Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  She nodded. 'Googie sent him. He and Adela were down in Sussex last weekend. They went over to Broughton and of course Googie dragged him off to her lair. The meeting was her idea.'

  'And?'

  'They want to hurry the divorce.' She paused, sensing his recoil. 'Googie wants to involve you.'

  'Jesus!' Simon didn't know what to think. Part of him revelled in it. Visions of more picture spreads on page three in the Daily Mail flickered through his brain but with them came trailing streamers of a distant panic. He felt as if he was hurtling down some tube, weightless and powerless, into the unknown. 'Is she serious?'

  'I think so but you can calm down. They're wrong. I'm fairly sure no one has to be cited any more. The point is they want to get on with it.'

  'What did you say?'

  Edith studied the pretty boy before her. He had abandoned his customary flirtatious, winking manner and, although he didn't realise, he looked the better for it. A little seriousness added charm to his bright blue eyes and the careless locks of shining hair that fell forward to veil them. 'I said I had to think about it.'

  'Can you stop them?'

  'If I want to.'

  'How?'

  'I'll tell Charles not to go ahead with it.'

  Simon laughed. 'And that would do it?'

  Edith observed him coolly. How provincial he was! How little he understood men like Charles! She was almost haughty in her defence of her discarded husband to her preferred lover. 'Yes. That would do it.' Simon had stopped laughing but suddenly there seemed to be something irredeemably irritating about him. She couldn't be bothered to embark on the usual chats about how bad everyone was in any film they were watching, how jealous his fellow actors were, how stupid the cameraman. 'I'm going to have a bath,' she said, disengaging herself from his embrace.

  Simon threw himself back into the sofa, fixing his gaze once more upon the screen. 'You're very sulky,' he said. 'I shall be charitable and blame the time of the month.'

  She didn't answer but went instead down to the basement bathroom that opened off their dark, little bedroom. An attempt had been made with a looking glass and a wallpaper of enormous poppies to brighten the two rooms up but it only deepened their lightless gloom. She ran the bath, undressed and climbed in. She was aware that since she had entered the park she had been in a kind of strange, unworldly mental state. She felt intensely aware of every movement of her limbs, of every ripple of the water against her skin. She felt spacey, almost drunk — although she certainly drank very little at lunch. A vague sense of apprehension seemed to bloat her stomach and her very nerve ends prickled individually the length of her body. But then, at last, she realised what it was that was catching at the edge of her attention. Simon had said no more than he knew. It was her time of the month. She was as regular as clockwork.

  And she was five days late.

  TWENTY

  The morning following my lunch with Edith our doorbell rang at not much later than a quarter past eight.

  'Christ!' said Adela. 'Who on earth's that?' We were in our tiny bedroom, which overlooked the area. As the front door was just out of sight to the right, it wasn't possible to sneak a preview of our visitor but, in any case, at that time in the morning, I just assumed it was the postman so I was not particularly careful with my toilet as I shouted that I was coming.

  When I unlocked the door in my underpants with my hair unbrushed, I discovered it was not the postman, who must after all be accustomed to such sights, but Edith Broughton who stood on the mat.

  'Hello,' I said with something of a tone of wonder.

  Edith pushed past me into the room. 'I have to talk to you.' She threw herself down onto the sofa that divided the living bit from the eating bit of the flat's solitary 'reception room'.

  'Can I dress first?' I asked.

  She nodded and I hurried back into the bedroom to inform the amazed Adela, busy struggling into her clothes, of the identity of our early morning caller.

  She was ready first and when I rejoined them Edith already had a cup of coffee in her hand and a piece of toast before her.

  'So?' I said. There didn't seem to be much point in pretending that this was a normal way of carrying on. Edith glanced at Adela who jumped up.

  'I'd better be off, hadn't I? Not to worry. I've a mass of paperwork to do…'

  Edith waved her back to her seat. 'Stay. There's no secret. Anyway,' she glanced around at our minuscule accommodation, 'I imagine you'd be within earshot wherever you went.' Adela settled herself and we both waited.

  'I want to see Charles.' Her voice was quite flat as she spoke but of course we were both most interested by what she said.

  I did not really understand why she had felt the need to come round and communicate this to us at dawn but I was fascinated nevertheless. I was soon to understand what my part was to be. 'I want you to arrange it.'

  Adela caught my eye and faintly shook her head. She had all the horror of her kind for getting involved in this kind of thing. Whatever the outcome, somehow one is always blameworthy. She also, as she told me later, had no wish to incur Lady Uckfield's enmity and she suspected that this would be an inevitable by-product of the proposed plan of action. One must remember of course that Adela, from first to last, was entirely on Lady Uckfield's side and never on Edith's.

  'Why do you need me?' I said rather wanly.

  'I rang Broughton last night. I asked for Charles but I got Googie. She said he wasn't there but I'm sure he was. I rang London and Feltham and they said he was at Broughton. I know he was. She doesn't want me to speak to him.'

  All this would only confirm Adela's suspicions that in some vague way we were being asked to take on Lady Uckfield. 'I don't really see what I can do.'

  'They'll let you speak to him. Say you want to ask him to lunch or something and then, when he comes on the line, tell him I want to meet him.'

  'I don't think I can do that,' I said. 'I don't mind telephoning,' which was a lie, 'but if Lady Uckfield asks me what I'm going to say, I'll tell her. She can't imagine she can prevent you meeting for ever.'

  'Not for ever, no. Just long enough.'

  'I don't believe that,' I said. Although I did.

  In truth, I was pretty sure that I too was on Lady Uckfield's side when it came down to it. The facts were simple enough.

  Edith had married Charles without loving him in order to gain a position. She had then made a complete failure of that same position, abandoned it, broken her faith with Charles, made a great scandal and caused him a good deal of pain. Lady Uckfield now wished to be rid of her once and for all and, frankly, could anyone wonder at it?

  'Do you think Charles will want to see you?' asked Adela. 'Perhaps it was he who refused to come to the telephone.'

  Which was certainly a point worth considering.

  'If he doesn't, I want to hear it from him.'

  The three of us sat in silence for a while. Adela crunched her toast and turned to Nigel Dempster.

  'Anything?' I said.

  'Sarah Carter's sister's married some painter and the Langwells are getting a divorce, which we knew last October.'

  'Will you do it?' said Edith.

  Adela and I looked at each other but I refused the message in her eyes. Ultimately, much as I would have liked to, it would have been wrong of me to have abandoned Edith to her fate and espoused the cause of the Broughtons. Whatever I might privately think about the wrongs and rights of the matter, this would have been a dishonourable course. First, and before everything else, I had been Edith's friend, as even Lady Uckfield had acknowledged.

  'I will,' I said. 'But I won't do it either at this time of the morning or with you listening. Go home and I'll telephone you.'

  Edith nodded and, after finishing her coffee, left.

  'Something's up,' said Adela.

  I rang at half past ten and asked for Charles. Despite what Edith had said I was quite surprised when Lady Uckfield came on the line.

  'Hello,' she said. 'H
ow are you?'

  'I was trying to track down Charles.'

  She was very smooth and clearly four steps ahead of me. 'I'm afraid he's not here. Can I give him a message?'

  I toyed with the idea of bluffing but she was obviously well aware of why I was ringing and it seemed a foolish corner to paint myself into. 'I'm on an errand, I'm afraid. And I'm not at all sure you'll approve.'

  'Try me.' Her voice had gone from reserved to glacial.

  'It's Edith. She wants to see Charles.'

  'Why?'

  'I don't know why.' This was true.

  'What's the point?'

  'I don't know that there is any point but I do know that you won't get a straight answer out of her concerning your proposals re the divorce unless she sees him.'

  'You've asked her then?'

  'I've asked her and she says she wants to think about it. Part of that thinking, I take it, has to go on in Charles's presence.'

  There was a pause for a moment and I could hear down the line that eerie echo of other conversations, other, strange anonymous bits of lives being lived, a thousand miles away. 'Are you free this afternoon? Can you meet me for tea?'

  'There's nothing I would enjoy more but in this instance I don't know that I'll be able to add anything to what I've already told you.'

  'I'll be at the Ritz. At four.'

  I was interested that she did not want me to come to their flat in Cadogan Square.

  'Perhaps Tigger's coming up with her. Perhaps Charles is there,' said Adela and for a moment I was tempted to walk round and ring the bell. I thought better of it, having decided that it might behove me to hear what Lady Uckfield had to say first.

  I did, however, telephone Edith.

  'What are you going to say to her?'

  'I don't know. That she is wasting her time trying to keep you two apart, I suppose. If that's what she's doing.'

  'Of course it's what she's doing.'

  'I mean without Charles's knowledge.' Edith was silent. 'At any rate, I'll call you this evening.' I rang off.

  I asked tentatively whether or not Lady Uckfield had arrived but the manager was not one to let such an opportunity slip by.

  'Gentleman for the Marchioness of Uckfield,' he observed loudly to a passing waiter, who escorted me courteously past the turning heads to where she waited. She was sitting trimly at a table in the Marble Hall to the right of the great, gilded fountain.

  She smiled and waved a little hand as I approached, and stood to greet me with her neat, bird-like movements. The man brought the tea with a lot of milady'ing, all of it gently and serenely acknowledged. She laughed gaily. 'Isn't this a treat?'

  'It is for me,' I said.

  Her manner became not exactly more serious but at any rate more direct. She was a little less breathlessly urgent and remembering that scene in her sitting room at Broughton I understood that she was going to impart some real, as opposed to faked, intimacy. 'I want to be quite honest because I think you may be able to help.'

  'I'm simultaneously flattered and dubious,' I said.

  'I don't want Charles to have to see Edith.'

  'So I gathered.'

  'It's not that I'm being unkind. Truly. It's just that I think he's in the most tremendous muddle and I don't want him any more confused.'

  'Lady Uckfield,' I said, 'I know very well why you think it a bad idea. So do I. You believe the marriage was a mistake and you had rather not prolong it. I quite agree. The fact remains that, at this moment, Edith is Charles's wife and if she wants to see him and if he, as I suspect, also wants to see her, then hadn't we better get out of the way?'

  A momentary flicker of irritation shadowed her face. 'Why do you think he wants to see her?'

  'Because he's still in love with her.'

  She said nothing for a moment but poked among the sandwiches to find an egg one, which she nibbled with exaggerated delight. 'Aren't these good!' she whispered covertly, as if we must prevent anyone else hearing at all costs. She looked at me with her darting, cat-like eyes. 'You think I've been unfair to Edith.'

  I shook my head. 'No. I think you don't like her but I don't think you've been particularly unfair to her.'

  She nodded in acknowledgement of this. 'I don't like her. Much. However, that's not the point.'

  'What is the point?'

  'The point is that she cannot make Charles happy. Whether I like her or not is neither here nor there. I detested my mother-in-law and yet I was fully aware of what a success she had made of Broughton and of Tigger's wretched father. It took me twenty years to bury her memory. Do you think it would matter to me if I simply didn't like her? I'm not a schoolgirl.'

  'No.' I sipped my tea. This was flattering indeed. For some reason Lady Uckfield had decided to draw aside the curtain that habitually clothed all her private thoughts and actually talk to me. She had not finished.

  'Let me tell you about my son. Charles is a good, kind, uncomplicated man. He's much nicer than I am, you know. But he is less…' She faltered, searching for a loyal adjective that would fit the need.

  'Intelligent?' I ventured.

  Since I had said it, she let it pass. 'He needs a wife who values not just him but who he is, what he does. What their life is.

  He is not one to be able to give weight to a different philosophy in his own home. He could not be married to a socialist opera singer and respect her for her different views. It is not in him.'

  'I don't think it's in Edith either,' I said.

  'Edith married an idea of a life that she had gleaned from novels and magazines. She thought it meant travel and fashion shows and meeting Mick Jagger. She saw herself throwing parties for Princess Michael in Mauritius…' She shrugged. I was quite impressed that she'd heard of Mick Jagger. 'I don't know if some people live like that. Maybe. What I do know is that will never be Charles's life. His whole existence is the farming calendar. For the next fifty years he will shoot and farm and farm and shoot and go abroad for three weeks in July. He will worry about the tenants and have fights with the vicar and try to get the government to contribute to rewiring the east wing. And his friends, with very few exceptions, will be other people reroofing their houses and farming and shooting and trying to get government grants and exemptions. That is his future.'

  'And you're sure it could never be Edith's?'

  'Aren't you?'

  I could remember Edith sobbing with boredom on the shoot at Broughton and sulking through evening after evening of Tigger's stories and Googie's charm. But of course, what Lady Uckfield did not know and I suspected, was how bored and depressed Edith was with her new life. I thought of her at Fiona Grey's party being led around like a prize heifer. Lady Uckfield interpreted my silence as agreement and her manner warmed. 'It's not entirely her fault. Even I can see that. That terrible mother has stuffed her head with a lot of Barbara Cartland nonsense. What chance had she?'

  'Poor old Mrs Lavery,' I said. Lady Uckfield shuddered with a tiny grimace. This was the woman Mrs Lavery had planned to share scrumptious lunches with and trips to the milliner.

  'I'm not a snob,' started Lady Uckfield but this was really too much and I could not prevent at least one eyebrow rising.

  She attempted to rebuke me. 'I'm not! I know people can marry up and bring it off. I have lots of different sorts of friends. I do!' She was quite indignant. I suppose she believed she was telling the truth.

  'Who?' I said.

  She thought for a moment. 'Susan Curragh and Anne Melton. I like them both very much. I defy you to say that I don't.'

  She had named an immensely rich American heiress who was now the wife of a rather dull junior minister and the daughter of a clothing millionaire who had married an impoverished Irish earl thereby putting him on the social map. I knew neither woman but I trembled for Edith if Lady Uckfield thought them good examples of 'marrying up'. 'You don't believe me, I know, but I was brought up not to think in terms of "class".'

  What interested me in this was that Lady Uckf
ield could have made that statement quite safely on a lie detector while the truth was, of course, that she had been brought up to think in terms of nothing else and she had largely (if not entirely) been true to her teaching. She continued. 'The important thing is not Edith's class, whatever that means, but that she simply doesn't enjoy the job. She and her frightful mother are "London Ladies". They want to lunch in Italian restaurants and go to charity balls and fly to the sun for the winter. Running a house like Broughton, or Feltham for that matter, is just slog once the gilt's worn off. It's paperwork and committees. It's arguing with English Heritage inspectors who all hate you for living there and want to make everything as difficult for you as they possibly can. It's pleading with government departments and economising on the heating. Those houses are fun to stay in. Even "London Ladies" like that. But they're hard, hard work to own. She could never take either pleasure or satisfaction in that life. I don't even blame her but she couldn't. And to be quite frank,' she paused, almost hesitating in case she was giving away too much ammunition, 'I'm not sure how much she likes Charles.'

  I thought of that far away engagement dinner with Caroline Chase on my left. It's frightfully dreary down here… flower shows all summer, freezing pipes all winter. I could hear the echo of her cold, hard voice. I suppose Edith's ready for all that? And how triumphant Edith had seemed. How she had swept the pool and gained the prize.

  'If what you say is true then where's the danger of letting them meet?'

  'Because I suspect that eight months with an out-of-work actor in Ebury Street has reminded her of why she found Charles attractive, or should I say an attractive proposition, in the first place. I think she may want him back.'

  'And you're against that?' I felt a bit sorry for Simon to be described as an 'out-of-work actor' when he, poor soul, thought he was dazzling in his success. Still, it didn't seem the moment to cavil.