Snobs: A Novel

open my mouth, I sound like a complete half-wit. I'm sure they only got me because Tara Palmer-Tomkinson chucked.'

'Did she?'

'I don't know. I'm making it up.'

'Perhaps the answer is not to do any talking.'

'That's what Charles says, but it wouldn't make the smallest difference. They quote you anyway.' This is of course quite true.

'You and Charles make a fetching team. Your mother must be thrilled.'

Edith rolled her eyes. 'She's beside herself. She's afraid she'll find Bobby in the shower and it'll all have been a dream.'

'And will she?'

Edith's face hardened into a worldly mask that seemed more suited to an opera box in the belle epoque than the Australian at lunchtime. 'No, I don't think so.'

I raised my eyebrows. 'Are congratulations in order?'

'Not yet,' she said firmly, 'but promise me you'll be there on Saturday. Eight o'clock. Black tie.'

'All right. But you must tell Isabel. Do you want me to write to Lady Uckfield?'

'No, no, I'll do all that. Just be there.'

When I telephoned Isabel that evening Edith had already spoken to her and the matter was swiftly arranged. And so, a few days later, I found myself joining the others in the Eastons' drawing room for a drink before we set off. David was being gauche and grumpy to conceal his palpitating excitement at finally being received within the citadel. Isabel was less excited and consequently less afraid of it showing.

'Well, do we think the dinner's in aid of anything?' she said with a giggle as I entered.

'I don't know,' I said. 'Do we?'

David pushed a glass into my hand. His whiskies were always warm, which was rather tiresome. He had read somewhere that gentlemen don't have ice. 'Isabel thinks they're going to announce their engagement.'

The thought had obviously crossed my mind, which would explain why Edith felt she had to have a few people on her own team but nursery training has made me beware of the obvious. 'Wouldn't her parents have been asked?'

'Perhaps they have been.' That was a thought. The image of Stella Lavery walking up to her room to find her bags unpacked and her evening dress laid out warmed my heart. Everyone deserves a few moments when life is Quite Perfect.

'Well, we'll know soon enough,' I said.

Isabel looked at the clock. 'Shouldn't we be off?'

'Not yet. There's plenty of time.' David could afford to mumble his prey now that he was sure of it. 'What about another drink?'

But Isabel won and we set off for our first but (as we were all secretly thinking) probably not our last private visit to Broughton Hall.

The house looked no less forbidding than it had before but the fact that this fortress had been breached made its very chill gratifying. We stood outside the same door and rang the bell.

'I wonder if this is the right entrance,' said Isabel, but before we could ponder further, the door was opened by a butler and we were being escorted upstairs into the Red Saloon. I think I was surprised that the family appeared to use those rooms generally on public show. I had expected to be ushered into some other, sloaney sitting room on the first floor where the portraits and the Louis Quinze furniture would be interlarded with squashy sofas and chintz — that being the usual form on such occasions. I was to learn that I was quite right and the fact that we were having drinks in the Red Saloon and dinner in the State Dining Room should have given the game away at once. At all events, when I walked in and saw Mrs Lavery standing by the fireplace next to the burly figure of Lord Uckfield I knew. Edith had brought it off and we were there to witness her triumph.

Lady Uckfield stepped forward. She was a small, fine-boned, attractive woman who must have been extremely pretty in her youth but at first sight she seemed quite unimposing, even cosy. This always stands out in my mind as the most mistaken in a lifetime of incorrect first impressions. When she spoke her voice was light and belllike with that tremendously far-back enunciation that one associates with wartime newsreels. 'How terribly sweet you all are to be here,' she sparkled, smiling gaily.

'I know you've come down from London.' She directed this to me. The point being to show us that she had done her homework and she knew precisely who we were.

'How very kind you are to ask us.' I know this game and its responses.

'Not at all. We're delighted to see you here.' Lady Uckfield spoke with a kind of intimate urgency, which punctuated everything she said, as if she were sharing a permanent private joke that only you (or whomever she was talking to) would understand. I think of her now as the most socially expert individual I have ever known at all well. She combined a watchmaker's eye for detail with a madam's knowledge of the world. She was also utterly confident. I knew she had been born the prettiest daughter of a rich earl and I supposed then, young as I was, that her confidence was nothing to be wondered at, but I know now that such things do not always follow and I later learned that, like all of us, she had had her share of troubles.

Maybe these had made her strong, maybe she was born strong anyway; whatever the reason, by the time I met her she was a complete and invulnerable perfectionist. Every evening I have ever participated in at her invitation has been constructed as carefully as a Cellini salt-cellar. From the species of potato to the arrangement of the cushions nothing was left to chance or others' judgement.

Of course, as soon as she said, 'How lovely it is to welcome some friends of our darling Edith,' I could see that she didn't like her future daughter-in-law. Having said that, 'didn't like' is probably not quite accurate. It was amazing to her that her son should be marrying someone she didn't know or even know of. It was fantastic to her that this girl's friends should not be the children of her friends. Au fond, it was