'Will you do it?' said Edith.
Adela and I looked at each other but I refused the message in her eyes. Ultimately, much as I would have liked to, it would have been wrong of me to have abandoned Edith to her fate and espoused the cause of the Broughtons. Whatever I might privately think about the wrongs and rights of the matter, this would have been a dishonourable course. First, and before everything else, I had been Edith's friend, as even Lady Uckfield had acknowledged.
'I will,' I said. 'But I won't do it either at this time of the morning or with you listening. Go home and I'll telephone you.'
Edith nodded and, after finishing her coffee, left.
'Something's up,' said Adela.
I rang at half past ten and asked for Charles. Despite what Edith had said I was quite surprised when Lady Uckfield came on the line.
'Hello,' she said. 'How are you?'
'I was trying to track down Charles.'
She was very smooth and clearly four steps ahead of me. 'I'm afraid he's not here. Can I give him a message?'
I toyed with the idea of bluffing but she was obviously well aware of why I was ringing and it seemed a foolish corner to paint myself into. 'I'm on an errand, I'm afraid. And I'm not at all sure you'll approve.'
'Try me.' Her voice had gone from reserved to glacial.
'It's Edith. She wants to see Charles.'
'Why?'
'I don't know why.' This was true.
'What's the point?'
'I don't know that there is any point but I do know that you won't get a straight answer out of her concerning your proposals re the divorce unless she sees him.'
'You've asked her then?'
'I've asked her and she says she wants to think about it. Part of that thinking, I take it, has to go on in Charles's presence.'
There was a pause for a moment and I could hear down the line that eerie echo of other conversations, other, strange anonymous bits of lives being lived, a thousand miles away. 'Are you free this afternoon? Can you meet me for tea?'
'There's nothing I would enjoy more but in this instance I don't know that I'll be able to add anything to what I've already told you.'
'I'll be at the Ritz. At four.'
I was interested that she did not want me to come to their flat in Cadogan Square.
'Perhaps Tigger's coming up with her. Perhaps Charles is there,' said Adela and for a moment I was tempted to walk round and ring the bell. I thought better of it, having decided that it might behove me to hear what Lady Uckfield had to say first.
I did, however, telephone Edith.
'What are you going to say to her?'
'I don't know. That she is wasting her time trying to keep you two apart, I suppose. If that's what she's doing.'
'Of course it's what she's doing.'
'I mean without Charles's knowledge.' Edith was silent. 'At any rate, I'll call you this evening.' I rang off.
I asked tentatively whether or not Lady Uckfield had arrived but the manager was not one to let such an opportunity slip by.
'Gentleman for the Marchioness of Uckfield,' he observed loudly to a passing waiter, who escorted me courteously past the turning heads to where she waited. She was sitting trimly at a table in the Marble Hall to the right of the great, gilded fountain.
She smiled and waved a little hand as I approached, and stood to greet me with her neat, bird-like movements. The man brought the tea with a lot of milady'ing, all of it gently and serenely acknowledged. She laughed gaily. 'Isn't this a treat?'
'It is for me,' I said.
Her manner became not exactly more serious but at any rate more direct. She was a little less breathlessly urgent and remembering that scene in her sitting room at Broughton I understood that she was going to impart some real, as opposed to faked, intimacy. 'I want to be quite honest because I think you may be able to help.'
'I'm simultaneously flattered and dubious,' I said.
'I don't want Charles to have to see Edith.'
'So I gathered.'
'It's not that I'm being unkind. Truly. It's just that I think he's in the most tremendous muddle and I don't want him any more confused.'
'Lady Uckfield,' I said, 'I know very well why you think it a bad idea. So do I. You believe the marriage was a mistake and you had rather not prolong it. I quite agree. The fact remains that, at this moment, Edith is Charles's
