Snobs: A Novel

which the upper classes demonstrate their ease with their elegant surroundings.

'This is very nice,' I said. 'Where's Edith's sitting room? Is it next door?'

Charles shook his head. 'Upstairs,' he muttered. 'Quite near our bedroom.'

He stared at me mutely and rather than return his anguished glance, I started to peer at the spines of the books in the cases round the room. Can You Forgive Her? by Trollope caught my eye and gave me a disloyal inner smile. He Knew He Was Right by the same author sobered me up. I don't know that I had then any real understanding of Charles's capacity for jealousy, since I had no true knowledge of his capacity for emotion. The fact that someone is not particularly intelligent is no guide in these things. People may be stupid and extremely complicated just as they can be clever and incapable of deep feeling.

'What do you think?' I heard him say and for a moment I wondered if I was being asked my opinion of some unusual book but catching sight of Charles's face, I thought this was probably not the case. Just to be safe I answered with a question:

'What do you mean?'

'What are they up to?'

He was gruff and tweedy in his manner and I realised that we were embarking on what is called a 'man-to- man' talk. I shuddered at the prospect. Apart from anything else I am a firm believer in the 'least said soonest mended' school of marital harmony — a belief incidentally quite unshaken by marriage itself.

'Oh, Charles, come on,' I said warmly, implying that they couldn't possibly be 'up to' anything. I am not sure whether I was being dishonest in taking this tack. I rather think not. It seems naive but although, looking back, it is clear that Edith and Simon were drawn to each other from the second day, I don't know that their mutual attraction had really impinged itself on me much before that evening.

'You come on,' said Charles, more sharply than usual.

'Look,' I was very conciliatory, 'if you're asking me if I know anything, I don't. If you're asking if I think anything, I don't either. Much. I think they like each other, that's all. Is that so terrible? Haven't you ever wanted to flirt with anyone since you were married?'

'No,' said Charles, slumping into a Chippendale chair, and resting his elbows on a charming and untidy partner's desk. He let his head fall forward into his hands as he spoke and started to push his fingers through his hair. He was posing for a statue of misery. I felt wrong-footed in that I had judged badly to think that warm reassurance would do the trick and yet I didn't want to lead the way into a different level of intimacy, which Charles, whom after all I did not even then know well, might regard as an impertinence. I felt sorry for the fellow and wished to find a way to lighten rather than increase his load. My detached ruminations were interrupted by a sigh from the desk.

'She doesn't love me, you see.' He spoke to a pile of papers beneath his face but since the remark was presumably addressed to me, I tried to assess the correct level of response.

Of course, what made this doubly hard was that Charles's statement, bald as it was, was essentially true. There was no question in my mind but that Edith did not then love him. She did not desire him (which of course I only surmised at that time), she did not enjoy his company, she did not share his interests, she did not like most of his friends. I do not think, then or later, that she ever actually disliked him but I could hardly say that in answer to Charles's cry of pain. I was silent, which I suppose was in itself a tacit agreement, and Charles looked up. I cannot say how moved I was by the terrible suffering in his simple, county face. His narrow eyes were reddening with tears, which had already begun to run down his large and bony nose. His hair, normally as sleek as a 1930s advertisement for unguent, was ruffled and untidy and sticking up in awkward little spikes. Great grief can be worn charmingly by a beauty and I have seen a lot of gracious dignity at funerals in my time but it is my experience that when grief is becoming it is also suspect. Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul.

I blush to recall that I was surprised that Charles — nice, bluff Charles with his shooting and his hedgerows and his dogs —

had a heart that could be broken. But he had and I was there to witness its breaking.

Before I could say anything there was a sound from the corridor outside. 'Charles?' It was Lady Uckfield. Rather than commit, even in a moment of emotional tension such as this, the social solecism of knocking at a sitting-room door (an action that, with white-gloved butlers, always plays so prominent a part in inaccurate television period drama) she contrived to wrestle with the door knob as if it would have been easier to get into the Ark of the Covenant. At any rate, having given us both enough time to dress had we so needed let alone dry our tears, she opened the door and came into the room. 'Ah, Charles,' she smiled easily into her son's face, ignoring the Fall of Rome that was written there, 'Edith's back. They got stuck getting out of the town. Too boring.' She nodded towards me. 'Your friend's gone straight on up to the farm.' Charles nodded his thanks in a kind of daze and started back towards the drawing room. I would have followed but Lady Uckfield, with an almost imperceptible pressure on my arm, held me back.

'We'd better be off, too.' I said. 'Where's Bob? I must thank him for dinner.'

'He's gone to bed,' she replied. 'Your nice Adela said thank you.' We were silent. She stood by the fireplace, idly fingering the pasteboard squares that summoned her child to various festivities. There was only one light on in the farthest corner of the room, a glass and ormolu desk lamp, which threw longish shadows about her and in the half- light grooved her face cruelly.

For once she looked her years. The glamorous veil of her manner was momentarily lifted and a tired, worried woman in late middle-age was revealed to the naked eye.

'Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish,' she said, not looking up from the invitation to a wedding on which I could see a tick and 'Acc' in Edith's loose scrawl.

'Oh, I don't know,' I replied. My position was an awkward one for, after all, I was in that house as a friend of Edith. It behoved me to be loyal to her and yet I did think she had behaved foolishly. I was not, if you like, 'on her side' while finding it unsuitable that I should be on anyone else's.

'Well, I do.' She paused while I looked up in answer to her acid tone. 'It's worse than you think. Eric was by his car when they arrived. He saw them kissing.'

I was for a moment what a cockney friend of mine would call gobsmacked. I had thought we had been fringing around slight improprieties brought on by Edith's tedium. I had expected a little chat about Edith 'bucking up'. Of course, I suspected at once that Eric was not 'by his car' when they drove up but was quite consciously concealed somewhere near the entrance that he might not miss this Heaven-sent chance to nail Edith, whom, by this stage,