Snobs: A Novel

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

'Oh,' she said.

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

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

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

'How marvellous! What is it?'

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

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

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

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

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

===OO=OOO=OO===

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

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

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

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

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

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

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