Edith nodded. 'I had to know what you were thinking about everything. I understand your parents want you free straight away.'
'Oh that.' He looked sheepish. 'I don't mind. Honestly. Whatever suits you.' He stared at her in the unflattering light of an overhead bulb. 'How's Simon?'
'Fine. Very well. Loving his series.'
'Good. I'm glad.' He didn't sound it but he was trying to be courteous. Edith was struck anew by the decency and kindness of this man she had tossed aside. What had she been thinking of? Her own actions sometimes seemed to her so hard to understand. Like a foreign film. And yet these had been her choices. The conversation limped on.
'I don't think I ever came to Feltham at this time of year. I must have but I don't remember. It's rather lovely, isn't it?'
Charles smiled. 'Dear old Feltham,' he said.
'You ought to live here. Do it up. Get some of the stuff back.'
He half nodded. 'I think I'd be a bit lonely, stuck out here on my own. Don't you? Nice idea, though.'
'Oh, Charles.' In spite of the cynicism with which she had embarked on this mission Edith had become a victim of her own justifications. Like Deborah Kerr in The King and I, whistling her happy tune to make herself brave, Edith had succeeded in talking herself into believing that she was a romantic figure who had lost her love rather than a selfish girl who bitterly regretted her comforts. Her eyes began to moisten.
Oddly perhaps, it was only at this moment that Charles fully grasped she had definitely come to try to get him back. Up to this point he was still wondering if it might not just be for some financial or time-related scheme that she had made the journey.
Despite his earlier suspicions, his non-existent vanity made him slow to reach the obvious conclusion and he thought she might want him to agree to something before his lawyers could talk him out of it. He was not offended by this but, if it should prove to be the case, he was anxious to conceal his wretchedness from her. Both out of consideration for her feelings and from a (perfectly justifiable) sense of pride. It now occurred to him, with a lurch in his stomach, that this was not what he was dealing with. She wanted to come back to him. He looked at her.
For all his simplicity, he was not an idiot. Thinking along the same lines as that night in his study at Broughton he knew that he was no more interesting than when she left him. He also suspected that the world of show business had not really appealed to her, not at any rate for 'every day'. Just as a year of sin had served to give Edith a clearer idea of what Simon consisted of, so two years of marriage and a year apart had made Edith comprehensible to Charles. He knew she was an arriviste and the child of an arriviste. He saw her vulgarities of spirit now as sharply as he saw her fine points, of which, despite Lady Uckfield's comments, he still believed there were many. He also knew that if he made a move towards her the thing was settled.
He stared at the hunched-up figure, trying to scoop warmth out of the electric bars. Her coat was a sort of camel colour and looked rather cheap. Was this sad little figure, this 'blonde piece' as his mother would say, to be the next Marchioness of Uckfield? To be painted by some indifferent chocolate box portraitist and hung alongside the Sargeants, Laszlos and Birleys of the preceding generations? Was it in her to make a go of it?
But as he watched her, the sense of how vulnerable she suddenly seemed to him, with her bright make-up and her chain store coat, trying to charm him and looking instead somehow pathetic, overwhelmed him with pity and, in the wake of pity, with love. Whatever her suitability, whatever the limitations of her feelings, whatever her motives, he knew that he, Charles Broughton, could not be responsible for her unhappiness. He was, in short, incapable of hurting her.
'Are you happy?' he said slowly, knowing as he did so that the words gave her permission to return to him and to his life.
At the sound of them Edith knew her pardon had come through. Despite the difficulties with Simon, with her mother-inlaw, with the newspapers, with the sun, with the moon, she could now be Charles's wife again if she chose, which, not very surprisingly given all the circumstances, she did. For a second she felt almost sick with relief but then, since she did not wish to appear too desperate, she waited for a minute before she spoke, deliberately punctuating the moment with a pregnant pause. Once satisfied that her answer was anticipated by them both she carefully raised her tear-stained eyes to his.
'No,' she said.
EPILOGUE
Smorzando
It did not, so far as I remember, cause any great murmur when Edith was delivered of a daughter seven months or so after the reconciliation. Of course, there was a lot of talk, particularly from her mother, about their being taken by surprise as Edith was
'so frighteningly early'. In fact, Mrs Lavery rather over-egged her performance by insisting on sitting in the hospital throughout the night because of the 'risks of premature birth', which naturally gave rise to a few funny stories on the dinner circuit, but nobody minded. Versions of this sort of folderol are still rather touchingly employed in Society on such occasions. These things are rituals rather than untruths and cause no harm. The point was the baby was female, which took any future strain out of the situation. It meant everything could return to normal without a lingering after-taste.
Even Lady Uckfield, usually so careful, gave herself away in a rare unguarded moment when I telephoned to learn the news.
'Boy or girl?' I asked when she picked up the receiver.
'Girl,' said Lady Uckfield. 'Isn't it a relief?' Then, quickly but not quickly enough, she added, 'That they're both doing so well.'
'A great relief,' I answered, going along with this dishonesty. There was no point in blaming her for retaining the deepest prejudices of her kind. Now that the baby could not inherit the glories of Broughton, thanks to the arcane laws governing the peerage that even Mr Blair, for all his trumpeting of women's rights, has not seen fit to change, she would present no further danger and might be lived with in peace. Since all three 'parents' were fair there was not much chance of the baby having the wrong colouring and, at least to date, the girl does not seem particularly to favour Simon, always assuming of course that the infant is his — something of which one can, after all, never be entirely sure. Not at least without resorting to DNA testing, which no entrant in Debrett's would ever risk for fear of what it might reveal. One foreign visitor at Broughton, ignorant of the excellent Edwardian maxim never to 'comment on a likeness in another's child' asked me if I did not think she took after Charles.
I may have imagined a momentary chill in the room but I nodded. 'I do,' I said. 'She's not like Edith at all.' Thereby earning an especially warm glance from my host. Amusingly enough, when I looked at the toddler properly, she did seem to resemble him a bit. But then again that may have been in expression rather than feature. It might seem strange but in later years Charles came to love the girl so much that his younger children would complain of his favouritism. Even less logically, she would eventually develop into the preferred grandchild of Lady Uckfield, which only goes to show that the old maxim is correct and there's nowt so queer as folk. At any rate, barely fourteen months later, Lady Broughton was once more brought to bed, this time of a boy. The new Viscount Nutley was welcomed with bonfires and bun fights in Sussex and Norfolk and, frankly, to be brutal and unmodernist about it, the exact paternity of little Lady Anne had ceased to matter much to anyone.
Caroline did divorce Eric. It was a quiet business without acrimony and with more style than I confess I thought Eric capable of. He was not single long. Within eighteen months he had married the daughter of an immensely rich Cheshire industrialist, Christine somebody or other. They were much better suited than he and Caroline had been. For one thing, she shared Eric's ambitions, which she pursued as relentlessly as if they had been her own and of course they soon were. I happened to meet them both at Ascot a few months after they married and I must say I liked her. She was full of energy and in many ways a good deal easier to rub along with than Caroline, even if she was already infected with Eric's nonsense. I remember her using the phrase 'our sort of people', meaning, I imagine, some sort of exclusive social group to which they belonged. It must have been a luxury for Eric who had spent his entire first marriage being reminded daily of an Inner Circle forever closed to him.