Snobs: A Novel

by Julian Fellowes

  For all his simplicity, he was not an idiot. Thinking along the same lines as that night in his study at Broughton he knew that he was no more interesting than when she left him. He also suspected that the world of show business had not really appealed to her, not at any rate for 'every day'. Just as a year of sin had served to give Edith a clearer idea of what Simon consisted of, so two years of marriage and a year apart had made Edith comprehensible to Charles. He knew she was an arriviste and the child of an arriviste. He saw her vulgarities of spirit now as sharply as he saw her fine points, of which, despite Lady Uckfield's comments, he still believed there were many. He also knew that if he made a move towards her the thing was settled.

  He stared at the hunched-up figure, trying to scoop warmth out of the electric bars. Her coat was a sort of camel colour and looked rather cheap. Was this sad little figure, this 'blonde piece' as his mother would say, to be the next Marchioness of Uckfield? To be painted by some indifferent chocolate box portraitist and hung alongside the Sargeants, Laszlos and Birleys of the preceding generations? Was it in her to make a go of it?

  But as he watched her, the sense of how vulnerable she suddenly seemed to him, with her bright make-up and her chain store coat, trying to charm him and looking instead somehow pathetic, overwhelmed him with pity and, in the wake of pity, with love. Whatever her suitability, whatever the limitations of her feelings, whatever her motives, he knew that he, Charles Broughton, could not be responsible for her unhappiness. He was, in short, incapable of hurting her.

  'Are you happy?' he said slowly, knowing as he did so that the words gave her permission to return to him and to his life.

  At the sound of them Edith knew her pardon had come through. Despite the difficulties with Simon, with her mother-inlaw, with the newspapers, with the sun, with the moon, she could now be Charles's wife again if she chose, which, not very surprisingly given all the circumstances, she did. For a second she felt almost sick with relief but then, since she did not wish to appear too desperate, she waited for a minute before she spoke, deliberately punctuating the moment with a pregnant pause. Once satisfied that her answer was anticipated by them both she carefully raised her tear-stained eyes to his.

  'No,' she said.

  EPILOGUE

  Smorzando

  It did not, so far as I remember, cause any great murmur when Edith was delivered of a daughter seven months or so after the reconciliation. Of course, there was a lot of talk, particularly from her mother, about their being taken by surprise as Edith was

  'so frighteningly early'. In fact, Mrs Lavery rather over-egged her performance by insisting on sitting in the hospital throughout the night because of the 'risks of premature birth', which naturally gave rise to a few funny stories on the dinner circuit, but nobody minded. Versions of this sort of folderol are still rather touchingly employed in Society on such occasions. These things are rituals rather than untruths and cause no harm. The point was the baby was female, which took any future strain out of the situation. It meant everything could return to normal without a lingering after-taste.

  Even Lady Uckfield, usually so careful, gave herself away in a rare unguarded moment when I telephoned to learn the news.

  'Boy or girl?' I asked when she picked up the receiver.

  'Girl,' said Lady Uckfield. 'Isn't it a relief?' Then, quickly but not quickly enough, she added, 'That they're both doing so well.'

  'A great relief,' I answered, going along with this dishonesty. There was no point in blaming her for retaining the deepest prejudices of her kind. Now that the baby could not inherit the glories of Broughton, thanks to the arcane laws governing the peerage that even Mr Blair, for all his trumpeting of women's rights, has not seen fit to change, she would present no further danger and might be lived with in peace. Since all three 'parents' were fair there was not much chance of the baby having the wrong colouring and, at least to date, the girl does not seem particularly to favour Simon, always assuming of course that the infant is his — something of which one can, after all, never be entirely sure. Not at least without resorting to DNA testing, which no entrant in Debrett's would ever risk for fear of what it might reveal. One foreign visitor at Broughton, ignorant of the excellent Edwardian maxim never to 'comment on a likeness in another's child' asked me if I did not think she took after Charles.

  I may have imagined a momentary chill in the room but I nodded. 'I do,' I said. 'She's not like Edith at all.' Thereby earning an especially warm glance from my host. Amusingly enough, when I looked at the toddler properly, she did seem to resemble him a bit. But then again that may have been in expression rather than feature. It might seem strange but in later years Charles came to love the girl so much that his younger children would complain of his favouritism. Even less logically, she would eventually develop into the preferred grandchild of Lady Uckfield, which only goes to show that the old maxim is correct and there's nowt so queer as folk. At any rate, barely fourteen months later, Lady Broughton was once more brought to bed, this time of a boy. The new Viscount Nutley was welcomed with bonfires and bun fights in Sussex and Norfolk and, frankly, to be brutal and unmodernist about it, the exact paternity of little Lady Anne had ceased to matter much to anyone.

  Caroline did divorce Eric. It was a quiet business without acrimony and with more style than I confess I thought Eric capable of. He was not single long. Within eighteen months he had married the daughter of an immensely rich Cheshire industrialist, Christine somebody or other. They were much better suited than he and Caroline had been. For one thing, she shared Eric's ambitions, which she pursued as relentlessly as if they had been her own and of course they soon were. I happened to meet them both at Ascot a few months after they married and I must say I liked her. She was full of energy and in many ways a good deal easier to rub along with than Caroline, even if she was already infected with Eric's nonsense. I remember her using the phrase 'our sort of people', meaning, I imagine, some sort of exclusive social group to which they belonged. It must have been a luxury for Eric who had spent his entire first marriage being reminded daily of an Inner Circle forever closed to him.

  He growled at me by way of recognition but I was not offended. I had by this time forgiven Eric his earlier insults and anyway one of the freedoms of growing older is that one is no longer obliged to dislike someone simply because they dislike you. After all, he was entitled. Lady Uckfield had made no secret of how little she relished his company and had, somewhat maliciously I suspect, used me at times to demonstrate this.

  'I suppose you still see them all?' he said when his wife had stopped discussing her new Poggenpohl kitchen.

  I nodded. 'We've got a baby now so a bit less than I did. But yes, I see them.'

  'And is dear Edith happy in her work?' Of course, it was quite understandable that he should be irritated when he contemplated one who had survived the course that had brought him down.

  'I think so.'

  'I'll bet she is. And how is darling "Googie"?' He spat out the name just as I had once heard Edith do before her rehabilitation. Now, for her at least, the name had re-normalised. 'I wonder what my dear ex-mother-in-law thinks of all the recent developments.'

  'Oh, I'd say she was pretty merry, one way and another,' I said, for all the world as if I thought he cared, and we nodded to each other and moved on.

  As I strolled away to rejoin Adela for tea with Louisa in the Household Stand I pondered my answers and concluded that I had spoken no more than the truth. Of course, as everyone had predicted, the children had changed everything. One may be exhausted but there is little time to be bored with two children under four, particularly as Edith, to her mother-in-law's bemusement, had eschewed a proper Norland nanny and chosen instead to have a series of Portuguese and Australians.

  Charming girls, one and all (or nearly all), but not the type to take over the nursery as their province. I thought it a wise decision and so, I was pleased to note, did Charles.

  But as to quite what Lady Uckfield
really made of it all … One would have to get up very early in the morning to know precisely what she thought about anything, earlier than I rise, certainly. We were not, as I had predicted, quite such friends after the reinstatement of Edith. Although I have not yet given up hope of regaining my former position of Court Favourite.

  Poor woman, she had allowed herself to dream a little during the interregnum and the imagined life she had woven for herself with dear Clarissa or one of her kind as junior chatelaine had filled her with happy prospects. Ironically her imaginings had not been all that unlike the despised Mrs Lavery's. Lady Uckfield, too, had seen herself as a special friend of her daughter-in-law's family. The two grandmothers would lunch together perhaps and take in an exhibition… So it was hard to reconcile herself to the Return of Edith, not least because she had allowed herself the rare luxury of admitting what she really felt while Edith was away. Worse, she had confessed these secrets not only to herself and her husband, which was bad enough, but to me, a non-relation. In doing so she knew she had given me a weapon. From now on whenever she referred to 'our darling Edith' there was a risk that I might catch her eye if I so wished and in her heart expose her. I had no intention of doing this but the threat of it introduced a coldness between us nevertheless. I was and am sorry but there is nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, Adela and I continue to stay at Broughton pretty regularly.

  I remember once Lady Uckfield did let herself go a little. There had been a dinner party and the guests were spread out in knots over the drawing room and the Red Saloon next door. Edith was at the centre of an admiring group, for you will understand that a lot of people had a good deal of ground to make up having dropped her during her period of exile. One might have thought that those who had been loyal, Annette Watson for one, would have been rewarded with a shower of invitations but I don't believe they were. Perhaps this was predictable. Anyway, on this particular evening, surrounded as she was, Edith made some remark, I forget what, which was greeted with gales of sycophantic laughter. I was alone, having helped myself to some more coffee, so there was no one to overhear when Lady Uckfield drew level.

  'Edith Triumphans,' she said. I nodded. But she would not let it go. 'To the victor the spoils.'

  'And is Edith the victor?' I asked.

  'Isn't she?'

  'I don't know.' I shrugged. I imagine I was attempting to be philosophical and by an easy and familiar transition had become dishonest.

  'Of course she is the victor,' said Lady Uckfield, quite truthfully. 'You have won.'

  Now this was irritating. She was right about Edith, I do admit, but not about me. If anything I had always been a partisan of the Uckfields during the struggle for Charles's soul and she knew it. 'Don't blame me,' I said quite firmly. 'You asked me not to encourage her and I didn't. It was your own daughter who arranged it all, not me. The fact is Charles wanted her back.

  Voilà tout. He must know what's best for himself, I suppose.'

  Lady Uckfield laughed. 'That, of course, is precisely what he does not know.' Her tone was a little bitter but more predominately sad. It was also, as I knew it must be, the tone of resignation. 'I told you I didn't believe they would be happy and I wait anxiously to be proved wrong. However,' she waved her little claws and the jewels in her rings flashed in the firelight, 'the thing is done. We must make the best of it. It is time to move on to the next square. Let us at least hope they will be no less happy than everybody else.' And she was gone.

  Would they be less happy than everybody else? That was certainly the question. Although she had returned to him without treaty, Edith had nevertheless wrung some considerable concessions in the process. To start with she had grasped the folly of her earlier belief that it was safer to be bored in the country than entertained in London and she had persuaded Charles into a house in Fulham, which had been purchased for more or less what the little flat in Eaton Place had gone for. Now she allowed herself a day or two in London a week. She had also found some committees to sit on and had become involved, down in Sussex, in the actual day-to-day running of a hospice near Lewes. All in all, she had started to evolve the life she would be leading at sixty when she herself, never mind everyone else, would have forgotten that there had ever been a hiccup in her early married life. I thought, on reflection, that it all boded quite well.

  We went down to Broughton two or three times a year as a rule. Adela and Edith were never much more than amiable with each other but Charles became very fond of my wife and so we were easy guests, I think. We enjoyed it as, apart from anything else, we had a baby in tow and the houses we could stay in without feeling that we had imported a miniature anarchist were few. Our son, Hugo, was about five months older than Anne and that ensured a measure of shared activity, accompanied by a good deal of merriment from both mothers. It is a truism but it is still true that the longer one knows people the less relevant it becomes whether or not one liked them initially. As I knew from my friendship with Isabel Easton, there is no substitute for shared history and it was clear that by the time ten years had passed, my wife and Lady Broughton would think of themselves as close friends without ever necessarily liking each other much more than they did to start with.

  Needless to say, at an early stage after the great patch-up, Edith wished me to understand that she was not interested in pursuing long conversations about her choices, past or present. I quite agreed with her so she needn't have worried. I know only too well how tedious it is to have the recipient of earlier intimacies still hanging around when those intimacies have become irrelevant embarrassments. Anyway, so far as I was concerned, she had seen sense and I hadn't the slightest desire to shake her resolve.

  She tested me a few times, waiting, when we happened to be alone, to see if I would bring up the subject of Simon or Charles or marriage or, worse, the baby, but I never did and I am happy to say she began to relax into our old intimacy.

  In truth, even had she questioned me, I would have had little to report on the Simon front. I don't know how anxious his wife was to take him back when she had been given the surprising news that his Great Affair was over but, whatever her feelings, she had done it. I saw him once, some months later, at an audition and he told me he was planning to move to Los Angeles to 'try my luck'. I wasn't surprised since this is not an unusual reaction for a player after a disappointing career. As a rule the Hollywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money — and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years. However, there are always exceptions and I would not be surprised if Simon were one. He seemed to have all the qualities the natives of that city admire and none that they dislike.

  Perhaps because he knew we would not be meeting for a while, he asked after Edith. I muttered that she was well and he nodded. 'I'm glad.'

  'Good.'

  He shook his head at me and raised his eyebrows. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Women!'

  I nodded and gave him a sympathetic laugh so we parted friends. I suppose one might gauge the extent of his heartbreak from this subsequent reaction. I do not think Charles would have shaken his head to an acquaintance and said, 'Women!' like a character from a situation comedy had his wife chosen never to return. I think he would have curled up in the dark somewhere and never mentioned her name again, so I suppose we must all concede that Edith had ended up with the man who loved her most. Even so, there was no malice in Simon's eyes and I think one should remember this at least, that when all was said and done there really wasn't any harm in him. It is surely not so terrible a testimonial.

  Nor did I ever betray to Edith the Eastons', or rather David's, anxiety to stay in with the family, if necessary at her expense.

  Gradually even that slightly uncomfortable connection was also resumed. All in all, things went back to normal surprisingly quickly. Even the papers only gave it a couple of squibs — in the Standard, I s
eem to remember, and in one of the tabloids

  — and then it was over.

  Just once she did bring it up, perhaps because I never had. We were walking in the gardens on a Sunday in summer three or even four years after she had returned to the fold and we found ourselves down by the approach to the rose garden where they had set up our chairs for the filming, however long ago it was. The others were playing croquet and as we strolled along, the sound of balls being hit and people getting cross wafted gently over us. Suddenly I was struck by the image of Simon Russell, in his frilled shirt, stretched out on the ground in all his comeliness, as he gossiped that faraway day to a younger, sillier Edith. I said nothing of course and I was taken by surprise when she suddenly spoke into my imaginings.

  'Do you ever see him now?' she said.

  I shook my head. 'No. I don't think anyone does. He's gone off to California.'

  'To make films?'

  'Well, that's the idea. Or at least to make a television series.'

  'And is he making one?'

  'Not yet but you never know.'

  'What about his wife?'

  'She's gone with him.'

  Edith nodded. We strolled on into the rose garden. Some heavily scented, dark red blooms, Papa Meilland maybe, filled the warm air with their sweet stench.

  'Aren't you ever going to ask me if I'm happy?' said Edith with a provocative flick of her head.

  'No.'

  'Well, I'll tell you anyway.' She broke off a half-open bud and fed its stalk through the top buttonhole of my shirt. 'The fact is, I'm happy enough.'