Snobs: A Novel, page 24
'Jane. Henry.' Charles stood up and gestured at Edith. 'Do you know Edith Lavery? Henry and Jane Cumnor.' Jane took Edith's hand in a swift and lifeless hold then turned back to Charles as she sat down and poured herself a glass of their wine.
'I'm parched. How are you? What happened to you at Ascot?'
'Nothing happened. I was there.'
'I thought we were all having lunch on Thursday. With the Weatherbys? We hunted and hunted for you before we gave up.
Camilla was bitterly disappointed.' She gave a half-smirk to Edith, ostensibly inviting her to join the joke. In fact, of course, consciously excluding her from it.
'Well, she shouldn't have been. I told her and Anne that I had to have lunch with my parents that day.'
'Needless to say they'd completely forgotten. Anyway, doesn't matter now. By the way, tell me: are you going to Eric and Caroline in August? They swore you were but it seemed so unlike you.'
'Why?'
Jane shrugged with a lazy, sinuous movement of the shoulder. 'I don't know. I thought you hated the heat.'
'I haven't made up my mind. Are you going?'
'We don't know, do we, darling?' She reached across to her puffing husband and kneaded his doughy hand. 'We're so behind with everything at Royton. We've hardly been home since Henry got political. I've a ghastly feeling we might be stuck there all summer.' She again broadened her smile to include Edith.
Edith smiled back. She was quite used to this curious need on the part of the upper-classes to demonstrate that they all know each other and do the same things with the same people. This was perhaps an unusually manic example of the palisade mentality but, looking at Lord Cumnor, aka Henry the Green Engine, it was not difficult to see that Jane had made some severe sacrifices to achieve whatever position she was in command of. It would be hard for her to set it aside, even for a moment, as a thing of little importance.
'Are you very political?' Edith said to Henry, who seemed to be recovering from the effort it had taken him to cross the floor.
'Yes,' he said, and turned back to the others.
Edith had been inclined to feel rather sorry for him but she saw in a moment that he perceived no need to feel sorry for himself. He was quite happy being who he was. Just as he was quite happy to demonstrate that he knew Charles and did not know Edith. Charles, however, was not prepared to have the Cumnors be rude to the girl he had invited for dinner and he consciously and obviously turned the conversation back to her.
'Henry's frightfully serious since he took his seat. What was your latest cause? Organic veg for prisoners?'
'Ha, ha,' said Henry.
Jane came to her husband's aid. 'Don't be beastly. He's done a lot of work for the national diet, haven't you, darling?'
'Which didn't include going on it, I gather,' said Charles.
'You laugh now but they'll come after you when your father snuffs it. You'll see,' said Jane.
'No they won't. Labour will win next time and they'll have the hereditaries out before you can say Jack Robinson.'
'Don't be so pessimistic.' Jane did not want to hear that the world she had pinned all her hopes on was threatened with extinction. 'Anyway, it'd be years before they came up with a formula for the Lords that works better and they won't do anything in a hurry.'
Charles stood up and asked Edith to dance.
She raised her eyes in a half-query as they shambled around the floor, by now crammed with Iranian bankers and their mistresses.
He smiled. 'Henry's all right.'
'Is he a great friend?'
'He's a sort of cousin. I've known him all my life. God, he's fat at the moment, isn't he? He looks like a balloon.'
'How long have they been married?'
He shook his head. 'Four, five years, I suppose.'
'Do they have any children?'
He made a wry shape with his mouth. 'Two girls. Poor old Henry. Setchell's got him drinking port and eating cheese and Christ knows what.'
'Why?'
'To get a boy, of course. To get the bloody boy.'
'What happens if they don't have one?'
Charles frowned. 'There are no brothers. I think some bloke in South Africa gets the title although I'm not sure if he or the girls get the swag. Anyway, they're both quite young. They'll bash on for a while longer, I should think.'
'It could get rather expensive.'
'It certainly could. You never know how long to keep going. Look at the Clanwilliams. Six girls before they called it a day and it's worse nowadays.'
'Why?'
'Why do you think? Even the girls have to go to decent schools.'
They danced in silence for a while with Charles occasionally nodding to various acquaintances on the floor. Edith gratefully recognised two girls from her deb season and flashed brilliant smiles at them. Taking in the identity of her partner, they waved back, allowing her to feel less invisible. By the time they returned to the table, she was beginning to feel that she was really having quite a jolly time.
Henry and Jane had not moved and as they approached, Jane jumped up and seized Charles's hand. 'It's time you danced with me. Henry hates dancing. Come on.' She led Charles back to the floor, leaving Edith alone with her porcine husband.
He smiled vaguely. 'She always says that. I don't really hate dancing at all. Would you like to give it a go?'
Edith shook her head. 'Not unless you're dying to, if you don't mind. I'm exhausted.' The thought of being pressed into that pillow of blubber made her shudder.
He nodded philosophically. Being turned down was obviously not a new experience. 'Do you know Charlie well?'
'No. We just met in the country and then again at Ascot and here I am.'
'Where in the country? Who with?' He perked up a bit at the chance of some more Name Exchange.
'With the Eastons. In Sussex. David and Isabel. Do you know them?' She knew very well he would not. She was right.
'I've known Charlie all my life.'
Edith fished idly in her brain for an answer. 'I don't think I've known anybody all my life. Except my parents,' she added with a laugh.
Henry did not laugh back. 'Oh,' he said.
She tried again. 'Who are Eric and Caroline?'
'Caroline's his sister. I've known her all my life too.' He nodded gently to himself, pleased with these long associations.
'Eric's this chap she's just married.'
'I gather you haven't known him all your life.'
'Never saw him before the wedding.'
'Is he nice?'
'I really couldn't tell you.' Obviously Caroline was guilty of some hideous impropriety in Henry's eyes. Some horrible miscegenation had taken place in this coupling of strangers. Edith felt that she herself was hovering at the borders of a solecism by even talking about the interloper.
'Where is Royton?'
This time Henry's face registered surprise rather than distaste. For her not to know where Royton was must surely indicate that she was an eccentric. 'Norfolk.'
'Is it lovely?' Edith was beginning to feel as if she was turning over huge clods of ploughed earth in her effort to keep Henry entertained.
He shrugged and looked round for the bottle to help himself to another glass. 'People seem to think so.'
Edith opened her mouth to try again and then shut it. Not for the last time she was struck by the tyranny of the socially inept. Endless effort is harnessed to a sluggish and boring conversation simply to preserve these dullards from a sense of their inadequacy. The irony being that they are quite impervious to their own shortcomings. If Henry had even noticed things were at all heavy going he would unhesitatingly have blamed it on Edith and the fact that she didn't know anyone interesting. Before the silence had become oppressive Charles and Jane returned and the remainder of the time was spent gossiping about more people that Edith had never met.
'What a lovely evening,' she said, as the car stopped outside her parents' flat. Charles made no attempt to park it so he clearly knew the night would contain no sexual epilogue.
'I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm sorry we got rather lumbered.'
'Don't be. I liked them,' she lied.
'Did you?' He seemed a bit anxious. 'I'm glad.'
'Henry was telling me about Royton.'
He nodded, back on home territory. 'Yes, they're next door to me up there. That's really why I know them.'
'I thought they were cousins.'
'Well, they are. From a marriage in about eighteen thirty. But I know them because they live next door.'
'It sounds lovely.'
'It is. I'm not sure how good old Henry is at managing it but it is charming. Anyway, there's pots of money so I suppose it doesn't matter too much.' It was easy to see that Charles thought he was terrifically good at managing Broughton.
They stared at each other for a moment. Edith realised that she rather wanted him to kiss her. Partly because she wanted to be sure she'd been a success, and partly because she just wanted to kiss him. He leaned forward awkwardly and pressed his mouth against hers. His lips were hard and firmly shut. He sat back. Ah, she thought. More Philip than George. Oh well. What she said was, 'Good night and thank you again. I have so enjoyed it.'
'Good,' he said, and he got out of the car and escorted her across the road to the front door, but he made no attempt to kiss her again as he said good night, nor was there any mention of the next time they would meet. It would be fair to say that, up to that moment, she had not been aware of wanting much more from the evening than the reassurance that Charles found her attractive, liked her company and wanted to see more of her. But now that the ending was proving rather flat, she was filled with a feeling of disappointment, with the sense of a chance lost. This had been a great opportunity and she had blown it without fully understanding why. On the whole, it was with a sense of failure that she crept quietly into her room, trying not to wake the mother who was lying staring at the ceiling two doors down.
She need not have been downcast. She did not know Charles and had misinterpreted his reticence. Because he was generally seen as a prize, she thought he must share this image of himself but this was not so. He felt that it was he, not Edith, on whom the responsibility for the evening lay. He was shy (not rude-shy, really shy) and so, while he could not quite express it, he was very pleased that she had appeared to have enjoyed being with him. In fact, as Charles pushed the key into the lock of his parents' flat in Cadogan Square, it was with a warm sense of an evening well spent. He liked Edith very much. More than he could remember liking any girl. With the respect for hypocrisy that is the due of a hypocritical society, he admired her all the more for pretending to like the Cumnors when it was plain that they, or at least Jane, had been bestial to her all evening.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The Uckfields' London flat occupied the ground and first floors of one of those tall, Edwardian Dutch, red brick houses that surround the exclusive, if not exactly bewitching square. It was a pleasant enough place, furnished with that delicately balanced mixture of the comfortable and the grand that his mother had learned from John Fowler and proceeded to make her own. The pictures, from the B-list of the family's collection, were carefully chosen to suggest hereditary importance without overpowering the spaces. The hangings, the ornaments, the very tables and chairs proclaimed the rank of the family but in a modest way. 'This is where we visit,' the artefacts seemed to say, 'but it is not who we are.' Just as no member of the family, not even Caroline, who lived there solidly for four years before her marriage, would ever refer to the place as 'home'. Home was Broughton. 'I'll be in the flat next week', 'I'm going up to the flat', 'Why don't we meet at the flat?' were all very well, but 'I must get home', even at the end of a long London dinner, could only ever mean that the Broughton in question was driving down to Sussex that night. These people may own a house in Chester Square and rent a small cottage in Derbyshire, but you may be pretty sure that 'home' is the one with the grass growing round it. And if no such hide-away exists, then they will make it plain that it is essential to their well-being to escape the smoke and pavements and fly to their rural friends as often as they can, thereby suggesting that while they may spend their lives walking on tarmac or behind a city desk, they will always be country people at heart. It is rare to find an aristocrat who is happier in London — at least, it is rare to find one who admits it.
Charles had his own flat, a jumble of modest rooms on a third floor in Eaton Place but he didn't usually bother with it.
Cadogan Square was nicer and more comfortable, and he could pick up any post there and bring it down without a fuss. But perhaps because Broughton was after all the product of many generations' taste, he was always aware of the imprint of his mother whenever he visited her London base. The family's real London headquarters, Broughton House, had been in St James's Square, but it had taken a direct hit in the Blitz and so they were spared the agonising decision of most of their relations as to whether or not it was sensible to abandon the town house at the end of the war. Charles's grandparents had acquired a rather dank flat in Albert Hall Mansions, which his mother had rejected out of hand and it was she who selected and therefore entirely created this apartment as an appropriate setting for the charity work and the entertaining that demanded her presence in the capital from time to time.
As he sat down with a late-night glass of whisky, Charles thought about his mother. He looked at the prettily framed sketch of the seven-year-old Lady Harriet Trevane (as Lady Uckfield was born). It was by Annigoni and was placed on a small régence table near the drawing-room chimneypiece. Even as a girl, with a hair-ribbon drooping down among her charcoaled curls, he could detect the familiar, unflinching, cat-like stare. He might as well face facts. His mother would not like Edith.
That he knew. If Edith had been presented to his mother as the wife of a friend she might have liked her — if she had taken the smallest notice of her — but Edith would not be welcomed as Charles's girlfriend. Still less, should such a thing ever come to pass, would she be encouraged as Lady Uckfield's ultimate successor, as the one to whom his mother must entrust the house, the position, the very county she had worked so hard on and for so long.
This is not to say that Charles was without sympathy for his mama. On the contrary, he loved her very much and he felt he was right to do so. He saw beyond her public image of studied perfection and he liked what he found there. It pleased Lady Uckfield always to give the impression that everything in life had been handed to her on a plate. This was no truer for her than it is for the rest of the human race but she preferred to be on the receiving end of envy rather than pity and all her life had chosen, in the words of the song, to pack up her troubles in her old kit bag and smile. As a rule, this was not too onerous a choice, since she found her own problems as dull as she found everybody else's, but Charles respected this philosophy and he liked her for it. He did not perhaps fully appreciate the extent to which, in her concerted assumption of the 'brave face', she was only being loyal to the tenets of her kind.
The upper classes are not, as a whole, a complaining lot. As a group they would generally rather not 'go on about it'. A brisk walk and a stiff drink are their chosen methods of recovery whether struck in the heart or the wallet. Much has been written in the tabloid press about their coldness but it is not lack of feeling that marks them apart, rather it is lack of expression of feeling. Naturally they do not see this as a failing in themselves and nor do they admire public emotion in others. They are genuinely bewildered by working-class grief, those bereaved mothers being dragged sobbing and supported into church, those soldiers' widows photographed weeping over 'his last letter'. The very word 'counsellor' sends a shudder of disgust down any truly well-bred spine. What they do not appreciate, of course, is that these tragedies, national and domestic, the war casualties, the random killings, the pile-ups on the M3, offer most ordinary bereaved what is probably their only chance of fleeting celebrity. For once in their lives they can appease that very human craving for some prominence, some public recognition of their plight. The upper classes do not understand this hunger because they do not share it. They are born prominent.
The one arena of his mother's struggles that Charles really knew about was Lady Uckfield's war with his grandmother, the dowager marchioness, who had not been an easy mother-in-law. She was the tall, bony, long-nosed daughter of a duke and so not at all impressed with the pretty little brunette her son had brought home with him. Old Lady Uckfield had been Queen Mary to her daughter-in-law's Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and the relationship was never warm. Even after her husband's demise and well into Charles's conscious years, the dowager's behaviour continued unchecked and she was still attempting to countermand orders with the housekeeper, instruct the gardeners directly and cancel groceries with a view to replacing them with more 'suitable' items to the day of her largely unlamented death.
That these attempts were not successful, that her power was broken was a direct result of the one real fight between them, the thought of which always made Charles smile. Soon after her dethronement as chatelaine of Broughton, his grandmother had interfered with a new re-hang of the pictures in the saloon while Lady Uckfield was in London. On her return, Lady Uckfield's discovery that her scheme had been abandoned made her so angry that, for the only time in recorded history, she, in modern parlance, lost it. This resulted in a fully fledged screaming match, surely unique in the history of the room in question — at least since the more rollicking days of the eighteenth century. To the enraptured delight of the listening servants, Lady Uckfield denounced her mother-in-law as an ill-mannered, ill-bred, interfering old bitch. 'Ill-bred?' shrieked the dowager, selecting from the list of insults the only one to pierce her carapace. 'Ill-bred!' and she stalked from the house, determined never to darken its doors again. His mother had told Charles many times that she regretted the incident and it was certainly a relief to her that old Lady Uckfield, having made her point, did eventually return to Broughton for the customary festivals but, even so, the battle had achieved its purpose. Thenceforth the young Marchioness was in charge, and the house, the estate and the village were under no illusions about it.
