Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  'sources close to the Royal Couple' in a newspaper means gossip from the outermost circle of Royal hangers-on. 'I know him,' I said.

  Twist wasn't put off. 'Well, he thinks very highly of you,' he continued. He had that odd, mid-Atlantic manner of speech that reminds one of a television chat show where every trivial remark is supposed (a) to denote a caring soul and (b) to bring all reasonable conjecture on the subject to an end.

  'That's nice,' I said.

  'So,' he lay back in his chair, stretching his legs and revealing a pair of cowboy boots covered in frightful Red Indian patterns, 'tell me a little about yourself.'

  It is hard for anyone who is not an actor to comprehend fully the level of depression into which one is plunged by this question, when the credits of one's feeble career must be dragged out and displayed like the tawdry contents of a salesman's battered suitcase. I shall consequently pass over it and say that I was given the job. This was not because of the 'little about myself that I had told but because Twist did not want to start on the wrong side of Lady Uckfield, who had apparently, I later learned, been most resolute in my cause.

  As soon as my agent had confirmed that I was hired for the full eight weeks of the movie — which would involve six weeks in or around Broughton — I telephoned Edith.

  'But how perfectly thrilling! Of course you'll stay with us.'

  It is always nice to be asked but I had already resolved that I would not stay at Broughton itself. I could foresee a certain amount of awkwardness being generated by my being friendly with the family as it was. Had I stayed with them, in a short time I would have separated myself from the actual 'making' of the film entirely.

  'You are kind. I don't think you could stand me for six weeks.'

  'Don't be silly. Of course we could.'

  'I shan't be so unreasonable as to put you to the test.'

  Edith understood this kind of talk well enough to know that she had been turned down and the invitation was not repeated.

  I told her that I would be at the unit hotel, a converted country house just outside Uckfield, but that we would obviously be seeing a lot of each other. I must confess that after my little taster at the shooting party, I felt a slightly ghoulish curiosity to see her and Charles on their home ground. Perhaps at the back of my mind was a faint glimmering of Schadenfreude — that terrible pleasure we feel at our friends' ill-fortune — although I hope not. But I had witnessed Edith's accession to Dreamland and I'm afraid there is always a kind of pleasurable self-justification in others' disappointment in the world's blessings. It is the consolation prize of failure.

  Two or three weeks passed. I went for my fittings at Bermans and Wig Creations, occasionally bumping into others in the cast. The Gunnings themselves were to be played by a couple of American blondes on 'hiatus' from a Hollywood cop series.

  The product was consequently doomed from the start so far as any artistic standards were concerned. I do not wish to sound snobbish here. There are many roles that should unquestionably be filled by American blondes. I only mean to imply that the casting of Louanne Peters and Jane Darnell meant that the producers had entirely abandoned the idea of trying for any kind of truthful representation of eighteenth-century London in favour of viewing figures. One cannot blame them, I suppose, or at least one would not if only they would ever admit what they have done. As it is, the rest of the cast has to sit in endless restaurants on location hearing how hard they've tried to get the right candlesticks or mob-caps when they know as well as you do that the central characters do not and will not bear the slightest semblance of reality. Actors laugh together as they

  'take the money and run' but it is disheartening all the same. At any rate I was glad to learn that the sisters' mother, Mrs Gunning, was to be played by an actress called Bella Stevens with whom I had once shared a cottage in Northampton during early rep days after leaving drama school, and it was pleasant to renew a friendship that we had made no effort to maintain during the interim.

  A strange and perhaps unique feature of theatrical lives is the depth of involvement one forms with people when working together, only to return home and literally never bother to pick up the telephone to contact them again. Weeks of tearful intimacies, to say nothing of sexual liaisons, are lightly discarded without a backward glance. It is inevitable in that the nature of the work generates intimacy and the number of jobs makes the support of all such relationships impossible. But it is strange nevertheless to contemplate how many people are walking the streets of London who know a great deal more about you than anyone in your immediate family.

  Conversely, nothing is more agreeable than the renewal of such a friendship after several years' interlude, as there is no need for the preamble to intimacy. It is already in place. One may immediately pick it up, like a piece of unfinished tapestry, where one left off ten years before. So it was with Bella. She was a ferociously strong personality, with a dark, almost satanic face, a cross between Joan Crawford and the commedia dell'arte, but this went along with a kind heart, a witty if promiscuous tongue and a genius for cookery. The repertory company we had worked in — she as leading lady, me as assistant stage manager — had been unusually chaotic even by the standards of the time, run as it was by an amiable, alcoholic cynic who slept through most rehearsals and all performances, and we consequently had a good many shared horror stories to laugh about.

  Soon after I had arrived in my hotel room, while I was still reeling from the obligatory brown and orange colour scheme, the telephone rang. It was Bella. I agreed to meet her in the bar in an hour. She was sitting at a table with a companion she introduced to me as Simon Russell, an actor of whom I had more or less heard, who had landed the good part (if any parts in these epics may be defined in such terms) of Colonel John Campbell, faithful lover of our principal heroine and eventually, in the last five minutes of the film, Duke of Argyll.

  Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy. All this I am fully aware of. I know too, however, that of the four great gifts that the fairies may or may not bring to the christening — Brains, Birth, Beauty and Money — it is Beauty that makes locked doors spring open at a touch. Whether it is for a job interview, a place at a dining table, a brilliant promotion or a lift on the motorway, everyone, regardless of their sex or their sexual proclivity, would always rather deal with a good-looking face. And no one is more aware of this than the Beauties themselves. They have a power they simultaneously respect and take for granted. Despite the moralists who tut about its transience, it is generally a power that is never completely lost. One can usually trace in the wrinkled lines of a nonagenarian, stooped and leaning on a stick, the style and confidence that turned heads in a ballroom in 1929. Simon Russell was without question the most beautiful man I have ever seen. I do not call him handsome for the word implies some kind of masculine confining of the concept of beauty, a rugged state of alluring imperfection. Russell's face had none of this. It was quite simply perfect. Thick waving blond locks fell forward, half shading large, startlingly blue eyes. A chiselled, statue's nose (I have always disliked my nose, and so am rather nose-conscious), and a modelled, girlish mouth framing even, if marginally sharp, teeth completed the picture. Nor did the perfection end there.

  Instead of the weedy build that one associates with the Blond Toff school of actors, Russell was possessed of an athlete's body, muscular and trim. He was in short a magnificent specimen. Sometimes it seems the Gods grow bored with marring their handiwork and allow someone through without a hitch and Russell was such a one. If he had a fault, and really one had to search for it, I suppose his legs were a little too short for his size. I later learned that this tiny deta
il, this fleck of dust against the rainbow, caused him hours of mental anguish daily, revealing the paranoia and ingratitude of the human race.

  The three of us, having decided to avoid both the director and the hotel dining room, found ourselves some time later ensconced in the booth table of a curious restaurant in Uckfield decorated with, of all odd choices, a Wild West motif. It was a pleasant evening and a heartening start to the job. Simon was good company, one of the lovely things about the lucky being that they are so easy to be with. He was married with three children, a boy and two girls, about whom we heard (and would continue to hear) a great deal, and he talked of himself and his triumphs in that relaxed unselfconscious way that only the deeply egocentric can manage. Still, he was funny and pleasant and charming, and he toned well with Bella's more frenetic volubility. He was also patently a colossal flirt. No interchange with another mortal, from our waitress to a man we stopped to ask for directions, escaped the beam of his arc lamp smile. Everyone, no matter how mean or meagre, had to be roped to his chariot. I enjoyed watching him at work enormously.

  'I don't think I can manage six weeks in the room I've got,' said Bella. 'I thought there must have been some mistake. It's the size of a drawer and the lavatory is in a sort of wardrobe.' She waved her hand for another bottle.

  It is a truism that the collective noun for actors is 'a grumble'. They are never happier than when they can have a really good whinge about the conditions under which they're working, sleeping, changing. There is the old joke about the actor who, after five years of unemployment, at the point of suicide, is given a starring film role opposite Julia Roberts and when asked if it's really true replies: 'Yes. And the best thing is, I've got tomorrow off.' Nevertheless, even I, who care little about such things, felt daunted by the prospect of six weeks of orange and brown wallpaper and it was at this moment that the idea of the three of us sharing a cottage took shape. It was a risk, of course, and we resolved to make it a week-by-week arrangement, but it would be a great saving on expenses and generally a considerable improvement on our present situation. 'The only thing is,' said Bella, 'I've been asking around. Practically everything near here is part of the Broughton estate and I gather they're not keen on short-term rentals. They have an absolute embargo on holiday lets.'

  'Couldn't the film people pull some string?' Simon smiled the gentle smile of one for whom an inconvenient status quo can always be overcome. 'They must be making quite a lot out of us. Who's the location manager? Someone must be on good terms with them. At least at this stage.'

  Since we were starting on the film the next day and it was bound to be revealed quite early on that I knew the family, I cut in. 'I know them,' I said. 'I don't know if there's anything to let, but I can certainly ask.'

  Bella was pleased and unsurprised at this turn of events. She had known my double life of old and, being unsnobbish, did not feel any attitude to it was called for. I could see, however, from the headlight-glare of Simon's eyes as he turned to me with a chariot-roping smile, that I had risen quantifiably in his estimation.

  The next morning I'd barely arrived on the set, a ballroom scene in the Red Saloon where Charles and Edith had received us at the engagement dinner, when my cover, if I had one, was blown. Most of the principals had assembled in their not-very-accurate costumes when Lady Uckfield came in. 'Ah, Marchioness,' said Twist with what I suppose he thought a courtly bow.

  Not a glimmer of a wince could I trace in her even, smiling features as, portentously, like the local mayor in a Midlands manufactory, he started to introduce her to the cast. Spying me, she broke away, kissed me on both cheeks and led me over to the window. For most of the unit, in that one second, I was a marked man and it took me several weeks of production to regain the slightest credibility as an actor.

  'Edith tells me you won't come and stay with us.'

  'You are kind but honestly not. I think I'd get muddled about which team I was on.'

  She laughed and answered, with a cursory glance round the room, 'I do hope not.' I smiled. 'So where are you going to stay? You can't seriously mean to stick it out in the local pub?'

  I thought of those sad brochures on my hotel dressing-table welcoming me to the 'country house splendours of Notley Park', and shook my head. 'I don't think so.'

  'Thank goodness for that.'

  'As a matter of fact, three of us were wondering if there was anywhere on the estate we might be able to hire. What do you think? It doesn't have to be sumptuous. So long as there are three bedrooms and hot water.'

  'Which three?'

  I nodded towards Bella, laced into burgundy velvet, who was talking to Simon. He was in pale blue silk, with lace at his throat and wrists, and a wig, which, unlike those of most of the extras, did not look as if it had been removed from a body in the Thames but rather framed his face with even more of the abundant, fair curls he boasted in life. He caught our glance, looked over to us and smiled.

  Lady Uckfield smiled carefully back. 'Heavens, what a beauty.'

  'He's our love interest.'

  'I can well believe it.' She turned back to me. 'I'm sure we can fix up something. You could probably have Brook Farm if you don't mind pretty minimal furnishing. I'll ask Charles to sort it out. Come to dinner tonight and bring the other two. For vetting,' she added crisply, as she moved off. 'About eight and don't change.'

  'You're sure this is all right?' said Bella for the twelfth time, as we crunched to a halt outside the front entrance.

  'I'm sure.

  She wriggled out of the car. 'God, I've brought nothing but dungarees and sweaters.' Actually she looked quite saucy in a black outfit with big earrings, like a French singer in some politically subversive boîte.

  Simon was considerably cooler as we approached the great horseshoe stair. He was one of those actors, who come if not in battalions at least not singly, who play aristocrats so often on television that they end by believing in themselves as one. He had worn almost every uniform, gone over the top in almost every conflict, ridden to hounds and danced till he dropped in epic serial after epic serial, and now in some way he believed that he was indeed the sort of person who gets his shoes from Lobb's and his hats from Lock's, that somehow he would be a member of White's if they only knew about him, that he was, in short, a member of the gratin. He would lounge around Fulham sitting rooms making disparaging remarks about junior members of the Royal Family with the air of one who would rather not tell all he knows. Not that there was much difference between him and David Easton down the road. It was just that he had been less in the country and so was still unaware that it is a harder act to bring off out of London.

  Of course, what neither Simon nor David ever really grasped was that the key to these people is their familiarity with one another. Most of them are unable to receive anyone as 'one of their own' who is not either known to them from early youth or at the very least known to one of their circle. They cannot accept that they would not have come across, at least at one remove, anyone who was entitled to be included in their set. The best that all those grinning racing-drivers and cockney actors can hope for as they glow in the pews at Royal weddings is the position of unofficial court jester, a service that may be dispensed with at any time. Simon was insufficiently familiar with the great world to understand this and so he maintained throughout the evening a kind of swagger, which was presumably supposed to demonstrate to the company that he was always dining in large stately homes all over the country. Needless to say, they were neither deceived nor interested.

  There were only the four of them at home when we were ushered by Jago into the family drawing room and when we walked in they were all silent and reading. I thought, although I could not be sure, that I detected a rather torpid atmosphere.

  Lady Uckfield came over to greet us. Receiving Bella's gushings, she led her instantly to her husband with whom, she could see straight away, Bella was going to be a great hit. When she turned back to us, Simon had already forged over to Charles to ask him ab
out the possibilities of Brook Farm and I watched as Charles almost jumped at the ferocity of this full frontal attack, but he recovered his ground. In fact, he was nodding with an amiable half-smile after a while so I assumed that all would be well. Edith, I noticed, after acknowledging me, had not risen and had returned to her book. I watched Simon eyeing her but she would not be included and after he had tried throwing a few remarks sideways, he gave up for the moment and returned to dazzling her husband.

  Lady Uckfield brought me some whisky and water, my evening drink, without being asked, which was flattering. Her glance followed mine. 'Charles seems to think Brook Farm will be fine if you're really serious. He'll have Mr Roberts go over it in the morning. We must have it ready for next month at the latest anyway so it'll be good to have a spurt at it. You could move in the day after tomorrow if you don't mind a bit of work going on around you all. I hope this means we'll be seeing a lot of you.'

  'Much too much, I have no doubt.' I hesitated for a moment. 'Wasn't Brook Farm being done up for Charles and Edith?'

  Lady Uckfield nodded. 'Yes. But they've changed their minds.' She caught my eye. 'Too lovely for Tigger and me,' she said firmly.

  I nodded. 'Lovely,' I said.

  Poor Charles had rather a dry time of it at dinner. Bella was having a great success with Lord Uckfield, telling him raucous and unsuitable stories to his obvious delight, and he was not inclined to include anyone else in their exchanges, while Simon was giving the same treatment — though more decorously — to Lady Uckfield at the other end. Edith certainly seemed to have very little to say to her husband though, as it happens, she didn't appear to have much to say to anybody. I saw her watching Simon as he sprayed her mother-in-law with wit and charm. He had of course met his match in Lady Uckfield who was not to be caught in such a frail net as his but I must say this for him: he clearly knew he was outranked, something that in all the time I knew him he was seldom conscious of.