Snobs: A Novel

'Charles said he'd look over the farmhouse for us, and see if anything needed doing.'

'How long before we can move in, do you think?'

I shrugged. 'Straight away, I gather. If we don't mind roughing it a bit.'

'God knows I'd sleep on a mountain side rather than spend another night in that hotel,' said Bella with a wry laugh as she held a flame to her apparently non-flammable, little smoke.

Simon took another look at the departing figures below. 'I think I might go up there with them. I can tell him if he's fussing unnecessarily. After all, we want to get in tonight if we can.' He nodded and walked off down the corridor. Bella and I watched him go in silence. She spoke first.

'Off he goes. To break more hearts.'

'Don't you like him?'

She bent down to concentrate harder on her dingy little fag. 'What's not to like? I just get a bit worn out with all that charm.'

'I shouldn't think Charles would notice it,' I said.

'Maybe not. But she will. And judging by last night I'm not sure she'll like it much. I hope he doesn't bugger things up before we've even moved in.'

He didn't. Or not enough to prevent us taking up residence that night. We had broken for lunch and were sitting at a rickety caterers' table on the gravel in front of the house, making the best of our cardboard lunch, when Simon returned in triumph, dancing and punching the air as he spoke. 'We're in!'

'When?'

'Today.'

'What about the hotel?'

'All done. I've given them notice for the three of us and told them we'll be back to pack and pay as quickly as we can.

They're making so much money out of the film they didn't complain too much.' He beamed. 'Edith and Charles have asked us back for supper tonight so we don't have to worry about any shopping.'

'But how very generous of Edith and Charles.' Bella let the unaccustomed names linger on her tongue with a conspiratorial half-smile at me. I could see that Simon was destined to give her a great deal of amusement.

It was of course rather a bore to have to return to Broughton for the second evening running and make more polite conversation with 'Tigger' and 'Googie'. Bella and I confessed later that we had each privately thought of chucking. I would imagine that Simon had no such scruples. But in the event we came independently to the conclusion that it would have been a churlish return for what was both a favour and a dramatic improvement in our lot, so once again, shortly after eight o'clock, we crunched our car to a halt and made for the front door.

Simon was a changed man. The night before, his general braggadocio (unbeknownst to him, of course) had betrayed his social unease even to the unobservant. He had dropped names that had no kudos and spoken of social events that had either no currency value or with which he was clearly completely unfamiliar. In the end it was hard to resist a twinge of sympathy for his gaucheness despite the success he was having with his hostess. Like many actors, or civilians for that matter, he had been caught out by the need to demonstrate his right to belong in a world that he had long claimed as his own but seldom, if ever, penetrated. Tonight, however, he was free. He had that glow that distinguishes the insecure egomaniac when they find that their doubts were ill-founded and that they are liked. It was hard to avoid catching Bella's smiling eye as we made our way up to the family drawing room, with Simon trailing his hand along the gleaming banister and chattering amiabilities to the butler all the way, very much the Friend of the Family. Once there, we witnessed him greeting both Lord and, particularly, Lady Uckfield as Old Pals.

Of course, one of the basic truths of life is that, as a general rule, the world takes you at your own estimation. Just as the inexperienced hostess will tremble over her guest list, pondering endlessly whether or not she dare invite some grandee or media personality she hardly knows, only to discover in later years that nobody usually questions anyone's 'right' to send them an invitation. If they want to go, they will accept. If they don't, they won't. So, now, it would not have occurred to Lord Uckfield to ponder whether or not Simon Russell was his social equal. He appeared to consider himself so, and that, coupled to the fact that his role in Lord Uckfield's life consisted of eating dinners and telling funny stories, more than justified his amiability and relaxation in the peer's eyes. Just so are many social careers, particularly in London, constructed. Simon was no different to the art-dealers and opera- enthusiasts that are taken up by the various duchesses of our day, whose grinning images, sandwiched between media personalities and the wives of the heirs to great fortunes, are glimpsed in magazines. Of course, such people, like Simon, are generally unaware that beneath the superficial acceptance that their charm and easy manner can gain for them, their grand hosts do not seriously consider them to belong to their world. It is sad to watch the

'walker-favourite' of a great family arrive, after years of drawing-room service, at a public event — a wedding, say, or, worse, a memorial — only to find that they are placed in the back pew between the local MP and the central heating duct, while half-known and much disliked grandees are shown up to the front. Such is life. Or such, at least, are the values of this life.

Something that Simon Russell was quite ignorant of, and Lady Uckfield knew very well indeed.

What interested me this evening, however, was not Lady Uckfield's response to Simon, which was predictably one of careful amusement, but Edith's. The sulks and rather affected hostility of the previous night had gone and been replaced by a mannered silence. She was looking more beautiful than she had been the evening before, in a black skirt and cream silk top, with some pearls at her throat and another string wound round her wrist in a chunky tangle. For want of a better word, she looked sexier than I had seen her since her marriage. She had not abandoned her cold hauteur, which I truly believe was already unconscious, but as we walked in, she looked up from the sofa with the kind of measured glance that I have learned from experience generally indicates that a woman means business.

Looking back, I am forced to conclude that Edith's plan to stay in the country in order to keep out of trouble was a poor one. Like some bored colonial wife in a hill station in India, the lack of sympathetic companions only really served to throw into advantageously high relief anyone who did make it to the outpost. I am not sure that if she and Charles had flung themselves into the whirl of parties, charities and all the other rubbish so eagerly awaiting them in London, that her virtue would have been in graver danger. I suspect it would have been quite the contrary. Society has the great merit of blunting the dullness of one's partner. The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.