point was it had come. The End of Her Marriage. I am not sure to what extent she had truly accepted that this was where her romance with Simon had brought her until this moment. Though I must say her voice was quite calm when she spoke. 'You mean they want Charles to divorce me for adultery. Citing Simon.'
I nodded. 'I suppose so. I don't think it really works like that these days but I would guess that's the general idea. We didn't actually talk details. If he were to divorce you now it would have to be for a reason, or has that finished? I'm not too sure.'
'I can't say it seems very gentlemanly.'
'It wasn't very ladylike going off with a married actor.'
She nodded and resumed her eating. 'So what do you want from me? What am I to say?'
'I think they feel they have to know that if the divorce does go ahead now you won't suddenly try to fight it. It won't interest you but it won't make any difference, you know, to the money.'
She looked at me rather sadly. 'I don't want any money. Not much anyway. Less than Charles would give me tomorrow if I asked him.'
'I know,' I said. 'I told Lady Uckfield that.'
'Anyway,' she added after a pause, 'it's not a generous offer. Nowadays there isn't a 'guilty party'. It never does make any difference financially. Didn't you realise that?' I shook my head. 'Well, I bet 'Googie' does.' We continued eating in silence for a while. The waiter returned, took away our plates and came back with salmon fishcakes and a bowl of
'Yes, I talked to him.' While theoretically correct, my answer was a lie, for Charles had not been there when Lady Uckfield was sketching out her plans, which is what Edith had meant by her question. I very much doubted he would have allowed his mother to talk as she did had he been. I corrected myself, suddenly oppressed by my implied deception. 'Actually he wasn't there when I was talking to his mother but we went back the next day.'
'And?'
'He says he'll abide by your decision. Whatever you want to do.'
'That sounds more like him. Poor old Charles,' said Edith. 'How was he?'
I had dreaded this. If I could have said that he was looking fine and dandy I would have. I had come to feel, like Lady Uckfield, that it was time to call a halt to this unsuccessful experiment in miscegenation. The problem was he had not looked fine and dandy. 'OK,' I said. 'I don't think all of this has done him much good.'
'No.' She helped herself to some more chips. 'Was Clarissa down there?'
I nodded and Edith was silent. I was about to tell her to discount whatever she had heard, that it was a rumour inspired by Lady Uckfield's ambitions and nothing else, but I was silent. What was the point? She had to let Charles go and where was the good in slowing up her decision? For the rest of lunch we chatted about Simon and acting and Isabel and buying a flat, but as we were leaving Edith reopened the topic.
'Let me think about it.' She smiled slightly. 'Of course, we both know that I'll do what I'm asked but let me think about it.
I'll telephone you.'
===OO=OOO=OO===
Edith Broughton did not go home — or rather she did not return to Ebury Street — at once. It was a crisp, sunny, spring day, when everything seems as clear as a cut-out, cold and bright as a jewel. She was warmly dressed and so, once past the Ritz, she turned left into the Green Park. She strolled down the path, past Wimborne House, past the restored, statue decorated splendour of Spencer House, past the Italianate magnificence of Bridgewater House until she stopped and looked up at Lancaster House, the golden pile, built and occupied for many years by the mighty Dukes of Sutherland. Their duchesses had dominated London Society, one after another, summoning the great and the good of the different eras to ascend the giant, gilded staircase in the grandest of all grand London halls to pay court to each other's wealth and power.
It struck Edith then that she would have enjoyed that older, simpler world when these houses had held sway over the capital. When the Guests and the Spencers and the Egertons and the Leveson-Gowers had lived their ordained lives under these teeming roofs instead of the charitable organisations and government departments and Greek shipping magnates who occupied them now. Forgetting for the moment that she, Edith Lavery, would have had the greatest difficulty in penetrating even the outermost fringe of this golden troupe in any period but our own, she saw herself in her crinoline, never questioning her own happiness and, consequently, being happy. And as she did so, she was struck by how similar her fantasies of the old, pre-Great War world were to those fantasies about her coming life as Lady Broughton, which she had entertained while lying in the bath just before her wedding. How simple things were to be, how the villagers and tenants were going to love her, how the family would bless the day she had come among them! She found herself smiling wistfully as the dream image of herself as the Great Social Force of Twenty-First Century Society receded before her inner gaze, swathed in mist, tearfully waving goodbye.
Pondering this, it seemed at first to her troubled brain that her mother had been wrong and the media had been right all along, that these dreams and ambitions were outmoded, that no one nowadays wants titles and rank and inherited power, that these are the days of the self-made man, of talent, of creativity. But then, looking about at the office workers and sweepers and job interviewees who loitered near her in the park, she was struck by the dishonesty of the media pundits of our time.
Was there one here who would not change places with Charles if they could? Was it not possible that the small screen gurus praised meritocracy because it was the only class system that would accord them the highest rank? Even if unearned riches and position had no moral merit, even if they embodied the Dream That Dare Not Speak Its Name, it was still a dream that figured in plenty of people's fantasies. And she had casually discarded it.
Then she thought again with puzzled wonderment of her own supposed unhappiness with Charles. Why exactly had she been so unhappy? When she tried to think back to their time together, she kept remembering those pretty rooms at Broughton and the servants and the park and her work in the village. The only discomforts she could recall were things like packing the car and standing behind Charles at a shoot in the rain. Were these so terrible? And if she thought of Charles, himself, it was with a rather intimate affection. She remembered him swearing at fellow motorists or farting in his sleep and it provoked in her a kind of nostalgic warmth. There was no trace of relief at his passing. If only there had been. Instead she found herself worrying about his loneliness. It pained her to think he was suffering. And increasingly she asked herself what exactly was this personal fulfilment for which so much
