Snobs by Julian Fellowes (35 page)

'Don't tell me Charles has gone. I got stuck in traffic and I left too late anyway.'

It was easy to see why. She had taken immense trouble with her appearance and I could not remember seeing her in better fettle, her lovely face flawless, her hair shining and an alluring evening outfit encasing her already desirable form.

'Stop worrying,' I murmured reassuringly. 'He hasn't arrived yet.'

'But he is coming?'

'I suppose so. Tommy said he was.'

'That's what he said to me but where is he?'

She bit her lip in annoyance as a couple of her former friends grudgingly decided to acknowledge her presence and draw her into conversation. Adela came up to me.

'What's she doing here?' she said. 'I thought this was the other camp.'

'Not really. I gather Tommy was trying to bring them together.'

'You amaze me. Two days ago, I ran into Arabella at Harvey Nicks and she was saying the break-up was the best thing that could have happened.'

'I don't doubt it but even married couples can on occasion disagree. Or don't you believe such a thing possible?'

'I believe it,' said Adela sourly, 'but I still don't see how Arabella could have allowed the invitation in the first place.'

The answer, of course, which I could not give then but I was able to supply later, was that Arabella had given no such agreement.

The party was on its last legs. A few of us had been invited to stay on for dinner and we were in that uncomfortable, if familiar, period when almost everyone who is not invited to remain has gone but there is always a couple who do not realise that they are delaying the launch of the next stage of the evening. Usually, the hostess weakens and says to the obdurate, 'Do stay for something to eat if you'd like to.' To the trained ear, this translates as, 'Please go. We are hungry and you are not invited.' The old hand on the cocktail party circuit will then look around, blush and scuttle away, muttering about having to be somewhere else. But there is always the risk that the stayer will be uninitiated in these rituals or stubborn or simply stupid — in which case they may accept the unmeant offer of hospitality. In this instance, Arabella Wainwright was clearly not prepared to take a chance on having to entertain Edith for the rest of the evening and so she said nothing. But still Edith would not leave. I strolled over to her.

'I suppose you're having dinner here?' she said.

'We are. And so I imagine is more or less everyone else in the room.'

She looked around. When she spoke her voice had a bleakness that almost brought tears to my eyes. 'I was all geared up. It didn't occur to me that he wouldn't come. His mother must have got wind of it and put him off somehow.'

'I don't see how. Tommy didn't tell me you were coming and I can't imagine he would have told anyone else.'

She didn't linger all that much longer. When Arabella brought a pile of plates out of the tiny kitchen and plonked them noisily onto the dining room table alongside an arrangement of sporting mats even Edith had to admit defeat.

'I must run,' she said to her detached and unbending hostess. 'Thank you. It's been lovely seeing you again.'

Arabella nodded silently, only too glad to be rid of her but Tommy took her to the door. 'I don't know what happened,' he said. 'I am sorry.'

Edith gave him a sad little smile. 'Oh well. Perhaps it's not meant to be.' Then she kissed him and left. But for all her pretended acceptance of fate, she continued to think someone had wrecked her chances. And she was right.

It was much later in the evening when, in a rare break with my personal tradition, I was helping to clear some plates away, that I overheard a short snatch of conversation coming from behind the kitchen door.

'What do you mean?' said an exasperated Tommy.

'Exactly what I say. I thought it was unfair to spring an ambush on him when we're supposed to be his friends.'

'If that was really what you thought then why didn't you tell Charles and let him make up his own mind?'

'I might ask you the same question.'

Tommy was clearly flustered. 'Because I'm not sure he knows his own mind.'

When Arabella spoke again, it was hard to discern the faintest traces of regret. 'Precisely. And that is why I told his mother.'

'Then you're a bitch.'

'Maybe. You can tell me I was wrong in six months time. Now take in the cream and don't spill it.'

Unable to pretend that I was arranging the dirty plates for much longer, I pushed the kitchen door open to find no sign of dispute within.

'How kind you are,' said Arabella, smoothly relieving me of my burden.

My wife was reluctant to be drawn into a moral position as we drove home. 'Just don't do anything of the sort to me,' she said, and I agreed. Not that I would criticise Tommy. Indeed I thought he had acted the part of a true friend but, rather feebly perhaps, it was not a position I was anxious to find myself in. I did not repeat what Arabella had said about the six-month interval probably because, even at that stage, I did not want to take it on board.

===OO=OOO=OO===

A few days later, Edith awoke to find herself vomiting into the lavatory bowl. She must have fumbled her way there in half-sleep and it was only the act of retching that finally brought her to her senses. When at last it seemed that even the very lining of her stomach must have been discharged into the pan, she stopped, gasped for air and sat back. Simon came to the door, with his hand over the portable telephone. He slept naked and normally the sight of his godly form cheered her into a sense of present good but this morning, his lightly muscled charms were wasted on her.

'Are you all right?' he asked superfluously.

'I think it must have been those prawns,' she said, knowing full well that he had chosen the soup.

'Poor you. Better out than in.' He smiled, holding up the receiver, and mimed, 'It's your mother,' with a comic grimace. Edith nodded and reached out her hand for the telephone. 'I'll make some coffee,' said Simon, and wandered off to the kitchen.

Edith wiped her mouth and settled her thoughts. 'Mummy? No, I was in the bathroom.'

'Was that you being sick?' said Mrs Lavery at the other end.

'Well, I don't know who else.'

'Are you all right?'

'Of course I'm all right. We went to a ghastly place in Earl's Court last night that's been opened by some failed actor Simon knows. I had shellfish. I must have been mad.'

'Only I thought you were looking rather green around the gills when I saw you.' Edith had accompanied her mother on a fruitless search for a hat the previous week. That was enough in itself to make most people fairly green but she said nothing. 'So you're not ill?'

'Certainly not.'

'You would tell me if there was… something, wouldn't you?'

Edith knew very well that she would hesitate to trust her mother with the time of day but there was no point in going into that now. 'Of course I would,' she said. There was a pause.

'And I suppose there's no news. About… everything…'

'No.'

'Oh, darling.' However irritated, Edith did feel sorry for her mother. She was forced to concede that Mrs Lavery, shallow as her values might be, was experiencing some perfectly genuine emotions. Particularly regret. 'You won't take any… step you might be sorry about, will you?'

'What step?'

'I mean… you won't burn your bridges until you're sure…'

Edith was used to her mother's seemingly limitless supply of clich�s so she needed no translator to tell her what they were discussing. Oddly, despite the paucity of her mother's vocabulary, the question had succeeded in centring her thoughts on the matter. As she brought the conversation to an end and cleared the line, she knew the time had come for positive action.

It was a Saturday, a mild, pleasant day for them as a rule, involving newspapers, a lunch out somewhere, perhaps a cinema or possibly a dinner with some friends in a Wandsworth kitchen but as Edith dressed she knew that no such day lay ahead for her. She selected her outfit with considerable care, casual country clothes, well bred, unshowy, exactly the type of skirt and jersey that she had renounced with a religious fervour so short a time ago. Just as when she was choosing her clothes for the dress show, she was once more conscious that her two lives demanded two costumes. A duke's daughter might get away with wearing some streetwalker's outfit from Voyage at a dinner in Shropshire, indeed she would be praised for her aristocratic eccentricity but she, Edith, would never be given the same licence. Had she dared to wear London clothes in the country, to Charles's circle it would only have been a confirmation of her ill-breeding. When she entered the kitchen, Simon looked up in surprise. 'My word. You look as if you're auditioning for
Hay Fever.'

'I feel such a fool. I promised to take my mother to a lunch party today and I completely forgot about it. That's why she rang. Can you forgive me?'

'Whose lunch party?'

'Just some country cousins.'

'You don't have any country cousins. Wasn't that the whole point?' In saying this, Simon showed one of his rare flashes of understanding. It was exactly the point.

'I do but I never talk about them. They're too boring to live.'

'Which means you don't want me to come.' Simon hated to be left out of anything. Or at least, if he was, it had to be his choice. He didn't mind being too busy to join in, in fact he quite enjoyed it, but the thought that people were not anxious for his company — even if it was for a journey to the post box — was anathema to him.

Edith smiled a wistful, wouldn't-that-be-nice smile. 'I wish. But she's been begging me for us to have some time on our own. I suppose she wants to talk about everything.' This was accompanied by a half-shrug that brooked no argument.

'Just be nice about me.'

She gave him a warm and supportive smile, knowing that in her heart she was plotting his fall, and set off downstairs to their bedroom to collect her coat. She did not want to tell Simon where she was going as that would have detonated a scene and she was by no means certain of the day's possible outcome. The last thing she wanted was for him to flounce back to his wife in a pet, leaving her to come home to an empty flat.

The truth was she had determined, in that morning moment of surveying her own floating sick, that she was not going to be put off for one day longer. She would drive that very morning to Broughton and beard the lion — or rather the lioness's cub — in his den. As she sped out down the A22, she couldn't really understand what had taken her so long to come to this decision. This was her husband and she was going to what was, after all, her marital home. No one could argue with that.

An unpleasant surprise was waiting for her, as she had forgotten that on a Saturday in summer the house would of course be open to the public. Somehow that had slipped through her calculations and she was now in the faintly ludicrous position of having to choose between parking her car in the courtyard and going in through the family's entrance or entering by the public door and travelling up into the body of the house surrounded by tourists and housewives from Brighton. She made the bold decision to go in by the latter route. She thought there would be plenty of time to block her path if she rang the family's doorbell and she was gambling on Charles being in his own study, which was next to the library. It would be the work of a moment to slip through the cordon and open the door and she correctly guessed that none of the guides would stop her. Indeed, she made a point of pausing to say hello to the pleasant woman in a stout, country suit who stood taking tickets. 'Hello, Mrs Curley, how are you? Can I creep in this way? Would you mind?' Edith had mastered this particular trick of her husband's people, that of asking as a favour something that cannot be refused. 'Oh, Mrs So-and-so, could you
bear
to wait up until we get home? Would that be a
terrible
bore for you?' Of course, the wretched woman being instructed in this way (as well as her employer) knows that this really means 'You are forbidden to go to bed until I have returned' but it is of course a more self-congratulatory way to deliver a command. It is all part of the aristocracy's consciously created image. They like to pride themselves on being 'marvellous with servants', which usually means making impossible demands in the friendliest voice imaginable.

Mrs Curley was clearly uncomfortable with the request but as Edith had predicted, there was nothing she could do about it. 'Of course, mi-lady,' she said with a cheerful nod, and dialled the family's private number the minute Edith had passed by.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Charles Broughton was indeed in his study or, as Lady Uckfield liked to call it, the Little Library, just as Edith suspected. He was answering letters in a vague sort of way, pretending to be, rather than actually being, busy. The house party was of his mother's choosing and, as always, those friends she had selected for him were not congenial to his wounded soul. Diana Bohun he found cold and too self-consciously grand to be of interest while her husband was very nearly mad. Clarissa was not among them. He had at least managed to persuade his mother that she was barking up the wrong tree there but… if not Clarissa then who?

He knew about Edith's appearance at Tommy Wainwright's. Indeed Tommy had told him the following day, perhaps not wanting to have someone else deliver the news. At first Charles had been extremely angry, not with Tommy but with his mother. On the evening in question she had suddenly made him take her to visit some ancient friend in hospital, a mission that was represented to him as crucial but was of course, as he could see now, the simplest ploy to keep him from the Wainwright party. But then, after he had calmed down a little, he wondered for the thousandth time what would have been achieved by their meeting. Whatever his friends might say about the strangeness of her actions, he did understand why Edith had left him. He was dull. He knew this was true because, alas for him, he was just clever enough to be aware of it. He knew he was no company for her once the joy of her advancement had worn off. Half the time, if he was honest, he didn't really know what his wife was talking about. When she questioned the policy of the Opposition or tried to evaluate the benefits and harm of intervening in the Middle East… Charles knew there were differing points of view on these subjects but he didn't see why he was called upon to have them. So long as he kept voting Conservative and saying how frightful he thought New Labour, wasn't that enough? It was all and more than most of his pals in White's expected of him. Well, clearly it wasn't enough for Edith. Now even he had begun to suspect that she might conceivably want him back — or at least that she wanted to talk about it — but had anything changed? Wouldn't she tire of him again within a matter of months, if not weeks? Wouldn't it be better for her and for him if they knew when they were beaten? This in short was how he had begun to think of his marriage. A defeat certainly but a defeat that should now be faced up to and walked away from. Which was of course precisely what Lady Uckfield had intended. It is customary these days to suggest that all interference in the private lives of one's children invariably leads to disappointment but this is not true. Clever parents, who do not play their game too fast, can achieve their aims. And the Marchioness of Uckfield was cleverer than most.