Snobs: A Novel

he absolutely detested. Much more than I had realised. At any rate, whatever the truth of his motive, he had not lied about what he had seen. For old times' sake I tried to dig Edith out of the hole she had buried herself in. 'Oh, surely, she was just kissing him goodnight.'

'She was kissing him passionately. His hand was inside her shirt and hers was out of sight beneath the dashboard.' Lady Uckfield spoke with the dead-pan delivery of a policeman giving evidence in the County Court. I stared at her in silence. My first instinct was to apologise for being there at all and run for it. Certainly I could think of nothing more to say. Lady Uckfield continued. 'It is the greatest pity that it should have been Eric who saw them. He is quite incapable of keeping anything to himself and anyway I have a suspicion he is not overly fond of Edith. He has already told Caroline who told me. She will try to keep him quiet but I imagine she will fail.' What interested me most about all this was Lady Uckfield's manner. I had grown used to her passionate, half-whispered intimacy when she shared with you the day's headlines or your place at dinner. Now she really did have a secret to impart and all her girlish urgency was gone. She might have been an officer in the WVS

addressing a group of recruits. 'I suppose we may hope that things have not progressed any further but I'm not sure what difference that makes anyway.'

'Will you tell Charles?'

She looked up startled. 'Of course not. Do you think I'm mad?' She relaxed again. Her shock at being thought unworldly was past. She dropped the card and strolled over to the window. 'He'll find out, though.'

'How?' I asked, meaning to imply that I too would be silent.

She smiled sadly. 'Probably because Edith will tell him. At any rate, someone will.' There was nothing I could profitably add to this since she was unquestionably right. Edith in her boredom was just ripe for succumbing to that fatal desire to 'bring things to a head' that so many married couples these days seem to indulge in. In sharp contrast to their great-grandparents who expended all their energy in trying to stop things coming to a head at any cost. My silence felt clumsy but I didn't in truth know exactly why Lady Uckfield was telling me any of this. For all her pseudo-intimacy she never usually imparted anything even faintly private, let alone potentially scandalous. She must have caught this question from my manner for she answered it without being asked: 'I want you to do something for me.'

'Of course.'

'I want you to tell the boy Simon to leave her alone.'

'Well…' Woe betide the man who accepts this kind of commission readily. Whatever opinion I might have of Simon's character or morals, I was hardly in a position to act the wise uncle with him.

Lady Uckfield drove full tilt at my hesitation. Her voice resumed more of its normal glib, light tone as the words gushed forth. 'She's bored. That's all there is to it. She's bored and she ought to get up to London more. She ought to see more of her friends. Or have a baby. Or get a job. That's what she needs. As for this boy…' She shrugged. 'He's handsome, he's charming and, above all, he's here. One does these things when one is settling into a new life. They mean nothing. The nuisance is that Eric saw her. He will almost certainly tell and it's our job to make sure no one can corroborate his story.'

I began to see things by her light. Of course, it was all a silly nonsense that was only horrid because it could hurt Charles if he found out. Yes, it was a pity that Eric had seen them. That was the pity. Her charming, even voice beat back the threat of anarchy and storm that had seemed to envelop us for a moment and returned us to the shore. 'I'll do my best,' I said.

'Of course you will, and the film's nearly over anyway. Too sad to be losing you,' she added hastily, remembering herself,

'but all the same…'

I nodded and she started towards the door. Her work was done. She had acted to contain the damage and that had necessitated taking me into her confidence. But I was already her ally. Things might have been worse.

'Lady Uckfield,' I said. She stopped and turned, her hand still resting on the gleaming door knob. 'Don't be too hard on Edith.'

'Of course not,' she laughed. 'You may not believe it but I was young once too, you know.' Then she was gone and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hated her daughter-in-law as fiercely as she would have hated any woman who had made her only son cry.

FOURTEEN

'What on earth was going on?' said Adela as soon as we drove away from the front of the house.

'What do you mean?'

'Well, first of all you two slope off and everyone looks haunted. Then Eric vanishes. Brief calm and then suddenly we're into farce with people running in and out of doors with stricken faces. I, meanwhile, am sitting there throughout with Lord Uckfield who's trying to explain something about trout farming. What happened to you? I thought I was going to have to ring and ask for a bed.' I told her everything of course and we drove on in silence for a while. Adela broke it. 'What can you possibly say to Simon? Unhand this lady? Won't he hit you on the nose?'

'I shouldn't think so. He doesn't look the type.'

'Well?'

I didn't really have an answer for her as I also could not quite envisage how to play this most embarrassing of scenes. And by what right was I even to open my mouth on the subject?

Adela gave me my motive. 'I suppose you'll just have to do your best for poor old Edith. It'll be a shame if she buggers it up after all that effort. And for such a nothing.'

We arrived at the farmhouse to find Simon sitting at the kitchen table nursing a glass of wine. His mood and the mere fact that he had not gone to bed seemed to suggest the desire for an unburdening talk although he could not have guessed that I already knew what he had to unburden. This was a worrying sign. We had already discovered, Bella and I, that Simon liked to talk of his romances, despite an almost constant stream of doting references to his children and their mother languishing at home. I did not then realise that for him the fame abroad was quite as pleasurable as the deed itself and this is a most dangerous characteristic in a married lover of married women. Adela went straight up to her room and I took Simon's proffered drink with a heavy heart. We sat in silence for a moment or two. At last he could curb his impatience no longer.

'Good evening?' he said.