'With the Eastons. In Sussex. David and Isabel. Do you know them?' She knew very well he would not. She was right.
'I've known Charlie all my life.'
Edith fished idly in her brain for an answer. 'I don't think I've known anybody all my life. Except my parents,' she added with a laugh.
Henry did not laugh back. 'Oh,' he said.
She tried again. 'Who are Eric and Caroline?'
'Caroline's his sister. I've known her all my life too.' He nodded gently to himself, pleased with these long associations.
'Eric's this chap she's just married.'
'I gather you haven't known him all your life.'
'Never saw him before the wedding.'
'Is he nice?'
'I really couldn't tell you.' Obviously Caroline was guilty of some hideous impropriety in Henry's eyes. Some horrible miscegenation had taken place in this coupling of strangers. Edith felt that she herself was hovering at the borders of a solecism by even talking about the interloper.
'Where is Royton?'
This time Henry's face registered surprise rather than distaste. For her not to know where Royton was must surely indicate that she was an eccentric. 'Norfolk.'
'Is it lovely?' Edith was beginning to feel as if she was turning over huge clods of ploughed earth in her effort to keep Henry entertained.
He shrugged and looked round for the bottle to help himself to another glass. 'People seem to think so.'
Edith opened her mouth to try again and then shut it. Not for the last time she was struck by the tyranny of the socially inept. Endless effort is harnessed to a sluggish and boring conversation simply to preserve these dullards from a sense of their inadequacy. The irony being that they are quite impervious to their own shortcomings. If Henry had even noticed things were at all heavy going he would unhesitatingly have blamed it on Edith and the fact that she didn't know anyone interesting. Before the silence had become oppressive Charles and Jane returned and the remainder of the time was spent gossiping about more people that Edith had never met.
'What a lovely evening,' she said, as the car stopped outside her parents' flat. Charles made no attempt to park it so he clearly knew the night would contain no sexual epilogue.
'I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm sorry we got rather lumbered.'
'Don't be. I liked them,' she lied.
'Did you?' He seemed a bit anxious. 'I'm glad.'
'Henry was telling me about Royton.'
He nodded, back on home territory. 'Yes, they're next door to me up there. That's really why I know them.'
'I thought they were cousins.'
'Well, they are. From a marriage in about eighteen thirty. But I know them because they live next door.'
'It sounds lovely.'
'It is. I'm not sure how good old Henry is at managing it but it is charming. Anyway, there's pots of money so I suppose it doesn't matter too much.' It was easy to see that Charles thought he was terrifically good at managing Broughton.
They stared at each other for a moment. Edith realised that she rather wanted him to kiss her. Partly because she wanted to be sure she'd been a success, and partly because she just wanted to kiss him. He leaned forward awkwardly and pressed his mouth against hers. His lips were hard and firmly shut. He sat back. Ah, she thought. More Philip than George. Oh well. What she said was, 'Good night and thank you again. I have so enjoyed it.'
'Good,' he said, and he got out of the car and escorted her across the road to the front door, but he made no attempt to kiss her again as he said good night, nor was there any mention of the next time they would meet. It would be fair to say that, up to that moment, she had not been aware of wanting much more from the evening than the reassurance that Charles found her attractive, liked her company and wanted to see more of her. But now that the ending was proving rather flat, she was filled with a feeling of disappointment, with the sense of a chance lost. This had been a great opportunity and she had blown it without fully understanding why. On the whole, it was with a sense of failure that she crept quietly into her room, trying not to wake the mother who was lying staring at the ceiling two doors down.
She need not have been downcast. She did not know Charles and had misinterpreted his reticence. Because he was generally seen as a prize, she thought he must share this image of himself but this was not so. He felt that it was he, not Edith, on whom the responsibility for the evening lay. He was shy (not rude-shy, really shy) and so, while he could not quite express it, he was very pleased that she had appeared to have enjoyed being with him. In fact, as Charles pushed the key into the lock of his parents' flat in Cadogan Square, it was with a warm sense of an evening well spent. He liked Edith very much. More than he could remember liking any girl. With the respect for hypocrisy that is the due of a hypocritical society, he admired her all the more for pretending to like the Cumnors when it was plain that they, or at least Jane, had been bestial to her all evening.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The Uckfields' London flat occupied the ground and first floors of one of those tall, Edwardian Dutch, red brick houses that surround the exclusive, if not exactly bewitching square. It was a pleasant enough place, furnished with that delicately balanced mixture of the comfortable and the grand that his mother had learned from John Fowler and proceeded to make her own. The pictures, from the B-list of the family's collection, were carefully chosen to suggest hereditary importance without overpowering the spaces. The hangings, the ornaments, the very tables and chairs proclaimed the rank of the family but in a modest way. 'This is where we visit,' the artefacts seemed to say, 'but it is not who we are.' Just as no member of the family, not even Caroline, who lived there solidly for four years before her marriage, would ever refer to the place as 'home'. Home was Broughton. 'I'll be in the flat next week', 'I'm going up to the flat', 'Why don't we meet at the flat?' were all very well, but 'I must get home', even at the end of a long London dinner, could only ever mean that the Broughton in question was driving down to Sussex that night. These people may own a house in Chester Square and rent a small cottage in Derbyshire, but you may be pretty sure that 'home' is the one with the grass growing round it. And if no such hide-away exists, then they will make it plain that it is essential to their well-being to escape the smoke and pavements and fly to their rural friends as often as they can, thereby suggesting that while they may spend their lives walking on tarmac or behind a city desk, they will always be country people at heart. It is rare to find an aristocrat who is happier in London — at least, it is rare to find one who admits it.
Charles had his own flat, a jumble of modest rooms on a third floor in Eaton Place but he didn't usually bother with it.
Cadogan Square was nicer and more comfortable, and he could pick up any post there and bring it down without a fuss. But perhaps because Broughton was after all the product of many generations' taste, he was always aware of the imprint of his mother whenever he visited her London base. The family's real London headquarters, Broughton House, had been in St James's Square, but it had taken a direct hit in the Blitz and so they were spared the agonising decision of most of their relations as to whether or not it was sensible to abandon the town house at the end of the war. Charles's grandparents had acquired a rather dank flat in Albert Hall Mansions, which his mother had rejected out of hand and it was she who selected and therefore entirely created this apartment as an appropriate setting for the charity work and the entertaining that demanded her presence in the capital from time to time.
As he sat down with a late-night glass of whisky, Charles thought about his mother. He looked at the prettily framed sketch of the seven-year-old Lady Harriet Trevane (as Lady Uckfield was born). It was by Annigoni and was placed on a small régence table near the drawing-room chimneypiece. Even as a girl, with a hair-ribbon drooping down among her charcoaled curls, he could detect the familiar, unflinching, cat-like stare. He might as well face facts. His mother would not like Edith.