Snobs: A Novel

This, to my delight, did at last make him slightly uncomfortable — or at least irritated. 'Who's going to tell her? You won't.'

This was obviously true as far as it went and for a moment I did wonder if I wasn't over-reacting when I heard a knock on the glass behind me. I turned and to my complete amazement I saw Edith, in an Hermes scarf loosely knotted on her chin, rapping at the window and begging, like Cathy Earnshaw, to be let in from the night. Simon, however, was no Heathcliff and it was I, not he, who jumped up to open the back door.

'What the hell are you doing here?' I said, but she pushed past me and sauntered over to the Aga to warm her hands.

'Don't you scold me as well. I've had enough for one night I can assure you.'

'Does Charles know?'

'Of course. Eric told him.'

'But does he know you're here? And why are you here, for God's sake? Don't make everything worse than it is.'

All this time Simon had neither moved nor spoken. Now, very deliberately he rose from his chair, put down his glass, walked over to Edith and slowly, for my benefit I assume, enfolded her in his arms and bent his head to kiss her with the slow, moist, hungry motion of a modern film star in close-up. He looked as if he were eating her tongue. For a moment I watched their two blond heads rocking against each other and behind them, like the ghosts in Richard Ill's tent, I saw Charles and his mother and the wretched Mrs Lavery whose dreams were being incinerated in a farmhouse kitchen in Sussex as I stood there.

And behind them, the more distant figures of the Cumnors, and old Lady Tenby and her daughters, and all those others who would be enthralled and secretly (or not so secretly) delighted at the ruin that was being encompassed by these two silly people.

'Well?' said Adela, whom I had promised I would report to before turning in. She rolled over in bed, blinking herself into concentration.

'Hopeless,' I said.

'Wouldn't he listen?'

'He's loving it, I'm afraid. Anyway, I didn't say that much. I was just getting started when Edith turned up. She's down there now.'

Adela was quiet for a second. 'Oh,' she said. And then: 'So it is hopeless. Poor Charles.' And she rolled back into her pillow, pulling the covers up around her face.

Some time after this I proposed and was accepted. It was rather a tense period for me, I must confess, as I was inspected by an endless series of my intended's disapproving relations, most of whom were seriously unnerved by the thought of their beloved Adela relying on a stage career in future. 'Well, all I can say is good luck with that artistic temperament,' was the advice she received from a particularly unpleasant aunt. After a couple of months of this sort of thing, I was anxious to end the waiting. We decided to be married in April and, since it is a notoriously unpredictable month, to have a London ceremony.

As Adela remarked, 'Country weddings can be such muddy affairs.' It was a 'Society Event', I suppose, though not quite on the scale of the Broughtons, but even so, anyone who has ever played a central part in a large wedding, let alone a large London wedding with all the paraphernalia it involves, will understand that I had very little time to worry about Edith and her menage in the months that led up to it. I had asked the Uckfields and the Broughtons and, to my mother-in-law's delight, they had all four accepted. I was comforted by this, in the thick of the chaos of my nuptials, as I assumed it meant that the trouble had passed and the nonsense of an autumn night had been forgotten. Then, about two weeks before the wedding itself, I had a telephone call from Edith. 'Have you invited Simon?' she said.

I understood at once that she was anxious lest there might be an awkwardness and I was able to reassure her. 'No, I haven't. You're all right.' I laughed mildly, so that that hideous evening might be turned the sooner into a shared joke between us.

'Could you?' she said.

The smile left my face, the straw my clutch. 'No, I could not,' I said tersely.

'Why not?'

'You know very well why not.'

There was a pause at the other end of the line. 'Can I ask you a favour?' I didn't answer this as I dreaded to hear it. I was not spared. 'Could we possibly borrow your flat while you're away?'

'No.'

Edith's voice was cold and definite. 'No. Well, I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

'Edith, darling,' I said. This is the kind of thing that always happens just when one is entirely engrossed in some other large event. The night before crucial exams is invariably the moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to prison.

'Of course you can't see Simon here. How could I possibly do that to Charles? Or to Simon's wretched wife for that matter?

Don't be insane, darling, please. I beg you.'

But she was not to be won. With some perfunctory formula words she slid away and the line went dead.

I told Adela and she was not surprised. 'He thinks she can get him into things. That she can open doors. He's Johnny-on-the-make.'

'I don't know how interested he is in all that.'

'He's interested. He wants to be at the Head Table, that one. You'll see.'

'Well, I don't know how much poor old Edith can fix it for him.'

Adela smiled, a trifle coldly I thought. 'She can't. She'll be lucky to get a table in the St James's Club when all