down on the appointed night in her rather battered green Mini, was introduced to the other two over a merry and, thanks to Bella, delicious dinner and promised to join us on the set the following day when she had done a bit of shopping.
The next morning, before she had arrived, Edith came stalking me. We were filming in a rose garden, which was at the end of a short avenue leading away from one side of the house. The scene had originally been scheduled for the first week but had been endlessly delayed, I forget why, and so here we were, shooting it in mid-October. However, the luck of our (fearful) producers held and the day dawned as bright and hot as any in late June. I was almost irritated that their improvidence should have been so rewarded. It was a long sequence, involving Elizabeth Gunning (the fiercest American, Louanne) and Campbell (Simon) in a love duet, which was ultimately interrupted by Creevey (me). I was therefore sitting and reading, waiting my turn on the edge of the proceedings and I must say enjoying the location when Edith came into view.
'What's this I hear? You're a very dark horse.' I nodded that I was. 'Is it serious?' I observed that since I was already established as a dark horse it wasn't very likely that she'd know anything about it if it wasn't. 'Is she an actress?'
'Certainly not.'
'There's no need to sound so indignant. Why shouldn't she be?'
'Well, she isn't. She works in Christie's.'
Edith pulled a face. 'Not one of those earl's nieces at the front desk who sound so superior and then never know the answer to anything you ask them?'
'Exactly. Except she's not an earl's niece, she's a baronet's daughter.'
'What's her name?'
'Adela FitzGerald.'
'Well, you do disappoint me.' She threw herself down on a bank near to my folding chair. There were other empty chairs near so I felt no guilt.
'I can't think why.'
'You, my artist friend, to sink to a suitable match.'
'I'm not sure I'm prepared to listen to that from you. Anyway, surely the point is whether the suitability is an incidental detail or the primary motive.'
Edith blushed faintly and was silent. The first assistant signalled to us to be quiet and the cameras started to roll on Simon and the deadly Louanne. She pouted her way into the best position before the lens. We had all more or less reconciled ourselves to Jane Darnell, who was playing Lady Coventry. She was inept but there was no malice in her and she didn't appear to think much more of her chances of impersonating an eighteenth-century Irish beauty 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.'
