Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  The food was predictably pretentious, with bonfires going at practically every table. Inadequate portions arranged like cocktail hats followed each other in blank, tasteless succession, fussed over by suspiciously French waiters. The maître d'

  would not, by this time, leave us alone and kept dashing up for a review of the current course until Simon finally suggested he might like to take a seat to save himself the bother. Of course we all laughed and of course he was never seen again. In truth the dinner itself was the least awful part of the evening because of Simon. He certainly was on very funny form that night. He could match Annette's stories without challenging her and the pair of them did keep things going. Even Lady Uckfield gave in to the prevailing mood and chuckled away as she toyed with her unsatisfactory and costly dishes.

  Charles, on the other hand, was more or less in hell the entire time. He was not quick enough to get the point of most of the anecdotes, let alone tell his own. These were not his kind of people and unusually for him (for he seldom risked the possibility) he was outnumbered. Unlike his father he was not a flirt, unlike his mother he had very little sense of humour.

  Caroline tried to rescue him once or twice but she was in a dark mood of her own and in the end it was Adela who got him onto the business of improving the shoot at Feltham. He had apparently only restarted it three years before after a long gap and the topic released some of the pent-up flow within him, but even this had a limited success for when Simon was telling a story about some production he'd been in where the stage manager had filled the bath with boiling instead of cold water, he paused for the punch line and into the silence came Charles's voice: 'The great thing is to leave a wide enough headland of kale, which of course some of the farmers are reluctant to do…'

  Simon laughed. 'Well, obviously Charles is fascinated,' he said. He meant it pleasantly enough, I think, and all would probably have passed on if Edith had not spoken up at that moment: 'Oh, Charles for God's sake, shut up about your bloody shoot.'

  I imagine she thought that in some way this would be a joke too and we would all smile but it came out wrong. Her voice was harsh and I suppose unloving in a way that, particularly in the presence of Charles's parents as we were, made a strange and embarrassing tremor at the table. I saw Annette catch Bob's eye as I felt Adela nudge my foot.

  Charles looked up, hurt rather than angry, like a puppy who has been smacked for some other dog's pee. 'Am I being very boring?' he said.

  There was a faint pause and then Eric, either misguidedly thinking to be amusing or, more probably in his case, just in order to be unkind, said, 'Yes, you are. Better have some more to drink.' He started to pour wine into Charles's glass but Charles shook his head.

  'Actually, I don't know why but I'm terribly tired.' He turned his harassed eyes to Bob. 'Would you forgive me if I skipped the coffee and headed on home?'

  Bob knew by now, long before he had reached for his plastic, that the evening had been the most crashing flop and so he shook his head merrily. 'Of course not! You go. We'll be fine.'

  Charles smiled wanly and stood up. 'Well then, I think I will be off if I may. We've lots of cars, haven't we? Will you be all right, darling?'

  Now it was perfectly plain to everyone present that Edith ought to have jumped to her feet, said that she, too, was tired and left with her husband. Normally this is exactly what she would have done but this evening some kind of devilry had got into her. Or maybe it was simple lust. At any rate, she neither moved nor spoke and it was Simon's voice that broke the silence:

  'Don't worry about Edith. I'll bring her home.'

  Charles looked at him and for a second they were what the Americans call 'eyeballing' each other. It might seem that Charles, rich and titled as he was, and really not that bad-looking in his 1930s-ish way, held all the aces, which of course in the long view he did, but Simon Russell, feeling successful and busy and as handsome as a man can be, bristled or rather shone with charismatic confidence that night. To all the onlookers at the table Charles paled before him and I at least felt a pang of real pity for this man who had everything. Obviously, looking back, I know that Simon had the confidence of a man in love whose love is returned and Charles conversely had the fear of a man facing ruin but even without that knowledge the figure of Russell, clad in his waisted blue velvet coat, eyes and hair aglow, looked like the embodiment of some unconquerable force in a mythological painting. I say this that one may perhaps be less hard and more forgiving of Edith. Having taken in the tableau for a moment, it was Lady Uckfield who spoke.

  'That's very kind of you, Mr Russell. Are you sure?' She broke the mood further by rising and forcing the company to their feet. 'Am I leading the ladies out? Or do we all go through together, here?'

  Even in this supreme moment of face-saving she could not resist pointing up the fact that she thought this place quite extraordinary and so, presumably, not governed by the normal rules of her existence. I have said before that I came to admire Lady Uckfield a good deal and this was one of the moments that underpinned my view of her. She had witnessed her son made a fool of, she had seen him dismissed by his wife, she was well aware of the danger in the air from Simon's offer and yet she would not have revealed any of these things for worlds. She would have cut out her tongue rather than give anyone the impression that she thought it a bad idea for Edith to travel home alone in the dark with Simon. And yet she would have given one hundred thousand pounds then and there to have Russell removed from her sight for ever. If Edith had only had her mother-in-law's control, there would have been no scandal of any kind, then or later.

  Back in the horrible 'withdrawing room' Lady Uckfield beckoned to me to sit beside her. If she felt uneasy, she did not betray it with the slightest flicker. 'You must let me congratulate you on your choice.'

  'You're pleased for me, then.'

  'Well, as your friend I'm pleased but as a hostess I'm furious.' I smiled because she spoke the truth. She would forgive me the inconvenience of ceasing to be a single man but only because of the 'rightness' of the thing. 'When will you be married?' I explained that while I had every reason to believe I would be successful, it was not all quite settled yet. I imagined it would be five or six months. 'And what about children? Have you thought about that? I'm an old woman so I can ask.'

  I shrugged. 'I don't know really. We both want them but I can't help feeling that the timing is rather up to the wife, isn't it?

  After all, my bit's rather easy.'

  Lady Uckfield laughed. 'It certainly is. But don't wait too long. I hope Charles and Edith don't.' She looked me in the eye as she said this because of course we both knew that they had already waited too long. If Edith was now fretting over some golden head in the nursery or indeed if she was simply big with child, none of the threatened nightmare would be happening. 'I quite agree,' I said.

  THIRTEEN

  I had wondered, when Simon made his offer to escort Edith home, whether his plot would be foiled by finding that he had to take various others with them, but as soon as I emerged from the house with Adela I saw that this would not be the case: the whole back seat of his car was stuffed with a pair of chairs and what looked like an assortment of gardening tools. By my side I could feel Lady Uckfield taking in the same fact. My guess is that she had intended to join her daughter-in-law in the shabby Cortina, but, if so, it was not to be. I offered her and Lord Uckfield a place in Adela's Mini and, with a glance at Eric, who had brought some sort of Tonka Toy/Range Rover, they accepted. Lady Uckfield and I squeezed into the back seat, leaving Lord Uckfield and Adela in front. Eric gestured to them impatiently but in her sublime way Lady Uckfield affected not to notice. We drove off, leaving Bob and Annette to the tender mercies of Eric's red-faced driving.

  'I hope he isn't stopped,' said Lord Uckfield.

  Lady Uckfield made a slight moue with her mouth. 'Oh well,' she said.

  We travelled in silence for a bit, all, I imagine, thinking of Simon and Edith whose car was nowhere in sigh
t.

  Lady Uckfield spoke again. 'Aren't those places too extraordinary? Who do you think goes to them?'

  'Isn't it these whad'y'a call "yuppies"?' Lord Uckfield spoke in inverted commas, pleased to be so up to the minute.

  'Well, it can't only be yuppies. Are there enough of them? There can't be that many round here. Americans too, I suppose.

  So sad, really.'

  'Oh, I don't know,' said Adela. 'I'd rather see them as hotels than council offices or pulled down altogether.'

  'I suppose so.' Lady Uckfield nodded doubtfully. In truth, she'd rather have seen them filled with the same well-mannered, rich people who'd lived in all these houses a hundred years ago. Even the ones whom, like the de Marneys, she disliked. For her there was no merit in the changes the twentieth century had wrought. Time had blurred her memory so that like the old recalling only the sunny days of childhood, she could think of nothing harsh or mean in the England of her beginnings. I found her views interesting. Even if her vision of the past was not quite as inaccurate or outlandish as Jeremy Paxman would have it, still Lady Uckfield's beliefs were rare by the closing years of the twentieth century. She had that absolute faith in the judgement of her own kind, seldom seen since 1914. No doubt it was common enough before then, which must have made Edwardian society such a philosophically relaxing place to be. If one were an aristocrat.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  Simon made a show of fuss in getting out his car keys so that the other Broughton cars had all pulled away as he started the motor. He turned to look at Edith. She hugged her coat around her and leaned back against the window. They were two games players, with equal hands, and now at last they were alone with intent. 'With intent' because something in the nature of Edith's rudeness to Charles, something in the brashness of Simon's offer of a lift, had signalled to both of them that the fun was about to begin. Looking at Simon's roguish smile, the slightly crooked crease by the side of his mouth where his beard was beginning to push through, Edith felt a tremor of sexual excitement shiver through her body. She was startled by the immediacy of her own lust. She had been with men who had attracted her, she remembered enjoying making love with George and there had been a time, admittedly mostly before her marriage, when she had relished the thought of being alone with Charles, but she was sharply aware that this was something rather different. Looking into Simon's dark blue eyes, she realised she simply and absolutely wanted to be naked with him. She wanted to feel his hard, nude body against and inside hers. She felt hot and faintly uncomfortable. The terrifying, exhilarating thrill of her principles deserting her rippled through her stomach.

  'Hadn't we better get going?' she said.

  Simon was watching her carefully. Her blonde hair fell over her grey-blue eyes and she pushed it out of the way with a slightly petulant gesture. Her lips had not shut again after she spoke but stayed moist and parted with her white teeth just visible in the darkness. He too was excited but not in quite the same way as she. He had made love to a good many pretty women in his time and it was not the thought of the sexual delights to come that aroused him. It was the certain and confirmed knowledge of her attraction to him.

  He was intensely aware of his own beauty. What is more he respected and enjoyed it as he sensed, quite rightly, that it was the core of his power. It was this simple truth that was at the epicentre of his flirtatious charm. From everyone, friend or foe, man or woman, he needed to eke out some response to his own physical desirability. Only then, in the warm glow of these aliens' admiration could he relax and be happy. The more threatening the situation, the more necessary it became to be wanted and wanted physically. He spent his life throwing out smouldering looks, laughing mysteriously, winking and twinkling at strangers solely in order to reassure himself that he was in control. Needless to say, he left behind a bewildered trail of wounded, who had responded for weeks or even months to clear signs of sexual and romantic interest only to find, once they were captive, that he had no more need of their love than if they had been trees in the field.

  He did not trouble himself much over his search for constant reassurance. He simply expected his looks to break down all barriers, even if he did glimpse dimly that this is not the behaviour of a securely-based personality. In a way, this lack of faith in his other qualities meant that his vanity was closely entwined with a kind of modesty. He had no real respect for his own intellect, and socially, for all his bravado, he knew he could be clumsily inept. Given these reasons, it was probably inevitable that his bourgeois yearnings coupled to his compulsion to inflame desire should have led him to Edith. The irony being that she saw in him some kind of escape from the Broughton life, while he, conversely, saw her as the entree to it. At this stage of the proceedings however these truths were concealed from them both. They were, in short, enraptured with each other.

  Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love', is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. And yet as we all know, it is a madness that, however ferocious, seldom, if ever, lasts. Nor, contrary to the popular teaching on the subject, does lust usually give way to a 'deeper and more meaningful love'. There are exceptions of course. Some spouses

  'love' forever. But, as a rule, if the couple is truly well matched, it gives way to a warm and interdependent friendship enriched with physical attraction. Should they be ill-assorted it simply fades into boredom or, if they have the misfortune to be married in the interim, dull hatred. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is in the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel passion slip away. How many of us, re-meeting objects of desire who once burned a scar through seasons and even years, whose voices on the telephone could start up flights of butterflies, whose slightest expression could set off a peal of tremulous sexual bells in our vitals, search our inner selves in vain for the least attraction to the face before us? How many of us, having cried bitter, rancid tears over a failed love, are actually disappointed when we discover, seeing the adored one again, that all trace of their power over us is gone? How often one has resisted the freedom-giving knowledge that they have actually begun to irritate us as that seems like the worst kind of disloyalty to our own dreams. No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all. It was not that Edith really saw Simon as any solid part of her future life, entranced as she was. But she had long forgotten her early irritation with his flirtatious verbosity and now she loved to listen to his trials, to his hopes, to his dreams — as much as anything because she loved watching the way his mouth moved — and then, wonderful looking as he was, he made her feel so warm and so wanted. She liked physically to be near him, to let his arm brush her sleeve, his hand graze hers, but she thought no further than that. Or had not up to this moment. Unfortunately for her, he had come into her life at a time of wretched ennui. Before her marriage, yawning over her estate agent's telephone, she had dreamed of all the variety that her new life would bring her but she had not allowed for the fact that within months that new life would have acquired a sameness all its own. And so she was bored and, having expected nothing but excitement in the fulfilment of her social pretensions, she thought boredom more terrible than it is.

  Slowly but inexorably she had allowed her residual affection for Charles to be driven out by his inability to interest her.

  Although, somewhere in her brain, Edith was aware that she need not have. If, like her mother-in-law before her, she had early on faced and dealt with the limitations of her husband then there could have been fondness between them. If she had ceased to look to him for her amusement, then she might have relied on him only for those things he could have given her: loyalty, security, even love in his unimaginative way. But, just as she had never really faced within herself that she had deliberately married a man she did not love for his position, so she could not now accept th
e responsibility for the fact that she was living with a man who was duller and stupider than she. It seemed to Edith to be Charles's fault that her life was so dreary, it was Charles's fault that they did not have a vivid round in London, it was Charles's fault that she dreaded their times together more than the hours she spent alone. Added to which she had already slid into that dangerous option, open only to those with high-profile, 'public' lives, of playing the part of the happy and gracious wife to an adoring crowd, which must always serve to throw the frigid inertia of her life at home into sharp relief. As popular as she was with the villagers, with her charities, with the estate workers, she had even begun to think that this happy and elegant woman she saw reflected in their eyes (and in the local press) was some kind of real truth and that it must be Charles's fault that he did not respond to her as her adoring, provincial fans did.

  Not that she had any substantial taste for danger. She had accepted Simon's offer of a ride home as much to irritate her mother-in-law as anything else. She was, in fact, surprised if anything at the strength of her physical attraction to him when they found themselves, as they now did for the first time, alone and in the dark. But what took her even more unawares was an aerated sense of the raising of her spirits and with it that heady flavour of unexplored potential. This, she suddenly knew in a blinding flash of revelation, was the very thing she had most missed since her marriage. For months now there had seemed to be no open-endedness about her existence. All the decisions had been taken and must now be lived with. And yet here she was, looking at the corduroy of Simon's trousers stretched over the muscles of his thigh, and sensing a delicious awareness that there were still unplanned-for possibilities between her and death.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  The Uckfields asked us in for a drink when we arrived at Broughton. I think they might have preferred us just to head for home but we accepted, partly out of politeness but also from that ghoulish sense that we all feel when we suspect an evening is not yet quite over. We were (or rather I was) still curious as to whether Charles really had gone to bed, how long it would take Simon and Edith to get home, how Lady Uckfield would behave — any number, in fact, of the different aspects of the case still to be revealed.