interested me in the least, but I was kept amused by observing Edith gazing up at him with fascinated, flattering attention. It is a technique that such women seem to acquire at birth. She was wearing a neat linen suit of a pale bluish colour, I think the correct term is eau-de-nil, with a little pill-box hat tipped forward over her forehead. It made her look frivolous but, in contrast to the Weybridge matrons in their organza frills, unsentimental and chic. It was an outfit that added a dash of wit and humour to her face, which, I was by this stage aware, was extremely beguiling. As she studied her card and made notes against the names with Charles's pencil, I watched him watching her and it was perhaps then that I first became aware of a real possibility that he was attracted to her. Not that this was very surprising. She had all the right attributes. She was pretty and witty and, as she had said herself, safe. She was not of his set, of course, but she lived and spoke like his own people. It is a popular fiction that there is a great difference in manner and manners between the upper-middle and upper classes. The truth is, on a day-to-day level they are in most things identical. Of course the aristocracy's circle of acquaintance is much smaller and so there is invariably with them the sense of the membership of a club. This can result in a tendency to display their social security by means of an off-handed rudeness, which doesn't bother them and upsets almost everybody else. But these things apart (and rudeness is very easily learned) there is little to tell between them in social style. No, Edith Lavery was clearly Charles's kind of girl.

  We watched a race or two but I could sense that Edith, in the nicest possible way, was trying to shake me off and so when Charles inevitably suggested tea in White's, I excused myself and went off in search of the others. Edith threw me a grateful look and the pair of them walked away arm in arm.

  I found Isabel and David in one of the champagne bars behind the grandstand, drinking warm Pimm's. The caterers had run out of ice. 'Where's Edith?'

  'She's gone off to White's with Charles.'

  David looked sulky. Poor David. He never did manage to be taken into White's at Ascot, neither in their old tent nor, so far as I am aware, in their new, more space-age accommodation. He would have given an arm to be a member. 'Jolly good,' he said through gritted teeth. 'I wouldn't have minded some tea.'

  'I think they were going to meet up with the rest of Charles's party.'

  'I'm sure they were.'

  Isabel in contrast said nothing but kept sipping at the tepid liquid with its four bits of floating cucumber.

  'I said we'd meet up at the car after the second last race.'

  'Fine,' David said grimly, and we lapsed into silence. Isabel, to her credit, still looked more interested than irritated as she stared into her unappetising drink.

  Edith was already leaning against the locked car when we got there and I could see at once that the day had been a success.

  'Where's Charles?' I said.

  She nodded towards the grandstand. 'He's gone to find the people he's staying with tonight. He's coming tomorrow and Friday.'

  'Good luck to him.'

  'Haven't you enjoyed yourself?'

  'Oh yes,' I said. 'But not half as much as you.'

  She laughed and said nothing, and at that moment David arrived to unlock the vehicle. He did not mention Charles and he was noticeably grumpy with Edith, so it was not as a general announcement but in a whisper that she informed me that Charles had asked her out for dinner the following Tuesday. It was of course more than she could do to keep it to herself.

  THREE

  Edith sat at her dressing table, bathed and sweet-smelling, and prepared to paint on her social face. She hadn't told her mother exactly whom she was dining with and now she pondered why she had not. It would certainly have given Stella a great deal of pleasure. It was probably a fear of this very pleasure that kept her daughter silent. And anyway, at this stage, Edith had not made up her mind whether or not she thought there was any what the magazines call 'future' in it.

  Edith Lavery was not in the least promiscuous but, at this point, she was certainly not a virgin. She had, in her time, had several boyfriends. None was serious until she was about twenty-three but then there had been a stockbroker, five years older than her and very good-looking, whom she had made up her mind to accept when he proposed. They went out for about a year, stayed in a lot of house-parties, enjoyed quite a few of the same things, and generally were happy or at least as happy as anyone else. His name was Philip, his mother was fairly grand, there was a little money — enough to start them off in Clapham

  — and in fact it all seemed fine, so no one was more surprised than Edith when he explained one evening, in halting tones, that he had met someone else and it was all over. For a moment Edith had difficulty making sense of this. Partly because he chose to tell her in San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, where the customers on the two neighbouring tables were listening to every word, and partly because she could
n't imagine in all modesty what this 'someone else' could have that she, Edith, didn't. She and Philip liked each other, they were a good-looking pair, they both enjoyed country weekends, they both skied. Where was the difficulty?

  At any rate, Philip left and three months later she was invited to his wedding. She went, being very gracious and looking (as she was determined to do) ravishing. The bride was plainer than her, naturally, and rather ordinary really but as Edith watched her gazing up at Philip as if he were God on earth, she had an uncomfortable inkling that this had something to do with what had gone wrong.

  After that there had been various walk-outs but not much more. One, an estate agent named George, had lasted about six months but this was only because he was the first competent lover she had experienced and the pleasures he unlocked in her made her wilfully blind to his shortcomings until one day, at Henley (which he had taken her to imagining, rather touchingly, that it was a smart event), while they were lunching in some members' tent, she had looked across the table at him, laughing his loud and gummy laugh, and realised that he really was too frightful. After that it was simply a matter of time.

  Her parents had been quite sorry about Philip whom they liked, not in the least sorry about George and, on the whole, without an opinion on the various others who had briefly penetrated Elm Park Gardens, but Edith had begun to notice that the veiled hints and half-joking, half-worried remarks from her mother had been getting more frequent since her twenty-seventh birthday. And for the first time she had started to feel a very far-away, distant echo of panic. Just supposing, for the sake of argument, that no one did ask her to marry them, what would she do?

  What on earth was she going to do?

  But then, she thought as she pulled out the heated rollers and picked up her Mason Pearson brush, everything could change so quickly. Being a woman wasn't like being a man. Men were either born with money or they spent years beavering away at careers to make themselves rich while women… women can be poor one day and rich, or at least married to a rich man, the next. It might not be fashionable to admit it but even in this day and age, a woman's life can be utterly transformed by means of the right ring.

  It is easy to get the impression from these ruminations that Edith was harshly, even exclusively, mercenary at this time in her life but that would be unjust. And it would have surprised her. If asked whether she was materialistic she would have answered she was practical, if snobbish she would have said she was worldly. After all, she read novels, she went to the cinema, she knew about happiness, she believed in love. But she saw her future career as primarily social (how could she not?) and if it was to be social then how could she have a career worthy of the name without money and position? Of course, by the 1990s, these were supposed to be outmoded ambitions but Edith did not have it in her to rush off and found a keep-fit empire or publish a new magazine. As for any of the professions, she had missed her chance of those ten years before when she left school. And it was no longer unfashionable to want to be affluent. The brown rice and dirndl-skirted generation of her childhood had given way to a brasher, post-Thatcherite world and weren't her dreams, in a way, in tune with that development?

  Still, if she was ambitious and reluctantly committed to the idea that it would be a man who would open the golden pathway to fulfilment, it would not be true to say that Edith was fundamentally a snob. Certainly not compared to her mother.

  She said herself that she liked to be on the inside looking out rather than the other way round, but she was more interested in achievement (or power, to use its less fragrant name) than rank. She wanted to be at the centre of things. She wanted a winner, not a coronet. Within limits. She was not looking for a successful costermonger but she was not really looking for an earl either. Which probably explains why she got one.

  She stared at her reflection in the glass. She was wearing a short black dress in wild silk. What her mother would have called 'a little black number', the eternal stand-by of the London Lady. It was well-cut, quite expensive and, apart from a French paste bracelet, she wore no ornament. She looked pretty and snappy with that slight tang of severity a certain kind of Englishman finds intriguing. She was satisfied. Edith was not vain but she was glad, not to say relieved, that she had not been saddled with a plain face. The doorbell rang.

  She had entertained the idea that she might simply tell Charles to wait downstairs but then he might think she was concealing something far more compromising than a rather routine father and a snobbish mother so she decided to ask him up but to introduce him in the American way, Christian names only. A modern habit that as a rule she particularly disliked as it withheld the only part of a name that might carry any information. Her mother defeated her as soon as she had taken the field.

  'Charles what?' she said, while Kenneth was making them all a drink.

  'Broughton.' Charles smiled. Edith saw the penny drop with a silent boing but not for nothing had her mother been a lifelong admirer of Elizabeth I. The mask remained smiling but immobile.

  'And how do you know Edith?'

  'We met in Sussex at my parents' house.'

  'When I was staying with Isabel and David.'

  'Oh, so you know the Eastons?'

  Charles nodded, for which Edith was grateful. He was not prepared to say, 'No, I do not know them and we were not introduced at a private party. I met your daughter when she had bought a ticket to see where I live.' This was about the size of it but it would have got the evening off to an odd start. Nevertheless, having escaped this manhole, Edith brought the chat to a fairly rapid conclusion rather than chance her arm a second time. So, far from being nervous, she was actually quite relieved when they settled themselves into the gleaming Porsche that awaited them below.

  'I thought we'd go to Annabel's.'

  'Now?' She was surprised and spoke before she had edited.

  'Is that all right? We don't have to.' Charles looked faintly hurt and she felt mean at dashing what he might have supposed to be a bit of a treat. The thought that he had actually planned an evening for her was rather gratifying.

  'Lovely.' She smiled warmly into his open, pleasant, slightly dim face. 'It's just that I've always gone on late. I don't think I've ever had dinner there.'

  'I rather like it.'

  He drove off and they lapsed into silence until the car pulled up outside the famous basement entrance in Berkeley Square.

  Charles got out and handed the keys to a doorman. Edith had always been to Annabel's with young men who parked their cars around the square and walked to the club. There was a cosy feeling in the knowledge that she was out with someone who had no need to cut corners. They made their way down the steps and in through the door at the bottom. Charles signed in with a lot of 'good evenin', m'lord' going on all round.

  There was practically no one in the bar and seemingly even fewer in the restaurant. The empty dance-floor looked dark and maudlin with its black mirrors reflecting nothing. Charles seemed puzzled at first and then embarrassed. 'You're right. It is too early. I don't think it really picks up until about ten. Do you want to go somewhere else?'

  'Not at all,' she said with a brisk smile as she settled into the banquette. 'Now, tell me what to eat.'

  She had not yet decided what she thought about Charles but one thing she was quite sure of. This evening was going to be a great success if it killed her. The menu provided a few minutes of welcome chat. Charles knew about food and drink, and he was happy to take command, although in fact she had only asked for his help in order to re-establish herself as the helpless underdog like the good, nubile girl she was. The last thing she wanted was for him to start apologising. Experience had taught her that much. But in the event he chose well and the dinner was a good one.

  Charles Broughton was not exactly handsome. His nose was too large for that and his lips too thin. But in the candlelight he was not unattractive. He was very what Nanny would call 'distinguished'. He looked so like an English gentleman that he could have come f
rom Central Casting and Edith felt herself being quite drawn to him physically. Much more than she had imagined she would be. She was mildly surprised to realise that she was looking forward to his asking her to dance.

  'Do you spend a lot of time in London?' she said.

  He shook his head. 'Good Lord no. Little as possible.'

  'So you're generally in Sussex?'

  'Most of the time. We've got a place in Norfolk as well. I have to get up there from time to time.'

  'Funny. I'd thought of you as rather social.'

  'Me? You must be joking.' He laughed out loud. 'Why was that?'

  'I don't know.' She did know although she was not prepared to say that she had read about him in various social columns.

  Since he and she had run into each other at Ascot, it all seemed to add up to a rather fun-filled image. It was a mistaken impression that lingered for some time before it was firmly put right.

  The truth was that, like most of the human race, Charles went to parties if he was asked and had nothing else to do but he did not have many friends — certainly not many that he had made in the last few years — and he saw himself exclusively as a countryman, helping his father to run the estates and the houses that God had seen fit to entrust to their care. He did not question nor resist his position but neither did he exploit it. If he had ever thought about the issues of inheritance or rank he would only have said that he felt very lucky. He would not have said this aloud, however.