Snobs by Julian Fellowes (37 page)

'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 and 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.

She saw then that people would not think ill of her for coming round to this opinion — something she dreaded — but, on the contrary, they were amazed she had ever walked out on her husband for such a hollow gourd. Even so, and at this moment she felt it behoved her to be honest for once in her life, it was not for Charles's virtues that she wanted him back nor even because of her secret. It was for the sense of protected importance that she missed and that now, in her unadmitted crisis, she needed more than ever. The truth was that her months away had only finally confirmed her mother's prejudices. Edith had gone for a walk and found it was cold outside.

'I think I'm leaving Eric,' said Caroline, as they nosed at last on to the M11. Edith nodded, raised her eyebrows slightly and said nothing. 'No comment?' asked Caroline. She was a terrifying driver, as she had never mastered the art of conducting a conversation without facing the other person.

Edith glanced nervously at a lorry that passed within inches and shook her head. 'Not really. I don't know that I'm in a position to make a comment. Anyway,' she stared out of the window, 'I never grasped why you married him. Leaving him seems much easier to understand.'

Caroline laughed. 'I've forgotten why I married him. That's the problem.'

'What luck there are no children.'

'Is it?' Caroline's face had assumed a hard Mount Rushmore look, which gave her the appearance of an Indian chief in some fifties western when one was still allowed to be on the side of the cowboys. 'I think it's rather a bore. It means if I want any I'll have to go through the whole bloody business again.' There was some truth in this. 'I can't help feeling sometimes that, within limits, it doesn't seem to make much odds whom one marries. One's bound to get a bit sick of them in the end.'

'Then why leave Eric?'

'I said "within limits",' answered Caroline with some asperity, taking her eyes completely off the road and narrowly avoiding a large transporter. 'In my old age, I have to concede that Lady Uckfield may have been right.' One of the most chilling comments on the private family life of the Broughtons was that Caroline and Charles, when talking to each other, would refer to their mother as 'Lady Uckfield'. It was sort of a joke and sort of a comment. Either way there was something troubling in it. Caroline continued. 'She told me it was a mistake to marry a man who was vulgar and had no money, which of course I went on to do. But she added that if I had to break these primary rules then I should be sure to marry a man who was polite and kind, rudeness and cruelty being the only two qualities that absolutely poison life.'

Edith nodded. 'I agree with her,' she said. She was perhaps surprised at the wisdom of her mother-in-law's injunction. She shouldn't have been. Lady Uckfield was far too intelligent not to realise that true misery stifles all endeavour. It was just that she was much more sensible than Edith about what constitutes true misery.

'Eric was so rude. Not just to me but to everyone. A dinner party at our house was a kind of survival course. The guests had to arrive armed and see how many brickbats they could avoid before escaping into the night. Looking back, I can't imagine why anyone ever came twice.'

'Then why did you marry him?'

'Partly to annoy my mother,' said Caroline, as if that was absolutely understood. 'Then partly because he was so good-looking. And finally, I suppose, because he tremendously wanted to marry me.'

'And now you don't think he was genuine.'

'No, he was genuine all right. He was desperate to marry me. But it was because I was a marquess's daughter. I didn't see that. Or I didn't see it was
only
that.'

Edith said nothing. The conversation was moving into a dangerous area. She heard the distant sound of cracking ice under her halting steps. 'Right,' she murmured.

But Caroline had not finished with her. 'Rather as you wanted to marry Charles,' she said. When Edith made no comment, she continued, 'Not that I blame you. There's much more point to it that way round. At least marrying Charles made you a countess. Even now, I can't see what Eric thought he'd get out of it.'

They drove on for a bit in silence. Then Edith re-opened. 'If that's what you think why are you driving me up here?'

Caroline thought for a moment, wrinkling her brows, as if the idea had only just occurred to her. She was almost hesitant when she spoke. 'Because Charles is so unhappy.'