Snobs: A Novel

To make matters worse, just at this moment Charles arrived to see what was going on. He recognised Adela and I think in revenge (although she would have denied it) she lost no time in leading him into a conversation about several people that they both knew but Edith did not. In short she used Edith's dreaded Name Exchange against her. I suppose I should have felt indignant for one or the other of them but these things have a way of sorting themselves out without help from outsiders and anyway I could see that Adela had a point. I don't think I expected, even then, that she and Edith would ever be particularly close. Adela was too near what Edith wished to be (certainly so far as her past went) and while Adela was not a snob as a general rule, she was not above putting the likes of Edith in their place. I used to call it her 'Vicereine Mode.' All in all I could see that the best I might hope for was a kind of mutual tolerance. On this particular morning, before things could get sticky, Charles offered to show Adela the stables and with a nod towards me they set off. Edith watched them go.

'That's who should have married Charles.'

'Well, she's going to marry me.'

'No, I mean that's the kind of girl who would have made him happy. Giving out prizes, running the WVS. Can't you see it?'

'If that had been the kind of girl he wanted to marry, he would have married one. Lord knows there were plenty to choose from.'

'That doesn't sound very complimentary to your beloved.'

'You are talking of her obvious characteristics, which are, as you rightly observe, those of her time and her class. Her unusual qualities, of which you know nothing, are at the root of why she has chosen to marry an impoverished actor with a basement flat and not a rich earl.'

'Well, we'll have to watch our Ps and Qs around her.'

I wasn't having that. 'Don't make us into two teams, my dear. If you do, I warn you I'm on hers not yours.'

'Ouch.'

'Anyway, who says Charles should have married anyone but you?'

Edith said nothing but lay back and stared at the sky.

'You two look very intense.' Simon appeared, stripped of his embroidered coat, more romantic than ever in his flapping linen sleeves. He threw himself down on the bank next to Edith with a gay disregard of his costume. I could see his dresser sucking his teeth in the background but Simon was playing Byron to Edith's Caroline Lamb and he was not going to let a detail like grass stains deflect him. 'Where's Adela? Wasn't she here?'

'She's gone off to see the stables with Charles,' I said.

'To catch up on old times,' added Edith dryly.

Simon laughed. 'Lawks,' he said. 'We'd better be on our best behaviour when those two get together.'

'Don't start that,' said Edith. 'I've just been ticked off.'

Simon gave a comic guilty look in my direction but actually I was rather interested that his social confidence had grown sound enough to attempt this kind of joke. I suppose I was faintly annoyed that Adela was being equated with Charles under some kind of 'dull nob' label by them both, but when I saw Edith smile and mutter to Simon under her breath I realised at once what a clever flirt he was. For by including me in his observation he had contrived to take the threat out of what was nevertheless a deliberate complicity, a shared joke with Edith, which excluded Charles. I saw then that Adela and I were quite irrelevant to his purposes.

It transpired that this weekend, Edith, in a spirit of revenge as well as generosity, and quite against Charles's will, had invited the very Bob and Annette who had been staying with the Chases during the Mallorcin honeymoon. She had done this partly to see Annette again (who had, of course, kept up a lively correspondence with her new and eminent pal), partly to annoy Charles, partly to annoy Googie, and mainly to annoy Eric Chase who was down at Broughton with Caroline. She thought it would infuriate him to have this pair introduced to his parents-in-law as 'friends of Eric' as if they were typical of his crowd. She was correct. It did.

Simon, Adela and I had been asked for dinner, Bella having taken off for a few days in London, so at eight that night we found ourselves joining this motley throng in the family drawing room. The mismatched group promised a strangely disparate evening and in fact, Adela initially got the wrong end of the stick and spent the first hour assuming that Eric was something to do with the film and not the family. The more names he dropped the more she was confirmed in her opinion until finally he referred to 'my father-in-law, Tigger', in red-faced exasperation. Even then she looked over to me for a second opinion.

Lady Uckfield's responses on the other hand were calculatedly, and deliberately, disappointing to Edith. She made a great fuss of Bob and Annette all weekend and simultaneously managed to convey, with a sort of discreet gush, what a relief it was to her to find a kindred spirit in Adela, which was, I think, meant as a compliment to me.

It reassured her that, having taken an actor into her circle, he should turn out to be her sort after all. She found it fitting that her friends should marry people she had more or less heard of. As it happened she knew one of Adela's aunts quite well and had come out the same year as her mother, all of which was as it should be in her quaintly ordered world. Obviously, it was exactly this security blanket that Charles's choice of Edith had withheld and it was hard not to suspect a touch of spite towards her daughter-in-law in the liveliness with which Lady Uckfield took up my intended. Adela, naturally, blossomed under the attention, still only half aware of the games being played around her. I found Edith in one of the windows, staring grumpily at the ill-assorted party. She nodded at my beloved. 'What did I tell you? She's perfect.'

'I know.' I followed her gaze and saw that it had shifted from the cosy scene on the sofa to a far corner where Caroline Chase was listening absorbedly to Simon, apparently, as always, in full flow. Between the groups Charles wandered rather disconsolately, offering refills. 'Poor old Charles. Who's got him at dinner?' The question was more impertinent than I had meant but I suppose I wasn't thinking. At any rate, instead of reprimanding me as she should have, Edith shrugged.

'Who knows? We've got the most ghastly evening ahead.' I looked enquiringly. 'Bob and Annette Watson are taking us all out.'

'That's very nice of them. Why on earth should they?'

Edith did not share my view of things. 'That's not all. They've booked us into Fairburn Hall. Googie's in fits. She's thrilled, of course. She's been dying to see what they've done with it since the de Marneys left and she's never dared admit it.'

Her lack of gratitude at the Watsons' invitation did not surprise me. The plan was, naturally, a frightful prospect to the Broughtons and their ilk. In England one of the saddest mistakes a social climber can make is excessive generosity. It's odd really for what could be more charming? To arrive with presents and treats, to gather up whole house-parties and take them out on the town — what could be nicer than this? And yet these courteous acts are as clear a signal to the Insiders that the would-be benefactor is a newcomer to their world as if they had worn a sign on their hat. Of all these solecisms, that of offering to take people 'out' in the country is perhaps the worst. The English upper-classes do not as a rule leave their houses in the country in the evening except to go to other people's houses. They might be tempted by a country house opera or even the occasional play with a picnic attached, but if they want to eat in a restaurant they do it in the week and in London. Nor do they ever go to 'country house hotels' unless it is on a pilgrimage of personal curiosity. They might visit one because 'I used to spend my summers here when it belonged to my Aunt Ursula', but they would never, on pain of death, book in for dinner or a weekend. One of the saddest aspects of these places is that the gentility promised in the brochures can never, by its very nature, be reflected in the guests.

The Watsons, anxious to ingratiate themselves with Lady Uckfield and to become Broughton 'regulars' had hit on the sure way to render themselves ridiculous to their hostess for ever, as well as providing her with a welcome new source of funny stories. For this privilege they would pay a great deal of money.

Fairburn Hall was a large and ugly house on the other side of Uckfield. It had belonged for several centuries to the ancient if low-achieving family of de Marney, who had finally managed a baronetcy by befriending, of all people, Lloyd George. The de Marney of a particularly unfortunate architectural period in the 1850s had encased a blameless Queen Anne manor house in a hideous, neo-gothic shell, studded with bas-reliefs of the family's triumphant, historical moments. These apparently were few and as a result rather nebulous and un-sourced scenes of 'Gerald de Marney welcoming Queen Eleanor to Fairburn', or 'Philip de Marney taking the colours at Edgehill' gave rise to great hilarity among the Broughtons. I need hardly say there was no love lost between the families and never had been. Technically the de Marneys were the older family and had consequently always tried to assume a lordly manner towards their neighbours. This was absurd of them as the Broughtons, whether the de Marneys liked it or not, were much richer and much grander as they had been for the previous three centuries. A couple of years before this, the current incumbent, Sir Robert de Marney, had given up the unequal struggle, sold Fairburn on a long lease to a large group of 'Leisure Hotels' and moved with his family into the dower house four miles away.

'Do you think we ought to be veiled?' whispered Lady Uckfield, as we climbed out of the cars. She turned to me. 'It was always the vilest house in the world. My mother-in-law used to swear they'd muddled up the plans with Lewes prison and got the wrong one.'

The entrance was through a wide semi-conservatory, with stone flags and odd, quasi-armorial grills at the window, like a rather grand bank. Through this one came into a cumbrous entrance hall. Thick, square Victorian columns stood everywhere, but the decision in the rebuilding not to raise the original ceiling height of the old house gave it the look of some central German under-vault, making one feel like a caryatid. The de Marney crest in loud colours was on every wall and an ornate family tree, framed in gilt, hung over the gas-log fire. Lady Uckfield stared at it. 'They've got the wrong branch,' she said happily.

An immensely important head waiter came towards us and mistaking Bob Watson's nervous enquiry about the reservation for the general tone of the party he attempted a very superior air as he ushered us into what he referred to as the 'withdrawing room'. He was soon disabused.

'What a horrid colour!' said Lady Uckfield, ignoring the chair he was indicating and plumping down onto a sofa instead.

'Too sad, as this was really the only room that was nice at all. It was the music room in the old days although they were tone deaf to a man!' She laughed pleasantly, as the crushed waiter tried to salvage his position by fawning over her for her choice of 'aperitif.

'I think Lady Uckfield would like some champagne,' said Bob loudly, and one or two lacquered heads in the corners of the room looked round. He, in his turn, wanted to get some mileage out of bringing such a distinguished group to this, as he imagined, smart venue and I can't say I blamed him. Heaven knows he was going to pay dearly for it. His tone further flattened the attendant who was sufficiently familiar with the area to realise by now the extent of his initial faux pas. The party was becoming uncomfortable and Charles and Caroline exchanged a quick, edgy look. I found myself longing to defend Bob and his kindness of spirit, but I knew I would be fighting insuperable odds and, coward-like, I seized one of the huge, leather-bound menus when they arrived and hid behind it until the wine was brought with a great flurry of silver and glass and linen. At this moment, to everyone's amazement except possibly Caroline's, Eric leaned forward, plucked a bottle out of its silver-plated, ice-lined nest and spoke, not to Bob but to the waiter:

'Haven't you got any of the ninety-two?'

The waiter shook his head with murmured apologies. Just as Bob's timorousness had at first made us all worthless so far as he was concerned, now Lady Uckfield's presence made us all fine folk indeed.

Eric glowed at his deference. 'Then you shouldn't say it's ninety-two, should you?' He dropped the bottle back into its holder and sat back as the waiter poured.

Across the group Edith caught my eyes and rolled hers.

Bob was fumbling. He knew he faced a bill of something in the region of seven or eight hundred pounds and already the mixture of suppressed giggles and secret smiles was telling him that, mysteriously, his treat was making him not eminent but ridiculous. This was doubly irritating to him as his wife had tried to talk him out of it and had suggested, instead, asking the Broughtons and the Uckfields to dinner at the Ivy in London (which would, of course, have been perfectly acceptable to them).

Charles came to his aid. 'This is delicious,' he said firmly, sipping his wine and looking towards the rest of us.

'Absolutely lovely,' said Adela, and I nodded away.

Actually, it was quite nice but too cold. However, Simon, on this dangerous evening, had clearly decided to go for broke.

Once and for all he was determined to shake off the concept that he was in any sense overawed by the present company.

'Would it be a great bore if I have a whisky?' he said.

'Good idea,' said Eric. 'Me, too.'

The careful cruelty of this was that Bob had already ordered three bottles opened, which the rest of us could not now possibly finish. He was foundering. His wine had been rejected, he had been insulted and yet somehow he had to go on as if everything was going swimmingly. 'Of course!' he smiled broadly. 'What about you, Edith?'

Edith sank back into the over-stuffed, chintz-covered chair and stared her pellucid stare. I could see her gaze trailing over Charles, who was giving her an admonishing look, imploring her to behave. Poor man. These were his wife's friends and yet it was he who was having to work to save the evening. Behind him, Simon stood beaming at her. 'I wouldn't mind some vodka,'

she said. Simon half winked, and they both caught in their smiles before they spilled over into impropriety.

'Fine,' said Bob in a lacklustre voice. He looked around for more trouble but Caroline, with a deliberate gesture, reached across Eric to help herself to a large glass of champagne. The battle-lines were forming.

The food was predictably pretentious, with bonfires going at practically every table. Inadequate portions arranged like cocktail hats followed each other in blank, tasteless succession, fussed over by suspiciously French waiters. The maître d'

would not, by this time, leave us alone and kept dashing up for a review of the current course until Simon finally suggested he might like to take a seat to save himself the bother. Of course we all laughed and of course he was never seen again. In truth the dinner itself was the least awful part of the evening because of Simon. He certainly was on very funny form that night. He could match Annette's stories without challenging her and the pair of them did keep things going. Even Lady Uckfield gave in to the prevailing mood and chuckled away as she toyed with her unsatisfactory and costly dishes.

Charles, on the other hand, was more or less in hell the entire time. He was not quick enough to get the point of most of the anecdotes, let alone tell his own. These were not his kind of people and unusually for him (for he seldom risked the possibility) he was outnumbered. Unlike his father he was not a flirt, unlike his mother he had very little sense of humour.

Caroline tried to rescue him once or twice but she was in a dark mood of her own and in the end it was Adela who got him onto the business of improving the shoot at Feltham. He had apparently only restarted it three years before after a long gap and the topic released some of the pent-up flow within him, but even this had a limited success for when Simon was telling a story about some production he'd been in where the stage manager had filled the bath with boiling instead of cold water, he paused for the punch line and into the silence came Charles's voice: 'The great thing is to leave a wide enough headland of kale, which of course some of the farmers are reluctant to do…'

Simon laughed. 'Well, obviously Charles is fascinated,' he said. He meant it pleasantly enough, I think, and all would probably have passed on if Edith had not spoken up at that moment: 'Oh, Charles for God's sake, shut up about your bloody shoot.'

I imagine she thought that in some way this would be a joke too and we would all smile but it came out wrong. Her voice was harsh and I suppose unloving in a way that, particularly in the presence of Charles's parents as we were, made a strange and embarrassing tremor at the table. I saw Annette catch Bob's eye as I felt Adela nudge my foot.

Charles looked up, hurt rather than angry, like a puppy who has been smacked for some other dog's pee. 'Am I being very boring?' he said.

There was a faint pause and then Eric, either misguidedly thinking to be amusing or, more probably in his case, just in order to be unkind, said, 'Yes, you are. Better have some more to drink.' He started to pour wine into Charles's glass but Charles shook his head.

'Actually, I don't know why but I'm terribly tired.' He turned his harassed eyes to Bob. 'Would you forgive me if I skipped the coffee and headed on home?'

Bob knew by now, long before he had reached for his plastic, that the evening had been the most crashing flop and so he shook his head merrily. 'Of course not! You go. We'll be fine.'

Charles smiled wanly and stood up. 'Well then, I think I will be off if I may. We've lots of cars, haven't we? Will you be all right, darling?'

Now it was perfectly plain to everyone present that Edith ought to have jumped to her feet, said that she, too, was tired and left with her husband. Normally this is exactly what she would have done but this evening some kind of devilry had got into her. Or maybe it was simple lust. At any rate, she neither moved nor spoke and it was Simon's voice that broke the silence:

'Don't worry about Edith. I'll bring her home.'

Charles looked at him and for a second they were what the Americans call 'eyeballing' each other. It might seem that Charles, rich and titled as he was, and really not that bad-looking in his 1930s-ish way, held all the aces, which of course in the long view he did, but Simon Russell, feeling successful and busy and as handsome as a man can be, bristled or rather shone with charismatic confidence that night. To all the onlookers at the table Charles paled before him and I at least felt a pang of real pity for this man who had everything. Obviously, looking back, I know that Simon had the confidence of a man in love whose love is returned and Charles conversely had the fear of a man facing ruin but even without that knowledge the figure of Russell, clad in his waisted blue velvet coat, eyes and hair aglow, looked like the embodiment of some unconquerable force in a mythological painting. I say this that one may perhaps be less hard and more forgiving of Edith. Having taken in the tableau for a moment, it was Lady Uckfield who spoke.

'That's very kind of you, Mr Russell. Are you sure?' She broke the mood further by rising and forcing the company to their feet. 'Am I leading the ladies out? Or do we all go through together, here?'

Even in this supreme moment of face-saving she could not resist pointing up the fact that she thought this place quite extraordinary and so, presumably, not governed by the normal rules of her existence. I have said before that I came to admire Lady Uckfield a good deal and this was one of the moments that underpinned my view of her. She had witnessed her son made a fool of, she had seen him dismissed by his wife, she was well aware of the danger in the air from Simon's offer and yet she would not have revealed any of these things for worlds. She would have cut out her tongue rather than give anyone the impression that she thought it a bad idea for Edith to travel home alone in the dark with Simon. And yet she would have given one hundred thousand pounds then and there to have Russell removed from her sight for ever. If Edith had only had her mother-in-law's control, there would have been no scandal of any kind, then or later.

Back in the horrible 'withdrawing room' Lady Uckfield beckoned to me to sit beside her. If she felt uneasy, she did not betray it with the slightest flicker. 'You must let me congratulate you on your choice.'

'You're pleased for me, then.'

'Well, as your friend I'm pleased but as a hostess I'm furious.' I smiled because she spoke the truth. She would forgive me the inconvenience of ceasing to be a single man but only because of the 'rightness' of the thing. 'When will you be married?' I explained that while I had every reason to believe I would be successful, it was not all quite settled yet. I imagined it would be five or six months. 'And what about children? Have you thought about that? I'm an old woman so I can ask.'

I shrugged. 'I don't know really. We both want them but I can't help feeling that the timing is rather up to the wife, isn't it?

After all, my bit's rather easy.'

Lady Uckfield laughed. 'It certainly is. But don't wait too long. I hope Charles and Edith don't.' She looked me in the eye as she said this because of course we both knew that they had already waited too long. If Edith was now fretting over some golden head in the nursery or indeed if she was simply big with child, none of the threatened nightmare would be happening. 'I quite agree,' I said.

THIRTEEN

I had wondered, when Simon made his offer to escort Edith home, whether his plot would be foiled by finding that he had to take various others with them, but as soon as I emerged from the house with Adela I saw that this would not be the case: the whole back seat of his car was stuffed with a pair of chairs and what looked like an assortment of gardening tools. By my side I could feel Lady Uckfield taking in the same fact. My guess is that she had intended to join her daughter-in-law in the shabby Cortina, but, if so, it was not to be. I offered her and Lord Uckfield a place in Adela's Mini and, with a glance at Eric, who had brought some sort of Tonka Toy/Range Rover, they accepted. Lady Uckfield and I squeezed into the back seat, leaving Lord Uckfield and Adela in front. Eric gestured to them impatiently but in her sublime way Lady Uckfield affected not to notice. We drove off, leaving Bob and Annette to the tender mercies of Eric's red-faced driving.

'I hope he isn't stopped,' said Lord Uckfield.

Lady Uckfield made a slight moue with her mouth. 'Oh well,' she said.

We travelled in silence for a bit, all, I imagine, thinking of Simon and Edith whose car was nowhere in sight.

Lady Uckfield spoke again. 'Aren't those places too extraordinary? Who do you think goes to them?'

'Isn't it these whad'y'a call "yuppies"?' Lord Uckfield spoke in inverted commas, pleased to be so up to the minute.

'Well, it can't only be yuppies. Are there enough of them? There can't be that many round here. Americans too, I suppose.

So sad, really.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Adela. 'I'd rather see them as hotels than council offices or pulled down altogether.'

'I suppose so.' Lady Uckfield nodded doubtfully. In truth, she'd rather have seen them filled with the same well-mannered, rich people who'd lived in all these houses a hundred years ago. Even the ones whom, like the de Marneys, she disliked. For her there was no merit in the changes the twentieth century had wrought. Time had blurred her memory so that like the old recalling only the sunny days of childhood, she could think of nothing harsh or mean in the England of her beginnings. I found her views interesting. Even if her vision of the past was not quite as inaccurate or outlandish as Jeremy Paxman would have it, still Lady Uckfield's beliefs were rare by the closing years of the twentieth century. She had that absolute faith in the judgement of her own kind, seldom seen since 1914. No doubt it was common enough before then, which must have made Edwardian society such a philosophically relaxing place to be. If one were an aristocrat.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Simon made a show of fuss in getting out his car keys so that the other Broughton cars had all pulled away as he started the motor. He turned to look at Edith. She hugged her coat around her and leaned back against the window. They were two games players, with equal hands, and now at last they were alone with intent. 'With intent' because something in the nature of Edith's rudeness to Charles, something in the brashness of Simon's offer of a lift, had signalled to both of them that the fun was about to begin. Looking at Simon's roguish smile, the slightly crooked crease by the side of his mouth where his beard was beginning to push through, Edith felt a tremor of sexual excitement shiver through her body. She was startled by the immediacy of her own lust. She had been with men who had attracted her, she remembered enjoying making love with George and there had been a time, admittedly mostly before her marriage, when she had relished the thought of being alone with Charles, but she was sharply aware that this was something rather different. Looking into Simon's dark blue eyes, she realised she simply and absolutely wanted to be naked with him. She wanted to feel his hard, nude body against and inside hers. She felt hot and faintly uncomfortable. The terrifying, exhilarating thrill of her principles deserting her rippled through her stomach.

'Hadn't we better get going?' she said.

Simon was watching her carefully. Her blonde hair fell over her grey-blue eyes and she pushed it out of the way with a slightly petulant gesture. Her lips had not shut again after she spoke but stayed moist and parted with her white teeth just visible in the darkness. He too was excited but not in quite the same way as she. He had made love to a good many pretty women in his time and it was not the thought of the sexual delights to come that aroused him. It was the certain and confirmed knowledge of her attraction to him.

He was intensely aware of his own beauty. What is more he respected and enjoyed it as he sensed, quite rightly, that it was the core of his power. It was this simple truth that was at the epicentre of his flirtatious charm. From everyone, friend or foe, man or woman, he needed to eke out some response to his own physical desirability. Only then, in the warm glow of these aliens' admiration could he relax and be happy. The more threatening the situation, the more necessary it became to be wanted and wanted physically. He spent his life throwing out smouldering looks, laughing mysteriously, winking and twinkling at strangers solely in order to reassure himself that he was in control. Needless to say, he left behind a bewildered trail of wounded, who had responded for weeks or even months to clear signs of sexual and romantic interest only to find, once they were captive, that he had no more need of their love than if they had been trees in the field.

He did not trouble himself much over his search for constant reassurance. He simply expected his looks to break down all barriers, even if he did glimpse dimly that this is not the behaviour of a securely-based personality. In a way, this lack of faith in his other qualities meant that his vanity was closely entwined with a kind of modesty. He had no real respect for his own intellect, and socially, for all his bravado, he knew he could be clumsily inept. Given these reasons, it was probably inevitable that his bourgeois yearnings coupled to his compulsion to inflame desire should have led him to Edith. The irony being that she saw in him some kind of escape from the Broughton life, while he, conversely, saw her as the entree to it. At this stage of the proceedings however these truths were concealed from them both. They were, in short, enraptured with each other.

Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love', is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. And yet as we all know, it is a madness that, however ferocious, seldom, if ever, lasts. Nor, contrary to the popular teaching on the subject, does lust usually give way to a 'deeper and more meaningful love'. There are exceptions of course. Some spouses

'love' forever. But, as a rule, if the couple is truly well matched, it gives way to a warm and interdependent friendship enriched with physical attraction. Should they be ill-assorted it simply fades into boredom or, if they have the misfortune to be married in the interim, dull hatred. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is in the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel passion slip away. How many of us, re-meeting objects of desire who once burned a scar through seasons and even years, whose voices on the telephone could start up flights of butterflies, whose slightest expression could set off a peal of tremulous sexual bells in our vitals, search our inner selves in vain for the least attraction to the face before us? How many of us, having cried bitter, rancid tears over a failed love, are actually disappointed when we discover, seeing the adored one again, that all trace of their power over us is gone? How often one has resisted the freedom-giving knowledge that they have actually begun to irritate us as that seems like the worst kind of disloyalty to our own dreams. No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all. It was not that Edith really saw Simon as any solid part of her future life, entranced as she was. But she had long forgotten her early irritation with his flirtatious verbosity and now she loved to listen to his trials, to his hopes, to his dreams — as much as anything because she loved watching the way his mouth moved — and then, wonderful looking as he was, he made her feel so warm and so wanted. She liked physically to be near him, to let his arm brush her sleeve, his hand graze hers, but she thought no further than that. Or had not up to this moment. Unfortunately for her, he had come into her life at a time of wretched ennui. Before her marriage, yawning over her estate agent's telephone, she had dreamed of all the variety that her new life would bring her but she had not allowed for the fact that within months that new life would have acquired a sameness all its own. And so she was bored and, having expected nothing but excitement in the fulfilment of her social pretensions, she thought boredom more terrible than it is.

Slowly but inexorably she had allowed her residual affection for Charles to be driven out by his inability to interest her.

Although, somewhere in her brain, Edith was aware that she need not have. If, like her mother-in-law before her, she had early on faced and dealt with the limitations of her husband then there could have been fondness between them. If she had ceased to look to him for her amusement, then she might have relied on him only for those things he could have given her: loyalty, security, even love in his unimaginative way. But, just as she had never really faced within herself that she had deliberately married a man she did not love for his position, so she could not now accept the responsibility for the fact that she was living with a man who was duller and stupider than she. It seemed to Edith to be Charles's fault that her life was so dreary, it was Charles's fault that they did not have a vivid round in London, it was Charles's fault that she dreaded their times together more than the hours she spent alone. Added to which she had already slid into that dangerous option, open only to those with high-profile, 'public' lives, of playing the part of the happy and gracious wife to an adoring crowd, which must always serve to throw the frigid inertia of her life at home into sharp relief. As popular as she was with the villagers, with her charities, with the estate workers, she had even begun to think that this happy and elegant woman she saw reflected in their eyes (and in the local press) was some kind of real truth and that it must be Charles's fault that he did not respond to her as her adoring, provincial fans did.

Not that she had any substantial taste for danger. She had accepted Simon's offer of a ride home as much to irritate her mother-in-law as anything else. She was, in fact, surprised if anything at the strength of her physical attraction to him when they found themselves, as they now did for the first time, alone and in the dark. But what took her even more unawares was an aerated sense of the raising of her spirits and with it that heady flavour of unexplored potential. This, she suddenly knew in a blinding flash of revelation, was the very thing she had most missed since her marriage. For months now there had seemed to be no open-endedness about her existence. All the decisions had been taken and must now be lived with. And yet here she was, looking at the corduroy of Simon's trousers stretched over the muscles of his thigh, and sensing a delicious awareness that there were still unplanned-for possibilities between her and death.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The Uckfields asked us in for a drink when we arrived at Broughton. I think they might have preferred us just to head for home but we accepted, partly out of politeness but also from that ghoulish sense that we all feel when we suspect an evening is not yet quite over. We were (or rather I was) still curious as to whether Charles really had gone to bed, how long it would take Simon and Edith to get home, how Lady Uckfield would behave — any number, in fact, of the different aspects of the case still to be revealed.

Charles was in the drawing room. He had hardly touched the whisky on the table beside his chair and was, I suspect, staring into mid-air until he heard our step. At any rate he seemed to be very puzzled by the women's magazine he had snatched up as we came in. He fetched Scotches for his father and me and some water for Adela (her customary, somewhat lacklustre late-night refreshment) and we all sat down. We had not been there long before the unmistakable sounds of Eric on the staircase told us that the Range Rover at least was back. The four of them came into the room.

'Where's Edith?' said Eric brightly, happy of course to see that she was not back and that therefore he might score some points off her.

'I hope they haven't broken down,' said Adela firmly.

'Oh dear. Might they have?' said Lady Uckfield.

Under silent instruction from Adela, I nodded. 'Simon's car is the most frightful wreck. I do hope not.'

Lady Uckfield recognised instantly that this was a life raft that she could rope to her decks in case of future need. She was not exactly grateful. For her to register gratitude she would have had first to admit to herself that there was anything wrong.

But she was noticeably warm as she joined Adela on the sofa and started to question her about her aunt.

Eric had another try. 'They took forever before they even started the car,' he said. 'We were loaded up and out of the gates before I heard the engine.' But the initiative had slipped from him. The later the errant couple were, the more the family could hide behind fear of a break-down or an accident. All other possible reasons for lateness had by this means been painlessly obviated.

As the conversation became more general and people flopped down into the various chairs and sofas around the room, Charles came up and asked me if I would join him in his office. I forget his excuse, some book or picture he had been meaning to show me, the usual sort of thing, but we both knew that he simply wanted to talk to me alone. I nodded and followed him out, uncomfortably aware of Chase's slightly quizzical smile, and we started down a corridor to the left. I wasn't looking forward to the interview as I had begun to feel responsible for the mayhem that even then I was only just starting to admit might be looming. I had after all been the one to introduce Simon to them. Had I not been in the film I am quite sure he would never have penetrated the charmed circle of the family.

Charles's office, its door sporting one of those 'private' notices that give one such pleasure to set aside, was a smallish corner room some distance away from the drawing and dining rooms used by the family. It was an extension of the main library, still on the principal floor, and so had handsome cornices and door cases and, by day, a fine view across the park from both of its tall windows. A pair of double doors would have connected it to the larger room if they were opened, which, as the library was one of the rooms on the public tour, they seldom if ever were. The fireplace was a delicate one of some kind of pinkish marble and the walls themselves had been covered with crimson damask that stretched from dado to ceiling.

Against it stood high, glazed bookcases that looked as if they had been made for the room. A portrait of some female forebear, painted in a costume for a fancy-dress ball, hung over the chimneypiece, the gilded frame and the marble shelf below stuffed with a mass of invitations, snapshots, notes, postcards — the usual paper chaos with which the upper classes demonstrate their ease with their elegant surroundings.

'This is very nice,' I said. 'Where's Edith's sitting room? Is it next door?'

Charles shook his head. 'Upstairs,' he muttered. 'Quite near our bedroom.'

He stared at me mutely and rather than return his anguished glance, I started to peer at the spines of the books in the cases round the room. Can You Forgive Her? by Trollope caught my eye and gave me a disloyal inner smile. He Knew He Was Right by the same author sobered me up. I don't know that I had then any real understanding of Charles's capacity for jealousy, since I had no true knowledge of his capacity for emotion. The fact that someone is not particularly intelligent is no guide in these things. People may be stupid and extremely complicated just as they can be clever and incapable of deep feeling.

'What do you think?' I heard him say and for a moment I wondered if I was being asked my opinion of some unusual book but catching sight of Charles's face, I thought this was probably not the case. Just to be safe I answered with a question:

'What do you mean?'

'What are they up to?'

He was gruff and tweedy in his manner and I realised that we were embarking on what is called a 'man-to-man' talk. I shuddered at the prospect. Apart from anything else I am a firm believer in the 'least said soonest mended' school of marital harmony — a belief incidentally quite unshaken by marriage itself.

'Oh, Charles, come on,' I said warmly, implying that they couldn't possibly be 'up to' anything. I am not sure whether I was being dishonest in taking this tack. I rather think not. It seems naive but although, looking back, it is clear that Edith and Simon were drawn to each other from the second day, I don't know that their mutual attraction had really impinged itself on me much before that evening.

'You come on,' said Charles, more sharply than usual.

'Look,' I was very conciliatory, 'if you're asking me if I know anything, I don't. If you're asking if I think anything, I don't either. Much. I think they like each other, that's all. Is that so terrible? Haven't you ever wanted to flirt with anyone since you were married?'

'No,' said Charles, slumping into a Chippendale chair, and resting his elbows on a charming and untidy partner's desk. He let his head fall forward into his hands as he spoke and started to push his fingers through his hair. He was posing for a statue of misery. I felt wrong-footed in that I had judged badly to think that warm reassurance would do the trick and yet I didn't want to lead the way into a different level of intimacy, which Charles, whom after all I did not even then know well, might regard as an impertinence. I felt sorry for the fellow and wished to find a way to lighten rather than increase his load. My detached ruminations were interrupted by a sigh from the desk.

'She doesn't love me, you see.' He spoke to a pile of papers beneath his face but since the remark was presumably addressed to me, I tried to assess the correct level of response.

Of course, what made this doubly hard was that Charles's statement, bald as it was, was essentially true. There was no question in my mind but that Edith did not then love him. She did not desire him (which of course I only surmised at that time), she did not enjoy his company, she did not share his interests, she did not like most of his friends. I do not think, then or later, that she ever actually disliked him but I could hardly say that in answer to Charles's cry of pain. I was silent, which I suppose was in itself a tacit agreement, and Charles looked up. I cannot say how moved I was by the terrible suffering in his simple, county face. His narrow eyes were reddening with tears, which had already begun to run down his large and bony nose. His hair, normally as sleek as a 1930s advertisement for unguent, was ruffled and untidy and sticking up in awkward little spikes. Great grief can be worn charmingly by a beauty and I have seen a lot of gracious dignity at funerals in my time but it is my experience that when grief is becoming it is also suspect. Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul.

I blush to recall that I was surprised that Charles — nice, bluff Charles with his shooting and his hedgerows and his dogs —

had a heart that could be broken. But he had and I was there to witness its breaking.

Before I could say anything there was a sound from the corridor outside. 'Charles?' It was Lady Uckfield. Rather than commit, even in a moment of emotional tension such as this, the social solecism of knocking at a sitting-room door (an action that, with white-gloved butlers, always plays so prominent a part in inaccurate television period drama) she contrived to wrestle with the door knob as if it would have been easier to get into the Ark of the Covenant. At any rate, having given us both enough time to dress had we so needed let alone dry our tears, she opened the door and came into the room. 'Ah, Charles,' she smiled easily into her son's face, ignoring the Fall of Rome that was written there, 'Edith's back. They got stuck getting out of the town. Too boring.' She nodded towards me. 'Your friend's gone straight on up to the farm.' Charles nodded his thanks in a kind of daze and started back towards the drawing room. I would have followed but Lady Uckfield, with an almost imperceptible pressure on my arm, held me back.

'We'd better be off, too.' I said. 'Where's Bob? I must thank him for dinner.'

'He's gone to bed,' she replied. 'Your nice Adela said thank you.' We were silent. She stood by the fireplace, idly fingering the pasteboard squares that summoned her child to various festivities. There was only one light on in the farthest corner of the room, a glass and ormolu desk lamp, which threw longish shadows about her and in the half-light grooved her face cruelly.

For once she looked her years. The glamorous veil of her manner was momentarily lifted and a tired, worried woman in late middle-age was revealed to the naked eye.

'Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish,' she said, not looking up from the invitation to a wedding on which I could see a tick and 'Acc' in Edith's loose scrawl.

'Oh, I don't know,' I replied. My position was an awkward one for, after all, I was in that house as a friend of Edith. It behoved me to be loyal to her and yet I did think she had behaved foolishly. I was not, if you like, 'on her side' while finding it unsuitable that I should be on anyone else's.

'Well, I do.' She paused while I looked up in answer to her acid tone. 'It's worse than you think. Eric was by his car when they arrived. He saw them kissing.'

I was for a moment what a cockney friend of mine would call gobsmacked. I had thought we had been fringing around slight improprieties brought on by Edith's tedium. I had expected a little chat about Edith 'bucking up'. Of course, I suspected at once that Eric was not 'by his car' when they drove up but was quite consciously concealed somewhere near the entrance that he might not miss this Heaven-sent chance to nail Edith, whom, by this stage, he absolutely detested. Much more than I had realised. At any rate, whatever the truth of his motive, he had not lied about what he had seen. For old times' sake I tried to dig Edith out of the hole she had buried herself in. 'Oh, surely, she was just kissing him goodnight.'

'She was kissing him passionately. His hand was inside her shirt and hers was out of sight beneath the dashboard.' Lady Uckfield spoke with the dead-pan delivery of a policeman giving evidence in the County Court. I stared at her in silence. My first instinct was to apologise for being there at all and run for it. Certainly I could think of nothing more to say. Lady Uckfield continued. 'It is the greatest pity that it should have been Eric who saw them. He is quite incapable of keeping anything to himself and anyway I have a suspicion he is not overly fond of Edith. He has already told Caroline who told me. She will try to keep him quiet but I imagine she will fail.' What interested me most about all this was Lady Uckfield's manner. I had grown used to her passionate, half-whispered intimacy when she shared with you the day's headlines or your place at dinner. Now she really did have a secret to impart and all her girlish urgency was gone. She might have been an officer in the WVS

addressing a group of recruits. 'I suppose we may hope that things have not progressed any further but I'm not sure what difference that makes anyway.'

'Will you tell Charles?'

She looked up startled. 'Of course not. Do you think I'm mad?' She relaxed again. Her shock at being thought unworldly was past. She dropped the card and strolled over to the window. 'He'll find out, though.'

'How?' I asked, meaning to imply that I too would be silent.

She smiled sadly. 'Probably because Edith will tell him. At any rate, someone will.' There was nothing I could profitably add to this since she was unquestionably right. Edith in her boredom was just ripe for succumbing to that fatal desire to 'bring things to a head' that so many married couples these days seem to indulge in. In sharp contrast to their great-grandparents who expended all their energy in trying to stop things coming to a head at any cost. My silence felt clumsy but I didn't in truth know exactly why Lady Uckfield was telling me any of this. For all her pseudo-intimacy she never usually imparted anything even faintly private, let alone potentially scandalous. She must have caught this question from my manner for she answered it without being asked: 'I want you to do something for me.'

'Of course.'

'I want you to tell the boy Simon to leave her alone.'

'Well…' Woe betide the man who accepts this kind of commission readily. Whatever opinion I might have of Simon's character or morals, I was hardly in a position to act the wise uncle with him.

Lady Uckfield drove full tilt at my hesitation. Her voice resumed more of its normal glib, light tone as the words gushed forth. 'She's bored. That's all there is to it. She's bored and she ought to get up to London more. She ought to see more of her friends. Or have a baby. Or get a job. That's what she needs. As for this boy…' She shrugged. 'He's handsome, he's charming and, above all, he's here. One does these things when one is settling into a new life. They mean nothing. The nuisance is that Eric saw her. He will almost certainly tell and it's our job to make sure no one can corroborate his story.'

I began to see things by her light. Of course, it was all a silly nonsense that was only horrid because it could hurt Charles if he found out. Yes, it was a pity that Eric had seen them. That was the pity. Her charming, even voice beat back the threat of anarchy and storm that had seemed to envelop us for a moment and returned us to the shore. 'I'll do my best,' I said.

'Of course you will, and the film's nearly over anyway. Too sad to be losing you,' she added hastily, remembering herself,

'but all the same…'

I nodded and she started towards the door. Her work was done. She had acted to contain the damage and that had necessitated taking me into her confidence. But I was already her ally. Things might have been worse.

'Lady Uckfield,' I said. She stopped and turned, her hand still resting on the gleaming door knob. 'Don't be too hard on Edith.'

'Of course not,' she laughed. 'You may not believe it but I was young once too, you know.' Then she was gone and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hated her daughter-in-law as fiercely as she would have hated any woman who had made her only son cry.

FOURTEEN

'What on earth was going on?' said Adela as soon as we drove away from the front of the house.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, first of all you two slope off and everyone looks haunted. Then Eric vanishes. Brief calm and then suddenly we're into farce with people running in and out of doors with stricken faces. I, meanwhile, am sitting there throughout with Lord Uckfield who's trying to explain something about trout farming. What happened to you? I thought I was going to have to ring and ask for a bed.' I told her everything of course and we drove on in silence for a while. Adela broke it. 'What can you possibly say to Simon? Unhand this lady? Won't he hit you on the nose?'

'I shouldn't think so. He doesn't look the type.'

'Well?'

I didn't really have an answer for her as I also could not quite envisage how to play this most embarrassing of scenes. And by what right was I even to open my mouth on the subject?

Adela gave me my motive. 'I suppose you'll just have to do your best for poor old Edith. It'll be a shame if she buggers it up after all that effort. And for such a nothing.'

We arrived at the farmhouse to find Simon sitting at the kitchen table nursing a glass of wine. His mood and the mere fact that he had not gone to bed seemed to suggest the desire for an unburdening talk although he could not have guessed that I already knew what he had to unburden. This was a worrying sign. We had already discovered, Bella and I, that Simon liked to talk of his romances, despite an almost constant stream of doting references to his children and their mother languishing at home. I did not then realise that for him the fame abroad was quite as pleasurable as the deed itself and this is a most dangerous characteristic in a married lover of married women. Adela went straight up to her room and I took Simon's proffered drink with a heavy heart. We sat in silence for a moment or two. At last he could curb his impatience no longer.

'Good evening?' he said.

I nodded in a half-hearted fashion. 'Quite. I thought the dinner was pretty filthy. Poor old Bob. He blenched visibly at the bill.' There was another silence. I suppose neither of us was clear about how to get on to the subject that was uppermost in both our minds. This time I tried the opener. 'You didn't come in.'

Simon shook his head. 'There was a bit of an awkwardness with that frightful brother-in-law when we got back. I thought I'd better just hop it.'

So that was it. No wonder Simon wanted to talk about it. Eric had made his presence known. The chances of his keeping his secret were statistically reduced to zero. Eric had made a scene. This, in my experience, generally happens when people want to make a scene. 'I heard about that,' I said.

Simon looked up. 'Oh? Who from? Not from Edith?'

I shook my head. 'From Charles's mother.'

I could see that this was a bit of a facer — as well it might be — but at the same time, while the flushed embarrassment of discovery was spreading over Simon's features, it brought in its wake, in the shy smile that he threw at me, a certain ominous delight in being the central figure in what I soon perceived he saw as a romantic drama. My heart sank even further at the realisation that with his actor's perverse pleasure in crisis, Simon would soon be all set to enjoy this chance of notoriety. 'Does Charles know?'

'Not when I left. Should he? Is there anything to know?'

Simon was not to be had so easily. He laughed gently and shrugged as he helped himself to another tot. I looked as paternal as I could. 'Don't start making a mess, Simon.' But still he only smiled and winked at me with that infuriating sexual confidence of the never-refused who think moral laws are designed for lesser mortals. My only recourse seemed to be some sort of appeal to his better nature. 'Edith is an old friend of mine.'

'I know.'

'And I don't want to see her made unhappy.'

'She's unhappy now.'

There was some truth in this, though much less than either he or Edith knew. 'She's not half as unhappy as she's going to be if you start making some silly little scandal for no better reason than that she's here and you're bored.' Again he smiled and shrugged. Of course I was on a hiding to nothing as few things could have given Simon more pleasure than to be begged to avert the arc-light of his fatal charm from some tender victim. Here was I, pleading with the Great Lord to have pity on a poor damsel. He was thrilled. I tried a new and faintly dishonourable tack. 'What about your wife?'

'What about her?'

'Won't she be upset?'

This, to my delight, did at last make him slightly uncomfortable — or at least irritated. 'Who's going to tell her? You won't.'

This was obviously true as far as it went and for a moment I did wonder if I wasn't over-reacting when I heard a knock on the glass behind me. I turned and to my complete amazement I saw Edith, in an Hermes scarf loosely knotted on her chin, rapping at the window and begging, like Cathy Earnshaw, to be let in from the night. Simon, however, was no Heathcliff and it was I, not he, who jumped up to open the back door.

'What the hell are you doing here?' I said, but she pushed past me and sauntered over to the Aga to warm her hands.

'Don't you scold me as well. I've had enough for one night I can assure you.'

'Does Charles know?'

'Of course. Eric told him.'

'But does he know you're here? And why are you here, for God's sake? Don't make everything worse than it is.'

All this time Simon had neither moved nor spoken. Now, very deliberately he rose from his chair, put down his glass, walked over to Edith and slowly, for my benefit I assume, enfolded her in his arms and bent his head to kiss her with the slow, moist, hungry motion of a modern film star in close-up. He looked as if he were eating her tongue. For a moment I watched their two blond heads rocking against each other and behind them, like the ghosts in Richard Ill's tent, I saw Charles and his mother and the wretched Mrs Lavery whose dreams were being incinerated in a farmhouse kitchen in Sussex as I stood there.

And behind them, the more distant figures of the Cumnors, and old Lady Tenby and her daughters, and all those others who would be enthralled and secretly (or not so secretly) delighted at the ruin that was being encompassed by these two silly people.

'Well?' said Adela, whom I had promised I would report to before turning in. She rolled over in bed, blinking herself into concentration.

'Hopeless,' I said.

'Wouldn't he listen?'

'He's loving it, I'm afraid. Anyway, I didn't say that much. I was just getting started when Edith turned up. She's down there now.'

Adela was quiet for a second. 'Oh,' she said. And then: 'So it is hopeless. Poor Charles.' And she rolled back into her pillow, pulling the covers up around her face.

Some time after this I proposed and was accepted. It was rather a tense period for me, I must confess, as I was inspected by an endless series of my intended's disapproving relations, most of whom were seriously unnerved by the thought of their beloved Adela relying on a stage career in future. 'Well, all I can say is good luck with that artistic temperament,' was the advice she received from a particularly unpleasant aunt. After a couple of months of this sort of thing, I was anxious to end the waiting. We decided to be married in April and, since it is a notoriously unpredictable month, to have a London ceremony.

As Adela remarked, 'Country weddings can be such muddy affairs.' It was a 'Society Event', I suppose, though not quite on the scale of the Broughtons, but even so, anyone who has ever played a central part in a large wedding, let alone a large London wedding with all the paraphernalia it involves, will understand that I had very little time to worry about Edith and her ménage in the months that led up to it. I had asked the Uckfields and the Broughtons and, to my mother-in-law's delight, they had all four accepted. I was comforted by this, in the thick of the chaos of my nuptials, as I assumed it meant that the trouble had passed and the nonsense of an autumn night had been forgotten. Then, about two weeks before the wedding itself, I had a telephone call from Edith. 'Have you invited Simon?' she said.

I understood at once that she was anxious lest there might be an awkwardness and I was able to reassure her. 'No, I haven't. You're all right.' I laughed mildly, so that that hideous evening might be turned the sooner into a shared joke between us.

'Could you?' she said.

The smile left my face, the straw my clutch. 'No, I could not,' I said tersely.

'Why not?'

'You know very well why not.'

There was a pause at the other end of the line. 'Can I ask you a favour?' I didn't answer this as I dreaded to hear it. I was not spared. 'Could we possibly borrow your flat while you're away?'

'No.'

Edith's voice was cold and definite. 'No. Well, I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

'Edith, darling,' I said. This is the kind of thing that always happens just when one is entirely engrossed in some other large event. The night before crucial exams is invariably the moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to prison.

'Of course you can't see Simon here. How could I possibly do that to Charles? Or to Simon's wretched wife for that matter?

Don't be insane, darling, please. I beg you.'

But she was not to be won. With some perfunctory formula words she slid away and the line went dead.

I told Adela and she was not surprised. 'He thinks she can get him into things. That she can open doors. He's Johnny-on-the-make.'

'I don't know how interested he is in all that.'

'He's interested. He wants to be at the Head Table, that one. You'll see.'

'Well, I don't know how much poor old Edith can fix it for him.'

Adela smiled, a trifle coldly I thought. 'She can't. She'll be lucky to get a table in the St James's Club when all this is finished. Stupid fool.'

It was Adela who nudged me to look towards the door when, as we were standing to receive the line of our guests, the footman announced in ringing tones: 'The Marquess and Marchioness of Uckfield and the Earl Broughton,' rolling the words lovingly around his tongue like delicious sweets. The three of them entered.

'Where's Edith?' I said.

Charles shrugged faintly and we let it go. I was, in truth, rather touched that the Uckfields had made the effort to come. As a general rule, such people are long on friendship on their own terms but short on doing anything on yours. I don't actually think Lord Uckfield had any idea why he had been forced to dress up and sacrifice a perfectly good afternoon when he might have been watching racing on the box, but Lady Uckfield, I believe, liked me by this time and also, I suspect, wished to establish a beachhead on Edith's only pre-marriage friend that had made the transition into her new life. They were ushered on through into the reception and we turned back to the unending line of old nannies and relations from the shires.

It is not possible to speak to anyone properly at your own wedding — certainly not at a smart wedding where it is out of the question that the company should do anything as middle class or sensible as sit down to eat. The bride and groom are passed round, like one of those endless trays of nibbling things, for a few words here or there, justifying those overnight journeys down from Scotland or those flights from Paris and New York. Still, Charles did manage to seize me for a moment.

'Can we have lunch when you get back?' he said. I nodded and smiled but avoided discussing the matter since the beginning of one marriage seems a poor place to ruminate over the probable end of another. I must confess I was flattered that by this time Charles obviously thought of me as his friend as well as Edith's, flattered but also vindicated for I certainly was on Charles's side, if sides there must be. Of course, I knew well enough that I was not one of Charles's close pals, but I had the merit of being able to discuss his wife with some real experience of her, which most of his friends, since they had never met her before the engagement, could not.

Adela and I spent a delightful fortnight in Venice and when we got back to the flat we found, along with further piles of wedding presents from Peter Jones and the General Trading Company, a letter from Charles suggesting that I meet him at his club the following Thursday. I accepted. Charles's club was inevitably White's and I accordingly found myself outside its familiar Adamesque entrance at one o'clock on the appointed day.

Of the three smart clubs whose charming eighteenth-century facades dominate St James's, White's is, I would guess most people are agreed, the smartest. It boasts few sleek City arrivistes even among its younger members, perhaps because there is still enough of the gratin left to supply its needs, perhaps because the air is too thin for lesser mortals to breathe and after one or two visits they decide to try for something a little less rich. Having said that, I have always enjoyed White's. I would no more wish to be a member than I would apply to sponsor a polo team but one of the virtues of the English upper-class (and it is only fair to give some credit, alert as I am to their vices) is that when they are gathered together in familiar, congenial surroundings, they are a most relaxed and pleasant bunch. They've all known each other since they could first breathe and, when there is no one near to criticize them for it, they revel in this familiarity of the extended family. At their best, alone together and in a 'safe house', they are polite and unafraid, a charming combination.

I gave my name and asked for Charles at the mahogany booth in the entrance hall but 'his Lordship' had not yet arrived and I was invited to sit and wait for him. Not here the nodding through of strangers into the inner sanctums. But I had hardly had time to read the latest bulletins from the tickertape machine (alas now gone) before Charles clapped me on the shoulder.

'My dear fellow, forgive me. I got stuck.' We went on through the staircase hall to the little bar, where Charles ordered dry sherry for us both. He was looking a good deal more like his old self, I was happy to see, smartly dressed and neatly coiffed.

His crinkly, blond hair in smooth Marcel waves, a tie of some educational or military significance at his throat. 'So, how are you? Busy, I hope.'

I wasn't frightfully, as it happens, but there was a chance of one or two things coming up so I hadn't yet reached the desperate stage that is the occupational hazard of Equity membership. I muttered away about Adela, the flat, Venice and so on but of course Charles was aching to get started. 'How are things with you?' I asked.

As if in answer he put down his drink. 'Let's go up and get a table,' he muttered, and we started up the staircase.

The dining room of the club is a grand, undisappointing chamber with a high gilded ceiling and long windows overlooking St James's. Against its damask-covered walls hang full-length portraits of erstwhile grandee members, the whole emanating that characteristic of aristocratic solidity that Charles correctly, if subconsciously, believed the mainstay both of his personality and his way of life. We gave our orders as we came in and found ourselves a table for two on the wall away from the windows.

'I think Edith's left me.' The statement was so bald that for a moment I suspected I'd misheard.

'What do you mean "you think"?' I didn't quite see how one could be mistaken about such things.

He cleared his throat. 'Well, perhaps I should say she thinks she's left me.' He raised his eyebrows. I suppose the only way that he felt he could have this conversation at all was by distancing the whole business. As if we were exchanging a piece of gossip about someone else. 'She telephoned this morning. She's rented a flat in Ebury Street. Apparently the idea is for them to set up there together.'

I think the phrase is 'the universe reeled'. My first response, rather unworthily, was that I couldn't believe Edith would be this stupid before the scandal had forced her hand. 'What did she say?'

'Just that they're in love. She's been very unhappy. Nobody's fault, blah, blah, blah… You know. What you'd expect.'

At that moment my potted shrimps arrived, closely followed by Charles's avocado, I tried to use the silence to collect my thoughts but for the life of me I couldn't think of anything sensible to say. I chose badly. 'Who else knows?'

'You sound like my mother.'

At the mention of her name I yearned for Lady Uckfield to take the helm and steer everyone out of this ghastly mess. Not for her, be she never so young, a rented flat in Ebury Street shared with a married actor. 'Does your mother know?'

'She doesn't know all the details. Edith telephoned me a few days ago. When I sent round the note to you. I've been rather incommunicado since then. I don't see that there's much to be gained in facing the storm if the storm itself can be avoided.'

In my mind's eye I could see the articles in the very pages that had taken Edith up as Charles's intended and covered the wedding in such loving, glutinous detail barely two years before. I know, only too well, the high moral tone those raddled alcoholic journalists love to take when they choose to discuss the low lives of the haut monde. And Edith had made herself their creature, had willingly allowed herself to become a columnist's toy, something I knew would give them every licence to tear her in pieces now.

'Can it be avoided?' I asked.

'I don't know. That's where I need your help.'

Naturally my heart sank at the sound of these words. All, of this was happening too close to me. I yearned to get back into the outer circle of this family's world. How little Americans know when they disparage acquaintanceship in favour of real, true friendship. It is in acquaintanceship, bringing with it as it does delicious dinners, comfortable weekends, gossip shared in picturesque surroundings, but no real intimacy, no responsibility, that the greatest charm of social intercourse lies. I am an observer. It troubles me to be forced into the role of participant.

'You'd take her back then?'

Charles looked almost puzzled by the question. 'What do you mean? She's my wife.'

It is hard to explain quite why I found these words so moving but I did. It sounds odd to write it in our tawdry era but at that moment I was aware I was in the presence of a good man, a man whose word could be trusted, a man whose morality was more than fashion. What could Edith possibly have found in the embrace of her tinsel lover that was worth more than this solid, unquestioning commitment? He looked almost embarrassed by his noble declaration.

'I just want you to talk to her.'

'Well, I assumed you didn't want me to kidnap her.' I put down my glass. 'But what can I say? I think she's quite mad.'

Charles smiled. 'But I don't imagine that my telling her that will make much odds if she doesn't listen to you or her mother.'

Poor Mrs Lavery! This news would bring hara-kiri in its wake.

'I know that but…' Charles paused. 'I mean, you know the world that this Simon chap operates in. I don't mean to be, well, rude, but is it the sort of world that Edith would like? Has she thought about all that?'

Now this was quite a complicated question, certainly more complicated than Charles was aware. Nobody knows who is going to like the stage world. Adela took to it like a duck to water and never had a moment's difficulty synthesising it with her other, more traditional, social group. She found she liked the feast-or-famine, crisis-ridden, siege mentality of the whole thing.

To others, my mother-in-law for instance, the people of the stage seem simply awful, a sleazy crowd of oiks, all plastered in makeup, falling in and out of other people's beds, and getting drunk in restaurants. There is a good deal of truth in this picture, too. Charles was of the latter school. It quite amused him to know an actor socially but it was no accident that the only one he did know had grown up in fairly traditional circumstances. If he came to us for a drink it was fun for him to see people he recognised from various television series but he had no desire to befriend them. This was one of his main difficulties throughout the whole affair. He found it impossible to understand how Edith, having known his world from the inside, a world that if nothing else is elegant and rooted in charming settings, could have deliberately renounced it for an environment as alluring to him as Cardboard City.

Of course, the danger of the stage world, even for those initially drawn to its glitter, is that there is always a risk that one may grow out of it. It is the choice of high colour over more muted shades in terms of one's daily drama and for many there comes a time when the sobbing in the dressing room, the anti-director cabals, the midnight telephone calls of reassurance, simply become an adolescent bore. Some actors slake this sense of growing emptiness by the discovery of a 'cause' and try to put their need for daily trouble and strife to some use. Nothing is easier than to raise a crowd of furiously indignant actors who will happily protest at almost anything. But causes are a taste not shared by all, certainly not much by the pragmatic.

Besides, there is a risk, not always avoided by some quite famous stage names, of attaching oneself to so many noble struggles against injustice that the weight of one's contribution finally becomes rather flimsy. All in all, the most effective antidote to the palling pleasures of stage gossip is simply to become very successful. Then the money and the status that fame brings are pleasant enough in themselves and lead to a rather broader life willy nilly. Which thought brought me back to the question of Edith's adjustment to her new existence. I attempted to answer honestly.

'I think it would depend on how well Simon does.' Charles shook his head impatiently. 'I'm not saying she'd mind moving in with Jude Law but how successful is this fellow? I've never heard of him. Edith's used to living high on the hog, you know.'

I knew. 'It's difficult to say. He's started picking up some good parts. He might easily get the lead in a series and then he'd be up and running.'

'But he might not.'

This was certainly true. People in the outside world talk of actors being 'successful', which roughly means stars that they have heard of, or 'unsuccessful', which means the bottom 60 per cent who never really make a decent living. You do not need to be a mathematician to work out that there is a large group in between these two, doing quite well, earning reasonable amounts, known within the business, any one of whom can be picked for a new television show and have their fortunes transformed, as the papers like to put it, 'overnight'. This is the trap of the stage life. It is easy to give up something if you are failing, almost impossible to do so if you are almost succeeding. Simon Russell was definitely in this category.

I bought some time as our main course arrived. 'The trouble is, Charles, what argument could I employ that would make any difference? As I have just told you, I think she's quite crazy but she's a grown woman. To give up what you've offered her in order to go and live with an actor of moderate talent and even more moderate means is beyond comprehension to me.

But she already knows all this and so I don't know what I could add to it that would be helpful.'

'I suppose she loves him. I suppose it's sex.' He bit the word out of the air and two men on the next table glanced briefly in our direction.

'It might be sex,' I said. 'But I'm not at all sure that she loves him.'

Charles frowned disapprovingly. 'I can't quite follow you there,' he said, and turned his attention to the bones of his lamb chops, which he began to scrape fiercely, apparently anxious to retrieve every last morsel of edible matter.

It was clear Charles was not prepared to admit that his wife could differentiate between these elements, that she might be able to indulge her body without involving her heart. I loved him for it.

We didn't say much more. All I knew was that by the time I was back in Piccadilly strolling down the Ritz arcade towards Green Park Underground station I had agreed to telephone Edith and attempt to 'reason' with her.

FIFTEEN

As it happened Edith sounded quite eager to meet, 'so long as you don't start to lecture me.' I shouldn't have been surprised.

Freud has some special word for this 'compulsion to reveal' that undermines us all. She longed to discuss everything with someone who knew all the characters involved and given that she would expect some sympathy from her listener, I was probably in a category of one. We decided on a cheap and cheerful little restaurant in Milner Street, alas long gone now, a victim of the developers, that we had occasionally used during her estate agency days. When I arrived I found her already seated in a separate booth in the corner. She wore a scarf tied tightly and pulled forward over her brow. It was all quite exciting.

'I suppose Charles has put you up to this?' she said. I nodded since I supposed he had. 'How is he?'

'How do you think?'

'Poor darling.'

'Indeed.'

She wrinkled her nose crossly. 'Now you're not to make me feel like a beast.'

'But I think you are a beast.' We were interrupted, perhaps just in time, by the arrival of the waitress. Of course it was easy to see that Edith was enjoying the whole adventure tremendously. 'How's Simon?' I said.

'Oh, terribly well. He's having lunch with his new agent. Apparently she thinks he's the natural successor to Simon McCorkindale.'

'And that's good, is it?'

'Very good,' she said crisply with an admonishing glance. 'At any rate, it's much better than his last agent who always seemed to think he was lucky to get a job.'

'Is he working now?'

'He's about to do a play in Bromley. A revival of Rebecca. Apparently they're hoping it might come into the West End.'

'Edith, it'll be a cold day in hell when a revival of Rebecca comes into London from Bromley.'

'Well, that's what they've told him.'

'They say such things for two reasons. One is to tempt you into being in it, and two, so that you have something slightly less pathetic to tell your friends when they ask you what you're doing. This is my world, remember.'

She nodded slightly, 'I imagine that's why Charles has chosen you to talk to me. You're to take the gilt off the gingerbread and show me the dingy lowlife that lies beneath. He's given up trying to remind me of the glories of Broughton although I dare say I've got all that to look forward to when Googie gets in on the act.' She shivered in mock dread.

I felt rather slighted. 'I don't see why I shouldn't remind you of the glories of Broughton,' I said. She shrugged. Suddenly I was irritated by her air of insouciance. I knew, better than most, the effort that had gone into netting Charles and I was damned if I was going to witness Edith playing the part of a jaded aristocrat coming to the end of an arranged marriage.

'Come off it,' I said, driving back the waitress who was approaching with our first courses. 'You loved it. You loved every minute of it. All those cringing shop assistants and sucking-up hairdressers. All that "yes, milady, no, milady". You'll miss it, you know.'

She shook her head. 'No, I won't. You know better than anyone that I didn't grow up with it.'

'It's precisely because you didn't grow up with it that you'll miss it so severely.' I sighed. 'You're in for a terrific setting down, I'm afraid.'

'You don't sound afraid,' she said. 'You sound thrilled.' She took a sip of her Perrier as the plates were laid before us.

'And if Simon becomes a star? What then? Aren't more people interested in meeting a star than some boring old lord?'

It was then that I perceived that Edith, in the full flush of something akin to love, had made two tremendous miscalculations. Firstly, in weighing up the relative merits of aristocracy and stardom she had assumed that the benefits that would accrue to her, as partner, would be roughly equivalent. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The wife of an earl is, after all, a genuine countess. When people meet her it is not solely because they see her as a route to her husband.

Better still, if the family she has married into still possesses its estates, as the Broughtons did, then the landed peer offers his wife a mini-kingdom where she may reign as queen. On the other hand, the wife of a star is… his wife. Nothing more. If she is cultivated by people it is usually only so that they may ingratiate themselves with her husband. He has no land where she may reign. His kingdom is the studio or the stage where she has no place and where in fact, on her rare visits, she is in the way, an unprofessional among working people. She is excluded from the shared jokes between her husband and his workmates, she holds no interest even for his agent except as a method of controlling him. At dinner her opinions only irritate the other professionals present. Finally and worst of all, while a divorced peeress faces the world and the search for a new husband with a dented but legal title, the divorced wife of a star has returned absolutely to square one. As many Hollywood wives have had to learn before now.

Edith's second miscalculation was simpler. The comparison was false. Charles was a lord. Simon was not a star. Nor was he, in my opinion, very likely to become one. I felt myself becoming caustic. 'What makes you think so well of Simon's prospects?'

'You're very acid this morning. Anyway,' she looked at me with a real expression of appeal and I felt myself softening a little, 'the simple fact is I love him. I don't know whether he's worth it, perhaps he isn't, but I do. And there we are. You wouldn't want me to deny the first genuine feeling I've ever had, would you?'

Part of me wanted to scream yes into her stupid ear but I could see that was not what the moment called for. Poor Edith.

She was probably right when she said this passion for Simon was the first real emotion she had ever felt. That was precisely why she knew so little of what she was going through. She never guessed that after a year, however lovely the sex might be, it would no longer obscure from her the life they were leading together. Besides, I knew the strength of the ambition that lurked below Edith's placid surface. Modern psychology constantly harps on the dangers of suppressing one's true sexual nature. It seems to me that it is quite as dangerous to give one's sexual nature free rein and suppress one's worldly aims. Edith was, au fond, the ambitious child of an ambitious mother. Quite unconsciously, she had begun to defend her defection by assuming Simon's eventual stardom and wealth. In her mind's eye she already saw herself at a premiere in white fox (or whatever the glamour equivalent is in these ecological days), blowing a kiss to the waiting crowds and sweeping into a stretch limo with a motorcycle escort.

'Darling Edith,' I tried a softer tone, 'I'm not here to lecture you on your morals. I just want to be sure you understand that the likelihood of Simon being able to give you anything approximate to the life you have tasted since your marriage is more or less nil.'

'Well, hurrah for that,' said Edith.

We were done. For the rest of lunch we gossiped about various topics. Moving into the stage world she had of course crossed paths with a few people I knew so we had a new field for our malice. As we were leaving she asked after Adela. I said she was well. 'And madly disapproving, I suppose?'

'Well, she'd hardly be madly approving. Who is?'

'She should have married Charles. She'd have stuck to him through thick and thin.'

'Am I supposed to think badly of her for that?'

She smiled and ruffled my hair. 'You've earned your living in chaos and married into the system. I've been imprisoned in the system. Can you blame me if I yearn for a bit of chaos?'

We parted amicably enough. I telephoned Charles who was grateful and sounded more resigned, I thought. At any rate about a week later it hit the papers so the chance of sorting everything quietly was gone. Adela laid Nigel Dempster's column before my breakfast eyes and I studied the laughing, bosomy picture of Edith that had been selected. There was a more sombre one of Charles and a perfectly terrible 'cad' shot of Simon, which was presumably a still from some television show.

It was clear from the illustrations and the headline — 'the Countess and the Showboy' that Dempster had already chosen his side. In fairness to him, both pragmatism and decency seemed (for once) to favour the same team and I couldn't see Edith picking up many supporters.

The story itself was a moderately accurate account of the meeting at Broughton with a dignified quote from Simon's wife that did her credit.

'Really!' Adela was always curiously unforgiving about this sort of mess. 'Stupid fools!'

I don't know why she was so offended when people appeared to let their hearts rule their heads. After all, she had chosen to marry me, which her mother, for one, had thought a choice reckless to the point of lunacy.

'Why are you so cross?' I said. 'I think it's all jolly sad.'

'Sad for Charles and for that wretched woman with her children. Not sad for them. They're just wreckers.'

Once Dempster had opened the floodgates, Edith was predictably savaged by those very journalists who had taken such pains to ingratiate themselves with her as a bride only months earlier. The timing didn't help. It was during the period of disenchantment with John Major's government, when New Labour was performing the Dance of the Seven Veils before an increasingly bewitched electorate, and this tale of high corruption suited the public mood exactly. So there were critical columns from Lynda Lee-Potter on the right and snide disparagement from Private Eye on the left. Edith the self-made success story had been replaced by Edith the Social Climber to end all, her greedy, grasping ways apparently a reflection of the heartless society Mrs Thatcher had created. Like the Hamilton scandal or the Spencer divorce, it was soon clear that the actual events and personalities had ceased to have much significance and instead it was simply what the papers decided they stood for that counted. Predictably, it was a nightmare for the Uckfields, who were completely of that school where a respectable woman's name only appears in print three times: hatch, match and despatch — that is to say, when she is born, when she marries and when she dies. Finding their daughter-in-law criticised in column headlines was like being stripped naked and whipped in a public square and if it was ghastly for them it was really horrible for Charles. Slightly illogically, since the press was already limbering up for the Blairocracy that was then in training, they decided that Charles, despite being a worthless aristocrat, was the innocent party (probably because there was no other way of telling the story) but even so, to see his wife's adultery gloated over in newsprint and magazines was a kind of martyrdom for him. The more they telephoned Broughton, urging him to tell 'his side', the more invaded and violated Charles felt. The truth was his horror of scandal was not an affectation but a deeply held belief and here he was in the middle of one. He was being punished and he hadn't done anything wrong. This at least was Charles's view of the whole hideous episode and I do not think it was unjust.

After this circus had been played out for some weeks, it transpired that I had accepted an invitation for both of us to a supper party at the home of an actress I knew who had recently played Simon's mother in a television thriller. I thought there was every likelihood that the lovers might be there.

Adela was very cool when I told her. 'Well, I'm not going to flounce out of the room or cut her dead if that's what you're worried about.'

'I'm not worried. I'm just telling you they might have been invited. I think it's desirable to avoid publicly taking sides.'

'You need have no fear on that score,' she said witheringly. 'However,' she added, giving an unusually searching look in the glass and picking up her lipstick in real earnest, 'I'm not going to kiss her and wish her every happiness either.'

As it happened, I was right and Edith and Simon were on the guest list for that evening. Edith told me later she hadn't really wanted to go as they had been out every night since the scandal broke but Simon was insistent. He suffered from that common illusion among disappointed actors that it is good to be 'seen' at things. The truth is that it is good to be employed.

Whether one is seen at parties is immaterial. However, he had acquired a newsworthy mistress and he probably wanted to get some mileage out of her. If I'm honest and at this distance, I suspect Simon was sorry it had not all been managed without her leaving Charles. That said, since the breach had happened, he would have wanted to profit from the publicity.

Simon Russell was one of those actors whose initial progress had seemed to point inexorably toward a stardom that, somehow, the years had never quite delivered. In the early days he had been given the lead in a series opposite a popular female star but the show had failed. Then he had landed a good part in a Hollywood sequel, which had died at the box office.

And gradually the spotlight had shifted and slid away to those newer, younger, blonder men who seemed to arrive in such limitless supply. He was good — or good enough — and, as I have said, wonderful looking, especially when well photographed, and it could all still have happened for him but, by the point of our story, there was no time to lose. And now, most unexpectedly, his private life had put him into print. Edith had made him a topic.

As for his wife and children, I think it would be wrong to say he didn't worry about them. He did. As much as he was able.

She, Deirdre, had done her best for him and he really loved the kids, but I suppose it had all become a bit dreary over the last few years and so terribly the same. Besides, it was obvious when you saw them together (which we did a couple of times during the early days of the filming at Broughton) that Deirdre had ceased to think of him as a romantic figure and had begun to treat him more and more as a kind of overgrown, recalcitrant boy. He wanted worship and what he got was someone telling him to eat his greens. Of course, I wasn't sure how much unmixed adoration he would be able to count on from Edith. Or for how long.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'Darling, please… we must go…' It was quite unconscious but Simon had fallen into the habit of dealing with Edith in a wheedling tone, a cross between a lounge lizard and a travelling salesman. 'I hate to be naff but you have to get used to the idea that I earn my living. I'm not Charles swanning around giving orders at the Home Farm. I have to be out there. I have to remind people that I exist.'

She sat before the little dressing table in their dreary bedroom, frowning with concentration as she studied her reflection. It did seem rather naff really. Edith was hating her black celebrity. Every time some 'friend' rang her with the news that yet another journalist had taken a swipe at her ('I thought I ought to tell you, darling, before you read it unawares,' the voice would gloat), her heart would sink anew. She wanted fame in a way but fame that brought status and conferred glamour, not this awful washing of dirty linen. She even caught herself feeling sorry for her parents-in-law when she thought of the papers that were probably being edited by Charles or the servants before the Uckfields could set eyes on them. Poor Charles… how was he coping with it all, poor dear? And these frightful parties that Simon kept wanting to take her to. Could it be so necessary to keep chatting up these weird representatives from another planet? She had been too long a Broughton to be able to throw off (easily anyway) the notion that Simon's crowd was a sort of joke — useful to enliven a party but not quite right for every day.

'Why?' she said.

He watched her painting her face with care and artistry. He knew what she was thinking but he didn't much care. If she wanted to go back among her old world rather than spend all their time in his, well, that was fine so far as he was concerned.

In fact, he was becoming the teeniest bit impatient to get started on some of her gang. She had introduced him to a few Fulham Sloanes, but that wasn't what he had in mind as her contribution at all. Where she dreamed of shepherding him past the Press into his trailer on the Universal lot, he saw himself in tweeds, a gun on his arm, a welcome guest at other houses in the Broughton mould where he would flirt with other great ladies and be taken up by other great families. All of this his alliance with Edith would bring about. He did not grasp, perhaps because she did not yet either, that the great world was preparing to shut its doors on little Edith. From now on she would be condemned to the company of a few divorced wives of younger sons, eking out their alimony selling ugly jewellery or writing gossip columns for unread giveaway magazines.

She put down her mascara. 'Who is this woman tonight, anyway?'

'Fiona Grey.'

'Never heard of her. Have I met her?'

'No, I don't think so but you do know her. She was the girl in the film about the confidence trickster. When he fell off the train. On television last week. Michael Redgrave was the policeman.'

'Never heard of him, either.' Simon winced. 'She must be a thousand.'

'She's about seventy.' Actually Simon was very flattered to have been invited by Miss Grey. For this was the other side of his schizophrenic ambition. While part of him wanted Edith to get him into the world of the 'nobs', the rest of him, in almost direct contradiction, longed to be taken seriously as an actor, by the kind of actors that other actors take seriously, and just such a one was Fiona Grey. She had played Juliet opposite Gielgud in her youth and Lady Teazle opposite Olivier. Now, when she appeared on television it was usually some sort of an event — a series directed by Peter Hall or written by Melvyn Bragg — and she was invariably mentioned lovingly in English stars' autobiographies.

Theatre folk are much given to making claims for the classlessness of their world but the truth is that there is a rigidly structured class system within the business. It is only classless in the sense that this system is based on different values to that of the outside world. Birth may mean nothing but success is all. And not just success but the right kind of success. Simon Russell was acutely aware that, even when he had tasted his little helping of fame, he had never come close to doing work that was 'rated' by his fellow members of Equity and, secretly, it pained him.

When actors tell television interviewers that they don't mind what the critics say so long as the public enjoys what they do, they are lying. Few actors care anything for the public's opinion when set against the verdict of the critics and their peers. To be valued and given status behind the proscenium arch is their goal. If it can be accompanied by public adulation, fame and money — so much the better. At the core of the business is a clique whose pre-eminence in 'correct' work is unassailable, and Simon had ever longed to be included in it. The stars and directors, the writers and designers who count among this number patronise all but the most tumultuous public stardom. Their names may be linked to many causes, their interview manner and (certainly) their clothes may seem like a rejection of distinction, but the fact remains they form an elite whose exclusivity rivals that of the noblesse d'épée at the court of Versailles. Simon ached to be a member of this golden group who always get good reviews from Time Out and are never off the list at BAFTA.

His dreams were not realistic. On this particular evening, for example, he'd only been invited because he was in the papers.

Despite their high-sounding principles, these players share one characteristic with their Hollywood brethren: they love to be with famous people. If they lunch with Labour politicians, they like them to be front bench Labour politicians, if they march in a cause, they like to march next to Ian McKellen or Anita Roddick, not some obscure enthusiast from Harlow. But if Miss Grey had taken Simon up because he was In The News, she was incurious about his talent.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The party was in a house in Hampstead, which seemed to Edith to have taken about a year to get to and which, from the street anyway, did not appear to be worth the effort. Inside, every trace of the labourer, whose domestic arrangements it was designed to house in the 1890s, had been swept away in a sea of gleaming wooden floors and concealed lighting. There were knots of earnest discussion in the large living room, which opened off the hall, but the loudest noise was, inevitably, coming from the kitchen downstairs. Adela and I were standing by the stove, surrounded by bowls of pulses and pasta interlarded with strange creatures from the deep, when they came in. I felt Adela nudge me with her elbow as she went on talking animatedly to the unemployed designer we had got stuck with.

Our hostess advanced to Simon and kissed him, staring at Edith throughout. 'Now first you must have a drink and then you must let me introduce you. Do you know David Samson?' She indicated a famous comedy star who had planted himself at her elbow almost as soon as the couple had appeared. Edith smiled and took his hand only to find that hers had been raised to his hoary lips.

'Lady Broughton.' His fruity and familiar tones rolled the name round his tongue, savouring its flavour. He spoke loudly enough for bystanders to turn in curiosity and connect Simon and Edith with the stories they had read or vaguely heard of.

There was a faint buzz of awareness. Edith received Samson's adulation coldly, I thought, with a murmured, 'Edith. Please.'

Samson was not to be put off. He drew her arm through his and prepared to wheel her about the room. He turned to an inquisitive group nearby, booming out, 'Do you know the Countess of Broughton?'

Edith, needless to say, was in hell.

I would have rescued her earlier but Adela restrained me. I wonder if she didn't take a malicious pleasure in seeing Edith exhibited like a captive in a Roman Triumph. Adela had never endangered her footing in the old camp when she ventured into this new one and I suppose it was hard for her not to feel a tremor of victory. Simon came up to us, beaming. There are some who shudder at the thought of being an 'item' in the news. There are, conversely, others who cannot live without it. Simon was on the latter team. As the half-curious eyes followed him about the room, he was in his element. We broke away, leaving Adela to work over a rather grim-faced casting director on my behalf.

'How are you getting on?' I asked.

'Fine,' said Simon. 'Great.'

'So what happens next?'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, divorce, marriage, statements to the press?'

Simon raised his hands and eyebrows. 'Woah!' he cried with a spangled laugh. 'You sound like my mother.' It is easy to forget that even people like Simon have mothers. Some decent widow of a civil servant sitting in a flat in Leatherhead wondering what on earth was going on. He made me rather cross.

'You do know that you've got in very deep here? You do see that a lot of people are very upset about all this?'

He stroked my cheek. 'Oh well,' he said.

Of course, Adela enjoyed the whole evening hugely. Quite as much as Edith detested it, paraded round the rooms, as she was, like a sacred cow. Adela watched her struggling for small talk with these people who were so remarkably like ordinary people — the very people, in fact, that Edith had spent her twenties trying to escape from forever. The irony of all this was that, for all her hatred of the world of the Name Exchange, Edith had grown used to the comforting snugness of its limited membership. Suddenly she was back in open country where nobody seemed to know anyone she'd ever met. She felt something akin to panic. What did one talk about to people with whom one had no interest and no acquaintance in common?

After her time in Broughtonland, she had forgotten.

'Well, I hope she's enjoying herself.' Adela snuggled down into her coat as we started the long trek south.

'Do you?'

'Well, really! What has she done? And to leave without producing a child! So when the door shuts it's shut for ever. What a fool!'

I was still capable of being shocked by my wife's intense worldliness that lived so happily alongside her great, and I knew quite genuine, kindness.

'Isn't it better that there aren't any children?'

'Better for whom? Better for Charles and Googie. Not for her. To produce the heir is the only effective second act for a first wife. Think of Consuelo Vanderbilt's triumph when she returned to hated Blenheim as the mother of the new duke.

There'll be none of that for little Edith.' She sighed wearily. 'As for him!'

'I thought you rather liked him.'

'He's pleasant enough in his silly, blond way but hardly the craft to be entrusted with the cargo of life's happiness. What is she thinking of?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Similar thoughts were flickering somewhere at the back of Edith's brain at just that moment as they too sped back towards what she regarded as Civilisation. She was conscious of a kind of dull disappointment deep in her vitals. She had just been to another 'show business party' and as the phrase echoed through her brain she remembered the image it used to conjure up: vivid actresses, over made-up beauties in sequinned haute couture, intense, Jewish writers lecturing groups in the corners of the room, singers helping out a drunken pianist and, all the time, glassy laughter slashing the air… In fact, when she thought about it, she realised that the whole scene had been taken, more or less unchewed, from All About Eve. It seemed to have so little to do with this pack of suburbanites, eating health food and talking about their holidays in Greece.

Nor did she care for their fascination with her as the envoy of a different, and obviously disapproved of, world. She was not indifferent to the glamour of the stage but she had started to see that the quality of glamour as such was no longer rated by the fashionable thespians themselves. To make matters worse, she felt that she had entered this strange arena not as a star (which privately she had counted on) but as a freak.

'What a ghastly bunch! Who were those people?'

Simon never answered these questions, which were in truth more or less rhetorical. They both knew that what Edith was pointing out was that she found theatre folk 'common', though she would never quite say it. Simon, partly because he was not interested in whether they were common or not because it wasn't relevant, and partly because he suspected (deep in his heart) that by her standards he was pretty common himself, never rose to this one. 'I had a good time,' he said.

'You didn't have some frightful man with a voice like a bowl of fruit salad slobbering over your hand all evening. Are all your parties going to be like that?'

'Are all your parties going to consist of six Sloane Rangers and someone who lost money in Lloyd's? Because, if so, I'll take the fruit salad. Any day of the week.'

They drove home in silence.

SIXTEEN

It happened that I was in the Fulham Road late one afternoon running various errands and Adela had asked me to look in on Colefax and Fowler to collect some braid she had ordered a few weeks before. Normally I would have refused the commission since at that time (unlike today) all the assistants there seemed to have taken a degree in Higher Rudeness, but she insisted and in fact I was dealt with by a pleasant enough woman. Even though, as Adela had expected, the order had still not arrived, she did seem quite sorry about it.

At any rate, I was just receiving my token apology together with the standard assurances that it would be in next week when I glanced back towards the street and there, leafing idly through the racks of samples, was Edith's mother. I had last seen Mrs Lavery almost exactly two years before, around the time of the festivities of the wedding. It moved me now to think of that victorious figure, trembling with satisfied ambition in the Red Saloon at Broughton, as I looked at this lost and broken soul. She stared glassily at the huge flapping areas of pattern as they waved past her face but she saw nothing. Nothing, that is, except the ruin of all her dreams, which clearly played endlessly like a cursed tableau in her brain.

'Hello, Mrs Lavery,' I said.

She turned to me, gathered the knowledge of who I was from some distant mental shelf and nodded a greeting. 'Hello,' she answered in a hollow, frigid tone.

I learned later that she blamed me for introducing Simon to the Broughton family. With some justice, I suppose. It is customary nowadays for people to shrug off guilt in this sort of thing by saying 'it would have happened anyway' but I am not at all convinced by this argument. Most of our lives are not the fulfilling of some inexorable design laid down at birth but rather the sum total of a series of random events. If Edith had never met Simon — or not met him until after she'd had a child

— I think it quite unlikely that the whole thing would have happened. However, she had met him. And it did happen. And, when all is said and done, I had introduced them.

'Have you seen anything of Edith lately?' I said. The sense of her daughter's Banquo-like presence in the room, of her daughter's story, was making us both uncomfortable. It seemed easier to normalise the situation by talking about it.

'Not very much, no.' She shook her head. 'But she…' she hesitated, 'they are coming to dinner tonight. I dare say I shall catch up then.'

I nodded. 'Well, give her my love.'

But Mrs Lavery was not quite prepared to let me go. 'You know him, I gather. This new fellow.'

'Simon? Yes, I know him. Not very well but we were in a film together. Down at Broughton. That's how they met.'

'Yes.' She stared at the floor for a moment. 'And is he nice?'

I was rather touched at this. Mrs Lavery was trying to force herself to be a Good Mother and to concentrate on the timeless values in assessing her daughter's new beau when we both knew that if Simon had been the nicest man in Europe he could never have repaid what had been lost with Charles. 'Very nice,' I said. 'In his way.'

'I don't suppose you've seen much of Charles? Since all the — business happened?'

'I have, in fact. I had lunch with him the other day.'

Mrs Lavery was surprised. I suppose in her romantic imaginings of her son-in-law's world she had erected much fiercer divisions than in fact exist. Also my admission gave the impression that I might not have encouraged Edith in her folly. She softened noticeably. By this time she had convinced herself, of course, that her affection for Charles was genuine and based entirely on his qualities as a man. It wasn't but I don't know that it was any the less felt for that. 'How is he? I'd love to see him but…' She trailed off miserably.

'Oh, you know. I'm sure he'd love to see you,' I lied. 'He's still pretty cast down.'

'Well, he would be.' She sighed wearily and without hope. 'I'd better get going. They're coming at eight and I haven't done a thing.'

And she left the shop, her shoulders stooping as she pulled at the heavy door. When I had last seen her she had resembled a character from some frothy Coward comedy. Now she looked like Mother Courage.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Simon was oddly nervous as they turned right off the King's Road down the Vale towards Elm Park Gardens. He'd been fiddling with his tie every time they stopped at a light and as they drew closer, he started picking at his nails. Edith could feel herself tensing with irritation. She couldn't decide if he was apprehensive because he thought her parents were much grander than they in fact were — or if he was nervous of his role as a Wrecker of Marital Bliss. Either way she just wished he'd relax, as the evening promised to be quite sticky enough as it was.

'What is the matter with you?'

Simon just smiled and shook his head. He himself was not exactly clear as to why he had such butterflies although it was true he did think that the Laverys were smarter than they were. He had a very unclear idea of the nuances of London Society and, since he had no knowledge of the Inner Circle whatever, he was unaware of the extent to which Edith had been an outsider at the time of her marriage. Since he still thought of his new mistress as fearfully smart he imagined her background was correspondingly impressive. But that was not actually the source of his unease on this particular evening. Probably it was the more ordinary complaint that this formalisation of their relationship, this presentation to the parents, seemed to set some sort of seal of finality on what had originally been nothing more than a flirtation. He had not really, even now, faced that he was heading into the realms of 'divorce' and 'division of property' and 'maintenance' and 'custody' and all sorts of other depressing words and phrases and yet that is what suddenly seemed to loom ahead. He supposed that in some perhaps roundabout way Mr Lavery was going to ask him about his 'intentions' and it struck him that he didn't really have any intentions — not absolutely fixed ones anyway. But then he glanced across at Edith and she did look very lovely when he thought about it and he was aware of how much prettier her profile was than Deirdre's, who had always looked just a little gormless from sideways on and he thought that after all he could do worse. And thus mollified and heartened he got out of the car.

Mrs Lavery had confided in her husband about her meeting in Colefax. The words of the conversation had gone round and round her head until she had tried to spin them into a skein of hope. Even as she cooked for her daughter's lover she shouted through to the drawing room, 'What do you think he meant by "cast down" exactly?'

Kenneth Lavery was almost as unhappy as his wife over the turn events had taken but for more honourable motives. He hated to see his beloved 'Princess' involved in a public scandal. He hated to witness his wife's despair. And he was not insensible to the fact that his daughter had thrown away a position of power from which she might have achieved fine things and run instead to a place barely within decent society. He had been proud of his daughter as a Great Lady and he was saddened by her fall. Having said that, he was a good deal more philosophical about the nature of Edith's folly than his wife.

Unlike her he had never deluded himself that Edith's marriage was going to make all that much of a difference in his own life.

'I think he meant what he said. Charles is cast down. Of course he's cast down. His wife has just gone off with another man. What would you expect him to be?'

Stella Lavery stuck her head round the door. 'I just meant that it sounds as if Charles still hasn't got used to the idea. I wondered if there was any point in perhaps getting in touch with him…?' Her voice trailed away, as her husband started to shake his head slowly but firmly from side to side.

'My dear, it is not Charles who decided to end the marriage. It doesn't matter what he thinks. He is not to blame for this.

Nor do I think it fair to start trying to stir him up. Maybe he is getting over her, maybe he isn't. Either way it will not help him to have his hopes revived by you. He is a nice man and our daughter has behaved badly to him. It is fitting for us to keep out of his way.' So saying he returned to the television.

His wife did not resent this treatment by her husband because in her heart she agreed with it. Try as she might to affect some sort of modern tolerance the fact remained that she was deeply, deeply ashamed of Edith's behaviour. As long as she could remember she had imagined herself perfectly suited for a Great Role in the public life of England. She would daydream as she watched those ladies-in-waiting hovering behind the Queen in Parliament, all dressed in their fifties Hartnell frocks, and she had thought how well she, Stella Lavery, would have acquitted herself as Duchess of Grafton or Countess of Airlie if fate had only called her. She would have served well, she knew, even if, like the little mermaid, every step had been taken on knives. And all this fantasy had been passed on to her daughter who had, miraculously, made it come true. But now, instead of hearing that Edith had been asked to chair the Red Cross or to join the household of one of the princesses, the telephone had rung to tell her that it was all over. That her dream was in ruins. And at the bottom of this pit of slime into which she had been hurled was the bitter gall of knowing that all over London people were tut-tutting and saying that after all Charles had married beneath him, that Edith was a little nobody who just couldn't 'handle it' and that he should have stuck to his own kind.

The doorbell went but before they could get to it Edith had let herself in and was calling to them through the flat. As the lovers entered the drawing room, she hurried to kiss her father. He gave her an affectionate squeeze and she knew he at least would be no trouble as she led him over to be introduced to Simon. One glance at the frozen statue of her mother framed in the doorway, however, told her all she needed to know about the evening to come.

Mrs Lavery advanced stiffly and extended a hand. But she could not smile and in a way it was almost a relief that, as soon as Kenneth had left them to fetch some drinks, she dispensed with Simon's inept attempts at small talk and launched straight into the heart of the matter. 'You will understand that this is all very difficult for us, Mr Russell.' She deliberately ignored his attempts to make her call him Simon and in this there was a certain similarity to the way her idol, Lady Uckfield, would have managed the meeting. The latter would have been much cosier, of course. 'We are both very fond of our son-in-law. So you will forgive us if we don't fall on your neck.'

Simon smiled, crinkling up his eyes in a way that was usually effective. 'Neck-falling is quite optional, I assure you,' he muttered gaily.

Mrs Lavery did not return his smile. It wasn't that she was immune to physical attraction. She could see well enough that Simon was one of the handsomest men she had ever encountered but in her eyes his beauty was the explanation of her daughter's ruin. Nothing less. At that moment she could cheerfully have taken a knife and cut the features from his face if it would have turned Edith back from her chosen course. 'My daughter was,' she paused, 'is married to a fine man. Obviously you've thought about what you're doing but it's hard for us to see her break her vows without a pang.'

'It wouldn't have cost you much of a pang if I was leaving Simon for Charles,' said Edith.

Now this was completely true. So true in fact that it made Mr Lavery smile momentarily as he came back in with a tray of glasses, but Edith was forgetting that Mrs Lavery had cast herself in the part of Hecuba, the Noble Widow. In Stella's shattered mind she and Googie Uckfield were two high-born victims in a cosmic disaster (she talked of Lady Uckfield as Googie but not yet to her. Now, she thought tearfully, she would never have the chance). There was no room for irony in her suffering. She looked at her daughter with brimming eyes.

'How little you know me,' she said, and retreated majestically into the kitchen. Edith, her father and Simon stared at each other.

'Well, I suppose we all knew it was going to be a rough night,' said Mr Lavery, tucking into his whisky.

Later, sitting round the oval reproduction table in the flat's modest dining room, the four of them did contrive some quasi-normal conversation. Mr Lavery questioned Simon about acting and Simon questioned Mr Lavery about business and Mrs Lavery fetched the food and removed the plates and made elaborately courteous remarks all evening. She had that uniquely media personality she hardly knows, only to discover in later years that nobody usually questions anyone's 'right' to send them an invitation. If they want to go, they will accept. If they don't, they won't. So, now, it would not have occurred to Lord Uckfield to ponder whether or not Simon Russell was his social equal. He appeared to consider himself so, and that, coupled to the fact that his role in Lord Uckfield's life consisted of eating dinners and telling funny stories, more than justified his amiability and relaxation in the peer's eyes. Just so are many social careers, particularly in London, constructed. Simon was no different to the art-dealers and opera-enthusiasts that are taken up by the various duchesses of our day, whose grinning images, sandwiched between media personalities and the wives of the heirs to great fortunes, are glimpsed in magazines. Of course, such people, like Simon, are generally unaware that beneath the superficial acceptance that their charm and easy manner can gain for them, their grand hosts do not seriously consider them to belong to their world. It is sad to watch the

'walker-favourite' of a great family arrive, after years of drawing-room service, at a public event — a wedding, say, or, worse, a memorial — only to find that they are placed in the back pew between the local MP and the central heating duct, while half-known and much disliked grandees are shown up to the front. Such is life. Or such, at least, are the values of this life.

Something that Simon Russell was quite ignorant of, and Lady Uckfield knew very well indeed.

What interested me this evening, however, was not Lady Uckfield's response to Simon, which was predictably one of careful amusement, but Edith's. The sulks and rather affected hostility of the previous night had gone and been replaced by a mannered silence. She was looking more beautiful than she had been the evening before, in a black skirt and cream silk top, with some pearls at her throat and another string wound round her wrist in a chunky tangle. For want of a better word, she looked sexier than I had seen her since her marriage. She had not abandoned her cold hauteur, which I truly believe was already unconscious, but as we walked in, she looked up from the sofa with the kind of measured glance that I have learned from experience generally indicates that a woman means business.

Looking back, I am forced to conclude that Edith's plan to stay in the country in order to keep out of trouble was a poor one. Like some bored colonial wife in a hill station in India, the lack of sympathetic companions only really served to throw into advantageously high relief anyone who did make it to the outpost. I am not sure that if she and Charles had flung themselves into the whirl of parties, charities and all the other rubbish so eagerly awaiting them in London, that her virtue would have been in graver danger. I suspect it would have been quite the contrary. Society has the great merit of blunting the dullness of one's partner. The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.

Companionship, like retirement in the middle classes, can so often bring divorce in its wake. One thing I am sure of: in London, Edith would never have been attracted to Simon Russell. He was astonishingly good-looking as I have said, but in truth the trailer was better than the feature. He could talk and he was a really expert flirt, a joy to watch in action in fact, but when the chips were down and the doors were closed there was not much substance there. I do not mean to imply that I disliked him. On the contrary, I was extremely fond of him. And he could discuss mortgages or Europe or Madonna as well as anyone, but then couldn't Charles (at least the first two)? Of the feu sacré, that holy, charismatic flame that makes the world seem well lost for love, Simon had none at all. Or none that was discernible to me.

'Tell me, Mr Russell, what sort of acting do you like best?' This was Lady Uckfield. She was always careful to address strangers, especially those younger than herself as 'Mr' and 'Miss' or by their correct title. The main reason for this, indeed the reason for her whole vocabulary, was to underpin her image of herself as a miraculous survival of the Edwardian age in modern England. She liked to think that in her behaviour and manner people had a chance to see how things were done in the days when they were done properly. How matters would have been managed by Lady Desborough or the Countess of Dudley or the Marchioness of Salisbury or any of the other forgotten fin de siècle beauties who made their lives their art, which consequently perished with them. As part of this carefully studied performance, everything she touched was credited with uniqueness. She would speak of 'receipts' and 'luncheon' as she made a special point of her Irish ham ('dry and delicious and quite unfindable in England') or her French cherries ('I'm simply stuffing myself with them') or her yellow, American paper ('I find I just can't write without it'). The fun of this approach was that all her guests were blackmailed, on the principle of the Emperor's New Clothes, into agreeing that they could perceive an enormous difference in everything that was set before them, thus reinforcing the very prejudices that had made them lie. Actually, the food was always good and well-chosen so I was as craven as the rest in pretending to discern huge shades of taste between different types of asparagus or whatever the challenge of the day might be. And anyway, the more I came to know Lady Uckfield the more I came to admire the completeness of her self-image. She never took time off from being the ultra-charming but ultra-fastidious marchioness of the long Edwardian Summer. Never. I am sure that if she were going in for a potentially fatal operation, she would be fussing about the make of the surgeon's scissors.

Edith never understood the strength of her mother-in-law's chosen path. She thought her a fuss-pot and a pain in the neck.

But Lady Uckfield had a self-discipline that would have kept Edith out of trouble. She did not know what it was to be bored

— or rather, to admit to herself that she was bored. The fact she was married to a man who hadn't a quarter of her brain had never disturbed her conscious mind for half a second. Her road was chosen and she would make a success of it without pity or remorse. In our sloppy century, one must at least respect, if not revere, such moral resolution. And, after all, to borrow a phrase from Trollope, when all was said and done, 'her lines had fallen in pleasant places'.

The other reason that Lady Uckfield called Simon 'Mr Russell' of course, was to stop him calling her 'Googie'.

'Well, I like being employed,' he said in answer to her question. 'I don't know that there's much more to it than that.'

'Don't you want to be a great film star?' To an actor, this is an unfair question. They all want to be great film stars but it is something that, by universal unspoken agreement, they are not supposed to admit to.

Simon fell back on the stock reply. 'I think I just want to do good work.' He looked awkward as he said it although there was, to be fair, more truth in this than one might suppose. Or rather, it would be true to say he wanted to be admired for doing good work, which is not quite the same thing. But how else was he to answer her? Obviously, he wanted to be a great film star, just as Lady Uckfield had supposed. But while he knew this, he also knew not to reveal it.

'And will you always be an actor?' Here Lady Uckfield unconsciously exposed her own prejudices and put Simon even more securely in his place. It is a question often asked and yet I cannot for the life of me imagine people saying, 'And will you always be a doctor? Will you always be an accountant?' The reason is simple: try as they might they cannot see acting as a

'real' job. There is a distinction to be made here between the middle classes, who in some mysterious way are often affronted by the choice of acting as a career — as if one was choosing to live off immoral earnings — and the upper classes, who are usually only too delighted for one to be having a jolly time. But neither group can envisage actually staying with it. Perhaps because, despite quite a large number of posh actors in recent years, very few seem to make it through into the top strata of the profession. This may be because of prejudice, or lack of temperament, or simply because the road is too thorny for those with financial options, but the result is that while almost every aristocrat knows someone whose younger son or daughter has had a 'go at the stage' almost none of them know one who has succeeded. It can't be encouraging.

'Will you always be a marchioness?' said Edith from her place on the sofa, without raising her eyes.

Lady Uckfield glanced at her daughter-in-law for a moment. She quite understood the significance of Edith's weighing in on Simon's behalf. But she turned it back with a laugh. 'These days, my dear, who knows?' The smile became general and although I could not resist exchanging a quick look with Bella, we set about the business of being guests.

Simon, delighted to have acquired so attractive a champion, joined Edith on the sofa and was soon regaling her with Tales of the Film Set in his most engaging fashion.

Within minutes he was sparkling like the Regent Street Christmas lights. I watched Edith as she laughed and answered and flicked her hair about and laughed again, and watching her, I became aware that Charles, half talking to his mother across the room, was watching too. We both knew that we were looking at a more animated Edith than we had either of us seen in many moons and I knew that, above all things, I must be careful not to catch his eye or I would become complicit in a knowledge that would ultimately bring him great unhappiness. When he glanced towards me, I looked away and joined Bella, who was, needless to say, telling some risqué story about being stranded overnight in a garage to a fascinated Tigger.

Once into the dining room, the evening was undemanding and pleasant enough. The food was excellent as usual and I noticed that the servants had begun to assume towards me that slightly ingratiating manner that is their usual defence in the case of 'regulars'. Having ascertained that you will be back, all servants who view their position as a career will abandon the (no doubt great but inevitably temporary) pleasure of assuming a patronising air and snubbing you on behalf of their masters.

Instead they adopt a kind of respectful chumminess that will ensure large tips and a good mention for them if they come up in conversation. This pat-a-cake is usually accepted. I have known many people who should know better to feel flattered at being made a fuss of by the staff of the grand. They believe this intimacy will bring them many opportunities in the future of demonstrating their familiarity with a Great House that may be denied to other guests. They will enjoy these moments a good deal. Properly handled, the relationship soon develops into a mutual, if slightly glutinous, admiration society. At any rate, on this occasion I disappointed myself by feeling quite warmed by deference as we made our way back to the car. Bella and I chatted on the way home, both of us relieved that the evening was over and yet pleased that it had been easier than we had anticipated. Reaching Brook Farm, we loitered outside as Simon went in and started to turn on the lights.

'So he's made another conquest after all,' said Bella.

I nodded. 'Thank goodness really,' I said. 'After last night, I thought I might find myself keeping the peace.'

'Oh, I don't think that's going to be your role at all,' said Bella with a half-smile.

I raised an admonishing finger. 'Don't make scandal. We're all getting on very well and this is a cushy job. Let us look no further than that.'

Bella laughed. 'Maybe. But you haven't noticed one thing.' I raised my eyebrows quizzically. 'He hasn't spoken a word since we left the party.'

She was right. I think I had noticed but had forced the knowledge out. For when someone as eager for approval, as hungry for status, as ready for the world to know of his adventures as Simon Russell, spends the evening basking in the intimate glow of a young and beautiful countess and feels no need to brag about it, then it is generally because the story has only just begun.

And so it proved.

TWELVE

I was perhaps not as observant as I might have been around this period as it so happened that some time before beginning the film at Broughton I had met the girl whom I was going to marry. She does not play much of a part in Edith's story and so I shall try to be as brief as possible. There was nothing particularly unusual in our meeting. It was at a cocktail party in Eaton Terrace given by a friend of my uncle's and, as it happened, her mother's that neither of us had especially wanted to attend. I was introduced to her quite soon after she arrived (with said mother) and more or less at once decided that this was my future wife. Her name was Adela FitzGerald, her father was an Irish baronet, one of the earliest creations as she was wont to point out crisply from time to time. She was tall, good-looking and businesslike, and I saw at once that this was someone with whom I could feasibly be happy for the rest of my life. I was consequently very taken up for the next few months trying to persuade her of this truth, which seemed manifestly self-evident to me but was not, I must confess, so immediately apparent to her. Quite why one makes one's choice in these matters is a mystery to me as much now, happily married as I am, as then when I was chasing after someone I hardly knew. I had spent many years trying and failing to find the right partner and it seems rather illogical that I should have been satisfied on the instant but I was. Nor have I had any cause to regret my decision since.

I concealed Adela from my acquaintance for a while. When you are approaching forty everyone is apt to make a great fuss over any companion you are seen out with more than once — well-meaning friends kill many romances in the bud — and so I thought I would keep quiet until I knew if there was 'anything in it'. However, in the end, I felt there was and so I introduced her around. My society friends and to a much greater extent my family were relieved that I had chosen from my old world rather than my new. My theatrical friends — more generous if more casual of heart as a rule — were just relieved that I'd found somebody.

We were nearly at the end of the shoot when I suggested that Adela might like to come down to Sussex one Friday, watch a bit of the filming and stay two nights at the farmhouse. This was to be arranged, to Bella's delighted hilarity, quite properly, with me giving up my room and sleeping on the sofa. Adela accordingly drove down on the appointed night in her rather battered green Mini, was introduced to the other two over a merry and, thanks to Bella, delicious dinner and promised to join us on the set the following day when she had done a bit of shopping.

The next morning, before she had arrived, Edith came stalking me. We were filming in a rose garden, which was at the end of a short avenue leading away from one side of the house. The scene had originally been scheduled for the first week but had been endlessly delayed, I forget why, and so here we were, shooting it in mid-October. However, the luck of our (fearful) producers held and the day dawned as bright and hot as any in late June. I was almost irritated that their improvidence should have been so rewarded. It was a long sequence, involving Elizabeth Gunning (the fiercest American, Louanne) and Campbell (Simon) in a love duet, which was ultimately interrupted by Creevey (me). I was therefore sitting and reading, waiting my turn on the edge of the proceedings and I must say enjoying the location when Edith came into view.

'What's this I hear? You're a very dark horse.' I nodded that I was. 'Is it serious?' I observed that since I was already established as a dark horse it wasn't very likely that she'd know anything about it if it wasn't. 'Is she an actress?'

'Certainly not.'

'There's no need to sound so indignant. Why shouldn't she be?'

'Well, she isn't. She works in Christie's.'

Edith pulled a face. 'Not one of those earl's nieces at the front desk who sound so superior and then never know the answer to anything you ask them?'

'Exactly. Except she's not an earl's niece, she's a baronet's daughter.'

'What's her name?'

'Adela FitzGerald.'

'Well, you do disappoint me.' She threw herself down on a bank near to my folding chair. There were other empty chairs near so I felt no guilt.

'I can't think why.'

'You, my artist friend, to sink to a suitable match.'

'I'm not sure I'm prepared to listen to that from you. Anyway, surely the point is whether the suitability is an incidental detail or the primary motive.'

Edith blushed faintly and was silent. The first assistant signalled to us to be quiet and the cameras started to roll on Simon and the deadly Louanne. She pouted her way into the best position before the lens. We had all more or less reconciled ourselves to Jane Darnell, who was playing Lady Coventry. She was inept but there was no malice in her and she didn't appear to think much more of her chances of impersonating an eighteenth-century Irish beauty than we did. She was only really interested in collecting horse-brasses to take back to her Laurel Canyon home. Louanne Peters was an entirely different matter. Not only was she convinced that she was possessed of a seriously remarkable talent but her egotism nearly ranked as mental illness. She would talk of her successes and her looks, her lovers and her earning capacity by the hour, and always without asking a single question of her unwilling listeners. At first one was inclined to think that it must be some sort of complicated joke and that she was waiting for us all to call her on it, to burst out laughing, to hold up our hands and shout,

'Enough! We give in!' Only it wasn't and she wasn't. Simon loathed her, which didn't help their rather underwritten love scenes.

The shot finished, releasing Simon and Louanne, just as Adela came striding down the avenue towards us. In her corduroy knee breeches and fisherman's sweater, her long hair held back with a briskly tied silk scarf, she was the very antithesis of Louanne's synthetic charms and, for a moment, she showed Edith's carefully painted face in a slightly unfavourable light. She was so… healthy. But then again, of course, I was in love with her.

Edith stood up in greeting. 'Adela, how lovely to meet you at last. I'm Edith Broughton.'

'But I'm thrilled to meet you too!'

The girls exchanged their guarded greetings. That they were guarded was for two principal reasons, neither of which meant that there was the smallest romantic rivalry between them. Edith was not then and never had been in the least interested in me in that way. No, on her side it was the annoyance of having to surrender a confidant who has done good service and who will never be quite so useful married as he has been single. If you marry late there are many who feel this, even if those that love you attempt to control it. Added to which, just as happily married friends drive us all mad by their insistence that the married state is the only possible one, so do one's unhappily married acquaintance see it as their mission to turn all and sundry back from the church door. This stance is often used, half jokingly, as a means of insulting their partner in public. 'Get married!

What on earth do you want to do that for?' one hears jocularly at a dinner party, and from further down the table comes a sour look from a lip-biting spouse. Ominously, this was a position that Edith, quite unconsciously I'm sure, was nudging into.

On Adela's side the guardedness was more subtle. She knew of course exactly who Edith was and, until meeting me, had been inclined to take the other point of view about the new Lady Broughton — that Charles, whom she had met a few times on the circuit, had been 'caught.' I had brought her at least to the point of suspending her judgement but in Edith's tone of greeting Adela had detected, with some justification, the faintest note of graciousness. Edith the Aristocrat welcoming this nice little actor's girlfriend. These things are hard to gauge correctly but it is true that Edith had developed a rather grand manner by this time so she may have been tempted into this dangerous area. Understandably, Adela, while previously prepared by me not to snub Edith, was damned if she was going to be patronised by her.

To make matters worse, just at this moment Charles arrived to see what was going on. He recognised Adela and I think in revenge (although she would have denied it) she lost no time in leading him into a conversation about several people that they both knew but Edith did not. In short she used Edith's dreaded Name Exchange against her. I suppose I should have felt indignant for one or the other of them but these things have a way of sorting themselves out without help from outsiders and anyway I could see that Adela had a point. I don't think I expected, even then, that she and Edith would ever be particularly close. Adela was too near what Edith wished to be (certainly so far as her past went) and while Adela was not a snob as a general rule, she was not above putting the likes of Edith in their place. I used to call it her 'Vicereine Mode.' All in all I could see that the best I might hope for was a kind of mutual tolerance. On this particular morning, before things could get sticky, Charles offered to show Adela the stables and with a nod towards me they set off. Edith watched them go.

'That's who should have married Charles.'

'Well, she's going to marry me.'

'No, I mean that's the kind of girl who would have made him happy. Giving out prizes, running the WVS. Can't you see it?'

'If that had been the kind of girl he wanted to marry, he would have married one. Lord knows there were plenty to choose from.'

'That doesn't sound very complimentary to your beloved.'

'You are talking of her obvious characteristics, which are, as you rightly observe, those of her time and her class. Her unusual qualities, of which you know nothing, are at the root of why she has chosen to marry an impoverished actor with a basement flat and not a rich earl.'

'Well, we'll have to watch our Ps and Qs around her.'

I wasn't having that. 'Don't make us into two teams, my dear. If you do, I warn you I'm on hers not yours.'

'Ouch.'

'Anyway, who says Charles should have married anyone but you?'

Edith said nothing but lay back and stared at the sky.

'You two look very intense.' Simon appeared, stripped of his embroidered coat, more romantic than ever in his flapping linen sleeves. He threw himself down on the bank next to Edith with a gay disregard of his costume. I could see his dresser sucking his teeth in the background but Simon was playing Byron to Edith's Caroline Lamb and he was not going to let a detail like grass stains deflect him. 'Where's Adela? Wasn't she here?'

'She's gone off to see the stables with Charles,' I said.

'To catch up on old times,' added Edith dryly.

Simon laughed. 'Lawks,' he said. 'We'd better be on our best behaviour when those two get together.'

'Don't start that,' said Edith. 'I've just been ticked off.'

Simon gave a comic guilty look in my direction but actually I was rather interested that his social confidence had grown sound enough to attempt this kind of joke. I suppose I was faintly annoyed that Adela was being equated with Charles under some kind of 'dull nob' label by them both, but when I saw Edith smile and mutter to Simon under her breath I realised at once what a clever flirt he was. For by including me in his observation he had contrived to take the threat out of what was nevertheless a deliberate complicity, a shared joke with Edith, which excluded Charles. I saw then that Adela and I were quite irrelevant to his purposes.

It transpired that this weekend, Edith, in a spirit of revenge as well as generosity, and quite against Charles's will, had invited the very Bob and Annette who had been staying with the Chases during the Mallorcin honeymoon. She had done this partly to see Annette again (who had, of course, kept up a lively correspondence with her new and eminent pal), partly to annoy Charles, partly to annoy Googie, and mainly to annoy Eric Chase who was down at Broughton with Caroline. She thought it would infuriate him to have this pair introduced to his parents-in-law as 'friends of Eric' as if they were typical of his crowd. She was correct. It did.

Simon, Adela and I had been asked for dinner, Bella having taken off for a few days in London, so at eight that night we found ourselves joining this motley throng in the family drawing room. The mismatched group promised a strangely disparate evening and in fact, Adela initially got the wrong end of the stick and spent the first hour assuming that Eric was something to do with the film and not the family. The more names he dropped the more she was confirmed in her opinion until finally he referred to 'my father-in-law, Tigger', in red-faced exasperation. Even then she looked over to me for a second opinion.

Lady Uckfield's responses on the other hand were calculatedly, and deliberately, disappointing to Edith. She made a great fuss of Bob and Annette all weekend and simultaneously managed to convey, with a sort of discreet gush, what a relief it was to her to find a kindred spirit in Adela, which was, I think, meant as a compliment to me.

It reassured her that, having taken an actor into her circle, he should turn out to be her sort after all. She found it fitting that her friends should marry people she had more or less heard of. As it happened she knew one of Adela's aunts quite well and had come out the same year as her mother, all of which was as it should be in her quaintly ordered world. Obviously, it was exactly this security blanket that Charles's choice of Edith had withheld and it was hard not to suspect a touch of spite towards her daughter-in-law in the liveliness with which Lady Uckfield took up my intended. Adela, naturally, blossomed under the attention, still only half aware of the games being played around her. I found Edith in one of the windows, staring grumpily at the ill-assorted party. She nodded at my beloved. 'What did I tell you? She's perfect.'

'I know.' I followed her gaze and saw that it had shifted from the cosy scene on the sofa to a far corner where Caroline Chase was listening absorbedly to Simon, apparently, as always, in full flow. Between the groups Charles wandered rather disconsolately, offering refills. 'Poor old Charles. Who's got him at dinner?' The question was more impertinent than I had meant but I suppose I wasn't thinking. At any rate, instead of reprimanding me as she should have, Edith shrugged.

'Who knows? We've got the most ghastly evening ahead.' I looked enquiringly. 'Bob and Annette Watson are taking us all out.'

'That's very nice of them. Why on earth should they?'

Edith did not share my view of things. 'That's not all. They've booked us into Fairburn Hall. Googie's in fits. She's thrilled, of course. She's been dying to see what they've done with it since the de Marneys left and she's never dared admit it.'

Her lack of gratitude at the Watsons' invitation did not surprise me. The plan was, naturally, a frightful prospect to the Broughtons and their ilk. In England one of the saddest mistakes a social climber can make is excessive generosity. It's odd really for what could be more charming? To arrive with presents and treats, to gather up whole house-parties and take them out on the town — what could be nicer than this? And yet these courteous acts are as clear a signal to the Insiders that the would-be benefactor is a newcomer to their world as if they had worn a sign on their hat. Of all these solecisms, that of offering to take people 'out' in the country is perhaps the worst. The English upper-classes do not as a rule leave their houses in the country in the evening except to go to other people's houses. They might be tempted by a country house opera or even the occasional play with a picnic attached, but if they want to eat in a restaurant they do it in the week and in London. Nor do they ever go to 'country house hotels' unless it is on a pilgrimage of personal curiosity. They might visit one because 'I used to spend my summers here when it belonged to my Aunt Ursula', but they would never, on pain of death, book in for dinner or a weekend. One of the saddest aspects of these places is that the gentility promised in the brochures can never, by its very nature, be reflected in the guests.

The Watsons, anxious to ingratiate themselves with Lady Uckfield and to become Broughton 'regulars' had hit on the sure way to render themselves ridiculous to their hostess for ever, as well as providing her with a welcome new source of funny stories. For this privilege they would pay a great deal of money.

Fairburn Hall was a large and ugly house on the other side of Uckfield. It had belonged for several centuries to the ancient if low-achieving family of de Marney, who had finally managed a baronetcy by befriending, of all people, Lloyd George. The de Marney of a particularly unfortunate architectural period in the 1850s had encased a blameless Queen Anne manor house in a hideous, neo-gothic shell, studded with bas-reliefs of the family's triumphant, historical moments. These apparently were few and as a result rather nebulous and un-sourced scenes of 'Gerald de Marney welcoming Queen Eleanor to Fairburn', or 'Philip de Marney taking the colours at Edgehill' gave rise to great hilarity among the Broughtons. I need hardly say there was no love lost between the families and never had been. Technically the de Marneys were the older family and had consequently always tried to assume a lordly manner towards their neighbours. This was absurd of them as the Broughtons, whether the de Marneys liked it or not, were much richer and much grander as they had been for the previous three centuries. A couple of years before this, the current incumbent, Sir Robert de Marney, had given up the unequal struggle, sold Fairburn on a long lease to a large group of 'Leisure Hotels' and moved with his family into the dower house four miles away.

'Do you think we ought to be veiled?' whispered Lady Uckfield, as we climbed out of the cars. She turned to me. 'It was always the vilest house in the world. My mother-in-law used to swear they'd muddled up the plans with Lewes prison and got the wrong one.'

The entrance was through a wide semi-conservatory, with stone flags and odd, quasi-armorial grills at the window, like a rather grand bank. Through this one came into a cumbrous entrance hall. Thick, square Victorian columns stood everywhere, but the decision in the rebuilding not to raise the original ceiling height of the old house gave it the look of some central German under-vault, making one feel like a caryatid. The de Marney crest in loud colours was on every wall and an ornate family tree, framed in gilt, hung over the gas-log fire. Lady Uckfield stared at it. 'They've got the wrong branch,' she said happily.

An immensely important head waiter came towards us and mistaking Bob Watson's nervous enquiry about the reservation for the general tone of the party he attempted a very superior air as he ushered us into what he referred to as the 'withdrawing room'. He was soon disabused.

'What a horrid colour!' said Lady Uckfield, ignoring the chair he was indicating and plumping down onto a sofa instead.

'Too sad, as this was really the only room that was nice at all. It was the music room in the old days although they were tone deaf to a man!' She laughed pleasantly, as the crushed waiter tried to salvage his position by fawning over her for her choice of 'aperitif.

'I think Lady Uckfield would like some champagne,' said Bob loudly, and one or two lacquered heads in the corners of the room looked round. He, in his turn, wanted to get some mileage out of bringing such a distinguished group to this, as he imagined, smart venue and I can't say I blamed him. Heaven knows he was going to pay dearly for it. His tone further flattened the attendant who was sufficiently familiar with the area to realise by now the extent of his initial faux pas. The party was becoming uncomfortable and Charles and Caroline exchanged a quick, edgy look. I found myself longing to defend Bob and his kindness of spirit, but I knew I would be fighting insuperable odds and, coward-like, I seized one of the huge, leather-bound menus when they arrived and hid behind it until the wine was brought with a great flurry of silver and glass and linen. At this moment, to everyone's amazement except possibly Caroline's, Eric leaned forward, plucked a bottle out of its silver-plated, ice-lined nest and spoke, not to Bob but to the waiter:

'Haven't you got any of the ninety-two?'

The waiter shook his head with murmured apologies. Just as Bob's timorousness had at first made us all worthless so far as he was concerned, now Lady Uckfield's presence made us all fine folk indeed.

Eric glowed at his deference. 'Then you shouldn't say it's ninety-two, should you?' He dropped the bottle back into its holder and sat back as the waiter poured.

Across the group Edith caught my eyes and rolled hers.

Bob was fumbling. He knew he faced a bill of something in the region of seven or eight hundred pounds and already the mixture of suppressed giggles and secret smiles was telling him that, mysteriously, his treat was making him not eminent but ridiculous. This was doubly irritating to him as his wife had tried to talk him out of it and had suggested, instead, asking the Broughtons and the Uckfields to dinner at the Ivy in London (which would, of course, have been perfectly acceptable to them).

Charles came to his aid. 'This is delicious,' he said firmly, sipping his wine and looking towards the rest of us.

'Absolutely lovely,' said Adela, and I nodded away.

Actually, it was quite nice but too cold. However, Simon, on this dangerous evening, had clearly decided to go for broke.

Once and for all he was determined to shake off the concept that he was in any sense overawed by the present company.

'Would it be a great bore if I have a whisky?' he said.

'Good idea,' said Eric. 'Me, too.'

The careful cruelty of this was that Bob had already ordered three bottles opened, which the rest of us could not now possibly finish. He was foundering. His wine had been rejected, he had been insulted and yet somehow he had to go on as if everything was going swimmingly. 'Of course!' he smiled broadly. 'What about you, Edith?'

Edith sank back into the over-stuffed, chintz-covered chair and stared her pellucid stare. I could see her gaze trailing over Charles, who was giving her an admonishing look, imploring her to behave. Poor man. These were his wife's friends and yet it was he who was having to work to save the evening. Behind him, Simon stood beaming at her. 'I wouldn't mind some vodka,'

she said. Simon half winked, and they both caught in their smiles before they spilled over into impropriety.

'Fine,' said Bob in a lacklustre voice. He looked around for more trouble but Caroline, with a deliberate gesture, reached across Eric to help herself to a large glass of champagne. The battle-lines were forming.

The food was predictably pretentious, with bonfires going at practically every table. Inadequate portions arranged like cocktail hats followed each other in blank, tasteless succession, fussed over by suspiciously French waiters. The maître d'

would not, by this time, leave us alone and kept dashing up for a review of the current course until Simon finally suggested he might like to take a seat to save himself the bother. Of course we all laughed and of course he was never seen again. In truth the dinner itself was the least awful part of the evening because of Simon. He certainly was on very funny form that night. He could match Annette's stories without challenging her and the pair of them did keep things going. Even Lady Uckfield gave in to the prevailing mood and chuckled away as she toyed with her unsatisfactory and costly dishes.

Charles, on the other hand, was more or less in hell the entire time. He was not quick enough to get the point of most of the anecdotes, let alone tell his own. These were not his kind of people and unusually for him (for he seldom risked the possibility) he was outnumbered. Unlike his father he was not a flirt, unlike his mother he had very little sense of humour.

Caroline tried to rescue him once or twice but she was in a dark mood of her own and in the end it was Adela who got him onto the business of improving the shoot at Feltham. He had apparently only restarted it three years before after a long gap and the topic released some of the pent-up flow within him, but even this had a limited success for when Simon was telling a story about some production he'd been in where the stage manager had filled the bath with boiling instead of cold water, he paused for the punch line and into the silence came Charles's voice: 'The great thing is to leave a wide enough headland of kale, which of course some of the farmers are reluctant to do…'

Simon laughed. 'Well, obviously Charles is fascinated,' he said. He meant it pleasantly enough, I think, and all would probably have passed on if Edith had not spoken up at that moment: 'Oh, Charles for God's sake, shut up about your bloody shoot.'

I imagine she thought that in some way this would be a joke too and we would all smile but it came out wrong. Her voice was harsh and I suppose unloving in a way that, particularly in the presence of Charles's parents as we were, made a strange and embarrassing tremor at the table. I saw Annette catch Bob's eye as I felt Adela nudge my foot.

Charles looked up, hurt rather than angry, like a puppy who has been smacked for some other dog's pee. 'Am I being very boring?' he said.

There was a faint pause and then Eric, either misguidedly thinking to be amusing or, more probably in his case, just in order to be unkind, said, 'Yes, you are. Better have some more to drink.' He started to pour wine into Charles's glass but Charles shook his head.

'Actually, I don't know why but I'm terribly tired.' He turned his harassed eyes to Bob. 'Would you forgive me if I skipped the coffee and headed on home?'

Bob knew by now, long before he had reached for his plastic, that the evening had been the most crashing flop and so he shook his head merrily. 'Of course not! You go. We'll be fine.'

Charles smiled wanly and stood up. 'Well then, I think I will be off if I may. We've lots of cars, haven't we? Will you be all right, darling?'

Now it was perfectly plain to everyone present that Edith ought to have jumped to her feet, said that she, too, was tired and left with her husband. Normally this is exactly what she would have done but this evening some kind of devilry had got into her. Or maybe it was simple lust. At any rate, she neither moved nor spoke and it was Simon's voice that broke the silence:

'Don't worry about Edith. I'll bring her home.'

Charles looked at him and for a second they were what the Americans call 'eyeballing' each other. It might seem that Charles, rich and titled as he was, and really not that bad-looking in his 1930s-ish way, held all the aces, which of course in the long view he did, but Simon Russell, feeling successful and busy and as handsome as a man can be, bristled or rather shone with charismatic confidence that night. To all the onlookers at the table Charles paled before him and I at least felt a pang of real pity for this man who had everything. Obviously, looking back, I know that Simon had the confidence of a man in love whose love is returned and Charles conversely had the fear of a man facing ruin but even without that knowledge the figure of Russell, clad in his waisted blue velvet coat, eyes and hair aglow, looked like the embodiment of some unconquerable force in a mythological painting. I say this that one may perhaps be less hard and more forgiving of Edith. Having taken in the tableau for a moment, it was Lady Uckfield who spoke.

'That's very kind of you, Mr Russell. Are you sure?' She broke the mood further by rising and forcing the company to their feet. 'Am I leading the ladies out? Or do we all go through together, here?'

Even in this supreme moment of face-saving she could not resist pointing up the fact that she thought this place quite extraordinary and so, presumably, not governed by the normal rules of her existence. I have said before that I came to admire Lady Uckfield a good deal and this was one of the moments that underpinned my view of her. She had witnessed her son made a fool of, she had seen him dismissed by his wife, she was well aware of the danger in the air from Simon's offer and yet she would not have revealed any of these things for worlds. She would have cut out her tongue rather than give anyone the impression that she thought it a bad idea for Edith to travel home alone in the dark with Simon. And yet she would have given one hundred thousand pounds then and there to have Russell removed from her sight for ever. If Edith had only had her mother-in-law's control, there would have been no scandal of any kind, then or later.

Back in the horrible 'withdrawing room' Lady Uckfield beckoned to me to sit beside her. If she felt uneasy, she did not betray it with the slightest flicker. 'You must let me congratulate you on your choice.'

'You're pleased for me, then.'

'Well, as your friend I'm pleased but as a hostess I'm furious.' I smiled because she spoke the truth. She would forgive me the inconvenience of ceasing to be a single man but only because of the 'rightness' of the thing. 'When will you be married?' I explained that while I had every reason to believe I would be successful, it was not all quite settled yet. I imagined it would be five or six months. 'And what about children? Have you thought about that? I'm an old woman so I can ask.'

I shrugged. 'I don't know really. We both want them but I can't help feeling that the timing is rather up to the wife, isn't it?

After all, my bit's rather easy.'

Lady Uckfield laughed. 'It certainly is. But don't wait too long. I hope Charles and Edith don't.' She looked me in the eye as she said this because of course we both knew that they had already waited too long. If Edith was now fretting over some golden head in the nursery or indeed if she was simply big with child, none of the threatened nightmare would be happening. 'I quite agree,' I said.

THIRTEEN

I had wondered, when Simon made his offer to escort Edith home, whether his plot would be foiled by finding that he had to take various others with them, but as soon as I emerged from the house with Adela I saw that this would not be the case: the whole back seat of his car was stuffed with a pair of chairs and what looked like an assortment of gardening tools. By my side I could feel Lady Uckfield taking in the same fact. My guess is that she had intended to join her daughter-in-law in the shabby Cortina, but, if so, it was not to be. I offered her and Lord Uckfield a place in Adela's Mini and, with a glance at Eric, who had brought some sort of Tonka Toy/Range Rover, they accepted. Lady Uckfield and I squeezed into the back seat, leaving Lord Uckfield and Adela in front. Eric gestured to them impatiently but in her sublime way Lady Uckfield affected not to notice. We drove off, leaving Bob and Annette to the tender mercies of Eric's red-faced driving.

'I hope he isn't stopped,' said Lord Uckfield.

Lady Uckfield made a slight moue with her mouth. 'Oh well,' she said.

We travelled in silence for a bit, all, I imagine, thinking of Simon and Edith whose car was nowhere in sight.

Lady Uckfield spoke again. 'Aren't those places too extraordinary? Who do you think goes to them?'

'Isn't it these whad'y'a call "yuppies"?' Lord Uckfield spoke in inverted commas, pleased to be so up to the minute.

'Well, it can't only be yuppies. Are there enough of them? There can't be that many round here. Americans too, I suppose.

So sad, really.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Adela. 'I'd rather see them as hotels than council offices or pulled down altogether.'

'I suppose so.' Lady Uckfield nodded doubtfully. In truth, she'd rather have seen them filled with the same well-mannered, rich people who'd lived in all these houses a hundred years ago. Even the ones whom, like the de Marneys, she disliked. For her there was no merit in the changes the twentieth century had wrought. Time had blurred her memory so that like the old recalling only the sunny days of childhood, she could think of nothing harsh or mean in the England of her beginnings. I found her views interesting. Even if her vision of the past was not quite as inaccurate or outlandish as Jeremy Paxman would have it, still Lady Uckfield's beliefs were rare by the closing years of the twentieth century. She had that absolute faith in the judgement of her own kind, seldom seen since 1914. No doubt it was common enough before then, which must have made Edwardian society such a philosophically relaxing place to be. If one were an aristocrat.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Simon made a show of fuss in getting out his car keys so that the other Broughton cars had all pulled away as he started the motor. He turned to look at Edith. She hugged her coat around her and leaned back against the window. They were two games players, with equal hands, and now at last they were alone with intent. 'With intent' because something in the nature of Edith's rudeness to Charles, something in the brashness of Simon's offer of a lift, had signalled to both of them that the fun was about to begin. Looking at Simon's roguish smile, the slightly crooked crease by the side of his mouth where his beard was beginning to push through, Edith felt a tremor of sexual excitement shiver through her body. She was startled by the immediacy of her own lust. She had been with men who had attracted her, she remembered enjoying making love with George and there had been a time, admittedly mostly before her marriage, when she had relished the thought of being alone with Charles, but she was sharply aware that this was something rather different. Looking into Simon's dark blue eyes, she realised she simply and absolutely wanted to be naked with him. She wanted to feel his hard, nude body against and inside hers. She felt hot and faintly uncomfortable. The terrifying, exhilarating thrill of her principles deserting her rippled through her stomach.

'Hadn't we better get going?' she said.

Simon was watching her carefully. Her blonde hair fell over her grey-blue eyes and she pushed it out of the way with a slightly petulant gesture. Her lips had not shut again after she spoke but stayed moist and parted with her white teeth just visible in the darkness. He too was excited but not in quite the same way as she. He had made love to a good many pretty women in his time and it was not the thought of the sexual delights to come that aroused him. It was the certain and confirmed knowledge of her attraction to him.

He was intensely aware of his own beauty. What is more he respected and enjoyed it as he sensed, quite rightly, that it was the core of his power. It was this simple truth that was at the epicentre of his flirtatious charm. From everyone, friend or foe, man or woman, he needed to eke out some response to his own physical desirability. Only then, in the warm glow of these aliens' admiration could he relax and be happy. The more threatening the situation, the more necessary it became to be wanted and wanted physically. He spent his life throwing out smouldering looks, laughing mysteriously, winking and twinkling at strangers solely in order to reassure himself that he was in control. Needless to say, he left behind a bewildered trail of wounded, who had responded for weeks or even months to clear signs of sexual and romantic interest only to find, once they were captive, that he had no more need of their love than if they had been trees in the field.

He did not trouble himself much over his search for constant reassurance. He simply expected his looks to break down all barriers, even if he did glimpse dimly that this is not the behaviour of a securely-based personality. In a way, this lack of faith in his other qualities meant that his vanity was closely entwined with a kind of modesty. He had no real respect for his own intellect, and socially, for all his bravado, he knew he could be clumsily inept. Given these reasons, it was probably inevitable that his bourgeois yearnings coupled to his compulsion to inflame desire should have led him to Edith. The irony being that she saw in him some kind of escape from the Broughton life, while he, conversely, saw her as the entree to it. At this stage of the proceedings however these truths were concealed from them both. They were, in short, enraptured with each other.

Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love', is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. And yet as we all know, it is a madness that, however ferocious, seldom, if ever, lasts. Nor, contrary to the popular teaching on the subject, does lust usually give way to a 'deeper and more meaningful love'. There are exceptions of course. Some spouses

'love' forever. But, as a rule, if the couple is truly well matched, it gives way to a warm and interdependent friendship enriched with physical attraction. Should they be ill-assorted it simply fades into boredom or, if they have the misfortune to be married in the interim, dull hatred. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is in the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel passion slip away. How many of us, re-meeting objects of desire who once burned a scar through seasons and even years, whose voices on the telephone could start up flights of butterflies, whose slightest expression could set off a peal of tremulous sexual bells in our vitals, search our inner selves in vain for the least attraction to the face before us? How many of us, having cried bitter, rancid tears over a failed love, are actually disappointed when we discover, seeing the adored one again, that all trace of their power over us is gone? How often one has resisted the freedom-giving knowledge that they have actually begun to irritate us as that seems like the worst kind of disloyalty to our own dreams. No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all. It was not that Edith really saw Simon as any solid part of her future life, entranced as she was. But she had long forgotten her early irritation with his flirtatious verbosity and now she loved to listen to his trials, to his hopes, to his dreams — as much as anything because she loved watching the way his mouth moved — and then, wonderful looking as he was, he made her feel so warm and so wanted. She liked physically to be near him, to let his arm brush her sleeve, his hand graze hers, but she thought no further than that. Or had not up to this moment. Unfortunately for her, he had come into her life at a time of wretched ennui. Before her marriage, yawning over her estate agent's telephone, she had dreamed of all the variety that her new life would bring her but she had not allowed for the fact that within months that new life would have acquired a sameness all its own. And so she was bored and, having expected nothing but excitement in the fulfilment of her social pretensions, she thought boredom more terrible than it is.

Slowly but inexorably she had allowed her residual affection for Charles to be driven out by his inability to interest her.

Although, somewhere in her brain, Edith was aware that she need not have. If, like her mother-in-law before her, she had early on faced and dealt with the limitations of her husband then there could have been fondness between them. If she had ceased to look to him for her amusement, then she might have relied on him only for those things he could have given her: loyalty, security, even love in his unimaginative way. But, just as she had never really faced within herself that she had deliberately married a man she did not love for his position, so she could not now accept the responsibility for the fact that she was living with a man who was duller and stupider than she. It seemed to Edith to be Charles's fault that her life was so dreary, it was Charles's fault that they did not have a vivid round in London, it was Charles's fault that she dreaded their times together more than the hours she spent alone. Added to which she had already slid into that dangerous option, open only to those with high-profile, 'public' lives, of playing the part of the happy and gracious wife to an adoring crowd, which must always serve to throw the frigid inertia of her life at home into sharp relief. As popular as she was with the villagers, with her charities, with the estate workers, she had even begun to think that this happy and elegant woman she saw reflected in their eyes (and in the local press) was some kind of real truth and that it must be Charles's fault that he did not respond to her as her adoring, provincial fans did.

Not that she had any substantial taste for danger. She had accepted Simon's offer of a ride home as much to irritate her mother-in-law as anything else. She was, in fact, surprised if anything at the strength of her physical attraction to him when they found themselves, as they now did for the first time, alone and in the dark. But what took her even more unawares was an aerated sense of the raising of her spirits and with it that heady flavour of unexplored potential. This, she suddenly knew in a blinding flash of revelation, was the very thing she had most missed since her marriage. For months now there had seemed to be no open-endedness about her existence. All the decisions had been taken and must now be lived with. And yet here she was, looking at the corduroy of Simon's trousers stretched over the muscles of his thigh, and sensing a delicious awareness that there were still unplanned-for possibilities between her and death.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The Uckfields asked us in for a drink when we arrived at Broughton. I think they might have preferred us just to head for home but we accepted, partly out of politeness but also from that ghoulish sense that we all feel when we suspect an evening is not yet quite over. We were (or rather I was) still curious as to whether Charles really had gone to bed, how long it would take Simon and Edith to get home, how Lady Uckfield would behave — any number, in fact, of the different aspects of the case still to be revealed.

Charles was in the drawing room. He had hardly touched the whisky on the table beside his chair and was, I suspect, staring into mid-air until he heard our step. At any rate he seemed to be very puzzled by the women's magazine he had snatched up as we came in. He fetched Scotches for his father and me and some water for Adela (her customary, somewhat lacklustre late-night refreshment) and we all sat down. We had not been there long before the unmistakable sounds of Eric on the staircase told us that the Range Rover at least was back. The four of them came into the room.

'Where's Edith?' said Eric brightly, happy of course to see that she was not back and that therefore he might score some points off her.

'I hope they haven't broken down,' said Adela firmly.

'Oh dear. Might they have?' said Lady Uckfield.

Under silent instruction from Adela, I nodded. 'Simon's car is the most frightful wreck. I do hope not.'

Lady Uckfield recognised instantly that this was a life raft that she could rope to her decks in case of future need. She was not exactly grateful. For her to register gratitude she would have had first to admit to herself that there was anything wrong.

But she was noticeably warm as she joined Adela on the sofa and started to question her about her aunt.

Eric had another try. 'They took forever before they even started the car,' he said. 'We were loaded up and out of the gates before I heard the engine.' But the initiative had slipped from him. The later the errant couple were, the more the family could hide behind fear of a break-down or an accident. All other possible reasons for lateness had by this means been painlessly obviated.

As the conversation became more general and people flopped down into the various chairs and sofas around the room, Charles came up and asked me if I would join him in his office. I forget his excuse, some book or picture he had been meaning to show me, the usual sort of thing, but we both knew that he simply wanted to talk to me alone. I nodded and followed him out, uncomfortably aware of Chase's slightly quizzical smile, and we started down a corridor to the left. I wasn't looking forward to the interview as I had begun to feel responsible for the mayhem that even then I was only just starting to admit might be looming. I had after all been the one to introduce Simon to them. Had I not been in the film I am quite sure he would never have penetrated the charmed circle of the family.

Charles's office, its door sporting one of those 'private' notices that give one such pleasure to set aside, was a smallish corner room some distance away from the drawing and dining rooms used by the family. It was an extension of the main library, still on the principal floor, and so had handsome cornices and door cases and, by day, a fine view across the park from both of its tall windows. A pair of double doors would have connected it to the larger room if they were opened, which, as the library was one of the rooms on the public tour, they seldom if ever were. The fireplace was a delicate one of some kind of pinkish marble and the walls themselves had been covered with crimson damask that stretched from dado to ceiling.

Against it stood high, glazed bookcases that looked as if they had been made for the room. A portrait of some female forebear, painted in a costume for a fancy-dress ball, hung over the chimneypiece, the gilded frame and the marble shelf below stuffed with a mass of invitations, snapshots, notes, postcards — the usual paper chaos with which the upper classes demonstrate their ease with their elegant surroundings.

'This is very nice,' I said. 'Where's Edith's sitting room? Is it next door?'

Charles shook his head. 'Upstairs,' he muttered. 'Quite near our bedroom.'

He stared at me mutely and rather than return his anguished glance, I started to peer at the spines of the books in the cases round the room. Can You Forgive Her? by Trollope caught my eye and gave me a disloyal inner smile. He Knew He Was Right by the same author sobered me up. I don't know that I had then any real understanding of Charles's capacity for jealousy, since I had no true knowledge of his capacity for emotion. The fact that someone is not particularly intelligent is no guide in these things. People may be stupid and extremely complicated just as they can be clever and incapable of deep feeling.

'What do you think?' I heard him say and for a moment I wondered if I was being asked my opinion of some unusual book but catching sight of Charles's face, I thought this was probably not the case. Just to be safe I answered with a question:

'What do you mean?'

'What are they up to?'

He was gruff and tweedy in his manner and I realised that we were embarking on what is called a 'man-to-man' talk. I shuddered at the prospect. Apart from anything else I am a firm believer in the 'least said soonest mended' school of marital harmony — a belief incidentally quite unshaken by marriage itself.

'Oh, Charles, come on,' I said warmly, implying that they couldn't possibly be 'up to' anything. I am not sure whether I was being dishonest in taking this tack. I rather think not. It seems naive but although, looking back, it is clear that Edith and Simon were drawn to each other from the second day, I don't know that their mutual attraction had really impinged itself on me much before that evening.

'You come on,' said Charles, more sharply than usual.

'Look,' I was very conciliatory, 'if you're asking me if I know anything, I don't. If you're asking if I think anything, I don't either. Much. I think they like each other, that's all. Is that so terrible? Haven't you ever wanted to flirt with anyone since you were married?'

'No,' said Charles, slumping into a Chippendale chair, and resting his elbows on a charming and untidy partner's desk. He let his head fall forward into his hands as he spoke and started to push his fingers through his hair. He was posing for a statue of misery. I felt wrong-footed in that I had judged badly to think that warm reassurance would do the trick and yet I didn't want to lead the way into a different level of intimacy, which Charles, whom after all I did not even then know well, might regard as an impertinence. I felt sorry for the fellow and wished to find a way to lighten rather than increase his load. My detached ruminations were interrupted by a sigh from the desk.

'She doesn't love me, you see.' He spoke to a pile of papers beneath his face but since the remark was presumably addressed to me, I tried to assess the correct level of response.

Of course, what made this doubly hard was that Charles's statement, bald as it was, was essentially true. There was no question in my mind but that Edith did not then love him. She did not desire him (which of course I only surmised at that time), she did not enjoy his company, she did not share his interests, she did not like most of his friends. I do not think, then or later, that she ever actually disliked him but I could hardly say that in answer to Charles's cry of pain. I was silent, which I suppose was in itself a tacit agreement, and Charles looked up. I cannot say how moved I was by the terrible suffering in his simple, county face. His narrow eyes were reddening with tears, which had already begun to run down his large and bony nose. His hair, normally as sleek as a 1930s advertisement for unguent, was ruffled and untidy and sticking up in awkward little spikes. Great grief can be worn charmingly by a beauty and I have seen a lot of gracious dignity at funerals in my time but it is my experience that when grief is becoming it is also suspect. Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul.

I blush to recall that I was surprised that Charles — nice, bluff Charles with his shooting and his hedgerows and his dogs —

had a heart that could be broken. But he had and I was there to witness its breaking.

Before I could say anything there was a sound from the corridor outside. 'Charles?' It was Lady Uckfield. Rather than commit, even in a moment of emotional tension such as this, the social solecism of knocking at a sitting-room door (an action that, with white-gloved butlers, always plays so prominent a part in inaccurate television period drama) she contrived to wrestle with the door knob as if it would have been easier to get into the Ark of the Covenant. At any rate, having given us both enough time to dress had we so needed let alone dry our tears, she opened the door and came into the room. 'Ah, Charles,' she smiled easily into her son's face, ignoring the Fall of Rome that was written there, 'Edith's back. They got stuck getting out of the town. Too boring.' She nodded towards me. 'Your friend's gone straight on up to the farm.' Charles nodded his thanks in a kind of daze and started back towards the drawing room. I would have followed but Lady Uckfield, with an almost imperceptible pressure on my arm, held me back.

'We'd better be off, too.' I said. 'Where's Bob? I must thank him for dinner.'

'He's gone to bed,' she replied. 'Your nice Adela said thank you.' We were silent. She stood by the fireplace, idly fingering the pasteboard squares that summoned her child to various festivities. There was only one light on in the farthest corner of the room, a glass and ormolu desk lamp, which threw longish shadows about her and in the half-light grooved her face cruelly.

For once she looked her years. The glamorous veil of her manner was momentarily lifted and a tired, worried woman in late middle-age was revealed to the naked eye.

'Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish,' she said, not looking up from the invitation to a wedding on which I could see a tick and 'Acc' in Edith's loose scrawl.

'Oh, I don't know,' I replied. My position was an awkward one for, after all, I was in that house as a friend of Edith. It behoved me to be loyal to her and yet I did think she had behaved foolishly. I was not, if you like, 'on her side' while finding it unsuitable that I should be on anyone else's.

'Well, I do.' She paused while I looked up in answer to her acid tone. 'It's worse than you think. Eric was by his car when they arrived. He saw them kissing.'

I was for a moment what a cockney friend of mine would call gobsmacked. I had thought we had been fringing around slight improprieties brought on by Edith's tedium. I had expected a little chat about Edith 'bucking up'. Of course, I suspected at once that Eric was not 'by his car' when they drove up but was quite consciously concealed somewhere near the entrance that he might not miss this Heaven-sent chance to nail Edith, whom, by this stage, he absolutely detested. Much more than I had realised. At any rate, whatever the truth of his motive, he had not lied about what he had seen. For old times' sake I tried to dig Edith out of the hole she had buried herself in. 'Oh, surely, she was just kissing him goodnight.'

'She was kissing him passionately. His hand was inside her shirt and hers was out of sight beneath the dashboard.' Lady Uckfield spoke with the dead-pan delivery of a policeman giving evidence in the County Court. I stared at her in silence. My first instinct was to apologise for being there at all and run for it. Certainly I could think of nothing more to say. Lady Uckfield continued. 'It is the greatest pity that it should have been Eric who saw them. He is quite incapable of keeping anything to himself and anyway I have a suspicion he is not overly fond of Edith. He has already told Caroline who told me. She will try to keep him quiet but I imagine she will fail.' What interested me most about all this was Lady Uckfield's manner. I had grown used to her passionate, half-whispered intimacy when she shared with you the day's headlines or your place at dinner. Now she really did have a secret to impart and all her girlish urgency was gone. She might have been an officer in the WVS

addressing a group of recruits. 'I suppose we may hope that things have not progressed any further but I'm not sure what difference that makes anyway.'

'Will you tell Charles?'

She looked up startled. 'Of course not. Do you think I'm mad?' She relaxed again. Her shock at being thought unworldly was past. She dropped the card and strolled over to the window. 'He'll find out, though.'

'How?' I asked, meaning to imply that I too would be silent.

She smiled sadly. 'Probably because Edith will tell him. At any rate, someone will.' There was nothing I could profitably add to this since she was unquestionably right. Edith in her boredom was just ripe for succumbing to that fatal desire to 'bring things to a head' that so many married couples these days seem to indulge in. In sharp contrast to their great-grandparents who expended all their energy in trying to stop things coming to a head at any cost. My silence felt clumsy but I didn't in truth know exactly why Lady Uckfield was telling me any of this. For all her pseudo-intimacy she never usually imparted anything even faintly private, let alone potentially scandalous. She must have caught this question from my manner for she answered it without being asked: 'I want you to do something for me.'

'Of course.'

'I want you to tell the boy Simon to leave her alone.'

'Well…' Woe betide the man who accepts this kind of commission readily. Whatever opinion I might have of Simon's character or morals, I was hardly in a position to act the wise uncle with him.

Lady Uckfield drove full tilt at my hesitation. Her voice resumed more of its normal glib, light tone as the words gushed forth. 'She's bored. That's all there is to it. She's bored and she ought to get up to London more. She ought to see more of her friends. Or have a baby. Or get a job. That's what she needs. As for this boy…' She shrugged. 'He's handsome, he's charming and, above all, he's here. One does these things when one is settling into a new life. They mean nothing. The nuisance is that Eric saw her. He will almost certainly tell and it's our job to make sure no one can corroborate his story.'

I began to see things by her light. Of course, it was all a silly nonsense that was only horrid because it could hurt Charles if he found out. Yes, it was a pity that Eric had seen them. That was the pity. Her charming, even voice beat back the threat of anarchy and storm that had seemed to envelop us for a moment and returned us to the shore. 'I'll do my best,' I said.

'Of course you will, and the film's nearly over anyway. Too sad to be losing you,' she added hastily, remembering herself,

'but all the same…'

I nodded and she started towards the door. Her work was done. She had acted to contain the damage and that had necessitated taking me into her confidence. But I was already her ally. Things might have been worse.

'Lady Uckfield,' I said. She stopped and turned, her hand still resting on the gleaming door knob. 'Don't be too hard on Edith.'

'Of course not,' she laughed. 'You may not believe it but I was young once too, you know.' Then she was gone and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hated her daughter-in-law as fiercely as she would have hated any woman who had made her only son cry.

FOURTEEN

'What on earth was going on?' said Adela as soon as we drove away from the front of the house.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, first of all you two slope off and everyone looks haunted. Then Eric vanishes. Brief calm and then suddenly we're into farce with people running in and out of doors with stricken faces. I, meanwhile, am sitting there throughout with Lord Uckfield who's trying to explain something about trout farming. What happened to you? I thought I was going to have to ring and ask for a bed.' I told her everything of course and we drove on in silence for a while. Adela broke it. 'What can you possibly say to Simon? Unhand this lady? Won't he hit you on the nose?'

'I shouldn't think so. He doesn't look the type.'

'Well?'

I didn't really have an answer for her as I also could not quite envisage how to play this most embarrassing of scenes. And by what right was I even to open my mouth on the subject?

Adela gave me my motive. 'I suppose you'll just have to do your best for poor old Edith. It'll be a shame if she buggers it up after all that effort. And for such a nothing.'

We arrived at the farmhouse to find Simon sitting at the kitchen table nursing a glass of wine. His mood and the mere fact that he had not gone to bed seemed to suggest the desire for an unburdening talk although he could not have guessed that I already knew what he had to unburden. This was a worrying sign. We had already discovered, Bella and I, that Simon liked to talk of his romances, despite an almost constant stream of doting references to his children and their mother languishing at home. I did not then realise that for him the fame abroad was quite as pleasurable as the deed itself and this is a most dangerous characteristic in a married lover of married women. Adela went straight up to her room and I took Simon's proffered drink with a heavy heart. We sat in silence for a moment or two. At last he could curb his impatience no longer.

'Good evening?' he said.

I nodded in a half-hearted fashion. 'Quite. I thought the dinner was pretty filthy. Poor old Bob. He blenched visibly at the bill.' There was another silence. I suppose neither of us was clear about how to get on to the subject that was uppermost in both our minds. This time I tried the opener. 'You didn't come in.'

Simon shook his head. 'There was a bit of an awkwardness with that frightful brother-in-law when we got back. I thought I'd better just hop it.'

So that was it. No wonder Simon wanted to talk about it. Eric had made his presence known. The chances of his keeping his secret were statistically reduced to zero. Eric had made a scene. This, in my experience, generally happens when people want to make a scene. 'I heard about that,' I said.

Simon looked up. 'Oh? Who from? Not from Edith?'

I shook my head. 'From Charles's mother.'

I could see that this was a bit of a facer — as well it might be — but at the same time, while the flushed embarrassment of discovery was spreading over Simon's features, it brought in its wake, in the shy smile that he threw at me, a certain ominous delight in being the central figure in what I soon perceived he saw as a romantic drama. My heart sank even further at the realisation that with his actor's perverse pleasure in crisis, Simon would soon be all set to enjoy this chance of notoriety. 'Does Charles know?'

'Not when I left. Should he? Is there anything to know?'

Simon was not to be had so easily. He laughed gently and shrugged as he helped himself to another tot. I looked as paternal as I could. 'Don't start making a mess, Simon.' But still he only smiled and winked at me with that infuriating sexual confidence of the never-refused who think moral laws are designed for lesser mortals. My only recourse seemed to be some sort of appeal to his better nature. 'Edith is an old friend of mine.'

'I know.'

'And I don't want to see her made unhappy.'

'She's unhappy now.'

There was some truth in this, though much less than either he or Edith knew. 'She's not half as unhappy as she's going to be if you start making some silly little scandal for no better reason than that she's here and you're bored.' Again he smiled and shrugged. Of course I was on a hiding to nothing as few things could have given Simon more pleasure than to be begged to avert the arc-light of his fatal charm from some tender victim. Here was I, pleading with the Great Lord to have pity on a poor damsel. He was thrilled. I tried a new and faintly dishonourable tack. 'What about your wife?'

'What about her?'

'Won't she be upset?'

This, to my delight, did at last make him slightly uncomfortable — or at least irritated. 'Who's going to tell her? You won't.'

This was obviously true as far as it went and for a moment I did wonder if I wasn't over-reacting when I heard a knock on the glass behind me. I turned and to my complete amazement I saw Edith, in an Hermes scarf loosely knotted on her chin, rapping at the window and begging, like Cathy Earnshaw, to be let in from the night. Simon, however, was no Heathcliff and it was I, not he, who jumped up to open the back door.

'What the hell are you doing here?' I said, but she pushed past me and sauntered over to the Aga to warm her hands.

'Don't you scold me as well. I've had enough for one night I can assure you.'

'Does Charles know?'

'Of course. Eric told him.'

'But does he know you're here? And why are you here, for God's sake? Don't make everything worse than it is.'

All this time Simon had neither moved nor spoken. Now, very deliberately he rose from his chair, put down his glass, walked over to Edith and slowly, for my benefit I assume, enfolded her in his arms and bent his head to kiss her with the slow, moist, hungry motion of a modern film star in close-up. He looked as if he were eating her tongue. For a moment I watched their two blond heads rocking against each other and behind them, like the ghosts in Richard Ill's tent, I saw Charles and his mother and the wretched Mrs Lavery whose dreams were being incinerated in a farmhouse kitchen in Sussex as I stood there.

And behind them, the more distant figures of the Cumnors, and old Lady Tenby and her daughters, and all those others who would be enthralled and secretly (or not so secretly) delighted at the ruin that was being encompassed by these two silly people.

'Well?' said Adela, whom I had promised I would report to before turning in. She rolled over in bed, blinking herself into concentration.

'Hopeless,' I said.

'Wouldn't he listen?'

'He's loving it, I'm afraid. Anyway, I didn't say that much. I was just getting started when Edith turned up. She's down there now.'

Adela was quiet for a second. 'Oh,' she said. And then: 'So it is hopeless. Poor Charles.' And she rolled back into her pillow, pulling the covers up around her face.

Some time after this I proposed and was accepted. It was rather a tense period for me, I must confess, as I was inspected by an endless series of my intended's disapproving relations, most of whom were seriously unnerved by the thought of their beloved Adela relying on a stage career in future. 'Well, all I can say is good luck with that artistic temperament,' was the advice she received from a particularly unpleasant aunt. After a couple of months of this sort of thing, I was anxious to end the waiting. We decided to be married in April and, since it is a notoriously unpredictable month, to have a London ceremony.

As Adela remarked, 'Country weddings can be such muddy affairs.' It was a 'Society Event', I suppose, though not quite on the scale of the Broughtons, but even so, anyone who has ever played a central part in a large wedding, let alone a large London wedding with all the paraphernalia it involves, will understand that I had very little time to worry about Edith and her ménage in the months that led up to it. I had asked the Uckfields and the Broughtons and, to my mother-in-law's delight, they had all four accepted. I was comforted by this, in the thick of the chaos of my nuptials, as I assumed it meant that the trouble had passed and the nonsense of an autumn night had been forgotten. Then, about two weeks before the wedding itself, I had a telephone call from Edith. 'Have you invited Simon?' she said.

I understood at once that she was anxious lest there might be an awkwardness and I was able to reassure her. 'No, I haven't. You're all right.' I laughed mildly, so that that hideous evening might be turned the sooner into a shared joke between us.

'Could you?' she said.

The smile left my face, the straw my clutch. 'No, I could not,' I said tersely.

'Why not?'

'You know very well why not.'

There was a pause at the other end of the line. 'Can I ask you a favour?' I didn't answer this as I dreaded to hear it. I was not spared. 'Could we possibly borrow your flat while you're away?'

'No.'

Edith's voice was cold and definite. 'No. Well, I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

'Edith, darling,' I said. This is the kind of thing that always happens just when one is entirely engrossed in some other large event. The night before crucial exams is invariably the moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to prison.

'Of course you can't see Simon here. How could I possibly do that to Charles? Or to Simon's wretched wife for that matter?

Don't be insane, darling, please. I beg you.'

But she was not to be won. With some perfunctory formula words she slid away and the line went dead.