Snobs: A Novel

Annette, in fact, was doing quite well by this stage, largely because, against all predictions, the dreary Bob had gone from well-off to extremely rich during the heady nineties. I seem to recall that his success was somehow connected to the 'dot.com'

revolution although I cannot remember exactly what he did, if I ever knew. Anyway, whatever it was he obviously did it profitably. In the two or three years since the Watsons had been Eric's embarrassing guests in Mallorca they had consolidated their social position and, in London at any rate, they had gathered up quite a satisfactory address book. They had not penetrated Lady Uckfield's charmed circle on any level but they were on good terms with a couple of the more disreputable young marchionesses and the 'It' girls who were busy on the London scene at this time. Annette had even been pictured in Hello shopping with the Duchess of York. On the whole, she was satisfied.

A good part of that satisfaction was because she was now in a position to refuse the Chases' invitations, which had become more pressing of late. Caroline Chase, of course, cared little one way or the other, but Eric's shadowy dealings on the outer fringes of what he optimistically described as 'Business Skills and Public Relations' had been badly hit by the recession.

These skills, it seems, were among the first economies in the newly hard-pressed companies that had bloomed so fast and were now looking as if they would wither as quickly. Eric felt that a helping hand from Bob Watson might make all the difference. Indeed it might have, I suppose, but perhaps because of that terrible dinner at Fairburn, the hand was withheld.

The Chases, or Eric anyway, had ceased to be necessary to the social game-plan of the Watsons. Apart from anything else Eric was not expected to be around all that much longer. It was known that they were living on Caroline's money and questions were beginning to be asked among her circle as to how long this would go on. Particularly as there were no children to confuse the issue. To Caroline's set, there did not seem to be much logic in being married to someone who was common and poor. Although I reject these people's values in many areas, when dealing with someone as abrasive as Chase I must confess to understanding them. It is pleasant to record that one friend who had not dropped Edith and automatically taken Charles's side in order to keep in with the Broughtons was this same Annette Watson. For Edith had paid a severe penalty for her chosen path. Actually I didn't much blame most of their crowd. They had been Charles's friends to begin with and Edith certainly had behaved badly. But this was not the real reason that they flocked to the Broughton banner. To a man they would have remained on Charles's team if he'd beaten Edith while keeping a string of chorus girls in the attic. However, I suppose one must concede that in this particular instance it was hard to argue with them. At any rate, Annette, partly because she knew she held few charms for Charles or his mother and partly because she really did like Edith, had stuck by her pal and one of the invitations she'd proffered was to accompany her to the Hardy Amies afternoon show and have some lunch beforehand.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Edith had never been to the first-floor restaurant of the Meridien in Piccadilly, which had recently been subjected to an exhaustive 'renovation'. The dining room was formed out of the old terrace, which had been glazed and palmed and marble-floored and generally made into a home from home for all those natives of Los Angeles who were now, hopefully, going to flock through the newly re-opened doors. Edith picked her way among the tables, following Annette's waving hand. She was smartly dressed in a snappy winter suit, complete with pearls and a brooch. She had surprised herself by being tempted to wear a hat. She didn't, but the costume, as it stood, was perhaps an expression of a part of her life that had been suppressed for a time beneath the T-shirts and sequins, apparently the only two options of Simon's crowd. Even he had commented on her outfit as he lay on a sofa happily reading the next day's scenes: 'Heavens, very smart! You look like your mother-in-law!'

But she hadn't risen. Maybe, subconsciously, she'd felt complimented.

Annette kissed her and ordered glasses of champagne for them both. It was not long before they had moved from the customary greetings to the real business. 'So, when do you make your next move?'

'Move?' said Edith.

'Well. The divorce. Are you getting on with it?'

Edith shifted slightly uncomfortably. 'Not really. Not yet.'

'Why not?'

She shrugged. 'I suppose I — we — rather feel that we might as well wait out the two years and do it with a minimum of fuss. Otherwise it means such a palaver…'

'Two years!' Annette laughed. 'Oh, I don't think Charles is going to be happy waiting two years.'

'Why not?'

Annette stared at her. 'Darling, you must know the race is on.'

Edith was surprised to find that her stomach lurched. 'What do you mean?'

'My dear, as soon as the news was out he was absolutely pounced on. How could he not be? You haven't even had a child so there's nothing to hold them back.'

Edith felt herself growing irritated. How dare this woman know more about her husband than she did? 'I don't think he's seeing anyone particularly.'

'Then you think wrong.' Annette took a sip to punctuate her pause. 'You remember Clarissa Marlowe?'

Edith laughed and breathed easily again. The Honourable Clarissa Marlowe, great-granddaughter of a courtier who had been raised to a lowly barony in the 1920s, was a second cousin of Charles's through their mothers. She was a hearty, healthy brunette, good in the saddle and helpful at sticky dinner parties. She worked as an up-market receptionist in a dubious property company, thereby lending it some respectability, and she lived in a flat with her sister just off the Old Brompton Road. A classic member of the Alice Band Brigade and, Edith thought comfortably, not at all Charles's type.

'Don't be silly. She's his cousin. She's just chumming him.'

Annette raised her eyebrows. 'Well, she chummed him to the West Indies for a week just before Christmas and she spent the New Year at Broughton.'

There was no denying that this was a blow. In fact Edith was astonished at its severity. What had she thought? That Charles would stay single for ever? She had been gone for eight months now and he was only human. As she conjured up the image of Clarissa, Edith felt herself washed with a tide of rage towards this blameless, county girl. In truth she had always rather liked Clarissa, who put herself out to be useful and laughed at Edith's funny stories and had never been one of those relations who persisted in treating her as a tiresome foreigner. When she thought about it she supposed that his cousin had always had rather a soft spot for Charles. With a sinking heart she recognised Clarissa for what she was, the sort of girl men like Charles marry.

'Oh,' she said.

The waiter had arrived to hand them enormous, leather-bound menus in ungrammatical French. He retreated with a murmur of guttural Rs.

'Cheer up, darling,' said Annette with a piercing look. 'Tell me about Simon. Is he well?'

'Oh yes,' said Edith, bracing herself again. 'Very. He's got a series that goes on until June and then, with any luck, starts again in December.'

'How marvellous! What is it?'

'Oh, you know,' said Edith, trying to decide between liver and seared tuna. 'Some detective police thing. He's the nice side-kick who keeps missing the point.' She finally fixed on kidneys with a salad.

'Well done him,' said Annette. 'Who else is in it? Do you go on the set and everything?'

Edith appreciated Annette's efforts at enthusiasm. It was kind of her. 'Not really, no. Sometimes. So I can put a face to the stories. It puts him off a bit.'

The truth was that, try as she might, she had found that she just could not get really involved in Simon's work. There were parts of it she quite liked, first nights and a few (very few) of the parties and meeting people one knew from television. She was quite interested in reading scripts and then comparing them to the finished product but most of it, well… At the beginning she had gone down to the location a few times but, honestly, it was so monotonous. They just seemed to say the same three lines to each other from a thousand angles until she ended up in the make-up room, gossiping to the girls. If she was really honest she couldn't understand why Simon made such a song and dance about it all. Most of it seemed to be pretty straightforward. You learned the lines, they trained the camera onto you and you said the lines. She was quite able to see that some people could do it and some couldn't, but fretting about it didn't seem to help. She never noticed that Simon was much better in the parts he had sweated over than in the ones that he did off the top of his head. One thing she had grasped since our lunch together in those early days — there wasn't really a place for her down on the set. After her initial forays she would roll up once or twice, or stay on location for a weekend, so that she could say hello to the other members of the cast and crew and leave it at that. It seemed to be the best way to play it.

'Give him my love,' said Annette. They locked eyes for a moment and to Edith's relief the waiter reappeared at this precise moment to take their orders. That done, they shifted their ground back to more general topics.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Louisa rang our basement bell promptly at a quarter to one. They had decided to lunch at home as they were going on to Fortnum's for tea after the show. Adela, at five months, had only recently stopped feeling sick and was sorely in need of a Treat. I was to give them a lift to Savile Row on my way to a wig fitting in Old Burlington Street. I liked Adela's cousin. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish landowner, she had that slightly fey, unjudgemental quality of her tribe, so unlike their English counterparts, that made her easy company for anyone, despite her tweeds and sensible shoes. She was also a natural spinster for whom, I suspected, a lifetime of Royal service was going to have to do the work of husband and children. Of course, she was thrilled by the idea of the impending baby and I could see before Adela asked me that she was classic godmother material.

The traffic was not heavy and accordingly it was no later than a quarter to three when the two of them climbed the staircase of Hardy Amies's headquarters and entered the large, first-floor salon overlooking Savile Row itself, where the collection was to be displayed.

There is no real benefit in getting to these things early as all the seats are clearly and unarguably allocated but they had enough to gossip about to pass the time and so, once they had been ushered to two seats labelled, in a flowing hand; 'Lady Louisa Shaw & Friend', they were soon so engrossed in their own soap-opera that they were oblivious to the rest of the fast-filling room. They were seated well, at the foot of the catwalk on the short side of the room near the door from the staircase and therefore had a full view not only of the length of the catwalk but also of most of the rest of the seating. So Adela was quite surprised, on looking up as the lights were turned on to signify that the show was about to begin, to see Edith Broughton tucked into the far corner, in the back row, opposite the door where the models make their entrance. It seemed odd that Edith had not said hello, since she must have brushed past them to get to her seat and even now, while looking at Adela, she made no real sign of recognition. I am afraid that one could have read in this the treatment that Edith had had to endure over the previous months but at any rate Adela, for whom even the vestige of any kind of feud is anathema, immediately smiled and waved, and Edith, relieved perhaps, waved back.

The conversation was beginning to die away in anticipation when there was a slight confusion at the door. Adela turned in time to see one of the princesses enter the room, followed by Lady Uckfield. Smiling their apologies, they made their way to two seats reserved for them near the foot of the catwalk beyond my wife and Louisa, in the front row. They were in their places before Adela looked back to where Edith sat, her eyes fixed on her mother-in-law. The contrast between the state of the two women was not lost on Adela and it must have seemed vividly clear to Edith. She sat in the back row, with her over-made-up friend, about to look at clothes she could not seriously entertain a thought of buying. Two rows before her sat the woman she might herself have been, with a member of the Royal Family, envied by more or less every other woman present.

The music started, a selection of Copacabana rock, which seemed a surprising choice given the age of the majority of the clients. Adela glanced down at her programme for the description of the first presentation. Three models appeared, the numbers of their dresses displayed on plastic discs in their elegant hands, and the show had begun.

It was a lively hour with the audience chatting relentlessly as each ensemble was paraded before them. 'Lovely for Spain',

'What an odd colour, I wonder if they do it in cream', 'Pretty dress, wrong model', and other similar phrases would ring out, quite audibly, as the girls sailed imperviously by. From time to time a little fun was added by a model dropping her number disc (I gather these have since been abandoned, perhaps for this reason) or one might stumble in a graceful spin but these were rare breaks in the super-smooth operation. Still, Adela was distracted. Every time she glanced over to where Edith sat, she could see that her gaze was not on the catwalk but on the back of her mother-in-law's head, still blithely unaware of Edith's presence, as she scribbled on her programme and exchanged whispers with her august companion.

The collection was presented and the company, notes jotted and images fixed, rose to go. A way was made for the Royal Highness to pass, with Lady Uckfield following on. With proper diffidence Adela did not draw attention to herself but it so happened that the princess recognised Louisa at the same moment that Lady Uckfield saw my wife. Accordingly she was presented, made her curtsey, and for a few moments the crowd fell deferentially back to leave them in a foursome. They were chatting quite amiably about which frocks they had preferred when Adela caught sight of Edith edging towards them through the thinning crush. These situations are hard. Though I say it myself, Adela is not one to shirk a difficult task, but what was the point of spoiling Lady Uckfield's afternoon or placing her in an invidious position as regards her companion? Her daughter-in-law was a figure of scandal and this was a public place stuffed with journalists. Judas-like, Adela opted for Damage Containment, and catching Lady Uckfield's eye nodded slightly in the direction of Edith's advancing figure. Lady Uckfield, demonstrating the skill that ran the Empire, became aware of her daughter-in-law's presence without so much as a flicker of recognition. Even Adela would have been hard put to it to deny that her immediate departure was simply fortuitous, had it not been for the conspiratorial squeeze of her arm by the older woman. In a moment princess and attendant were gone, leaving Adela to introduce Edith as she drew alongside a slightly bemused Louisa.

They talked for a while with Edith asking about me and Adela rather pointedly not asking about Simon and then they parted. Though not before Edith had observed brightly, 'My dear mother-in-law looks well.'

'Very well, I gather,' said Adela.

Edith laughed. 'How funny to think one has turned into an awkward relation! Oh well. She can't avoid me entirely. She might as well get used to the idea that I do still live in London, whether she likes it or not.'

'I don't think she was avoiding you. She just didn't see you,' said Adela, adding lamely, 'I never thought to say anything…'

'No,' said Edith. 'Why would you?'

And so they parted, Adela and Louisa to Fortnum's and then back to the flat to tell me every detail, Edith to Ebury Street and Simon, who was in a rage because one of his speeches had been cut from tomorrow's scene. He suspected his co-star, whom he was already beginning actively to dislike, and his brain was so full of this particular injustice that he had very little time for Edith's narrative. I doubt she told him much anyway. Only that she'd seen Googie but Googie hadn't seen her. In truth, beyond lesser horrors like the evening at Annabel's, this had been the starkest illustration so far of the extent of her fall and she could not yet talk about it without beginning to feel slightly ill.

I knew enough from Adela's account to understand that Edith must be going through a pretty rough time however happy she was with Simon and I resolved to telephone her and buy her a decent lunch. But before I got around to it, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Isabel Easton to go down to Sussex for the weekend. The envelope was in fact addressed to Adela.

Isabel had apparently learned her lessons well and grasped that the upper classes only ever address an envelope to the female part of a couple. Why? Who knows? At any rate it was Adela who read it first and she who suggested we accept. Adela was only mildly fond of Isabel and she didn't like David much so I suspected at once that she had an ulterior motive.

'We might give Charles a ring when we're there,' she said, so I didn't have to wait long to know what it was.

I don't think I had stayed with the Eastons since that time, three years before, when we had all been summoned to Broughton to witness Edith's triumph. I had seen them in London so the gap was not obvious and, looking back, I'm not sure why I had got out of the habit of going there. Perhaps the fact that Edith and I had become friends over their heads had made an awkwardness between us. I'm not sure. At any rate I was quite glad to find myself and my wife, a couple of Friday nights later, back in their familiar, GTC drawing room of frilled tables and chintz sofas and over-stuffed cushions. We had unpacked and bathed and been given a pre-dinner drink, but not much more than this before the real reason for our invitation became clear.

'Are you going to go over to Broughton while you're here?' said David.

I looked at Adela. 'I don't know. I don't know if they're there. We thought we might give them a ring.'

'Good,' said David. 'Good.' He paused. 'Give our love to Charles when you speak to him, anyway.'

And there it was. I should have guessed. After all, what a situation they were in! For years they had been driven nearly mad by their inability to get onto any sort of terms with the local family. Then, miracle of miracles, their friend marries the heir.

They start to inch their way into the County. They are just beginning to make a little headway with the Sir William Fartleys of this world when, bang, a scandal erupts. Suddenly Edith, their friend, the woman they first invited down to these parts (for one may be sure they had made no secret of the role they had played), runs off with an actor, disgraces the family, lets down poor, darling Charles. Exeunt David and Isabel Easton.

I think one would have to be very hard-hearted indeed not to feel some sympathy for them, poor things, even if their goal was a worthless one. It is easy to laugh at the pretensions of others — particularly when their ambitions are trivial — but most of us have a thorny path of it in some area of our lives, which is not worth the importance we give it. I suppose it is hard to live in a small society and to be obliged to accept that one is excluded from the first rank of that little group. This is what drives so many socially minded people back to the towns where the game is more fluid and up for grabs. On top of which the Eastons had come, at least in their own minds, so near the prize…

David continued. 'I'm afraid the simple truth is that our dear Edith has behaved most fearfully badly.'

We all, including Isabel, greeted this with a slight silence. Even Adela (who, I knew, most thoroughly agreed with this assessment) seemed reluctant to weigh in with David in Edith's absence. 'I don't know,' I said.

'Really!' David was quite indignant. 'I'm surprised to hear you defending her.'

'I'm not defending her exactly,' I said. 'I'm just saying that one doesn't "know". One never knows anything about other people's lives. Not really.'

This is a truism but it isn't completely true. One does know about other people's lives. And I, in fact, knew quite a lot about Edith's and Charles's lives but, even if I was guilty of a certain dishonesty, there was some truth in what I said. I am not convinced that one ever knows quite enough to come down with a full condemnation.

Isabel entered with her peace-making hat. 'I think all David means is that we felt so sorry for poor Charles. He didn't seem to deserve any of it. Not from where we were sitting anyway.'

We all agreed with this but it was nevertheless perfectly obvious that David hoped to be able to ditch Edith and by demonstrating his indignation to someone who would report it to the Broughton household, he believed he would earn points and end up back on their list. Or on their list, full stop, since he wrongly thought he had penetrated the citadel during Edith's reign. In this I think he was mistaken for two reasons. The first was that he was simply not Charles's cup of tea. The English upper classes are, as a rule, not amused by upper-middle-class facsimiles of themselves. This brand of arriviste has all the dreariness of the familiar with none of the cosiness of the intimate. On the whole, if they are to fraternise outside their set they choose artists or singers or people who will make them laugh. But the second reason was more personal to Charles. I had a feeling that he would not admire David for attempting to abandon Edith and her cause, however he, Charles, had been treated.

At any rate, following both David's urgings and Adela's original suggestion, I did indeed telephone Broughton that night.

Jago, the butler, answered and told me that Charles was in London but when I was about to sign off there was the sound of an extension being lifted and Lady Uckfield came on the line.

'How are you?' she said. 'I ran into your pretty wife the other day.' I said I knew. 'Is there any chance of seeing you down here in the future? I do hope so.' She spoke with the intimate urgency, with that voice of a Girl With A Secret, that I had come to associate with, and enjoy about, her social manner.

'In actual fact we are here. Staying with the Eastons. I just rang to see if Charles was down.'

'Well, he should be back tomorrow night. What are you doing for dinner? I don't suppose you can get away?' She made the heartless request without the glimmer of a qualm. Did she know that David would give his life's blood to be included among her intimates? Probably.

'Not really,' I said.

Her tone became even more conspiratorial. 'Can't you talk?'

'Not really,' I said again, glancing over to where David stood by the fireplace watching me like a sparrow hawk.

'What about tea? Surely you can manage that?'

'I should think so,' I answered, still rather non-committally.

'And bring your nice wife.' She rang off.

David was bitterly disappointed that the call had not resulted in the general invitation that had been his unspoken plan. He suggested rather grumpily ringing back and asking the Uckfields to dinner instead but Isabel, always more reasonable, prevented him. 'I expect they want to have a bit of a chat about Edith and everything. Who can blame them?' In conclusion, deciding perhaps that since he had asked us down to re-establish relations with the Great House there wasn't much point in preventing us from doing so, he agreed that we should go for tea but carry with us an invitation for a drink on the Sunday morning.

EIGHTEEN

There were about six or seven people staying the weekend, which was par for the course with the Broughtons. I recognised Lady Tenby, who nodded at me quite pleasantly and a cousin of the family whom I had met with Charles and Edith in London a couple of times. I did not then know that there was any special significance in Clarissa Marlowe's presence but we did both notice that she was very proprietary in her manner, worrying about whether we were comfortable or had a sandwich or whatever and I suppose in retrospect that marked her out from an ordinary guest. The others, men in corduroys and sweaters, girls in skirts and walking shoes, barely looked up from their respective tasks, reading, gossiping, stroking the dogs, making toast at the glowing fire, as we came in. The Uckfields, by contrast, could not have been more solicitous. They asked our news, chatted about the dress show, discussed some film they had seen me in, fetched crumpets, topped up tea-cups until it must have been as plain to the other occupants of the room as it was to us that we were about to figure in some Master Plan.

The normal manner one has come to expect from hosts and fellow guests alike in an English country house is a state of moderately amiable lack of interest. The guests loaf about, reading magazines, going for walks, having baths, writing letters, without making any great social demands on each other. Only when eating — and even then only really at dinner — are they expected to 'perform'. This lack of effort, this business of people barely raising their heads from their books to acknowledge one's entry into a room, may seem rude to the foreigner (indeed it is rude), but I must confess it brings with it a certain relaxation. They make no effort to be polite to you and you therefore are not required to make any effort to be polite to them.

In fact, when a great fuss is made of someone in a house party it is almost invariably because they have been recognised as an

'outsider' or at the very least someone with a terminal illness on whom extra energy must be expended. For everyone to jump to their feet and gush is therefore more or less an insult to the recipient.

Adela and I, however, did not read any kind of social 'set-down' in the lathering we were receiving. We simply understood that a favour was about to be asked. Consequently, when Lady Uckfield wondered if I would like to see her sitting room, which had just been decorated and which, apparently, we had discussed at some time in the past, I got to my feet at once. My wife was included in the invitation but something in Lady Uckfield's manner told her that what was wanted was me on my own and since we were both dying to know what was going on, she opted to stay with Lord Uckfield and have some more tea to precipitate the expected intimacy.

The sitting room in question was quite far from the rooms I knew and was situated in one of the wings, separated from the main block by a curving corridor from which the windows looked across the park. Once reached it was revealed as a charming and elegant nest, displaying Lady Uckfield's sure touch for gemüchtlich, fussy grandeur. It was quite a large room, with walls upholstered in rose damask and pretty chairs covered in delightful chintzes. Little japanned bureaux, painted bookcases and delicate inlaid tables stood about, all littered with the debris of the aristocratic rich, flowers, bits of Meissen, pretty lamps, miniatures, bowls of dried lavender, enamelled candlesticks, small paintings on carved stands, and, of course, on her main desk (a handsome, ormolu-mounted bureau plat, which sat sideways to the wall), a mass of papers and invitations and official requests. A day bed upholstered in buttoned moiré was placed at right angles to the little fire, which twinkled and crackled in the leaded and polished grate. Above the mantelshelf, where china figures and snuff-boxes jostled with chewed dog toys, a knitted rabbit and postcards from friends in Barbados and San Francisco, was a pastel by Greuze of an earlier Lady Broughton. It was, in other words, the definitive HQ of a Great Lady.

'How nicely you've done it,' I said.

But Lady Uckfield had forgotten on what excuse she had brought me here and just waved me to the armchair on the other side of the fire from the day bed as she sat down with a grave expression.

'Have you seen Edith lately?'

'Not lately, no. Not since Adela saw her at the dress show.'

'I see,' she said. She was silent for a moment. In truth I had never before seen her uncomfortable but that is certainly what she was at this moment.

'How's Charles?'

She answered with a shrug of the mouth. 'I want to ask you something. I know that Edith is still with what's-his-name.

Does she intend to marry him?'

I was rather taken aback. 'I don't know. He isn't divorced yet — I'm not even sure he's started the whole process.'

She nodded to herself. 'Charles has told me she's planning to wait the two years and go for a non-contested separation.'

She paused and I sort of nodded back. This was news to me but it didn't seem such a bad idea, if only because it would hardly be headlines by that time. 'The thing is, Tigger and I are not behind this plan…'

She hesitated, more awkward than I had ever seen her. 'We feel that the sooner Charles can draw a line under the whole thing and start his life afresh, the better for him. We hate the idea of everything dragging on and on and his never really feeling that anything's over.' She looked at me quizzically. 'You do see what we mean?'

'I suppose I do.'

'You may not know it but it has cut him up most dreadfully. He's not a great one for showing his feelings but he was in the most frightful state, I can tell you.'

I nodded. I had only to think of that scene in his study when he had cried in front of me to believe this implicitly. Charles was one of those men, much less rare than modern women's magazines would have us believe, who make their choice in marriage and then never question it. They do not ration the commitment they give their wives because it never occurs to them that they will have to regroup their emotions before death separates them — and even then they tend to assume that it will be the husband who will go first. I do not necessarily think that he would have been incapable of infidelity. On some farming convention in America, during some shooting party in Scotland, who knows what could happen? But I would say that he would have been incapable of instigating the end of his own marriage. Having chosen Edith, he had given her all the love of which he was capable and, as a natural sequitur, all the trust. Neither of these would have been very interesting in their quality but they would have been given in great quantity. Of that I am sure. No, I was not surprised to hear that he had been in 'a frightful state'.

Lady Uckfield had not finished. 'We are so desperately hoping he can rebuild his life and we really feel that he has a chance of that now.'

'Has he met someone else?'

She inclined her head to one side without answering and I knew he had. Or that they hoped he had. Minutes later I had worked out it was probably Clarissa.

'The point is if he was free he could plan in those terms. Now he can't. The past is pulling and pulling at him until I don't believe he can think straight.'

Now this was an intriguing choice of phrase. In what way was Charles not 'thinking straight'? She watched me, waiting for some acknowledgement.

'How can I help?' I said. I wanted to find out what Lady Uckfield had in store for me. I knew it would be something big because it is an absolute truth that for a woman of her type to discuss any aspect of the intimate life of her family with anyone other than a life-long, contemporary friend of similar rank (and that only rarely) was a kind of torture. Whether she liked me or not was irrelevant. This interview was agony for her.

'Can you talk to Edith? Can you ask her if she'll let Charles divorce her now? Of course, in the past that would have been an uncomfortable way round but do people think like that these days? I don't believe they do — and you must assure her that it would make no difference to the settlement. None at all.' She was gushing to cover her own embarrassment. And no wonder. This was a vulgar request if ever I heard one. Perhaps the only vulgar thing I ever knew to issue from her lips. My surprise must have shown on my face. 'You must think this a very tiresome commission.'

'I don't know that tiresome is the word I'd have chosen.' My tone was a little severe but Lady Uckfield was enough of a lady to know that she had transgressed her own code. She took the reprimand gracefully as one who deserved it.

'Of course, it's an awful thing to ask.'

'You do Edith an injustice,' I said. 'She wouldn't think about the money.' This was true. I do not think it ever occurred to Edith to take anything off Charles beyond a few thousand to give her a breathing space. It was enough that he had paid the rent in Ebury Street and left her able to cash cheques in this interim. What Lady Uckfield did not understand was that Edith was fully conscious of having behaved badly. People like the Uckfields can be slow, indeed unable, to realise that 'honour' is not a perquisite of their own class. They have heard so often about the materialism of the middle classes and the grace and self-sacrifice of their own kind that they have come to believe these two fictions equally.

She raised her eyebrows slightly. 'I suppose that might be true.'

'It is true,' I said. 'You do not like Edith and because you don't like her you underestimate her.'

At this she unbent slightly. She did not deny what I had said and when she answered me she spoke with a slight smile.

'You are right to defend her. You first came to this house as her friend — and you are right to defend her.'

'I will tell Edith what you've said but I really cannot do much more than that.'

'You see, we can't have Charles bringing a case and her contesting it or challenging it in any way. We must know that won't happen. You see that?'

'Of course I do.' Which I did. 'But I can't advise her. She wouldn't listen to me if I tried.'

'You'll tell me what she says?'

I nodded. Our interview was over. We stood and had almost left the room when Lady Uckfield clearly felt impelled to convince me further of the urgency of her request.

'You see, Charles is so dreadfully unhappy. It can't go on, can it? It's so terrible for us. Seeing him like this.'

In answer I put my arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. It was considerably more intimate an action than anything I had attempted before. Perhaps it was a sign that we were somehow bonded by this awful mess of tears and waste.

At any rate, she didn't object. Nor did she assume that faintly perceptible stiffness that her kind of English women use at such a moment to demonstrate that some unwarranted liberty has been taken.

We went back to the drawing room where Adela, in an effort to escape from Tigger's meticulously outlined plans for the South Wood, was attempting to teach one of the dogs to balance a biscuit on its nose. She looked up when we came in and, since she was burning to hear what had happened (as I was to tell it), we made our excuses fairly soon after that. We still had the awful burden of David's invitation to impart but, since it was the price by which we had bought our tea, we knew it had to be done. Lady Uckfield followed us down to the Under Hall so it was easier than it might have been.

'David and Isabel,' I started. She looked quizzical so I clarified, 'Easton. Our hosts.' She nodded. This interchange alone would have been enough to have depressed David for months. 'They wondered if you'd like to bring your party over for a drink tomorrow morning?' It was done.

Lady Uckfield smiled briskly. 'But how very kind. I'm afraid we're too many for that. But do thank them.' Her customary urgent intimacy was back as she rejected an invitation I knew well enough would never be accepted. But she surprised me by continuing. 'Why don't you come back here instead — and bring them?'

This was kindness above and beyond the call of duty. Feeling guilty at the thought of David's delight had he but known, I shook my head. 'I think that's rather a bore for you, isn't it? Let's leave it for another time.'

But Lady Uckfield, to my further bewilderment, was insistent. 'No, please. Do come.' She smiled. 'Charles will be back. I know he'd love to see you.'

At the time, I didn't understand what she hoped to achieve by bringing us together with Charles. It seemed if anything a risk to her plans, for if I had confided her mission to her son, I am certain he would have been furious. But later I realised that she wanted me to see Charles in his misery for this would be her justification and might motivate me more than ever to carry out her wishes. It is possible too that she believed that by allowing us to bring our friends to Broughton we would be even more tightly strapped to the family carriage. 'Don't feel you have to,' said Adela, but we could protest no more and so, bidding her goodbye until the morrow, we set off to deliver our happy message to a delighted David and a less enthralled but pleasantly surprised Isabel.

Charles was waiting for us in the drawing room when we reappeared the next day or so it seemed. He bounded out of his chair, kissed Adela on both cheeks and almost wrung my hand. He wasn't able to say much more than how pleased he was to see us, as his mother approached to normalise the situation and lead us over to the drinks cupboard, cunningly inserted behind a dummy door that had originally been constructed to balance the door that led, through an ante-room, to the dining room. Tigger stood there in his role as Mine Host, dispensing Bloody Marys. He presented one to his wife. She wrinkled her nose fractionally. 'Not enough Tabasco, the wrong vodka — and you've forgotten the lime juice.' I was waiting for a bowl of fresh limes to be rung for when to my surprise Lord Uckfield took down a plastic bottle of lime juice cordial and sloshed a great measure into the jug. I was about to request one without this ingredient then thought better of it and took what I was given. Naturally enough, it was delicious.

'How do you think he's looking?' said my hostess.

She knew well enough that Charles looked perfectly terrible. His face was tired and lumpy. His skin, which normally shone with the kind of uncomplicated health redolent of grouse moors and hunting fields, looked sallow and almost dirty. His hair hung in unsorted tendrils down his neck.

'Not great,' I said.

She nodded. 'You do see why I felt I had to ask your help?'

She drifted away without referring again to our curious interview of the previous day. To be honest and in her defence I could see why, as a mother, she had been driven to pretty desperate measures. Clearly her son was dying by inches before her eyes. What puzzled me was this hinted-at, burgeoning romance that promised new life and happiness. He really did not look like one who has found his True Love, even though Clarissa was in his eye-line. There were some other pre-lunch drinkers and she was again playing the hostess, leading people here and there and introducing them but, so far as I could tell, without exciting any special interest in her cousin's heart.

The house-guests were as surly as they had been the previous day and I saw a couple of them being grudgingly yoked to David and Isabel. One, Viscount Bohun, who had been out for a walk the day before, I had met occasionally in London. His youngest sister had been a vague friend of mine at one time and I had always suspected him then of being mentally sub-normal

— or at least as near sub-normal as one can be without actually risking clinical classification — so I had been quite surprised to read somewhere that he had married a pretty girl with a respectable job in publishing. Remembering this, I was curious to see the new Lady Bohun, she who had made this unholy contract. She was easy to spot. Her shining hair swept back flawlessly under a velvet band, her nose tilted in the air, she was being as grand and as difficult with a foundering David as it is possible to be without actually resorting to insults. The poor man struggled on, hopefully dropping names and references, all of which were courteously spurned, until I could almost see the sweat popping out on his brow. I can only hope that such petty victories were worth the terrible sacrifice of her life that she had made. Bohun himself had caught the wretched Adela and was telling her some interminable story, which he kept punctuating with a shrill and unprovoked laugh. I could see her checking the exits.

Charles approached and touched me on the elbow. 'So how are you? How was your filming?'

'OK. How about you?'

He gestured towards a window seat where, untroubled by the others, we might perch and be a little alone. He stared out over the gardens for a moment in silence. 'Oh, I'm fine.' He smiled rather wryly. 'Well, quite fine.'

He didn't look it but I nodded. 'I'm glad.'

'Mummy said you were over here yesterday.'

'We came for tea.'

'I expect they wanted to talk to you about, you know, the mess.'

'A bit.'

'What did they say?' I wasn't really prepared to betray Lady Uckfield to her son. Apart from anything else, although I thought her request had been intrusive and improper, I did not question the honesty of her motives. Her child looked like hell.

Of course she wanted to bring things to an end, what mother wouldn't? I couldn't blame her for that so I shrugged. Charles continued. 'They're very keen to hurry everything on. They want me to "put it all behind me'".

'And shouldn't you?'

He stared back out of the window. It was early May and the flowers that were springing into life all over the lovingly tended terraces should have looked fresh and gay but there had been a cloudburst that morning and instead they all seemed rather soggy and careworn. Beyond the ha-ha, the trees in the park were in leaf but still light, their first foliage so much more subtle in its colours than the thick lushness of high summer. 'They packed me off to Jamaica in November with Clarissa and some friends of hers.'

'Was it fun?' I found Clarissa who was busying herself with refills. Charles followed my glance.

'Poor old Clarissa. Yes. Quite fun. I like Jamaica. Well, Ocho Rios anyway. Have you ever been?' I shook my head. 'My dear old mother's trying to make a match for me. She doesn't want to take her chances on the open market a second time.' He laughed.

'I suppose she just wants you to be happy,' I said.

He looked at me. 'It isn't quite that. You see, she does want me to be happy but this time she wants me to be happy in a way she understands. She fears the unknown. Edith was the unknown. She thinks she's working for my happiness but more than that she is anxious to prevent a repetition. There are to be no more strangers at Broughton. Edith and Eric have been quite enough.'

'Well, I can see her point so far as Eric's concerned,' I said, and we both laughed.

I looked back at Clarissa who was beginning to cast slightly nervous looks in our direction as if she sensed that our conversation would bode her no good. I felt sorry for her. She was a nice girl and she would have made a success of all this

— far more of a success probably than the wretched Edith ever could. Why shouldn't she have a go at making Charles happy? But even as I entertained such thoughts, I knew the whole thing was a figment of Lady Uckfield's imagination and destined to remain so.

'Have you seen Edith lately?' he asked.

I was struck again by the common error, into which I have often fallen, certainly with Charles, of assuming that stupid people are spared deep feeling. Not that Charles was exactly stupid. He was simply incapable of original thought. But I knew now that he was more than capable of great love. It is endlessly fascinating to speculate on the reasons for love's choices. I liked Edith and I had since I met her. I enjoyed her beauty and her low-key self-mockery and her naturally cool manner, but I could not pretend to understand how she had become so great a love object for this Young Man Who Had Everything. Her greatest merit as company, after all, was her sense of irony, which Charles was not capable of appreciating or even understanding. In my way I was as puzzled as Lady Uckfield as to why he had not chosen someone of his own sort who would have known the ropes and the other members of his world, who would have chaired her charities and ridden her horses and bossed the village around without a qualm, certainly with none of the suppressed sense of self-ridicule that underlay so much of Edith's role-playing. At all events, there it was. Charles had fallen in love with Edith Lavery and he loved her with a disinterested heart. The blow she had dealt to his self-esteem and indeed to his life had obviously been critical but it was quite clear from the look he turned to me that he loved her still.

'Adela saw her the other day at something.'

'How was she?'

'Well, I think.' This was a thorny path, if you like. I did not want to say she had looked rather down in case it stirred up hopes in his breast that were doomed to disappointment, nor did I care to say she was bursting with happiness as that would be needlessly painful. It would also be, from what I could gather from Adela, untrue.

'Will you be seeing her soon?'

'I thought I might give her lunch.'

'Tell her — tell her I'll do whatever she wants. You know. I'll fit in.' I nodded. 'And give her my love,' he said.

Predictably David had not enjoyed his sojourn in Valhalla. As so often in such cases, the realisation of the dream brings resentment in its wake. Perhaps because, in their imaginings, David and his like see themselves as inner members of the Charmed Circle, chums of half the peerage, swapping stories about childhood friends and making plans to share a villa in Tuscany. Inevitably, the reality of these attempts at intermingling tends to make them bitter and irritated as they find themselves snubbed as aliens by those very people they have spent their adult life admiring and emulating.

'I must say,' he muttered as he climbed into the back seat of my car, 'I found those Bohuns pretty hard going. Do you know them?'

'I used to know him a bit.'

'Really? I don't know what I thought of him.'

I smiled. 'He's a half-wit. What's she like?'

'Quite difficult, I'd say.'

Isabel nodded. 'Diana Bohun has made a hard bargain and her only compensation is the envy of strangers. I wonder how long she'll bear it. No doubt in five years we'll read that she's run off with the local doctor.'

Adela shook her head. 'No, we won't. I knew her when she came out. She'd stay with Hitler if he brought her a title and a house.'

Isabel raised her eyebrows. 'I think I'd rather have Hitler.'

I was interested in this exchange because, even as they ridiculed the pitiful hypocrisy of Diana Bohun, I was well aware that Adela and David and even Isabel, whatever they might say, fundamentally approved of her pact with the devil. Perhaps none of them would have been prepared to marry someone who actually repulsed them, but nevertheless those girls in their acquaintance who had done so (and I could name at least seven in my own address book) were not despicable figures to them unless they reneged on their bargain. To the members of this world this was Edith's real crime. Not marrying Charles without loving him, but leaving him for love of someone else. To them, her folly was in abandoning the false values she had endorsed with her marriage and in attempting to return to the timeless virtues. Her decision was unworldly, it was not mondaine.

Americans may affect to admire this in their fiction if not in their lives but their British counterparts, at least among the upper-middle and upper classes do not. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.

And it was by these standards that Edith had been judged and found wanting.

NINETEEN

Here was a hard task. On the one hand I had a commission from Lady Uckfield, which I had sworn to carry out, to ask Edith to allow herself to be divorced at once, on the other, I had been made fully aware during our time at Broughton that Charles was still in love with his wife.

'So what are you going to say?' said Adela on the day when I had arranged to meet Edith for lunch. Naturally I had told my wife all. I don't know that I had been sworn to secrecy but even if I had been I never feel it includes one's spouse except in the most exceptional cases. Nothing can be more irritating than attempting to live intimately with a Keeper of Secrets.

'What Lady Uckfield wants me to say, I suppose.'

'Don't tell me you're going to promote the cause of that wretched Marlowe girl?'

I shook my head. 'No, I'll keep off that. I'll tell her they want it to be over, that's all.'

Adela pondered. 'Tell her Lady Uckfield wants it to be over. That'll be nearer the mark.' Considering her prejudice, I thought this was commendably just.

I had arranged to meet Edith at the Caprice. At lunchtime particularly it seems to combine a sense of clean, business-like lines with a whiff of glamour, which I thought would be an appropriate and undepressing setting for our proposed conversation. I arrived to find that I had been allotted the table at the far end of the restaurant away from the bar. This was by chance but it could not have been more suitable. I ordered a glass of champagne to cheer myself up and waited for my guest.

Edith was glad of my choice of venue. Simon was working a lot these days and earning quite respectable sums but what with his mortgage and his wife and the general financial backlog that any actor has to pay off when things start to roll again, he was not one for much West End entertaining unless it was at someone else's expense. Edith could have managed it as she had been given no real guidelines as to how much she could spend but she was reluctant to use Charles's money for inessentials.

She had been known to interpret this term fairly widely but somehow to take Simon out for treats on her husband's money didn't seem quite cricket. And then the bore was she had no money of her own — something that had come to seem quite strange to her, so far had she travelled from the world of her girlhood. At all events she was always glad to have an excuse to dress up and go out.

We kissed and chatted and ordered, knowing as we did so that there was a conversation of some substance to come, but by mutual consent we waited until our first courses, bang bang chicken for me and some hot hors d'oeuvres for Edith, were on the table. The waiter filled our glasses and retreated and we knew that we had a little while to ourselves.

'We saw David and Isabel last weekend,' I opened. 'We stayed with them in fact.'

'How are they?'

'All right. David's quite busy though I never really know what with.' I paused. 'We all went over to Broughton for a drink.'

Edith took a bite of something in thin batter. 'David must have enjoyed that.'

'He didn't much. He was stuck with Diana Bohun. He kept trying to impress her, which I don't think was very successful.'

'I should say not. She cut me dead the other day in Peter Jones.' She continued to eat and drink with some gusto but she would not give me the slightest help with my task. With an inward sigh I soldiered on.

'Lady Uckfield was there.'

'So I imagined. How is dear old "Googie"?' She was of course being ironic although not uncomfortably bitter. The tiresome nickname had once again gone into inverted commas as it had been in the first weeks of her marriage. And there was the recognition of a barrier there, a deep divide, which now separated the existences of her former mother-in-law and herself.

'Very well. I think. Of course, she wanted to talk about you.'

'There's no "of course" about it. As a matter of fact, I'm rather surprised. Googie is not one for discussing the family troubles. You should feel very flattered.'

'I think she felt that I might be of some use.'

Edith nodded. The penny was dropping and she began to understand that this talk might be leading to deeper waters than she had come prepared for. 'Ah,' she said.

'She told me you were planning to wait the two years.' Edith looked at me in a non-committal way. 'It's not what they want.

They want Charles to divorce you now. Straight away. She needs to know what you would think about that.'

I had said it and there was some relief. The words were out. Edith stopped eating and laid her fork down gently on the plate. Very deliberately she sipped her wine as if she were savouring each separate droplet. I suppose the point was it had come. The End of Her Marriage. I am not sure to what extent she had truly accepted that this was where her romance with Simon had brought her until this moment. Though I must say her voice was quite calm when she spoke. 'You mean they want Charles to divorce me for adultery. Citing Simon.'

I nodded. 'I suppose so. I don't think it really works like that these days but I would guess that's the general idea. We didn't actually talk details. If he were to divorce you now it would have to be for a reason, or has that finished? I'm not too sure.'

'I can't say it seems very gentlemanly.'

'It wasn't very ladylike going off with a married actor.'

She nodded and resumed her eating. 'So what do you want from me? What am I to say?'

'I think they feel they have to know that if the divorce does go ahead now you won't suddenly try to fight it. It won't interest you but it won't make any difference, you know, to the money.'

She looked at me rather sadly. 'I don't want any money. Not much anyway. Less than Charles would give me tomorrow if I asked him.'

'I know,' I said. 'I told Lady Uckfield that.'

'Anyway,' she added after a pause, 'it's not a generous offer. Nowadays there isn't a "guilty party". It never does make any difference financially. Didn't you realise that?' I shook my head. 'Well, I bet "Googie" does.' We continued eating in silence for a while. The waiter returned, took away our plates and came back with salmon fishcakes and a bowl of pommes allumettes. But the subject remained there on the table like a weeping centrepiece. It was Edith who introduced the character we were both thinking of. 'What does Charles say about all this? I assume he was there. Did you talk to him?'

'Yes, I talked to him.' While theoretically correct, my answer was a lie, for Charles had not been there when Lady Uckfield was sketching out her plans, which is what Edith had meant by her question. I very much doubted he would have allowed his mother to talk as she did had he been. I corrected myself, suddenly oppressed by my implied deception. 'Actually he wasn't there when I was talking to his mother but we went back the next day.'

'And?'

'He says he'll abide by your decision. Whatever you want to do.'

'That sounds more like him. Poor old Charles,' said Edith. 'How was he?'

I had dreaded this. If I could have said that he was looking fine and dandy I would have. I had come to feel, like Lady Uckfield, that it was time to call a halt to this unsuccessful experiment in miscegenation. The problem was he had not looked fine and dandy. 'OK,' I said. 'I don't think all of this has done him much good.'

'No.' She helped herself to some more chips. 'Was Clarissa down there?'

I nodded and Edith was silent. I was about to tell her to discount whatever she had heard, that it was a rumour inspired by Lady Uckfield's ambitions and nothing else, but I was silent. What was the point? She had to let Charles go and where was the good in slowing up her decision? For the rest of lunch we chatted about Simon and acting and Isabel and buying a flat, but as we were leaving Edith reopened the topic.

'Let me think about it.' She smiled slightly. 'Of course, we both know that I'll do what I'm asked but let me think about it.

I'll telephone you.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Edith Broughton did not go home — or rather she did not return to Ebury Street — at once. It was a crisp, sunny, spring day, when everything seems as clear as a cut-out, cold and bright as a jewel. She was warmly dressed and so, once past the Ritz, she turned left into the Green Park. She strolled down the path, past Wimborne House, past the restored, statue decorated splendour of Spencer House, past the Italianate magnificence of Bridgewater House until she stopped and looked up at Lancaster House, the golden pile, built and occupied for many years by the mighty Dukes of Sutherland. Their duchesses had dominated London Society, one after another, summoning the great and the good of the different eras to ascend the giant, gilded staircase in the grandest of all grand London halls to pay court to each other's wealth and power.

It struck Edith then that she would have enjoyed that older, simpler world when these houses had held sway over the capital. When the Guests and the Spencers and the Egertons and the Leveson-Gowers had lived their ordained lives under these teeming roofs instead of the charitable organisations and government departments and Greek shipping magnates who occupied them now. Forgetting for the moment that she, Edith Lavery, would have had the greatest difficulty in penetrating even the outermost fringe of this golden troupe in any period but our own, she saw herself in her crinoline, never questioning her own happiness and, consequently, being happy. And as she did so, she was struck by how similar her fantasies of the old, pre-Great War world were to those fantasies about her coming life as Lady Broughton, which she had entertained while lying in the bath just before her wedding. How simple things were to be, how the villagers and tenants were going to love her, how the family would bless the day she had come among them! She found herself smiling wistfully as the dream image of herself as the Great Social Force of Twenty-First Century Society receded before her inner gaze, swathed in mist, tearfully waving goodbye.

Pondering this, it seemed at first to her troubled brain that her mother had been wrong and the media had been right all along, that these dreams and ambitions were outmoded, that no one nowadays wants titles and rank and inherited power, that these are the days of the self-made man, of talent, of creativity. But then, looking about at the office workers and sweepers and job interviewees who loitered near her in the park, she was struck by the dishonesty of the media pundits of our time.

Was there one here who would not change places with Charles if they could? Was it not possible that the small screen gurus praised meritocracy because it was the only class system that would accord them the highest rank? Even if unearned riches and position had no moral merit, even if they embodied the Dream That Dare Not Speak Its Name, it was still a dream that figured in plenty of people's fantasies. And she had casually discarded it.

Then she thought again with puzzled wonderment of her own supposed unhappiness with Charles. Why exactly had she been so unhappy? When she tried to think back to their time together, she kept remembering those pretty rooms at Broughton and the servants and the park and her work in the village. The only discomforts she could recall were things like packing the car and standing behind Charles at a shoot in the rain. Were these so terrible? And if she thought of Charles, himself, it was with a rather intimate affection. She remembered him swearing at fellow motorists or farting in his sleep and it provoked in her a kind of nostalgic warmth. There was no trace of relief at his passing. If only there had been. Instead she found herself worrying about his loneliness. It pained her to think he was suffering. And increasingly she asked herself what exactly was this personal fulfilment for which so much disruption had been necessary? Was it sexual? Was she admitting that she had done all this because of Simon's cock? Or was it simply to do with boredom? But if it was, how much less bored was she now, sitting in Ebury Street talking to girlfriends on the telephone or meeting them for lunch than she had been working with her committees in the library at Broughton?

She turned away from Lancaster House and walked slowly towards the Victory Arch with Buckingham Palace on her left.

The Royal Standard announcing the monarch's presence in London hung limply against its staff. Tourists hovered at the railings, peering in with rapt attention, as if they hoped to catch a glimpse of some Royal Highness strolling down a corridor or coming out for a breather. And again, as she walked, Edith considered the mystery of unearned greatness. She thought how Tigger and Googie and Charles would all be invited to the next court ball, an event of unimaginable glamour to these Japanese travellers with their clicking cameras, to these northerners in their hideous anoraks, blobs of bright, synthetic colour against the cold grey, neo-Georgian facade. Any one of these would have made an invitation to the Palace into a life-long story, sodden with repetition and yet she had turned away from her role in this fairy tale in order to be — to be what precisely? Happy?

The fact was that of late Edith had come to wonder just how much she could be fulfilled by 'personal happiness', if that was what Simon was offering her. Perhaps because she had never succeeded in disentangling her ambitions of fulfilment from her mother's values, she had already begun to hanker for that sweet sense of self-importance that her life at Broughton had brought with it. She understood that these feelings did her no credit but her defence was a pragmatic one. How else was she to enjoy the good things in life if she did not marry them? And her faith in Simon's eventual triumph was waning. She knew more about show business now than she had when they met and she sensed that the series he was in, with a couple more to follow, was probably the best he could hope for. Whatever they might pretend together, they would not be holding hands tightly, stiff with anticipation, at the Oscar ceremony. What was her life to be then? A vicarage in the Home Counties and the occasional interview for an evening newspaper? Was she really expected to provide vocal and emotional support through twenty years of semi-failure to prove she was a real person? Some might say it is only personal achievement that should lead on to glory but what of those who have no talent or special gift with which to achieve? Are they so blameworthy to want to live among the blessed? Poor Edith was aware that she could neither weave nor spin but was she therefore forbidden to covet a life of splendour? Was this so shameful? She shook her head in irritation. At the far corner of her brain, these thoughts were beginning to tell her that despite the reckless choice she had made, her own assessment of the world and her place in it had not really changed in the least. She felt herself resenting anew the accusations she heard from her parents and friends when she first made her run for it, that she could not settle to her new life because beneath the skin of a rebel beat the heart of Mrs Lavery's little girl. And she resented them because she was beginning to be horribly afraid they might be true.

Walking towards Victory Arch, watching the afternoon light glint against the windows of Apsley House, whither she and Charles had been summoned for a party the previous summer, one of the first engagements she had been obliged to cancel because of the split, she recalled with amazement (and it really had begun to seem almost unbelievably strange) that she had jettisoned a high place in the world of the worldly for the position of partner to an obscure man in a generally despised profession. And not for the first time she sat down to think about the extraordinary events of the last year of her life in more detail.

Simon was at the flat when she got back. He was drinking tea and watching an old film. When he was working he was at peace and so inclined to relax and take it easy. It was only when he was out of a job that he would go haring about London keeping lunch dates with people he disliked and telephoning his agent every four hours.

Edith left her coat in the hall. 'Is there a cup for me?' He waved his mug in the air. 'I just made it with a bag. The water's still hot if you want some.' He had taken his trainers off and they lay, pigeon-toed on the hearth rug. His coat had been thrown across an armchair and books and scripts were littered about the room. Edith stood at the door, taking in the whole scene like a spectator from another country. The Way We Live Now. This was the way she lived now, with sixties sofas covered in stained, oatmeal tweed, with large nondescript flower prints in coloured mounts on the walls, with a Perspex coffee table and a gas-log fire. This was the way she was living now. She was acutely aware that she had no desire to enter the room.

Simon, sensing some strangeness between them, stood and approached her in the doorway. He slid an arm around her waist and squeezed her, pushing his mouth onto hers. They had been in an Indian restaurant the night before and she could still taste the spices on his breath. He pressed himself against her and she could feel that he was already aroused. 'Good lunch?' he said.

She nodded. 'Googie sent him. He and Adela were down in Sussex last weekend. They went over to Broughton and of course Googie dragged him off to her lair. The meeting was her idea.'

'And?'

'They want to hurry the divorce.' She paused, sensing his recoil. 'Googie wants to involve you.'

'Jesus!' Simon didn't know what to think. Part of him revelled in it. Visions of more picture spreads on page three in the Daily Mail flickered through his brain but with them came trailing streamers of a distant panic. He felt as if he was hurtling down some tube, weightless and powerless, into the unknown. 'Is she serious?'

'I think so but you can calm down. They're wrong. I'm fairly sure no one has to be cited any more. The point is they want to get on with it.'

'What did you say?'

Edith studied the pretty boy before her. He had abandoned his customary flirtatious, winking manner and, although he didn't realise, he looked the better for it. A little seriousness added charm to his bright blue eyes and the careless locks of shining hair that fell forward to veil them. 'I said I had to think about it.'

'Can you stop them?'

'If I want to.'

'How?'

'I'll tell Charles not to go ahead with it.'

Simon laughed. 'And that would do it?'

Edith observed him coolly. How provincial he was! How little he understood men like Charles! She was almost haughty in her defence of her discarded husband to her preferred lover. 'Yes. That would do it.' Simon had stopped laughing but suddenly there seemed to be something irredeemably irritating about him. She couldn't be bothered to embark on the usual chats about how bad everyone was in any film they were watching, how jealous his fellow actors were, how stupid the cameraman. 'I'm going to have a bath,' she said, disengaging herself from his embrace.

Simon threw himself back into the sofa, fixing his gaze once more upon the screen. 'You're very sulky,' he said. 'I shall be charitable and blame the time of the month.'

She didn't answer but went instead down to the basement bathroom that opened off their dark, little bedroom. An attempt had been made with a looking glass and a wallpaper of enormous poppies to brighten the two rooms up but it only deepened their lightless gloom. She ran the bath, undressed and climbed in. She was aware that since she had entered the park she had been in a kind of strange, unworldly mental state. She felt intensely aware of every movement of her limbs, of every ripple of the water against her skin. She felt spacey, almost drunk — although she certainly drank very little at lunch. A vague sense of apprehension seemed to bloat her stomach and her very nerve ends prickled individually the length of her body. But then, at last, she realised what it was that was catching at the edge of her attention. Simon had said no more than he knew. It was her time of the month. She was as regular as clockwork.

And she was five days late.

TWENTY

The morning following my lunch with Edith our doorbell rang at not much later than a quarter past eight.

'Christ!' said Adela. 'Who on earth's that?' We were in our tiny bedroom, which overlooked the area. As the front door was just out of sight to the right, it wasn't possible to sneak a preview of our visitor but, in any case, at that time in the morning, I just assumed it was the postman so I was not particularly careful with my toilet as I shouted that I was coming.

When I unlocked the door in my underpants with my hair unbrushed, I discovered it was not the postman, who must after all be accustomed to such sights, but Edith Broughton who stood on the mat.

'Hello,' I said with something of a tone of wonder.

Edith pushed past me into the room. 'I have to talk to you.' She threw herself down onto the sofa that divided the living bit from the eating bit of the flat's solitary 'reception room'.

'Can I dress first?' I asked.

She nodded and I hurried back into the bedroom to inform the amazed Adela, busy struggling into her clothes, of the identity of our early morning caller.

She was ready first and when I rejoined them Edith already had a cup of coffee in her hand and a piece of toast before her.

'So?' I said. There didn't seem to be much point in pretending that this was a normal way of carrying on. Edith glanced at Adela who jumped up.

'I'd better be off, hadn't I? Not to worry. I've a mass of paperwork to do…'

Edith waved her back to her seat. 'Stay. There's no secret. Anyway,' she glanced around at our minuscule accommodation, 'I imagine you'd be within earshot wherever you went.' Adela settled herself and we both waited.

'I want to see Charles.' Her voice was quite flat as she spoke but of course we were both most interested by what she said.

I did not really understand why she had felt the need to come round and communicate this to us at dawn but I was fascinated nevertheless. I was soon to understand what my part was to be. 'I want you to arrange it.'

Adela caught my eye and faintly shook her head. She had all the horror of her kind for getting involved in this kind of thing. Whatever the outcome, somehow one is always blameworthy. She also, as she told me later, had no wish to incur Lady Uckfield's enmity and she suspected that this would be an inevitable by-product of the proposed plan of action. One must remember of course that Adela, from first to last, was entirely on Lady Uckfield's side and never on Edith's.

'Why do you need me?' I said rather wanly.

'I rang Broughton last night. I asked for Charles but I got Googie. She said he wasn't there but I'm sure he was. I rang London and Feltham and they said he was at Broughton. I know he was. She doesn't want me to speak to him.'

All this would only confirm Adela's suspicions that in some vague way we were being asked to take on Lady Uckfield. 'I don't really see what I can do.'

'They'll let you speak to him. Say you want to ask him to lunch or something and then, when he comes on the line, tell him I want to meet him.'

'I don't think I can do that,' I said. 'I don't mind telephoning,' which was a lie, 'but if Lady Uckfield asks me what I'm going to say, I'll tell her. She can't imagine she can prevent you meeting for ever.'

'Not for ever, no. Just long enough.'

'I don't believe that,' I said. Although I did.

In truth, I was pretty sure that I too was on Lady Uckfield's side when it came down to it. The facts were simple enough.

Edith had married Charles without loving him in order to gain a position. She had then made a complete failure of that same position, abandoned it, broken her faith with Charles, made a great scandal and caused him a good deal of pain. Lady Uckfield now wished to be rid of her once and for all and, frankly, could anyone wonder at it?

'Do you think Charles will want to see you?' asked Adela. 'Perhaps it was he who refused to come to the telephone.'

Which was certainly a point worth considering.

'If he doesn't, I want to hear it from him.'

The three of us sat in silence for a while. Adela crunched her toast and turned to Nigel Dempster.

'Anything?' I said.

'Sarah Carter's sister's married some painter and the Langwells are getting a divorce, which we knew last October.'

'Will you do it?' said Edith.

Adela and I looked at each other but I refused the message in her eyes. Ultimately, much as I would have liked to, it would have been wrong of me to have abandoned Edith to her fate and espoused the cause of the Broughtons. Whatever I might privately think about the wrongs and rights of the matter, this would have been a dishonourable course. First, and before everything else, I had been Edith's friend, as even Lady Uckfield had acknowledged.

'I will,' I said. 'But I won't do it either at this time of the morning or with you listening. Go home and I'll telephone you.'

Edith nodded and, after finishing her coffee, left.

'Something's up,' said Adela.

I rang at half past ten and asked for Charles. Despite what Edith had said I was quite surprised when Lady Uckfield came on the line.

'Hello,' she said. 'How are you?'

'I was trying to track down Charles.'

She was very smooth and clearly four steps ahead of me. 'I'm afraid he's not here. Can I give him a message?'

I toyed with the idea of bluffing but she was obviously well aware of why I was ringing and it seemed a foolish corner to paint myself into. 'I'm on an errand, I'm afraid. And I'm not at all sure you'll approve.'

'Try me.' Her voice had gone from reserved to glacial.

'It's Edith. She wants to see Charles.'

'Why?'

'I don't know why.' This was true.

'What's the point?'

'I don't know that there is any point but I do know that you won't get a straight answer out of her concerning your proposals re the divorce unless she sees him.'

'You've asked her then?'

'I've asked her and she says she wants to think about it. Part of that thinking, I take it, has to go on in Charles's presence.'

There was a pause for a moment and I could hear down the line that eerie echo of other conversations, other, strange anonymous bits of lives being lived, a thousand miles away. 'Are you free this afternoon? Can you meet me for tea?'

'There's nothing I would enjoy more but in this instance I don't know that I'll be able to add anything to what I've already told you.'

'I'll be at the Ritz. At four.'

I was interested that she did not want me to come to their flat in Cadogan Square.

'Perhaps Tigger's coming up with her. Perhaps Charles is there,' said Adela and for a moment I was tempted to walk round and ring the bell. I thought better of it, having decided that it might behove me to hear what Lady Uckfield had to say first.

I did, however, telephone Edith.

'What are you going to say to her?'

'I don't know. That she is wasting her time trying to keep you two apart, I suppose. If that's what she's doing.'

'Of course it's what she's doing.'

'I mean without Charles's knowledge.' Edith was silent. 'At any rate, I'll call you this evening.' I rang off.

I asked tentatively whether or not Lady Uckfield had arrived but the manager was not one to let such an opportunity slip by.

'Gentleman for the Marchioness of Uckfield,' he observed loudly to a passing waiter, who escorted me courteously past the turning heads to where she waited. She was sitting trimly at a table in the Marble Hall to the right of the great, gilded fountain.

She smiled and waved a little hand as I approached, and stood to greet me with her neat, bird-like movements. The man brought the tea with a lot of milady'ing, all of it gently and serenely acknowledged. She laughed gaily. 'Isn't this a treat?'

'It is for me,' I said.

Her manner became not exactly more serious but at any rate more direct. She was a little less breathlessly urgent and remembering that scene in her sitting room at Broughton I understood that she was going to impart some real, as opposed to faked, intimacy. 'I want to be quite honest because I think you may be able to help.'

'I'm simultaneously flattered and dubious,' I said.

'I don't want Charles to have to see Edith.'

'So I gathered.'

'It's not that I'm being unkind. Truly. It's just that I think he's in the most tremendous muddle and I don't want him any more confused.'

'Lady Uckfield,' I said, 'I know very well why you think it a bad idea. So do I. You believe the marriage was a mistake and you had rather not prolong it. I quite agree. The fact remains that, at this moment, Edith is Charles's wife and if she wants to see him and if he, as I suspect, also wants to see her, then hadn't we better get out of the way?'

A momentary flicker of irritation shadowed her face. 'Why do you think he wants to see her?'

'Because he's still in love with her.'

She said nothing for a moment but poked among the sandwiches to find an egg one, which she nibbled with exaggerated delight. 'Aren't these good!' she whispered covertly, as if we must prevent anyone else hearing at all costs. She looked at me with her darting, cat-like eyes. 'You think I've been unfair to Edith.'

I shook my head. 'No. I think you don't like her but I don't think you've been particularly unfair to her.'

She nodded in acknowledgement of this. 'I don't like her. Much. However, that's not the point.'

'What is the point?'

'The point is that she cannot make Charles happy. Whether I like her or not is neither here nor there. I detested my mother-in-law and yet I was fully aware of what a success she had made of Broughton and of Tigger's wretched father. It took me twenty years to bury her memory. Do you think it would matter to me if I simply didn't like her? I'm not a schoolgirl.'

'No.' I sipped my tea. This was flattering indeed. For some reason Lady Uckfield had decided to draw aside the curtain that habitually clothed all her private thoughts and actually talk to me. She had not finished.

'Let me tell you about my son. Charles is a good, kind, uncomplicated man. He's much nicer than I am, you know. But he is less…' She faltered, searching for a loyal adjective that would fit the need.

'Intelligent?' I ventured.

Since I had said it, she let it pass. 'He needs a wife who values not just him but who he is, what he does. What their life is.

He is not one to be able to give weight to a different philosophy in his own home. He could not be married to a socialist opera singer and respect her for her different views. It is not in him.'

'I don't think it's in Edith either,' I said.

'Edith married an idea of a life that she had gleaned from novels and magazines. She thought it meant travel and fashion shows and meeting Mick Jagger. She saw herself throwing parties for Princess Michael in Mauritius…' She shrugged. I was quite impressed that she'd heard of Mick Jagger. 'I don't know if some people live like that. Maybe. What I do know is that will never be Charles's life. His whole existence is the farming calendar. For the next fifty years he will shoot and farm and farm and shoot and go abroad for three weeks in July. He will worry about the tenants and have fights with the vicar and try to get the government to contribute to rewiring the east wing. And his friends, with very few exceptions, will be other people reroofing their houses and farming and shooting and trying to get government grants and exemptions. That is his future.'

'And you're sure it could never be Edith's?'

'Aren't you?'

I could remember Edith sobbing with boredom on the shoot at Broughton and sulking through evening after evening of Tigger's stories and Googie's charm. But of course, what Lady Uckfield did not know and I suspected, was how bored and depressed Edith was with her new life. I thought of her at Fiona Grey's party being led around like a prize heifer. Lady Uckfield interpreted my silence as agreement and her manner warmed. 'It's not entirely her fault. Even I can see that. That terrible mother has stuffed her head with a lot of Barbara Cartland nonsense. What chance had she?'

'Poor old Mrs Lavery,' I said. Lady Uckfield shuddered with a tiny grimace. This was the woman Mrs Lavery had planned to share scrumptious lunches with and trips to the milliner.

'I'm not a snob,' started Lady Uckfield but this was really too much and I could not prevent at least one eyebrow rising.

She attempted to rebuke me. 'I'm not! I know people can marry up and bring it off. I have lots of different sorts of friends. I do!' She was quite indignant. I suppose she believed she was telling the truth.

'Who?' I said.

She thought for a moment. 'Susan Curragh and Anne Melton. I like them both very much. I defy you to say that I don't.'

She had named an immensely rich American heiress who was now the wife of a rather dull junior minister and the daughter of a clothing millionaire who had married an impoverished Irish earl thereby putting him on the social map. I knew neither woman but I trembled for Edith if Lady Uckfield thought them good examples of 'marrying up'. 'You don't believe me, I know, but I was brought up not to think in terms of "class".'

What interested me in this was that Lady Uckfield could have made that statement quite safely on a lie detector while the truth was, of course, that she had been brought up to think in terms of nothing else and she had largely (if not entirely) been true to her teaching. She continued. 'The important thing is not Edith's class, whatever that means, but that she simply doesn't enjoy the job. She and her frightful mother are "London Ladies". They want to lunch in Italian restaurants and go to charity balls and fly to the sun for the winter. Running a house like Broughton, or Feltham for that matter, is just slog once the gilt's worn off. It's paperwork and committees. It's arguing with English Heritage inspectors who all hate you for living there and want to make everything as difficult for you as they possibly can. It's pleading with government departments and economising on the heating. Those houses are fun to stay in. Even "London Ladies" like that. But they're hard, hard work to own. She could never take either pleasure or satisfaction in that life. I don't even blame her but she couldn't. And to be quite frank,' she paused, almost hesitating in case she was giving away too much ammunition, 'I'm not sure how much she likes Charles.'

I thought of that far away engagement dinner with Caroline Chase on my left. It's frightfully dreary down here… flower shows all summer, freezing pipes all winter. I could hear the echo of her cold, hard voice. I suppose Edith's ready for all that? And how triumphant Edith had seemed. How she had swept the pool and gained the prize.

'If what you say is true then where's the danger of letting them meet?'

'Because I suspect that eight months with an out-of-work actor in Ebury Street has reminded her of why she found Charles attractive, or should I say an attractive proposition, in the first place. I think she may want him back.'

'And you're against that?' I felt a bit sorry for Simon to be described as an 'out-of-work actor' when he, poor soul, thought he was dazzling in his success. Still, it didn't seem the moment to cavil.

She spoke with statesmanlike clarity. 'I am against it with every fibre of my being.' I suppose in some part of me I was surprised at her honesty. I was used to the token revulsion for divorce that is one of the obligatory attitudes in Society.

Although in truth they care little whether people are divorced or not, simply whom they are married to at the time. Even so, she was of the old school and I was fairly sure there was no such thing as a divorce in either her, or Tigger's, genealogy. She nodded. 'You're surprised I'd prefer the scandal to run its course. I admit it. I would rather have what little of this story is left than patch things up and risk a bigger smash in five years when Edith has either rediscovered how bored she is, or found someone as rich as Charles who bores her less. There may be children involved by that time and I prefer to see my grandchildren brought up at Broughton by both parents.'

'I do see,' I said. It was fruitless to deny that there was a good deal of logic in her reasoning.

'So can you help me?' She tucked busily into another sandwich and filled both our cups. She had been honest with me and I could not be less than honest with her.

'No, Lady Uckfield, I cannot help you.' She stopped pouring in her surprise. I suppose she felt that she had extended such an enormous privilege to me by revealing so much of her hand that I could not fail to be firmly attached to her interest. Seeing her disappointment, I clarified. 'It is not because I do not agree with you. As a matter of fact I do. It is because I do not believe any argument will turn Edith from her meeting. And I do not believe I have the smallest right to interfere.'

She nodded slightly, a sharp, jerky movement, which betrayed her terrible pain. 'I imagine you mean I have no right either.'

I shook my head. 'You're Charles's mother. You have the right to interfere. I am not sure you have any hope of success but you have the right to try.' I felt the interview had come to an end and I stood. As it was, I doubted that Lady Uckfield and I would be so easy in each other's company again. She'd abandoned too many of her customary defences to be able to forgive me quickly for witnessing her in this state. To make matters worse I could see that her eyes were beginning to moisten and before my horrified gaze a single tear, amazed to be released from a duct that must have held it prisoner for twenty years, started to make its tentative way down her carefully powdered cheek.

She stood and put her hand on my arm. 'Just don't help her.' Her voice was urgent, it is true, but not with that girlish, don't-tell-Father, pseudo-urgency that I had grown used to. This was a cry of desperation. 'Just don't encourage her. That's all I beg. For her sake as much as for his. They'll both be wretched.'

I nodded and gave what assurances I felt I could, thanked her for my tea and watched her pull herself together before my eyes so that, by the time I turned at the arch taking me towards the Arlington Street entrance, she could wave at me as composed as if she were in the Royal Box at Ascot. All I knew was that I could not have been less clear as to quite what I was going to say to Edith.

'You're right, of course. She doesn't want you to meet.'

'I told you.'

'Even so, I don't really see how she can prevent it'

'She'll send him away again. To America. For horse sales or something. She'll fix it up with her friends. They're everywhere.'

'Sounds like Watergate.'

She gave a harsh little laugh. 'You think you're joking.'

'At any rate,' I said, 'he can't stay in America for ever. You'll just have to keep trying. I don't think he'll avoid you when you do run him to earth. Really I don't. You must just bide your time.'

'I haven't got time,' said Edith.

Something in the tone of her voice prevented my asking for clarification and, indeed, I confess that I deliberately put the remark out of my mind. I did not want to address it, I suppose, and I certainly did not want to share it with Adela, sensing perhaps that it could mean everything or nothing. If everything, why risk the release of that knowledge into the ether? If nothing, why not forget it?

We were silent a moment with Edith perhaps aware that she had said more than she'd intended. She may have been pondering how to contain the remark without referring to it again.

'What do you plan to do then?' I asked.

'I don't know,' she said.

TWENTY-ONE

She didn't know. It seemed crazy but she literally did not know how she could contact her own husband. It may surprise some people but for a time, Edith had assumed that either Sotheby's or Christie's would rescue her from this dilemma. The public is not aware of it but over the last decade the summer parties of those two great auction houses have become in many ways the high points of the London social calendar, a chance for the genuine gratin, as opposed to the ubiquitous Cafe Society, to meet and mingle before they disperse for the summer. Edith knew that Charles would attend both, as would Googie. Even Tigger was prepared to struggle up from the country in order to renew his acquaintance with most of his class.

It was an annual, pleasurable duty cheerfully undertaken by a large proportion of the high aristocracy much as the opening day of the Summer Exhibition used to be. There Charles would be found and there Edith would buttonhole him. The only trouble was that the days went by and every morning the envelopes flopped down onto the mat but the requisite, white, pasteboard cards with their embossed, italic script were not among them. Whether to spare Charles from embarrassment or perhaps to shield Lady Uckfield from discomfort (nobody can have thought that Lord Uckfield would even notice Edith's presence), for whatever reason, the Countess Broughton's name had clearly been excised from the list. She was not invited to either gathering.

At last it became impossible for her not to accept that she had been passed over. It was time for an alternative plan. She sat hunched over her address book, leafing through the neatly pencilled names. This was a habit she had unconsciously adopted from her hated mother-in-law. It meant the entries could be more easily rubbed out when their owners moved or when their use was finished and done with. This morning she stared at page after page, trying to find one who would help. At last, faute de mieux, she dialled Tommy Wainwright's number. Arabella answered and Edith asked for Tommy, a request that was greeted with a cool silence at the other end before Arabella spoke.

'He's at the House, I'm afraid.'

'When will he be back?'

'The thing is, he's most frightfully busy at the moment. Can I help?'

No, thought Edith. You cannot and you would not. 'Not really,' she said lightly. 'I don't want to be a bother. Just say I telephoned.'

'Of course I will.' It was obvious from her flat tone of voice that Arabella intended to say nothing but, in the event, she felt discomfort at the thought of being discovered in a lie so she did pass on the message while predictably urging her husband to ignore it. Edith had already played out this scenario or something like it in her brain so it was quite a surprise that evening when she picked up the receiver to hear Tommy speaking.

'I want to see Charles and everyone's stopping me,' she said after the usual pleasantries.

'Why?'

'Because they're frightened of Googie, because they want to stay in with the family. I don't know why.'

There was a short silence. The request may not have been articulated but it had nevertheless been made. 'I don't want to land him in it.'

'Nor do I,' said Edith firmly. 'I just want to see him.'

Another silence. Then with something like a sigh, Tommy spoke. 'He's coming here for a drink on Wednesday at about seven. You could always drop in then.'

'I will never forget this.' Edith's voice was sonorous with significance and from it Tommy could easily gauge the treatment she had been receiving elsewhere from her erstwhile world.

'Don't get your hopes up too much,' he said. He was after all fully aware of the powers she was ranging herself against.

===OO=OOO=OO===

I was already in the Wainwright drawing room when Edith arrived. It wasn't a large party, roughly twenty or thirty souls who had nothing better to do. They had dutifully assembled in the cramped mews house near Queen Anne Street to start their evening with a few smoked salmon whirls from Marks & Spencer and some bottles of Majestic champagne. The gathering was already past its zenith and the guests had begun to peel away, heeding the call of dinner reservations and theatres and baby-sitters, when Edith came through the door. She was smiling with anticipation but I could see her face shrink with disappointment as she surveyed the room. I went up to her.

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

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

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

'But he is coming?'

'I suppose so. Tommy said he was.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked around. When she spoke her voice had a bleakness that almost brought tears to my eyes. 'I was all geared up.

It didn't occur to me that he wouldn't come. His mother must have got wind of it and put him off somehow.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'I might ask you the same question.'

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

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

'Then you're a bitch.'

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

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

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

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

===OO=OOO=OO===

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

'Are you all right?' he asked superfluously.

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

'Poor you. Better out than in.' He smiled, holding up the receiver, and mimed, 'It's your mother,' with a comic grimace.

Edith nodded and reached out her hand for the telephone. 'I'll make some coffee,' said Simon, and wandered off to the kitchen.

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

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

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

'Are you all right?'

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

'Only I thought you were looking rather green around the gills when I saw you.' Edith had accompanied her mother on a fruitless search for a hat the previous week. That was enough in itself to make most people fairly green but she said nothing.

'So you're not ill?'

'Certainly not.'

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

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

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

'No.'

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

'What step?'

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

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

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

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

'Whose lunch party?'

'Just some country cousins.'

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

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

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

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

'Just be nice about me.'

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

The truth was she had determined, in that morning moment of surveying her own floating sick, that she was not going to be put off for one day longer. She would drive that very morning to Broughton and beard the lion — or rather the lioness's cub

— in his den. As she sped out down the A22, she couldn't really understand what had taken her so long to come to this decision. This was her husband and she was going to what was, after all, her marital home. No one could argue with that.

An unpleasant surprise was waiting for her, as she had forgotten that on a Saturday in summer the house would of course be open to the public. Somehow that had slipped through her calculations and she was now in the faintly ludicrous position of having to choose between parking her car in the courtyard and going in through the family's entrance or entering by the public door and travelling up into the body of the house surrounded by tourists and housewives from Brighton. She made the bold decision to go in by the latter route. She thought there would be plenty of time to block her path if she rang the family's doorbell and she was gambling on Charles being in his own study, which was next to the library. It would be the work of a moment to slip through the cordon and open the door and she correctly guessed that none of the guides would stop her.

Indeed, she made a point of pausing to say hello to the pleasant woman in a stout, country suit who stood taking tickets.

'Hello, Mrs Curley, how are you? Can I creep in this way? Would you mind?' Edith had mastered this particular trick of her husband's people, that of asking as a favour something that cannot be refused. 'Oh, Mrs So-and-so, could you bear to wait up until we get home? Would that be a terrible bore for you?' Of course, the wretched woman being instructed in this way (as well as her employer) knows that this really means 'You are forbidden to go to bed until I have returned' but it is of course a more self-congratulatory way to deliver a command. It is all part of the aristocracy's consciously created image. They like to pride themselves on being 'marvellous with servants', which usually means making impossible demands in the friendliest voice imaginable.

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

===OO=OOO=OO===

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

He knew about Edith's appearance at Tommy Wainwright's. Indeed Tommy had told him the following day, perhaps not wanting to have someone else deliver the news. At first Charles had been extremely angry, not with Tommy but with his mother. On the evening in question she had suddenly made him take her to visit some ancient friend in hospital, a mission that was represented to him as crucial but was of course, as he could see now, the simplest ploy to keep him from the Wainwright party. But then, after he had calmed down a little, he wondered for the thousandth time what would have been achieved by their meeting. Whatever his friends might say about the strangeness of her actions, he did understand why Edith had left him.

He was dull. He knew this was true because, alas for him, he was just clever enough to be aware of it. He knew he was no company for her once the joy of her advancement had worn off. Half the time, if he was honest, he didn't really know what his wife was talking about. When she questioned the policy of the Opposition or tried to evaluate the benefits and harm of intervening in the Middle East… Charles knew there were differing points of view on these subjects but he didn't see why he was called upon to have them. So long as he kept voting Conservative and saying how frightful he thought New Labour, wasn't that enough? It was all and more than most of his pals in White's expected of him. Well, clearly it wasn't enough for Edith. Now even he had begun to suspect that she might conceivably want him back — or at least that she wanted to talk about it — but had anything changed? Wouldn't she tire of him again within a matter of months, if not weeks? Wouldn't it be better for her and for him if they knew when they were beaten? This in short was how he had begun to think of his marriage. A defeat certainly but a defeat that should now be faced up to and walked away from. Which was of course precisely what Lady Uckfield had intended. It is customary these days to suggest that all interference in the private lives of one's children invariably leads to disappointment but this is not true. Clever parents, who do not play their game too fast, can achieve their aims. And the Marchioness of Uckfield was cleverer than most.

He looked up as the door opened and the sedate figure of the Viscountess Bohun slid into the room. 'Charles?' she said with a despairing roll of her eyes. 'Thank God you're here.'

'Why? What is it?'

'I'm in the most frightful fix. Peter's gone for a walk and we haven't got the car with us. Anyway…' Charles waited patiently. 'The thing is…' Diana moistened her lip nervously. She was really quite a talented actress. 'I've made a sort of muddle of the dates and I've come without anything…'

Charles looked at her, puzzled. This made no sense at all, like a piece translated badly from a foreign tongue. 'I'm so sorry,' he said in answer to Diana's pseudo-blushes, 'I'm not sure I…'

Diana overcame her revulsion for this sort of tactic. Desperate times breed desperate measures and as her hostess had made clear, these were desperate times. 'I wasn't expecting it but… it's that time of the month and I've got to get to a chemist…'

'Oh, Lord.' Charles leaped to his feet in a frenzy of embarrassment. 'Of course. What can I do?'

Diana breathed more easily. She had reached her goal and wonderfully quickly. 'Could you bear to run me into Lewes, only everything in the country shuts at one and—'

'Certainly. Right away.'

'I've just got to tell your mother something.'

Lavery fetched the food and removed the plates and made elaborately courteous remarks all evening. She had that uniquely English talent of demonstrating, through her scrupulously polite manner, just how awful she thought the company. She could leave a roomful crushed and rejected and yet congratulate herself on behaving perfectly. It is of course of all forms of rudeness the most offensive as it leaves no room for rebuttal. Even at the height of hostility the Moral High Ground is never abandoned.

Edith watched the three familiar faces and tried to question herself as to what was really taking place. Was this the cementing of a new alliance that would shape her future life? Would these three people be her companions through twenty Christmases to come? Would Simon and her mother build their bridges and talk about the children and come to share private jokes? Handsome as Simon was and strong as her desire for him remained, she was struck this evening by the dreariness of them all.

She had lived the last two years in the front rank of English life and on reflection she was surprised to discover how normal it had become for her to do so — until, that is, she had removed herself from it. While she had been at Broughton she had been oppressed by the lack of event, by the emptiness of her daily round. Now that she had left it, however, hardly a day passed when at least one of her acquaintance from her life with Charles was not in the newspaper. And when she thought about it, having at the time complained ceaselessly that they never did anything, she remembered dinner after dinner where she had sat opposite some faintly famous face from the Cabinet or the opera or simply the gossip columns. Bored to sobs as she was by Googie and Tigger, she had become used to hearing political and Royal chat days or even weeks before it hit the headlines. She was accustomed to knowing the details of the private lives of the great before they became common knowledge — if indeed they ever did. She and Charles had not spent a great deal of time staying away but now her memory reminded her of three or four shooting parties during the winter and a couple of house parties in the summer. She knew Blenheim by this time and Houghton and Arundel and Scone. She had lost the sense of these places' historicity. They had become the homes of her circle. In this she was almost being honest — as honest certainly as those born to the class to which she had so briefly belonged. Edith had learned well all the tricks of aristocratic irreverence. She would stride like the best of them into a dazzling great hall by Vanbrugh, lined with full length van Dycks, and curse the M25 as she threw her handbag into a Hepplewhite chair. By this stage, she understood how to make that statement of solidarity. 'This wonderful room is ordinary to me,' their actions say, 'because it is my natural habitat. I belong here even if you do not.'

Now, it seemed to her, looking at Kenneth and Stella with their framed flower prints from Peter Jones, their pseudo-Regency furniture, their Jane Churchill print curtains, that her membership of that club where she could curl up in an armchair in the long library at Wilton and leaf through Vogue, hugging a vodka and tonic, had been revoked without reference to her. In a rare moment of clarity she understood that in choosing this actor, far from making a wild bohemian statement, she had in fact returned to her own country. That Simon was far more of a piece with Stella and her faraway baronet cousin or Kenneth and his business friends than Charles had ever been. This world, where, as a general rule, one laughed and cried alongside the obscure — this was her real world. The world in which she had grown up and where she would now again live. Charles and Broughton and the Name Exchange only touched her people tangentially. They were, whatever her mother might like to think, an entirely different tribe.

'Phew!' said Simon, as they pulled away from the curb and headed back towards the King's Road. Edith nodded. They had survived. That was the main thing. She had taken the first step in explaining to her mother that her dream-life was over.

Simon winked at her. 'We're alive,' he said. For a moment they rode on in silence. 'Do you want to go straight home?'

'As opposed to?'

'Well, we could go on somewhere.'

'Where?'

Simon made a slight pout. 'What about Annabel's?'

Edith was rather surprised. 'Are you a member?'

He shook his head, a little petulantly, she thought. 'No, of course I'm not. But you can get us in.'

Edith wasn't at all sure that she could get them in. Charles was the member, after all, and although they had been together fairly frequently and they certainly knew her at the club she wasn't clear as to where that left her. Nor was she convinced that it was a good idea. There were bound to be people there from Charles's set. 'I don't know,' she said.

'Come on. Charles is in Sussex and you can't run away from being seen all the time. We've got our life, too, I suppose.'

This time, unlike her excursions with Charles, they parked in the square and walked to the entrance steps. Simon had only been once before and was grinning like a madman as they descended. Edith was less certain of herself and the moment they had entered the corridor hall she knew she had been right. This was a Mistake. The club servant in charge greeted her affably enough. 'Lady Broughton,' he paused to take in Simon, 'are you meeting someone? Can I tell them you're here?'

Edith felt herself blushing. 'Well, we're not actually. I just wondered if we could come in for a moment.'

Again the answer was scrupulously polite. 'I didn't know you were a member, milady.'

'Well, I'm not. I mean, Charles — Lord Broughton — is and I just thought…' She tailed off in the face of the regretful smile on the face of the attendant.

'I'm very sorry, milady…'

If fate had been kind that would have been it but at that precise moment the door pushed open and with a sinking heart Edith heard the shrill tones of Jane Cumnor. Turning, she smiled straight into the huge, sweating face of Henry as he lumbered in, puffing with the effort of clambering down the basement steps. For a fraction of a second Jane was silent as she took in Edith and, of course, Simon. Then her smile returned.

'Edith! How lovely!' She kissed her coldly on both cheeks. 'Aren't you going to introduce us?'

'Simon Russell. Lord and Lady Cumnor.' She didn't really know why she hadn't used their Christian names. Could it be that she felt the need to impress Simon? After the evening they had just spent?

Jane gave her a slightly old-fashioned look. 'Are you coming in?'

For a moment Edith was going to say that they were in fact leaving when Simon spoke. 'They won't let us. Apparently you have to be a full member.' He didn't really understand the enormity of his betrayal of Edith in this. He simply wanted to get inside the club and so far as he could see, here were two people who could manage it for them.

But Henry was not to be caught. Sensing what was coming he nodded briskly. 'Edith,' he said, and strode on past her down the corridor towards the bar.

Jane smiled wanly. 'What a bore for you,' she murmured. 'I'm not a member either. I, um, I suppose I could go after Henry if you want…' She tailed away to demonstrate how very much she did not wish to carry out her own suggestion and Edith let her go.

'No, no,' she said. 'It couldn't matter less. We're late anyway. I don't know why we looked in.' She kissed Jane perfunctorily with Simon twinkling away by her side, still hoping to be taken in and still missing what was going on. And then they were alone again. The attendant, ever impeccably polite, was anxious to bring about a satisfactory conclusion. 'I am sorry, Lady Broughton…'

Edith nodded. 'We're just off,' she said.

They were outside the door and at the bottom of the steps when a voice hailed them from above. 'Edith?' They looked up and there was the lanky figure of Tommy Wainwright descending towards them. 'Fancy meeting you.' He smiled affably enough and shook Simon's hand. His wife, Arabella, a cooler customer entirely than her husband, was silent. 'Are you going already?' said Tommy. 'Yes,' said Edith. But before she could stop him Simon was having another shot at completing his evening in the way he had planned.

'Edith thought she could get us in but she can't,' he said, thereby giving Arabella Wainwright a funny story and a parable of Edith's fall all in one phrase.

Tommy smiled. 'Then you must let me.'

'Really, it doesn't matter,' protested Edith.

'Come on,' said Simon.

Arabella murmured gently, 'If she doesn't want to…' It was quite clear that she was no more anxious than Jane Cumnor to be seen escorting Edith Broughton and her new lover into Annabel's but Tommy was made of stouter stuff. A few minutes later he had equipped them all with drinks and they were seated at the foot of a giant Buddha in the little red smoking room to one side of the bar. Simon saw Arabella as a challenge and they had hardly sat down before he was inviting her to dance.

Perhaps because being seen dancing with an unknown was preferable to being spotted in Edith's company, she accepted and Tommy and Edith were left alone.

'How've you been?'

Edith shrugged. 'You know.'

'I do.' He smiled at her quite kindly. 'You mustn't let the newspaper nonsense get to you. I should know, in my job.

Today's scandal really is tomorrow's budgie paper. People forget more or less everything.'

Edith nodded. She knew well enough that while this is a general truth, it is seldom a personal one. She had been touched by scandal and inasmuch as she would ever feature in the papers again once it was all over, there would always be a small paragraph referring to her separation from Charles until the end of her life. 'Have you seen Charles?' she said.

Tommy nodded. 'I saw him in White's last week. We had a drink together.'

'How is he?'

'Not very chipper but I suppose he'll manage.' Edith felt a sudden pang of nostalgia for Tommy and White's and even Jane Cumnor, whom she had nodded to across the bar but had not attempted to join. Six months ago she would have sat with Tommy and ranged over the up-to-date stories of their mutual acquaintance and whatever she might say about all that now, it would have made her feel rather cosy. But on this evening there didn't seem to be any point. It wasn't her world any more and they both knew it. As for Charles. Poor old Charles. What had he done to deserve this? He'd just been dull company. That's all. Nothing worse than that. And then Simon returned and, much to Arabella's relief, led Edith away to the dance floor.

She was silent in the car although she smiled at Simon to allay his fears that she might be angry about something when she really wasn't. As she put the key into the lock of the Ebury Street front door Simon allowed the arm that had enclosed her waist to slip down to her buttocks, which he caressed gently as they walked through the little hall and stopped outside the door to the flat. Edith could feel a tingling sensation start to warm her at the base of her stomach. Simon leaned forward and kissed the back of her neck, his tongue licking her softly between his parted lips. They were hardly inside the door before she was kissing him in a strong, fierce way, and running her hands over his body and down to his crotch. She felt his large, hard penis pushing against her. 'Darling,' he said with the anticipatory smile of a man who understands and enjoys his work.

They made love three times that night at Edith's insistence. Simon had never known her throw herself into it with quite such abandon before. She mounted him and pushed herself down, forcing as much of him into her as she could. Because it was suddenly quite clear to her that this was the decision she had made. When she came home with Charles the evening was over as they shut the door. When she went out with Simon the evening was something that had to be endured until they could be alone together again. Fate had given her the choice between her private and her public life. Neither man, it seemed, could provide her with both. Well, she thought as she lay back watching the dawn and listening to Simon snoring gently beside her, she had chosen private fulfilment over public splendour and she was glad of her choice. Glad, that is, in the night, when she lay naked and satisfied and far from the world. It was in the morning that she had to make up her mind all over again.

PART THREE

Dolente-Energico

SEVENTEEN

I did not see Edith for some months after this. In the autumn I was given the part of a villain in one of those series that are optimistically described as 'family viewing' because no one can decide into which category they really fall. At any rate, it was shot on location in Hampshire and I was consequently a good deal out of London for some time. I took a cottage in Itchen Abbas and Adela joined me when she could. Some time in November we discovered she was pregnant and the thought that my life was about to take yet another quantum leap rather drove all other considerations from my mind. We purchased books by the dozen to learn more about our new condition and spent the evenings looking up why Adela kept tasting metal filings or feeling back pains. Actually this was pretty fruitless as the answer to more or less everything we asked was 'the cause of this is not yet known'. However, we were kept quite merrily occupied.

Of Edith, Simon and Charles we had little news. The papers had dropped them as there did not appear to be any signs of divorce and presumably they were all saving the second half of the story for when it came to court. Once I wrote to Charles because I had seen, in some obscure art magazine, that a Broughton portrait was up for sale and I thought he, or some relation, might be interested. Naturally I also imparted our news and I received, almost by return, quite a touching letter wishing us well. 'How right you are not to wait too long,' he wrote. 'Being married is all very well but it's having a child that makes a real family. I envy you that.' I do not necessarily agree with this view but I took it, correctly I think, as a comment on his own marital disappointments. He concluded by asking us to get in touch when we were back in circulation and I thought I would. I felt that by this time Charles and I had gone through enough together to qualify as friends even by English standards and the potential awkwardness of attempting to prosecute friendships with the Mighty no longer seemed to apply. I was interested that he had not mentioned Edith and indeed we had no news of her from any quarter. Gossip confirmed that she and Simon were still together and that, either because his notoriety had paid off or just conceivably because of his talent, he had landed a running part in some police series. I had made up my mind that I would also contact her when I returned to London, as I was determined not to be cast in the role of someone who drops their friends when their status diminishes, but in actual fact it was not I but my spouse who renewed our links.

We had not been back in London long when Adela received an invitation from a cousin to attend Hardy Amies's spring dress show. The relation in question, Louisa Shaw, was in the household of a junior member of the Royal Family and either for this reason or (more probably) because she was an occasional purchaser she had got onto the various lists to be invited to these glittering events, always with jolly good seats. She and Adela had been friends from childhood and consequently she allowed my wife to share her good fortune on a regular basis.

Unbeknownst to us as Adela and Louisa made their plans, it so happened that our old familiar, Annette Watson, was also a Hardy Amies customer. She had been, as I have said, something of a screen beauty of the Lesley-Ann Down vintage and she had always provided willing fodder to the photographers at bashes where there was a scarcity of celebrities but now she figured on the pages of the glossy magazines wearing couture, which naturally made her a welcome guest at these galas.

Annette, in fact, was doing quite well by this stage, largely because, against all predictions, the dreary Bob had gone from well-off to extremely rich during the heady nineties. I seem to recall that his success was somehow connected to the 'dot.com'

revolution although I cannot remember exactly what he did, if I ever knew. Anyway, whatever it was he obviously did it profitably. In the two or three years since the Watsons had been Eric's embarrassing guests in Mallorca they had consolidated their social position and, in London at any rate, they had gathered up quite a satisfactory address book. They had not penetrated Lady Uckfield's charmed circle on any level but they were on good terms with a couple of the more disreputable young marchionesses and the 'It' girls who were busy on the London scene at this time. Annette had even been pictured in Hello shopping with the Duchess of York. On the whole, she was satisfied.

A good part of that satisfaction was because she was now in a position to refuse the Chases' invitations, which had become more pressing of late. Caroline Chase, of course, cared little one way or the other, but Eric's shadowy dealings on the outer fringes of what he optimistically described as 'Business Skills and Public Relations' had been badly hit by the recession.

These skills, it seems, were among the first economies in the newly hard-pressed companies that had bloomed so fast and were now looking as if they would wither as quickly. Eric felt that a helping hand from Bob Watson might make all the difference. Indeed it might have, I suppose, but perhaps because of that terrible dinner at Fairburn, the hand was withheld.

The Chases, or Eric anyway, had ceased to be necessary to the social game-plan of the Watsons. Apart from anything else Eric was not expected to be around all that much longer. It was known that they were living on Caroline's money and questions were beginning to be asked among her circle as to how long this would go on. Particularly as there were no children to confuse the issue. To Caroline's set, there did not seem to be much logic in being married to someone who was common and poor. Although I reject these people's values in many areas, when dealing with someone as abrasive as Chase I must confess to understanding them. It is pleasant to record that one friend who had not dropped Edith and automatically taken Charles's side in order to keep in with the Broughtons was this same Annette Watson. For Edith had paid a severe penalty for her chosen path. Actually I didn't much blame most of their crowd. They had been Charles's friends to begin with and Edith certainly had behaved badly. But this was not the real reason that they flocked to the Broughton banner. To a man they would have remained on Charles's team if he'd beaten Edith while keeping a string of chorus girls in the attic. However, I suppose one must concede that in this particular instance it was hard to argue with them. At any rate, Annette, partly because she knew she held few charms for Charles or his mother and partly because she really did like Edith, had stuck by her pal and one of the invitations she'd proffered was to accompany her to the Hardy Amies afternoon show and have some lunch beforehand.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Edith had never been to the first-floor restaurant of the Meridien in Piccadilly, which had recently been subjected to an exhaustive 'renovation'. The dining room was formed out of the old terrace, which had been glazed and palmed and marble-floored and generally made into a home from home for all those natives of Los Angeles who were now, hopefully, going to flock through the newly re-opened doors. Edith picked her way among the tables, following Annette's waving hand. She was smartly dressed in a snappy winter suit, complete with pearls and a brooch. She had surprised herself by being tempted to wear a hat. She didn't, but the costume, as it stood, was perhaps an expression of a part of her life that had been suppressed for a time beneath the T-shirts and sequins, apparently the only two options of Simon's crowd. Even he had commented on her outfit as he lay on a sofa happily reading the next day's scenes: 'Heavens, very smart! You look like your mother-in-law!'

But she hadn't risen. Maybe, subconsciously, she'd felt complimented.

Annette kissed her and ordered glasses of champagne for them both. It was not long before they had moved from the customary greetings to the real business. 'So, when do you make your next move?'

'Move?' said Edith.

'Well. The divorce. Are you getting on with it?'

Edith shifted slightly uncomfortably. 'Not really. Not yet.'

'Why not?'

She shrugged. 'I suppose I — we — rather feel that we might as well wait out the two years and do it with a minimum of fuss. Otherwise it means such a palaver…'

'Two years!' Annette laughed. 'Oh, I don't think Charles is going to be happy waiting two years.'

'Why not?'

Annette stared at her. 'Darling, you must know the race is on.'

Edith was surprised to find that her stomach lurched. 'What do you mean?'

'My dear, as soon as the news was out he was absolutely pounced on. How could he not be? You haven't even had a child so there's nothing to hold them back.'

Edith felt herself growing irritated. How dare this woman know more about her husband than she did? 'I don't think he's seeing anyone particularly.'

'Then you think wrong.' Annette took a sip to punctuate her pause. 'You remember Clarissa Marlowe?'

Edith laughed and breathed easily again. The Honourable Clarissa Marlowe, great-granddaughter of a courtier who had been raised to a lowly barony in the 1920s, was a second cousin of Charles's through their mothers. She was a hearty, healthy brunette, good in the saddle and helpful at sticky dinner parties. She worked as an up-market receptionist in a dubious property company, thereby lending it some respectability, and she lived in a flat with her sister just off the Old Brompton Road. A classic member of the Alice Band Brigade and, Edith thought comfortably, not at all Charles's type.

'Don't be silly. She's his cousin. She's just chumming him.'

Annette raised her eyebrows. 'Well, she chummed him to the West Indies for a week just before Christmas and she spent the New Year at Broughton.'

There was no denying that this was a blow. In fact Edith was astonished at its severity. What had she thought? That Charles would stay single for ever? She had been gone for eight months now and he was only human. As she conjured up the image of Clarissa, Edith felt herself washed with a tide of rage towards this blameless, county girl. In truth she had always rather liked Clarissa, who put herself out to be useful and laughed at Edith's funny stories and had never been one of those relations who persisted in treating her as a tiresome foreigner. When she thought about it she supposed that his cousin had always had rather a soft spot for Charles. With a sinking heart she recognised Clarissa for what she was, the sort of girl men like Charles marry.

'Oh,' she said.

The waiter had arrived to hand them enormous, leather-bound menus in ungrammatical French. He retreated with a murmur of guttural Rs.

'Cheer up, darling,' said Annette with a piercing look. 'Tell me about Simon. Is he well?'

'Oh yes,' said Edith, bracing herself again. 'Very. He's got a series that goes on until June and then, with any luck, starts again in December.'

'How marvellous! What is it?'

'Oh, you know,' said Edith, trying to decide between liver and seared tuna. 'Some detective police thing. He's the nice side-kick who keeps missing the point.' She finally fixed on kidneys with a salad.

'Well done him,' said Annette. 'Who else is in it? Do you go on the set and everything?'

Edith appreciated Annette's efforts at enthusiasm. It was kind of her. 'Not really, no. Sometimes. So I can put a face to the stories. It puts him off a bit.'

The truth was that, try as she might, she had found that she just could not get really involved in Simon's work. There were parts of it she quite liked, first nights and a few (very few) of the parties and meeting people one knew from television. She was quite interested in reading scripts and then comparing them to the finished product but most of it, well… At the beginning she had gone down to the location a few times but, honestly, it was so monotonous. They just seemed to say the same three lines to each other from a thousand angles until she ended up in the make-up room, gossiping to the girls. If she was really honest she couldn't understand why Simon made such a song and dance about it all. Most of it seemed to be pretty straightforward. You learned the lines, they trained the camera onto you and you said the lines. She was quite able to see that some people could do it and some couldn't, but fretting about it didn't seem to help. She never noticed that Simon was much better in the parts he had sweated over than in the ones that he did off the top of his head. One thing she had grasped since our lunch together in those early days — there wasn't really a place for her down on the set. After her initial forays she would roll up once or twice, or stay on location for a weekend, so that she could say hello to the other members of the cast and crew and leave it at that. It seemed to be the best way to play it.

'Give him my love,' said Annette. They locked eyes for a moment and to Edith's relief the waiter reappeared at this precise moment to take their orders. That done, they shifted their ground back to more general topics.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Louisa rang our basement bell promptly at a quarter to one. They had decided to lunch at home as they were going on to Fortnum's for tea after the show. Adela, at five months, had only recently stopped feeling sick and was sorely in need of a Treat. I was to give them a lift to Savile Row on my way to a wig fitting in Old Burlington Street. I liked Adela's cousin. The daughter of an Anglo-Irish landowner, she had that slightly fey, unjudgemental quality of her tribe, so unlike their English counterparts, that made her easy company for anyone, despite her tweeds and sensible shoes. She was also a natural spinster for whom, I suspected, a lifetime of Royal service was going to have to do the work of husband and children. Of course, she was thrilled by the idea of the impending baby and I could see before Adela asked me that she was classic godmother material.

The traffic was not heavy and accordingly it was no later than a quarter to three when the two of them climbed the staircase of Hardy Amies's headquarters and entered the large, first-floor salon overlooking Savile Row itself, where the collection was to be displayed.

There is no real benefit in getting to these things early as all the seats are clearly and unarguably allocated but they had enough to gossip about to pass the time and so, once they had been ushered to two seats labelled, in a flowing hand; 'Lady Louisa Shaw & Friend', they were soon so engrossed in their own soap-opera that they were oblivious to the rest of the fast-filling room. They were seated well, at the foot of the catwalk on the short side of the room near the door from the staircase and therefore had a full view not only of the length of the catwalk but also of most of the rest of the seating. So Adela was quite surprised, on looking up as the lights were turned on to signify that the show was about to begin, to see Edith Broughton tucked into the far corner, in the back row, opposite the door where the models make their entrance. It seemed odd that Edith had not said hello, since she must have brushed past them to get to her seat and even now, while looking at Adela, she made no real sign of recognition. I am afraid that one could have read in this the treatment that Edith had had to endure over the previous months but at any rate Adela, for whom even the vestige of any kind of feud is anathema, immediately smiled and waved, and Edith, relieved perhaps, waved back.

The conversation was beginning to die away in anticipation when there was a slight confusion at the door. Adela turned in time to see one of the princesses enter the room, followed by Lady Uckfield. Smiling their apologies, they made their way to two seats reserved for them near the foot of the catwalk beyond my wife and Louisa, in the front row. They were in their places before Adela looked back to where Edith sat, her eyes fixed on her mother-in-law. The contrast between the state of the two women was not lost on Adela and it must have seemed vividly clear to Edith. She sat in the back row, with her over-made-up friend, about to look at clothes she could not seriously entertain a thought of buying. Two rows before her sat the woman she might herself have been, with a member of the Royal Family, envied by more or less every other woman present.

The music started, a selection of Copacabana rock, which seemed a surprising choice given the age of the majority of the clients. Adela glanced down at her programme for the description of the first presentation. Three models appeared, the numbers of their dresses displayed on plastic discs in their elegant hands, and the show had begun.

It was a lively hour with the audience chatting relentlessly as each ensemble was paraded before them. 'Lovely for Spain',

'What an odd colour, I wonder if they do it in cream', 'Pretty dress, wrong model', and other similar phrases would ring out, quite audibly, as the girls sailed imperviously by. From time to time a little fun was added by a model dropping her number disc (I gather these have since been abandoned, perhaps for this reason) or one might stumble in a graceful spin but these were rare breaks in the super-smooth operation. Still, Adela was distracted. Every time she glanced over to where Edith sat, she could see that her gaze was not on the catwalk but on the back of her mother-in-law's head, still blithely unaware of Edith's presence, as she scribbled on her programme and exchanged whispers with her august companion.

The collection was presented and the company, notes jotted and images fixed, rose to go. A way was made for the Royal Highness to pass, with Lady Uckfield following on. With proper diffidence Adela did not draw attention to herself but it so happened that the princess recognised Louisa at the same moment that Lady Uckfield saw my wife. Accordingly she was presented, made her curtsey, and for a few moments the crowd fell deferentially back to leave them in a foursome. They were chatting quite amiably about which frocks they had preferred when Adela caught sight of Edith edging towards them through the thinning crush. These situations are hard. Though I say it myself, Adela is not one to shirk a difficult task, but what was the point of spoiling Lady Uckfield's afternoon or placing her in an invidious position as regards her companion? Her daughter-in-law was a figure of scandal and this was a public place stuffed with journalists. Judas-like, Adela opted for Damage Containment, and catching Lady Uckfield's eye nodded slightly in the direction of Edith's advancing figure. Lady Uckfield, demonstrating the skill that ran the Empire, became aware of her daughter-in-law's presence without so much as a flicker of recognition. Even Adela would have been hard put to it to deny that her immediate departure was simply fortuitous, had it not been for the conspiratorial squeeze of her arm by the older woman. In a moment princess and attendant were gone, leaving Adela to introduce Edith as she drew alongside a slightly bemused Louisa.

They talked for a while with Edith asking about me and Adela rather pointedly not asking about Simon and then they parted. Though not before Edith had observed brightly, 'My dear mother-in-law looks well.'

'Very well, I gather,' said Adela.

Edith laughed. 'How funny to think one has turned into an awkward relation! Oh well. She can't avoid me entirely. She might as well get used to the idea that I do still live in London, whether she likes it or not.'

'I don't think she was avoiding you. She just didn't see you,' said Adela, adding lamely, 'I never thought to say anything…'

'No,' said Edith. 'Why would you?'

And so they parted, Adela and Louisa to Fortnum's and then back to the flat to tell me every detail, Edith to Ebury Street and Simon, who was in a rage because one of his speeches had been cut from tomorrow's scene. He suspected his co-star, whom he was already beginning actively to dislike, and his brain was so full of this particular injustice that he had very little time for Edith's narrative. I doubt she told him much anyway. Only that she'd seen Googie but Googie hadn't seen her. In truth, beyond lesser horrors like the evening at Annabel's, this had been the starkest illustration so far of the extent of her fall and she could not yet talk about it without beginning to feel slightly ill.

I knew enough from Adela's account to understand that Edith must be going through a pretty rough time however happy she was with Simon and I resolved to telephone her and buy her a decent lunch. But before I got around to it, I was surprised to receive an invitation from Isabel Easton to go down to Sussex for the weekend. The envelope was in fact addressed to Adela.

Isabel had apparently learned her lessons well and grasped that the upper classes only ever address an envelope to the female part of a couple. Why? Who knows? At any rate it was Adela who read it first and she who suggested we accept. Adela was only mildly fond of Isabel and she didn't like David much so I suspected at once that she had an ulterior motive.

'We might give Charles a ring when we're there,' she said, so I didn't have to wait long to know what it was.

I don't think I had stayed with the Eastons since that time, three years before, when we had all been summoned to Broughton to witness Edith's triumph. I had seen them in London so the gap was not obvious and, looking back, I'm not sure why I had got out of the habit of going there. Perhaps the fact that Edith and I had become friends over their heads had made an awkwardness between us. I'm not sure. At any rate I was quite glad to find myself and my wife, a couple of Friday nights later, back in their familiar, GTC drawing room of frilled tables and chintz sofas and over-stuffed cushions. We had unpacked and bathed and been given a pre-dinner drink, but not much more than this before the real reason for our invitation became clear.

'Are you going to go over to Broughton while you're here?' said David.

I looked at Adela. 'I don't know. I don't know if they're there. We thought we might give them a ring.'

'Good,' said David. 'Good.' He paused. 'Give our love to Charles when you speak to him, anyway.'

And there it was. I should have guessed. After all, what a situation they were in! For years they had been driven nearly mad by their inability to get onto any sort of terms with the local family. Then, miracle of miracles, their friend marries the heir.

They start to inch their way into the County. They are just beginning to make a little headway with the Sir William Fartleys of this world when, bang, a scandal erupts. Suddenly Edith, their friend, the woman they first invited down to these parts (for one may be sure they had made no secret of the role they had played), runs off with an actor, disgraces the family, lets down poor, darling Charles. Exeunt David and Isabel Easton.

I think one would have to be very hard-hearted indeed not to feel some sympathy for them, poor things, even if their goal was a worthless one. It is easy to laugh at the pretensions of others — particularly when their ambitions are trivial — but most of us have a thorny path of it in some area of our lives, which is not worth the importance we give it. I suppose it is hard to live in a small society and to be obliged to accept that one is excluded from the first rank of that little group. This is what drives so many socially minded people back to the towns where the game is more fluid and up for grabs. On top of which the Eastons had come, at least in their own minds, so near the prize…

David continued. 'I'm afraid the simple truth is that our dear Edith has behaved most fearfully badly.'

We all, including Isabel, greeted this with a slight silence. Even Adela (who, I knew, most thoroughly agreed with this assessment) seemed reluctant to weigh in with David in Edith's absence. 'I don't know,' I said.

'Really!' David was quite indignant. 'I'm surprised to hear you defending her.'

'I'm not defending her exactly,' I said. 'I'm just saying that one doesn't "know". One never knows anything about other people's lives. Not really.'

This is a truism but it isn't completely true. One does know about other people's lives. And I, in fact, knew quite a lot about Edith's and Charles's lives but, even if I was guilty of a certain dishonesty, there was some truth in what I said. I am not convinced that one ever knows quite enough to come down with a full condemnation.

Isabel entered with her peace-making hat. 'I think all David means is that we felt so sorry for poor Charles. He didn't seem to deserve any of it. Not from where we were sitting anyway.'

We all agreed with this but it was nevertheless perfectly obvious that David hoped to be able to ditch Edith and by demonstrating his indignation to someone who would report it to the Broughton household, he believed he would earn points and end up back on their list. Or on their list, full stop, since he wrongly thought he had penetrated the citadel during Edith's reign. In this I think he was mistaken for two reasons. The first was that he was simply not Charles's cup of tea. The English upper classes are, as a rule, not amused by upper-middle-class facsimiles of themselves. This brand of arriviste has all the dreariness of the familiar with none of the cosiness of the intimate. On the whole, if they are to fraternise outside their set they choose artists or singers or people who will make them laugh. But the second reason was more personal to Charles. I had a feeling that he would not admire David for attempting to abandon Edith and her cause, however he, Charles, had been treated.

At any rate, following both David's urgings and Adela's original suggestion, I did indeed telephone Broughton that night.

Jago, the butler, answered and told me that Charles was in London but when I was about to sign off there was the sound of an extension being lifted and Lady Uckfield came on the line.

'How are you?' she said. 'I ran into your pretty wife the other day.' I said I knew. 'Is there any chance of seeing you down here in the future? I do hope so.' She spoke with the intimate urgency, with that voice of a Girl With A Secret, that I had come to associate with, and enjoy about, her social manner.

'In actual fact we are here. Staying with the Eastons. I just rang to see if Charles was down.'

'Well, he should be back tomorrow night. What are you doing for dinner? I don't suppose you can get away?' She made the heartless request without the glimmer of a qualm. Did she know that David would give his life's blood to be included among her intimates? Probably.

'Not really,' I said.

Her tone became even more conspiratorial. 'Can't you talk?'

'Not really,' I said again, glancing over to where David stood by the fireplace watching me like a sparrow hawk.

'What about tea? Surely you can manage that?'

'I should think so,' I answered, still rather non-committally.

'And bring your nice wife.' She rang off.

David was bitterly disappointed that the call had not resulted in the general invitation that had been his unspoken plan. He suggested rather grumpily ringing back and asking the Uckfields to dinner instead but Isabel, always more reasonable, prevented him. 'I expect they want to have a bit of a chat about Edith and everything. Who can blame them?' In conclusion, deciding perhaps that since he had asked us down to re-establish relations with the Great House there wasn't much point in preventing us from doing so, he agreed that we should go for tea but carry with us an invitation for a drink on the Sunday morning.

EIGHTEEN

There were about six or seven people staying the weekend, which was par for the course with the Broughtons. I recognised Lady Tenby, who nodded at me quite pleasantly and a cousin of the family whom I had met with Charles and Edith in London a couple of times. I did not then know that there was any special significance in Clarissa Marlowe's presence but we did both notice that she was very proprietary in her manner, worrying about whether we were comfortable or had a sandwich or whatever and I suppose in retrospect that marked her out from an ordinary guest. The others, men in corduroys and sweaters, girls in skirts and walking shoes, barely looked up from their respective tasks, reading, gossiping, stroking the dogs, making toast at the glowing fire, as we came in. The Uckfields, by contrast, could not have been more solicitous. They asked our news, chatted about the dress show, discussed some film they had seen me in, fetched crumpets, topped up tea-cups until it must have been as plain to the other occupants of the room as it was to us that we were about to figure in some Master Plan.

The normal manner one has come to expect from hosts and fellow guests alike in an English country house is a state of moderately amiable lack of interest. The guests loaf about, reading magazines, going for walks, having baths, writing letters, without making any great social demands on each other. Only when eating — and even then only really at dinner — are they expected to 'perform'. This lack of effort, this business of people barely raising their heads from their books to acknowledge one's entry into a room, may seem rude to the foreigner (indeed it is rude), but I must confess it brings with it a certain relaxation. They make no effort to be polite to you and you therefore are not required to make any effort to be polite to them.

In fact, when a great fuss is made of someone in a house party it is almost invariably because they have been recognised as an

'outsider' or at the very least someone with a terminal illness on whom extra energy must be expended. For everyone to jump to their feet and gush is therefore more or less an insult to the recipient.

Adela and I, however, did not read any kind of social 'set-down' in the lathering we were receiving. We simply understood that a favour was about to be asked. Consequently, when Lady Uckfield wondered if I would like to see her sitting room, which had just been decorated and which, apparently, we had discussed at some time in the past, I got to my feet at once. My wife was included in the invitation but something in Lady Uckfield's manner told her that what was wanted was me on my own and since we were both dying to know what was going on, she opted to stay with Lord Uckfield and have some more tea to precipitate the expected intimacy.

The sitting room in question was quite far from the rooms I knew and was situated in one of the wings, separated from the main block by a curving corridor from which the windows looked across the park. Once reached it was revealed as a charming and elegant nest, displaying Lady Uckfield's sure touch for gemüchtlich, fussy grandeur. It was quite a large room, with walls upholstered in rose damask and pretty chairs covered in delightful chintzes. Little japanned bureaux, painted bookcases and delicate inlaid tables stood about, all littered with the debris of the aristocratic rich, flowers, bits of Meissen, pretty lamps, miniatures, bowls of dried lavender, enamelled candlesticks, small paintings on carved stands, and, of course, on her main desk (a handsome, ormolu-mounted bureau plat, which sat sideways to the wall), a mass of papers and invitations and official requests. A day bed upholstered in buttoned moiré was placed at right angles to the little fire, which twinkled and crackled in the leaded and polished grate. Above the mantelshelf, where china figures and snuff-boxes jostled with chewed dog toys, a knitted rabbit and postcards from friends in Barbados and San Francisco, was a pastel by Greuze of an earlier Lady Broughton. It was, in other words, the definitive HQ of a Great Lady.

'How nicely you've done it,' I said.

But Lady Uckfield had forgotten on what excuse she had brought me here and just waved me to the armchair on the other side of the fire from the day bed as she sat down with a grave expression.

'Have you seen Edith lately?'

'Not lately, no. Not since Adela saw her at the dress show.'

'I see,' she said. She was silent for a moment. In truth I had never before seen her uncomfortable but that is certainly what she was at this moment.

'How's Charles?'

She answered with a shrug of the mouth. 'I want to ask you something. I know that Edith is still with what's-his-name.

Does she intend to marry him?'

I was rather taken aback. 'I don't know. He isn't divorced yet — I'm not even sure he's started the whole process.'

She nodded to herself. 'Charles has told me she's planning to wait the two years and go for a non-contested separation.'

She paused and I sort of nodded back. This was news to me but it didn't seem such a bad idea, if only because it would hardly be headlines by that time. 'The thing is, Tigger and I are not behind this plan…'

She hesitated, more awkward than I had ever seen her. 'We feel that the sooner Charles can draw a line under the whole thing and start his life afresh, the better for him. We hate the idea of everything dragging on and on and his never really feeling that anything's over.' She looked at me quizzically. 'You do see what we mean?'

'I suppose I do.'

'You may not know it but it has cut him up most dreadfully. He's not a great one for showing his feelings but he was in the most frightful state, I can tell you.'

I nodded. I had only to think of that scene in his study when he had cried in front of me to believe this implicitly. Charles was one of those men, much less rare than modern women's magazines would have us believe, who make their choice in marriage and then never question it. They do not ration the commitment they give their wives because it never occurs to them that they will have to regroup their emotions before death separates them — and even then they tend to assume that it will be the husband who will go first. I do not necessarily think that he would have been incapable of infidelity. On some farming convention in America, during some shooting party in Scotland, who knows what could happen? But I would say that he would have been incapable of instigating the end of his own marriage. Having chosen Edith, he had given her all the love of which he was capable and, as a natural sequitur, all the trust. Neither of these would have been very interesting in their quality but they would have been given in great quantity. Of that I am sure. No, I was not surprised to hear that he had been in 'a frightful state'.

Lady Uckfield had not finished. 'We are so desperately hoping he can rebuild his life and we really feel that he has a chance of that now.'

'Has he met someone else?'

She inclined her head to one side without answering and I knew he had. Or that they hoped he had. Minutes later I had worked out it was probably Clarissa.

'The point is if he was free he could plan in those terms. Now he can't. The past is pulling and pulling at him until I don't believe he can think straight.'

Now this was an intriguing choice of phrase. In what way was Charles not 'thinking straight'? She watched me, waiting for some acknowledgement.

'How can I help?' I said. I wanted to find out what Lady Uckfield had in store for me. I knew it would be something big because it is an absolute truth that for a woman of her type to discuss any aspect of the intimate life of her family with anyone other than a life-long, contemporary friend of similar rank (and that only rarely) was a kind of torture. Whether she liked me or not was irrelevant. This interview was agony for her.

'Can you talk to Edith? Can you ask her if she'll let Charles divorce her now? Of course, in the past that would have been an uncomfortable way round but do people think like that these days? I don't believe they do — and you must assure her that it would make no difference to the settlement. None at all.' She was gushing to cover her own embarrassment. And no wonder. This was a vulgar request if ever I heard one. Perhaps the only vulgar thing I ever knew to issue from her lips. My surprise must have shown on my face. 'You must think this a very tiresome commission.'

'I don't know that tiresome is the word I'd have chosen.' My tone was a little severe but Lady Uckfield was enough of a lady to know that she had transgressed her own code. She took the reprimand gracefully as one who deserved it.

'Of course, it's an awful thing to ask.'

'You do Edith an injustice,' I said. 'She wouldn't think about the money.' This was true. I do not think it ever occurred to Edith to take anything off Charles beyond a few thousand to give her a breathing space. It was enough that he had paid the rent in Ebury Street and left her able to cash cheques in this interim. What Lady Uckfield did not understand was that Edith was fully conscious of having behaved badly. People like the Uckfields can be slow, indeed unable, to realise that 'honour' is not a perquisite of their own class. They have heard so often about the materialism of the middle classes and the grace and self-sacrifice of their own kind that they have come to believe these two fictions equally.

She raised her eyebrows slightly. 'I suppose that might be true.'

'It is true,' I said. 'You do not like Edith and because you don't like her you underestimate her.'

At this she unbent slightly. She did not deny what I had said and when she answered me she spoke with a slight smile.

'You are right to defend her. You first came to this house as her friend — and you are right to defend her.'

'I will tell Edith what you've said but I really cannot do much more than that.'

'You see, we can't have Charles bringing a case and her contesting it or challenging it in any way. We must know that won't happen. You see that?'

'Of course I do.' Which I did. 'But I can't advise her. She wouldn't listen to me if I tried.'

'You'll tell me what she says?'

I nodded. Our interview was over. We stood and had almost left the room when Lady Uckfield clearly felt impelled to convince me further of the urgency of her request.

'You see, Charles is so dreadfully unhappy. It can't go on, can it? It's so terrible for us. Seeing him like this.'

In answer I put my arm round her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. It was considerably more intimate an action than anything I had attempted before. Perhaps it was a sign that we were somehow bonded by this awful mess of tears and waste.

At any rate, she didn't object. Nor did she assume that faintly perceptible stiffness that her kind of English women use at such a moment to demonstrate that some unwarranted liberty has been taken.

We went back to the drawing room where Adela, in an effort to escape from Tigger's meticulously outlined plans for the South Wood, was attempting to teach one of the dogs to balance a biscuit on its nose. She looked up when we came in and, since she was burning to hear what had happened (as I was to tell it), we made our excuses fairly soon after that. We still had the awful burden of David's invitation to impart but, since it was the price by which we had bought our tea, we knew it had to be done. Lady Uckfield followed us down to the Under Hall so it was easier than it might have been.

'David and Isabel,' I started. She looked quizzical so I clarified, 'Easton. Our hosts.' She nodded. This interchange alone would have been enough to have depressed David for months. 'They wondered if you'd like to bring your party over for a drink tomorrow morning?' It was done.

Lady Uckfield smiled briskly. 'But how very kind. I'm afraid we're too many for that. But do thank them.' Her customary urgent intimacy was back as she rejected an invitation I knew well enough would never be accepted. But she surprised me by continuing. 'Why don't you come back here instead — and bring them?'

This was kindness above and beyond the call of duty. Feeling guilty at the thought of David's delight had he but known, I shook my head. 'I think that's rather a bore for you, isn't it? Let's leave it for another time.'

But Lady Uckfield, to my further bewilderment, was insistent. 'No, please. Do come.' She smiled. 'Charles will be back. I know he'd love to see you.'

At the time, I didn't understand what she hoped to achieve by bringing us together with Charles. It seemed if anything a risk to her plans, for if I had confided her mission to her son, I am certain he would have been furious. But later I realised that she wanted me to see Charles in his misery for this would be her justification and might motivate me more than ever to carry out her wishes. It is possible too that she believed that by allowing us to bring our friends to Broughton we would be even more tightly strapped to the family carriage. 'Don't feel you have to,' said Adela, but we could protest no more and so, bidding her goodbye until the morrow, we set off to deliver our happy message to a delighted David and a less enthralled but pleasantly surprised Isabel.

Charles was waiting for us in the drawing room when we reappeared the next day or so it seemed. He bounded out of his chair, kissed Adela on both cheeks and almost wrung my hand. He wasn't able to say much more than how pleased he was to see us, as his mother approached to normalise the situation and lead us over to the drinks cupboard, cunningly inserted behind a dummy door that had originally been constructed to balance the door that led, through an ante-room, to the dining room. Tigger stood there in his role as Mine Host, dispensing Bloody Marys. He presented one to his wife. She wrinkled her nose fractionally. 'Not enough Tabasco, the wrong vodka — and you've forgotten the lime juice.' I was waiting for a bowl of fresh limes to be rung for when to my surprise Lord Uckfield took down a plastic bottle of lime juice cordial and sloshed a great measure into the jug. I was about to request one without this ingredient then thought better of it and took what I was given. Naturally enough, it was delicious.

'How do you think he's looking?' said my hostess.

She knew well enough that Charles looked perfectly terrible. His face was tired and lumpy. His skin, which normally shone with the kind of uncomplicated health redolent of grouse moors and hunting fields, looked sallow and almost dirty. His hair hung in unsorted tendrils down his neck.

'Not great,' I said.

She nodded. 'You do see why I felt I had to ask your help?'

She drifted away without referring again to our curious interview of the previous day. To be honest and in her defence I could see why, as a mother, she had been driven to pretty desperate measures. Clearly her son was dying by inches before her eyes. What puzzled me was this hinted-at, burgeoning romance that promised new life and happiness. He really did not look like one who has found his True Love, even though Clarissa was in his eye-line. There were some other pre-lunch drinkers and she was again playing the hostess, leading people here and there and introducing them but, so far as I could tell, without exciting any special interest in her cousin's heart.

The house-guests were as surly as they had been the previous day and I saw a couple of them being grudgingly yoked to David and Isabel. One, Viscount Bohun, who had been out for a walk the day before, I had met occasionally in London. His youngest sister had been a vague friend of mine at one time and I had always suspected him then of being mentally sub-normal

— or at least as near sub-normal as one can be without actually risking clinical classification — so I had been quite surprised to read somewhere that he had married a pretty girl with a respectable job in publishing. Remembering this, I was curious to see the new Lady Bohun, she who had made this unholy contract. She was easy to spot. Her shining hair swept back flawlessly under a velvet band, her nose tilted in the air, she was being as grand and as difficult with a foundering David as it is possible to be without actually resorting to insults. The poor man struggled on, hopefully dropping names and references, all of which were courteously spurned, until I could almost see the sweat popping out on his brow. I can only hope that such petty victories were worth the terrible sacrifice of her life that she had made. Bohun himself had caught the wretched Adela and was telling her some interminable story, which he kept punctuating with a shrill and unprovoked laugh. I could see her checking the exits.

Charles approached and touched me on the elbow. 'So how are you? How was your filming?'

'OK. How about you?'

He gestured towards a window seat where, untroubled by the others, we might perch and be a little alone. He stared out over the gardens for a moment in silence. 'Oh, I'm fine.' He smiled rather wryly. 'Well, quite fine.'

He didn't look it but I nodded. 'I'm glad.'

'Mummy said you were over here yesterday.'

'We came for tea.'

'I expect they wanted to talk to you about, you know, the mess.'

'A bit.'

'What did they say?' I wasn't really prepared to betray Lady Uckfield to her son. Apart from anything else, although I thought her request had been intrusive and improper, I did not question the honesty of her motives. Her child looked like hell.

Of course she wanted to bring things to an end, what mother wouldn't? I couldn't blame her for that so I shrugged. Charles continued. 'They're very keen to hurry everything on. They want me to "put it all behind me'".

'And shouldn't you?'

He stared back out of the window. It was early May and the flowers that were springing into life all over the lovingly tended terraces should have looked fresh and gay but there had been a cloudburst that morning and instead they all seemed rather soggy and careworn. Beyond the ha-ha, the trees in the park were in leaf but still light, their first foliage so much more subtle in its colours than the thick lushness of high summer. 'They packed me off to Jamaica in November with Clarissa and some friends of hers.'

'Was it fun?' I found Clarissa who was busying herself with refills. Charles followed my glance.

'Poor old Clarissa. Yes. Quite fun. I like Jamaica. Well, Ocho Rios anyway. Have you ever been?' I shook my head. 'My dear old mother's trying to make a match for me. She doesn't want to take her chances on the open market a second time.' He laughed.

'I suppose she just wants you to be happy,' I said.

He looked at me. 'It isn't quite that. You see, she does want me to be happy but this time she wants me to be happy in a way she understands. She fears the unknown. Edith was the unknown. She thinks she's working for my happiness but more than that she is anxious to prevent a repetition. There are to be no more strangers at Broughton. Edith and Eric have been quite enough.'

'Well, I can see her point so far as Eric's concerned,' I said, and we both laughed.

I looked back at Clarissa who was beginning to cast slightly nervous looks in our direction as if she sensed that our conversation would bode her no good. I felt sorry for her. She was a nice girl and she would have made a success of all this

— far more of a success probably than the wretched Edith ever could. Why shouldn't she have a go at making Charles happy? But even as I entertained such thoughts, I knew the whole thing was a figment of Lady Uckfield's imagination and destined to remain so.

'Have you seen Edith lately?' he asked.

I was struck again by the common error, into which I have often fallen, certainly with Charles, of assuming that stupid people are spared deep feeling. Not that Charles was exactly stupid. He was simply incapable of original thought. But I knew now that he was more than capable of great love. It is endlessly fascinating to speculate on the reasons for love's choices. I liked Edith and I had since I met her. I enjoyed her beauty and her low-key self-mockery and her naturally cool manner, but I could not pretend to understand how she had become so great a love object for this Young Man Who Had Everything. Her greatest merit as company, after all, was her sense of irony, which Charles was not capable of appreciating or even understanding. In my way I was as puzzled as Lady Uckfield as to why he had not chosen someone of his own sort who would have known the ropes and the other members of his world, who would have chaired her charities and ridden her horses and bossed the village around without a qualm, certainly with none of the suppressed sense of self-ridicule that underlay so much of Edith's role-playing. At all events, there it was. Charles had fallen in love with Edith Lavery and he loved her with a disinterested heart. The blow she had dealt to his self-esteem and indeed to his life had obviously been critical but it was quite clear from the look he turned to me that he loved her still.

'Adela saw her the other day at something.'

'How was she?'

'Well, I think.' This was a thorny path, if you like. I did not want to say she had looked rather down in case it stirred up hopes in his breast that were doomed to disappointment, nor did I care to say she was bursting with happiness as that would be needlessly painful. It would also be, from what I could gather from Adela, untrue.

'Will you be seeing her soon?'

'I thought I might give her lunch.'

'Tell her — tell her I'll do whatever she wants. You know. I'll fit in.' I nodded. 'And give her my love,' he said.

Predictably David had not enjoyed his sojourn in Valhalla. As so often in such cases, the realisation of the dream brings resentment in its wake. Perhaps because, in their imaginings, David and his like see themselves as inner members of the Charmed Circle, chums of half the peerage, swapping stories about childhood friends and making plans to share a villa in Tuscany. Inevitably, the reality of these attempts at intermingling tends to make them bitter and irritated as they find themselves snubbed as aliens by those very people they have spent their adult life admiring and emulating.

'I must say,' he muttered as he climbed into the back seat of my car, 'I found those Bohuns pretty hard going. Do you know them?'

'I used to know him a bit.'

'Really? I don't know what I thought of him.'

I smiled. 'He's a half-wit. What's she like?'

'Quite difficult, I'd say.'

Isabel nodded. 'Diana Bohun has made a hard bargain and her only compensation is the envy of strangers. I wonder how long she'll bear it. No doubt in five years we'll read that she's run off with the local doctor.'

Adela shook her head. 'No, we won't. I knew her when she came out. She'd stay with Hitler if he brought her a title and a house.'

Isabel raised her eyebrows. 'I think I'd rather have Hitler.'

I was interested in this exchange because, even as they ridiculed the pitiful hypocrisy of Diana Bohun, I was well aware that Adela and David and even Isabel, whatever they might say, fundamentally approved of her pact with the devil. Perhaps none of them would have been prepared to marry someone who actually repulsed them, but nevertheless those girls in their acquaintance who had done so (and I could name at least seven in my own address book) were not despicable figures to them unless they reneged on their bargain. To the members of this world this was Edith's real crime. Not marrying Charles without loving him, but leaving him for love of someone else. To them, her folly was in abandoning the false values she had endorsed with her marriage and in attempting to return to the timeless virtues. Her decision was unworldly, it was not mondaine.

Americans may affect to admire this in their fiction if not in their lives but their British counterparts, at least among the upper-middle and upper classes do not. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.

And it was by these standards that Edith had been judged and found wanting.

NINETEEN

Here was a hard task. On the one hand I had a commission from Lady Uckfield, which I had sworn to carry out, to ask Edith to allow herself to be divorced at once, on the other, I had been made fully aware during our time at Broughton that Charles was still in love with his wife.

'So what are you going to say?' said Adela on the day when I had arranged to meet Edith for lunch. Naturally I had told my wife all. I don't know that I had been sworn to secrecy but even if I had been I never feel it includes one's spouse except in the most exceptional cases. Nothing can be more irritating than attempting to live intimately with a Keeper of Secrets.

'What Lady Uckfield wants me to say, I suppose.'

'Don't tell me you're going to promote the cause of that wretched Marlowe girl?'

I shook my head. 'No, I'll keep off that. I'll tell her they want it to be over, that's all.'

Adela pondered. 'Tell her Lady Uckfield wants it to be over. That'll be nearer the mark.' Considering her prejudice, I thought this was commendably just.

I had arranged to meet Edith at the Caprice. At lunchtime particularly it seems to combine a sense of clean, business-like lines with a whiff of glamour, which I thought would be an appropriate and undepressing setting for our proposed conversation. I arrived to find that I had been allotted the table at the far end of the restaurant away from the bar. This was by chance but it could not have been more suitable. I ordered a glass of champagne to cheer myself up and waited for my guest.

Edith was glad of my choice of venue. Simon was working a lot these days and earning quite respectable sums but what with his mortgage and his wife and the general financial backlog that any actor has to pay off when things start to roll again, he was not one for much West End entertaining unless it was at someone else's expense. Edith could have managed it as she had been given no real guidelines as to how much she could spend but she was reluctant to use Charles's money for inessentials.

She had been known to interpret this term fairly widely but somehow to take Simon out for treats on her husband's money didn't seem quite cricket. And then the bore was she had no money of her own — something that had come to seem quite strange to her, so far had she travelled from the world of her girlhood. At all events she was always glad to have an excuse to dress up and go out.

We kissed and chatted and ordered, knowing as we did so that there was a conversation of some substance to come, but by mutual consent we waited until our first courses, bang bang chicken for me and some hot hors d'oeuvres for Edith, were on the table. The waiter filled our glasses and retreated and we knew that we had a little while to ourselves.

'We saw David and Isabel last weekend,' I opened. 'We stayed with them in fact.'

'How are they?'

'All right. David's quite busy though I never really know what with.' I paused. 'We all went over to Broughton for a drink.'

Edith took a bite of something in thin batter. 'David must have enjoyed that.'

'He didn't much. He was stuck with Diana Bohun. He kept trying to impress her, which I don't think was very successful.'

'I should say not. She cut me dead the other day in Peter Jones.' She continued to eat and drink with some gusto but she would not give me the slightest help with my task. With an inward sigh I soldiered on.

'Lady Uckfield was there.'

'So I imagined. How is dear old "Googie"?' She was of course being ironic although not uncomfortably bitter. The tiresome nickname had once again gone into inverted commas as it had been in the first weeks of her marriage. And there was the recognition of a barrier there, a deep divide, which now separated the existences of her former mother-in-law and herself.

'Very well. I think. Of course, she wanted to talk about you.'

'There's no "of course" about it. As a matter of fact, I'm rather surprised. Googie is not one for discussing the family troubles. You should feel very flattered.'

'I think she felt that I might be of some use.'

Edith nodded. The penny was dropping and she began to understand that this talk might be leading to deeper waters than she had come prepared for. 'Ah,' she said.

'She told me you were planning to wait the two years.' Edith looked at me in a non-committal way. 'It's not what they want.

They want Charles to divorce you now. Straight away. She needs to know what you would think about that.'

I had said it and there was some relief. The words were out. Edith stopped eating and laid her fork down gently on the plate. Very deliberately she sipped her wine as if she were savouring each separate droplet. I suppose the point was it had come. The End of Her Marriage. I am not sure to what extent she had truly accepted that this was where her romance with Simon had brought her until this moment. Though I must say her voice was quite calm when she spoke. 'You mean they want Charles to divorce me for adultery. Citing Simon.'

I nodded. 'I suppose so. I don't think it really works like that these days but I would guess that's the general idea. We didn't actually talk details. If he were to divorce you now it would have to be for a reason, or has that finished? I'm not too sure.'

'I can't say it seems very gentlemanly.'

'It wasn't very ladylike going off with a married actor.'

She nodded and resumed her eating. 'So what do you want from me? What am I to say?'

'I think they feel they have to know that if the divorce does go ahead now you won't suddenly try to fight it. It won't interest you but it won't make any difference, you know, to the money.'

She looked at me rather sadly. 'I don't want any money. Not much anyway. Less than Charles would give me tomorrow if I asked him.'

'I know,' I said. 'I told Lady Uckfield that.'

'Anyway,' she added after a pause, 'it's not a generous offer. Nowadays there isn't a "guilty party". It never does make any difference financially. Didn't you realise that?' I shook my head. 'Well, I bet "Googie" does.' We continued eating in silence for a while. The waiter returned, took away our plates and came back with salmon fishcakes and a bowl of pommes allumettes. But the subject remained there on the table like a weeping centrepiece. It was Edith who introduced the character we were both thinking of. 'What does Charles say about all this? I assume he was there. Did you talk to him?'

'Yes, I talked to him.' While theoretically correct, my answer was a lie, for Charles had not been there when Lady Uckfield was sketching out her plans, which is what Edith had meant by her question. I very much doubted he would have allowed his mother to talk as she did had he been. I corrected myself, suddenly oppressed by my implied deception. 'Actually he wasn't there when I was talking to his mother but we went back the next day.'

'And?'

'He says he'll abide by your decision. Whatever you want to do.'

'That sounds more like him. Poor old Charles,' said Edith. 'How was he?'

I had dreaded this. If I could have said that he was looking fine and dandy I would have. I had come to feel, like Lady Uckfield, that it was time to call a halt to this unsuccessful experiment in miscegenation. The problem was he had not looked fine and dandy. 'OK,' I said. 'I don't think all of this has done him much good.'

'No.' She helped herself to some more chips. 'Was Clarissa down there?'

I nodded and Edith was silent. I was about to tell her to discount whatever she had heard, that it was a rumour inspired by Lady Uckfield's ambitions and nothing else, but I was silent. What was the point? She had to let Charles go and where was the good in slowing up her decision? For the rest of lunch we chatted about Simon and acting and Isabel and buying a flat, but as we were leaving Edith reopened the topic.

'Let me think about it.' She smiled slightly. 'Of course, we both know that I'll do what I'm asked but let me think about it.

I'll telephone you.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Edith Broughton did not go home — or rather she did not return to Ebury Street — at once. It was a crisp, sunny, spring day, when everything seems as clear as a cut-out, cold and bright as a jewel. She was warmly dressed and so, once past the Ritz, she turned left into the Green Park. She strolled down the path, past Wimborne House, past the restored, statue decorated splendour of Spencer House, past the Italianate magnificence of Bridgewater House until she stopped and looked up at Lancaster House, the golden pile, built and occupied for many years by the mighty Dukes of Sutherland. Their duchesses had dominated London Society, one after another, summoning the great and the good of the different eras to ascend the giant, gilded staircase in the grandest of all grand London halls to pay court to each other's wealth and power.

It struck Edith then that she would have enjoyed that older, simpler world when these houses had held sway over the capital. When the Guests and the Spencers and the Egertons and the Leveson-Gowers had lived their ordained lives under these teeming roofs instead of the charitable organisations and government departments and Greek shipping magnates who occupied them now. Forgetting for the moment that she, Edith Lavery, would have had the greatest difficulty in penetrating even the outermost fringe of this golden troupe in any period but our own, she saw herself in her crinoline, never questioning her own happiness and, consequently, being happy. And as she did so, she was struck by how similar her fantasies of the old, pre-Great War world were to those fantasies about her coming life as Lady Broughton, which she had entertained while lying in the bath just before her wedding. How simple things were to be, how the villagers and tenants were going to love her, how the family would bless the day she had come among them! She found herself smiling wistfully as the dream image of herself as the Great Social Force of Twenty-First Century Society receded before her inner gaze, swathed in mist, tearfully waving goodbye.

Pondering this, it seemed at first to her troubled brain that her mother had been wrong and the media had been right all along, that these dreams and ambitions were outmoded, that no one nowadays wants titles and rank and inherited power, that these are the days of the self-made man, of talent, of creativity. But then, looking about at the office workers and sweepers and job interviewees who loitered near her in the park, she was struck by the dishonesty of the media pundits of our time.

Was there one here who would not change places with Charles if they could? Was it not possible that the small screen gurus praised meritocracy because it was the only class system that would accord them the highest rank? Even if unearned riches and position had no moral merit, even if they embodied the Dream That Dare Not Speak Its Name, it was still a dream that figured in plenty of people's fantasies. And she had casually discarded it.

Then she thought again with puzzled wonderment of her own supposed unhappiness with Charles. Why exactly had she been so unhappy? When she tried to think back to their time together, she kept remembering those pretty rooms at Broughton and the servants and the park and her work in the village. The only discomforts she could recall were things like packing the car and standing behind Charles at a shoot in the rain. Were these so terrible? And if she thought of Charles, himself, it was with a rather intimate affection. She remembered him swearing at fellow motorists or farting in his sleep and it provoked in her a kind of nostalgic warmth. There was no trace of relief at his passing. If only there had been. Instead she found herself worrying about his loneliness. It pained her to think he was suffering. And increasingly she asked herself what exactly was this personal fulfilment for which so much disruption had been necessary? Was it sexual? Was she admitting that she had done all this because of Simon's cock? Or was it simply to do with boredom? But if it was, how much less bored was she now, sitting in Ebury Street talking to girlfriends on the telephone or meeting them for lunch than she had been working with her committees in the library at Broughton?

She turned away from Lancaster House and walked slowly towards the Victory Arch with Buckingham Palace on her left.

The Royal Standard announcing the monarch's presence in London hung limply against its staff. Tourists hovered at the railings, peering in with rapt attention, as if they hoped to catch a glimpse of some Royal Highness strolling down a corridor or coming out for a breather. And again, as she walked, Edith considered the mystery of unearned greatness. She thought how Tigger and Googie and Charles would all be invited to the next court ball, an event of unimaginable glamour to these Japanese travellers with their clicking cameras, to these northerners in their hideous anoraks, blobs of bright, synthetic colour against the cold grey, neo-Georgian facade. Any one of these would have made an invitation to the Palace into a life-long story, sodden with repetition and yet she had turned away from her role in this fairy tale in order to be — to be what precisely? Happy?

The fact was that of late Edith had come to wonder just how much she could be fulfilled by 'personal happiness', if that was what Simon was offering her. Perhaps because she had never succeeded in disentangling her ambitions of fulfilment from her mother's values, she had already begun to hanker for that sweet sense of self-importance that her life at Broughton had brought with it. She understood that these feelings did her no credit but her defence was a pragmatic one. How else was she to enjoy the good things in life if she did not marry them? And her faith in Simon's eventual triumph was waning. She knew more about show business now than she had when they met and she sensed that the series he was in, with a couple more to follow, was probably the best he could hope for. Whatever they might pretend together, they would not be holding hands tightly, stiff with anticipation, at the Oscar ceremony. What was her life to be then? A vicarage in the Home Counties and the occasional interview for an evening newspaper? Was she really expected to provide vocal and emotional support through twenty years of semi-failure to prove she was a real person? Some might say it is only personal achievement that should lead on to glory but what of those who have no talent or special gift with which to achieve? Are they so blameworthy to want to live among the blessed? Poor Edith was aware that she could neither weave nor spin but was she therefore forbidden to covet a life of splendour? Was this so shameful? She shook her head in irritation. At the far corner of her brain, these thoughts were beginning to tell her that despite the reckless choice she had made, her own assessment of the world and her place in it had not really changed in the least. She felt herself resenting anew the accusations she heard from her parents and friends when she first made her run for it, that she could not settle to her new life because beneath the skin of a rebel beat the heart of Mrs Lavery's little girl. And she resented them because she was beginning to be horribly afraid they might be true.

Walking towards Victory Arch, watching the afternoon light glint against the windows of Apsley House, whither she and Charles had been summoned for a party the previous summer, one of the first engagements she had been obliged to cancel because of the split, she recalled with amazement (and it really had begun to seem almost unbelievably strange) that she had jettisoned a high place in the world of the worldly for the position of partner to an obscure man in a generally despised profession. And not for the first time she sat down to think about the extraordinary events of the last year of her life in more detail.

Simon was at the flat when she got back. He was drinking tea and watching an old film. When he was working he was at peace and so inclined to relax and take it easy. It was only when he was out of a job that he would go haring about London keeping lunch dates with people he disliked and telephoning his agent every four hours.

Edith left her coat in the hall. 'Is there a cup for me?' He waved his mug in the air. 'I just made it with a bag. The water's still hot if you want some.' He had taken his trainers off and they lay, pigeon-toed on the hearth rug. His coat had been thrown across an armchair and books and scripts were littered about the room. Edith stood at the door, taking in the whole scene like a spectator from another country. The Way We Live Now. This was the way she lived now, with sixties sofas covered in stained, oatmeal tweed, with large nondescript flower prints in coloured mounts on the walls, with a Perspex coffee table and a gas-log fire. This was the way she was living now. She was acutely aware that she had no desire to enter the room.

Simon, sensing some strangeness between them, stood and approached her in the doorway. He slid an arm around her waist and squeezed her, pushing his mouth onto hers. They had been in an Indian restaurant the night before and she could still taste the spices on his breath. He pressed himself against her and she could feel that he was already aroused. 'Good lunch?' he said.

She nodded. 'Googie sent him. He and Adela were down in Sussex last weekend. They went over to Broughton and of course Googie dragged him off to her lair. The meeting was her idea.'

'And?'

'They want to hurry the divorce.' She paused, sensing his recoil. 'Googie wants to involve you.'

'Jesus!' Simon didn't know what to think. Part of him revelled in it. Visions of more picture spreads on page three in the Daily Mail flickered through his brain but with them came trailing streamers of a distant panic. He felt as if he was hurtling down some tube, weightless and powerless, into the unknown. 'Is she serious?'

'I think so but you can calm down. They're wrong. I'm fairly sure no one has to be cited any more. The point is they want to get on with it.'

'What did you say?'

Edith studied the pretty boy before her. He had abandoned his customary flirtatious, winking manner and, although he didn't realise, he looked the better for it. A little seriousness added charm to his bright blue eyes and the careless locks of shining hair that fell forward to veil them. 'I said I had to think about it.'

'Can you stop them?'

'If I want to.'

'How?'

'I'll tell Charles not to go ahead with it.'

Simon laughed. 'And that would do it?'

Edith observed him coolly. How provincial he was! How little he understood men like Charles! She was almost haughty in her defence of her discarded husband to her preferred lover. 'Yes. That would do it.' Simon had stopped laughing but suddenly there seemed to be something irredeemably irritating about him. She couldn't be bothered to embark on the usual chats about how bad everyone was in any film they were watching, how jealous his fellow actors were, how stupid the cameraman. 'I'm going to have a bath,' she said, disengaging herself from his embrace.

Simon threw himself back into the sofa, fixing his gaze once more upon the screen. 'You're very sulky,' he said. 'I shall be charitable and blame the time of the month.'