His crinkly, blond hair in smooth Marcel waves, a tie of some educational or military significance at his throat. 'So, how are you? Busy, I hope.'
I wasn't frightfully, as it happens, but there was a chance of one or two things coming up so I hadn't yet reached the desperate stage that is the occupational hazard of Equity membership. I muttered away about Adela, the flat, Venice and so on but of course Charles was aching to get started. 'How are things with you?' I asked.
As if in answer he put down his drink. 'Let's go up and get a table,' he muttered, and we started up the staircase.
The dining room of the club is a grand, undisappointing chamber with a high gilded ceiling and long windows overlooking St James's. Against its damask-covered walls hang full-length portraits of erstwhile grandee members, the whole emanating that characteristic of aristocratic solidity that Charles correctly, if subconsciously, believed the mainstay both of his personality and his way of life. We gave our orders as we came in and found ourselves a table for two on the wall away from the windows.
'I think Edith's left me.' The statement was so bald that for a moment I suspected I'd misheard.
'What do you mean 'you think'?' I didn't quite see how one could be mistaken about such things.
He cleared his throat. 'Well, perhaps I should say she thinks she's left me.' He raised his eyebrows. I suppose the only way that he felt he could have this conversation at all was by distancing the whole business. As if we were exchanging a piece of gossip about someone else. 'She telephoned this morning. She's rented a flat in Ebury Street. Apparently the idea is for them to set up there together.'
I think the phrase is 'the universe reeled'. My first response, rather unworthily, was that I couldn't believe Edith would be this stupid before the scandal had forced her hand. 'What did she say?'
'Just that they're in love. She's been very unhappy. Nobody's fault, blah, blah, blah… You know. What you'd expect.'
At that moment my potted shrimps arrived, closely followed by Charles's avocado, I tried to use the silence to collect my thoughts but for the life of me I couldn't think of anything sensible to say. I chose badly. 'Who else knows?'
'You sound like my mother.'
At the mention of her name I yearned for Lady Uckfield to take the helm and steer everyone out of this ghastly mess. Not for her, be she never so young, a rented flat in Ebury Street shared with a married actor. 'Does your mother know?'
'She doesn't know all the details. Edith telephoned me a few days ago. When I sent round the note to you. I've been rather incommunicado since then. I don't see that there's much to be gained in facing the storm if the storm itself can be avoided.'
In my mind's eye I could see the articles in the very pages that had taken Edith up as Charles's intended and covered the wedding in such loving, glutinous detail barely two years before. I know, only too well, the high moral tone those raddled alcoholic journalists love to take when they choose to discuss the low lives of the
'Can it be avoided?' I asked.
'I don't know. That's where I need your help.'
Naturally my heart sank at the sound of these words. All, of this was happening too close to me. I yearned to get back into the outer circle of this family's world. How little Americans know when they disparage acquaintanceship in favour of real, true friendship. It is in acquaintanceship, bringing with it as it does delicious dinners, comfortable weekends, gossip shared in picturesque surroundings, but no real intimacy, no responsibility, that the greatest charm of social intercourse lies. I am an observer. It troubles me to be forced into the role of participant.
'You'd take her back then?'
Charles looked almost puzzled by the question. 'What do you mean? She's my wife.'
It is hard to explain quite why I found these words so moving but I did. It sounds odd to write it in our tawdry era but at that moment I was aware I was in the presence of a good man, a man whose word could be trusted, a man whose morality was more than fashion. What could Edith possibly have found in the embrace of her tinsel lover that was worth more than this solid, unquestioning commitment? He looked almost embarrassed by his noble declaration.
'I just want you to talk to her.'
'Well, I assumed you didn't want me to kidnap her.' I put down my glass. 'But what can I say? I think she's quite mad.'
Charles smiled. 'But I don't imagine that my telling her that will make much odds if she doesn't listen to you or her mother.'
Poor Mrs Lavery! This news would bring hara-kiri in its wake.
'I know that but…' Charles paused. 'I mean, you know the world that this Simon chap operates in. I don't mean to be, well, rude, but is it the sort of world that Edith would like? Has she thought about all that?'
Now this was quite a complicated question, certainly more complicated than Charles was aware. Nobody knows who is going to like the stage world. Adela took to it like a duck to water and never had a moment's difficulty synthesising it with her other, more traditional, social group. She found she liked the feast-or-famine, crisis-ridden, siege mentality of the whole thing.
To others, my mother-in-law for instance, the people of the stage seem simply awful, a sleazy crowd of oiks, all plastered in makeup, falling in and out of other people's beds, and getting drunk in restaurants. There is a good deal of truth in this picture, too. Charles was of the latter school. It quite amused him to know an actor socially but it was no accident that the only one he did know had grown up in fairly traditional circumstances. If he came to us for a drink it was fun for him to see people he recognised from various television series but he had no desire to befriend them. This was one of his main difficulties throughout the whole affair. He found it impossible to understand how Edith, having known his world from the inside, a world that if nothing else is elegant and rooted in charming settings, could have deliberately renounced it for an environment as alluring to him as Cardboard City.
