Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  Unfortunately a nineteenth-century Broughton had stripped the windows of their mullions and replaced them with plate glass so now they gaped, vacant and sightless, across the park. At the four corners of the house squat cupolas had been erected like watch-towers in a concentration camp. All in all, it did not so much complete the view as block it.

  The car crunched comfortably to a halt. 'Shall we do the house first or the garden?' Isabel, like a 1960s Soviet military inspector in the heart of NATO, was determined to miss nothing.

  Edith shrugged. 'Is there a lot to see inside?'

  'Oh, I think so,' said Isabel firmly, striding towards the door marked 'Enter'. It crouched in the embrace of the ponderous horseshoe flight of steps leading up to the piano nobile. The rusticated granite swallowed her and we meekly followed.

  One of Edith's favourite stories would always be that she first saw Broughton as a paying guest, barred by a red rope from the intimate life of the house. 'Not,' as she would remark with her funny half-laugh, 'that the place has ever had much intimate life.' There are houses with such a sense of the personalities that built them, an all-pervading smell of the lives lived there, that the visitor feels himself a cross between a burglar and a ghost, spying on a private place with hidden secrets. Broughton was not such a house. It had been designed down to the last fender and finial with one single aim: to impress strangers.

  Consequently its role at the end of the twentieth century had hardly changed at all. The only difference being that now the strangers bought tickets instead of tipping the housekeeper.

  For the modern visitor, however, the splendours of the state rooms were deferred, and the cold, dank room by which we entered (later we would know it as the Under Hall) was as welcoming as a deserted stadium. Hard-looking footmen's chairs stood around the walls, conjuring up a vision of endless hours of boredom spent sitting on them, and a long, black table filled the centre of the discoloured stone floor. Apart from four dirty views of Venice, a long way after Canaletto, there were no pictures. Like all the rooms at Broughton, the hall was perfectly enormous, making the three of us feel like the Borrowers.

  'Well, they don't believe in the soft sell,' said Edith.

  From the Under Hall, clutching our guide-books, we climbed the Great Staircase with its carved oak flights clambering up around a burly and rather depressing bronze of a dying slave. At the top, after crossing the wide landing, we came first to the Marble Hall, a vast, double-storeyed space with a balustraded gallery round all four sides at second-floor level. Had we entered by the exterior horseshoe stair this would have been our (intentionally flattening) introduction to the house. From this we progressed to the Saloon, another huge room, this time with heavy mahogany mouldings picked out in gold and walls hung with crimson flock wallpaper.

  'Chicken tikka for me,' said Edith.

  I laughed. She was quite right. It looked exactly like a gigantic Indian restaurant.

  Isabel opened the guide-book and began to read in a geography-mistress voice: 'The Saloon is hung with its original paper, one of the chief glories of Broughton's interior. The gilt side-tables were made for this room by William Kent in seventeen-thirty-nine. The maritime theme of the carved pier glasses was inspired by the appointment of the third earl to the embassy in Portugal in seventeen thirty-seven. The Earl, himself, is commemorated in this, his favourite room in the full-length portrait by Jarvis, which hangs, together with its companion of his countess by Hudson, on either side of the Italian fireplace.'

  Edith and I stared at the pictures. The one of Lady Broughton made a little stab at gaiety by posing the heavy-featured young woman on a bank of flowers, a summer hat trailing from her large hand.

  'There's a woman at my gym exactly like that,' said Edith. 'She's always trying to sell me Conservative raffle tickets.'

  Isabel droned on. 'The cabinet in the centre of the south wall is by Boulle and was a gift from Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, Dauphine of France, to the bride of the fifth earl on the occasion of her marriage. Between the windows…'

  I drifted away to these same, tall windows and looked down into the park. It was one of those hot, sulky days in late August when the trees seem overburdened with leaf and the green upon green of the countryside is stuffy and airless. As I stood there, a man came round the corner of the house. He was wearing tweeds and corduroys despite the weather and one of those tiresome brown felt derbies that Englishmen in the country imagine to be dashing. He looked up and I saw it was Charles Broughton. He barely glanced at me and looked away, but then he stopped and looked up again. I supposed that he had recognised me and I raised my hand in greeting, which he acknowledged with some slight gesture of his own and went on about his business.

  'Who was that?' Edith was standing behind me. She had also abandoned Isabel to her orisons.

  'Charles Broughton.'

  'A son of the house?'

  'The only son of the house, I think.'

  'Will he ask us in for tea?'

  'I shouldn't think so. I've met him precisely twice.'

  Charles did not ask us in for tea and I'm sure he wouldn't have given me another thought if we hadn't run into him on our way back to the car. He was talking to one of the many gardeners who were drifting about the place and happened to finish just as we started back across the forecourt.

  'Hello,' he nodded quite amiably. 'What are you doing here?' He had clearly forgotten my name and probably where we had met but he was pleasant enough and stood waiting to be introduced to the others.

  Isabel, taken short by this sudden and unexpected propulsion into the Land Where Dreams Come True, fumbled for something to say that would fasten like a fascinating burr inside Charles's brain and result in a close friendship springing up more or less immediately. No inspiration came.

  'He's staying with us. We're two miles away,' she said baldly.

  'Really? Do you get down often?'

  'We're here all the time.'

  'Ah,' said Charles. He turned to Edith. 'Are you local, too?'

  She smiled. 'Don't worry, I'm quite safe. I live in London.'

  He laughed and his fleshy, hearty features looked momentarily quite attractive. He took off his hat and revealed that fair, Rupert Brooke hair, crinkly curls at the nape of the neck, that is so characteristic of the English aristocrat. 'I hope you liked the house.'

  Edith smiled and said nothing, leaving Isabel to reel off her silly gleanings from the guide-book.

  I stepped in with the pardon. 'We ought to be off. David will be wondering what's happened to us.'

  We all smiled and nodded and touched hands, and a few minutes later we were back on the road.

  'You never said you knew Charles Broughton,' said Isabel in a flat tone.

  'I don't.'

  'Well, you never said you'd met him.'

  'Didn't I?'

  Although, naturally, I knew I hadn't. Isabel drove the rest of the way in silence. Edith turned from the front passenger seat and made a that's-torn-it expression with her mouth. It was clear I had failed and Isabel was noticeably cool to me for the rest of the weekend.

  TWO

  Edith Lavery was the daughter of a successful chartered accountant, himself the grandson of a Jewish immigrant who had arrived in England in 1905 to escape the pogroms of the late, and to Edith's father, unlamented Tsar Nicholas II. I do not think I ever knew the family's original name, Levy, perhaps, or Levin. At any rate, the Edwardian portraitist, Sir John Lavery, was the inspiration for the change, which seemed, and almost certainly was, a good idea at the time. When asked if they were connected to the painter, the Laverys would answer, 'Vaguely, I think,' thus linking themselves with the British establishment without making any disputable claims. It is quite customary for the English, when asked if they have met so-and-so, to say,

  'Yes, but they wouldn't remember me,' or 'Well, I've met them but I don't know them,' when they have not met them.

  This is because of a subconscious urge on their part to create the comforting il
lusion that England, or rather the England of the upper-middle and upper classes, is crisscrossed with a million invisible silken threads that weave them together into a brilliant community of rank and grace and exclude everybody else. There is little dishonesty in it for as a rule they understand each other. To an Englishman or woman of a certain background the answer, 'Well, I've met them but they wouldn't remember me' means 'I have not met them.'

  Mrs Lavery, Edith's mother, considered herself a bird of quite different feather to her spouse, fond as she was of him. Her own father had been an Indian army colonel but the salient detail was that his mother had been the great-niece of a banking baronet. Although kindly in many ways, Mrs Lavery was passionately snobbish to a degree verging on insanity and so her frail connection to this, the very lowest hereditary rank filled her with the warming sense of belonging to that inner circle of rank and privilege where her poor husband must ever be a stranger. Mr Lavery did not, for this reason, resent his wife. Not in the least. On the contrary he was proud of her. She was, after all, a tall, good-looking woman who knew how to dress and if anything he was rather entertained by the idea that the phrase 'noblesse oblige' (one of Mrs Lavery's favourites) could have the slightest application to his household.

  They lived in a large flat in Elm Park Gardens, which was almost at the wrong end of Chelsea and not quite to Mrs Lavery's taste. Still, it was not exactly Fulham nor, worse, Battersea, names that had only recently begun to appear on Mrs Lavery's mental map. She still felt the thrill of the new, like an intrepid explorer pushing ever further from civilization, whenever she was invited for dinner by one of her friends' married children. She listened perkily as they discussed what a good investment the 'toast rack' was or how the children loved Tooting after that poky flat in Marloes Road. It was all Greek to Mrs Lavery. So far as she was concerned she was in Hell until she got back over the river, her own personal Styx, that forever divided the Underworld from Real Life.

  The Laverys were not rich but nor were they poor and, having only one child, there was never any need to stint. Edith was sent off to a fashionable nursery school and then Benenden ('No, not because of the Princess Royal. We simply looked around and we thought it the most inspiring place'.) Mr Lavery would have liked the girl's education to have been continued at university but when Edith's exam results were not good enough, certainly not for anywhere they were interested in sending her, Mrs Lavery was not disappointed. Her great ambition had always been to bring her daughter out.

  Stella Lavery had not been a debutante herself. This was something of which she was deeply ashamed. She would seek to conceal it under a lot of laughing references to the fun she'd had as a girl and, if pushed for specifics, she might sigh that her father had taken rather a tumble in the thirties (thereby connecting herself with the Wall Street Crash and echoes of Scott Fitzgerald and Gatsby). Alternatively, fudging her dates, she would blame it on the war. The truth, as Mrs Lavery was forced to admit to herself in the dark night of the soul, was that in the less socially free-wheeling world of the 1950s, there had been clearer demarcation lines between precisely who was in Society and who was not. Stella Lavery's family was not. She envied those of her friends who had met as debutantes with a deep and secret envy that gnawed at her entrails. She even hated them for including her in their reminiscences about Henrietta Tiarks or Miranda Smiley as if they believed that she, Stella Lavery, had 'come out' when they knew, and she knew they knew, she had not. For these reasons she had been determined from the outset that no such gaps would shadow the life of her beloved Edith. (The name Edith incidentally was chosen for its fragrant overtones of a slower, better England and perhaps, half-consciously, to suggest that it was a family name handed down from some Edwardian beauty. It was not.) At all events, the girl was to be propelled into the charmed circle from the first. Since by the eighties Presentation at Court (which might have posed a problem) was a thing of the distant past, all Mrs Lavery had to do was to convince her husband and her daughter that it would be time and money well spent.

  They did not need much persuasion. Edith had no concrete plans for how she was to pass her adult life and to delay the decision-making process with a year-long round of parties seemed a pretty good idea. As for Mr Lavery, he enjoyed the vision of his wife and his daughter in the beau monde and was perfectly happy to pay for it. Mrs Lavery's carefully tended connections were enough to get Edith onto Peter Townend's list for the opening tea-parties and the girl's own looks won her a place as a model at the Berkeley Dress Show. After that it was plain sailing. Mrs Lavery went to the mothers' lunches and packed her daughter's dresses for balls in the country and on the whole had a wonderful time. Edith quite enjoyed it, too.

  The only reservation for Mrs Lavery was that when the Season was over, when the last winter Charity Balls had finished and the Tatler cuttings had been pasted into a scrap-book along with the invitations, nothing much seemed to have changed.

  Edith had obviously been entertained by the daughters of several peers — including one duke, which was particularly thrilling

  — indeed, all of these girls had attended Edith's own cocktail party at Claridge's (one of Mrs Lavery's happiest evenings), but the friends who stayed on after the dances had ceased were very like the girls she had brought home from school, the daughters of prosperous, upper-middle-class businessmen. Exactly what Edith was herself in fact. This did not seem right to Mrs Lavery. She had for so long attributed her own failure to reach the dizzying upper echelons of London Society (a group she rather archly labelled 'the Court') to her lack of a proper launch that she had expected great things from her daughter.

  Perhaps her enthusiasm blinded her to a simple truth: the fact that the Season had opened its arms to her daughter meant it was no longer in the 1980s the exclusive institution it had been in Mrs Lavery's youth.

  Edith was aware of her mother's disappointment but while she was certainly not immune, as we would find out, to the charms of rank and fortune, she did not quite see how she was expected to prosecute these intimacies with the daughters of the Great Houses. To start with they all seemed to have known each other from birth and anyway she couldn't help feeling it would be difficult to cater for their pleasures in a flat in Elm Park Gardens. In the end she remained on nodding terms with most of the girls in her year but returned to a very similar groove to the one she had occupied on leaving school.

  I learned all this quite soon after first meeting Edith at the Eastons' because it so transpired that she took a job answering the telephone in an estate agent's in Milner Street, just round the corner from where I had a basement flat. I started bumping into her in Peter Jones, or having a sandwich in one of the local pubs, or buying a five-thirty pint of milk in Partridges and gradually, almost without noticing it, we became quite friendly. One day I saw her coming out of the General Trading Company at about one o'clock and I invited her for some lunch.

  'Have you seen Isabel lately?' I asked, as we squeezed into a banquette in one of those little Italian places where the waiters shout.

  'I had dinner with them both last week.'

  'All well?'

  It was, or well enough. They were engaged in some school drama about their child. Isabel had discovered dyslexia. I pitied the headmaster.

  'She asked after you. I said I'd seen you,' said Edith.

  I remarked that I didn't think Isabel had as yet forgiven me for failing to tell her I knew Charles Broughton, and Edith laughed. It was then that I heard about her mother. I asked if she'd told Mrs Lavery about our time at Broughton. It so happened that Charles was rather on my mind as that morning I'd seen one of those idiotic magazine articles about eligible bachelors and Charles had led the pack. I blush to say I was rather impressed with the list of his assets.

  'Not likely. I wouldn't want to give her any ideas.'

  'She must be very susceptible.'

  'She certainly is. She'd have me up the aisle before you could say knife.'

  'And you don't want to get married?'


  Edith looked at me as if I were mad. 'Of course I want to get married.'

  'You don't see yourself as a career girl? I thought all women want careers now.' I do not know why I slid into this kind of pompous anti-feminism since it does not in the least reflect my views.

  'Well, I don't want to spend the rest of my life answering the telephone in an estate agent's office if that's what you mean.'

  I was duly reprimanded. 'That's not quite what I had in mind,' I said.

  Edith looked at me indulgently as if it were necessary to take me through my three times table. 'I'm twenty-seven. I have no qualifications and, what is worse, no particular talent. I also have tastes that require, at the very least, eighty thousand a year.

  When my father dies he will leave what money he has to my mother and I don't anticipate either of them quitting the scene much before 2030. What do you suggest I should do?'

  I do not know why but I felt rather muted by this Anita Loos-style practicality emanating from the little rose before me, with her Alice band and her neat, navy-blue suit.

  'So you intend to marry a rich man?' I asked.

  Edith looked at me quizzically. Perhaps she felt she had given away too much, perhaps she was trying to ascertain if I was judging her and if so, whether or not she was coming out ahead. She should have been reassured by what she saw in my eyes for it has always seemed to me that if one can face up early on to what one really wants in life, then there is every chance of avoiding the seemingly inevitable modern disease of mid-life crisis.

  'Not necessarily,' she answered, with a trace of defensiveness in her voice. 'It's just that I cannot imagine I would be very happy married to a poor one.'

  'I do see that,' I said.