Snobs: A Novel

daughter with brimming eyes.

'How little you know me,' she said, and retreated majestically into the kitchen. Edith, her father and Simon stared at each other.

'Well, I suppose we all knew it was going to be a rough night,' said Mr Lavery, tucking into his whisky.

Later, sitting round the oval reproduction table in the flat's modest dining room, the four of them did contrive some quasi-normal conversation. Mr Lavery questioned Simon about acting and Simon questioned Mr Lavery about business and Mrs Lavery fetched the food and removed the plates and made elaborately courteous remarks all evening. She had that uniquely 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one of careful amusement, but Edith's. The sulks and rather affected hostility of the previous night had gone and been replaced by a mannered silence.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.

Companionship, like retirement in the middle classes, can so often bring divorce in its wake. One thing I am sure of: in London, Edith would never have been attracted to Simon Russell. He was astonishingly good-looking as I have said, but in truth the trailer was better than the feature. He could talk and he was a really expert flirt, a joy to watch in action in fact, but when the chips were down and the doors were closed there was not much substance there. I do not mean to imply that I disliked him. On the contrary, I was extremely fond of him. And he could discuss mortgages or Europe or Madonna as well as anyone, but then couldn't Charles (at least the first two)? Of the feu sacre, that holy, charismatic flame that makes the world seem well lost for love, Simon had none at all. Or none that was discernible to me.

'Tell me, Mr Russell, what sort of acting do you like best?' This was Lady Uckfield. She was always careful to address strangers, especially those younger than herself as 'Mr' and 'Miss' or by their correct title. The main reason for this, indeed the reason for her whole vocabulary, was to underpin her image of herself as a miraculous survival of the Edwardian age in modern England. She liked to think that in her behaviour and manner people had a chance to see how things were done in the days when they were done properly. How matters would have been managed by Lady Desborough or the Countess of Dudley or the Marchioness of Salisbury or any of the other forgotten fin de siecle beauties who made their lives their art, which consequently perished with them. As part of this carefully studied performance, everything she touched was credited with uniqueness. She would speak of 'receipts' and 'luncheon' as she made a special point of her Irish ham ('dry and delicious and quite unfindable in England') or her French cherries ('I'm simply stuffing myself with them') or her yellow, American paper ('I find I just can't write without it'). The fun of this approach was that all her guests were blackmailed, on the principle of the Emperor's New Clothes, into agreeing that they could perceive an enormous difference in everything that was set before them, thus reinforcing the very prejudices that had made them lie. Actually, the food was always good and well-chosen so I was as craven as the rest in pretending to discern huge shades of taste between different types of asparagus or whatever the challenge of the day might be. And anyway, the more I came to know Lady Uckfield the more I came to admire the completeness of her self-image. She never took time off from being the ultra-charming but ultra-fastidious marchioness of the long Edwardian Summer. Never. I am sure that if she were going in for a potentially fatal operation, she would be fussing about the make of the surgeon's scissors.

Edith never understood the strength of her mother-in-law's chosen path. She thought her a fuss-pot and a pain in the neck.

But Lady Uckfield had a self-discipline that would have kept Edith out of trouble. She did not know what it was to be bored

— or rather, to admit to herself that she was bored. The fact she was married to a man who hadn't a quarter of her brain had never disturbed her conscious mind for half a second. Her road was chosen and she would make a success of it without pity or remorse. In our sloppy century, one must at least respect, if not revere, such moral resolution. And, after all, to borrow a phrase from Trollope, when all was said and done, 'her lines had fallen in pleasant places'.

The other reason that Lady Uckfield called Simon 'Mr Russell' of course, was to stop him calling her 'Googie'.

'Well, I like being employed,' he said in answer to her question. 'I don't know that there's much more to it than that.'

'Don't you want to be a great film star?' To an actor, this is an unfair question. They all want to be great film stars but it is something that, by universal unspoken agreement, they are not supposed to admit to.

Simon fell back on the stock reply. 'I think I just want to do good work.' He looked awkward as he said it although there was, to be fair, more truth in this than one might suppose. Or rather, it would be true to say he