'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.
It transpired that this weekend, Edith, in a spirit of revenge as well as generosity, and quite against Charles's will, had invited the very Bob and Annette who had been staying with the Chases during the Mallorcin honeymoon. She had done this partly to see Annette again (who had, of course, kept up a lively correspondence with her new and eminent pal), partly to annoy Charles, partly to annoy Googie, and mainly to annoy Eric Chase who was down at Broughton with Caroline. She thought it would infuriate him to have this pair introduced to his parents-in-law as 'friends of Eric' as if they were typical of his crowd. She was correct. It did.
Simon, Adela and I had been asked for dinner, Bella having taken off for a few days in London, so at eight that night we found ourselves joining this motley throng in the family drawing room. The mismatched group promised a strangely disparate evening and in fact, Adela initially got the wrong end of the stick and spent the first hour assuming that Eric was something to do with the film and not the family. The more names he dropped the more she was confirmed in her opinion until finally he referred to 'my father-in-law, Tigger', in red-faced exasperation. Even then she looked over to me for a second opinion.
Lady Uckfield's responses on the other hand were calculatedly, and deliberately, disappointing to Edith. She made a great fuss of Bob and Annette all weekend and simultaneously managed to convey, with a sort of discreet gush, what a relief it was to her to find a kindred spirit in Adela, which was, I think, meant as a compliment to me.
It reassured her that, having taken an actor into her circle, he should turn out to be her sort after all. She found it fitting that her friends should marry people she had more or less heard of. As it happened she knew one of Adela's aunts quite well and had come out the same year as her mother, all of which was as it should be in her quaintly ordered world. Obviously, it was exactly this security blanket that Charles's choice of Edith had withheld and it was hard not to suspect a touch of spite towards her daughter-in-law in the liveliness with which Lady Uckfield took up my intended. Adela, naturally, blossomed under the attention, still only half aware of the games being played around her. I found Edith in one of the windows, staring grumpily at the ill-assorted party. She nodded at my beloved. 'What did I tell you? She's perfect.'
'I know.' I followed her gaze and saw that it had shifted from the cosy scene on the sofa to a far corner where Caroline Chase was listening absorbedly to Simon, apparently, as always, in full flow. Between the groups Charles wandered rather disconsolately, offering refills. 'Poor old Charles. Who's got him at dinner?' The question was more impertinent than I had meant but I suppose I wasn't thinking. At any rate, instead of reprimanding me as she should have, Edith shrugged.
'Who knows? We've got the most ghastly evening ahead.' I looked enquiringly. 'Bob and Annette Watson are taking us all out.'
'That's very nice of them. Why on earth should they?'
Edith did not share my view of things. 'That's not all. They've booked us into Fairburn Hall. Googie's in fits. She's thrilled, of course. She's been dying to see what they've done with it since the de Marneys left and she's never dared admit it.'
Her lack of gratitude at the Watsons' invitation did not surprise me. The plan was, naturally, a frightful prospect to the Broughtons and their ilk. In England one of the saddest mistakes a social climber can make is excessive generosity. It's odd really for what could be more charming? To arrive with presents and treats, to gather up whole house-parties and take them out on the town — what could be nicer than this? And yet these courteous acts are as clear a signal to the Insiders that the would-be benefactor is a newcomer to their world as if they had worn a sign on their hat. Of all these solecisms, that of offering to take people 'out' in the country is perhaps the worst. The English upper-classes do not as a rule leave their houses in the country in the evening except to go to other people's houses. They might be tempted by a country house opera or even the occasional play with a picnic attached, but if they want to eat in a restaurant they do it in the week and in London. Nor do they ever go to 'country house hotels' unless it is on a pilgrimage of personal curiosity. They might visit one because 'I used to
