She sighed, idly scratching a bit of dried mud from her Barbour. 'Terrific. I know almost everything there is to know about estate planning. I could list the parts of a horse in my sleep. And what I haven't learned about running a charity is, believe me, not worth knowing.'
'You must get about a bit, though. Isn't that quite interesting?'
'Oh, it is! Did you know that in Italy the bowl of water in front of your place is to dip your fruit in, not your fingers? Or that in America you must never discuss acreage? Or that in Spain it is the crudest social solecism to use a knife when eating an egg however it may be cooked?' She paused for breath.
'I didn't know about the egg,' I said. She was silent for a while and I had another go at a bird passing overhead. 'There must be some of them you like.'
'I suppose so.'
'What about the family? Do they know how bored you are?'
'Googie, yes. Not darling old Tigger, of course. He's much too dense to notice anything that doesn't hit him over the head.
Caroline, I think.'
'And Charles?'
Edith looked up at the woods above us for a moment. 'The thing is, he finds it all so riveting that he is quite sure that, as I get into it, I will too. He sees it as a 'period of adjustment'.'
'That sounds very sensible to me.' Of course, as I said these words, I realised I was failing her by taking Charles's part.
But I couldn't, for the life of me, think of any other line to take. The simple fact remained that she had married a man who was, through no fault of his own, much duller than she was, for the purpose of her own social advancement. That was the deal she had made. No amount of fretting was going to make Charles witty and dynamic, and I already doubted that Edith was prepared to rejoin the mortals on the tier from which she had so lately risen. She had that common twenty-first-century desire, namely to have her cake and her half penny too. 'Surely there must be a lot to do? Didn't you have great schemes of combing the attics and re-writing the guide book?'
'There really isn't anything in the attics except for a lot of Victorian furniture. Googie rescued all the good stuff years ago.
And the librarian got rather ratty when I suggested putting a bit more about the family into the book.' She yawned. 'Anyway, Tigger and Charles were so completely uninterested. They think it's rather common to know too much. It was a bit disheartening in the end.'
'Then you'll have to find something else to take up. I can't believe you're short of offers from the local charities.' Even as I spoke I knew I was sounding more and more like a German governess but the truth was I felt like one, watching this spoiled beauty pouting against the fence.
She sighed drearily. 'So I suppose you're saying I've just got to tough it out?'
'Well, haven't you?'
She caught my eye as the whistle blew. The drive was over and we headed back to the Range Rovers. There we were distracted by a certain amount of fuss and suppressed rage, which appeared to have been caused by Eric Chase firing more or less directly at M. de Montalambert's nose. Eric was, of course, wildly indignant at the very suggestion, while the other side was muttering a collection of extraordinary French phrases, some of which were quite unfamiliar to me. I was appealed to as an independent witness but, needless to say, chatting to Edith, I had missed the whole thing.
Caroline listened to my protestations and nodded her approval. 'Quite right,' she said, blandly. 'I should stay out of it if I were you.'
I wasn't absolutely sure as to what she was referring.
After tea, I was just getting into my car at that slightly awkward moment when one lot of guests leaves and the next contingent draws up, when Charles followed me out across the gravel and came up to the driving window. I wound it down, wondering what I'd forgotten as I'd already done all my goodbyes, tips and signing. 'I meant to tell you,' he said, 'we've had an offer from a film company. My father's a bit blank. It's your neck of the woods. What do you think we ought to do?'
'They want to make a film at Broughton?'
'I don't know if it's a real film or one of those television things, but yes. What are they like? Is it safe?'
As a general rule, speaking as an actor, I wouldn't let a film unit within a mile of my house, under any circumstances, but it is nevertheless true that they are fairly reliable when they are dealing with anything that might qualify as 'historic'. Of course, whether or not it is worth it rather depends, like everything else in life, on what one is getting out of it. The best I could do was give Charles the name of an agency who might know the form for negotiating with film companies and suggest that he did what they told him.
He thanked me and nodded. 'We must stipulate you as part of the contract,' he said with a smile, as I drove away.
TEN
Oddly enough, and in sharp contrast to most of my Show Business acquaintance in similar circumstances, Charles kept his word. The film in question was one of those made-for-television pieces, which gather together as many fashionable actors as are short of money at the time, and run for three interminable hours on Sunday nights.
It was supposed to be the story of the Gunning sisters, an obscure pair of Irish beauties who arrived in London in 1750, took it by storm and married respectively the Earl of Coventry and the Duke of Hamilton. As it happened, the Hamilton marriage was unhappy — a situation rectified by the early death of the Duke — but the widowed Duchess went on, with some panache, to marry her long-term admirer, Colonel John Campbell, himself the heir to the dukedom of Argyll.
This was clearly the stuff of which pseudo-historical mini-series are made. Broughton was to double as both Hamilton Palace (demolished in the twenties) and Inverary (which I suppose was too far from London. Either that
