Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  Charles threw himself down next to her, spraying her with drops of sea and gave her a salty kiss. 'Good morning, darling.' She smiled and kissed him back.

  'What shall we do today? Just lie here and drink up the sun?'

  Caroline answered her. 'We thought we might go into Calaratjada for lunch and then the Franks have asked us for tea.

  You're all included.'

  'Who are the Franks?'

  'They're this rather extraordinary family who are fearfully rich and they have a collection of sculpture that apparently must not be missed.'

  'Why are they so rich and how do you know them?'

  'To the first, God knows. Something to do with Franco so we'd better not ask, and to the second, we don't, but Mummy's godmother to one of their nephews in Rome and she let them know we were going to be here.'

  Edith lay back and closed her eyes. This great network, this web that reached far beyond national boundaries, that crossed seas and mountain ranges, need not threaten her any more because now she was part of it. And soon, in Vienna or Dublin or Rome, people would be saying, 'I saw Edith Broughton when I was in London. She says they might be in New York in September…' and this would be greeted by some member of the Inner Circle saying, 'Edith? How is she?' or better still, 'I'm so mad about Edith. Aren't you?' and thus would be excluded all those other people in all those rooms in Vienna or Dublin or Rome who did not know Edith Broughton; and they would feel the poorer and the more middle-class for it, which would have been the intention of the name-droppers who would then go away satisfied that they had once again asserted their caste. In all this Edith would play her part by being the kind of person it is hard to meet unless you are in her set. And just for a moment on this particular morning, with the sun caressing her eyelids and the children shouting on the distant beach, Edith pondered the ultimate purpose of this endless raising and lowering of barriers.

  There was a terrific thud near her and she opened her eyes to see the awe-inspiring sight of Henry Cumnor stretching out to sunbathe. If anything he looked even larger without his clothes, like a seaside postcard captioned 'Where's my little willy?'

  'What about the others? We can't all go to these wretched people, can we?' He spoke undirected, straight up into the air, so that he should not have the inconvenience of moving more than his lips.

  Caroline shrugged. 'I don't see why not. I said there were lots of us.' She had that curiously English upper-class belief that whatever the occasion, however much people have put themselves out, even when, as now, total strangers extend their hospitality as a duty, still she, Lady Caroline Chase, was doing them a favour. It is impossible for such people to conceive that they have not necessarily honoured a house by entering it. Consequently, because of this sense of having blessed her hosts by her presence, Caroline made no effort whatsoever with anyone outside her own crowd and despite being an intelligent woman could be a crushingly boring guest. Something of which neither she nor the many others of her kind who are just like her have any suspicion. 'We'll ask them when they come down,' she said.

  'How long are they staying?' said Jane, propping herself up on her elbows and reaching for the oil.

  'Who? Peter or the others?'

  'Oh, not darling Peter. "Bob" and "Annette".' Jane spoke their names in inverted commas, distancing herself from them to make it clear to her listeners that she did not consider them as ordinary members of the house-party but rather as strange specimens of an alien culture. This was carefully judged.

  'Tuesday or Wednesday, I think.' Caroline looked over to Eric who nodded and wrinkled his nose. He was quite clear about which team he wished to be on.

  'Crikey,' said Henry. 'Who's in the listening chair this evening?' They all laughed.

  Edith felt an irresistible urge to tear up her membership of the Club. 'Is this Annette you're talking about?' she said in a tone of feigned disbelief. 'How funny you are. I really like her.'

  Henry was unfazed. 'Well, you can sit next to her at dinner. I hope you're ready to discuss her film career ad nauseam.'

  Edith smiled. 'Why? What would you rather talk about? The people you all know in Shropshire?' She lay back with her smile still intact and her eyes closed, relishing the awkward silence like a naughty schoolgirl.

  'I'm not often in Shropshire, actually.' Henry rolled away from her, bloated and breathless, like a beached whale far from the water.

  'I'm going for a swim,' said Charles.

  They lunched late on paella with too much squid in it in an open-air restaurant overlooking the harbour with its bobbing flotilla of yachts and then set off in two cars for the Franks's house, which lay outside the town on the edge of the sea and appeared to be entirely surrounded, on the land-locked frontier at any rate, by a high stone wall, topped with broken glass.

  The gates were not gates but rather iron doors, which swung open automatically when they identified themselves and then clanged shut, only just missing the rear fender of the second vehicle. 'Well, they're obviously not expecting two cars,' said Annette with a laugh.

  Undaunted, Caroline, who was driving the first car with Edith, Annette and Henry, ploughed on through the enormous, empty pleasure gardens. Tantalising glimpses through the trees of Henry Moores and Giacomettis flashed past until rounding a huge clump of rhododendra they came to a fork in the road. One led apparently up to a nineteenth-century castle that was perched on the highest point of the estate, which Edith had assumed was their destination, while the other, incredibly, pointed the way to another house, as large as the first only modern, which had been built at the water's edge. It was too low, with its balconies thrusting out barely higher than the waves, to be seen from the road.

  'Which one do we go to?' said Edith.

  'The bottom one. Mrs Frank likes to be near the sea.'

  'What happens up on the hill?'

  Caroline looked suitably vague. 'I think it's mainly for the grandchildren.'

  'Blimey O'Reilly,' said Annette and Edith noted with interest that no one else would acknowledge the strangeness, the orgiastic luxury that they were witnessing. She was beginning to understand it is a point of honour in that world that one must never be overawed by any display of wealth, no matter how fabulous. To register that riches on any scale are not routine, even mundane, is to risk being 'middle-class' — a sector of society to which many of them spend most of their lives proving to no one in particular that they do not belong. There are exceptions to this rule. It is possible to exclaim, 'How simply lovely!' but it is done in such a way as to show generosity rather than awe on the part of the speaker. Better yet, 'My dear, how grand!' This in a tone to show that the decoration, menu, whatever, is excessive and verging perilously close to vulgar. Lady Uckfield was particularly adept at crushing with smiling enthusiasm. These are hard skills for the novice though and Edith did well not to attempt them.

  A white-coated footman took the party through the gleaming marble rooms out on to the terrace where Mrs Frank, a sun-beaten, robust figure, reclined in a brightly coloured cotton sarong, chunky bracelets bouncing and rattling against her sinewy, masculine arms. She waved them all over towards her.

  Caroline took charge. 'How do you do?' she said lazily. 'I'm Caroline Chase.'

  She started to indicate the other members of the party, deliberately pausing a fraction of a second before the three non-Broughton guests, Bob, Annette and Peter's girl, as if to demonstrate to Mrs Frank that they were not in the first circle and she need not therefore bother with them. Mrs Frank took the signal and welcomed the outsiders with a perceptibly cooler smiling nod than the one she reserved for the principals.

  'You must be the bride,' she said, rising and taking Edith by the arm to lead them back into the house. Edith smelled the strong musk of her scent and watched the leathery creases move around the thin, scarlet-greased mouth. 'How are you enjoying Mallorca?'

  'We only arrived last night. It seems lovely so far.' She smiled back into the glassy, bored eyes of her grinning hostess.
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br />   'You must let us entertain you while you're here. Tell me, how is darling Googie?'

  'She's fine. She and Tigger are in Scotland.' As the words came out, Edith realised that this was the first time she had spoken these ludicrous nicknames out loud. Before her marriage she had privately determined to address her inlaws as Harriet and John, but already the unspoken urgings of intimacy, of club-membership, which rippled through Mrs Frank, had made her break her vow because the truth was that whatever she might say to her friends, she did not want to be the 'foreign' daughter-in-law. She did not want people to sympathise with Lady Uckfield that Charles had not done better. She wanted her mother-in-law to be congratulated on her, Edith's, brilliance, on her taste, on her charm, on her entertaining. And so Edith learned the first lesson of why England has had no revolutions, of what has emasculated so many careers from Edward IV's queen to Ramsay MacDonald. Namely that the way to deal with a troublesome outsider is to let him in, to make him a convert with a convert's zeal and in no time he will be plus Catholique que le Pape. Learning this lesson did not reduce Edith's resentment of the forces that taught it to her but she had another heady moment of realising she was now a member of the Gang. It made her feel powerful. She turned and smiled at Charles.

  A tour of the sculptures had been planned and the party set off. As they came out of the front door they were approached by a young, rather stringy woman, a reduced, ferret-sized version of Mrs Frank. She had obviously just been playing tennis and carried a slightly oversized racket in front of her, covering her face, half shield, half fan. Their hostess introduced her as her niece, Tina. Unlike her aunt the girl was painfully shy. She fell into step with them as she was quite clearly commanded to do but mutely, only muttering miserable, whispered answers if she was directly addressed.

  They passed a swimming pool, cut into a small cliff above the sea, and Edith heard Annette asking about the terracotta vases that surrounded it, apparently continually filling it with faintly steaming water.

  'They are Roman,' said Tina almost inaudibly. 'My uncle had them brought up from a wreck off the coast near here.'

  'And now they're plumbed in?'

  'What is "plumbed in" excuse me?'

  Charles cut off Annette rather irritably. 'She means that now they're used to feed the pool.'

  'Yes. With sea water.'

  'Sea water? Warmed sea water?'

  Tina nodded. 'It's much better for you, no? We have another pool with clear water but I think this is good, no?'

  Annette was silent for a while. She was clearly beginning to agree with the others — that she was out of her depth. The group had stopped on a terrace dripping with bougainvillea where a large male torso by Rodin stood on a marble plinth. They murmured and admired. Mrs Frank turned to Caroline and started to enquire about various mutual friends. She appeared to resent the fact that she had not been asked to Charles's wedding, as many of her queries ended by an assumption that 'they must have been at the reception', and time and again Caroline was forced to admit that they had been. The names rippled out as they climbed from terrace to terrace, against the deep azure blue of the Mediterranean sky. Had they seen the Esterhazys?

  the Polignacs? the Devonshires? the Metternichs? the Frescobaldis? Names torn from history books, names that Edith knew from studies of Philip II of Spain, or the Risorgimento, or the French Revolution, or the Congress of Vienna. And yet here they were, stripped of any real significance. They had simply become court cards, rich court cards, in the game of Name Exchange. These were high stakes indeed and Edith noticed with some amusement that Jane Cumnor and Eric had dropped back with Tina, no doubt anxious to avoid the left-out feeling that it pleased them to inflict on others. Caroline and Charles were unfazed. It was clear that whatever the extent of the Frank millions they could match name for name and top them too.

  And so the afternoon passed in a litany of duchesses intoned against a background of art enshrined by money. An hour and three quarters after setting out they were back at the modern palace-by-the-sea.

  On the terrace a tea had been set out 'English-style', that is to say 'American-hotel-style' and three white-coated footmen waited to serve it. Mrs Frank led them to their chairs. Peter's girl, Bob and Annette were thoroughly squashed by this time and secretly longing to regain the villa and turn this flattening experience into a funny story. Eric brought up the rear, red-faced with his exertions and clearly irritated that his social ignorance had excluded him from the conversation that had revolved around his wife for most of the afternoon. He dumped down onto a chaise next to Edith and seized a proffered cup.

  Mrs Frank turned her attention back to the bride. 'Tell me, was Hilary Weston at the wedding? Someone said she was stuck in Canada.'

  Eric looked up with a snort. 'No good asking Edith, is it, old girl? You'll have to wait until she's done a bit more training.'

  Edith ignored him. By some merciful providence it so happened that she had spoken to Mrs Weston for quite a time at the reception. She thanked her patron saint as she spoke chattily across Eric making no reference to him. 'No, she was there.

  Galen was in Florida and couldn't get back. I suppose that's what they were thinking of.'

  Mrs Frank nodded, casting a slightly strange look at Eric. 'She does so much! I feel like a sloth when I think of her.' She moved on. Edith had passed.

  Eric lay back and looked at her: 'Well done. Ten out of ten.'

  She stared back at him, holding every inch of gained ground. 'Do you know Hilary?'

  'I know her as well as you do,' said Eric, and stood up to join Caroline at the other end of the terrace. This interchange was oddly refreshing to Edith because it established beyond any doubt that Eric was her enemy in the family circle. There was no pretence necessary any longer and, best of all, in their first round, Edith had won.

  She was singing in the shower when Charles came in to change for dinner later that evening. He smiled. 'You seem very happy. Did you enjoy yourself today? What a collection! What a place!' Even in these circles amazement is not forbidden in private between consenting adults and Charles clearly felt he had been unimpressed for long enough.

  'I'll say. And yes, I am happy.' She turned off the tap and kissed him, standing there wet and naked.

  The next few minutes, indeed the rest of the evening, were as agreeable as any she had known with Charles and it was with a sense of victory and well-being that she climbed into bed that night.

  Charles turned to her. 'I gather the Franks want to give us a dinner before we go.'

  She pulled a slight face. 'Oh dear. I suppose we have to?'

  'Come on, darling,' said Charles. 'It's good of them and they're not that bad.'

  'The old girl's not that bad but the niece is a nightmare.'

  He laughed. 'I thought she was rather sweet. We must be kind.'

  Edith propped herself up on her elbows beside him. 'Why is it that when someone like Annette is talkative and funny you all cold-shoulder her and wrinkle your noses behind her back and yet with Tina Frank, who must be the most boring and inconsequential young woman I have ever met, you make excuses and pretend that she's a dear?'

  'I don't know what you mean.'

  'Yes, you do, Charles.' She felt oddly confident, almost breezy. For the first time since her marriage she began to sense that she really was Lady Broughton. She had managed things well and according to the ancient tradition she was 'entitled to her own opinions'. She continued, smilingly severe. 'You know very well. And I'll tell you the answer. Annette does not know the people we know and Tina does and Tina has a hundred million besides. I don't know, darling, doesn't it ever make you wonder? Just a bit?' Edith was feeling her oats. She smiled at her husband quizzically, shaking her head slightly, imagining how charming her hair must look, rippling against her neck.

  Charles stared at her. 'Who are all these people that you and Tina Frank know?' he said sourly and turned out the light.

  PART TWO

  Forte-Piano

&n
bsp; NINE

  I did not see a great deal of Edith in the months after she had returned from her honeymoon although they were in London from time to time. She did not apparently care for her mother-in-law's lair in Cadogan Square but they used Charles's little flat in Eaton Place and occasionally they would come up for a party or a show. I ran into them at a couple of dinners and I was asked for a drink with a few others in their tiny second-floor sitting room one day in October but there wasn't much of an opportunity for talk. Edith looked happy enough and had already begun to acquire that patina of the privileged, the faint, touch-me-not aura of luxe that marks such people apart from us mortals, and I was amused to trace the beginnings of an hauteur starting to obliterate the lucky girl from Fulham. I didn't see them at all in the build-up to Christmas and I was just beginning to feel myself drifting out of their circle when I received a letter tucked into a card, not from Edith but from Charles, asking me for a day's shooting in January. It was to be a Friday so I was asked for dinner and the night on the Thursday and, since nothing further was specified, I was presumably intended to vanish after the shoot to make way for the arrival of Saturday's guests. The lateness of the invitation meant that someone had chucked, but it was no less attractive for that and I knew (for once) that I was going to be free on the date in question. I had already been booked to be villain-of-the-week in one of those endless boy-and-girl-detective series, which was due to start five days after the date proposed so I wrote back accepting and received, almost by return, directions by road or rail. These told me which train to be on if that was how I would be travelling or alternatively to arrive at the house at about six o'clock.