Snobs: A Novel, page 39
He shook our hands in a hearty, blank way. 'Jolly good,' he said. 'Did you have a lot of trouble getting here?'
'We've only come from Ringmer,' said Isabel. 'My husband and I live there.'
'Really?' said Lord Uckfield. 'Was there a lot of traffic on the road? All those bloody people trying to escape the city if there's a glimmer of sun in the forecast. Was it difficult getting out?'
Isabel was about to embark on another long explanation of how she had not come from London, which I spared her. 'I came on the train,' I said.
'Very sensible.' He smiled his expansive, florid smile and nodded us away.
The Marquess of Uckfield was a dull and stupid man but there was, on the whole, no harm in him. He had been spoiled all his life and surrounded by the kind of toadies that such people find comfort in, garnered from the distant strands of their own families as well as on the highways and byways, and so he had no conception of how dull and stupid he really was. His uneducated banalities were greeted as if they had come from Solomon and his unfunny, old jokes were rewarded with gales of breathless laughter. If it is the experience of life that shapes us, is it to be wondered at that men like Lord Uckfield are so signally unshaped? People would speak, even out of his hearing, of his wisdom and judgement when he certainly had neither.
The reason for this was that if they could convince themselves they truly believed him to possess these qualities, then they would not have to admit to themselves that they were toadies, which is a powerful motive among the fashionable. And if their outer acquaintance ever expressed doubt as to his Lordship's mental prowess, they could always answer, 'Ah, you wouldn't think that if you really knew him,' thereby giving themselves one mark for being on intimate terms with yet another Great House and a second mark for being a genuine person. He was not ungenerous, just lazy with the fundamental laziness that marks most friendships of the privileged with a dead hand. He had long since decided that pursuing relations with any but sycophants and those members of his own class necessary for his self-image was far too like hard work and he had abandoned the effort, but the decision had been a subconscious one and he still thought of himself as a kind man. In truth, he would always be kind to Edith. He was not in the least admirable but nor was he a snob and anyway, apart from anything else, he was just glad she was so pretty.
I could see the butler in the door catching Lady Uckfield's eye. She nodded, cast her professional glance about the room and walked over to me. 'We're having dinner in a minute,' she said. 'I wonder if you'd like to take in Lady Tenby?' She indicated a stout party of sixty-plus wedged in a chair by the fire. I nodded and muttered and Lady Uckfield continued her rounds. We had been almost the last-comers and I suppose everyone else already had their orders. I walked towards my partner, thinking I might be needed to haul her into an upright position. She looked up and extended a fat, jewelled hand.
'Are you taking me in?' she said. I nodded. 'Googie's so brilliant at organising things. She should have run a hotel chain.
Help me up.'
I have always been uncomfortable with the jejune pseudo-informality implicit in the upper-class passion for nicknames.
Everyone is 'Toffee' or 'Bobo' or 'Snook'. They themselves think the names imply a kind of playfulness, an eternal childhood, fragrant with memories of Nanny and pyjamas warming by the nursery fire, but they are really a simple reaffirmation of insularity, a reminder of shared history that excludes more recent arrivals, yet another way of publicly displaying their intimacy with each other. Certainly the nicknames form an effective fence. A newcomer is often in the position of knowing someone too well to continue to call them Lady So-and-So but not nearly well enough to call them 'Sausage', while to use their actual Christian name is a sure sign within their circle that one doesn't really know them at all. And so the new arrival is forced back from the normal development of friendly intimacy that is customary among acquaintances in other classes.
Dinner had been announced and my partner had lumbered to her feet and was now leaning heavily against me. I could see that for her at least this arm-in-arm procession was more than a self-conscious replay of an Edwardian custom: it was a very necessary service. A few couples ahead of us I could see Lady Uckfield chattering gaily into the face of a shell-shocked Kenneth Lavery. They reminded me of the front benches going through into the Lords to hear the Queen's speech, when the Tory ministers always seem to be filmed frenetically gabbling away to their glum and serious Socialist opposite numbers.
Behind them Edith was with Lord Uckfield. She was wearing a black velvet dress, cut low at the neck with long tight sleeves and no jewellery of any sort. The effect was beautiful and triste, like Juliet in mourning. I suppose she felt it would be tasteless to look too merry.
Lady Tenby followed my glance. 'Very good-looking. No question about that. But who on earth is she?'
I smiled down at her. 'She's a great friend of mine,' I said.
'Oops,' said Lady Tenby, and we continued in silence.
I later learned that the Countess of Tenby was the widowed mother of four daughters and, as Lady Uckfield's second cousin, had always rather hoped to get Charles for one of them. It was not an unreasonable ambition. They were nice girls and quite pleasant of face. Any one of them would probably have made him happy. In the end only the eldest, Lady Daphne, married at all 'well' in their mother's opinion (and he was a younger son), two married routine Hoorays and the youngest and best-looking went to California to live with the founder of a rather sinister sect. The point being that Lady Tenby was not a nasty or an unreasonable woman. She had put in many years work on her daughters for what were to be meagre dividends and now, this evening, she had been invited to witness the triumph of an interloper, a stranger who had stolen into their camp under cover of darkness and made off with the fattest sheep of all. Of course she would smile and congratulate and kiss but then she would go home and say how marvellous Googie and Tigger had been, how nobody would have known they were disappointed, how the girl was, after all, very pretty and seemed fond of Charles. And forever Edith would be marked as a lucky outsider.
Dinner was delicious, which was a surprise. I had been expecting the usual country house fare dispensed by my parents'
generation, more redolent of a girls' prep school than the kitchens of the Ivy but I was not then used to Lady Uckfield's command of detail. I had Lady Tenby on my left and I spent the first course in one of those are-you-an-actor-what-might-I-have-seen-you-in conversations, which are so disheartening, but when the plates were taken away and I was allowed to turn to my companion on my right, I found myself talking to a rather hard-faced but intriguing woman of about my own age who introduced herself as Charles's sister, Caroline.
'So you're an old friend of Edith?' she said.
'I don't know how "old". I've known her about a year and a half.'
'Longer than we have,' she said with a crisp little laugh.
'And do you think you're going to like her?' I asked.
'I don't know,' said Caroline, looking down the table to where Edith was flirting gently with her future father-in-law. 'As a matter of fact I think I might. But is she going to like Charles? That's the question.'
This was of course the question. I followed my neighbour's gaze to where Charles was sitting, his heavy, good-natured face frowning over what was in all probability a rather small intellectual problem being posed by his neighbour. I wondered if Edith had faced up to how thick he really was. Or, for that matter, to how bleak the country can be. Caroline was reading my mind. 'It's frightfully dreary down here, you know. I suppose Edith's ready for all that? Flower shows all summer, freezing pipes all winter. Does she hunt?'
'She rides so she probably could hunt.'
'I don't suppose it matters much. With the antis about to kill it off at any moment.'
'Perhaps she's an anti and doesn't approve. You never know these days.'
'Oh, I doubt Edith is anti-blood sport,' said Caroline carefully. 'She looks quite carnivorous to me.'
'What about you? Do you hunt?'
'Heavens no. I hate the country. I don't even go to Hyde Park if I can avoid it.'
'What does your husband do? Or is it common to ask?'
'It is. But I'll answer anyway. Mainly advertising but he also organises charity events.'
I have often thought how simple it must have been to live a hundred years ago when every man one knew was in the army, the navy, the Church, or owned land. These extraordinary jobs one hears about every day, that one never even knew existed, have an unsettling effect on me. Headhunting or working in futures, credit management or people skills, as explanations they all sound as if one were concealing one's true activity. Perhaps a lot of them are. I couldn't think of an appropriate response.
'Does he favour any particular cause?' I said.
'So how do you know Edith?' said Caroline, who was obviously as uninterested in her husband's activities as I was. I explained about the Eastons. 'I wondered what they were doing here. It's funny we haven't met before if they're so near.' I was glad David was too far down the table to hear this. After that we turned to more general topics and I soon learned that Lady Caroline Chase was one of those children of the purple who manage to reject their upbringing in their way of living, their philosophy, their chosen partner and their choice of address and yet take their snobbery with them absolutely intact into their new life. I liked her but she was in her way quite as dismissive as her mother only without, perhaps, Lady Uckfield's armour of moral certainty. To Lady Uckfield her social position was an article of faith; to Caroline it was simply a matter of fact.
The meal progressed with some sort of apple snow for pudding, then the cheese and just when I was expecting our hostess to gather up the women with her and leave us to leaden political discussion and port, I was pleased to see that an unused glass in the nest before me was being filled with champagne. This then was the moment.
Lord Uckfield stood. 'I suppose we all know why we're here tonight.' I suppose we all did, although one or two people looked a bit surprised. Kenneth Lavery, himself, seated next to Lady Uckfield, seemed to be full of wonder as well he might.
'It's to welcome a very charming newcomer into our family.' I looked at Mrs Lavery, glazed with delight on Lord Uckfield's right. Precedence had been set aside for this one night. I do not think I ever saw her seated so advantageously again. 'Shall we raise our glasses? Edith and Charles.' We all stood with a lot of chair scraping and a certain amount of panting from Lady Tenby.
'Edith and Charles!' We drank and sat, while poor Charles, scarlet in the face, attempted some sort of answer in an unnaturally base voice.
'I haven't anything to say, really. Except that I think myself a very lucky man.'
'Hear, hear!' The table was alive with muttered gallantries. I was watching Edith as she gazed at Charles with a kind of fresh-faced, open adoration that reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet. When she's given the horse. I don't know if this was a lesson she had learned from her ex-suitor's bride four years previously or if she was simply assuming the most suitable expression to quell criticism or if, for that moment at any rate, she simply adored him. It was probably a mixture of all three. I turned my head and I saw that Lady Uckfield was watching me, a tender, perfectly constructed smile on her pretty cat-face. I looked back at her and she raised her eyebrows slightly before standing and bringing the table once more to its feet. I'm not quite sure what she meant to express by this quizzical look.
Probably Caroline spoke for them all (she certainly spoke for me) when she muttered in a low voice: 'Well, she's done it. I only hope she knows what she's getting into.'
FIVE
I have not often participated in anything that could remotely be described as a Great Society Event. At any rate, not in an event that garnered much public curiosity. But by then Edith had achieved her status as a minor tabloid heroine and when she did succeed in landing her fish, the journalists who had set her up were only too anxious to reap their rewards. They'd established her as a story and she had not disappointed them. There were consequently offers from Hello! and OK! — much to Lady Uckfield's hilarity — for exclusive coverage and even though they were of course turned down the level of interest remained high. I do not think Mrs Lavery understood at first why the magazines were not to be allowed their way. I suspect she might have rather liked the idea of Edith and Charles on one of those red-outlined covers surrounded by the noble offspring of Charles's relations but when she had half suggested this to Lady Uckfield, she had been flattened to hear her companion turn to Edith and say, 'Your mother has got a wicked sense of humour. She had me quite taken in for a moment.'
Naturally, Mrs Lavery then laughed like billyo at the thought that Lady Uckfield might have believed her! And she never mentioned it again. At any rate, for all sorts of reasons, I was curious as well as flattered to be asked to be an usher at what was shaping up to be the Wedding of the Year — or so the newspapers told me.
I received the invitation from Charles, who had written to me in his rather charming, round hand, wondering if I would do this for him. It is always hard for an actor to commit in advance to anything social — not least because it is a kind of unwritten law of the theatre that if you accord the slightest importance to anything other than work then you have no talent. I suppose I would have chucked if I had been offered the title role in Ben Hur but I was pretty determined to play my part in the Apotheosis of Edith.
Isabel telephoned me the same morning: 'I gather you're an usher,' she said. 'David isn't.' I answered, as I knew I must, that this seemed a bit hard. 'Well, I must say I think it really is. He's in a sulk, which is a great bore and I don't see that there's anything I can do about it.' I said there was absolutely nothing she could do about it and after all, I was the only one of Edith's friends that Charles had even met before the whole thing began. 'I know that and I've said it, but you know David.'
'What about you?'
'What do you mean?'
'Are you going to play any part in it all? I thought Alice might be one of the bridesmaids or something.' Alice was the Eastons' eldest child. She was as plain as a pikestaff but quite amiable withal.
'No.' Isabel's voice was sodden with disappointment. 'Edith tried but apparently there were covens of prior claims and so she's settled for just having tinies. Much nicer really,' she muttered drearily. I could tell she had not finished. 'I was wondering about Charles's night out.'
'What about it?'
'Is he having one?'
'I don't know. I suppose so.'
'But you haven't been asked?'
'No. Should I have been?'
'Well, it's just that David was wondering if he, or both of you, shouldn't do something about organising one ... ' Her voice trailed away.
'Come off it. We hardly know him. What are you thinking of?'
'I dare say you're right.' I wondered if David was in the room with her. 'You might let us know if you are asked.'
David's background anxiety was becoming uncomfortable. He had obviously started on a lifetime's career of dropping Charles's name and he could not face the obloquy of being publicly excluded from his circle of intimates.
'All right,' I said, 'but I'm sure I won't be.'
As it happened, a month later, ten days before the wedding, I was asked. Presumably because of a dropout. A party of twelve was being flown to Paris in a week's time, three days before the Great Event, to dine and stay overnight at the Ritz. I was sent the ticket by bike and all I had to do was to be ready for collection from the flat at the appointed hour. The flight was to take off from the City airport. Instead of telephoning Isabel, I spoke to Edith. 'I've been asked to Charles's shindig.'
'I know. Completely his idea. I think it'll be fun, don't you? I love the Paris Ritz.'
'I suppose David isn't going?'
'No. The thing is Henry Cumnor and Charles's uncle Peter are organising and paying for the whole thing and so he can't have everyone.'
'Fains I tell David.'
'I've told Isabel.' Edith paused. 'As a matter of fact, I do think they're being tiresome. I am fond of Isabel but they want to be such "best friends" all the time. I feel like a heroine out of Angela Brazil. After all, I don't know David well and Charles has hardly met him.'
'My dear,' I said sagely. 'This is only the beginning.'
At three o'clock the following Saturday a capped and uniformed chauffeur rang my basement bell and seized my waiting suitcase to carry it up to the car. I had treated myself to a new one in honour of the elevated company I was about to keep so it was especially irritating when he caught it on the corner of the cellar steps and wrenched one of the handles off. As a result, despite my reckless extravagance, I felt shabby for the entire trip. Sic transit gloria mundi, or, I suppose, sic transit gloria transit.
Henry Cumnor was already in the car, his corpulence spilling itself across the back seat in vast folds of Turnbull and Asser-shirted flesh, leaving the barest ledge of vacant leather beside him. As I climbed in, I felt like Carrie Fisher squeezing up against Jabba the Hutt. I knew Henry vaguely, as it so happened that we had attended the same school although in different years, and this afforded me a faint protection against his exclusivity, but only faint. At any rate, I knew what to expect as Edith had made quite a funny story out of her 'first date' with Charles.
There was another passenger in the front seat who was cursorily introduced as Tommy Wainwright and whom I recognised as a rising Member of Parliament — if any Tory could be said to be rising at that time. So far as I could remember from those profiles beloved of the Sunday colour sections he was the younger son of a Home Counties peer and was consequently a slightly surprising inclusion in the group on whom Mrs Thatcher had smiled — she not being much in favour of the aristocracy. He was tall, almost lanky, with an amiable, round face and thinning hair that made him look like a kind of trainee old buffer, although, as I would learn, this was not at all the case. He turned, smiled and shook my hand, which placed him three-nil in the courtesy stakes against Henry and we set off.
