Snobs: A Novel

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 ou est la plume de ma tante, and Tigger can hardly manage encore. Henri married a cousin of ours thirty years ago and I doubt if we've exchanged as many words since.'

'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 endless, sticky translated conversation that lay ahead.

She caught my look. 'Cheer up, you'll have Edith between you.' She darted one of her flirtatious, birdlike glances at me.

'How do you find our bride?'

'She's looking very well,' I said. 'In fact, I've never seen her prettier.'

'Yes, she does look well.' Lady Uckfield hesitated for a fraction of a second. 'I only hope she finds it amusing down here.

She's been the most marvellous success, you know. The trouble is they all love her so much that it's frightfully hard not to rope her into sharing all the wretched duties. I'm afraid I've been rather selfish in unloading the cares of state.'

'Knowing Edith, I bet she enjoys all that. It's a step up on answering a telephone in Milner Street.'

Lady Uckfield smiled. 'Well, as long as it is.'

'She seems to have given up London so you must be doing something right.'

'Yes,' she said briskly. 'If they're happy, that's the main thing, isn't it?'

She drifted away to greet some new arrivals. It struck me that I had missed some nuance in the coiled recesses of Lady Uckfield's perfectly ordered mind.

The dinner, as predicted, was rather leaden. I had Daphne Bolingbroke, Lady Tenby's coolly pleasant daughter, on my right, so I was all right for the first course but behind me I could hear Edith struggling gamely with M. de Montalambert on her other side and, in truth, I found it quite hard to concentrate on my own conversation. The trouble was that Edith's French and her neighbour's English were more or less on a par. That is, terrible but not so non-existent as to preclude all effort. It would have been simpler if neither had commanded a word of the other's language but they had, alas, just enough vocabulary to be utterly confusing. Edith kept maundering on about bits of Paris being so 'bon' and London being 'epouvantable' with M. de Montalambert alternately looking completely blank or, worse, when he thought he had understood her observation, answering with a swirling torrent of French of which Edith could barely catch more than the first word or two.

The courses changed and I turned to rescue Edith from her travails but M. de Montalambert declined to obey the English regulations and refused to give her up. Instead, grasping at the slight improvement in communication that my moderate French offered him, he launched into a passionate denunciation of the French government, which had reference, in some mystifying way that was quite lost on me, to Louis XVIII's minister, the Duc Decazes.

'What are we talking about?' said Edith softly under the apparently unstoppable Gallic flow.

'God knows. The French Restoration, I think.'

'Crikey.'

In truth, we were both completely worn out by this time and longing for a reprieve but the Duc resolutely ignored Lady Uckfield on his left and she, needless to say, could not have been more delighted to set aside the conventions this once.

The Duc paused and smiled. I sensed a change of topic. Perversely, having discovered that my French was better than Edith's, he decided it was time to demonstrate his grasp of English. 'You like sex?' he said pleasantly. 'You find you come often?'

At exactly this moment Edith was drinking some of her water and so of course did a massive nose trick. Seizing her napkin, she tried vainly to pass it off as a fit of coughing. To my right I could feel Daphne shaking with silent laughter. A desperate schoolroom hysteria was enveloping the table.

'I think,' said Lady Uckfield, who sensed the whiff of civic unrest, 'that Henri is asking if you are familiar with Sussex.' She spoke firmly, like a schoolmistress with a rowdy troop of children, but inevitably her statement gave rise to another terrible wave of giggles among us all. Edith was literally red in the face and almost weeping in her attempts to control her mirth.

At this point Charles looked up. He had naturally missed everything. 'Darling,' he said, 'do you know what I've done with my other gun sleeve? Richard wants to borrow it tomorrow and I cannot think where it is.'

His words achieved what his mother's had failed to do. They fell like a heavy fire-blanket on the burgeoning hilarity and effectively stifled it. There was a flat pause before Edith spoke. 'You lent it to Billy Westbrook,' she said. And as she turned back to her tiresome neighbour, she caught my eye. It was at that moment, hearing Edith's patient answer and sensing her weariness, that I began to realise her bargain had perhaps not been an easy one.

I was up early the next day, but when I arrived in the dining room, most of the house-party was already there, munching away at the splendid, fin de siecle breakfast that was spread out in silver chafing dishes along the sideboard. I helped myself to various cholesterol-rich preparations and took my plate over to an empty chair next to Tommy.

'Do we draw numbers, or do they just tell us where to stand?' I asked.