than we did. She was only really interested in collecting horse-brasses to take back to her Laurel Canyon home. Louanne Peters was an entirely different matter. Not only was she convinced that she was possessed of a seriously remarkable talent but her egotism nearly ranked as mental illness. She would talk of her successes and her looks, her lovers and her earning capacity by the hour, and always without asking a single question of her unwilling listeners. At first one was inclined to think that it must be some sort of complicated joke and that she was waiting for us all to call her on it, to burst out laughing, to hold up our hands and shout,
'Enough! We give in!' Only it wasn't and she wasn't. Simon loathed her, which didn't help their rather underwritten love scenes.
The shot finished, releasing Simon and Louanne, just as Adela came striding down the avenue towards us. In her corduroy knee breeches and fisherman's sweater, her long hair held back with a briskly tied silk scarf, she was the very antithesis of Louanne's synthetic charms and, for a moment, she showed Edith's carefully painted face in a slightly unfavourable light. She was so… healthy. But then again, of course, I was in love with her.
Edith stood up in greeting. 'Adela, how lovely to meet you at last. I'm Edith Broughton.'
'But I'm thrilled to meet you too!'
The girls exchanged their guarded greetings. That they were guarded was for two principal reasons, neither of which meant that there was the smallest romantic rivalry between them. Edith was not then and never had been in the least interested in me in that way. No, on her side it was the annoyance of having to surrender a confidant who has done good service and who will never be quite so useful married as he has been single. If you marry late there are many who feel this, even if those that love you attempt to control it. Added to which, just as happily married friends drive us all mad by their insistence that the married state is the only possible one, so do one's unhappily married acquaintance see it as their mission to turn all and sundry back from the church door. This stance is often used, half jokingly, as a means of insulting their partner in public. 'Get married!
What on earth do you want to do that for?' one hears jocularly at a dinner party, and from further down the table comes a sour look from a lip-biting spouse. Ominously, this was a position that Edith, quite unconsciously I'm sure, was nudging into.
On Adela's side the guardedness was more subtle. She knew of course exactly who Edith was and, until meeting me, had been inclined to take the other point of view about the new Lady Broughton — that Charles, whom she had met a few times on the circuit, had been 'caught.' I had brought her at least to the point of suspending her judgement but in Edith's tone of greeting Adela had detected, with some justification, the faintest note of graciousness. Edith the Aristocrat welcoming this nice little actor's girlfriend. These things are hard to gauge correctly but it is true that Edith had developed a rather grand manner by this time so she may have been tempted into this dangerous area. Understandably, Adela, while previously prepared by me not to snub Edith, was damned if she was going to be patronised by her.
To make matters worse, just at this moment Charles arrived to see what was going on. He recognised Adela and I think in revenge (although she would have denied it) she lost no time in leading him into a conversation about several people that they both knew but Edith did not. In short she used Edith's dreaded Name Exchange against her. I suppose I should have felt indignant for one or the other of them but these things have a way of sorting themselves out without help from outsiders and anyway I could see that Adela had a point. I don't think I expected, even then, that she and Edith would ever be particularly close. Adela was too near what Edith wished to be (certainly so far as her past went) and while Adela was not a snob as a general rule, she was not above putting the likes of Edith in their place. I used to call it her 'Vicereine Mode.' All in all I could see that the best I might hope for was a kind of mutual tolerance. On this particular morning, before things could get sticky, Charles offered to show Adela the stables and with a nod towards me they set off. Edith watched them go.
'That's who should have married Charles.'
'Well, she's going to marry me.'
'No, I mean that's the kind of girl who would have made him happy. Giving out prizes, running the WVS. Can't you see it?'
'If that had been the kind of girl he wanted to marry, he would have married one. Lord knows there were plenty to choose from.'
'That doesn't sound very complimentary to your beloved.'
'You are talking of her obvious characteristics, which are, as you rightly observe, those of her time and her class. Her unusual qualities, of which you know nothing, are at the root of why she has chosen to marry an impoverished actor with a basement flat and not a rich earl.'
'Well, we'll have to watch our Ps and Qs around her.'
I wasn't having that. 'Don't make us into two teams, my dear. If you do, I warn you I'm on hers not yours.'
'Ouch.'
'Anyway, who says Charles should have married anyone but you?'
Edith said nothing but lay back and stared at the sky.
'You two look very intense.' Simon appeared, stripped of his embroidered coat, more romantic than ever in his flapping linen sleeves. He threw himself down on the bank next to Edith with a gay disregard of his costume. I could see his dresser sucking his teeth in the background but Simon was playing Byron to Edith's Caroline Lamb and he was not going to let a detail like grass stains deflect him. 'Where's Adela? Wasn't she here?'
'She's gone off to see the stables with Charles,' I said.
'To catch up on old times,' added Edith dryly.
Simon laughed. 'Lawks,' he said. 'We'd better be on our best behaviour when those two get together.'
'Don't start that,' said Edith. 'I've just been ticked off.'
Simon gave a comic guilty look in my direction but actually I was rather interested that his social confidence had grown sound enough to attempt this kind of joke. I suppose I was faintly annoyed that Adela was being equated with Charles under some kind of 'dull nob' label by them both, but when I saw Edith smile and mutter to Simon under her breath I realised at once what a clever flirt he was. For by including me in his observation he had contrived to take the threat out of what was nevertheless a deliberate complicity, a shared joke with Edith, which excluded Charles. I saw then that Adela and I were quite irrelevant to his purposes.
