Snobs: A Novel

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

'Will you be seeing her soon?'

'I thought I might give her lunch.'

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

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

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

'I used to know him a bit.'

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

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

'Quite difficult, I'd say.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

NINETEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'How are they?'

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