Lady Uckfield had not finished. 'We are so desperately hoping he can rebuild his life and we really feel that he has a chance of that now.'
'Has he met someone else?'
She inclined her head to one side without answering and I knew he had. Or that they hoped he had. Minutes later I had worked out it was probably Clarissa.
'The point is if he was free he could plan in those terms. Now he can't. The past is pulling and pulling at him until I don't believe he can think straight.'
Now this was an intriguing choice of phrase. In what way was Charles not 'thinking straight'? She watched me, waiting for some acknowledgement.
'How can I help?' I said. I wanted to find out what Lady Uckfield had in store for me. I knew it would be something big because it is an absolute truth that for a woman of her type to discuss any aspect of the intimate life of her family with anyone other than a life-long, contemporary friend of similar rank (and that only rarely) was a kind of torture. Whether she liked me or not was irrelevant. This interview was agony for her.
'Can you talk to Edith? Can you ask her if she'll let Charles divorce her now? Of course, in the past that would have been an uncomfortable way round but do people think like that these days? I don't believe they do — and you must assure her that it would make no difference to the settlement. None at all.' She was gushing to cover her own embarrassment. And no wonder. This was a vulgar request if ever I heard one. Perhaps the only vulgar thing I ever knew to issue from her lips. My surprise must have shown on my face. 'You must think this a very tiresome commission.'
'I don't know that tiresome is the word I'd have chosen.' My tone was a little severe but Lady Uckfield was enough of a lady to know that she had transgressed her own code. She took the reprimand gracefully as one who deserved it.
'Of course, it's an awful thing to ask.'
'You do Edith an injustice,' I said. 'She wouldn't think about the money.' This was true. I do not think it ever occurred to Edith to take anything off Charles beyond a few thousand to give her a breathing space. It was enough that he had paid the rent in Ebury Street and left her able to cash cheques in this interim. What Lady Uckfield did not understand was that Edith was fully conscious of having behaved badly. People like the Uckfields can be slow, indeed unable, to realise that 'honour' is not a perquisite of their own class. They have heard so often about the materialism of the middle classes and the grace and self-sacrifice of their own kind that they have come to believe these two fictions equally.
She raised her eyebrows slightly. 'I suppose that might be true.'
'It is true,' I said. 'You do not like Edith and because you don't like her you underestimate her.'
At this she unbent slightly. She did not deny what I had said and when she answered me she spoke with a slight smile.
'You are right to defend her. You first came to this house as her friend — and you are right to defend her.'
'I will tell Edith what you've said but I really cannot do much more than that.'
'You see, we can't have Charles bringing a case and her contesting it or challenging it in any way. We must know that won't happen. You see that?'
'Of course I do.' Which I did. 'But I can't advise her. She wouldn't listen to me if I tried.'
'You'll tell me what she says?'
I nodded. Our interview was over. We stood and had almost left the room when Lady Uckfield clearly felt impelled to convince me further of the urgency of her request.
'You see, Charles is so dreadfully unhappy. It can't go on, can it? It's so terrible for us. Seeing him like this.'
In answer I put my arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. It was considerably more intimate an action than anything I had attempted before. Perhaps it was a sign that we were somehow bonded by this awful mess of tears and waste.
At any rate, she didn't object. Nor did she assume that faintly perceptible stiffness that her kind of English women use at such a moment to demonstrate that some unwarranted liberty has been taken.
We went back to the drawing room where Adela, in an effort to escape from Tigger's meticulously outlined plans for the South Wood, was attempting to teach one of the dogs to balance a biscuit on its nose. She looked up when we came in and, since she was burning to hear what had happened (as I was to tell it), we made our excuses fairly soon after that. We still had the awful burden of David's invitation to impart but, since it was the price by which we had bought our tea, we knew it had to be done. Lady Uckfield followed us down to the Under Hall so it was easier than it might have been.
'David and Isabel,' I started. She looked quizzical so I clarified, 'Easton. Our hosts.' She nodded. This interchange alone would have been enough to have depressed David for months. 'They wondered if you'd like to bring your party over for a drink tomorrow morning?' It was done.
Lady Uckfield smiled briskly. 'But how very kind. I'm afraid we're too many for that. But do thank them.' Her customary urgent intimacy was back as she rejected an invitation I knew well enough would never be accepted. But she surprised me by continuing. 'Why don't you come back here instead — and bring them?'
This was kindness above and beyond the call of duty. Feeling guilty at the thought of David's delight had he but known, I shook my head. 'I think that's rather a bore for you, isn't it? Let's leave it for another time.'
But Lady Uckfield, to my further bewilderment, was insistent. 'No, please. Do come.' She smiled. 'Charles will be back. I know he'd love to see you.'
At the time, I didn't understand what she hoped to achieve by bringing us together with Charles. It seemed if anything a risk to her plans, for if I had confided her mission to her son, I am certain he would have been furious. But later I realised that she wanted me to see Charles in his misery for this would be her justification and might motivate me more than ever to carry out her wishes. It is possible too that she believed that by allowing us to bring our friends to Broughton we would be even more tightly strapped to the family carriage. 'Don't feel you have to,' said Adela, but we could protest no more and so, bidding her goodbye until the morrow, we set off to deliver our happy message to a delighted David and a less enthralled but pleasantly surprised Isabel.
Charles was waiting for us in the drawing room when we reappeared the next day or so it seemed. He bounded out of his chair, kissed Adela on both cheeks and almost wrung my hand. He wasn't able to say much more than how pleased he was to see us, as his mother approached to normalise the situation and lead us over to the drinks cupboard, cunningly inserted behind a dummy door that had originally been constructed to balance the door that led, through an ante-room, to the dining room. Tigger stood there in his role as Mine Host, dispensing Bloody Marys. He presented one to his wife. She wrinkled her nose fractionally. 'Not enough Tabasco, the wrong vodka — and you've forgotten the lime juice.' I was waiting for a bowl of fresh limes to be rung for when to my surprise Lord Uckfield took down a plastic bottle of lime juice cordial and sloshed a great measure into the jug. I was about to request one without this ingredient then thought better of it and took what I was given. Naturally enough, it was delicious.
'How do you think he's looking?' said my hostess.
She knew well enough that Charles looked perfectly terrible. His face was tired and lumpy. His skin, which normally shone with the kind of uncomplicated health redolent of grouse moors and hunting fields, looked sallow and almost dirty. His hair hung in unsorted tendrils down his neck.
'Not great,' I said.
She nodded. 'You do see why I felt I had to ask your help?'
She drifted away without referring again to our curious interview of the previous day. To be honest and in her defence I could see why, as a mother, she had been driven to pretty desperate measures. Clearly her son was dying by inches before her eyes. What puzzled me was this hinted-at, burgeoning romance that promised new life and happiness. He really did not look like one who has found his True Love, even though Clarissa was in his eye-line. There were some other pre-lunch drin
kers and she was again playing the hostess, leading people here and there and introducing them but, so far as I could tell, without exciting any special interest in her cousin's heart.
The house-guests were as surly as they had been the previous day and I saw a couple of them being grudgingly yoked to David and Isabel. One, Viscount Bohun, who had been out for a walk the day before, I had met occasionally in London. His youngest sister had been a vague friend of mine at one time and I had always suspected him then of being mentally sub-normal
— or at least as near sub-normal as one can be without actually risking clinical classification — so I had been quite surprised to read somewhere that he had married a pretty girl with a respectable job in publishing. Remembering this, I was curious to see the new Lady Bohun, she who had made this unholy contract. She was easy to spot. Her shining hair swept back flawlessly under a velvet band, her nose tilted in the air, she was being as grand and as difficult with a foundering David as it is possible to be without actually resorting to insults. The poor man struggled on, hopefully dropping names and references, all of which were courteously spurned, until I could almost see the sweat popping out on his brow. I can only hope that such petty victories were worth the terrible sacrifice of her life that she had made. Bohun himself had caught the wretched Adela and was telling her some interminable story, which he kept punctuating with a shrill and unprovoked laugh. I could see her checking the exits.
Charles approached and touched me on the elbow. 'So how are you? How was your filming?'
'OK. How about you?'
He gestured towards a window seat where, untroubled by the others, we might perch and be a little alone. He stared out over the gardens for a moment in silence. 'Oh, I'm fine.' He smiled rather wryly. 'Well, quite fine.'
He didn't look it but I nodded. 'I'm glad.'
'Mummy said you were over here yesterday.'
'We came for tea.'
'I expect they wanted to talk to you about, you know, the mess.'
'A bit.'
'What did they say?' I wasn't really prepared to betray Lady Uckfield to her son. Apart from anything else, although I thought her request had been intrusive and improper, I did not question the honesty of her motives. Her child looked like hell.
Of course she wanted to bring things to an end, what mother wouldn't? I couldn't blame her for that so I shrugged. Charles continued. 'They're very keen to hurry everything on. They want me to "put it all behind me'".
'And shouldn't you?'
He stared back out of the window. It was early May and the flowers that were springing into life all over the lovingly tended terraces should have looked fresh and gay but there had been a cloudburst that morning and instead they all seemed rather soggy and careworn. Beyond the ha-ha, the trees in the park were in leaf but still light, their first foliage so much more subtle in its colours than the thick lushness of high summer. 'They packed me off to Jamaica in November with Clarissa and some friends of hers.'
'Was it fun?' I found Clarissa who was busying herself with refills. Charles followed my glance.
'Poor old Clarissa. Yes. Quite fun. I like Jamaica. Well, Ocho Rios anyway. Have you ever been?' I shook my head. 'My dear old mother's trying to make a match for me. She doesn't want to take her chances on the open market a second time.' He laughed.
'I suppose she just wants you to be happy,' I said.
He looked at me. 'It isn't quite that. You see, she does want me to be happy but this time she wants me to be happy in a way she understands. She fears the unknown. Edith was the unknown. She thinks she's working for my happiness but more than that she is anxious to prevent a repetition. There are to be no more strangers at Broughton. Edith and Eric have been quite enough.'
'Well, I can see her point so far as Eric's concerned,' I said, and we both laughed.
I looked back at Clarissa who was beginning to cast slightly nervous looks in our direction as if she sensed that our conversation would bode her no good. I felt sorry for her. She was a nice girl and she would have made a success of all this
— far more of a success probably than the wretched Edith ever could. Why shouldn't she have a go at making Charles happy? But even as I entertained such thoughts, I knew the whole thing was a figment of Lady Uckfield's imagination and destined to remain so.
'Have you seen Edith lately?' he asked.
I was struck again by the common error, into which I have often fallen, certainly with Charles, of assuming that stupid people are spared deep feeling. Not that Charles was exactly stupid. He was simply incapable of original thought. But I knew now that he was more than capable of great love. It is endlessly fascinating to speculate on the reasons for love's choices. I liked Edith and I had since I met her. I enjoyed her beauty and her low-key self-mockery and her naturally cool manner, but I could not pretend to understand how she had become so great a love object for this Young Man Who Had Everything. Her greatest merit as company, after all, was her sense of irony, which Charles was not capable of appreciating or even understanding. In my way I was as puzzled as Lady Uckfield as to why he had not chosen someone of his own sort who would have known the ropes and the other members of his world, who would have chaired her charities and ridden her horses and bossed the village around without a qualm, certainly with none of the suppressed sense of self-ridicule that underlay so much of Edith's role-playing. At all events, there it was. Charles had fallen in love with Edith Lavery and he loved her with a disinterested heart. The blow she had dealt to his self-esteem and indeed to his life had obviously been critical but it was quite clear from the look he turned to me that he loved her still.
'Adela saw her the other day at something.'
'How was she?'
'Well, I think.' This was a thorny path, if you like. I did not want to say she had looked rather down in case it stirred up hopes in his breast that were doomed to disappointment, nor did I care to say she was bursting with happiness as that would be needlessly painful. It would also be, from what I could gather from Adela, untrue.
'Will you be seeing her soon?'
'I thought I might give her lunch.'
'Tell her — tell her I'll do whatever she wants. You know. I'll fit in.' I nodded. 'And give her my love,' he said.
Predictably David had not enjoyed his sojourn in Valhalla. As so often in such cases, the realisation of the dream brings resentment in its wake. Perhaps because, in their imaginings, David and his like see themselves as inner members of the Charmed Circle, chums of half the peerage, swapping stories about childhood friends and making plans to share a villa in Tuscany. Inevitably, the reality of these attempts at intermingling tends to make them bitter and irritated as they find themselves snubbed as aliens by those very people they have spent their adult life admiring and emulating.
'I must say,' he muttered as he climbed into the back seat of my car, 'I found those Bohuns pretty hard going. Do you know them?'
'I used to know him a bit.'
'Really? I don't know what I thought of him.'
I smiled. 'He's a half-wit. What's she like?'
'Quite difficult, I'd say.'
Isabel nodded. 'Diana Bohun has made a hard bargain and her only compensation is the envy of strangers. I wonder how long she'll bear it. No doubt in five years we'll read that she's run off with the local doctor.'
Adela shook her head. 'No, we won't. I knew her when she came out. She'd stay with Hitler if he brought her a title and a house.'
Isabel raised her eyebrows. 'I think I'd rather have Hitler.'
I was interested in this exchange because, even as they ridiculed the pitiful hypocrisy of Diana Bohun, I was well aware that Adela and David and even Isabel, whatever they might say, fundamentally approved of her pact with the devil. Perhaps none of them would have been prepared to marry someone who actually repulsed them, but nevertheless those girls in their acquaintance who had done so (and I could name at least seven in my own address book) were not despicable figures to them unless they reneged
on their bargain. To the members of this world this was Edith's real crime. Not marrying Charles without loving him, but leaving him for love of someone else. To them, her folly was in abandoning the false values she had endorsed with her marriage and in attempting to return to the timeless virtues. Her decision was unworldly, it was not mondaine.
Americans may affect to admire this in their fiction if not in their lives but their British counterparts, at least among the upper-middle and upper classes do not. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.
And it was by these standards that Edith had been judged and found wanting.
NINETEEN
Here was a hard task. On the one hand I had a commission from Lady Uckfield, which I had sworn to carry out, to ask Edith to allow herself to be divorced at once, on the other, I had been made fully aware during our time at Broughton that Charles was still in love with his wife.
'So what are you going to say?' said Adela on the day when I had arranged to meet Edith for lunch. Naturally I had told my wife all. I don't know that I had been sworn to secrecy but even if I had been I never feel it includes one's spouse except in the most exceptional cases. Nothing can be more irritating than attempting to live intimately with a Keeper of Secrets.
'What Lady Uckfield wants me to say, I suppose.'
'Don't tell me you're going to promote the cause of that wretched Marlowe girl?'
I shook my head. 'No, I'll keep off that. I'll tell her they want it to be over, that's all.'
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