Snobs by Julian Fellowes (14 page)

Having no desire to join in — the committees one is forced to attend are bad enough — I settled into a surprisingly comfortable velvet-and-gilt William Kent armchair in the Marble Hall. I didn't have very long to wait before the door opened to release some of the members, muttering fawning farewells to Edith who was in the process of showing them out. She broke away.

'Hello,' she said. 'I didn't know you were here.'

'I'm rather early so I thought I'd wait instead of coming in to spoil your fun.'

She sagged her shoulders with a comic sigh. 'Some fun!' she said. 'Come and have a cup of stewed tea.' Ignoring the nods and smiles of the departing ones, she led the way back into the room. They did not object to this treatment. Far from it. The net result of her cutting them in order to greet me was simply to make them include me in their deferential smiles as they sidled towards the staircase. I imagine they thought that I too had been touched by the golden wand.

The remaining members of the committee, the usual collection of provincial intellectuals, tightly permed councillors and farmers mad with boredom, were in the final stages of leaving. Some of them had that dilatory manner of collecting their things together, which betrays a resolve to 'catch' somebody before they go. The prey that most of the lingerers were after was, of course, Lady Uckfield, who was ensconced in a pretty, buttoned chair by the chimney-piece, surrounded by admirers. A few of the aspirants, disconcerted by the competition, made do with five minutes of Edith and left. I approached my hostess, who rose to greet me with a kiss, which was a kind of signal to the entourage that the audience was over.

'Goodbye, Lady Uckfield,' said a black councillor in a baggy artist's smock, 'and thank you.'

'No, thank
you.'
Lady Uckfield spoke with her usual intimate urgency. 'I gather you're doing the most
marvellous
things down in Cramney. I hear it's simply
buzzing.
I can't
wait
to come and see for myself.'

Her companion beamed, shedding his Socialism on the spot. 'We will be most glad to see you there.' He retreated, wreathed in smiles.

'Where's Cramney?' I said.

Lady Uckfield shrugged. 'Some ghastly little place in Kent. Do you want some tea?'

By the time I made it to my room, my things had been unpacked and my evening shirt, tie, socks and cummerbund lay waiting for me. There was, however, no sign of my clean underpants. I hunted around through various drawers and was just in the process of searching under the bed when I heard a voice behind me. 'What
can
you be looking for?' I turned and saw Tommy Wainwright standing in the doorway that connected my room, aka the Garden Room, with its larger neighbour, the Rose Velvet Room, where Tommy was billeted. Actually, despite these impressive titles, the chambers themselves were rather small, having been squeezed into a sort of mezzanine floor at one side of the house. They had been created by the architect as part of an arrangement to provide a score of secondary bedrooms while only messing up one end facade of the house. Consequently, despite the fragrant names, these chambers overlooked the stable yard, had eight-foot ceilings, and faced north.

We hunted around for my missing undergarment for a bit, then gave up, abandoning it to its fate. Presumably, to this day, a rather old pair of pants is still wedged at the back of some drawer in the Garden Room of Broughton Hall. Tommy retreated to his chamber and returned with a small bottle of Scotch and two tooth glasses. 'Essential equipment for hotels and house-parties,' he said, and poured us both a slug.

'Are they mean with the booze?' I asked. I have often been surprised at the fantastic discomfort and deprivation the grand English are prepared to put their friends (and total strangers) through, particularly in my youth. I've been shown into bathrooms that could just about manage a cold squirt of brown water, bedrooms with doors that don't shut, blankets like tissue, and pillows like rocks. I have driven an hour cross-country to lunch with some grand relations of my father, who gave me one sausage, two small potatoes and twenty-eight peas. Once, during a house-party for a ball in Hampshire, I was so cold that I ended up piling all my clothes, with two threadbare towels, onto the bed and then holding all this together with a worn square of Turkish carpet — the only bit of floor-covering in the room. When my hostess woke me the next day, she made no comment on the fact that I was sleeping in a sort of webbing sarcophagus and clearly could not have been less interested in whether I had ever shut my eyes. When one thinks of the Edwardians who revelled in luxury it seems odd that their grandchildren should be so impervious to it. Recently I have detected that the comfort demanded by new money is effecting a slow improvement in the houses of the
anciens riches
but, heavens, what a time it's taken.

Tommy shook his head in answer to my question. 'No, no. They're not mean at all. Not a bit of it. Lord U chucks it down everyone's throat. It's just too complicated to try and get a dressing drink.'

We sat and gossiped for a bit and I asked if Tommy had seen a lot of the Broughtons.

He shook his head. 'Not really. They're always down here. I must say, I'm quite surprised that Edith is content to coddle the village and give away prizes without taking a breather but the fact is they're hardly in London at all.'

I too found this slightly unlikely. Particularly as the young couple were still living in the big house with Charles's parents. There had been plans to renovate one of the farm houses when they were first married and I asked Tommy if he knew how it was coming along.

'I'm not sure they're going on with that,' he said. 'I gather they've gone off the idea.'

'Really?'

'I know. It's funny, isn't it? She wants to stay here and her in-laws are delighted, so Brook Farm will probably be finished quickly and let.'

'Do they have a flat in the house, then?'

'Not as such. Some sort of upstairs sitting room for Edith and Charles has his study, of course. But that's it. Rather like one of those American soap-operas, when they're all worth a hundred million and they still cram together in one house with a big staircase.'

I shook my head. 'I suppose Charles likes the set-up here but it seems rather tiresome for a bride.'

Just as Charles, like all his breed, was not immune to the sense of getting 'special' treatment wherever he went — in fact, as Edith had already observed, he resented its being withheld from him — so I could understand that, after a lifetime of pretending he was unaware of the extraordinary baroque surroundings of his life, it would be hard actually to give them up.

The English upper-classes have a deep, subconscious need to read their difference in the artefacts about them. Nothing is more depressing (or less convincing) to them than the attempt to claim some rank or position, some family background, some genealogical distinction, without the requisite acquaintance and props. They would not dream of decorating a bed sitting room in Putney without the odd watercolour of a grandmother in a crinoline, two or three decent antiques and preferably a relic of a privileged childhood. These things are a kind of sign language that tell the visitor where in the class system the owner places him or herself. But, above all things, the real marker for them, the absolute litmus test, is whether or not a family has retained its house and its estates. Or a respectable proportion of them. You may overhear a nobleman explaining to some American visitor that money is not important in England, that people can stay in Society without a bean, that land is 'more of a liability, these days', but in his heart, he does not believe any of these things. He knows that the family that has lost everything but its coronet, those duchesses in small houses near Cheyne Walk, those viscounts with little flats in Ebury Street, lined as they may be with portraits and pictures of the old place ('It's some sort of farmers' training college, nowadays'), these people are all
d�class�
to their own kind. It goes without saying that this consciousness of the need for the materialisation of rank is as unspoken as the Masonic ritual.

Of course, the Broughton position was an unusually solid one. Few were the families in the 1990s that held their sway and the day would dawn when Charles would enter Broughton Hall as its owner. Still, listening to Tommy, I suspected he might have dreaded the possibility that people, awe-struck as they shook his hand in the Marble Hall, could make the mistake, on finding him at home in a chintz-decorated farmhouse sitting room, of thinking that he was an Ordinary Person. In this, however, I was wrong.

Tommy shook his head. 'No, Charles wouldn't mind. Not now he's used to the idea.' He paused for thought and then decided against it. 'Oh, well. I must get changed.'

We assembled for dinner in the drawing room that the family generally used, a pretty apartment on the garden front, much less cumbrous than the adjacent Red Saloon where we had gathered for the engagement dinner. There were a few vaguely familiar faces besides Tommy. Peter Broughton was there, though apparently without his dreary blonde. Old Lady Tenby's eldest daughter, Daphne, now married to the rather dim second son of a Midlands earl, was talking to Caroline Chase in the corner. They looked up and smiled carefully across the room. Filled with trepidation, I looked around for Eric and saw him scoffing whisky as he lectured some poor old boy on the present state of the City. The listener stood looking into Eric's red face with all the pleasure of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

'What would you like to drink?' Lady Uckfield stood by my elbow and sent Jago off to fetch a glass of Scotch and water. She followed my glance. 'Heavens! Eric seems to be making very large small talk.'

I smiled. 'Who is the lucky recipient of his confidences?'

'Poor dear Henri de Montalambert.'

For some reason or other, I knew that the Duc de Montalambert was a relation of the Broughtons by marriage. His was not a particularly smart dukedom by French standards (they, having so many more than we do, can afford to grade them) since it had only been given by Louis XVIII in 1820, but a marriage in the 1890s to the heiress of a Cincinnati steel king, had placed the family up there alongside the Trémouilles and the Uzès. Lady Uckfield had referred to him in the manner in which one speaks of an old family friend, but since she always disguised her true feelings about anyone, even from herself, I was, as usual, unable to gauge the true degree of intimacy. 'He looks a bit dazed,' I said.

She nodded with a suppressed giggle. 'I can't imagine what he's making of it all. He hardly speaks a word of English. Never mind. Eric won't notice.' She accepted my laugh as tribute and then rebuked me for it. 'Now, you're not to make me unkind.'

'How long is Monsieur de Montalambert staying?'

Lady Uckfield pulled a face. 'All three days. What are we to do? I'm still at
où est la plume de ma tante,
and Tigger can hardly manage
encore.
Henri married a cousin of ours thirty years ago and I doubt if we've exchanged as many words since.'

'Is there an English-speaking duchesse, then?'

'There was. But since she was deaf and is dead, she cannot help us now. I don't suppose you speak French?'

'I do a bit,' I said with a sinking heart. In my mind's eye, I could see the re-shuffling of place cards and the endless, sticky translated conversation that lay ahead.

She caught my look. 'Cheer up, you'll have Edith between you.' She darted one of her flirtatious, birdlike glances at me. 'How do you find our bride?'

'She's looking very well,' I said. 'In fact, I've never seen her prettier.'

'Yes, she does look well.' Lady Uckfield hesitated for a fraction of a second. 'I only hope she finds it amusing down here. She's been the most marvellous success, you know. The trouble is they all love her so much that it's frightfully hard not to rope her into sharing all the wretched duties. I'm afraid I've been rather selfish in unloading the cares of state.'

'Knowing Edith, I bet she enjoys all that. It's a step up on answering a telephone in Milner Street.'

Lady Uckfield smiled. 'Well, as long as it is.'

'She seems to have given up London so you must be doing something right.'

'Yes,' she said briskly. 'If they're happy, that's the main thing, isn't it?'

She drifted away to greet some new arrivals. It struck me that I had missed some nuance in the coiled recesses of Lady Uckfield's perfectly ordered mind.

The dinner, as predicted, was rather leaden. I had Daphne Bolingbroke, Lady Tenby's coolly pleasant daughter, on my right, so I was all right for the first course but behind me I could hear Edith struggling gamely with M. de Montalambert on her other side and, in truth, I found it quite hard to concentrate on my own conversation. The trouble was that Edith's French and her neighbour's English were more or less on a par. That is, terrible but not so non-existent as to preclude all effort. It would have been simpler if neither had commanded a word of the other's language but they had, alas, just enough vocabulary to be utterly confusing. Edith kept maundering on about bits of Paris being so
'bon'
and London being
'épouvantable'
with M. de Montalambert alternately looking completely blank or, worse, when he thought he had understood her observation, answering with a swirling torrent of French of which Edith could barely catch more than the first word or two.

The courses changed and I turned to rescue Edith from her travails but M. de Montalambert declined to obey the English regulations and refused to give her up. Instead, grasping at the slight improvement in communication that my moderate French offered him, he launched into a passionate denunciation of the French government, which had reference, in some mystifying way that was quite lost on me, to Louis XVIII's minister, the Duc Decazes.

'What are we talking about?' said Edith softly under the apparently unstoppable Gallic flow.

'God knows. The French Restoration, I think.'

'Crikey.'

In truth, we were both completely worn out by this time and longing for a reprieve but the Duc resolutely ignored Lady Uckfield on his left and she, needless to say, could not have been more delighted to set aside the conventions this once.