Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  She sat before the little dressing table in their dreary bedroom, frowning with concentration as she studied her reflection. It did seem rather naff really. Edith was hating her black celebrity. Every time some 'friend' rang her with the news that yet another journalist had taken a swipe at her ('I thought I ought to tell you, darling, before you read it unawares,' the voice would gloat), her heart would sink anew. She wanted fame in a way but fame that brought status and conferred glamour, not this awful washing of dirty linen. She even caught herself feeling sorry for her parents-in-law when she thought of the papers that were probably being edited by Charles or the servants before the Uckfields could set eyes on them. Poor Charles… how was he coping with it all, poor dear? And these frightful parties that Simon kept wanting to take her to. Could it be so necessary to keep chatting up these weird representatives from another planet? She had been too long a Broughton to be able to throw off (easily anyway) the notion that Simon's crowd was a sort of joke — useful to enliven a party but not quite right for every day.

  'Why?' she said.

  He watched her painting her face with care and artistry. He knew what she was thinking but he didn't much care. If she wanted to go back among her old world rather than spend all their time in his, well, that was fine so far as he was concerned.

  In fact, he was becoming the teeniest bit impatient to get started on some of her gang. She had introduced him to a few Fulham Sloanes, but that wasn't what he had in mind as her contribution at all. Where she dreamed of shepherding him past the Press into his trailer on the Universal lot, he saw himself in tweeds, a gun on his arm, a welcome guest at other houses in the Broughton mould where he would flirt with other great ladies and be taken up by other great families. All of this his alliance with Edith would bring about. He did not grasp, perhaps because she did not yet either, that the great world was preparing to shut its doors on little Edith. From now on she would be condemned to the company of a few divorced wives of younger sons, eking out their alimony selling ugly jewellery or writing gossip columns for unread giveaway magazines.

  She put down her mascara. 'Who is this woman tonight, anyway?'

  'Fiona Grey.'

  'Never heard of her. Have I met her?'

  'No, I don't think so but you do know her. She was the girl in the film about the confidence trickster. When he fell off the train. On television last week. Michael Redgrave was the policeman.'

  'Never heard of him, either.' Simon winced. 'She must be a thousand.'

  'She's about seventy.' Actually Simon was very flattered to have been invited by Miss Grey. For this was the other side of his schizophrenic ambition. While part of him wanted Edith to get him into the world of the 'nobs', the rest of him, in almost direct contradiction, longed to be taken seriously as an actor, by the kind of actors that other actors take seriously, and just such a one was Fiona Grey. She had played Juliet opposite Gielgud in her youth and Lady Teazle opposite Olivier. Now, when she appeared on television it was usually some sort of an event — a series directed by Peter Hall or written by Melvyn Bragg — and she was invariably mentioned lovingly in English stars' autobiographies.

  Theatre folk are much given to making claims for the classlessness of their world but the truth is that there is a rigidly structured class system within the business. It is only classless in the sense that this system is based on different values to that of the outside world. Birth may mean nothing but success is all. And not just success but the right kind of success. Simon Russell was acutely aware that, even when he had tasted his little helping of fame, he had never come close to doing work that was 'rated' by his fellow members of Equity and, secretly, it pained him.

  When actors tell television interviewers that they don't mind what the critics say so long as the public enjoys what they do, they are lying. Few actors care anything for the public's opinion when set against the verdict of the critics and their peers. To be valued and given status behind the proscenium arch is their goal. If it can be accompanied by public adulation, fame and money — so much the better. At the core of the business is a clique whose pre-eminence in 'correct' work is unassailable, and Simon had ever longed to be included in it. The stars and directors, the writers and designers who count among this number patronise all but the most tumultuous public stardom. Their names may be linked to many causes, their interview manner and (certainly) their clothes may seem like a rejection of distinction, but the fact remains they form an elite whose exclusivity rivals that of the noblesse d'épée at the court of Versailles. Simon ached to be a member of this golden group who always get good reviews from Time Out and are never off the list at BAFTA.

  His dreams were not realistic. On this particular evening, for example, he'd only been invited because he was in the papers.

  Despite their high-sounding principles, these players share one characteristic with their Hollywood brethren: they love to be with famous people. If they lunch with Labour politicians, they like them to be front bench Labour politicians, if they march in a cause, they like to march next to Ian McKellen or Anita Roddick, not some obscure enthusiast from Harlow. But if Miss Grey had taken Simon up because he was In The News, she was incurious about his talent.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  The party was in a house in Hampstead, which seemed to Edith to have taken about a year to get to and which, from the street anyway, did not appear to be worth the effort. Inside, every trace of the labourer, whose domestic arrangements it was designed to house in the 1890s, had been swept away in a sea of gleaming wooden floors and concealed lighting. There were knots of earnest discussion in the large living room, which opened off the hall, but the loudest noise was, inevitably, coming from the kitchen downstairs. Adela and I were standing by the stove, surrounded by bowls of pulses and pasta interlarded with strange creatures from the deep, when they came in. I felt Adela nudge me with her elbow as she went on talking animatedly to the unemployed designer we had got stuck with.

  Our hostess advanced to Simon and kissed him, staring at Edith throughout. 'Now first you must have a drink and then you must let me introduce you. Do you know David Samson?' She indicated a famous comedy star who had planted himself at her elbow almost as soon as the couple had appeared. Edith smiled and took his hand only to find that hers had been raised to his hoary lips.

  'Lady Broughton.' His fruity and familiar tones rolled the name round his tongue, savouring its flavour. He spoke loudly enough for bystanders to turn in curiosity and connect Simon and Edith with the stories they had read or vaguely heard of.

  There was a faint buzz of awareness. Edith received Samson's adulation coldly, I thought, with a murmured, 'Edith. Please.'

  Samson was not to be put off. He drew her arm through his and prepared to wheel her about the room. He turned to an inquisitive group nearby, booming out, 'Do you know the Countess of Broughton?'

  Edith, needless to say, was in hell.

  I would have rescued her earlier but Adela restrained me. I wonder if she didn't take a malicious pleasure in seeing Edith exhibited like a captive in a Roman Triumph. Adela had never endangered her footing in the old camp when she ventured into this new one and I suppose it was hard for her not to feel a tremor of victory. Simon came up to us, beaming. There are some who shudder at the thought of being an 'item' in the news. There are, conversely, others who cannot live without it. Simon was on the latter team. As the half-curious eyes followed him about the room, he was in his element. We broke away, leaving Adela to work over a rather grim-faced casting director on my behalf.

  'How are you getting on?' I asked.

  'Fine,' said Simon. 'Great.'

  'So what happens next?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, divorce, marriage, statements to the press?'

  Simon raised his hands and eyebrows. 'Woah!' he cried with a spangled laugh. 'You sound like my mother.' It is easy to forget that even people like Simon have mothers. Some decent widow of a civil servant sitting in a flat in Leatherhead wonderin
g what on earth was going on. He made me rather cross.

  'You do know that you've got in very deep here? You do see that a lot of people are very upset about all this?'

  He stroked my cheek. 'Oh well,' he said.

  Of course, Adela enjoyed the whole evening hugely. Quite as much as Edith detested it, paraded round the rooms, as she was, like a sacred cow. Adela watched her struggling for small talk with these people who were so remarkably like ordinary people — the very people, in fact, that Edith had spent her twenties trying to escape from forever. The irony of all this was that, for all her hatred of the world of the Name Exchange, Edith had grown used to the comforting snugness of its limited membership. Suddenly she was back in open country where nobody seemed to know anyone she'd ever met. She felt something akin to panic. What did one talk about to people with whom one had no interest and no acquaintance in common?

  After her time in Broughtonland, she had forgotten.

  'Well, I hope she's enjoying herself.' Adela snuggled down into her coat as we started the long trek south.

  'Do you?'

  'Well, really! What has she done? And to leave without producing a child! So when the door shuts it's shut for ever. What a fool!'

  I was still capable of being shocked by my wife's intense worldliness that lived so happily alongside her great, and I knew quite genuine, kindness.

  'Isn't it better that there aren't any children?'

  'Better for whom? Better for Charles and Googie. Not for her. To produce the heir is the only effective second act for a first wife. Think of Consuelo Vanderbilt's triumph when she returned to hated Blenheim as the mother of the new duke.

  There'll be none of that for little Edith.' She sighed wearily. 'As for him!'

  'I thought you rather liked him.'

  'He's pleasant enough in his silly, blond way but hardly the craft to be entrusted with the cargo of life's happiness. What is she thinking of?'

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  Similar thoughts were flickering somewhere at the back of Edith's brain at just that moment as they too sped back towards what she regarded as Civilisation. She was conscious of a kind of dull disappointment deep in her vitals. She had just been to another 'show business party' and as the phrase echoed through her brain she remembered the image it used to conjure up: vivid actresses, over made-up beauties in sequinned haute couture, intense, Jewish writers lecturing groups in the corners of the room, singers helping out a drunken pianist and, all the time, glassy laughter slashing the air… In fact, when she thought about it, she realised that the whole scene had been taken, more or less unchewed, from All About Eve. It seemed to have so little to do with this pack of suburbanites, eating health food and talking about their holidays in Greece.

  Nor did she care for their fascination with her as the envoy of a different, and obviously disapproved of, world. She was not indifferent to the glamour of the stage but she had started to see that the quality of glamour as such was no longer rated by the fashionable thespians themselves. To make matters worse, she felt that she had entered this strange arena not as a star (which privately she had counted on) but as a freak.

  'What a ghastly bunch! Who were those people?'

  Simon never answered these questions, which were in truth more or less rhetorical. They both knew that what Edith was pointing out was that she found theatre folk 'common', though she would never quite say it. Simon, partly because he was not interested in whether they were common or not because it wasn't relevant, and partly because he suspected (deep in his heart) that by her standards he was pretty common himself, never rose to this one. 'I had a good time,' he said.

  'You didn't have some frightful man with a voice like a bowl of fruit salad slobbering over your hand all evening. Are all your parties going to be like that?'

  'Are all your parties going to consist of six Sloane Rangers and someone who lost money in Lloyd's? Because, if so, I'll take the fruit salad. Any day of the week.'

  They drove home in silence.

  SIXTEEN

  It happened that I was in the Fulham Road late one afternoon running various errands and Adela had asked me to look in on Colefax and Fowler to collect some braid she had ordered a few weeks before. Normally I would have refused the commission since at that time (unlike today) all the assistants there seemed to have taken a degree in Higher Rudeness, but she insisted and in fact I was dealt with by a pleasant enough woman. Even though, as Adela had expected, the order had still not arrived, she did seem quite sorry about it.

  At any rate, I was just receiving my token apology together with the standard assurances that it would be in next week when I glanced back towards the street and there, leafing idly through the racks of samples, was Edith's mother. I had last seen Mrs Lavery almost exactly two years before, around the time of the festivities of the wedding. It moved me now to think of that victorious figure, trembling with satisfied ambition in the Red Saloon at Broughton, as I looked at this lost and broken soul. She stared glassily at the huge flapping areas of pattern as they waved past her face but she saw nothing. Nothing, that is, except the ruin of all her dreams, which clearly played endlessly like a cursed tableau in her brain.

  'Hello, Mrs Lavery,' I said.

  She turned to me, gathered the knowledge of who I was from some distant mental shelf and nodded a greeting. 'Hello,' she answered in a hollow, frigid tone.

  I learned later that she blamed me for introducing Simon to the Broughton family. With some justice, I suppose. It is customary nowadays for people to shrug off guilt in this sort of thing by saying 'it would have happened anyway' but I am not at all convinced by this argument. Most of our lives are not the fulfilling of some inexorable design laid down at birth but rather the sum total of a series of random events. If Edith had never met Simon — or not met him until after she'd had a child

  — I think it quite unlikely that the whole thing would have happened. However, she had met him. And it did happen. And, when all is said and done, I had introduced them.

  'Have you seen anything of Edith lately?' I said. The sense of her daughter's Banquo-like presence in the room, of her daughter's story, was making us both uncomfortable. It seemed easier to normalise the situation by talking about it.

  'Not very much, no.' She shook her head. 'But she…' she hesitated, 'they are coming to dinner tonight. I dare say I shall catch up then.'

  I nodded. 'Well, give her my love.'

  But Mrs Lavery was not quite prepared to let me go. 'You know him, I gather. This new fellow.'

  'Simon? Yes, I know him. Not very well but we were in a film together. Down at Broughton. That's how they met.'

  'Yes.' She stared at the floor for a moment. 'And is he nice?'

  I was rather touched at this. Mrs Lavery was trying to force herself to be a Good Mother and to concentrate on the timeless values in assessing her daughter's new beau when we both knew that if Simon had been the nicest man in Europe he could never have repaid what had been lost with Charles. 'Very nice,' I said. 'In his way.'

  'I don't suppose you've seen much of Charles? Since all the — business happened?'

  'I have, in fact. I had lunch with him the other day.'

  Mrs Lavery was surprised. I suppose in her romantic imaginings of her son-in-law's world she had erected much fiercer divisions than in fact exist. Also my admission gave the impression that I might not have encouraged Edith in her folly. She softened noticeably. By this time she had convinced herself, of course, that her affection for Charles was genuine and based entirely on his qualities as a man. It wasn't but I don't know that it was any the less felt for that. 'How is he? I'd love to see him but…' She trailed off miserably.

  'Oh, you know. I'm sure he'd love to see you,' I lied. 'He's still pretty cast down.'

  'Well, he would be.' She sighed wearily and without hope. 'I'd better get going. They're coming at eight and I haven't done a thing.'

  And she left the shop, her shoulders stooping as she pulled at the heavy door. When I
had last seen her she had resembled a character from some frothy Coward comedy. Now she looked like Mother Courage.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  Simon was oddly nervous as they turned right off the King's Road down the Vale towards Elm Park Gardens. He'd been fiddling with his tie every time they stopped at a light and as they drew closer, he started picking at his nails. Edith could feel herself tensing with irritation. She couldn't decide if he was apprehensive because he thought her parents were much grander than they in fact were — or if he was nervous of his role as a Wrecker of Marital Bliss. Either way she just wished he'd relax, as the evening promised to be quite sticky enough as it was.

  'What is the matter with you?'

  Simon just smiled and shook his head. He himself was not exactly clear as to why he had such butterflies although it was true he did think that the Laverys were smarter than they were. He had a very unclear idea of the nuances of London Society and, since he had no knowledge of the Inner Circle whatever, he was unaware of the extent to which Edith had been an outsider at the time of her marriage. Since he still thought of his new mistress as fearfully smart he imagined her background was correspondingly impressive. But that was not actually the source of his unease on this particular evening. Probably it was the more ordinary complaint that this formalisation of their relationship, this presentation to the parents, seemed to set some sort of seal of finality on what had originally been nothing more than a flirtation. He had not really, even now, faced that he was heading into the realms of 'divorce' and 'division of property' and 'maintenance' and 'custody' and all sorts of other depressing words and phrases and yet that is what suddenly seemed to loom ahead. He supposed that in some perhaps roundabout way Mr Lavery was going to ask him about his 'intentions' and it struck him that he didn't really have any intentions — not absolutely fixed ones anyway. But then he glanced across at Edith and she did look very lovely when he thought about it and he was aware of how much prettier her profile was than Deirdre's, who had always looked just a little gormless from sideways on and he thought that after all he could do worse. And thus mollified and heartened he got out of the car.