Snobs: A Novel

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

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

'Then why did you marry him?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Is he?' said Edith, thrilled.

'Yes.' Caroline lit a cigarette and for a moment Edith thought they were going into the central divider. 'I know Lady Uckfield thinks it'll blow over. She has a fantasy that he will forget you and marry the daughter of some peer who'll give him four children, two of whom will inherit estates from relations of their mother's.' Caroline laughed wryly. This was of course a wonderfully accurate résumé of Lady Uckfield's dreams.

'Are you quite sure she's wrong?'

'How little you know my brother,' said Caroline, and lapsed again into silence. Edith naturally longed to hear more of this wretched and unhappy man, whose life was a misery without her and to whom, by some strange miracle, she was already married. She gave Caroline a quizzical look and the latter relented. 'In the first place I do not think that my mother's idea of your perfect successor is Charles's. To put it bluntly, if that was what he was looking for he could have found it with very little difficulty. But that is no longer the point. Charles is a simple man. He is capable of feelings but they are uncomplicated, straightforward and deep. He can hardly communicate and he cannot flirt at all.' Edith thought with wonder of her other love, who could only communicate and flirt. Simon's problem was the opposite of Charles's. He could not feel. Caroline was still talking. 'Charles has made his choice. You. You are his wife. In his heart that's it. Finish. I am not saying that if you did divorce him he wouldn't eventually settle for someone else as brood-mare but in his heart he would have failed and his real wife would be out there walking around with someone else. And that, my dear, would be you.'

The rest of the drive was accomplished in silence. It was almost as if they were waiting for the next event in the plot before they could continue their discussion. And so they wound their way through the flat Norfolk landscape until at last they turned into a well-kept but somewhat overshadowed drive, which in its turn, when they had been released from the high walls of rhododendron, brought them to the wide, gravelled forecourt of the main house.

Feltham Place had passed into the Broughton family in 1811 when the then Lord Broughton had married Anne Wykham, only child of Sir Marmaduke Wykham, sixth baronet and the last of his line. The house was Jacobean, more a gentleman's than a nobleman's residence, picturesque rather than magnificent with roofs bristling with barley sugar chimneys and possibly for this reason it had never managed to catch at the family's imagination. Like many houses of its period it was in a dip (before the pumping innovations of the late seventeenth century allowed those splendid, landscaped views), although the flatness of the county gave a certain openness at the bottom of its valley. It might have functioned as the Broughtons' Dower House or as a seat for the heir, but there were other houses nearer Uckfield that had served these turns at least until the Second World War and recently, as we know, the heir had chosen to live with his parents.

In the past, Feltham had been let but it was taken back for the shooting in the 1890s and had been farmed in hand ever since, despite the family's allowing the sport to lapse after the war. Charles had revived the shoot over the last few years and he was proud of the fact that he could now safely let two and three-hundred-bird days, secure in the knowledge that there would be no great disappointments. He and his keeper had worked hard. The covers and hedgerows had been replanted, the feeding pens reorganised, indeed the whole appearance of the countryside had been more or less restored to the condition of a century before. But despite this, he was not tempted to bring his own shooting guests to Feltham. They were offered the splendours of Broughton while businessmen, people with mobile telephones and gleaming sports wear, took the shooting at Feltham by the day. At a (considerable) extra cost they could even stay overnight, which may have accounted for the somewhat boarding-house quality within.

The Wykham who'd built the place had been a favourite of King James I and in those days it had been much larger but the king's beau had been improvident and his heir (a nephew since, unsurprisingly, the builder had never married) demolished two-thirds of it. This meant that the brickwork and carving on the façade and throughout the house was of a much higher standard than one would normally associate with the scale of building. Inside, all the first-rate furniture and pictures had long since been swallowed up by Broughton and most of what remained dated from its rehabilitation as a shooting-lodge at the end of the last century. Lumpy, leather-covered Chesterfields provided the seating and the walls were covered with second-rate portraits and enormous, indifferently painted scenes of hunting, shooting and all the other methods of country killing. Still, the rooms themselves were pleasant and the staircase, more or less the sole survivor from the days of the Jacobean favourite, was magnificent.

Edith hardly knew the place. In Charles's mind it was the nearest thing to an 'office' in his weekly round. He ran it as a business and apart from an occasional appearance at a village show and an annual cocktail party for all those neighbours who might be tiresome about the shoot were they not courted every so often, he had no social profile in the county at all. Quite frequently he stayed with the Cumnors at their infinitely larger and more luxurious house four miles down the road, rather than put the ancient care-taking couple to the trouble of opening a bedroom.

Caroline drew up by the front door and the two women made their way into the wide and gloomy hall that took up two-thirds of the entrance front. It was decorated by a frieze of slightly bogus armorial tributes to the Wykhams and the Broughtons but otherwise boasted no colour at all apart from the brown of the panelling and the less attractive brown of the leather furniture. 'Charles!' Caroline called out. It was a chilly day and the interior of the house was noticeably colder than the air outside. Edith pulled her coat tightly around her. 'Charles!' shouted Caroline again, and she set off through a doorway that led first to the staircase and then into the former morning room that operated as Charles's office. Edith followed her. Desks and filing cabinets stood about the room, the chill slightly alleviated by a three-bar electric fire in the grate that looked as if its very existence breached the entire safety code. They were still standing there when another door, facing them, opened and there all at once stood a flummoxed Charles. To her amazement, even to her delight, Edith suddenly realised that she was shocked at his appearance. Gone was that sleek country gentleman who always looked as if he was on the way to make an advertisement for Burberry's. She was astonished to see that her fastidious husband was looking scruffy and unkempt. He was almost dirty. Caught out by her stare, he pushed his fingers through his hair. 'Hello,' he said, with a watery smile. 'Fancy seeing you here.'

At this point Caroline took her leave. 'I'm going in to Norwich,' she said. 'I'll be back in a couple of hours.' It was a relief really that she didn't even try to normalise the situation or start any we-were-just-driving-past nonsense.

Charles nodded. 'I see,' he said.

Left alone, Edith was oddly blank as to quite what she was going to say next. She sat on the edge of a chair near the fire like a housemaid at an interview and leaned forward to warm her hands. 'I hope you're not cross. I did so want to talk to you.

Properly. And I began to feel that I was never going to be allowed to. I'm afraid I thought I'd just chance it.'

He shook his head. 'I'm not a bit cross. Not at all.' He hesitated. 'I — I'm sorry about the telephone calls and all the rest of it. It wasn't my mother not telling me, you know. Well, it wasn't only that. I expect you thought it was. It was just that I didn't really know what to say. It seemed better to leave it all to the professionals. Of course now you're here…' He tailed off disconsolately.

Edith nodded. 'I had to know what you were thinking about everything. I understand your parents want you free straight away.'

'Oh that.' He looked sheepish. 'I don't mind. Honestly. Whatever suits you.' He stared at her in the unflattering light of an overhead bulb. 'How's Simon?'

'Fine. Very well. Loving his series.'

'Good. I'm glad.' He didn't sound it but he was trying to be courteous. Edith was struck anew by the decency and kindness of this man she had tossed aside. What had she been thinking of? Her own actions sometimes seemed to her so hard to understand. Like a foreign film. And yet these had been her choices. The conversation limped on.

'I don't think I ever came to Feltham at this time of year. I must have but I don't remember. It's rather lovely, isn't it?'

Charles smiled. 'Dear old Feltham,' he said.

'You ought to live here. Do it up. Get some of the stuff back.'

He half nodded. 'I think I'd be a bit lonely, stuck out here on my own. Don't you? Nice idea, though.'

'Oh, Charles.' In spite of the cynicism with which she had embarked on this mission Edith had become a victim of her own justifications. Like Deborah Kerr in The King and I, whistling her happy tune to make herself brave, Edith had succeeded in talking herself into believing that she was a romantic figure who had lost her love rather than a selfish girl who bitterly regretted her comforts. Her eyes began to moisten.

Oddly perhaps, it was only at this moment that Charles fully grasped she had definitely come to try to get him back. Up to this point he was still wondering if it might not just be for some financial or time-related scheme that she had made the journey.

Despite his earlier suspicions, his non-existent vanity made him slow to reach the obvious conclusion and he thought she might want him to agree to something before his lawyers could talk him out of it. He was not offended by this but, if it should prove to be the case, he was anxious to conceal his wretchedness from her. Both out of consideration for her feelings and from a (perfectly justifiable) sense of pride. It now occurred to him, with a lurch in his stomach, that this was not what he was dealing with. She wanted to come back to him. He looked at her.

For all his simplicity, he was not an idiot. Thinking along the same lines as that night in his study at Broughton he knew that he was no more interesting than when she left him. He also suspected that the world of show business had not really appealed to her, not at any rate for 'every day'. Just as a year of sin had served to give Edith a clearer idea of what Simon consisted of, so two years of marriage and a year apart had made Edith comprehensible to Charles. He knew she was an arriviste and the child of an arriviste. He saw her vulgarities of spirit now as sharply as he saw her fine points, of which, despite Lady Uckfield's comments, he still believed there were many. He also knew that if he made a move towards her the thing was settled.

He stared at the hunched-up figure, trying to scoop warmth out of the electric bars. Her coat was a sort of camel colour and looked rather cheap. Was this sad little figure, this 'blonde piece' as his mother would say, to be the next Marchioness of Uckfield? To be painted by some indifferent chocolate box portraitist and hung alongside the Sargeants, Laszlos and Birleys of the preceding generations? Was it in her to make a go of it?

But as he watched her, the sense of how vulnerable she suddenly seemed to him, with her bright make-up and her chain store coat, trying to charm him and looking instead somehow pathetic, overwhelmed him with pity and, in the wake of pity, with love. Whatever her suitability, whatever the limitations of her feelings, whatever her motives, he knew that he, Charles Broughton, could not be responsible for her unhappiness. He was, in short, incapable of hurting her.

'Are you happy?' he said slowly, knowing as he did so that the words gave her permission to return to him and to his life.

At the sound of them Edith knew her pardon had come through. Despite the difficulties with Simon, with her mother-inlaw, with the newspapers, with the sun, with the moon, she could now be Charles's wife again if she chose, which, not very surprisingly given all the circumstances, she did. For a second she felt almost sick with relief but then, since she did not wish to appear too desperate, she waited for a minute before she spoke, deliberately punctuating the moment with a pregnant pause. Once satisfied that her answer was anticipated by them both she carefully raised her tear-stained eyes to his.

'No,' she said.

EPILOGUE

Smorzando

It did not, so far as I remember, cause any great murmur when Edith was delivered of a daughter seven months or so after the reconciliation. Of course, there was a lot of talk, particularly from her mother, about their being taken by surprise as Edith was

'so frighteningly early'. In fact, Mrs Lavery rather over-egged her performance by insisting on sitting in the hospital throughout the night because of the 'risks of premature birth', which naturally gave rise to a few funny stories on the dinner circuit, but nobody minded. Versions of this sort of folderol are still rather touchingly employed in Society on such occasions. These things are rituals rather than untruths and cause no harm. The point was the baby was female, which took any future strain out of the situation. It meant everything could return to normal without a lingering after-taste.

Even Lady Uckfield, usually so careful, gave herself away in a rare unguarded moment when I telephoned to learn the news.

'Boy or girl?' I asked when she picked up the receiver.

'Girl,' said Lady Uckfield. 'Isn't it a relief?' Then, quickly but not quickly enough, she added, 'That they're both doing so well.'

'A great relief,' I answered, going along with this dishonesty. There was no point in blaming her for retaining the deepest prejudices of her kind. Now that the baby could not inherit the glories of Broughton, thanks to the arcane laws governing the peerage that even Mr Blair, for all his trumpeting of women's rights, has not seen fit to change, she would present no further danger and might be lived with in peace. Since all three 'parents' were fair there was not much chance of the baby having the wrong colouring and, at least to date, the girl does not seem particularly to favour Simon, always assuming of course that the infant is his — something of which one can, after all, never be entirely sure. Not at least without resorting to DNA testing, which no entrant in Debrett's would ever risk for fear of what it might reveal. One foreign visitor at Broughton, ignorant of the excellent Edwardian maxim never to 'comment on a likeness in another's child' asked me if I did not think she took after Charles.

I may have imagined a momentary chill in the room but I nodded. 'I do,' I said. 'She's not like Edith at all.' Thereby earning an especially warm glance from my host. Amusingly enough, when I looked at the toddler properly, she did seem to resemble him a bit. But then again that may have been in expression rather than feature. It might seem strange but in later years Charles came to love the girl so much that his younger children would complain of his favouritism. Even less logically, she would eventually develop into the preferred grandchild of Lady Uckfield, which only goes to show that the old maxim is correct and there's nowt so queer as folk. At any rate, barely fourteen months later, Lady Broughton was once more brought to bed, this time of a boy. The new Viscount Nutley was welcomed with bonfires and bun fights in Sussex and Norfolk and, frankly, to be brutal and unmodernist about it, the exact paternity of little Lady Anne had ceased to matter much to anyone.

Caroline did divorce Eric. It was a quiet business without acrimony and with more style than I confess I thought Eric capable of. He was not single long. Within eighteen months he had married the daughter of an immensely rich Cheshire industrialist, Christine somebody or other. They were much better suited than he and Caroline had been. For one thing, she shared Eric's ambitions, which she pursued as relentlessly as if they had been her own and of course they soon were. I happened to meet them both at Ascot a few months after they married and I must say I liked her. She was full of energy and in many ways a good deal easier to rub along with than Caroline, even if she was already infected with Eric's nonsense. I remember her using the phrase 'our sort of people', meaning, I imagine, some sort of exclusive social group to which they belonged. It must have been a luxury for Eric who had spent his entire first marriage being reminded daily of an Inner Circle forever closed to him.

He growled at me by way of recognition but I was not offended. I had by this time forgiven Eric his earlier insults and anyway one of the freedoms of growing older is that one is no longer obliged to dislike someone simply because they dislike you. After all, he was entitled. Lady Uckfield had made no secret of how little she relished his company and had, somewhat maliciously I suspect, used me at times to demonstrate this.

'I suppose you still see them all?' he said when his wife had stopped discussing her new Poggenpohl kitchen.

I nodded. 'We've got a baby now so a bit less than I did. But yes, I see them.'

'And is dear Edith happy in her work?' Of course, it was quite understandable that he should be irritated when he contemplated one who had survived the course that had brought him down.

'I think so.'

'I'll bet she is. And how is darling "Googie"?' He spat out the name just as I had once heard Edith do before her rehabilitation. Now, for her at least, the name had re-normalised. 'I wonder what my dear ex-mother-in-law thinks of all the recent developments.'

'Oh, I'd say she was pretty merry, one way and another,' I said, for all the world as if I thought he cared, and we nodded to each other and moved on.

As I strolled away to rejoin Adela for tea with Louisa in the Household Stand I pondered my answers and concluded that I had spoken no more than the truth. Of course, as everyone had predicted, the children had changed everything. One may be exhausted but there is little time to be bored with two children under four, particularly as Edith, to her mother-in-law's bemusement, had eschewed a proper Norland nanny and chosen instead to have a series of Portuguese and Australians.

Charming girls, one and all (or nearly all), but not the type to take over the nursery as their province. I thought it a wise decision and so, I was pleased to note, did Charles.

But as to quite what Lady Uckfield really made of it all … One would have to get up very early in the morning to know precisely what she thought about anything, earlier than I rise, certainly. We were not, as I had predicted, quite such friends after the reinstatement of Edith. Although I have not yet given up hope of regaining my former position of Court Favourite.

Poor woman, she had allowed herself to dream a little during the interregnum and the imagined life she had woven for herself with dear Clarissa or one of her kind as junior chatelaine had filled her with happy prospects. Ironically her imaginings had not been all that unlike the despised Mrs Lavery's. Lady Uckfield, too, had seen herself as a special friend of her daughter-in-law's family. The two grandmothers would lunch together perhaps and take in an exhibition… So it was hard to reconcile herself to the Return of Edith, not least because she had allowed herself the rare luxury of admitting what she really felt while Edith was away. Worse, she had confessed these secrets not only to herself and her husband, which was bad enough, but to me, a non-relation. In doing so she knew she had given me a weapon. From now on whenever she referred to 'our darling Edith' there was a risk that I might catch her eye if I so wished and in her heart expose her. I had no intention of doing this but the threat of it introduced a coldness between us nevertheless. I was and am sorry but there is nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, Adela and I continue to stay at Broughton pretty regularly.

I remember once Lady Uckfield did let herself go a little. There had been a dinner party and the guests were spread out in knots over the drawing room and the Red Saloon next door. Edith was at the centre of an admiring group, for you will understand that a lot of people had a good deal of ground to make up having dropped her during her period of exile. One might have thought that those who had been loyal, Annette Watson for one, would have been rewarded with a shower of invitations but I don't believe they were. Perhaps this was predictable. Anyway, on this particular evening, surrounded as she was, Edith made some remark, I forget what, which was greeted with gales of sycophantic laughter. I was alone, having helped myself to some more coffee, so there was no one to overhear when Lady Uckfield drew level.

'Edith Triumphans,' she said. I nodded. But she would not let it go. 'To the victor the spoils.'

'And is Edith the victor?' I asked.

'Isn't she?'

'I don't know.' I shrugged. I imagine I was attempting to be philosophical and by an easy and familiar transition had become dishonest.

'Of course she is the victor,' said Lady Uckfield, quite truthfully. 'You have won.'

Now this was irritating. She was right about Edith, I do admit, but not about me. If anything I had always been a partisan of the Uckfields during the struggle for Charles's soul and she knew it. 'Don't blame me,' I said quite firmly. 'You asked me not to encourage her and I didn't. It was your own daughter who arranged it all, not me. The fact is Charles wanted her back.

Voilà tout. He must know what's best for himself, I suppose.'

Lady Uckfield laughed. 'That, of course, is precisely what he does not know.' Her tone was a little bitter but more predominately sad. It was also, as I knew it must be, the tone of resignation. 'I told you I didn't believe they would be happy and I wait anxiously to be proved wrong. However,' she waved her little claws and the jewels in her rings flashed in the firelight, 'the thing is done. We must make the best of it. It is time to move on to the next square. Let us at least hope they will be no less happy than everybody else.' And she was gone.

Would they be less happy than everybody else? That was certainly the question. Although she had returned to him without treaty, Edith had nevertheless wrung some considerable concessions in the process. To start with she had grasped the folly of her earlier belief that it was safer to be bored in the country than entertained in London and she had persuaded Charles into a house in Fulham, which had been purchased for more or less what the little flat in Eaton Place had gone for. Now she allowed herself a day or two in London a week. She had also found some committees to sit on and had become involved, down in Sussex, in the actual day-to-day running of a hospice near Lewes. All in all, she had started to evolve the life she would be leading at sixty when she herself, never mind everyone else, would have forgotten that there had ever been a hiccup in her early married life. I thought, on reflection, that it all boded quite well.

We went down to Broughton two or three times a year as a rule. Adela and Edith were never much more than amiable with each other but Charles became very fond of my wife and so we were easy guests, I think. We enjoyed it as, apart from anything else, we had a baby in tow and the houses we could stay in without feeling that we had imported a miniature anarchist were few. Our son, Hugo, was about five months older than Anne and that ensured a measure of shared activity, accompanied by a good deal of merriment from both mothers. It is a truism but it is still true that the longer one knows people the less relevant it becomes whether or not one liked them initially. As I knew from my friendship with Isabel Easton, there is no substitute for shared history and it was clear that by the time ten years had passed, my wife and Lady Broughton would think of themselves as close friends without ever necessarily liking each other much more than they did to start with.

Needless to say, at an early stage after the great patch-up, Edith wished me to understand that she was not interested in pursuing long conversations about her choices, past or present. I quite agreed with her so she needn't have worried. I know only too well how tedious it is to have the recipient of earlier intimacies still hanging around when those intimacies have become irrelevant embarrassments. Anyway, so far as I was concerned, she had seen sense and I hadn't the slightest desire to shake her resolve.

She tested me a few times, waiting, when we happened to be alone, to see if I would bring up the subject of Simon or Charles or marriage or, worse, the baby, but I never did and I am happy to say she began to relax into our old intimacy.

In truth, even had she questioned me, I would have had little to report on the Simon front. I don't know how anxious his wife was to take him back when she had been given the surprising news that his Great Affair was over but, whatever her feelings, she had done it. I saw him once, some months later, at an audition and he told me he was planning to move to Los Angeles to 'try my luck'. I wasn't surprised since this is not an unusual reaction for a player after a disappointing career. As a rule the Hollywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money — and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years. However, there are always exceptions and I would not be surprised if Simon were one. He seemed to have all the qualities the natives of that city admire and none that they dislike.

Perhaps because he knew we would not be meeting for a while, he asked after Edith. I muttered that she was well and he nodded. 'I'm glad.'

'Good.'

He shook his head at me and raised his eyebrows. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Women!'

I nodded and gave him a sympathetic laugh so we parted friends. I suppose one might gauge the extent of his heartbreak from this subsequent reaction. I do not think Charles would have shaken his head to an acquaintance and said, 'Women!' like a character from a situation comedy had his wife chosen never to return. I think he would have curled up in the dark somewhere and never mentioned her name again, so I suppose we must all concede that Edith had ended up with the man who loved her most. Even so, there was no malice in Simon's eyes and I think one should remember this at least, that when all was said and done there really wasn't any harm in him. It is surely not so terrible a testimonial.

Nor did I ever betray to Edith the Eastons', or rather David's, anxiety to stay in with the family, if necessary at her expense.

Gradually even that slightly uncomfortable connection was also resumed. All in all, things went back to normal surprisingly quickly. Even the papers only gave it a couple of squibs — in the Standard, I seem to remember, and in one of the tabloids

— and then it was over.

Just once she did bring it up, perhaps because I never had. We were walking in the gardens on a Sunday in summer three or even four years after she had returned to the fold and we found ourselves down by the approach to the rose garden where they had set up our chairs for the filming, however long ago it was. The others were playing croquet and as we strolled along, the sound of balls being hit and people getting cross wafted gently over us. Suddenly I was struck by the image of Simon Russell, in his frilled shirt, stretched out on the ground in all his comeliness, as he gossiped that faraway day to a younger, sillier Edith. I said nothing of course and I was taken by surprise when she suddenly spoke into my imaginings.

'Do you ever see him now?' she said.

I shook my head. 'No. I don't think anyone does. He's gone off to California.'

'To make films?'

'Well, that's the idea. Or at least to make a television series.'

'And is he making one?'

'Not yet but you never know.'

'What about his wife?'

'She's gone with him.'

Edith nodded. We strolled on into the rose garden. Some heavily scented, dark red blooms, Papa Meilland maybe, filled the warm air with their sweet stench.

'Aren't you ever going to ask me if I'm happy?' said Edith with a provocative flick of her head.

'No.'

'Well, I'll tell you anyway.' She broke off a half-open bud and fed its stalk through the top buttonhole of my shirt. 'The fact is, I'm happy enough.'

I did not question her statement. I am glad she was and is happy enough. That is a good deal happier than a large proportion of my address book.

About the Author:

Julian Fellowes, writer, actor and film director, was educated at Ampleforth, Magdalene College, Cambridge and the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. As an actor he is probably best-known for his portrayal of the incorrigible Lord Kilwillie in BBC Television's series Monarch of the Glen. In the cinema he was seen in Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins and Tomorrow Never Dies with Pierce Brosnan. His film screenplay debut was Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay among many other prizes. He has written and directed the film of A Way Through the Wood, based on a book by Nigel Balchin. In the theatre he has written the 'book' for the Cameron Mackintosh/Walt Disney stage musical of Mary Poppins. As well as Snobs, he has a children's story being published in 2006. He has a wife, Emma, a son, Peregrine, and a dachshund called Fudge.

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

'Righto. I'll get the car. Be outside our entrance in five minutes. And don't worry.'

She rather loved him for telling her not to worry about an experience she had been going through once a month since she was twelve but she chose not to assuage his anxiety. With a weak smile, she watched him scuttle out of the room. In this choice of lie, Diana had judged correctly if she wanted instant action. As she calculated, Charles, like all men of his type, had the greatest possible distaste for any of the mechanics of womanhood. One hint of them and he neither needed nor wanted further explanation in order to make him act fast. As he thundered down the family staircase, she listened with the just pride of an efficient workman.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Edith had hardly reached the landing by the bronze of the slave before Lady Uckfield issued forth from a roped-off archway.

'Edith? Is that you? Why didn't you tell us you were coming?' Her mother-in-law slid her arm through hers and attempted to drag her towards the door into the family sitting room. Edith knew that the game was up, silently cursing herself for not pulling a scarf over her face and sliding in unnoticed, but even so she would not give in at once. She extricated herself from Googie's grip and started towards the library and Charles's study beyond.

'I thought I'd be a nuisance and I only want a quick word with Charles. It won't take a moment.' She was walking so fast that, to the delight of the public present, Lady Uckfield was forced to break into a sort of trot to keep up with her. They passed into the splendid library with its high mahogany and ormolu-mounted bookshelves. Above the chimneypiece, an early Broughton in a chestnut periwig gazed down, startled at the scene being played out below him. A few tourists had recognised one or other of them and since the marital split had been in half the newspapers in the country, they left off their bored examination of the thousands of gilded, leather spines and turned all their attention to the two women, thrilled by this unexpected entertainment opportunity.

'Are you staying for luncheon?' said Lady Uckfield, aware of being the cynosure of all eyes and anxious to normalise this very abnormal situation.

'Why? Would you like me to?' said Edith. She in contrast was thoroughly enjoying the exposure of her mother-in-law to the gaze of the common multitude.

'Of course,' said Lady Uckfield, grabbing and pulling at Edith's sleeve in a vain attempt to slow her progress across the gleaming floor.

'I don't think so,' said Edith. She was at the study door by now and her hand was almost on the knob when it opened to reveal the stately form of Lady Bohun. Imperceptibly, with a movement hardly visible to the naked eye, she nodded to her hostess. Edith saw it and at once knew she was too late. The bird had flown.

'Hello, Edith,' said Diana in her slowest and most mannered drawl. 'Will you excuse me? I'm just running into Lewes for something and I must get there before everything closes. Will you be here when we get back?'

'What do you think?' said Edith, and Diana had gone without further ado. Left alone with her daughter-in-law, Lady Uckfield drew her into the room and closed the door. 'Sit down for a moment,' she said, taking her own place behind Charles's desk and absent-mindedly tidying his scattered papers into neat piles.

'There's no need for this,' answered Edith. 'If Charles isn't here, I'll go.'

'Please sit down,' was the repeated request, and Edith did. 'I am sorry you see us as your enemies, my dear.'

'You may be sorry but you can hardly be surprised.'

Lady Uckfield gave her a hurt look. 'I wanted your marriage to work, you know. You have misjudged me if you think otherwise. I always wanted you to be happy.'

'You wanted us to make the best of a bad job.'

'But you didn't, did you?' said Lady Uckfield crisply, all trace of her customary gush and vibrato gone.

There was a measure of reason to this that took some of the wind out of Edith's sails as she was forced to admit. Was it rational of her to suggest that Lady Uckfield should have celebrated when she, Edith, came into their lives? Why should her mother-in-law want her back now that this unpleasant episode was almost over? Lady Uckfield was not finished. 'A year ago,'

she said, 'you were sick of the sight of Charles. When he spoke you gritted your teeth, when he touched you, you shivered. I am his mother and I lived in the same house with you. Did you think I wouldn't notice these things?'

'It wasn't like that.'

'It was exactly like that. He bored you. He bored you to death. Worse than that, he irritated you to the point of distraction.

He could not please you however hard he tried. Nothing he said or did was right. He set your nerves on edge by his very presence and yet now… what am I to make of this sudden eagerness to see him? What has changed?'

Edith drew herself up and looked her opponent in the eye. She was determined somehow to try to gain the initiative. 'Has it occurred to you that I might have had some time for reflection? Or am I too stupid in your eyes to think of anything but money and social climbing?'

'My dear, I never thought you stupid.' Lady Uckfield held up her palm in protest. 'You must at least give me credit for that.' There was a noise on the gravel and the older woman walked over to the window but it was not, as she had feared, Charles coming back for something he'd forgotten. 'I have to ask myself why now, why suddenly, a meeting is so essential when in the first months away you exhibited no such wish. I am a mother and I have to say to myself, what could have changed that might make a reunion with my son so desirable now when it was so un desirable then?'

'Perhaps I don't feel I've made a good choice. Is that hard to understand?'

'On the contrary. I find it easy to understand. Especially since I think you've made a very poor choice indeed. But…' She rested her fingertips against each other like an avuncular preacher making a point in a pulpit. 'Why now? Why such a change upon an instant?'

Edith stared at her. 'You can't stop me seeing him for ever,' she said.

Lady Uckfield nodded. 'No. I dare say I can't.'

'Well then.'

'I think I can stop you seeing him for a few months. Six perhaps, or even three. Let us see how we all feel then about this poor choice you have made.'

At that moment Edith realised that of course her mother-in-law, dear Googie with her mind as pure as snow, knew. They never talked about it, neither at that time nor in the ensuing years, but they were always aware from then on that, beyond a shadow of doubt, they both knew. Edith stood up. 'I'm going now.'

'Are you sure? Can I at least give you something to eat? Or what about a loo? You've come such a long way.' Once again the tone had settled back into its usual intimate pattern with the rhythm of shared midnight secrets in the dormitory.

At this moment, in some strange way, it was hard for Edith not to admire this woman, her sworn foe, who held onto the high ground in every argument against all-comers. It was hard but it was not impossible. 'You are a fucking cow,' she said. 'A fucking cow with a hide of leather and no heart.'

Lady Uckfield seemed to think over these words for a moment before nodding. 'Probably there is some truth in your unflattering description,' she acknowledged. 'And it is perhaps for that reason, or something resembling it, expressed hopefully in more fragrant language, that I have made such a success of my opportunities and you have made such a failure of yours. Goodbye, my dear.'

TWENTY-TWO

You may ask yourself why Edith, outfoxed at every turn, did not travel the more modern route out of her dilemma and, released from embarrassment after a short stay in some discreet, rural nursing home, why she did not then wait the three or six months stipulated by Lady Uckfield and outface them all. I suspect that she hardly knew the reason herself but somehow she was determined not to go that way. She was not, so far as I am aware, particularly religious and, I would have thought, operated on the minimum of moral scruples generally but perhaps because she had seen a way in which she could spare a life, a life that depended on her and her alone, she could not now bring herself to sacrifice it. It was, I think, an essentially animal decision rather than a sentimental one — or else then every tigress in the jungle is sentimental. Women, I suspect, can understand better than most men why something that hardly existed notionally and legally did not yet exist at all should still have been able to command such loyalties.

In the end, help came from a most unlikely sector. She had told me the following morning about her brief sojourn at Broughton and I was naturally dreading the request that I should take a more proactive hand in the whole business when she surprised me by telling me that she was going to wait until Charles's next visit to Feltham. 'He goes every fortnight or so. I'll collar him there.'

'How will you know when he's visiting?'

'Caroline's going to tell me. She'll drive me down.'

This information was both relieving and astonishing. Relieving because of course it meant I could be dispensed with and astonishing because it would never have occurred to me that Caroline would work against her mother's interest. Even now I am not completely sure of her motives. The Chase marriage was looking rocky. It is possible that she did not want the issue of her own satisfactory divorce arrangements being swamped by the divorce of the heir. It may have been an act of rebellion against her mother whose values Caroline always thought (quite wrongly as it happens) she had rejected. It may have been simpler. She loved her brother and she must have hated seeing him unhappy. In the end, I suppose it was, as always, a mixture of all these elements.

'When did you get in touch with her?'

'She telephoned me this morning. She'd heard about my visit to Broughton. I suppose she feels sorry for me.'

'Well, I won't say I'm not surprised but I'm pleased for you. It's certainly a good deal more suitable that Charles's sister should help you than that I should. Will you let me know how you get on?'

'I will,' she said.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Despite her explanation, Edith herself was not really clear as to Caroline's motives. They had never been close since Edith's admission into the family. They were not enemies. Indeed, despite Eric's almost continual stream of snide comments directed at Edith, she and her sister-in-law had achieved a kind of guarded familiarity but 'friendship' would have been too strong a word for it and Caroline would never have been confused as to where her loyalties lay. For all her professed modernity, Caroline Chase, devoid of self-knowledge as she was, remained very much a chip off her mother's block. She might despise the taut-faced countesses and ministers' wives that made up Lady Uckfield's coterie but when it came down to it her own friends were generally these women's rebellious and oddly-dressed children.

At all events, whatever her motives, she was as good as her word. Two days later the telephone rang in the Ebury Street flat and when Edith picked it up Caroline was on the line. 'Charles is at Feltham now if you're serious. He went down last night and he's on his own there until tomorrow.'

Edith glanced over to where Simon was deep in the Daily Mail. He also had the Independent delivered every day but he never read it. She steadied herself for one of those faintly Chinese telephone conversations designed to conceal their subject from the witnesses present. 'That's kind of you,' she said.

'So do you want me to take you down?'

'If you can,' came the stilted reply.

'Can't you talk?'

'Not really.'

'I'll be at the top of lower Sloane Street by Coutts at ten o'clock.'

'Fine.' Edith replaced the receiver carefully. It was not, as she explained later, that she ever wavered in her desire to see Charles but, just as she kept silent about the Sussex visit, she was not a big one for bridge-burning. As it happened, Simon had hardly been aware of the telephone conversation at all. She smiled across at him. 'Aren't you working today?'

He looked up. 'In the afternoon. Why?'

'That was Caroline. Asking me to lunch.'

'You're keeping your options open, then.'

She didn't answer but he didn't care.

Once again, she chose her clothes with some deliberation. The easy option was to repeat herself and simply to don a country outfit from her Broughton days but that seemed somehow dishonourable after her humiliation at the hands of Lady Uckfield. It was also, as she now saw more clearly, obvious, which was worse. No, if Charles were to take her back it must be as herself and not because she could pass as Diana Bohun or any of the other cold-hearted bitches who enjoyed their loveless marriages at the heart of Charles's world. Eventually she selected a tight black skirt that showed her legs and a loose blue sweater interwoven with coloured ribbons. She brushed her hair and applied her make-up fairly heavily (that is, for Charles rather than for Caroline). She surveyed the results and was pleased. She looked pretty and bright and just Londony enough for it not to seem as if she was trying too hard.

'Very nice,' said Simon. 'Where are you off to now?'

'I thought I'd do some shopping. I've got to get a birthday present for my father.'

'I suppose I'm not included in the girls' lunch.'

'It's at Caroline's flat…' She shrugged sadly. 'Why not come with me now? If I can find something for Daddy, I'm going on to Harrods. See what they've got in for the summer.'

It may seem that there was a calculated risk in this cunning approach but there wasn't really. No man in his right mind would accept the job of trailing a woman through a series of departments when she isn't even looking for anything specific.

Especially when there's no lunch at the end of it. He shook his head as she knew he must. 'Not really. If it's all right. I'll see you tonight.'

'What time will you be back?'

He shrugged. 'Seven. Eight.'

They kissed and Edith seized a coat and was gone. A minute later she was walking towards the antique shops at the Pimlico Road end of the street. She knew that Caroline would ask her what she was up to in the two hours on the road that lay ahead and she was trying to determine both what she would say and what was the truth — not that these two would necessarily correlate.

She knew by now, if only from Lady Uckfield's near-hysterical opposition, that there must be a chance she could get Charles back. For a while she had pretended to herself that she was still simply exploring the possibility but in her heart she had already gone a stage further than that. She was bound to acknowledge that she would not have been as anxious as she had been in her attempts to secure a meeting had this not been the case. The question remained, how much did she want him back? Did she want him at any cost? Would she try to exact concessions? Would their life return to precisely the same pattern? And then again, could she gain concessions anyway? Weren't all the cards in Charles's hand? Worst of all: suppose she was wrong and he didn't want her back? In these ruminations, she was conscious that she had pushed the real reason for her change of heart to the back of her mind but she reasoned that if she was successful then that was after all where it was going to stay and so why worry about it now? It seemed to present her with such a yawning chasm that there was no reason to negotiate it before she absolutely had to. To all intents and purposes, from the moment she had known that she was at last to be permitted to see Charles, her secret had ceased to be true.

She stopped outside the art gallery opposite the Poule Au Pot and glanced at some sketches in the window. As she stood there, a gleaming limousine drew to a halt and the chauffeur helped a woman of some indeterminate Middle Eastern aspect to alight from the vehicle and enter the shop. Looking at this heavily-rouged, sable-wrapped creature, diamond bracelets flashing in the sun, Edith suddenly thought of her mother-in-law. How well she knew that this would not be Lady Uckfield's way. She would arrive in a taxi with a minimum of fuss, in sensible clothes and excellent pearls, and rely on the recognition of the manager. And yet the fact remained that, should these women meet, this Levantine would be nervous of Lady Uckfield while Lady Uckfield would be politely indifferent to her.

Her clash in the Little Library at Broughton, far from lowering Lady Uckfield in Edith's eyes, had paradoxically resulted in a grudging respect for her code. She had always faintly despised those members of her, or Charles's, circle who had fawned over her mother-in-law, but over the last days she had come to re-examine her feelings. In the early stages of her marriage she had perhaps yearned for more of what this Eastern woman in her furs took for granted in her daily round, luxury, glamour, famous faces. All these things — at any rate an English version of them — the young Edith Lavery had wrongly perceived as being connected to the world of a 'Lady Broughton' and she had been taken aback when so much of her new life had proved mundane. She knew that Lady Uckfield thought she, Edith, had gleaned her ideas from novels and nineteenth-century biographies, she had even attempted to defend her own mother occasionally from the accusation of filling her head with bourgeois fantasy, but she realised there was justice in the charge. The reality of life with Charles had seemed so flat and changeless compared to those action-packed plots, the glittering, power-filled ballrooms, that dizzying Lady-Palmerston-like career that she had been anticipating.

And yet, that day at the dress show, when the crowd had broken before Lady Uckfield and her minor Royal Highness like the Red Sea before Moses, Edith had seen what she had thrown away, the key to every closed door in England and most of the rest of the world — at least among the superficial. A landed title might not secure an invitation to Camp David but, even in the twenty-first century, she need never be alone in Palm Beach. And Edith knew by now that the kind of people who were superficial, the snobs whose social life was based around collecting people to underpin their own status, outnumbered the rest by ten to one. This kind of power might not be worth much in the great scheme of things but it was something and what had she gained in exchange for it? Life at Broughton might be dull but what was life in Ebury Street? Which did she prefer, lack of noise or lack of muscle? She had walked out of the world of the worldly in a petulant pout of boredom and overnight she had transformed herself from a high court card in the Game of Society into a non-person that people were ashamed to be seen with.

With something akin to a shiver she resumed her walk. Then she thought of the two men. Her subconscious assumption, because she knew that she had married Charles for his name and his fortune, had always been that, stripped of these things, she would never have looked at him. In their two years together she had grown to resent him, absurd as that now seemed even to her, for luring her with his worldly possessions without having the personality to amuse her once she was caught. The truth was she had pursued him and yet, in her self-justifying and dishonest mind, by the time Simon had come along, Charles had assumed the moral status of a baited trap.

Now, strolling down Pimlico Road, admiring the antique window displays, she thought back to her ruminations in the Green Park and realised that separation had changed things. It was her unconscious habit these days to think of her husband more gently. Was he really so disagreeable as company? So much less attractive than Simon? After all, men far worse than Charles find wives all the time. Would the idea of Charles as a husband have seemed so bad in the old days before her marriage? If she had been introduced to Mr Charles Broughton as a schoolfriend's suitor would she have wanted to run out screaming into the night, dragging the doomed girl with her? Of course not. Certainly Simon was a good deal better looking, there could be no doubt of that, but over the months she had grown used to his looks and she had begun to be irritated by the perpetual twinkling that seemed to accompany his every social interchange. All those half-smiles and narrowed lids lavished on waitresses and air hostesses and girls at the checkout in Partridges, all that tossing back of the golden locks, had started to bore her.

More troubling than the comparison of appearance (Charles, after all, while no beauty, was perfectly respectable to look at) was the question of sex. She had to concede that Simon was much the better lover, an excellent lover indeed by any standards let alone poor Charles's, and this was harder to dismiss. She enjoyed going to bed with Simon. Very much. In fact, the thought of making love with him was still enough to tickle her innards, to make her slightly fidgety and uncomfortable, to make her want to cross and uncross her legs. Dear Charles could never be a competitor here with his fumbling, five-minute thrust and his 'thank you, darling', which nearly drove her mad.

But for the first time she acknowledged, predictably perhaps, that after a year, making love to Simon had lost its novelty.

The sex, though less frequent than at first, was still excellent, no question, but it could no longer blind her to the life for which she had left her gilded cage. After all, how much time does one actually spend in bed making love? Was it really worth the rest of the bargain? Did a pleasurable half an hour two or three times a week compensate for those endless, terrible parties, those awful people with their flat accents, sitting around the flat smoking, or those frightful drama school pals discussing 'hair-dos'

and gardening tips and bucket-shop holidays? And anyway, wasn't Charles rather sweet in his way? Wasn't he more decent than Simon? Wasn't he truer as a person?

So Edith continued up Sloane Street belabouring herself with her false values, all the while attempting to convince herself with a litany of Charles's essential worth until, in a rare moment of honesty, like the sun breaking through the clouds, she saw the irony of this inner conversation. She, Edith, was using these arguments as if the opposition to them would overwhelm her should she give it a hearing. She was forcing herself to the next step when any impartial observer, and of this she was suddenly quite sure, would have freely volunteered that of course Charles was more decent than Simon. In fact, in any real way, it was perfectly obvious that Simon wasn't decent at all. Unlike Charles he had no honour, only pragmatism. He could not be true because there was no truth in him. His morality was a tawdry bundle of received, fashionable causes that he believed would make him attractive to casting directors. Edith was talking herself into thinking that in some ways she preferred Charles to Simon when to anyone who knew them both there could be no comparison. Charles, dull as he might be, was infinitely the better man. Simon was a mass of nothing.

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

Edith had gone for a walk and found it was cold outside.

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

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

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

'What luck there are no children.'

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

'Then why leave Eric?'

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

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

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

'Then why did you marry him?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Is he?' said Edith, thrilled.

'Yes.' Caroline lit a cigarette and for a moment Edith thought they were going into the central divider. 'I know Lady Uckfield thinks it'll blow over. She has a fantasy that he will forget you and marry the daughter of some peer who'll give him four children, two of whom will inherit estates from relations of their mother's.' Caroline laughed wryly. This was of course a wonderfully accurate résumé of Lady Uckfield's dreams.

'Are you quite sure she's wrong?'

'How little you know my brother,' said Caroline, and lapsed again into silence. Edith naturally longed to hear more of this wretched and unhappy man, whose life was a misery without her and to whom, by some strange miracle, she was already married. She gave Caroline a quizzical look and the latter relented. 'In the first place I do not think that my mother's idea of your perfect successor is Charles's. To put it bluntly, if that was what he was looking for he could have found it with very little difficulty. But that is no longer the point. Charles is a simple man. He is capable of feelings but they are uncomplicated, straightforward and deep. He can hardly communicate and he cannot flirt at all.' Edith thought with wonder of her other love, who could only communicate and flirt. Simon's problem was the opposite of Charles's. He could not feel. Caroline was still talking. 'Charles has made his choice. You. You are his wife. In his heart that's it. Finish. I am not saying that if you did divorce him he wouldn't eventually settle for someone else as brood-mare but in his heart he would have failed and his real wife would be out there walking around with someone else. And that, my dear, would be you.'

The rest of the drive was accomplished in silence. It was almost as if they were waiting for the next event in the plot before they could continue their discussion. And so they wound their way through the flat Norfolk landscape until at last they turned into a well-kept but somewhat overshadowed drive, which in its turn, when they had been released from the high walls of rhododendron, brought them to the wide, gravelled forecourt of the main house.

Feltham Place had passed into the Broughton family in 1811 when the then Lord Broughton had married Anne Wykham, only child of Sir Marmaduke Wykham, sixth baronet and the last of his line. The house was Jacobean, more a gentleman's than a nobleman's residence, picturesque rather than magnificent with roofs bristling with barley sugar chimneys and possibly for this reason it had never managed to catch at the family's imagination. Like many houses of its period it was in a dip (before the pumping innovations of the late seventeenth century allowed those splendid, landscaped views), although the flatness of the county gave a certain openness at the bottom of its valley. It might have functioned as the Broughtons' Dower House or as a seat for the heir, but there were other houses nearer Uckfield that had served these turns at least until the Second World War and recently, as we know, the heir had chosen to live with his parents.

In the past, Feltham had been let but it was taken back for the shooting in the 1890s and had been farmed in hand ever since, despite the family's allowing the sport to lapse after the war. Charles had revived the shoot over the last few years and he was proud of the fact that he could now safely let two and three-hundred-bird days, secure in the knowledge that there would be no great disappointments. He and his keeper had worked hard. The covers and hedgerows had been replanted, the feeding pens reorganised, indeed the whole appearance of the countryside had been more or less restored to the condition of a century before. But despite this, he was not tempted to bring his own shooting guests to Feltham. They were offered the splendours of Broughton while businessmen, people with mobile telephones and gleaming sports wear, took the shooting at Feltham by the day. At a (considerable) extra cost they could even stay overnight, which may have accounted for the somewhat boarding-house quality within.

The Wykham who'd built the place had been a favourite of King James I and in those days it had been much larger but the king's beau had been improvident and his heir (a nephew since, unsurprisingly, the builder had never married) demolished two-thirds of it. This meant that the brickwork and carving on the façade and throughout the house was of a much higher standard than one would normally associate with the scale of building. Inside, all the first-rate furniture and pictures had long since been swallowed up by Broughton and most of what remained dated from its rehabilitation as a shooting-lodge at the end of the last century. Lumpy, leather-covered Chesterfields provided the seating and the walls were covered with second-rate portraits and enormous, indifferently painted scenes of hunting, shooting and all the other methods of country killing. Still, the rooms themselves were pleasant and the staircase, more or less the sole survivor from the days of the Jacobean favourite, was magnificent.

Edith hardly knew the place. In Charles's mind it was the nearest thing to an 'office' in his weekly round. He ran it as a business and apart from an occasional appearance at a village show and an annual cocktail party for all those neighbours who might be tiresome about the shoot were they not courted every so often, he had no social profile in the county at all. Quite frequently he stayed with the Cumnors at their infinitely larger and more luxurious house four miles down the road, rather than put the ancient care-taking couple to the trouble of opening a bedroom.

Caroline drew up by the front door and the two women made their way into the wide and gloomy hall that took up two-thirds of the entrance front. It was decorated by a frieze of slightly bogus armorial tributes to the Wykhams and the Broughtons but otherwise boasted no colour at all apart from the brown of the panelling and the less attractive brown of the leather furniture. 'Charles!' Caroline called out. It was a chilly day and the interior of the house was noticeably colder than the air outside. Edith pulled her coat tightly around her. 'Charles!' shouted Caroline again, and she set off through a doorway that led first to the staircase and then into the former morning room that operated as Charles's office. Edith followed her. Desks and filing cabinets stood about the room, the chill slightly alleviated by a three-bar electric fire in the grate that looked as if its very existence breached the entire safety code. They were still standing there when another door, facing them, opened and there all at once stood a flummoxed Charles. To her amazement, even to her delight, Edith suddenly realised that she was shocked at his appearance. Gone was that sleek country gentleman who always looked as if he was on the way to make an advertisement for Burberry's. She was astonished to see that her fastidious husband was looking scruffy and unkempt. He was almost dirty. Caught out by her stare, he pushed his fingers through his hair. 'Hello,' he said, with a watery smile. 'Fancy seeing you here.'

At this point Caroline took her leave. 'I'm going in to Norwich,' she said. 'I'll be back in a couple of hours.' It was a relief really that she didn't even try to normalise the situation or start any we-were-just-driving-past nonsense.

Charles nodded. 'I see,' he said.

Left alone, Edith was oddly blank as to quite what she was going to say next. She sat on the edge of a chair near the fire like a housemaid at an interview and leaned forward to warm her hands. 'I hope you're not cross. I did so want to talk to you.

Properly. And I began to feel that I was never going to be allowed to. I'm afraid I thought I'd just chance it.'

He shook his head. 'I'm not a bit cross. Not at all.' He hesitated. 'I — I'm sorry about the telephone calls and all the rest of it. It wasn't my mother not telling me, you know. Well, it wasn't only that. I expect you thought it was. It was just that I didn't really know what to say. It seemed better to leave it all to the professionals. Of course now you're here…' He tailed off disconsolately.

Edith nodded. 'I had to know what you were thinking about everything. I understand your parents want you free straight away.'

'Oh that.' He looked sheepish. 'I don't mind. Honestly. Whatever suits you.' He stared at her in the unflattering light of an overhead bulb. 'How's Simon?'

'Fine. Very well. Loving his series.'

'Good. I'm glad.' He didn't sound it but he was trying to be courteous. Edith was struck anew by the decency and kindness of this man she had tossed aside. What had she been thinking of? Her own actions sometimes seemed to her so hard to understand. Like a foreign film. And yet these had been her choices. The conversation limped on.

'I don't think I ever came to Feltham at this time of year. I must have but I don't remember. It's rather lovely, isn't it?'

Charles smiled. 'Dear old Feltham,' he said.

'You ought to live here. Do it up. Get some of the stuff back.'

He half nodded. 'I think I'd be a bit lonely, stuck out here on my own. Don't you? Nice idea, though.'

'Oh, Charles.' In spite of the cynicism with which she had embarked on this mission Edith had become a victim of her own justifications. Like Deborah Kerr in The King and I, whistling her happy tune to make herself brave, Edith had succeeded in talking herself into believing that she was a romantic figure who had lost her love rather than a selfish girl who bitterly regretted her comforts. Her eyes began to moisten.

Oddly perhaps, it was only at this moment that Charles fully grasped she had definitely come to try to get him back. Up to this point he was still wondering if it might not just be for some financial or time-related scheme that she had made the journey.

Despite his earlier suspicions, his non-existent vanity made him slow to reach the obvious conclusion and he thought she might want him to agree to something before his lawyers could talk him out of it. He was not offended by this but, if it should prove to be the case, he was anxious to conceal his wretchedness from her. Both out of consideration for her feelings and from a (perfectly justifiable) sense of pride. It now occurred to him, with a lurch in his stomach, that this was not what he was dealing with. She wanted to come back to him. He looked at her.

For all his simplicity, he was not an idiot. Thinking along the same lines as that night in his study at Broughton he knew that he was no more interesting than when she left him. He also suspected that the world of show business had not really appealed to her, not at any rate for 'every day'. Just as a year of sin had served to give Edith a clearer idea of what Simon consisted of, so two years of marriage and a year apart had made Edith comprehensible to Charles. He knew she was an arriviste and the child of an arriviste. He saw her vulgarities of spirit now as sharply as he saw her fine points, of which, despite Lady Uckfield's comments, he still believed there were many. He also knew that if he made a move towards her the thing was settled.

He stared at the hunched-up figure, trying to scoop warmth out of the electric bars. Her coat was a sort of camel colour and looked rather cheap. Was this sad little figure, this 'blonde piece' as his mother would say, to be the next Marchioness of Uckfield? To be painted by some indifferent chocolate box portraitist and hung alongside the Sargeants, Laszlos and Birleys of the preceding generations? Was it in her to make a go of it?

But as he watched her, the sense of how vulnerable she suddenly seemed to him, with her bright make-up and her chain store coat, trying to charm him and looking instead somehow pathetic, overwhelmed him with pity and, in the wake of pity, with love. Whatever her suitability, whatever the limitations of her feelings, whatever her motives, he knew that he, Charles Broughton, could not be responsible for her unhappiness. He was, in short, incapable of hurting her.

'Are you happy?' he said slowly, knowing as he did so that the words gave her permission to return to him and to his life.

At the sound of them Edith knew her pardon had come through. Despite the difficulties with Simon, with her mother-inlaw, with the newspapers, with the sun, with the moon, she could now be Charles's wife again if she chose, which, not very surprisingly given all the circumstances, she did. For a second she felt almost sick with relief but then, since she did not wish to appear too desperate, she waited for a minute before she spoke, deliberately punctuating the moment with a pregnant pause. Once satisfied that her answer was anticipated by them both she carefully raised her tear-stained eyes to his.

'No,' she said.

EPILOGUE

Smorzando

It did not, so far as I remember, cause any great murmur when Edith was delivered of a daughter seven months or so after the reconciliation. Of course, there was a lot of talk, particularly from her mother, about their being taken by surprise as Edith was

'so frighteningly early'. In fact, Mrs Lavery rather over-egged her performance by insisting on sitting in the hospital throughout the night because of the 'risks of premature birth', which naturally gave rise to a few funny stories on the dinner circuit, but nobody minded. Versions of this sort of folderol are still rather touchingly employed in Society on such occasions. These things are rituals rather than untruths and cause no harm. The point was the baby was female, which took any future strain out of the situation. It meant everything could return to normal without a lingering after-taste.

Even Lady Uckfield, usually so careful, gave herself away in a rare unguarded moment when I telephoned to learn the news.

'Boy or girl?' I asked when she picked up the receiver.

'Girl,' said Lady Uckfield. 'Isn't it a relief?' Then, quickly but not quickly enough, she added, 'That they're both doing so well.'

'A great relief,' I answered, going along with this dishonesty. There was no point in blaming her for retaining the deepest prejudices of her kind. Now that the baby could not inherit the glories of Broughton, thanks to the arcane laws governing the peerage that even Mr Blair, for all his trumpeting of women's rights, has not seen fit to change, she would present no further danger and might be lived with in peace. Since all three 'parents' were fair there was not much chance of the baby having the wrong colouring and, at least to date, the girl does not seem particularly to favour Simon, always assuming of course that the infant is his — something of which one can, after all, never be entirely sure. Not at least without resorting to DNA testing, which no entrant in Debrett's would ever risk for fear of what it might reveal. One foreign visitor at Broughton, ignorant of the excellent Edwardian maxim never to 'comment on a likeness in another's child' asked me if I did not think she took after Charles.

I may have imagined a momentary chill in the room but I nodded. 'I do,' I said. 'She's not like Edith at all.' Thereby earning an especially warm glance from my host. Amusingly enough, when I looked at the toddler properly, she did seem to resemble him a bit. But then again that may have been in expression rather than feature. It might seem strange but in later years Charles came to love the girl so much that his younger children would complain of his favouritism. Even less logically, she would eventually develop into the preferred grandchild of Lady Uckfield, which only goes to show that the old maxim is correct and there's nowt so queer as folk. At any rate, barely fourteen months later, Lady Broughton was once more brought to bed, this time of a boy. The new Viscount Nutley was welcomed with bonfires and bun fights in Sussex and Norfolk and, frankly, to be brutal and unmodernist about it, the exact paternity of little Lady Anne had ceased to matter much to anyone.

Caroline did divorce Eric. It was a quiet business without acrimony and with more style than I confess I thought Eric capable of. He was not single long. Within eighteen months he had married the daughter of an immensely rich Cheshire industrialist, Christine somebody or other. They were much better suited than he and Caroline had been. For one thing, she shared Eric's ambitions, which she pursued as relentlessly as if they had been her own and of course they soon were. I happened to meet them both at Ascot a few months after they married and I must say I liked her. She was full of energy and in many ways a good deal easier to rub along with than Caroline, even if she was already infected with Eric's nonsense. I remember her using the phrase 'our sort of people', meaning, I imagine, some sort of exclusive social group to which they belonged. It must have been a luxury for Eric who had spent his entire first marriage being reminded daily of an Inner Circle forever closed to him.

He growled at me by way of recognition but I was not offended. I had by this time forgiven Eric his earlier insults and anyway one of the freedoms of growing older is that one is no longer obliged to dislike someone simply because they dislike you. After all, he was entitled. Lady Uckfield had made no secret of how little she relished his company and had, somewhat maliciously I suspect, used me at times to demonstrate this.

'I suppose you still see them all?' he said when his wife had stopped discussing her new Poggenpohl kitchen.

I nodded. 'We've got a baby now so a bit less than I did. But yes, I see them.'

'And is dear Edith happy in her work?' Of course, it was quite understandable that he should be irritated when he contemplated one who had survived the course that had brought him down.

'I think so.'

'I'll bet she is. And how is darling "Googie"?' He spat out the name just as I had once heard Edith do before her rehabilitation. Now, for her at least, the name had re-normalised. 'I wonder what my dear ex-mother-in-law thinks of all the recent developments.'

'Oh, I'd say she was pretty merry, one way and another,' I said, for all the world as if I thought he cared, and we nodded to each other and moved on.

As I strolled away to rejoin Adela for tea with Louisa in the Household Stand I pondered my answers and concluded that I had spoken no more than the truth. Of course, as everyone had predicted, the children had changed everything. One may be exhausted but there is little time to be bored with two children under four, particularly as Edith, to her mother-in-law's bemusement, had eschewed a proper Norland nanny and chosen instead to have a series of Portuguese and Australians.

Charming girls, one and all (or nearly all), but not the type to take over the nursery as their province. I thought it a wise decision and so, I was pleased to note, did Charles.

But as to quite what Lady Uckfield really made of it all … One would have to get up very early in the morning to know precisely what she thought about anything, earlier than I rise, certainly. We were not, as I had predicted, quite such friends after the reinstatement of Edith. Although I have not yet given up hope of regaining my former position of Court Favourite.

Poor woman, she had allowed herself to dream a little during the interregnum and the imagined life she had woven for herself with dear Clarissa or one of her kind as junior chatelaine had filled her with happy prospects. Ironically her imaginings had not been all that unlike the despised Mrs Lavery's. Lady Uckfield, too, had seen herself as a special friend of her daughter-in-law's family. The two grandmothers would lunch together perhaps and take in an exhibition… So it was hard to reconcile herself to the Return of Edith, not least because she had allowed herself the rare luxury of admitting what she really felt while Edith was away. Worse, she had confessed these secrets not only to herself and her husband, which was bad enough, but to me, a non-relation. In doing so she knew she had given me a weapon. From now on whenever she referred to 'our darling Edith' there was a risk that I might catch her eye if I so wished and in her heart expose her. I had no intention of doing this but the threat of it introduced a coldness between us nevertheless. I was and am sorry but there is nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, Adela and I continue to stay at Broughton pretty regularly.

I remember once Lady Uckfield did let herself go a little. There had been a dinner party and the guests were spread out in knots over the drawing room and the Red Saloon next door. Edith was at the centre of an admiring group, for you will understand that a lot of people had a good deal of ground to make up having dropped her during her period of exile. One might have thought that those who had been loyal, Annette Watson for one, would have been rewarded with a shower of invitations but I don't believe they were. Perhaps this was predictable. Anyway, on this particular evening, surrounded as she was, Edith made some remark, I forget what, which was greeted with gales of sycophantic laughter. I was alone, having helped myself to some more coffee, so there was no one to overhear when Lady Uckfield drew level.

'Edith Triumphans,' she said. I nodded. But she would not let it go. 'To the victor the spoils.'

'And is Edith the victor?' I asked.

'Isn't she?'

'I don't know.' I shrugged. I imagine I was attempting to be philosophical and by an easy and familiar transition had become dishonest.

'Of course she is the victor,' said Lady Uckfield, quite truthfully. 'You have won.'

Now this was irritating. She was right about Edith, I do admit, but not about me. If anything I had always been a partisan of the Uckfields during the struggle for Charles's soul and she knew it. 'Don't blame me,' I said quite firmly. 'You asked me not to encourage her and I didn't. It was your own daughter who arranged it all, not me. The fact is Charles wanted her back.

Voilà tout. He must know what's best for himself, I suppose.'

Lady Uckfield laughed. 'That, of course, is precisely what he does not know.' Her tone was a little bitter but more predominately sad. It was also, as I knew it must be, the tone of resignation. 'I told you I didn't believe they would be happy and I wait anxiously to be proved wrong. However,' she waved her little claws and the jewels in her rings flashed in the firelight, 'the thing is done. We must make the best of it. It is time to move on to the next square. Let us at least hope they will be no less happy than everybody else.' And she was gone.

Would they be less happy than everybody else? That was certainly the question. Although she had returned to him without treaty, Edith had nevertheless wrung some considerable concessions in the process. To start with she had grasped the folly of her earlier belief that it was safer to be bored in the country than entertained in London and she had persuaded Charles into a house in Fulham, which had been purchased for more or less what the little flat in Eaton Place had gone for. Now she allowed herself a day or two in London a week. She had also found some committees to sit on and had become involved, down in Sussex, in the actual day-to-day running of a hospice near Lewes. All in all, she had started to evolve the life she would be leading at sixty when she herself, never mind everyone else, would have forgotten that there had ever been a hiccup in her early married life. I thought, on reflection, that it all boded quite well.

We went down to Broughton two or three times a year as a rule. Adela and Edith were never much more than amiable with each other but Charles became very fond of my wife and so we were easy guests, I think. We enjoyed it as, apart from anything else, we had a baby in tow and the houses we could stay in without feeling that we had imported a miniature anarchist were few. Our son, Hugo, was about five months older than Anne and that ensured a measure of shared activity, accompanied by a good deal of merriment from both mothers. It is a truism but it is still true that the longer one knows people the less relevant it becomes whether or not one liked them initially. As I knew from my friendship with Isabel Easton, there is no substitute for shared history and it was clear that by the time ten years had passed, my wife and Lady Broughton would think of themselves as close friends without ever necessarily liking each other much more than they did to start with.

Needless to say, at an early stage after the great patch-up, Edith wished me to understand that she was not interested in pursuing long conversations about her choices, past or present. I quite agreed with her so she needn't have worried. I know only too well how tedious it is to have the recipient of earlier intimacies still hanging around when those intimacies have become irrelevant embarrassments. Anyway, so far as I was concerned, she had seen sense and I hadn't the slightest desire to shake her resolve.

She tested me a few times, waiting, when we happened to be alone, to see if I would bring up the subject of Simon or Charles or marriage or, worse, the baby, but I never did and I am happy to say she began to relax into our old intimacy.

In truth, even had she questioned me, I would have had little to report on the Simon front. I don't know how anxious his wife was to take him back when she had been given the surprising news that his Great Affair was over but, whatever her feelings, she had done it. I saw him once, some months later, at an audition and he told me he was planning to move to Los Angeles to 'try my luck'. I wasn't surprised since this is not an unusual reaction for a player after a disappointing career. As a rule the Hollywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money — and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years. However, there are always exceptions and I would not be surprised if Simon were one. He seemed to have all the qualities the natives of that city admire and none that they dislike.

Perhaps because he knew we would not be meeting for a while, he asked after Edith. I muttered that she was well and he nodded. 'I'm glad.'

'Good.'

He shook his head at me and raised his eyebrows. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Women!'

I nodded and gave him a sympathetic laugh so we parted friends. I suppose one might gauge the extent of his heartbreak from this subsequent reaction. I do not think Charles would have shaken his head to an acquaintance and said, 'Women!' like a character from a situation comedy had his wife chosen never to return. I think he would have curled up in the dark somewhere and never mentioned her name again, so I suppose we must all concede that Edith had ended up with the man who loved her most. Even so, there was no malice in Simon's eyes and I think one should remember this at least, that when all was said and done there really wasn't any harm in him. It is surely not so terrible a testimonial.

Nor did I ever betray to Edith the Eastons', or rather David's, anxiety to stay in with the family, if necessary at her expense.

Gradually even that slightly uncomfortable connection was also resumed. All in all, things went back to normal surprisingly quickly. Even the papers only gave it a couple of squibs — in the Standard, I seem to remember, and in one of the tabloids

— and then it was over.

Just once she did bring it up, perhaps because I never had. We were walking in the gardens on a Sunday in summer three or even four years after she had returned to the fold and we found ourselves down by the approach to the rose garden where they had set up our chairs for the filming, however long ago it was. The others were playing croquet and as we strolled along, the sound of balls being hit and people getting cross wafted gently over us. Suddenly I was struck by the image of Simon Russell, in his frilled shirt, stretched out on the ground in all his comeliness, as he gossiped that faraway day to a younger, sillier Edith. I said nothing of course and I was taken by surprise when she suddenly spoke into my imaginings.

'Do you ever see him now?' she said.

I shook my head. 'No. I don't think anyone does. He's gone off to California.'

'To make films?'

'Well, that's the idea. Or at least to make a television series.'

'And is he making one?'

'Not yet but you never know.'

'What about his wife?'

'She's gone with him.'

Edith nodded. We strolled on into the rose garden. Some heavily scented, dark red blooms, Papa Meilland maybe, filled the warm air with their sweet stench.

'Aren't you ever going to ask me if I'm happy?' said Edith with a provocative flick of her head.

'No.'

'Well, I'll tell you anyway.' She broke off a half-open bud and fed its stalk through the top buttonhole of my shirt. 'The fact is, I'm happy enough.'

I did not question her statement. I am glad she was and is happy enough. That is a good deal happier than a large proportion of my address book.

About the Author:

Julian Fellowes, writer, actor and film director, was educated at Ampleforth, Magdalene College, Cambridge and the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. As an actor he is probably best-known for his portrayal of the incorrigible Lord Kilwillie in BBC Television's series Monarch of the Glen. In the cinema he was seen in Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins and Tomorrow Never Dies with Pierce Brosnan. His film screenplay debut was Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay among many other prizes. He has written and directed the film of A Way Through the Wood, based on a book by Nigel Balchin. In the theatre he has written the 'book' for the Cameron Mackintosh/Walt Disney stage musical of Mary Poppins. As well as Snobs, he has a children's story being published in 2006. He has a wife, Emma, a son, Peregrine, and a dachshund called Fudge.

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

'Righto. I'll get the car. Be outside our entrance in five minutes. And don't worry.'

She rather loved him for telling her not to worry about an experience she had been going through once a month since she was twelve but she chose not to assuage his anxiety. With a weak smile, she watched him scuttle out of the room. In this choice of lie, Diana had judged correctly if she wanted instant action. As she calculated, Charles, like all men of his type, had the greatest possible distaste for any of the mechanics of womanhood. One hint of them and he neither needed nor wanted further explanation in order to make him act fast. As he thundered down the family staircase, she listened with the just pride of an efficient workman.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Edith had hardly reached the landing by the bronze of the slave before Lady Uckfield issued forth from a roped-off archway.

'Edith? Is that you? Why didn't you tell us you were coming?' Her mother-in-law slid her arm through hers and attempted to drag her towards the door into the family sitting room. Edith knew that the game was up, silently cursing herself for not pulling a scarf over her face and sliding in unnoticed, but even so she would not give in at once. She extricated herself from Googie's grip and started towards the library and Charles's study beyond.

'I thought I'd be a nuisance and I only want a quick word with Charles. It won't take a moment.' She was walking so fast that, to the delight of the public present, Lady Uckfield was forced to break into a sort of trot to keep up with her. They passed into the splendid library with its high mahogany and ormolu-mounted bookshelves. Above the chimneypiece, an early Broughton in a chestnut periwig gazed down, startled at the scene being played out below him. A few tourists had recognised one or other of them and since the marital split had been in half the newspapers in the country, they left off their bored examination of the thousands of gilded, leather spines and turned all their attention to the two women, thrilled by this unexpected entertainment opportunity.

'Are you staying for luncheon?' said Lady Uckfield, aware of being the cynosure of all eyes and anxious to normalise this very abnormal situation.

'Why? Would you like me to?' said Edith. She in contrast was thoroughly enjoying the exposure of her mother-in-law to the gaze of the common multitude.

'Of course,' said Lady Uckfield, grabbing and pulling at Edith's sleeve in a vain attempt to slow her progress across the gleaming floor.

'I don't think so,' said Edith. She was at the study door by now and her hand was almost on the knob when it opened to reveal the stately form of Lady Bohun. Imperceptibly, with a movement hardly visible to the naked eye, she nodded to her hostess. Edith saw it and at once knew she was too late. The bird had flown.

'Hello, Edith,' said Diana in her slowest and most mannered drawl. 'Will you excuse me? I'm just running into Lewes for something and I must get there before everything closes. Will you be here when we get back?'

'What do you think?' said Edith, and Diana had gone without further ado. Left alone with her daughter-in-law, Lady Uckfield drew her into the room and closed the door. 'Sit down for a moment,' she said, taking her own place behind Charles's desk and absent-mindedly tidying his scattered papers into neat piles.

'There's no need for this,' answered Edith. 'If Charles isn't here, I'll go.'

'Please sit down,' was the repeated request, and Edith did. 'I am sorry you see us as your enemies, my dear.'

'You may be sorry but you can hardly be surprised.'

Lady Uckfield gave her a hurt look. 'I wanted your marriage to work, you know. You have misjudged me if you think otherwise. I always wanted you to be happy.'

'You wanted us to make the best of a bad job.'

'But you didn't, did you?' said Lady Uckfield crisply, all trace of her customary gush and vibrato gone.

There was a measure of reason to this that took some of the wind out of Edith's sails as she was forced to admit. Was it rational of her to suggest that Lady Uckfield should have celebrated when she, Edith, came into their lives? Why should her mother-in-law want her back now that this unpleasant episode was almost over? Lady Uckfield was not finished. 'A year ago,'

she said, 'you were sick of the sight of Charles. When he spoke you gritted your teeth, when he touched you, you shivered. I am his mother and I lived in the same house with you. Did you think I wouldn't notice these things?'

'It wasn't like that.'

'It was exactly like that. He bored you. He bored you to death. Worse than that, he irritated you to the point of distraction.

He could not please you however hard he tried. Nothing he said or did was right. He set your nerves on edge by his very presence and yet now… what am I to make of this sudden eagerness to see him? What has changed?'

Edith drew herself up and looked her opponent in the eye. She was determined somehow to try to gain the initiative. 'Has it occurred to you that I might have had some time for reflection? Or am I too stupid in your eyes to think of anything but money and social climbing?'

'My dear, I never thought you stupid.' Lady Uckfield held up her palm in protest. 'You must at least give me credit for that.' There was a noise on the gravel and the older woman walked over to the window but it was not, as she had feared, Charles coming back for something he'd forgotten. 'I have to ask myself why now, why suddenly, a meeting is so essential when in the first months away you exhibited no such wish. I am a mother and I have to say to myself, what could have changed that might make a reunion with my son so desirable now when it was so un desirable then?'

'Perhaps I don't feel I've made a good choice. Is that hard to understand?'

'On the contrary. I find it easy to understand. Especially since I think you've made a very poor choice indeed. But…' She rested her fingertips against each other like an avuncular preacher making a point in a pulpit. 'Why now? Why such a change upon an instant?'

Edith stared at her. 'You can't stop me seeing him for ever,' she said.

Lady Uckfield nodded. 'No. I dare say I can't.'

'Well then.'

'I think I can stop you seeing him for a few months. Six perhaps, or even three. Let us see how we all feel then about this poor choice you have made.'

At that moment Edith realised that of course her mother-in-law, dear Googie with her mind as pure as snow, knew. They never talked about it, neither at that time nor in the ensuing years, but they were always aware from then on that, beyond a shadow of doubt, they both knew. Edith stood up. 'I'm going now.'

'Are you sure? Can I at least give you something to eat? Or what about a loo? You've come such a long way.' Once again the tone had settled back into its usual intimate pattern with the rhythm of shared midnight secrets in the dormitory.

At this moment, in some strange way, it was hard for Edith not to admire this woman, her sworn foe, who held onto the high ground in every argument against all-comers. It was hard but it was not impossible. 'You are a fucking cow,' she said. 'A fucking cow with a hide of leather and no heart.'

Lady Uckfield seemed to think over these words for a moment before nodding. 'Probably there is some truth in your unflattering description,' she acknowledged. 'And it is perhaps for that reason, or something resembling it, expressed hopefully in more fragrant language, that I have made such a success of my opportunities and you have made such a failure of yours. Goodbye, my dear.'

TWENTY-TWO

You may ask yourself why Edith, outfoxed at every turn, did not travel the more modern route out of her dilemma and, released from embarrassment after a short stay in some discreet, rural nursing home, why she did not then wait the three or six months stipulated by Lady Uckfield and outface them all. I suspect that she hardly knew the reason herself but somehow she was determined not to go that way. She was not, so far as I am aware, particularly religious and, I would have thought, operated on the minimum of moral scruples generally but perhaps because she had seen a way in which she could spare a life, a life that depended on her and her alone, she could not now bring herself to sacrifice it. It was, I think, an essentially animal decision rather than a sentimental one — or else then every tigress in the jungle is sentimental. Women, I suspect, can understand better than most men why something that hardly existed notionally and legally did not yet exist at all should still have been able to command such loyalties.

In the end, help came from a most unlikely sector. She had told me the following morning about her brief sojourn at Broughton and I was naturally dreading the request that I should take a more proactive hand in the whole business when she surprised me by telling me that she was going to wait until Charles's next visit to Feltham. 'He goes every fortnight or so. I'll collar him there.'

'How will you know when he's visiting?'

'Caroline's going to tell me. She'll drive me down.'

This information was both relieving and astonishing. Relieving because of course it meant I could be dispensed with and astonishing because it would never have occurred to me that Caroline would work against her mother's interest. Even now I am not completely sure of her motives. The Chase marriage was looking rocky. It is possible that she did not want the issue of her own satisfactory divorce arrangements being swamped by the divorce of the heir. It may have been an act of rebellion against her mother whose values Caroline always thought (quite wrongly as it happens) she had rejected. It may have been simpler. She loved her brother and she must have hated seeing him unhappy. In the end, I suppose it was, as always, a mixture of all these elements.

'When did you get in touch with her?'

'She telephoned me this morning. She'd heard about my visit to Broughton. I suppose she feels sorry for me.'

'Well, I won't say I'm not surprised but I'm pleased for you. It's certainly a good deal more suitable that Charles's sister should help you than that I should. Will you let me know how you get on?'

'I will,' she said.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Despite her explanation, Edith herself was not really clear as to Caroline's motives. They had never been close since Edith's admission into the family. They were not enemies. Indeed, despite Eric's almost continual stream of snide comments directed at Edith, she and her sister-in-law had achieved a kind of guarded familiarity but 'friendship' would have been too strong a word for it and Caroline would never have been confused as to where her loyalties lay. For all her professed modernity, Caroline Chase, devoid of self-knowledge as she was, remained very much a chip off her mother's block. She might despise the taut-faced countesses and ministers' wives that made up Lady Uckfield's coterie but when it came down to it her own friends were generally these women's rebellious and oddly-dressed children.

At all events, whatever her motives, she was as good as her word. Two days later the telephone rang in the Ebury Street flat and when Edith picked it up Caroline was on the line. 'Charles is at Feltham now if you're serious. He went down last night and he's on his own there until tomorrow.'

Edith glanced over to where Simon was deep in the Daily Mail. He also had the Independent delivered every day but he never read it. She steadied herself for one of those faintly Chinese telephone conversations designed to conceal their subject from the witnesses present. 'That's kind of you,' she said.

'So do you want me to take you down?'

'If you can,' came the stilted reply.

'Can't you talk?'

'Not really.'

'I'll be at the top of lower Sloane Street by Coutts at ten o'clock.'

'Fine.' Edith replaced the receiver carefully. It was not, as she explained later, that she ever wavered in her desire to see Charles but, just as she kept silent about the Sussex visit, she was not a big one for bridge-burning. As it happened, Simon had hardly been aware of the telephone conversation at all. She smiled across at him. 'Aren't you working today?'

He looked up. 'In the afternoon. Why?'

'That was Caroline. Asking me to lunch.'

'You're keeping your options open, then.'

She didn't answer but he didn't care.

Once again, she chose her clothes with some deliberation. The easy option was to repeat herself and simply to don a country outfit from her Broughton days but that seemed somehow dishonourable after her humiliation at the hands of Lady Uckfield. It was also, as she now saw more clearly, obvious, which was worse. No, if Charles were to take her back it must be as herself and not because she could pass as Diana Bohun or any of the other cold-hearted bitches who enjoyed their loveless marriages at the heart of Charles's world. Eventually she selected a tight black skirt that showed her legs and a loose blue sweater interwoven with coloured ribbons. She brushed her hair and applied her make-up fairly heavily (that is, for Charles rather than for Caroline). She surveyed the results and was pleased. She looked pretty and bright and just Londony enough for it not to seem as if she was trying too hard.

'Very nice,' said Simon. 'Where are you off to now?'

'I thought I'd do some shopping. I've got to get a birthday present for my father.'

'I suppose I'm not included in the girls' lunch.'

'It's at Caroline's flat…' She shrugged sadly. 'Why not come with me now? If I can find something for Daddy, I'm going on to Harrods. See what they've got in for the summer.'

It may seem that there was a calculated risk in this cunning approach but there wasn't really. No man in his right mind would accept the job of trailing a woman through a series of departments when she isn't even looking for anything specific.

Especially when there's no lunch at the end of it. He shook his head as she knew he must. 'Not really. If it's all right. I'll see you tonight.'

'What time will you be back?'

He shrugged. 'Seven. Eight.'

They kissed and Edith seized a coat and was gone. A minute later she was walking towards the antique shops at the Pimlico Road end of the street. She knew that Caroline would ask her what she was up to in the two hours on the road that lay ahead and she was trying to determine both what she would say and what was the truth — not that these two would necessarily correlate.

She knew by now, if only from Lady Uckfield's near-hysterical opposition, that there must be a chance she could get Charles back. For a while she had pretended to herself that she was still simply exploring the possibility but in her heart she had already gone a stage further than that. She was bound to acknowledge that she would not have been as anxious as she had been in her attempts to secure a meeting had this not been the case. The question remained, how much did she want him back? Did she want him at any cost? Would she try to exact concessions? Would their life return to precisely the same pattern? And then again, could she gain concessions anyway? Weren't all the cards in Charles's hand? Worst of all: suppose she was wrong and he didn't want her back? In these ruminations, she was conscious that she had pushed the real reason for her change of heart to the back of her mind but she reasoned that if she was successful then that was after all where it was going to stay and so why worry about it now? It seemed to present her with such a yawning chasm that there was no reason to negotiate it before she absolutely had to. To all intents and purposes, from the moment she had known that she was at last to be permitted to see Charles, her secret had ceased to be true.

She stopped outside the art gallery opposite the Poule Au Pot and glanced at some sketches in the window. As she stood there, a gleaming limousine drew to a halt and the chauffeur helped a woman of some indeterminate Middle Eastern aspect to alight from the vehicle and enter the shop. Looking at this heavily-rouged, sable-wrapped creature, diamond bracelets flashing in the sun, Edith suddenly thought of her mother-in-law. How well she knew that this would not be Lady Uckfield's way. She would arrive in a taxi with a minimum of fuss, in sensible clothes and excellent pearls, and rely on the recognition of the manager. And yet the fact remained that, should these women meet, this Levantine would be nervous of Lady Uckfield while Lady Uckfield would be politely indifferent to her.

Her clash in the Little Library at Broughton, far from lowering Lady Uckfield in Edith's eyes, had paradoxically resulted in a grudging respect for her code. She had always faintly despised those members of her, or Charles's, circle who had fawned over her mother-in-law, but over the last days she had come to re-examine her feelings. In the early stages of her marriage she had perhaps yearned for more of what this Eastern woman in her furs took for granted in her daily round, luxury, glamour, famous faces. All these things — at any rate an English version of them — the young Edith Lavery had wrongly perceived as being connected to the world of a 'Lady Broughton' and she had been taken aback when so much of her new life had proved mundane. She knew that Lady Uckfield thought she, Edith, had gleaned her ideas from novels and nineteenth-century biographies, she had even attempted to defend her own mother occasionally from the accusation of filling her head with bourgeois fantasy, but she realised there was justice in the charge. The reality of life with Charles had seemed so flat and changeless compared to those action-packed plots, the glittering, power-filled ballrooms, that dizzying Lady-Palmerston-like career that she had been anticipating.

And yet, that day at the dress show, when the crowd had broken before Lady Uckfield and her minor Royal Highness like the Red Sea before Moses, Edith had seen what she had thrown away, the key to every closed door in England and most of the rest of the world — at least among the superficial. A landed title might not secure an invitation to Camp David but, even in the twenty-first century, she need never be alone in Palm Beach. And Edith knew by now that the kind of people who were superficial, the snobs whose social life was based around collecting people to underpin their own status, outnumbered the rest by ten to one. This kind of power might not be worth much in the great scheme of things but it was something and what had she gained in exchange for it? Life at Broughton might be dull but what was life in Ebury Street? Which did she prefer, lack of noise or lack of muscle? She had walked out of the world of the worldly in a petulant pout of boredom and overnight she had transformed herself from a high court card in the Game of Society into a non-person that people were ashamed to be seen with.

With something akin to a shiver she resumed her walk. Then she thought of the two men. Her subconscious assumption, because she knew that she had married Charles for his name and his fortune, had always been that, stripped of these things, she would never have looked at him. In their two years together she had grown to resent him, absurd as that now seemed even to her, for luring her with his worldly possessions without having the personality to amuse her once she was caught. The truth was she had pursued him and yet, in her self-justifying and dishonest mind, by the time Simon had come along, Charles had assumed the moral status of a baited trap.

Now, strolling down Pimlico Road, admiring the antique window displays, she thought back to her ruminations in the Green Park and realised that separation had changed things. It was her unconscious habit these days to think of her husband more gently. Was he really so disagreeable as company? So much less attractive than Simon? After all, men far worse than Charles find wives all the time. Would the idea of Charles as a husband have seemed so bad in the old days before her marriage? If she had been introduced to Mr Charles Broughton as a schoolfriend's suitor would she have wanted to run out screaming into the night, dragging the doomed girl with her? Of course not. Certainly Simon was a good deal better looking, there could be no doubt of that, but over the months she had grown used to his looks and she had begun to be irritated by the perpetual twinkling that seemed to accompany his every social interchange. All those half-smiles and narrowed lids lavished on waitresses and air hostesses and girls at the checkout in Partridges, all that tossing back of the golden locks, had started to bore her.

More troubling than the comparison of appearance (Charles, after all, while no beauty, was perfectly respectable to look at) was the question of sex. She had to concede that Simon was much the better lover, an excellent lover indeed by any standards let alone poor Charles's, and this was harder to dismiss. She enjoyed going to bed with Simon. Very much. In fact, the thought of making love with him was still enough to tickle her innards, to make her slightly fidgety and uncomfortable, to make her want to cross and uncross her legs. Dear Charles could never be a competitor here with his fumbling, five-minute thrust and his 'thank you, darling', which nearly drove her mad.

But for the first time she acknowledged, predictably perhaps, that after a year, making love to Simon had lost its novelty.

The sex, though less frequent than at first, was still excellent, no question, but it could no longer blind her to the life for which she had left her gilded cage. After all, how much time does one actually spend in bed making love? Was it really worth the rest of the bargain? Did a pleasurable half an hour two or three times a week compensate for those endless, terrible parties, those awful people with their flat accents, sitting around the flat smoking, or those frightful drama school pals discussing 'hair-dos'

and gardening tips and bucket-shop holidays? And anyway, wasn't Charles rather sweet in his way? Wasn't he more decent than Simon? Wasn't he truer as a person?

So Edith continued up Sloane Street belabouring herself with her false values, all the while attempting to convince herself with a litany of Charles's essential worth until, in a rare moment of honesty, like the sun breaking through the clouds, she saw the irony of this inner conversation. She, Edith, was using these arguments as if the opposition to them would overwhelm her should she give it a hearing. She was forcing herself to the next step when any impartial observer, and of this she was suddenly quite sure, would have freely volunteered that of course Charles was more decent than Simon. In fact, in any real way, it was perfectly obvious that Simon wasn't decent at all. Unlike Charles he had no honour, only pragmatism. He could not be true because there was no truth in him. His morality was a tawdry bundle of received, fashionable causes that he believed would make him attractive to casting directors. Edith was talking herself into thinking that in some ways she preferred Charles to Simon when to anyone who knew them both there could be no comparison. Charles, dull as he might be, was infinitely the better man. Simon was a mass of nothing.

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

Edith had gone for a walk and found it was cold outside.

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

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

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

'What luck there are no children.'

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

'Then why leave Eric?'

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

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

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

'Then why did you marry him?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Is he?' said Edith, thrilled.

'Yes.' Caroline lit a cigarette and for a moment Edith thought they were going into the central divider. 'I know Lady Uckfield thinks it'll blow over. She has a fantasy that he will forget you and marry the daughter of some peer who'll give him four children, two of whom will inherit estates from relations of their mother's.' Caroline laughed wryly. This was of course a wonderfully accurate résumé of Lady Uckfield's dreams.

'Are you quite sure she's wrong?'

'How little you know my brother,' said Caroline, and lapsed again into silence. Edith naturally longed to hear more of this wretched and unhappy man, whose life was a misery without her and to whom, by some strange miracle, she was already married. She gave Caroline a quizzical look and the latter relented. 'In the first place I do not think that my mother's idea of your perfect successor is Charles's. To put it bluntly, if that was what he was looking for he could have found it with very little difficulty. But that is no longer the point. Charles is a simple man. He is capable of feelings but they are uncomplicated, straightforward and deep. He can hardly communicate and he cannot flirt at all.' Edith thought with wonder of her other love, who could only communicate and flirt. Simon's problem was the opposite of Charles's. He could not feel. Caroline was still talking. 'Charles has made his choice. You. You are his wife. In his heart that's it. Finish. I am not saying that if you did divorce him he wouldn't eventually settle for someone else as brood-mare but in his heart he would have failed and his real wife would be out there walking around with someone else. And that, my dear, would be you.'

The rest of the drive was accomplished in silence. It was almost as if they were waiting for the next event in the plot before they could continue their discussion. And so they wound their way through the flat Norfolk landscape until at last they turned into a well-kept but somewhat overshadowed drive, which in its turn, when they had been released from the high walls of rhododendron, brought them to the wide, gravelled forecourt of the main house.

Feltham Place had passed into the Broughton family in 1811 when the then Lord Broughton had married Anne Wykham, only child of Sir Marmaduke Wykham, sixth baronet and the last of his line. The house was Jacobean, more a gentleman's than a nobleman's residence, picturesque rather than magnificent with roofs bristling with barley sugar chimneys and possibly for this reason it had never managed to catch at the family's imagination. Like many houses of its period it was in a dip (before the pumping innovations of the late seventeenth century allowed those splendid, landscaped views), although the flatness of the county gave a certain openness at the bottom of its valley. It might have functioned as the Broughtons' Dower House or as a seat for the heir, but there were other houses nearer Uckfield that had served these turns at least until the Second World War and recently, as we know, the heir had chosen to live with his parents.

In the past, Feltham had been let but it was taken back for the shooting in the 1890s and had been farmed in hand ever since, despite the family's allowing the sport to lapse after the war. Charles had revived the shoot over the last few years and he was proud of the fact that he could now safely let two and three-hundred-bird days, secure in the knowledge that there would be no great disappointments. He and his keeper had worked hard. The covers and hedgerows had been replanted, the feeding pens reorganised, indeed the whole appearance of the countryside had been more or less restored to the condition of a century before. But despite this, he was not tempted to bring his own shooting guests to Feltham. They were offered the splendours of Broughton while businessmen, people with mobile telephones and gleaming sports wear, took the shooting at Feltham by the day. At a (considerable) extra cost they could even stay overnight, which may have accounted for the somewhat boarding-house quality within.

The Wykham who'd built the place had been a favourite of King James I and in those days it had been much larger but the king's beau had been improvident and his heir (a nephew since, unsurprisingly, the builder had never married) demolished two-thirds of it. This meant that the brickwork and carving on the façade and throughout the house was of a much higher standard than one would normally associate with the scale of building. Inside, all the first-rate furniture and pictures had long since been swallowed up by Broughton and most of what remained dated from its rehabilitation as a shooting-lodge at the end of the last century. Lumpy, leather-covered Chesterfields provided the seating and the walls were covered with second-rate portraits and enormous, indifferently painted scenes of hunting, shooting and all the other methods of country killing. Still, the rooms themselves were pleasant and the staircase, more or less the sole survivor from the days of the Jacobean favourite, was magnificent.

Edith hardly knew the place. In Charles's mind it was the nearest thing to an 'office' in his weekly round. He ran it as a business and apart from an occasional appearance at a village show and an annual cocktail party for all those neighbours who might be tiresome about the shoot were they not courted every so often, he had no social profile in the county at all. Quite frequently he stayed with the Cumnors at their infinitely larger and more luxurious house four miles down the road, rather than put the ancient care-taking couple to the trouble of opening a bedroom.

Caroline drew up by the front door and the two women made their way into the wide and gloomy hall that took up two-thirds of the entrance front. It was decorated by a frieze of slightly bogus armorial tributes to the Wykhams and the Broughtons but otherwise boasted no colour at all apart from the brown of the panelling and the less attractive brown of the leather furniture. 'Charles!' Caroline called out. It was a chilly day and the interior of the house was noticeably colder than the air outside. Edith pulled her coat tightly around her. 'Charles!' shouted Caroline again, and she set off through a doorway that led first to the staircase and then into the former morning room that operated as Charles's office. Edith followed her. Desks and filing cabinets stood about the room, the chill slightly alleviated by a three-bar electric fire in the grate that looked as if its very existence breached the entire safety code. They were still standing there when another door, facing them, opened and there all at once stood a flummoxed Charles. To her amazement, even to her delight, Edith suddenly realised that she was shocked at his appearance. Gone was that sleek country gentleman who always looked as if he was on the way to make an advertisement for Burberry's. She was astonished to see that her fastidious husband was looking scruffy and unkempt. He was almost dirty. Caught out by her stare, he pushed his fingers through his hair. 'Hello,' he said, with a watery smile. 'Fancy seeing you here.'

At this point Caroline took her leave. 'I'm going in to Norwich,' she said. 'I'll be back in a couple of hours.' It was a relief really that she didn't even try to normalise the situation or start any we-were-just-driving-past nonsense.

Charles nodded. 'I see,' he said.

Left alone, Edith was oddly blank as to quite what she was going to say next. She sat on the edge of a chair near the fire like a housemaid at an interview and leaned forward to warm her hands. 'I hope you're not cross. I did so want to talk to you.

Properly. And I began to feel that I was never going to be allowed to. I'm afraid I thought I'd just chance it.'

He shook his head. 'I'm not a bit cross. Not at all.' He hesitated. 'I — I'm sorry about the telephone calls and all the rest of it. It wasn't my mother not telling me, you know. Well, it wasn't only that. I expect you thought it was. It was just that I didn't really know what to say. It seemed better to leave it all to the professionals. Of course now you're here…' He tailed off disconsolately.

Edith nodded. 'I had to know what you were thinking about everything. I understand your parents want you free straight away.'

'Oh that.' He looked sheepish. 'I don't mind. Honestly. Whatever suits you.' He stared at her in the unflattering light of an overhead bulb. 'How's Simon?'

'Fine. Very well. Loving his series.'

'Good. I'm glad.' He didn't sound it but he was trying to be courteous. Edith was struck anew by the decency and kindness of this man she had tossed aside. What had she been thinking of? Her own actions sometimes seemed to her so hard to understand. Like a foreign film. And yet these had been her choices. The conversation limped on.

'I don't think I ever came to Feltham at this time of year. I must have but I don't remember. It's rather lovely, isn't it?'

Charles smiled. 'Dear old Feltham,' he said.

'You ought to live here. Do it up. Get some of the stuff back.'

He half nodded. 'I think I'd be a bit lonely, stuck out here on my own. Don't you? Nice idea, though.'

'Oh, Charles.' In spite of the cynicism with which she had embarked on this mission Edith had become a victim of her own justifications. Like Deborah Kerr in The King and I, whistling her happy tune to make herself brave, Edith had succeeded in talking herself into believing that she was a romantic figure who had lost her love rather than a selfish girl who bitterly regretted her comforts. Her eyes began to moisten.

Oddly perhaps, it was only at this moment that Charles fully grasped she had definitely come to try to get him back. Up to this point he was still wondering if it might not just be for some financial or time-related scheme that she had made the journey.

Despite his earlier suspicions, his non-existent vanity made him slow to reach the obvious conclusion and he thought she might want him to agree to something before his lawyers could talk him out of it. He was not offended by this but, if it should prove to be the case, he was anxious to conceal his wretchedness from her. Both out of consideration for her feelings and from a (perfectly justifiable) sense of pride. It now occurred to him, with a lurch in his stomach, that this was not what he was dealing with. She wanted to come back to him. He looked at her.

For all his simplicity, he was not an idiot. Thinking along the same lines as that night in his study at Broughton he knew that he was no more interesting than when she left him. He also suspected that the world of show business had not really appealed to her, not at any rate for 'every day'. Just as a year of sin had served to give Edith a clearer idea of what Simon consisted of, so two years of marriage and a year apart had made Edith comprehensible to Charles. He knew she was an arriviste and the child of an arriviste. He saw her vulgarities of spirit now as sharply as he saw her fine points, of which, despite Lady Uckfield's comments, he still believed there were many. He also knew that if he made a move towards her the thing was settled.

He stared at the hunched-up figure, trying to scoop warmth out of the electric bars. Her coat was a sort of camel colour and looked rather cheap. Was this sad little figure, this 'blonde piece' as his mother would say, to be the next Marchioness of Uckfield? To be painted by some indifferent chocolate box portraitist and hung alongside the Sargeants, Laszlos and Birleys of the preceding generations? Was it in her to make a go of it?

But as he watched her, the sense of how vulnerable she suddenly seemed to him, with her bright make-up and her chain store coat, trying to charm him and looking instead somehow pathetic, overwhelmed him with pity and, in the wake of pity, with love. Whatever her suitability, whatever the limitations of her feelings, whatever her motives, he knew that he, Charles Broughton, could not be responsible for her unhappiness. He was, in short, incapable of hurting her.

'Are you happy?' he said slowly, knowing as he did so that the words gave her permission to return to him and to his life.

At the sound of them Edith knew her pardon had come through. Despite the difficulties with Simon, with her mother-inlaw, with the newspapers, with the sun, with the moon, she could now be Charles's wife again if she chose, which, not very surprisingly given all the circumstances, she did. For a second she felt almost sick with relief but then, since she did not wish to appear too desperate, she waited for a minute before she spoke, deliberately punctuating the moment with a pregnant pause. Once satisfied that her answer was anticipated by them both she carefully raised her tear-stained eyes to his.

'No,' she said.

EPILOGUE

Smorzando

It did not, so far as I remember, cause any great murmur when Edith was delivered of a daughter seven months or so after the reconciliation. Of course, there was a lot of talk, particularly from her mother, about their being taken by surprise as Edith was

'so frighteningly early'. In fact, Mrs Lavery rather over-egged her performance by insisting on sitting in the hospital throughout the night because of the 'risks of premature birth', which naturally gave rise to a few funny stories on the dinner circuit, but nobody minded. Versions of this sort of folderol are still rather touchingly employed in Society on such occasions. These things are rituals rather than untruths and cause no harm. The point was the baby was female, which took any future strain out of the situation. It meant everything could return to normal without a lingering after-taste.

Even Lady Uckfield, usually so careful, gave herself away in a rare unguarded moment when I telephoned to learn the news.

'Boy or girl?' I asked when she picked up the receiver.

'Girl,' said Lady Uckfield. 'Isn't it a relief?' Then, quickly but not quickly enough, she added, 'That they're both doing so well.'

'A great relief,' I answered, going along with this dishonesty. There was no point in blaming her for retaining the deepest prejudices of her kind. Now that the baby could not inherit the glories of Broughton, thanks to the arcane laws governing the peerage that even Mr Blair, for all his trumpeting of women's rights, has not seen fit to change, she would present no further danger and might be lived with in peace. Since all three 'parents' were fair there was not much chance of the baby having the wrong colouring and, at least to date, the girl does not seem particularly to favour Simon, always assuming of course that the infant is his — something of which one can, after all, never be entirely sure. Not at least without resorting to DNA testing, which no entrant in Debrett's would ever risk for fear of what it might reveal. One foreign visitor at Broughton, ignorant of the excellent Edwardian maxim never to 'comment on a likeness in another's child' asked me if I did not think she took after Charles.

I may have imagined a momentary chill in the room but I nodded. 'I do,' I said. 'She's not like Edith at all.' Thereby earning an especially warm glance from my host. Amusingly enough, when I looked at the toddler properly, she did seem to resemble him a bit. But then again that may have been in expression rather than feature. It might seem strange but in later years Charles came to love the girl so much that his younger children would complain of his favouritism. Even less logically, she would eventually develop into the preferred grandchild of Lady Uckfield, which only goes to show that the old maxim is correct and there's nowt so queer as folk. At any rate, barely fourteen months later, Lady Broughton was once more brought to bed, this time of a boy. The new Viscount Nutley was welcomed with bonfires and bun fights in Sussex and Norfolk and, frankly, to be brutal and unmodernist about it, the exact paternity of little Lady Anne had ceased to matter much to anyone.

Caroline did divorce Eric. It was a quiet business without acrimony and with more style than I confess I thought Eric capable of. He was not single long. Within eighteen months he had married the daughter of an immensely rich Cheshire industrialist, Christine somebody or other. They were much better suited than he and Caroline had been. For one thing, she shared Eric's ambitions, which she pursued as relentlessly as if they had been her own and of course they soon were. I happened to meet them both at Ascot a few months after they married and I must say I liked her. She was full of energy and in many ways a good deal easier to rub along with than Caroline, even if she was already infected with Eric's nonsense. I remember her using the phrase 'our sort of people', meaning, I imagine, some sort of exclusive social group to which they belonged. It must have been a luxury for Eric who had spent his entire first marriage being reminded daily of an Inner Circle forever closed to him.

He growled at me by way of recognition but I was not offended. I had by this time forgiven Eric his earlier insults and anyway one of the freedoms of growing older is that one is no longer obliged to dislike someone simply because they dislike you. After all, he was entitled. Lady Uckfield had made no secret of how little she relished his company and had, somewhat maliciously I suspect, used me at times to demonstrate this.

'I suppose you still see them all?' he said when his wife had stopped discussing her new Poggenpohl kitchen.

I nodded. 'We've got a baby now so a bit less than I did. But yes, I see them.'

'And is dear Edith happy in her work?' Of course, it was quite understandable that he should be irritated when he contemplated one who had survived the course that had brought him down.

'I think so.'

'I'll bet she is. And how is darling "Googie"?' He spat out the name just as I had once heard Edith do before her rehabilitation. Now, for her at least, the name had re-normalised. 'I wonder what my dear ex-mother-in-law thinks of all the recent developments.'

'Oh, I'd say she was pretty merry, one way and another,' I said, for all the world as if I thought he cared, and we nodded to each other and moved on.

As I strolled away to rejoin Adela for tea with Louisa in the Household Stand I pondered my answers and concluded that I had spoken no more than the truth. Of course, as everyone had predicted, the children had changed everything. One may be exhausted but there is little time to be bored with two children under four, particularly as Edith, to her mother-in-law's bemusement, had eschewed a proper Norland nanny and chosen instead to have a series of Portuguese and Australians.

Charming girls, one and all (or nearly all), but not the type to take over the nursery as their province. I thought it a wise decision and so, I was pleased to note, did Charles.

But as to quite what Lady Uckfield really made of it all … One would have to get up very early in the morning to know precisely what she thought about anything, earlier than I rise, certainly. We were not, as I had predicted, quite such friends after the reinstatement of Edith. Although I have not yet given up hope of regaining my former position of Court Favourite.

Poor woman, she had allowed herself to dream a little during the interregnum and the imagined life she had woven for herself with dear Clarissa or one of her kind as junior chatelaine had filled her with happy prospects. Ironically her imaginings had not been all that unlike the despised Mrs Lavery's. Lady Uckfield, too, had seen herself as a special friend of her daughter-in-law's family. The two grandmothers would lunch together perhaps and take in an exhibition… So it was hard to reconcile herself to the Return of Edith, not least because she had allowed herself the rare luxury of admitting what she really felt while Edith was away. Worse, she had confessed these secrets not only to herself and her husband, which was bad enough, but to me, a non-relation. In doing so she knew she had given me a weapon. From now on whenever she referred to 'our darling Edith' there was a risk that I might catch her eye if I so wished and in her heart expose her. I had no intention of doing this but the threat of it introduced a coldness between us nevertheless. I was and am sorry but there is nothing to be done about it. Meanwhile, Adela and I continue to stay at Broughton pretty regularly.

I remember once Lady Uckfield did let herself go a little. There had been a dinner party and the guests were spread out in knots over the drawing room and the Red Saloon next door. Edith was at the centre of an admiring group, for you will understand that a lot of people had a good deal of ground to make up having dropped her during her period of exile. One might have thought that those who had been loyal, Annette Watson for one, would have been rewarded with a shower of invitations but I don't believe they were. Perhaps this was predictable. Anyway, on this particular evening, surrounded as she was, Edith made some remark, I forget what, which was greeted with gales of sycophantic laughter. I was alone, having helped myself to some more coffee, so there was no one to overhear when Lady Uckfield drew level.

'Edith Triumphans,' she said. I nodded. But she would not let it go. 'To the victor the spoils.'

'And is Edith the victor?' I asked.

'Isn't she?'

'I don't know.' I shrugged. I imagine I was attempting to be philosophical and by an easy and familiar transition had become dishonest.

'Of course she is the victor,' said Lady Uckfield, quite truthfully. 'You have won.'

Now this was irritating. She was right about Edith, I do admit, but not about me. If anything I had always been a partisan of the Uckfields during the struggle for Charles's soul and she knew it. 'Don't blame me,' I said quite firmly. 'You asked me not to encourage her and I didn't. It was your own daughter who arranged it all, not me. The fact is Charles wanted her back.

Voilà tout. He must know what's best for himself, I suppose.'

Lady Uckfield laughed. 'That, of course, is precisely what he does not know.' Her tone was a little bitter but more predominately sad. It was also, as I knew it must be, the tone of resignation. 'I told you I didn't believe they would be happy and I wait anxiously to be proved wrong. However,' she waved her little claws and the jewels in her rings flashed in the firelight, 'the thing is done. We must make the best of it. It is time to move on to the next square. Let us at least hope they will be no less happy than everybody else.' And she was gone.

Would they be less happy than everybody else? That was certainly the question. Although she had returned to him without treaty, Edith had nevertheless wrung some considerable concessions in the process. To start with she had grasped the folly of her earlier belief that it was safer to be bored in the country than entertained in London and she had persuaded Charles into a house in Fulham, which had been purchased for more or less what the little flat in Eaton Place had gone for. Now she allowed herself a day or two in London a week. She had also found some committees to sit on and had become involved, down in Sussex, in the actual day-to-day running of a hospice near Lewes. All in all, she had started to evolve the life she would be leading at sixty when she herself, never mind everyone else, would have forgotten that there had ever been a hiccup in her early married life. I thought, on reflection, that it all boded quite well.

We went down to Broughton two or three times a year as a rule. Adela and Edith were never much more than amiable with each other but Charles became very fond of my wife and so we were easy guests, I think. We enjoyed it as, apart from anything else, we had a baby in tow and the houses we could stay in without feeling that we had imported a miniature anarchist were few. Our son, Hugo, was about five months older than Anne and that ensured a measure of shared activity, accompanied by a good deal of merriment from both mothers. It is a truism but it is still true that the longer one knows people the less relevant it becomes whether or not one liked them initially. As I knew from my friendship with Isabel Easton, there is no substitute for shared history and it was clear that by the time ten years had passed, my wife and Lady Broughton would think of themselves as close friends without ever necessarily liking each other much more than they did to start with.

Needless to say, at an early stage after the great patch-up, Edith wished me to understand that she was not interested in pursuing long conversations about her choices, past or present. I quite agreed with her so she needn't have worried. I know only too well how tedious it is to have the recipient of earlier intimacies still hanging around when those intimacies have become irrelevant embarrassments. Anyway, so far as I was concerned, she had seen sense and I hadn't the slightest desire to shake her resolve.

She tested me a few times, waiting, when we happened to be alone, to see if I would bring up the subject of Simon or Charles or marriage or, worse, the baby, but I never did and I am happy to say she began to relax into our old intimacy.

In truth, even had she questioned me, I would have had little to report on the Simon front. I don't know how anxious his wife was to take him back when she had been given the surprising news that his Great Affair was over but, whatever her feelings, she had done it. I saw him once, some months later, at an audition and he told me he was planning to move to Los Angeles to 'try my luck'. I wasn't surprised since this is not an unusual reaction for a player after a disappointing career. As a rule the Hollywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money — and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years. However, there are always exceptions and I would not be surprised if Simon were one. He seemed to have all the qualities the natives of that city admire and none that they dislike.

Perhaps because he knew we would not be meeting for a while, he asked after Edith. I muttered that she was well and he nodded. 'I'm glad.'

'Good.'

He shook his head at me and raised his eyebrows. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Women!'

I nodded and gave him a sympathetic laugh so we parted friends. I suppose one might gauge the extent of his heartbreak from this subsequent reaction. I do not think Charles would have shaken his head to an acquaintance and said, 'Women!' like a character from a situation comedy had his wife chosen never to return. I think he would have curled up in the dark somewhere and never mentioned her name again, so I suppose we must all concede that Edith had ended up with the man who loved her most. Even so, there was no malice in Simon's eyes and I think one should remember this at least, that when all was said and done there really wasn't any harm in him. It is surely not so terrible a testimonial.

Nor did I ever betray to Edith the Eastons', or rather David's, anxiety to stay in with the family, if necessary at her expense.

Gradually even that slightly uncomfortable connection was also resumed. All in all, things went back to normal surprisingly quickly. Even the papers only gave it a couple of squibs — in the Standard, I seem to remember, and in one of the tabloids

— and then it was over.

Just once she did bring it up, perhaps because I never had. We were walking in the gardens on a Sunday in summer three or even four years after she had returned to the fold and we found ourselves down by the approach to the rose garden where they had set up our chairs for the filming, however long ago it was. The others were playing croquet and as we strolled along, the sound of balls being hit and people getting cross wafted gently over us. Suddenly I was struck by the image of Simon Russell, in his frilled shirt, stretched out on the ground in all his comeliness, as he gossiped that faraway day to a younger, sillier Edith. I said nothing of course and I was taken by surprise when she suddenly spoke into my imaginings.

'Do you ever see him now?' she said.

I shook my head. 'No. I don't think anyone does. He's gone off to California.'

'To make films?'

'Well, that's the idea. Or at least to make a television series.'

'And is he making one?'

'Not yet but you never know.'

'What about his wife?'

'She's gone with him.'

Edith nodded. We strolled on into the rose garden. Some heavily scented, dark red blooms, Papa Meilland maybe, filled the warm air with their sweet stench.

'Aren't you ever going to ask me if I'm happy?' said Edith with a provocative flick of her head.

'No.'

'Well, I'll tell you anyway.' She broke off a half-open bud and fed its stalk through the top buttonhole of my shirt. 'The fact is, I'm happy enough.'

I did not question her statement. I am glad she was and is happy enough. That is a good deal happier than a large proportion of my address book.

About the Author:

Julian Fellowes, writer, actor and film director, was educated at Ampleforth, Magdalene College, Cambridge and the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. As an actor he is probably best-known for his portrayal of the incorrigible Lord Kilwillie in BBC Television's series Monarch of the Glen. In the cinema he was seen in Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins and Tomorrow Never Dies with Pierce Brosnan. His film screenplay debut was Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay among many other prizes. He has written and directed the film of A Way Through the Wood, based on a book by Nigel Balchin. In the theatre he has written the 'book' for the Cameron Mackintosh/Walt Disney stage musical of Mary Poppins. As well as Snobs, he has a children's story being published in 2006. He has a wife, Emma, a son, Peregrine, and a dachshund called Fudge.

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

'Righto. I'll get the car. Be outside our entrance in five minutes. And don't worry.'

She rather loved him for telling her not to worry about an experience she had been going through once a month since she was twelve but she chose not to assuage his anxiety. With a weak smile, she watched him scuttle out of the room. In this choice of lie, Diana had judged correctly if she wanted instant action. As she calculated, Charles, like all men of his type, had the greatest possible distaste for any of the mechanics of womanhood. One hint of them and he neither needed nor wanted further explanation in order to make him act fast. As he thundered down the family staircase, she listened with the just pride of an efficient workman.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Edith had hardly reached the landing by the bronze of the slave before Lady Uckfield issued forth from a roped-off archway.

'Edith? Is that you? Why didn't you tell us you were coming?' Her mother-in-law slid her arm through hers and attempted to drag her towards the door into the family sitting room. Edith knew that the game was up, silently cursing herself for not pulling a scarf over her face and sliding in unnoticed, but even so she would not give in at once. She extricated herself from Googie's grip and started towards the library and Charles's study beyond.

'I thought I'd be a nuisance and I only want a quick word with Charles. It won't take a moment.' She was walking so fast that, to the delight of the public present, Lady Uckfield was forced to break into a sort of trot to keep up with her. They passed into the splendid library with its high mahogany and ormolu-mounted bookshelves. Above the chimneypiece, an early Broughton in a chestnut periwig gazed down, startled at the scene being played out below him. A few tourists had recognised one or other of them and since the marital split had been in half the newspapers in the country, they left off their bored examination of the thousands of gilded, leather spines and turned all their attention to the two women, thrilled by this unexpected entertainment opportunity.

'Are you staying for luncheon?' said Lady Uckfield, aware of being the cynosure of all eyes and anxious to normalise this very abnormal situation.

'Why? Would you like me to?' said Edith. She in contrast was thoroughly enjoying the exposure of her mother-in-law to the gaze of the common multitude.

'Of course,' said Lady Uckfield, grabbing and pulling at Edith's sleeve in a vain attempt to slow her progress across the gleaming floor.

'I don't think so,' said Edith. She was at the study door by now and her hand was almost on the knob when it opened to reveal the stately form of Lady Bohun. Imperceptibly, with a movement hardly visible to the naked eye, she nodded to her hostess. Edith saw it and at once knew she was too late. The bird had flown.

'Hello, Edith,' said Diana in her slowest and most mannered drawl. 'Will you excuse me? I'm just running into Lewes for something and I must get there before everything closes. Will you be here when we get back?'

'What do you think?' said Edith, and Diana had gone without further ado. Left alone with her daughter-in-law, Lady Uckfield drew her into the room and closed the door. 'Sit down for a moment,' she said, taking her own place behind Charles's desk and absent-mindedly tidying his scattered papers into neat piles.

'There's no need for this,' answered Edith. 'If Charles isn't here, I'll go.'

'Please sit down,' was the repeated request, and Edith did. 'I am sorry you see us as your enemies, my dear.'

'You may be sorry but you can hardly be surprised.'

Lady Uckfield gave her a hurt look. 'I wanted your marriage to work, you know. You have misjudged me if you think otherwise. I always wanted you to be happy.'

'You wanted us to make the best of a bad job.'

'But you didn't, did you?' said Lady Uckfield crisply, all trace of her customary gush and vibrato gone.

There was a measure of reason to this that took some of the wind out of Edith's sails as she was forced to admit. Was it rational of her to suggest that Lady Uckfield should have celebrated when she, Edith, came into their lives? Why should her mother-in-law want her back now that this unpleasant episode was almost over? Lady Uckfield was not finished. 'A year ago,'

she said, 'you were sick of the sight of Charles. When he spoke you gritted your teeth, when he touched you, you shivered. I am his mother and I lived in the same house with you. Did you think I wouldn't notice these things?'

'It wasn't like that.'

'It was exactly like that. He bored you. He bored you to death. Worse than that, he irritated you to the point of distraction.

He could not please you however hard he tried. Nothing he said or did was right. He set your nerves on edge by his very presence and yet now… what am I to make of this sudden eagerness to see him? What has changed?'

Edith drew herself up and looked her opponent in the eye. She was determined somehow to try to gain the initiative. 'Has it occurred to you that I might have had some time for reflection? Or am I too stupid in your eyes to think of anything but money and social climbing?'

'My dear, I never thought you stupid.' Lady Uckfield held up her palm in protest. 'You must at least give me credit for that.' There was a noise on the gravel and the older woman walked over to the window but it was not, as she had feared, Charles coming back for something he'd forgotten. 'I have to ask myself why now, why suddenly, a meeting is so essential when in the first months away you exhibited no such wish. I am a mother and I have to say to myself, what could have changed that might make a reunion with my son so desirable now when it was so un desirable then?'

'Perhaps I don't feel I've made a good choice. Is that hard to understand?'

'On the contrary. I find it easy to understand. Especially since I think you've made a very poor choice indeed. But…' She rested her fingertips against each other like an avuncular preacher making a point in a pulpit. 'Why now? Why such a change upon an instant?'

Edith stared at her. 'You can't stop me seeing him for ever,' she said.

Lady Uckfield nodded. 'No. I dare say I can't.'

'Well then.'

'I think I can stop you seeing him for a few months. Six perhaps, or even three. Let us see how we all feel then about this poor choice you have made.'

At that moment Edith realised that of course her mother-in-law, dear Googie with her mind as pure as snow, knew. They never talked about it, neither at that time nor in the ensuing years, but they were always aware from then on that, beyond a shadow of doubt, they both knew. Edith stood up. 'I'm going now.'

'Are you sure? Can I at least give you something to eat? Or what about a loo? You've come such a long way.' Once again the tone had settled back into its usual intimate pattern with the rhythm of shared midnight secrets in the dormitory.

At this moment, in some strange way, it was hard for Edith not to admire this woman, her sworn foe, who held onto the high ground in every argument against all-comers. It was hard but it was not impossible. 'You are a fucking cow,' she said. 'A fucking cow with a hide of leather and no heart.'

Lady Uckfield seemed to think over these words for a moment before nodding. 'Probably there is some truth in your unflattering description,' she acknowledged. 'And it is perhaps for that reason, or something resembling it, expressed hopefully in more fragrant language, that I have made such a success of my opportunities and you have made such a failure of yours. Goodbye, my dear.'

TWENTY-TWO

You may ask yourself why Edith, outfoxed at every turn, did not travel the more modern route out of her dilemma and, released from embarrassment after a short stay in some discreet, rural nursing home, why she did not then wait the three or six months stipulated by Lady Uckfield and outface them all. I suspect that she hardly knew the reason herself but somehow she was determined not to go that way. She was not, so far as I am aware, particularly religious and, I would have thought, operated on the minimum of moral scruples generally but perhaps because she had seen a way in which she could spare a life, a life that depended on her and her alone, she could not now bring herself to sacrifice it. It was, I think, an essentially animal decision rather than a sentimental one — or else then every tigress in the jungle is sentimental. Women, I suspect, can understand better than most men why something that hardly existed notionally and legally did not yet exist at all should still have been able to command such loyalties.

In the end, help came from a most unlikely sector. She had told me the following morning about her brief sojourn at Broughton and I was naturally dreading the request that I should take a more proactive hand in the whole business when she surprised me by telling me that she was going to wait until Charles's next visit to Feltham. 'He goes every fortnight or so. I'll collar him there.'

'How will you know when he's visiting?'

'Caroline's going to tell me. She'll drive me down.'

This information was both relieving and astonishing. Relieving because of course it meant I could be dispensed with and astonishing because it would never have occurred to me that Caroline would work against her mother's interest. Even now I am not completely sure of her motives. The Chase marriage was looking rocky. It is possible that she did not want the issue of her own satisfactory divorce arrangements being swamped by the divorce of the heir. It may have been an act of rebellion against her mother whose values Caroline always thought (quite wrongly as it happens) she had rejected. It may have been simpler. She loved her brother and she must have hated seeing him unhappy. In the end, I suppose it was, as always, a mixture of all these elements.

'When did you get in touch with her?'

'She telephoned me this morning. She'd heard about my visit to Broughton. I suppose she feels sorry for me.'

'Well, I won't say I'm not surprised but I'm pleased for you. It's certainly a good deal more suitable that Charles's sister should help you than that I should. Will you let me know how you get on?'

'I will,' she said.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Despite her explanation, Edith herself was not really clear as to Caroline's motives. They had never been close since Edith's admission into the family. They were not enemies. Indeed, despite Eric's almost continual stream of snide comments directed at Edith, she and her sister-in-law had achieved a kind of guarded familiarity but 'friendship' would have been too strong a word for it and Caroline would never have been confused as to where her loyalties lay. For all her professed modernity, Caroline Chase, devoid of self-knowledge as she was, remained very much a chip off her mother's block. She might despise the taut-faced countesses and ministers' wives that made up Lady Uckfield's coterie but when it came down to it her own friends were generally these women's rebellious and oddly-dressed children.

At all events, whatever her motives, she was as good as her word. Two days later the telephone rang in the Ebury Street flat and when Edith picked it up Caroline was on the line. 'Charles is at Feltham now if you're serious. He went down last night and he's on his own there until tomorrow.'

Edith glanced over to where Simon was deep in the Daily Mail. He also had the Independent delivered every day but he never read it. She steadied herself for one of those faintly Chinese telephone conversations designed to conceal their subject from the witnesses present. 'That's kind of you,' she said.

'So do you want me to take you down?'

'If you can,' came the stilted reply.

'Can't you talk?'

'Not really.'

'I'll be at the top of lower Sloane Street by Coutts at ten o'clock.'

'Fine.' Edith replaced the receiver carefully. It was not, as she explained later, that she ever wavered in her desire to see Charles but, just as she kept silent about the Sussex visit, she was not a big one for bridge-burning. As it happened, Simon had hardly been aware of the telephone conversation at all. She smiled across at him. 'Aren't you working today?'

He looked up. 'In the afternoon. Why?'

'That was Caroline. Asking me to lunch.'

'You're keeping your options open, then.'

She didn't answer but he didn't care.

Once again, she chose her clothes with some deliberation. The easy option was to repeat herself and simply to don a country outfit from her Broughton days but that seemed somehow dishonourable after her humiliation at the hands of Lady Uckfield. It was also, as she now saw more clearly, obvious, which was worse. No, if Charles were to take her back it must be as herself and not because she could pass as Diana Bohun or any of the other cold-hearted bitches who enjoyed their loveless marriages at the heart of Charles's world. Eventually she selected a tight black skirt that showed her legs and a loose blue sweater interwoven with coloured ribbons. She brushed her hair and applied her make-up fairly heavily (that is, for Charles rather than for Caroline). She surveyed the results and was pleased. She looked pretty and bright and just Londony enough for it not to seem as if she was trying too hard.

'Very nice,' said Simon. 'Where are you off to now?'

'I thought I'd do some shopping. I've got to get a birthday present for my father.'

'I suppose I'm not included in the girls' lunch.'

'It's at Caroline's flat…' She shrugged sadly. 'Why not come with me now? If I can find something for Daddy, I'm going on to Harrods. See what they've got in for the summer.'

It may seem that there was a calculated risk in this cunning approach but there wasn't really. No man in his right mind would accept the job of trailing a woman through a series of departments when she isn't even looking for anything specific.

Especially when there's no lunch at the end of it. He shook his head as she knew he must. 'Not really. If it's all right. I'll see you tonight.'

'What time will you be back?'

He shrugged. 'Seven. Eight.'

They kissed and Edith seized a coat and was gone. A minute later she was walking towards the antique shops at the Pimlico Road end of the street. She knew that Caroline would ask her what she was up to in the two hours on the road that lay ahead and she was trying to determine both what she would say and what was the truth — not that these two would necessarily correlate.

She knew by now, if only from Lady Uckfield's near-hysterical opposition, that there must be a chance she could get Charles back. For a while she had pretended to herself that she was still simply exploring the possibility but in her heart she had already gone a stage further than that. She was bound to acknowledge that she would not have been as anxious as she had been in her attempts to secure a meeting had this not been the case. The question remained, how much did she want him back? Did she want him at any cost? Would she try to exact concessions? Would their life return to precisely the same pattern? And then again, could she gain concessions anyway? Weren't all the cards in Charles's hand? Worst of all: suppose she was wrong and he didn't want her back? In these ruminations, she was conscious that she had pushed the real reason for her change of heart to the back of her mind but she reasoned that if she was successful then that was after all where it was going to stay and so why worry about it now? It seemed to present her with such a yawning chasm that there was no reason to negotiate it before she absolutely had to. To all intents and purposes, from the moment she had known that she was at last to be permitted to see Charles, her secret had ceased to be true.

She stopped outside the art gallery opposite the Poule Au Pot and glanced at some sketches in the window. As she stood there, a gleaming limousine drew to a halt and the chauffeur helped a woman of some indeterminate Middle Eastern aspect to alight from the vehicle and enter the shop. Looking at this heavily-rouged, sable-wrapped creature, diamond bracelets flashing in the sun, Edith suddenly thought of her mother-in-law. How well she knew that this would not be Lady Uckfield's way. She would arrive in a taxi with a minimum of fuss, in sensible clothes and excellent pearls, and rely on the recognition of the manager. And yet the fact remained that, should these women meet, this Levantine would be nervous of Lady Uckfield while Lady Uckfield would be politely indifferent to her.

Her clash in the Little Library at Broughton, far from lowering Lady Uckfield in Edith's eyes, had paradoxically resulted in a grudging respect for her code. She had always faintly despised those members of her, or Charles's, circle who had fawned over her mother-in-law, but over the last days she had come to re-examine her feelings. In the early stages of her marriage she had perhaps yearned for more of what this Eastern woman in her furs took for granted in her daily round, luxury, glamour, famous faces. All these things — at any rate an English version of them — the young Edith Lavery had wrongly perceived as being connected to the world of a 'Lady Broughton' and she had been taken aback when so much of her new life had proved mundane. She knew that Lady Uckfield thought she, Edith, had gleaned her ideas from novels and nineteenth-century biographies, she had even attempted to defend her own mother occasionally from the accusation of filling her head with bourgeois fantasy, but she realised there was justice in the charge. The reality of life with Charles had seemed so flat and changeless compared to those action-packed plots, the glittering, power-filled ballrooms, that dizzying Lady-Palmerston-like career that she had been anticipating.

And yet, that day at the dress show, when the crowd had broken before Lady Uckfield and her minor Royal Highness like the Red Sea before Moses, Edith had seen what she had thrown away, the key to every closed door in England and most of the rest of the world — at least among the superficial. A landed title might not secure an invitation to Camp David but, even in the twenty-first century, she need never be alone in Palm Beach. And Edith knew by now that the kind of people who were superficial, the snobs whose social life was based around collecting people to underpin their own status, outnumbered the rest by ten to one. This kind of power might not be worth much in the great scheme of things but it was something and what had she gained in exchange for it? Life at Broughton might be dull but what was life in Ebury Street? Which did she prefer, lack of noise or lack of muscle? She had walked out of the world of the worldly in a petulant pout of boredom and overnight she had transformed herself from a high court card in the Game of Society into a non-person that people were ashamed to be seen with.

With something akin to a shiver she resumed her walk. Then she thought of the two men. Her subconscious assumption, because she knew that she had married Charles for his name and his fortune, had always been that, stripped of these things, she would never have looked at him. In their two years together she had grown to resent him, absurd as that now seemed even to her, for luring her with his worldly possessions without having the personality to amuse her once she was caught. The truth was she had pursued him and yet, in her self-justifying and dishonest mind, by the time Simon had come along, Charles had assumed the moral status of a baited trap.

Now, strolling down Pimlico Road, admiring the antique window displays, she thought back to her ruminations in the Green Park and realised that separation had changed things. It was her unconscious habit these days to think of her husband more gently. Was he really so disagreeable as company? So much less attractive than Simon? After all, men far worse than Charles find wives all the time. Would the idea of Charles as a husband have seemed so bad in the old days before her marriage? If she had been introduced to Mr Charles Broughton as a schoolfriend's suitor would she have wanted to run out screaming into the night, dragging the doomed girl with her? Of course not. Certainly Simon was a good deal better looking, there could be no doubt of that, but over the months she had grown used to his looks and she had begun to be irritated by the perpetual twinkling that seemed to accompany his every social interchange. All those half-smiles and narrowed lids lavished on waitresses and air hostesses and girls at the checkout in Partridges, all that tossing back of the golden locks, had started to bore her.

More troubling than the comparison of appearance (Charles, after all, while no beauty, was perfectly respectable to look at) was the question of sex. She had to concede that Simon was much the better lover, an excellent lover indeed by any standards let alone poor Charles's, and this was harder to dismiss. She enjoyed going to bed with Simon. Very much. In fact, the thought of making love with him was still enough to tickle her innards, to make her slightly fidgety and uncomfortable, to make her want to cross and uncross her legs. Dear Charles could never be a competitor here with his fumbling, five-minute thrust and his 'thank you, darling', which nearly drove her mad.

But for the first time she acknowledged, predictably perhaps, that after a year, making love to Simon had lost its novelty.

The sex, though less frequent than at first, was still excellent, no question, but it could no longer blind her to the life for which she had left her gilded cage. After all, how much time does one actually spend in bed making love? Was it really worth the rest of the bargain? Did a pleasurable half an hour two or three times a week compensate for those endless, terrible parties, those awful people with their flat accents, sitting around the flat smoking, or those frightful drama school pals discussing 'hair-dos'

and gardening tips and bucket-shop holidays? And anyway, wasn't Charles rather sweet in his way? Wasn't he more decent than Simon? Wasn't he truer as a person?

So Edith continued up Sloane Street belabouring herself with her false values, all the while attempting to convince herself with a litany of Charles's essential worth until, in a rare moment of honesty, like the sun breaking through the clouds, she saw the irony of this inner conversation. She, Edith, was using these arguments as if the opposition to them would overwhelm her should she give it a hearing. She was forcing herself to the next step when any impartial observer, and of this she was suddenly quite sure, would have freely volunteered that of course Charles was more decent than Simon. In fact, in any real way, it was perfectly obvious that Simon wasn't decent at all. Unlike Charles he had no honour, only pragmatism. He could not be true because there was no truth in him. His morality was a tawdry bundle of received, fashionable causes that he believed would make him attractive to casting directors. Edith was talking herself into thinking that in some ways she preferred Charles to Simon when to anyone who knew them both there could be no comparison. Charles, dull as he might be, was infinitely the better man. Simon was a mass of nothing.

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

Edith had gone for a walk and found it was cold outside.

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

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

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

'What luck there are no children.'

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

'Then why leave Eric?'

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

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

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

'Then why did you marry him?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Is he?' said Edith, thrilled.

'Yes.' Caroline lit a cigarette and for a moment Edith thought they were going into the central divider. 'I know Lady Uckfield thinks it'll blow over. She has a fantasy that he will forget you and marry the daughter of some peer who'll give him four children, two of whom will inherit estates from relations of their mother's.' Caroline laughed wryly. This was of course a wonderfully accurate résumé of Lady Uckfield's dreams.

'Are you quite sure she's wrong?'

'How little you know my brother,' said Caroline, and lapsed again into silence. Edith naturally longed to hear more of this wretched and unhappy man, whose life was a misery without her and to whom, by some strange miracle, she was already married. She gave Caroline a quizzical look and the latter relented. 'In the first place I do not think that my mother's idea of your perfect successor is Charles's. To put it bluntly, if that was what he was looking for he could have found it with very little difficulty. But that is no longer the point. Charles is a simple man. He is capable of feelings but they are uncomplicated, straightforward and deep. He can hardly communicate and he cannot flirt at all.' Edith thought with wonder of her other love, who could only communicate and flirt. Simon's problem was the opposite of Charles's. He could not feel. Caroline was still talking. 'Charles has made his choice. You. You are his wife. In his heart that's it. Finish. I am not saying that if you did divorce him he wouldn't eventually settle for someone else as brood-mare but in his heart he would have failed and his real wife would be out there walking around with someone else. And that, my dear, would be you.'

The rest of the drive was accomplished in silence. It was almost as if they were waiting for the next event in the plot before they could continue their discussion. And so they wound their way through the flat Norfolk landscape until at last they turned into a well-kept but somewhat overshadowed drive, which in its turn, when they had been released from the high walls of rhododendron, brought them to the wide, gravelled forecourt of the main house.

Feltham Place had passed into the Broughton family in 1811 when the then Lord Broughton had married Anne Wykham, only child of Sir Marmaduke Wykham, sixth baronet and the last of his line. The house was Jacobean, more a gentleman's than a nobleman's residence, picturesque rather than magnificent with roofs bristling with barley sugar chimneys and possibly for this reason it had never managed to catch at the family's imagination. Like many houses of its period it was in a dip (before the pumping innovations of the late seventeenth century allowed those splendid, landscaped views), although the flatness of the county gave a certain openness at the bottom of its valley. It might have functioned as the Broughtons' Dower House or as a seat for the heir, but there were other houses nearer Uckfield that had served these turns at least until the Second World War and recently, as we know, the heir had chosen to live with his parents.

In the past, Feltham had been let but it was taken back for the shooting in the 1890s and had been farmed in hand ever since, despite the family's allowing the sport to lapse after the war. Charles had revived the shoot over the last few years and he was proud of the fact that he could now safely let two and three-hundred-bird days, secure in the knowledge that there would be no great disappointments. He and his keeper had worked hard. The covers and hedgerows had been replanted, the feeding pens reorganised, indeed the whole appearance of the countryside had been more or less restored to the condition of a century before. But despite this, he was not tempted to bring his own shooting guests to Feltham. They were offered the splendours of Broughton while businessmen, people with mobile telephones and gleaming sports wear, took the shooting at Feltham by the day. At a (considerable) extra cost they could even stay overnight, which may have accounted for the somewhat boarding-house quality within.

The Wykham who'd built the place had been a favourite of King James I and in those days it had been much larger but the king's beau had been improvident and his heir (a nephew since, unsurprisingly, the builder had never married) demolished two-thirds of it. This meant that the brickwork and carving on the façade and throughout the house was of a much higher standard than one would normally associate with the scale of building. Inside, all the first-rate furniture and pictures had long since been swallowed up by Broughton and most of what remained dated from its rehabilitation as a shooting-lodge at the end of the last century. Lumpy, leather-covered Chesterfields provided the seating and the walls were covered with second-rate portraits and enormous, indifferently painted scenes of hunting, shooting and all the other methods of country killing. Still, the rooms themselves were pleasant and the staircase, more or less the sole survivor from the days of the Jacobean favourite, was magnificent.

Edith hardly knew the place. In Charles's mind it was the nearest thing to an 'office' in his weekly round. He ran it as a business and apart from an occasional appearance at a village show and an annual cocktail party for all those neighbours who might be tiresome about the shoot were they not courted every so often, he had no social profile in the county at all. Quite frequently he stayed with the Cumnors at their infinitely larger and more luxurious house four miles down the road, rather than put the ancient care-taking couple to the trouble of opening a bedroom.

Caroline drew up by the front door and the two women made their way into the wide and gloomy hall that took up two-thirds of the entrance front. It was decorated by a frieze of slightly bogus armorial tributes to the Wykhams and the Broughtons but otherwise boasted no colour at all apart from the brown of the panelling and the less attractive brown of the leather furniture. 'Charles!' Caroline called out. It was a chilly day and the interior of the house was noticeably colder than the air outside. Edith pulled her coat tightly around her. 'Charles!' shouted Caroline again, and she set off through a doorway that led first to the staircase and then into the former morning room that operated as Charles's office. Edith followed her. Desks and filing cabinets stood about the room, the chill slightly alleviated by a three-bar electric fire in the grate that looked as if its very existence breached the entire safety code. They were still standing there when another door, facing them, opened and there all at once stood a flummoxed Charles. To her amazement, even to her delight, Edith suddenly realised that she was shocked at his appearance. Gone was that sleek country gentleman who always looked as if he was on the way to make an advertisement for Burberry's. She was astonished to see that her fastidious husband was looking scruffy and unkempt. He was almost dirty. Caught out by her stare, he pushed his fingers through his hair. 'Hello,' he said, with a watery smile. 'Fancy seeing you here.'

At this point Caroline took her leave. 'I'm going in to Norwich,' she said. 'I'll be back in a couple of hours.' It was a relief really that she didn't even try to normalise the situation or start any we-were-just-driving-past nonsense.

Charles nodded. 'I see,' he said.

Left alone, Edith was oddly blank as to quite what she was going to say next. She sat on the edge of a chair near the fire like a housemaid at an interview and leaned forward to warm her hands. 'I hope you're not cross. I did so want to talk to you.

Properly. And I began to feel that I was never going to be allowed to. I'm afraid I thought I'd just chance it.'

He shook his head. 'I'm not a bit cross. Not at all.' He hesitated. 'I — I'm sorry about the telephone calls and all the rest of it. It wasn't my mother not telling me, you know. Well, it wasn't only that. I expect you thought it was. It was just that I didn't really know what to say. It seemed better to leave it all to the professionals. Of course now you're here…' He tailed off disconsolately.

Edith nodded. 'I had to know what you were thinking about everything. I understand your parents want you free straight away.'

'Oh that.' He looked sheepish. 'I don't mind. Honestly. Whatever suits you.' He stared at her in the unflattering light of an overhead bulb. 'How's Simon?'

'Fine. Very well. Loving his series.'

'Good. I'm glad.' He didn't sound it but he was trying to be courteous. Edith was struck anew by the decency and kindness of this man she had tossed aside. What had she been thinking of? Her own actions sometimes seemed to her so hard to understand. Like a foreign film. And yet these had been her choices. The conversation limped on.

'I don't think I ever came to Feltham at this time of year. I must have but I don't remember. It's rather lovely, isn't it?'

Charles smiled. 'Dear old Feltham,' he said.

'You ought to live here. Do it up. Get some of the stuff back.'

He half nodded. 'I think I'd be a bit lonely, stuck out here on my own. Don't you? Nice idea, though.'

'Oh, Charles.' In spite of the cynicism with which she had embarked on this mission Edith had become a victim of her own justifications. Like Deborah Kerr in The King and I, whistling her happy tune to make herself brave, Edith had succeeded in talking herself into believing that she was a romantic figure who had lost her love rather than a selfish girl who bitterly regretted her comforts. Her eyes began to moisten.

Oddly perhaps, it was only at this moment that Charles fully grasped she had definitely come to try to get him back. Up to this point he was still wondering if it might not just be for some financial or time-related scheme that she had made the journey.

Despite his earlier suspicions, his non-existent vanity made him slow to reach the obvious conclusion and he thought she might want him to agree to something before his lawyers could talk him out of it. He was not offended by this but, if it should prove to be the case, he was anxious to conceal his wretchedness from her. Both out of consideration for her feelings and from a (perfectly justifiable) sense of pride. It now occurred to him, with a lurch in his stomach, that this was not what he was dealing with. She wanted to come back to him. He looked at her.

For all his simplicity, he was not an idiot. Thinking along the same lines as that night in his study at Broughton he knew that he was no more interesting than when she left him. He also suspected that the world of show business had not really appealed to her, not at any rate for 'every day'. Just as a year of sin had served to give Edith a clearer idea of what Simon consisted of, so two years of marriage and a year apart had made Edith comprehensible to Charles. He knew she was an arriviste and the child of an arriviste. He saw her vulgarities of spirit now as sharply as he saw her fine points, of which, despite Lady Uckfield's comments, he still believed there were many. He also knew that if he made a move towards her the thing was settled.

He stared at the hunched-up figure, trying to scoop warmth out of the electric bars. Her coat was a sort of camel colour and looked rather cheap. Was this sad little figure, this 'blonde piece' as his mother would say, to be the next Marchioness of Uckfield? To be painted by some indifferent chocolate box portraitist and hung alongside the Sargeants, Laszlos and Birleys of the preceding generations? Was it in her to make a go of it?

But as he watched her, the sense of how vulnerable she suddenly seemed to him, with her bright make-up and her chain store coat, trying to charm him and looking instead somehow pathetic, overwhelmed him with pity and, in the wake of pity, with love. Whatever her suitability, whatever the limitations of her feelings, whatever her motives, he knew that he, Charles Broughton, could not be responsible for her unhappiness. He was, in short, incapable of hurting her.

'Are you happy?' he said slowly, knowing as he did so that the words gave her permission to return to him and to his life.

At the sound of them Edith knew her pardon had come through. Despite the difficulties with Simon, with her mother-inlaw, with the newspapers, with the sun, with the moon, she could now be Charles's wife again if she chose, which, not very surprisingly given all the circumstances, she did. For a second she felt almost sick with relief but then, since she did not wish to appear too desperate, she waited for a minute before she spoke, deliberately punctuating the moment with a pregnant pause. Once satisfied that her answer was anticipated by them both she carefully raised her tear-stained eyes to his.

'No,' she said.

EPILOGUE

Smorzando

It did not, so far as I remember, cause any great murmur when Edith was delivered of a daughter seven months or so after the reconciliation. Of course, there was a lot of talk, particularly from her mother, about their being taken by surprise as Edith was

'so frighteningly early'. In fact, Mrs Lavery rather over-egged her performance by insisting on sitting in the hospital throughout the night because of the 'risks of premature birth', which naturally gave rise to a few funny stories on the dinner circuit, but nobody minded. Versions of this sort of folderol are still rather touchingly employed in Society on such occasions. These things are rituals rather than untruths and cause no harm. The point was the baby was female, which took any future strain out of the situation. It meant everything could return to normal without a lingering after-taste.

Even Lady Uckfield, usually so careful, gave herself away in a rare unguarded moment when I telephoned to learn the news.

'Boy or girl?' I asked when she picked up the receiver.

'Girl,' said Lady Uckfield. 'Isn't it a relief?' Then, quickly but not quickly enough, she added, 'That they're both doing so well.'

'A great relief,' I answered, going along with this dishonesty. There was no point in blaming her for retaining the deepest prejudices of her kind. Now that the baby could not inherit the glories of Broughton, thanks to the arcane laws governing the peerage that even Mr Blair, for all his trumpeting of women's rights, has not seen fit to change, she would present no further danger and might be lived with in peace. Since all three 'parents' were fair there was not much chance of the baby having the wrong colouring and, at least to date, the girl does not seem particularly to favour Simon, always assuming of course that the infant is his — something of which one can, after all, never be entirely sure. Not at least without resorting to DNA testing, which no entrant in Debrett's would ever risk for fear of what it might reveal. One foreign visitor at Broughton, ignorant of the excellent Edwardian maxim never to 'comment on a likeness in another's child' asked me if I did not think she took after Charles.

I may have imagined a momentary chill in the room but I nodded. 'I do,' I said. 'She's not like Edith at all.' Thereby earning an especially warm glance from my host. Amusingly enough, when I looked at the toddler properly, she did seem to resemble him a bit. But then again that may have been in expression rather than feature. It might seem strange but in later years Charles came to love the girl so much that his younger children would complain of his favouritism. Even less logically, she would eventually develop into the preferred grandchild of Lady Uckfield, which only goes to show that the old maxim is correct and there's nowt so queer as folk. At any rate, barely fourteen months later, Lady Broughton was once more brought to bed, this time of a boy. The new Viscount Nutley was welcomed with bonfires and bun fights in Sussex and Norfolk and, frankly, to be brutal and unmodernist about it, the exact paternity of little Lady Anne had ceased to matter much to anyone.

Caroline did divorce Eric. It was a quiet business without acrimony and with more style than I confess I thought Eric capable of. He was not single long. Within eighteen months he had married the daughter of an immensely rich Cheshire industrialist, Christine somebody or other. They were much better suited than he and Caroline had been. For one thing, she shared Eric's ambitions, which she pursued as relentlessly as if they had been her own and of course they soon were. I happened to meet them both at Ascot a few months after they married and I must say I liked her. She was full of energy and in many ways a good deal easier to rub along with than Caroline, even if she was already infected with Eric's nonsense. I remember her using the phrase 'our sort of people', meaning, I imagine, some sort of exclusive social group to which they belonged. It must have been a luxury for Eric who had spent his entire first marriage being reminded daily of an Inner Circle forever closed to him.

He growled at me by way of recognition but I was not offended. I had by this time forgiven Eric his earlier insults and anyway one of the freedoms of growing older is that one is no longer obliged to dislike someone simply because they dislike you. After all, he was entitled. Lady Uckfield had made no secret of how little she relished his company and had, somewhat maliciously I suspect, used me at times to demonstrate this.

'I suppose you still see them all?' he said when his wife had stopped discussing her new Poggenpohl kitchen.

I nodded. 'We've got a baby now so a bit less than I did. But yes, I see them.'

'And is dear Edith happy in her work?' Of course, it was quite understandable that he should be irritated when he contemplated one who had survived the course that had brought him down.

'I think so.'

'I'll bet she is. And how is darling "Googie"?' He spat out the name just as I had once heard Edith do before her rehabilitation. Now, for her at least, the name had re-normalised. 'I wonder what my dear ex-mother-in-law thinks of all the recent developments.'

'Oh, I'd say she was pretty merry, one way and another,' I said, for all the world as if I thought he cared, and we nodded to each other and moved on.