'Well, divorce, marriage, statements to the press?'
Simon raised his hands and eyebrows. 'Woah!' he cried with a spangled laugh. 'You sound like my mother.' It is easy to forget that even people like Simon have mothers. Some decent widow of a civil servant sitting in a flat in Leatherhead wondering what on earth was going on. He made me rather cross.
'You do know that you've got in very deep here? You do see that a lot of people are very upset about all this?'
He stroked my cheek. 'Oh well,' he said.
Of course, Adela enjoyed the whole evening hugely. Quite as much as Edith detested it, paraded round the rooms, as she was, like a sacred cow. Adela watched her struggling for small talk with these people who were so remarkably like ordinary people — the very people, in fact, that Edith had spent her twenties trying to escape from forever. The irony of all this was that, for all her hatred of the world of the Name Exchange, Edith had grown used to the comforting snugness of its limited membership. Suddenly she was back in open country where nobody seemed to know anyone she'd ever met. She felt something akin to panic. What did one talk about to people with whom one had no interest and no acquaintance in common?
After her time in Broughtonland, she had forgotten.
'Well, I hope she's enjoying herself.' Adela snuggled down into her coat as we started the long trek south.
'Do you?'
'Well, really! What has she done? And to leave without producing a child! So when the door shuts it's shut for ever. What a fool!'
I was still capable of being shocked by my wife's intense worldliness that lived so happily alongside her great, and I knew quite genuine, kindness.
'Isn't it better that there aren't any children?'
'Better for whom? Better for Charles and Googie. Not for her. To produce the heir is the only effective second act for a first wife. Think of Consuelo Vanderbilt's triumph when she returned to hated Blenheim as the mother of the new duke.
There'll be none of that for little Edith.' She sighed wearily. 'As for him!'
'I thought you rather liked him.'
'He's pleasant enough in his silly, blond way but hardly the craft to be entrusted with the cargo of life's happiness. What is she thinking of?'
===OO=OOO=OO===
Similar thoughts were flickering somewhere at the back of Edith's brain at just that moment as they too sped back towards what she regarded as Civilisation. She was conscious of a kind of dull disappointment deep in her vitals. She had just been to another 'show business party' and as the phrase echoed through her brain she remembered the image it used to conjure up: vivid actresses, over made-up beauties in sequinned
Nor did she care for their fascination with her as the envoy of a different, and obviously disapproved of, world. She was not indifferent to the glamour of the stage but she had started to see that the quality of glamour as such was no longer rated by the fashionable thespians themselves. To make matters worse, she felt that she had entered this strange arena not as a star (which privately she had counted on) but as a freak.
'What a ghastly bunch! Who were those people?'
Simon never answered these questions, which were in truth more or less rhetorical. They both knew that what Edith was pointing out was that she found theatre folk 'common', though she would never quite say it. Simon, partly because he was not interested in whether they were common or not because it wasn't relevant, and partly because he suspected (deep in his heart) that by her standards he was pretty common himself, never rose to this one. 'I had a good time,' he said.
'You didn't have some frightful man with a voice like a bowl of fruit salad slobbering over your hand all evening. Are all your parties going to be like that?'
'Are all your parties going to consist of six Sloane Rangers and someone who lost money in Lloyd's? Because, if so, I'll take the fruit salad. Any day of the week.'
They drove home in silence.
SIXTEEN
It happened that I was in the Fulham Road late one afternoon running various errands and Adela had asked me to look in on Colefax and Fowler to collect some braid she had ordered a few weeks before. Normally I would have refused the commission since at that time (unlike today) all the assistants there seemed to have taken a degree in Higher Rudeness, but she insisted and in fact I was dealt with by a pleasant enough woman. Even though, as Adela had expected, the order had still not arrived, she did seem quite sorry about it.
At any rate, I was just receiving my token apology together with the standard assurances that it would be in next week when I glanced back towards the street and there, leafing idly through the racks of samples, was Edith's mother. I had last seen Mrs Lavery almost exactly two years before, around the time of the festivities of the wedding. It moved me now to think of that victorious figure, trembling with satisfied ambition in the Red Saloon at Broughton, as I looked at this lost and broken soul. She stared glassily at the huge flapping areas of pattern as they waved past her face but she saw nothing. Nothing, that is, except the ruin of all her dreams, which clearly played endlessly like a cursed tableau in her brain.
'Hello, Mrs Lavery,' I said.
She turned to me, gathered the knowledge of who I was from some distant mental shelf and nodded a greeting. 'Hello,' she answered in a hollow, frigid tone.
I learned later that she blamed me for introducing Simon to the Broughton family. With some justice, I suppose.
