Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  she said, 'you were sick of the sight of Charles. When he spoke you gritted your teeth, when he touched you, you shivered. I am his mother and I lived in the same house with you. Did you think I wouldn't notice these things?'

  'It wasn't like that.'

  'It was exactly like that. He bored you. He bored you to death. Worse than that, he irritated you to the point of distraction.

  He could not please you however hard he tried. Nothing he said or did was right. He set your nerves on edge by his very presence and yet now… what am I to make of this sudden eagerness to see him? What has changed?'

  Edith drew herself up and looked her opponent in the eye. She was determined somehow to try to gain the initiative. 'Has it occurred to you that I might have had some time for reflection? Or am I too stupid in your eyes to think of anything but money and social climbing?'

  'My dear, I never thought you stupid.' Lady Uckfield held up her palm in protest. 'You must at least give me credit for that.' There was a noise on the gravel and the older woman walked over to the window but it was not, as she had feared, Charles coming back for something he'd forgotten. 'I have to ask myself why now, why suddenly, a meeting is so essential when in the first months away you exhibited no such wish. I am a mother and I have to say to myself, what could have changed that might make a reunion with my son so desirable now when it was so un desirable then?'

  'Perhaps I don't feel I've made a good choice. Is that hard to understand?'

  'On the contrary. I find it easy to understand. Especially since I think you've made a very poor choice indeed. But…' She rested her fingertips against each other like an avuncular preacher making a point in a pulpit. 'Why now? Why such a change upon an instant?'

  Edith stared at her. 'You can't stop me seeing him for ever,' she said.

  Lady Uckfield nodded. 'No. I dare say I can't.'

  'Well then.'

  'I think I can stop you seeing him for a few months. Six perhaps, or even three. Let us see how we all feel then about this poor choice you have made.'

  At that moment Edith realised that of course her mother-in-law, dear Googie with her mind as pure as snow, knew. They never talked about it, neither at that time nor in the ensuing years, but they were always aware from then on that, beyond a shadow of doubt, they both knew. Edith stood up. 'I'm going now.'

  'Are you sure? Can I at least give you something to eat? Or what about a loo? You've come such a long way.' Once again the tone had settled back into its usual intimate pattern with the rhythm of shared midnight secrets in the dormitory.

  At this moment, in some strange way, it was hard for Edith not to admire this woman, her sworn foe, who held onto the high ground in every argument against all-comers. It was hard but it was not impossible. 'You are a fucking cow,' she said. 'A fucking cow with a hide of leather and no heart.'

  Lady Uckfield seemed to think over these words for a moment before nodding. 'Probably there is some truth in your unflattering description,' she acknowledged. 'And it is perhaps for that reason, or something resembling it, expressed hopefully in more fragrant language, that I have made such a success of my opportunities and you have made such a failure of yours. Goodbye, my dear.'

  TWENTY-TWO

  You may ask yourself why Edith, outfoxed at every turn, did not travel the more modern route out of her dilemma and, released from embarrassment after a short stay in some discreet, rural nursing home, why she did not then wait the three or six months stipulated by Lady Uckfield and outface them all. I suspect that she hardly knew the reason herself but somehow she was determined not to go that way. She was not, so far as I am aware, particularly religious and, I would have thought, operated on the minimum of moral scruples generally but perhaps because she had seen a way in which she could spare a life, a life that depended on her and her alone, she could not now bring herself to sacrifice it. It was, I think, an essentially animal decision rather than a sentimental one — or else then every tigress in the jungle is sentimental. Women, I suspect, can understand better than most men why something that hardly existed notionally and legally did not yet exist at all should still have been able to command such loyalties.

  In the end, help came from a most unlikely sector. She had told me the following morning about her brief sojourn at Broughton and I was naturally dreading the request that I should take a more proactive hand in the whole business when she surprised me by telling me that she was going to wait until Charles's next visit to Feltham. 'He goes every fortnight or so. I'll collar him there.'

  'How will you know when he's visiting?'

  'Caroline's going to tell me. She'll drive me down.'

  This information was both relieving and astonishing. Relieving because of course it meant I could be dispensed with and astonishing because it would never have occurred to me that Caroline would work against her mother's interest. Even now I am not completely sure of her motives. The Chase marriage was looking rocky. It is possible that she did not want the issue of her own satisfactory divorce arrangements being swamped by the divorce of the heir. It may have been an act of rebellion against her mother whose values Caroline always thought (quite wrongly as it happens) she had rejected. It may have been simpler. She loved her brother and she must have hated seeing him unhappy. In the end, I suppose it was, as always, a mixture of all these elements.

  'When did you get in touch with her?'

  'She telephoned me this morning. She'd heard about my visit to Broughton. I suppose she feels sorry for me.'

  'Well, I won't say I'm not surprised but I'm pleased for you. It's certainly a good deal more suitable that Charles's sister should help you than that I should. Will you let me know how you get on?'

  'I will,' she said.

  ===OO=OOO=OO===

  Despite her explanation, Edith herself was not really clear as to Caroline's motives. They had never been close since Edith's admission into the family. They were not enemies. Indeed, despite Eric's almost continual stream of snide comments directed at Edith, she and her sister-in-law had achieved a kind of guarded familiarity but 'friendship' would have been too strong a word for it and Caroline would never have been confused as to where her loyalties lay. For all her professed modernity, Caroline Chase, devoid of self-knowledge as she was, remained very much a chip off her mother's block. She might despise the taut-faced countesses and ministers' wives that made up Lady Uckfield's coterie but when it came down to it her own friends were generally these women's rebellious and oddly-dressed children.

  At all events, whatever her motives, she was as good as her word. Two days later the telephone rang in the Ebury Street flat and when Edith picked it up Caroline was on the line. 'Charles is at Feltham now if you're serious. He went down last night and he's on his own there until tomorrow.'

  Edith glanced over to where Simon was deep in the Daily Mail. He also had the Independent delivered every day but he never read it. She steadied herself for one of those faintly Chinese telephone conversations designed to conceal their subject from the witnesses present. 'That's kind of you,' she said.

  'So do you want me to take you down?'

  'If you can,' came the stilted reply.

  'Can't you talk?'

  'Not really.'

  'I'll be at the top of lower Sloane Street by Coutts at ten o'clock.'

  'Fine.' Edith replaced the receiver carefully. It was not, as she explained later, that she ever wavered in her desire to see Charles but, just as she kept silent about the Sussex visit, she was not a big one for bridge-burning. As it happened, Simon had hardly been aware of the telephone conversation at all. She smiled across at him. 'Aren't you working today?'

  He looked up. 'In the afternoon. Why?'

  'That was Caroline. Asking me to lunch.'

  'You're keeping your options open, then.'

  She didn't answer but he didn't care.

  Once again, she chose her clothes with some deliberation. The easy option was to repeat herself and simply to don a country outfit from her Broug
hton days but that seemed somehow dishonourable after her humiliation at the hands of Lady Uckfield. It was also, as she now saw more clearly, obvious, which was worse. No, if Charles were to take her back it must be as herself and not because she could pass as Diana Bohun or any of the other cold-hearted bitches who enjoyed their loveless marriages at the heart of Charles's world. Eventually she selected a tight black skirt that showed her legs and a loose blue sweater interwoven with coloured ribbons. She brushed her hair and applied her make-up fairly heavily (that is, for Charles rather than for Caroline). She surveyed the results and was pleased. She looked pretty and bright and just Londony enough for it not to seem as if she was trying too hard.

  'Very nice,' said Simon. 'Where are you off to now?'

  'I thought I'd do some shopping. I've got to get a birthday present for my father.'

  'I suppose I'm not included in the girls' lunch.'

  'It's at Caroline's flat…' She shrugged sadly. 'Why not come with me now? If I can find something for Daddy, I'm going on to Harrods. See what they've got in for the summer.'

  It may seem that there was a calculated risk in this cunning approach but there wasn't really. No man in his right mind would accept the job of trailing a woman through a series of departments when she isn't even looking for anything specific.

  Especially when there's no lunch at the end of it. He shook his head as she knew he must. 'Not really. If it's all right. I'll see you tonight.'

  'What time will you be back?'

  He shrugged. 'Seven. Eight.'

  They kissed and Edith seized a coat and was gone. A minute later she was walking towards the antique shops at the Pimlico Road end of the street. She knew that Caroline would ask her what she was up to in the two hours on the road that lay ahead and she was trying to determine both what she would say and what was the truth — not that these two would necessarily correlate.

  She knew by now, if only from Lady Uckfield's near-hysterical opposition, that there must be a chance she could get Charles back. For a while she had pretended to herself that she was still simply exploring the possibility but in her heart she had already gone a stage further than that. She was bound to acknowledge that she would not have been as anxious as she had been in her attempts to secure a meeting had this not been the case. The question remained, how much did she want him back? Did she want him at any cost? Would she try to exact concessions? Would their life return to precisely the same pattern? And then again, could she gain concessions anyway? Weren't all the cards in Charles's hand? Worst of all: suppose she was wrong and he didn't want her back? In these ruminations, she was conscious that she had pushed the real reason for her change of heart to the back of her mind but she reasoned that if she was successful then that was after all where it was going to stay and so why worry about it now? It seemed to present her with such a yawning chasm that there was no reason to negotiate it before she absolutely had to. To all intents and purposes, from the moment she had known that she was at last to be permitted to see Charles, her secret had ceased to be true.

  She stopped outside the art gallery opposite the Poule Au Pot and glanced at some sketches in the window. As she stood there, a gleaming limousine drew to a halt and the chauffeur helped a woman of some indeterminate Middle Eastern aspect to alight from the vehicle and enter the shop. Looking at this heavily-rouged, sable-wrapped creature, diamond bracelets flashing in the sun, Edith suddenly thought of her mother-in-law. How well she knew that this would not be Lady Uckfield's way. She would arrive in a taxi with a minimum of fuss, in sensible clothes and excellent pearls, and rely on the recognition of the manager. And yet the fact remained that, should these women meet, this Levantine would be nervous of Lady Uckfield while Lady Uckfield would be politely indifferent to her.

  Her clash in the Little Library at Broughton, far from lowering Lady Uckfield in Edith's eyes, had paradoxically resulted in a grudging respect for her code. She had always faintly despised those members of her, or Charles's, circle who had fawned over her mother-in-law, but over the last days she had come to re-examine her feelings. In the early stages of her marriage she had perhaps yearned for more of what this Eastern woman in her furs took for granted in her daily round, luxury, glamour, famous faces. All these things — at any rate an English version of them — the young Edith Lavery had wrongly perceived as being connected to the world of a 'Lady Broughton' and she had been taken aback when so much of her new life had proved mundane. She knew that Lady Uckfield thought she, Edith, had gleaned her ideas from novels and nineteenth-century biographies, she had even attempted to defend her own mother occasionally from the accusation of filling her head with bourgeois fantasy, but she realised there was justice in the charge. The reality of life with Charles had seemed so flat and changeless compared to those action-packed plots, the glittering, power-filled ballrooms, that dizzying Lady-Palmerston-like career that she had been anticipating.

  And yet, that day at the dress show, when the crowd had broken before Lady Uckfield and her minor Royal Highness like the Red Sea before Moses, Edith had seen what she had thrown away, the key to every closed door in England and most of the rest of the world — at least among the superficial. A landed title might not secure an invitation to Camp David but, even in the twenty-first century, she need never be alone in Palm Beach. And Edith knew by now that the kind of people who were superficial, the snobs whose social life was based around collecting people to underpin their own status, outnumbered the rest by ten to one. This kind of power might not be worth much in the great scheme of things but it was something and what had she gained in exchange for it? Life at Broughton might be dull but what was life in Ebury Street? Which did she prefer, lack of noise or lack of muscle? She had walked out of the world of the worldly in a petulant pout of boredom and overnight she had transformed herself from a high court card in the Game of Society into a non-person that people were ashamed to be seen with.

  With something akin to a shiver she resumed her walk. Then she thought of the two men. Her subconscious assumption, because she knew that she had married Charles for his name and his fortune, had always been that, stripped of these things, she would never have looked at him. In their two years together she had grown to resent him, absurd as that now seemed even to her, for luring her with his worldly possessions without having the personality to amuse her once she was caught. The truth was she had pursued him and yet, in her self-justifying and dishonest mind, by the time Simon had come along, Charles had assumed the moral status of a baited trap.

  Now, strolling down Pimlico Road, admiring the antique window displays, she thought back to her ruminations in the Green Park and realised that separation had changed things. It was her unconscious habit these days to think of her husband more gently. Was he really so disagreeable as company? So much less attractive than Simon? After all, men far worse than Charles find wives all the time. Would the idea of Charles as a husband have seemed so bad in the old days before her marriage? If she had been introduced to Mr Charles Broughton as a schoolfriend's suitor would she have wanted to run out screaming into the night, dragging the doomed girl with her? Of course not. Certainly Simon was a good deal better looking, there could be no doubt of that, but over the months she had grown used to his looks and she had begun to be irritated by the perpetual twinkling that seemed to accompany his every social interchange. All those half-smiles and narrowed lids lavished on waitresses and air hostesses and girls at the checkout in Partridges, all that tossing back of the golden locks, had started to bore her.

  More troubling than the comparison of appearance (Charles, after all, while no beauty, was perfectly respectable to look at) was the question of sex. She had to concede that Simon was much the better lover, an excellent lover indeed by any standards let alone poor Charles's, and this was harder to dismiss. She enjoyed going to bed with Simon. Very much. In fact, the thought of making love with him was still enough to tickle her innards, to make her slightly fidgety and uncomfortable, to make her want to cross a
nd uncross her legs. Dear Charles could never be a competitor here with his fumbling, five-minute thrust and his 'thank you, darling', which nearly drove her mad.

  But for the first time she acknowledged, predictably perhaps, that after a year, making love to Simon had lost its novelty.

  The sex, though less frequent than at first, was still excellent, no question, but it could no longer blind her to the life for which she had left her gilded cage. After all, how much time does one actually spend in bed making love? Was it really worth the rest of the bargain? Did a pleasurable half an hour two or three times a week compensate for those endless, terrible parties, those awful people with their flat accents, sitting around the flat smoking, or those frightful drama school pals discussing 'hair-dos'

  and gardening tips and bucket-shop holidays? And anyway, wasn't Charles rather sweet in his way? Wasn't he more decent than Simon? Wasn't he truer as a person?

  So Edith continued up Sloane Street belabouring herself with her false values, all the while attempting to convince herself with a litany of Charles's essential worth until, in a rare moment of honesty, like the sun breaking through the clouds, she saw the irony of this inner conversation. She, Edith, was using these arguments as if the opposition to them would overwhelm her should she give it a hearing. She was forcing herself to the next step when any impartial observer, and of this she was suddenly quite sure, would have freely volunteered that of course Charles was more decent than Simon. In fact, in any real way, it was perfectly obvious that Simon wasn't decent at all. Unlike Charles he had no honour, only pragmatism. He could not be true because there was no truth in him. His morality was a tawdry bundle of received, fashionable causes that he believed would make him attractive to casting directors. Edith was talking herself into thinking that in some ways she preferred Charles to Simon when to anyone who knew them both there could be no comparison. Charles, dull as he might be, was infinitely the better man. Simon was a mass of nothing.