'Is he?' said Edith, thrilled.
'Yes.' Caroline lit a cigarette and for a moment Edith thought they were going into the central divider. 'I know Lady Uckfield thinks it'll blow over. She has a fantasy that he will forget you and marry the daughter of some peer who'll give him four children, two of whom will inherit estates from relations of their mother's.' Caroline laughed wryly. This was of course a wonderfully accurate résumé of Lady Uckfield's dreams.
'Are you quite sure she's wrong?'
'How little you know my brother,' said Caroline, and lapsed again into silence. Edith naturally longed to hear more of this wretched and unhappy man, whose life was a misery without her and to whom, by some strange miracle, she was already married. She gave Caroline a quizzical look and the latter relented. 'In the first place I do not think that my mother's idea of your perfect successor is Charles's. To put it bluntly, if that was what he was looking for he could have found it with very little difficulty. But that is no longer the point. Charles is a simple man. He is capable of feelings but they are uncomplicated, straightforward and deep. He can hardly communicate and he cannot flirt at all.' Edith thought with wonder of her other love, who could only communicate and flirt. Simon's problem was the opposite of Charles's. He could not feel. Caroline was still talking. 'Charles has made his choice. You. You are his wife. In his heart that's it. Finish. I am not saying that if you did divorce him he wouldn't eventually settle for someone else as brood-mare but in his heart he would have failed and his real wife would be out there walking around with someone else. And that, my dear, would be you.'
The rest of the drive was accomplished in silence. It was almost as if they were waiting for the next event in the plot before they could continue their discussion. And so they wound their way through the flat Norfolk landscape until at last they turned into a well-kept but somewhat overshadowed drive, which in its turn, when they had been released from the high walls of rhododendron, brought them to the wide, gravelled forecourt of the main house.
Feltham Place had passed into the Broughton family in 1811 when the then Lord Broughton had married Anne Wykham, only child of Sir Marmaduke Wykham, sixth baronet and the last of his line. The house was Jacobean, more a gentleman's than a nobleman's residence, picturesque rather than magnificent with roofs bristling with barley sugar chimneys and possibly for this reason it had never managed to catch at the family's imagination. Like many houses of its period it was in a dip (before the pumping innovations of the late seventeenth century allowed those splendid, landscaped views), although the flatness of the county gave a certain openness at the bottom of its valley. It might have functioned as the Broughtons' Dower House or as a seat for the heir, but there were other houses nearer Uckfield that had served these turns at least until the Second World War and recently, as we know, the heir had chosen to live with his parents.
In the past, Feltham had been let but it was taken back for the shooting in the 1890s and had been farmed in hand ever since, despite the family's allowing the sport to lapse after the war. Charles had revived the shoot over the last few years and he was proud of the fact that he could now safely let two and three-hundred-bird days, secure in the knowledge that there would be no great disappointments. He and his keeper had worked hard. The covers and hedgerows had been replanted, the feeding pens reorganised, indeed the whole appearance of the countryside had been more or less restored to the condition of a century before. But despite this, he was not tempted to bring his own shooting guests to Feltham. They were offered the splendours of Broughton while businessmen, people with mobile telephones and gleaming sports wear, took the shooting at Feltham by the day. At a (considerable) extra cost they could even stay overnight, which may have accounted for the somewhat boarding-house quality within.
The Wykham who'd built the place had been a favourite of King James I and in those days it had been much larger but the king's beau had been improvident and his heir (a nephew since, unsurprisingly, the builder had never married) demolished two-thirds of it. This meant that the brickwork and carving on the façade and throughout the house was of a much higher standard than one would normally associate with the scale of building. Inside, all the first-rate furniture and pictures had long since been swallowed up by Broughton and most of what remained dated from its rehabilitation as a shooting-lodge at the end of the last century. Lumpy, leather-covered Chesterfields provided the seating and the walls were covered with second-rate portraits and enormous, indifferently painted scenes of hunting, shooting and all the other methods of country killing. Still, the rooms themselves were pleasant and the staircase, more or less the sole survivor from the days of the Jacobean favourite, was magnificent.
Edith hardly knew the place. In Charles's mind it was the nearest thing to an 'office' in his weekly round. He ran it as a business and apart from an occasional appearance at a village show and an annual cocktail party for all those neighbours who might be tiresome about the shoot were they not courted every so often, he had no social profile in the county at all. Quite frequently he stayed with the Cumnors at their infinitely larger and more luxurious house four miles down the road, rather than put the ancient care-taking couple to the trouble of opening a bedroom.
Caroline drew up by the front door and the two women made their way into the wide and gloomy hall that took up two-thirds of the entrance front. It was decorated by a frieze of slightly bogus armorial tributes to the Wykhams and the Broughtons but otherwise boasted no colour at all apart from the brown of the panelling and the less attractive brown of the leather furniture. 'Charles!' Caroline called out. It was a chilly day and the interior of the house was noticeably colder than the air outside. Edith pulled her coat tightly around her. 'Charles!' shouted Caroline again, and she set off through a doorway that led first to the staircase and then into the former morning room that operated as Charles's office. Edith followed her. Desks and filing cabinets stood about the room, the chill slightly alleviated by a three-bar electric fire in the grate that looked as if its very existence breached the entire safety code. They were still standing there when another door, facing them, opened and there all at once stood a flummoxed Charles. To her amazement, even to her delight, Edith suddenly realised that she was shocked at his appearance. Gone was that sleek country gentleman who always looked as if he was on the way to make an advertisement for Burberry's. She was astonished to see that her fastidious husband was looking scruffy and unkempt. He was almost dirty. Caught out by her stare, he pushed his fingers through his hair. 'Hello,' he said, with a watery smile. 'Fancy seeing you here.'
At this point Caroline took her leave. 'I'm going in to Norwich,' she said. 'I'll be back in a couple of hours.' It was a relief really that she didn't even try to normalise the situation or start any we-were-just-driving-past nonsense.
Charles nodded. 'I see,' he said.
Left alone, Edith was oddly blank as to quite what she was going to say next. She sat on the edge of a chair near the fire like a housemaid at an interview and leaned forward to warm her hands. 'I hope you're not cross. I did so want to talk to you.
Properly. And I began to feel that I was never going to be allowed to. I'm afraid I thought I'd just chance it.'
He shook his head. 'I'm not a bit cross. Not at all.' He hesitated. 'I — I'm sorry about the telephone calls and all the rest of it. It wasn't my mother not telling me, you know. Well, it wasn't only that. I expect you thought it was. It was just that I didn't really know what to say. It seemed better to leave it all to the professionals. Of course now you're here…' He tailed off disconsolately.