He shook his head. 'Not really. They're always down here. I must say, I'm quite surprised that Edith is content to coddle the village and give away prizes without taking a breather but the fact is they're hardly in London at all.'
I too found this slightly unlikely. Particularly as the young couple were still living in the big house with Charles's parents.
There had been plans to renovate one of the farm houses when they were first married and I asked Tommy if he knew how it was coming along.
'I'm not sure they're going on with that,' he said. 'I gather they've gone off the idea.'
'Really?'
'I know. It's funny, isn't it? She wants to stay here and her in-laws are delighted, so Brook Farm will probably be finished quickly and let.'
'Do they have a flat in the house, then?'
'Not as such. Some sort of upstairs sitting room for Edith and Charles has his study, of course. But that's it. Rather like one of those American soap-operas, when they're all worth a hundred million and they still cram together in one house with a big staircase.'
I shook my head. 'I suppose Charles likes the set-up here but it seems rather tiresome for a bride.'
Just as Charles, like all his breed, was not immune to the sense of getting 'special' treatment wherever he went — in fact, as Edith had already observed, he resented its being withheld from him — so I could understand that, after a lifetime of pretending he was unaware of the extraordinary baroque surroundings of his life, it would be hard actually to give them up.
The English upper-classes have a deep, subconscious need to read their difference in the artefacts about them. Nothing is more depressing (or less convincing) to them than the attempt to claim some rank or position, some family background, some genealogical distinction, without the requisite acquaintance and props. They would not dream of decorating a bed sitting room in Putney without the odd watercolour of a grandmother in a crinoline, two or three decent antiques and preferably a relic of a privileged childhood. These things are a kind of sign language that tell the visitor where in the class system the owner places him or herself. But, above all things, the real marker for them, the absolute litmus test, is whether or not a family has retained its house and its estates. Or a respectable proportion of them. You may overhear a nobleman explaining to some American visitor that money is not important in England, that people can stay in Society without a bean, that land is 'more of a liability, these days', but in his heart, he does not believe any of these things. He knows that the family that has lost everything but its coronet, those duchesses in small houses near Cheyne Walk, those viscounts with little flats in Ebury Street, lined as they may be with portraits and pictures of the old place ('It's some sort of farmers' training college, nowadays'), these people are all
Of course, the Broughton position was an unusually solid one. Few were the families in the 1990s that held their sway and the day would dawn when Charles would enter Broughton Hall as its owner. Still, listening to Tommy, I suspected he might have dreaded the possibility that people, awe-struck as they shook his hand in the Marble Hall, could make the mistake, on finding him at home in a chintz-decorated farmhouse sitting room, of thinking that he was an Ordinary Person. In this, however, I was wrong.
Tommy shook his head. 'No, Charles wouldn't mind. Not now he's used to the idea.' He paused for thought and then decided against it. 'Oh, well. I must get changed.'
We assembled for dinner in the drawing room that the family generally used, a pretty apartment on the garden front, much less cumbrous than the adjacent Red Saloon where we had gathered for the engagement dinner. There were a few vaguely familiar faces besides Tommy. Peter Broughton was there, though apparently without his dreary blonde. Old Lady Tenby's eldest daughter, Daphne, now married to the rather dim second son of a Midlands earl, was talking to Caroline Chase in the corner. They looked up and smiled carefully across the room. Filled with trepidation, I looked around for Eric and saw him scoffing whisky as he lectured some poor old boy on the present state of the City. The listener stood looking into Eric's red face with all the pleasure of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.
'What would you like to drink?' Lady Uckfield stood by my elbow and sent Jago off to fetch a glass of Scotch and water.
She followed my glance. 'Heavens! Eric seems to be making very large small talk.'
I smiled. 'Who is the lucky recipient of his confidences?'
'Poor dear Henri de Montalambert.'
For some reason or other, I knew that the Duc de Montalambert was a relation of the Broughtons by marriage. His was not a particularly smart dukedom by French standards (they, having so many more than we do, can afford to grade them) since it had only been given by Louis XVIII in 1820, but a marriage in the 1890s to the heiress of a Cincinnati steel king, had placed the family up there alongside the Tremouilles and the Uzes. Lady Uckfield had referred to him in the manner in which one speaks of an old family friend, but since she always disguised her true feelings about anyone, even from herself, I was, as usual, unable to gauge the true degree of intimacy. 'He looks a bit dazed,' I said.
She nodded with a suppressed giggle. 'I can't imagine what he's making of it all. He hardly speaks a word of English.
Never mind. Eric won't notice.' She accepted my laugh as tribute and then rebuked me for it. 'Now, you're not to make me unkind.'
'How long is Monsieur de Montalambert staying?'
Lady Uckfield pulled a face. 'All three days. What are we to do? I'm still at
'Is there an English-speaking duchesse, then?'
'There was. But since she was deaf and is dead, she cannot help us now. I don't suppose you speak French?'
'I do a bit,' I said with a sinking heart. In my mind's eye, I could see the re-shuffling of place cards and the
