Snobs: A Novel

'Where's Cramney?' I said.

Lady Uckfield shrugged. 'Some ghastly little place in Kent. Do you want some tea?'

By the time I made it to my room, my things had been unpacked and my evening shirt, tie, socks and cummerbund lay waiting for me. There was, however, no sign of my clean underpants. I hunted around through various drawers and was just in the process of searching under the bed when I heard a voice behind me. 'What can you be looking for?' I turned and saw Tommy Wainwright standing in the doorway that connected my room, aka the Garden Room, with its larger neighbour, the Rose Velvet Room, where Tommy was billeted. Actually, despite these impressive titles, the chambers themselves were rather small, having been squeezed into a sort of mezzanine floor at one side of the house. They had been created by the architect as part of an arrangement to provide a score of secondary bedrooms while only messing up one end facade of the house.

Consequently, despite the fragrant names, these chambers overlooked the stable yard, had eight-foot ceilings, and faced north.

We hunted around for my missing undergarment for a bit, then gave up, abandoning it to its fate. Presumably, to this day, a rather old pair of pants is still wedged at the back of some drawer in the Garden Room of Broughton Hall. Tommy retreated to his chamber and returned with a small bottle of Scotch and two tooth glasses. 'Essential equipment for hotels and house-parties,' he said, and poured us both a slug.

'Are they mean with the booze?' I asked. I have often been surprised at the fantastic discomfort and deprivation the grand English are prepared to put their friends (and total strangers) through, particularly in my youth. I've been shown into bathrooms that could just about manage a cold squirt of brown water, bedrooms with doors that don't shut, blankets like tissue, and pillows like rocks. I have driven an hour cross-country to lunch with some grand relations of my father, who gave me one sausage, two small potatoes and twenty-eight peas. Once, during a house-party for a ball in Hampshire, I was so cold that I ended up piling all my clothes, with two threadbare towels, onto the bed and then holding all this together with a worn square of Turkish carpet — the only bit of floor-covering in the room. When my hostess woke me the next day, she made no comment on the fact that I was sleeping in a sort of webbing sarcophagus and clearly could not have been less interested in whether I had ever shut my eyes. When one thinks of the Edwardians who revelled in luxury it seems odd that their grandchildren should be so impervious to it. Recently I have detected that the comfort demanded by new money is effecting a slow improvement in the houses of the anciens riches but, heavens, what a time it's taken.

Tommy shook his head in answer to my question. 'No, no. They're not mean at all. Not a bit of it. Lord U chucks it down everyone's throat. It's just too complicated to try and get a dressing drink.'

We sat and gossiped for a bit and I asked if Tommy had seen a lot of the Broughtons.

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 declasse to their own kind. It goes without saying that this consciousness of the need for the materialisation of rank is as unspoken as the Masonic ritual.

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