strangeness of her actions, he did understand why Edith had left him.
He was dull. He knew this was true because, alas for him, he was just clever enough to be aware of it. He knew he was no company for her once the joy of her advancement had worn off. Half the time, if he was honest, he didn't really know what his wife was talking about. When she questioned the policy of the Opposition or tried to evaluate the benefits and harm of intervening in the Middle East… Charles knew there were differing points of view on these subjects but he didn't see why he was called upon to have them. So long as he kept voting Conservative and saying how frightful he thought New Labour, wasn't that enough? It was all and more than most of his pals in White's expected of him. Well, clearly it wasn't enough for Edith. Now even he had begun to suspect that she might conceivably want him back — or at least that she wanted to talk about it — but had anything changed? Wouldn't she tire of him again within a matter of months, if not weeks? Wouldn't it be better for her and for him if they knew when they were beaten? This in short was how he had begun to think of his marriage. A defeat certainly but a defeat that should now be faced up to and walked away from. Which was of course precisely what Lady Uckfield had intended. It is customary these days to suggest that all interference in the private lives of one's children invariably leads to disappointment but this is not true. Clever parents, who do not play their game too fast, can achieve their aims. And the Marchioness of Uckfield was cleverer than most.
He looked up as the door opened and the sedate figure of the Viscountess Bohun slid into the room. 'Charles?' she said with a despairing roll of her eyes. 'Thank God you're here.'
'Why? What is it?'
'I'm in the most frightful fix. Peter's gone for a walk and we haven't got the car with us. Anyway…' Charles waited patiently. 'The thing is…' Diana moistened her lip nervously. She was really quite a talented actress. 'I've made a sort of muddle of the dates and I've come without anything…'
Charles looked at her, puzzled. This made no sense at all, like a piece translated badly from a foreign tongue. 'I'm so sorry,' he said in answer to Diana's pseudo-blushes, 'I'm not sure I…'
Diana overcame her revulsion for this sort of tactic. Desperate times breed desperate measures and as her hostess had made clear, these were desperate times. 'I wasn't expecting it but… it's that time of the month and I've got to get to a chemist…'
'Oh, Lord.' Charles leaped to his feet in a frenzy of embarrassment. 'Of course. What can I do?'
Diana breathed more easily. She had reached her goal and wonderfully quickly. 'Could you bear to run me into Lewes, only everything in the country shuts at one and—'
'Certainly. Right away.'
'I've just got to tell your mother something.'
Lavery fetched the food and removed the plates and made elaborately courteous remarks all evening. She had that uniquely English talent of demonstrating, through her scrupulously polite manner, just how awful she thought the company. She could leave a roomful crushed and rejected and yet congratulate herself on behaving perfectly. It is of course of all forms of rudeness the most offensive as it leaves no room for rebuttal. Even at the height of hostility the Moral High Ground is never abandoned.
Edith watched the three familiar faces and tried to question herself as to what was really taking place. Was this the cementing of a new alliance that would shape her future life? Would these three people be her companions through twenty Christmases to come? Would Simon and her mother build their bridges and talk about the children and come to share private jokes? Handsome as Simon was and strong as her desire for him remained, she was struck this evening by the dreariness of them all.
She had lived the last two years in the front rank of English life and on reflection she was surprised to discover how normal it had become for her to do so — until, that is, she had removed herself from it. While she had been at Broughton she had been oppressed by the lack of event, by the emptiness of her daily round. Now that she had left it, however, hardly a day passed when at least one of her acquaintance from her life with Charles was not in the newspaper. And when she thought about it, having at the time complained ceaselessly that they never did anything, she remembered dinner after dinner where she had sat opposite some faintly famous face from the Cabinet or the opera or simply the gossip columns. Bored to sobs as she was by Googie and Tigger, she had become used to hearing political and Royal chat days or even weeks before it hit the headlines. She was accustomed to knowing the details of the private lives of the great before they became common knowledge — if indeed they ever did. She and Charles had not spent a great deal of time staying away but now her memory reminded her of three or four shooting parties during the winter and a couple of house parties in the summer. She knew Blenheim by this time and Houghton and Arundel and Scone. She had lost the sense of these places' historicity. They had become the homes of her circle. In this she was almost being honest — as honest certainly as those born to the class to which she had so briefly belonged. Edith had learned well all the tricks of aristocratic irreverence. She would stride like the best of them into a dazzling great hall by Vanbrugh, lined with full length van Dycks, and curse the M25 as she threw her handbag into a Hepplewhite chair. By this stage, she understood how to make that statement of solidarity. 'This wonderful room is ordinary to me,' their actions say, 'because it is my natural habitat. I belong here even if you do not.'
Now, it seemed to her, looking at Kenneth and Stella with their framed flower prints from Peter Jones, their pseudo-Regency furniture, their Jane Churchill print curtains, that her membership of that club where she could curl up in an armchair in the long library at Wilton and leaf through Vogue, hugging a vodka and tonic, had been revoked without reference to her. In a rare moment of clarity she understood that in choosing this actor, far from making a wild bohemian statement, she had in fact returned to her own country. That Simon was far more of a piece with Stella and her faraway baronet cousin or Kenneth and his business friends than Charles had ever been. This world, where, as a general rule, one laughed and cried alongside the obscure — this was her real world. The world in which she had grown up and where she would now again live. Charles and Broughton and the Name Exchange only touched her people tangentially. They were, whatever her mother might like to think, an entirely different tribe.
'Phew!' said Simon, as they pulled away from the curb and headed back towards the King's Road. Edith nodded. They had survived. That was the main thing. She had taken the first step in explaining to her mother that her dream-life was over.
Simon winked at her. 'We're alive,' he said. For a moment they rode on in silence. 'Do you want to go straight home?'
'As opposed to?'
'Well, we could go on somewhere.'
'Where?'
Simon made a slight pout. 'What about Annabel's?'
Edith was rather surprised. 'Are you a member?'
