PART ONE

Impetuoso-Fiero

ONE

I do not know exactly how Edith Lavery came first to be taken up by Isabel Easton. Probably they had a friend in common or sat on some committee together, or perhaps they just went to the same hairdresser. But I can remember that from quite early on, for some reason, Isabel decided that Edith was rather a feather in her cap, someone that little bit special to be fed to her country neighbours in rationed morsels. History was of course to prove her right, although there was no tremendously compelling evidence for this when I first met her. Edith was certainly very pretty then but not as she would be later when she had, as designers say, found her style. She was a type, albeit a superior example of it: the English blonde with large eyes and nice manners.

I had known Isabel Easton since we were children together in Hampshire and we enjoyed one of those pleasant, undemanding friendships that are based entirely on longevity. We had very little in common but we knew few other people who could remember us on our ponies at the age of nine and there was a certain comfort in our occasional encounters. I had gone into the theatre after leaving university and Isabel had married a stockbroker and moved to Sussex so our worlds scarcely crossed, but it was fun for Isabel to have an actor to stay occasionally who had been seen on television (though never, as it happens, by any of her friends) and for me, it was pleasant enough to spend the odd weekend with my old playmate.

I was in Sussex the first time that Edith came down and I can testify to Isabel's enthusiasm for her new friend, later queried by her less generous acquaintance. It was quite genuine: 'Things are going to happen for her. She's got something.' Isabel was fond of using phrases that seemed to imply an inside knowledge of the workings of the world. Some might have said that when Edith climbed out of the car half an hour later, she didn't appear to have got very much beyond her appearance and a rather beguiling, relaxed charm, but I was inclined to agree with our hostess. Looking back, there was a hint of what was to come in the mouth, one of those cut-glass mouths, with the clearly defined, almost chiselled lips that one associates with the film actresses of the forties. And then there was her skin. To the English, skin is, as a rule, the compliment of last resort, to be employed when there is nothing else to praise. Good skin is frequently dwelt on when talking of the plainer members of the Royal Family. Be that as it may, Edith Lavery had the loveliest complexion I have ever seen: cool, clear, pastel colours under layers of flawless wax. I have all my life had a weakness for good-looking people and in retrospect, I think I became Edith's ally in that first moment of admiring her face. At all events, Isabel was destined to become a self-fulfilling prophet for it was she who took Edith to Broughton.

Broughton Hall, indeed the very House of Broughton, was a wounding seam that marbled every aspect of the Eastons'

Sussex life. As first Barons and then Earls Broughton and lately, since 1879, Marquesses of Uckfield, the Broughtons had held mighty sway over this particular section of East Sussex for a great deal longer than most potentates of the Home Counties. Until little more than a century ago their neighbours and vassals had mainly consisted of lowly farmers eking a living out of the flat and boggy marshland at the base of the downs but the roads and the railways and the invention of the Saturday-to-Monday had brought the haute bourgeoisie flooding to the area in search of ton, and, like Byron, the Broughtons awoke to find themselves famous. Before long, the local mark of whether one was 'in' or 'out' was largely based on whether or not one was on their visiting list. In fairness I must say that the family did not seek its celebrity, not at first anyway, but as the major representatives of the anciens riches in an upwardly mobile area their power was forced upon them.

They had been lucky in other ways. Two marriages, one to a banker's daughter and the other to the heiress of a large section of San Francisco had steered the family craft through the turbulent seas of the agricultural depression and the Great War. Unlike many such dynasties, they had retained some if not all of their London holdings, and various tricks with property in the sixties had brought them to the comparatively safe shores of Mrs Thatcher's Britain. After that, when the socialists did start to regroup they turned out, happily for the upper classes generally, to have been reborn as New Labour and so would prove much more accommodating than their rapacious political forebears. All in all, the Broughtons were the very acme of the

'surviving' English family. They had reached the 1990s with their prestige and, more significantly, their estates practically intact.

Not that any of this was a problem for the Eastons. Far from resenting the family's privileges they positively worshipped them. No, the difficulty was that despite living two miles from Broughton Hall itself, despite Isabel's telling her girlfriends over lunch in Walton Street what luck it was having the house 'practically next door', still, after three and a half years, they had never set foot in it, nor succeeded in meeting one single member of the family.

Of course, David Easton was not the first upper-middle-class Englishman to discover that it is easier to demonstrate a spurious aristocratic background in London than in the country. The problem was that after years of lunches at Brooks's, Saturdays at race-meetings and evenings at Annabel's, mouthing his prejudices against the modern, mobile society, he had entirely lost touch with the fact that he was a product of it. It was as if he had forgotten his father had been the managing director of a minor furniture factory in the Midlands and it was with some difficulty that his parents had put him through Ardingly. By the time I met him I think he would have been genuinely surprised not to have found his name in Debrett's. I remember once reading an article in which Roddy Llewellyn was quoted as complaining that he had not been to Eton (as his elder brother had) because it was at Eton that one picked up one's lifelong friends. David happened to be passing my chair.

'Quite right,' he said. 'That's exactly how I feel.' I looked across the room to catch Isabel's eye but I saw at once in her sympathetic nod that she did not want to be in my conspiracy but rather in her husband's.

To an outsider it seems a vital ingredient of many marriages that each partner should support the illusions of the other.

Protected, as he had been, by a combination of Isabel's kindness and most London hostesses' indifference to anything beyond their guests' ability to talk and eat the food, it was now bitter indeed to sit at smart dinner tables and be asked about Charles Broughton's trip to Italy or how Caroline's new husband was shaping up and to have to murmur that he didn't really know them. 'But how extraordinary,' would come the answer. 'I thought you were neighbours.' And even in this admission there was a certain dishonesty, for it was not that David did not really know them. He did not know them at all.

Once at a cocktail party in Eaton Square he had ventured an opinion about the family only to hear his companion ask, 'But isn't that Charles over there? You must introduce me and we'll see if he remembers where we met.' And David had had to say he felt sick (which was more or less true) and go home and miss the dinner they had all been going on to. Lately he had taken to assuming a slightly dismissive air when they were mentioned. He would stand, loudly silent, on the edge of the discussion as if he, David Easton, preferred not to know the Broughtons. As if he had tried them and discovered they were not quite to his taste. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In fairness to David I would say that these frustrated social ambitions were probably as secret from his conscious mind as they were supposed to be from the rest of us. Or so it seemed to me as I watched him zip up his Barbour and whistle for the dogs.

Fittingly perhaps, it was Edith who suggested the visit. Isabel asked us at breakfast on Saturday if there was anything we'd like to do and Edith wondered whether there was a local 'stately' and what about that? She looked across at me.

'I wouldn't mind,' I said.

I saw Isabel glance at David deep in his Telegraph at the other end of the table. I knew and understood the Broughton situation and Isabel knew I knew, though, being English, we had naturally never discussed it. As it happens, I had met Charles Broughton, the rather lumpish son and heir, a couple of times in London at those hybrid evenings where Show Business and Society congregate but, like the crossing of two rivers, seldom mingle. These encounters I had kept from Isabel for fear of salting the wound.

'David?' she said.

He turned the pages of his newspaper with a large and insouciant gesture.

'You go if you want to. I've got to drive into Lewes. Sutton's lost the petrol cap of the lawn-mower again. He must eat them.'

'I could do that on Monday.'

'No, no. I want to get some cartridges anyway.' He looked up. 'Honestly, you go.'

There was reproach in his eyes, which Isabel dealt with by pulling a slight face as if her hand was being forced. The truth was they had an unspoken agreement not to visit the house as 'members of the public'. At first David had avoided it because he had expected to know the family quite soon and he did not want to run the risk of meeting them from the wrong side of the cordon. As the months and then years of disappointment had unfolded, not visiting the house had become a kind of principle, as if he did not want to give the Broughtons the satisfaction of seeing him pay good money to see what should, by rights, have been his for nothing. But Isabel was more pragmatic than her husband, as women generally are, and she had grown accustomed to the idea that their position in the 'County' was going to be deferred for a while. Now she was simply curious to see the place that had become a symbol of their lack of social muscle. She did not therefore require much persuading. The three of us packed into her battered Renault and set off.

I asked Edith if she knew Sussex at all.

'Not really. I had a friend in Chichester for a while.'

'The fashionable end.'

'Is it? I didn't know counties had fashionable ends. It sounds rather American. Like good and bad tables in the same restaurant.'

'Do you know America?'

'I spent a few months in Los Angeles after I left school.'

'Why?'

Edith laughed. 'Why not? Why does one go anywhere at seventeen?'

'I don't know why one goes to Los Angeles. Unless it's to become a film star.'

'Maybe I wanted to be a film star.' She smiled at me with what I have since come to recognise as a habitual expression of slight sadness, and I saw that her eyes were not blue as I had at first thought, but a sort of misty grey.

We turned through a pair of monumental stone piers, topped with lead stags' heads, antlers and all, and started down the wide gravel drive. Isabel stopped the car. 'Isn't it marvellous!' she said. The vast mass of Broughton Hall sprawled before us.

Edith smiled enthusiastically and we drove on. She did not think the house marvellous, no more did I, although it was in its way impressive. At any rate, it was very large. It seemed to have been designed by an eighteenth-century forerunner of Albert Speer. The main block, a huge granite cube, was connected to two smaller cubes with stocky and cumbersome colonnades.

Unfortunately a nineteenth-century Broughton had stripped the windows of their mullions and replaced them with plate glass so now they gaped, vacant and sightless, across the park. At the four corners of the house squat cupolas had been erected like watch-towers in a concentration camp. All in all, it did not so much complete the view as block it.

The car crunched comfortably to a halt. 'Shall we do the house first or the garden?' Isabel, like a 1960s Soviet military inspector in the heart of NATO, was determined to miss nothing.

Edith shrugged. 'Is there a lot to see inside?'

'Oh, I think so,' said Isabel firmly, striding towards the door marked 'Enter'. It crouched in the embrace of the ponderous horseshoe flight of steps leading up to the piano nobile. The rusticated granite swallowed her and we meekly followed.

One of Edith's favourite stories would always be that she first saw Broughton as a paying guest, barred by a red rope from the intimate life of the house. 'Not,' as she would remark with her funny half-laugh, 'that the place has ever had much intimate life.' There are houses with such a sense of the personalities that built them, an all-pervading smell of the lives lived there, that the visitor feels himself a cross between a burglar and a ghost, spying on a private place with hidden secrets. Broughton was not such a house. It had been designed down to the last fender and finial with one single aim: to impress strangers.

Consequently its role at the end of the twentieth century had hardly changed at all. The only difference being that now the strangers bought tickets instead of tipping the housekeeper.

For the modern visitor, however, the splendours of the state rooms were deferred, and the cold, dank room by which we entered (later we would know it as the Under Hall) was as welcoming as a deserted stadium. Hard-looking footmen's chairs stood around the walls, conjuring up a vision of endless hours of boredom spent sitting on them, and a long, black table filled the centre of the discoloured stone floor. Apart from four dirty views of Venice, a long way after Canaletto, there were no pictures. Like all the rooms at Broughton, the hall was perfectly enormous, making the three of us feel like the Borrowers.

'Well, they don't believe in the soft sell,' said Edith.

From the Under Hall, clutching our guide-books, we climbed the Great Staircase with its carved oak flights clambering up around a burly and rather depressing bronze of a dying slave. At the top, after crossing the wide landing, we came first to the Marble Hall, a vast, double-storeyed space with a balustraded gallery round all four sides at second-floor level. Had we entered by the exterior horseshoe stair this would have been our (intentionally flattening) introduction to the house. From this we progressed to the Saloon, another huge room, this time with heavy mahogany mouldings picked out in gold and walls hung with crimson flock wallpaper.

'Chicken tikka for me,' said Edith.

I laughed. She was quite right. It looked exactly like a gigantic Indian restaurant.

Isabel opened the guide-book and began to read in a geography-mistress voice: 'The Saloon is hung with its original paper, one of the chief glories of Broughton's interior. The gilt side-tables were made for this room by William Kent in seventeen-thirty-nine. The maritime theme of the carved pier glasses was inspired by the appointment of the third earl to the embassy in Portugal in seventeen thirty-seven. The Earl, himself, is commemorated in this, his favourite room in the full-length portrait by Jarvis, which hangs, together with its companion of his countess by Hudson, on either side of the Italian fireplace.'

Edith and I stared at the pictures. The one of Lady Broughton made a little stab at gaiety by posing the heavy-featured young woman on a bank of flowers, a summer hat trailing from her large hand.

'There's a woman at my gym exactly like that,' said Edith. 'She's always trying to sell me Conservative raffle tickets.'

Isabel droned on. 'The cabinet in the centre of the south wall is by Boulle and was a gift from Marie-Josèphe de Saxe, Dauphine of France, to the bride of the fifth earl on the occasion of her marriage. Between the windows…'

I drifted away to these same, tall windows and looked down into the park. It was one of those hot, sulky days in late August when the trees seem overburdened with leaf and the green upon green of the countryside is stuffy and airless. As I stood there, a man came round the corner of the house. He was wearing tweeds and corduroys despite the weather and one of those tiresome brown felt derbies that Englishmen in the country imagine to be dashing. He looked up and I saw it was Charles Broughton. He barely glanced at me and looked away, but then he stopped and looked up again. I supposed that he had recognised me and I raised my hand in greeting, which he acknowledged with some slight gesture of his own and went on about his business.

'Who was that?' Edith was standing behind me. She had also abandoned Isabel to her orisons.

'Charles Broughton.'

'A son of the house?'

'The only son of the house, I think.'

'Will he ask us in for tea?'

'I shouldn't think so. I've met him precisely twice.'

Charles did not ask us in for tea and I'm sure he wouldn't have given me another thought if we hadn't run into him on our way back to the car. He was talking to one of the many gardeners who were drifting about the place and happened to finish just as we started back across the forecourt.

'Hello,' he nodded quite amiably. 'What are you doing here?' He had clearly forgotten my name and probably where we had met but he was pleasant enough and stood waiting to be introduced to the others.

Isabel, taken short by this sudden and unexpected propulsion into the Land Where Dreams Come True, fumbled for something to say that would fasten like a fascinating burr inside Charles's brain and result in a close friendship springing up more or less immediately. No inspiration came.

'He's staying with us. We're two miles away,' she said baldly.

'Really? Do you get down often?'

'We're here all the time.'

'Ah,' said Charles. He turned to Edith. 'Are you local, too?'

She smiled. 'Don't worry, I'm quite safe. I live in London.'

He laughed and his fleshy, hearty features looked momentarily quite attractive. He took off his hat and revealed that fair, Rupert Brooke hair, crinkly curls at the nape of the neck, that is so characteristic of the English aristocrat. 'I hope you liked the house.'

Edith smiled and said nothing, leaving Isabel to reel off her silly gleanings from the guide-book.

I stepped in with the pardon. 'We ought to be off. David will be wondering what's happened to us.'

We all smiled and nodded and touched hands, and a few minutes later we were back on the road.

'You never said you knew Charles Broughton,' said Isabel in a flat tone.

'I don't.'

'Well, you never said you'd met him.'

'Didn't I?'

Although, naturally, I knew I hadn't. Isabel drove the rest of the way in silence. Edith turned from the front passenger seat and made a that's-torn-it expression with her mouth. It was clear I had failed and Isabel was noticeably cool to me for the rest of the weekend.

TWO

Edith Lavery was the daughter of a successful chartered accountant, himself the grandson of a Jewish immigrant who had arrived in England in 1905 to escape the pogroms of the late, and to Edith's father, unlamented Tsar Nicholas II. I do not think I ever knew the family's original name, Levy, perhaps, or Levin. At any rate, the Edwardian portraitist, Sir John Lavery, was the inspiration for the change, which seemed, and almost certainly was, a good idea at the time. When asked if they were connected to the painter, the Laverys would answer, 'Vaguely, I think,' thus linking themselves with the British establishment without making any disputable claims. It is quite customary for the English, when asked if they have met so-and-so, to say,

'Yes, but they wouldn't remember me,' or 'Well, I've met them but I don't know them,' when they have not met them.

This is because of a subconscious urge on their part to create the comforting illusion that England, or rather the England of the upper-middle and upper classes, is crisscrossed with a million invisible silken threads that weave them together into a brilliant community of rank and grace and exclude everybody else. There is little dishonesty in it for as a rule they understand each other. To an Englishman or woman of a certain background the answer, 'Well, I've met them but they wouldn't remember me' means 'I have not met them.'

Mrs Lavery, Edith's mother, considered herself a bird of quite different feather to her spouse, fond as she was of him. Her own father had been an Indian army colonel but the salient detail was that his mother had been the great-niece of a banking baronet. Although kindly in many ways, Mrs Lavery was passionately snobbish to a degree verging on insanity and so her frail connection to this, the very lowest hereditary rank filled her with the warming sense of belonging to that inner circle of rank and privilege where her poor husband must ever be a stranger. Mr Lavery did not, for this reason, resent his wife. Not in the least. On the contrary he was proud of her. She was, after all, a tall, good-looking woman who knew how to dress and if anything he was rather entertained by the idea that the phrase 'noblesse oblige' (one of Mrs Lavery's favourites) could have the slightest application to his household.

They lived in a large flat in Elm Park Gardens, which was almost at the wrong end of Chelsea and not quite to Mrs Lavery's taste. Still, it was not exactly Fulham nor, worse, Battersea, names that had only recently begun to appear on Mrs Lavery's mental map. She still felt the thrill of the new, like an intrepid explorer pushing ever further from civilization, whenever she was invited for dinner by one of her friends' married children. She listened perkily as they discussed what a good investment the 'toast rack' was or how the children loved Tooting after that poky flat in Marloes Road. It was all Greek to Mrs Lavery. So far as she was concerned she was in Hell until she got back over the river, her own personal Styx, that forever divided the Underworld from Real Life.

The Laverys were not rich but nor were they poor and, having only one child, there was never any need to stint. Edith was sent off to a fashionable nursery school and then Benenden ('No, not because of the Princess Royal. We simply looked around and we thought it the most inspiring place'.) Mr Lavery would have liked the girl's education to have been continued at university but when Edith's exam results were not good enough, certainly not for anywhere they were interested in sending her, Mrs Lavery was not disappointed. Her great ambition had always been to bring her daughter out.

Stella Lavery had not been a debutante herself. This was something of which she was deeply ashamed. She would seek to conceal it under a lot of laughing references to the fun she'd had as a girl and, if pushed for specifics, she might sigh that her father had taken rather a tumble in the thirties (thereby connecting herself with the Wall Street Crash and echoes of Scott Fitzgerald and Gatsby). Alternatively, fudging her dates, she would blame it on the war. The truth, as Mrs Lavery was forced to admit to herself in the dark night of the soul, was that in the less socially free-wheeling world of the 1950s, there had been clearer demarcation lines between precisely who was in Society and who was not. Stella Lavery's family was not. She envied those of her friends who had met as debutantes with a deep and secret envy that gnawed at her entrails. She even hated them for including her in their reminiscences about Henrietta Tiarks or Miranda Smiley as if they believed that she, Stella Lavery, had 'come out' when they knew, and she knew they knew, she had not. For these reasons she had been determined from the outset that no such gaps would shadow the life of her beloved Edith. (The name Edith incidentally was chosen for its fragrant overtones of a slower, better England and perhaps, half-consciously, to suggest that it was a family name handed down from some Edwardian beauty. It was not.) At all events, the girl was to be propelled into the charmed circle from the first. Since by the eighties Presentation at Court (which might have posed a problem) was a thing of the distant past, all Mrs Lavery had to do was to convince her husband and her daughter that it would be time and money well spent.

They did not need much persuasion. Edith had no concrete plans for how she was to pass her adult life and to delay the decision-making process with a year-long round of parties seemed a pretty good idea. As for Mr Lavery, he enjoyed the vision of his wife and his daughter in the beau monde and was perfectly happy to pay for it. Mrs Lavery's carefully tended connections were enough to get Edith onto Peter Townend's list for the opening tea-parties and the girl's own looks won her a place as a model at the Berkeley Dress Show. After that it was plain sailing. Mrs Lavery went to the mothers' lunches and packed her daughter's dresses for balls in the country and on the whole had a wonderful time. Edith quite enjoyed it, too.

The only reservation for Mrs Lavery was that when the Season was over, when the last winter Charity Balls had finished and the Tatler cuttings had been pasted into a scrap-book along with the invitations, nothing much seemed to have changed.

Edith had obviously been entertained by the daughters of several peers — including one duke, which was particularly thrilling

— indeed, all of these girls had attended Edith's own cocktail party at Claridge's (one of Mrs Lavery's happiest evenings), but the friends who stayed on after the dances had ceased were very like the girls she had brought home from school, the daughters of prosperous, upper-middle-class businessmen. Exactly what Edith was herself in fact. This did not seem right to Mrs Lavery. She had for so long attributed her own failure to reach the dizzying upper echelons of London Society (a group she rather archly labelled 'the Court') to her lack of a proper launch that she had expected great things from her daughter.

Perhaps her enthusiasm blinded her to a simple truth: the fact that the Season had opened its arms to her daughter meant it was no longer in the 1980s the exclusive institution it had been in Mrs Lavery's youth.

Edith was aware of her mother's disappointment but while she was certainly not immune, as we would find out, to the charms of rank and fortune, she did not quite see how she was expected to prosecute these intimacies with the daughters of the Great Houses. To start with they all seemed to have known each other from birth and anyway she couldn't help feeling it would be difficult to cater for their pleasures in a flat in Elm Park Gardens. In the end she remained on nodding terms with most of the girls in her year but returned to a very similar groove to the one she had occupied on leaving school.

I learned all this quite soon after first meeting Edith at the Eastons' because it so transpired that she took a job answering the telephone in an estate agent's in Milner Street, just round the corner from where I had a basement flat. I started bumping into her in Peter Jones, or having a sandwich in one of the local pubs, or buying a five-thirty pint of milk in Partridges and gradually, almost without noticing it, we became quite friendly. One day I saw her coming out of the General Trading Company at about one o'clock and I invited her for some lunch.

'Have you seen Isabel lately?' I asked, as we squeezed into a banquette in one of those little Italian places where the waiters shout.

'I had dinner with them both last week.'

'All well?'

It was, or well enough. They were engaged in some school drama about their child. Isabel had discovered dyslexia. I pitied the headmaster.

'She asked after you. I said I'd seen you,' said Edith.

I remarked that I didn't think Isabel had as yet forgiven me for failing to tell her I knew Charles Broughton, and Edith laughed. It was then that I heard about her mother. I asked if she'd told Mrs Lavery about our time at Broughton. It so happened that Charles was rather on my mind as that morning I'd seen one of those idiotic magazine articles about eligible bachelors and Charles had led the pack. I blush to say I was rather impressed with the list of his assets.

'Not likely. I wouldn't want to give her any ideas.'

'She must be very susceptible.'

'She certainly is. She'd have me up the aisle before you could say knife.'

'And you don't want to get married?'

Edith looked at me as if I were mad. 'Of course I want to get married.'

'You don't see yourself as a career girl? I thought all women want careers now.' I do not know why I slid into this kind of pompous anti-feminism since it does not in the least reflect my views.

'Well, I don't want to spend the rest of my life answering the telephone in an estate agent's office if that's what you mean.'

I was duly reprimanded. 'That's not quite what I had in mind,' I said.

Edith looked at me indulgently as if it were necessary to take me through my three times table. 'I'm twenty-seven. I have no qualifications and, what is worse, no particular talent. I also have tastes that require, at the very least, eighty thousand a year.

When my father dies he will leave what money he has to my mother and I don't anticipate either of them quitting the scene much before 2030. What do you suggest I should do?'

I do not know why but I felt rather muted by this Anita Loos-style practicality emanating from the little rose before me, with her Alice band and her neat, navy-blue suit.

'So you intend to marry a rich man?' I asked.

Edith looked at me quizzically. Perhaps she felt she had given away too much, perhaps she was trying to ascertain if I was judging her and if so, whether or not she was coming out ahead. She should have been reassured by what she saw in my eyes for it has always seemed to me that if one can face up early on to what one really wants in life, then there is every chance of avoiding the seemingly inevitable modern disease of mid-life crisis.

'Not necessarily,' she answered, with a trace of defensiveness in her voice. 'It's just that I cannot imagine I would be very happy married to a poor one.'

'I do see that,' I said.

Edith and I did not meet for some time after this luncheon. I was cast in one of those unwatchable American mini-series and I left for Paris and, of all places, Warsaw for some months. The job involved the supremely depressing experience of celebrating Christmas and New Year in a foreign hotel where they give you cheese for breakfast and all the bread is stale, and when I returned to London in May, I certainly did not feel I had very much advanced my art. On the other hand, I was at least a bit better off than when I left. Quite soon after I arrived home I received a card from Isabel asking me to join their party for the second day of Ascot. She must have forgiven me in my absence. I thought I would have to refuse as I had done nothing about applying for my voucher to the Enclosure but it turned out that my mother (who with such gestures would betray a defiant denial of the work and the life I have chosen) had applied for me. Today, in these more graceless times, it would not be possible for her to apply for someone else, even her own child, but then it was. She had in fact undertaken this annual responsibility in my youth and she proved reluctant to give it up. 'You'll be so sorry if you have to miss something fun,' she would say whenever I objected that I had no plans to attend the meeting. And this time my mother was proved right. I accepted Isabel's offer with the half-smile that the prospect of a day at Ascot always brings to my lips.

Like many famous institutions, the image and the reality of the Royal Enclosure at Ascot bear little or no relation to each other. The very name 'Royal Enclosure' (to say nothing of the glutinous coverage in the lowbrow press) conjures up visions of princes and duchesses, famous beauties and Rand millionaires strolling on manicured lawns in haute couture. Of this picture, I can, I suppose, testify to the quality of the lawns. The vast majority of visitors to the Enclosure appear to be middle-aged businessmen from the more expensive suburbs of London. They are accompanied by wives wearing inappropriate outfits, generally in chiffon. What, however, makes this disparity between dream and truth unusual and amusing is the wilfully blind support of the fantasy by the participants themselves. Even those members of Society, or rather those members of the upper-middle and upper classes, who do actually go to the meeting, take a touching delight in dressing and behaving as if they were at the smart and exclusive event the papers talk about. Their women wear just as inappropriate but more becoming fitted suits and swan about greeting each other as if they were at some gathering in the Ranelagh Gardens in 1770. For a day or two every year these working people allow themselves the luxury of pretending that they are part of some vanished leisure class, that the world they mourn and admire and pretend they would have belonged to if it still existed (which as a rule they would not) is alive and well and living near Windsor. Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming. I am always happy to spend one day at Ascot.

David collected me in his Volvo estate and I climbed in to find Edith, whom I had expected, and another couple, the Rattrays. Simon Rattray seemed to work for Strutt and Parker and talked a lot about shooting. His wife, Venetia, talked a little about her children and even less about anything else. We nosed our way down the M4 and through Windsor Great Park until we finally reached the course and David's slightly obscure car park. It was a perennial source of irritation to him that he could not get into Number One and he always vented his annoyance on Isabel as she was pointing out the signs. I never minded; it had become part of Ascot for me (like my father shouting at the tree-lights every Christmas — one of my few really vivid childhood memories), I had after all been with them several times.

Before too long the car was safely on its numbered place and the lunch was unpacked. It was clear that Edith had had no hand in it as it was Isabel and Venetia who assumed control, fussing and clucking and slicing and mixing until the feast was spread in all its glory before our eyes. The men and Edith watched from the safety of the folding chairs, clutching plastic glasses of champagne. As usual, there was a certain poignancy in all this preparation, given the brevity allotted to the food's consumption. We had hardly drawn up our seats to the wobbly table when Isabel, as predictable as David's worry over the car park, looked at her watch. 'We mustn't be long. It's twenty-five to two now.' David nodded and helped himself to strawberries. Nobody needed an explanation. Part of this day, Mass-like in its ritual, was getting to the steps in the Enclosure in time to see the arrival of the Royal house-party from Windsor. And getting there early enough to secure a good vantage point. Edith looked at me and rolled her eyes, but we both obediently gulped down our coffee, pinned on our badges and headed for the course.

We passed the stewards at the entrance, busily dividing the wheat from the tares. Two unfortunates had just been stopped, though whether it was because they didn't have the right badge or were wrongly dressed I do not know. Edith squeezed my arm with one of her secret smiles. I looked down. 'Something funny?'

She shook her head. 'No.'

'Well then.'

'I have a soft spot for getting in where others are held back.'

I laughed. 'You may feel that. Many do. But it is rather low to admit it.'

'Oh dear. Then I'm afraid I'm very low. I must just hope it doesn't hold me back.'

'I don't think it will,' I said.

What was interesting about this exchange was its honesty. Edith looked the perfect archetype of the Sloane Ranger girl she was, but I was beginning to understand that she had a disconcerting awareness of the realities of her life and situation when such girls generally make a show of pretended ignorance of these things. It was not that her sentiments marked her apart. The English, of all classes as it happens, are addicted to exclusivity. Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them. What made Edith different is that most people, and certainly all toffs, put on a great show of not being aware if it. Any suggestion that there is pleasure in being a guest where the public has to buy tickets, of being allowed through a gate, of being ushered into a room, where the people are turned away, will be met by the aristocrat (or would-be aristocrat) with blank looks and studied lack of comprehension. The practised matron will probably suggest with a slight movement of the eyebrows that the very idea denotes a lack of breeding. The dishonesty in all this is of course breathtaking but, as always with these people, the discipline in their unwavering rules commands a certain respect.

We must have dawdled, as the others were all at the steps, which were fast filling up, and waved to us to join them. A distant roar announced that the carriages were on the way and the footmen or stewards or whatever they are rushed forward to open the gates from the course. Edith nudged me and nodded towards Isabel as the first coach carrying Her Majesty and some dusky premier of an oil-rich state swept through the entrance. Like the other men I took my hat off with a perfectly genuine enthusiasm but I could not ignore the look on Isabel's face. It was the glazed, ecstatic expression of a rabbit before a cobra. She was hypnotised, enraptured. To be included in the Ascot house-party, Isabel, like Pervaneh in Hassan, would have faced the Procession of Protracted Death. Or at least she would have considered it. It only goes to show, I suppose, that for all the educated classes' contempt of mass star-worship, they themselves are just as susceptible to fantasy when it is presented in a palatable form.

Actually, the procession that year was a bit disappointing. The Prince of Wales, Isabel's paradigm of perfection, was not there and nor were any of the other princes. The only junior Royal was Zara Phillips, brightly attired in revealing beachwear.

Edith had been murmuring irreverent criticisms in my ear, much to the annoyance of Isabel and a woman with blue hair standing next to her, so, rather than continue to spoil their fun, we turned to go when I heard a voice right behind me: 'Hello, how are you?' I looked round and found myself face to face with Charles Broughton. This time there was no awkwardness over names, the best part of the Enclosure being that everyone has to wear a badge with their name written on it. There you will find no fumbling of introductions or pretending that people have already met. Just a cursory glance at the lapel or bosom of the unknown one and all is well. Would that such labelling were compulsory at all social gatherings. Charles's badge proclaimed 'The Earl Broughton' in the distinctive, round handwriting of the well-bred girls of the Ascot Office.

'Hello,' I said. 'You remember Edith Lavery?' I had employed the correct English usage for presenting a person whom one is fairly certain will have been forgotten, but in this instance I was wrong.

'Certainly I do. You're the safe one who lives in London.'

'Well, I hope I'm not as safe as all that.' Edith smiled and, either on her own initiative or on Charles's invitation, took his arm.

The Eastons and the Rattrays were bearing down on us and I could almost see the whites of their eyes when I suggested a visit to the paddock. It seems hard and probably reveals a deep insecurity in me but I felt embarrassed for poor old Isabel in her eagerness, and David's ambition looked nearly malevolent in its intensity. Mercifully, Charles, who was after all quite a polite fellow, nodded a greeting to Isabel that dismissed her but showed at least that he was aware they had been introduced.

David, seething, hung back and the three of us headed off towards the paddock where the horses were being paraded before the first race.

Predictably Charles turned out to know quite a lot about horses and before long he was happily engaged in informed chatter on fetlocks and form, none of which interested me in the least, but I was kept amused by observing Edith gazing up at him with fascinated, flattering attention. It is a technique that such women seem to acquire at birth. She was wearing a neat linen suit of a pale bluish colour, I think the correct term is eau-de-nil, with a little pill-box hat tipped forward over her forehead. It made her look frivolous but, in contrast to the Weybridge matrons in their organza frills, unsentimental and chic. It was an outfit that added a dash of wit and humour to her face, which, I was by this stage aware, was extremely beguiling. As she studied her card and made notes against the names with Charles's pencil, I watched him watching her and it was perhaps then that I first became aware of a real possibility that he was attracted to her. Not that this was very surprising. She had all the right attributes. She was pretty and witty and, as she had said herself, safe. She was not of his set, of course, but she lived and spoke like his own people. It is a popular fiction that there is a great difference in manner and manners between the upper-middle and upper classes. The truth is, on a day-to-day level they are in most things identical. Of course the aristocracy's circle of acquaintance is much smaller and so there is invariably with them the sense of the membership of a club. This can result in a tendency to display their social security by means of an off-handed rudeness, which doesn't bother them and upsets almost everybody else. But these things apart (and rudeness is very easily learned) there is little to tell between them in social style. No, Edith Lavery was clearly Charles's kind of girl.

We watched a race or two but I could sense that Edith, in the nicest possible way, was trying to shake me off and so when Charles inevitably suggested tea in White's, I excused myself and went off in search of the others. Edith threw me a grateful look and the pair of them walked away arm in arm.

I found Isabel and David in one of the champagne bars behind the grandstand, drinking warm Pimm's. The caterers had run out of ice. 'Where's Edith?'

'She's gone off to White's with Charles.'

David looked sulky. Poor David. He never did manage to be taken into White's at Ascot, neither in their old tent nor, so far as I am aware, in their new, more space-age accommodation. He would have given an arm to be a member. 'Jolly good,' he said through gritted teeth. 'I wouldn't have minded some tea.'

'I think they were going to meet up with the rest of Charles's party.'

'I'm sure they were.'

Isabel in contrast said nothing but kept sipping at the tepid liquid with its four bits of floating cucumber.

'I said we'd meet up at the car after the second last race.'

'Fine,' David said grimly, and we lapsed into silence. Isabel, to her credit, still looked more interested than irritated as she stared into her unappetising drink.

Edith was already leaning against the locked car when we got there and I could see at once that the day had been a success.

'Where's Charles?' I said.

She nodded towards the grandstand. 'He's gone to find the people he's staying with tonight. He's coming tomorrow and Friday.'

'Good luck to him.'

'Haven't you enjoyed yourself?'

'Oh yes,' I said. 'But not half as much as you.'

She laughed and said nothing, and at that moment David arrived to unlock the vehicle. He did not mention Charles and he was noticeably grumpy with Edith, so it was not as a general announcement but in a whisper that she informed me that Charles had asked her out for dinner the following Tuesday. It was of course more than she could do to keep it to herself.

THREE

Edith sat at her dressing table, bathed and sweet-smelling, and prepared to paint on her social face. She hadn't told her mother exactly whom she was dining with and now she pondered why she had not. It would certainly have given Stella a great deal of pleasure. It was probably a fear of this very pleasure that kept her daughter silent. And anyway, at this stage, Edith had not made up her mind whether or not she thought there was any what the magazines call 'future' in it.

Edith Lavery was not in the least promiscuous but, at this point, she was certainly not a virgin. She had, in her time, had several boyfriends. None was serious until she was about twenty-three but then there had been a stockbroker, five years older than her and very good-looking, whom she had made up her mind to accept when he proposed. They went out for about a year, stayed in a lot of house-parties, enjoyed quite a few of the same things, and generally were happy or at least as happy as anyone else. His name was Philip, his mother was fairly grand, there was a little money — enough to start them off in Clapham

— and in fact it all seemed fine, so no one was more surprised than Edith when he explained one evening, in halting tones, that he had met someone else and it was all over. For a moment Edith had difficulty making sense of this. Partly because he chose to tell her in San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, where the customers on the two neighbouring tables were listening to every word, and partly because she couldn't imagine in all modesty what this 'someone else' could have that she, Edith, didn't. She and Philip liked each other, they were a good-looking pair, they both enjoyed country weekends, they both skied. Where was the difficulty?

At any rate, Philip left and three months later she was invited to his wedding. She went, being very gracious and looking (as she was determined to do) ravishing. The bride was plainer than her, naturally, and rather ordinary really but as Edith watched her gazing up at Philip as if he were God on earth, she had an uncomfortable inkling that this had something to do with what had gone wrong.

After that there had been various walk-outs but not much more. One, an estate agent named George, had lasted about six months but this was only because he was the first competent lover she had experienced and the pleasures he unlocked in her made her wilfully blind to his shortcomings until one day, at Henley (which he had taken her to imagining, rather touchingly, that it was a smart event), while they were lunching in some members' tent, she had looked across the table at him, laughing his loud and gummy laugh, and realised that he really was too frightful. After that it was simply a matter of time.

Her parents had been quite sorry about Philip whom they liked, not in the least sorry about George and, on the whole, without an opinion on the various others who had briefly penetrated Elm Park Gardens, but Edith had begun to notice that the veiled hints and half-joking, half-worried remarks from her mother had been getting more frequent since her twenty-seventh birthday. And for the first time she had started to feel a very far-away, distant echo of panic. Just supposing, for the sake of argument, that no one did ask her to marry them, what would she do?

What on earth was she going to do?

But then, she thought as she pulled out the heated rollers and picked up her Mason Pearson brush, everything could change so quickly. Being a woman wasn't like being a man. Men were either born with money or they spent years beavering away at careers to make themselves rich while women… women can be poor one day and rich, or at least married to a rich man, the next. It might not be fashionable to admit it but even in this day and age, a woman's life can be utterly transformed by means of the right ring.

It is easy to get the impression from these ruminations that Edith was harshly, even exclusively, mercenary at this time in her life but that would be unjust. And it would have surprised her. If asked whether she was materialistic she would have answered she was practical, if snobbish she would have said she was worldly. After all, she read novels, she went to the cinema, she knew about happiness, she believed in love. But she saw her future career as primarily social (how could she not?) and if it was to be social then how could she have a career worthy of the name without money and position? Of course, by the 1990s, these were supposed to be outmoded ambitions but Edith did not have it in her to rush off and found a keep-fit empire or publish a new magazine. As for any of the professions, she had missed her chance of those ten years before when she left school. And it was no longer unfashionable to want to be affluent. The brown rice and dirndl-skirted generation of her childhood had given way to a brasher, post-Thatcherite world and weren't her dreams, in a way, in tune with that development?

Still, if she was ambitious and reluctantly committed to the idea that it would be a man who would open the golden pathway to fulfilment, it would not be true to say that Edith was fundamentally a snob. Certainly not compared to her mother.

She said herself that she liked to be on the inside looking out rather than the other way round, but she was more interested in achievement (or power, to use its less fragrant name) than rank. She wanted to be at the centre of things. She wanted a winner, not a coronet. Within limits. She was not looking for a successful costermonger but she was not really looking for an earl either. Which probably explains why she got one.

She stared at her reflection in the glass. She was wearing a short black dress in wild silk. What her mother would have called 'a little black number', the eternal stand-by of the London Lady. It was well-cut, quite expensive and, apart from a French paste bracelet, she wore no ornament. She looked pretty and snappy with that slight tang of severity a certain kind of Englishman finds intriguing. She was satisfied. Edith was not vain but she was glad, not to say relieved, that she had not been saddled with a plain face. The doorbell rang.

She had entertained the idea that she might simply tell Charles to wait downstairs but then he might think she was concealing something far more compromising than a rather routine father and a snobbish mother so she decided to ask him up but to introduce him in the American way, Christian names only. A modern habit that as a rule she particularly disliked as it withheld the only part of a name that might carry any information. Her mother defeated her as soon as she had taken the field.

'Charles what?' she said, while Kenneth was making them all a drink.

'Broughton.' Charles smiled. Edith saw the penny drop with a silent boing but not for nothing had her mother been a lifelong admirer of Elizabeth I. The mask remained smiling but immobile.

'And how do you know Edith?'

'We met in Sussex at my parents' house.'

'When I was staying with Isabel and David.'

'Oh, so you know the Eastons?'

Charles nodded, for which Edith was grateful. He was not prepared to say, 'No, I do not know them and we were not introduced at a private party. I met your daughter when she had bought a ticket to see where I live.' This was about the size of it but it would have got the evening off to an odd start. Nevertheless, having escaped this manhole, Edith brought the chat to a fairly rapid conclusion rather than chance her arm a second time. So, far from being nervous, she was actually quite relieved when they settled themselves into the gleaming Porsche that awaited them below.

'I thought we'd go to Annabel's.'

'Now?' She was surprised and spoke before she had edited.

'Is that all right? We don't have to.' Charles looked faintly hurt and she felt mean at dashing what he might have supposed to be a bit of a treat. The thought that he had actually planned an evening for her was rather gratifying.

'Lovely.' She smiled warmly into his open, pleasant, slightly dim face. 'It's just that I've always gone on late. I don't think I've ever had dinner there.'

'I rather like it.'

He drove off and they lapsed into silence until the car pulled up outside the famous basement entrance in Berkeley Square.

Charles got out and handed the keys to a doorman. Edith had always been to Annabel's with young men who parked their cars around the square and walked to the club. There was a cosy feeling in the knowledge that she was out with someone who had no need to cut corners. They made their way down the steps and in through the door at the bottom. Charles signed in with a lot of 'good evenin', m'lord' going on all round.

There was practically no one in the bar and seemingly even fewer in the restaurant. The empty dance-floor looked dark and maudlin with its black mirrors reflecting nothing. Charles seemed puzzled at first and then embarrassed. 'You're right. It is too early. I don't think it really picks up until about ten. Do you want to go somewhere else?'

'Not at all,' she said with a brisk smile as she settled into the banquette. 'Now, tell me what to eat.'

She had not yet decided what she thought about Charles but one thing she was quite sure of. This evening was going to be a great success if it killed her. The menu provided a few minutes of welcome chat. Charles knew about food and drink, and he was happy to take command, although in fact she had only asked for his help in order to re-establish herself as the helpless underdog like the good, nubile girl she was. The last thing she wanted was for him to start apologising. Experience had taught her that much. But in the event he chose well and the dinner was a good one.

Charles Broughton was not exactly handsome. His nose was too large for that and his lips too thin. But in the candlelight he was not unattractive. He was very what Nanny would call 'distinguished'. He looked so like an English gentleman that he could have come from Central Casting and Edith felt herself being quite drawn to him physically. Much more than she had imagined she would be. She was mildly surprised to realise that she was looking forward to his asking her to dance.

'Do you spend a lot of time in London?' she said.

He shook his head. 'Good Lord no. Little as possible.'

'So you're generally in Sussex?'

'Most of the time. We've got a place in Norfolk as well. I have to get up there from time to time.'

'Funny. I'd thought of you as rather social.'

'Me? You must be joking.' He laughed out loud. 'Why was that?'

'I don't know.' She did know although she was not prepared to say that she had read about him in various social columns.

Since he and she had run into each other at Ascot, it all seemed to add up to a rather fun-filled image. It was a mistaken impression that lingered for some time before it was firmly put right.

The truth was that, like most of the human race, Charles went to parties if he was asked and had nothing else to do but he did not have many friends — certainly not many that he had made in the last few years — and he saw himself exclusively as a countryman, helping his father to run the estates and the houses that God had seen fit to entrust to their care. He did not question nor resist his position but neither did he exploit it. If he had ever thought about the issues of inheritance or rank he would only have said that he felt very lucky. He would not have said this aloud, however.

Contrary to Edith's belief, he had not taken her to Annabel's as part of any romantic strategy. The truth was that, without admitting it to himself, he liked to take girls to places where he was known. It put a spin on the dinner that anonymity lacked.

It was his turn to speak.

'Have you lived a lot in the country?'

'Not much, really.' Edith realised this was an odd answer even as she said it for she had never, for half an hour, actually

'lived' in the country. Unless one counted boarding school, which of course one couldn't. Still, she liked the country. She'd stayed a lot in the country. She'd walked behind the guns. She'd ridden. It wasn't a total lie. She qualified it: 'My father's business. You know.'

Charles nodded. 'I suppose he has to move about quite a bit.'

Edith shrugged. 'Quite a bit.'

Actually, Kenneth Lavery had had to move about from the London Underground to the same office in the city for the last thirty-two years. He had once had to go to New York and once to Rotterdam. That was it. This slight re-shading of the truth was never corrected. Charles was forever thereafter under the impression that Edith's father had been some sort of international whizz-kid, jetting between Hong Kong and Zurich. In creating this false picture, however, Edith had read Charles correctly. There is something much less petit bourgeois about a businessman with permanent jet lag than a stationery drudge buying a ticket for the Piccadilly Line northbound, and Charles did like things just so.

Time had passed and the club was filling.

'Charlie!' Edith looked up to see a pretty brunette in a sharply tailored, sequinned cocktail dress bearing down on them.

She was accompanied by, or rather trailing, a whale. He wore a suit that must have taken a bale of worsted and a large spotted tie. When they had made it to the table, Edith noticed the rivulets of sweat that trickled continuously from behind his ears over the fat, red neck.

'Jane. Henry.' Charles stood up and gestured at Edith. 'Do you know Edith Lavery? Henry and Jane Cumnor.' Jane took Edith's hand in a swift and lifeless hold then turned back to Charles as she sat down and poured herself a glass of their wine.

'I'm parched. How are you? What happened to you at Ascot?'

'Nothing happened. I was there.'

'I thought we were all having lunch on Thursday. With the Weatherbys? We hunted and hunted for you before we gave up.

Camilla was bitterly disappointed.' She gave a half-smirk to Edith, ostensibly inviting her to join the joke. In fact, of course, consciously excluding her from it.

'Well, she shouldn't have been. I told her and Anne that I had to have lunch with my parents that day.'

'Needless to say they'd completely forgotten. Anyway, doesn't matter now. By the way, tell me: are you going to Eric and Caroline in August? They swore you were but it seemed so unlike you.'

'Why?'

Jane shrugged with a lazy, sinuous movement of the shoulder. 'I don't know. I thought you hated the heat.'

'I haven't made up my mind. Are you going?'

'We don't know, do we, darling?' She reached across to her puffing husband and kneaded his doughy hand. 'We're so behind with everything at Royton. We've hardly been home since Henry got political. I've a ghastly feeling we might be stuck there all summer.' She again broadened her smile to include Edith.

Edith smiled back. She was quite used to this curious need on the part of the upper-classes to demonstrate that they all know each other and do the same things with the same people. This was perhaps an unusually manic example of the palisade mentality but, looking at Lord Cumnor, aka Henry the Green Engine, it was not difficult to see that Jane had made some severe sacrifices to achieve whatever position she was in command of. It would be hard for her to set it aside, even for a moment, as a thing of little importance.

'Are you very political?' Edith said to Henry, who seemed to be recovering from the effort it had taken him to cross the floor.

'Yes,' he said, and turned back to the others.

Edith had been inclined to feel rather sorry for him but she saw in a moment that he perceived no need to feel sorry for himself. He was quite happy being who he was. Just as he was quite happy to demonstrate that he knew Charles and did not know Edith. Charles, however, was not prepared to have the Cumnors be rude to the girl he had invited for dinner and he consciously and obviously turned the conversation back to her.

'Henry's frightfully serious since he took his seat. What was your latest cause? Organic veg for prisoners?'

'Ha, ha,' said Henry.

Jane came to her husband's aid. 'Don't be beastly. He's done a lot of work for the national diet, haven't you, darling?'

'Which didn't include going on it, I gather,' said Charles.

'You laugh now but they'll come after you when your father snuffs it. You'll see,' said Jane.

'No they won't. Labour will win next time and they'll have the hereditaries out before you can say Jack Robinson.'

'Don't be so pessimistic.' Jane did not want to hear that the world she had pinned all her hopes on was threatened with extinction. 'Anyway, it'd be years before they came up with a formula for the Lords that works better and they won't do anything in a hurry.'

Charles stood up and asked Edith to dance.

She raised her eyes in a half-query as they shambled around the floor, by now crammed with Iranian bankers and their mistresses.

He smiled. 'Henry's all right.'

'Is he a great friend?'

'He's a sort of cousin. I've known him all my life. God, he's fat at the moment, isn't he? He looks like a balloon.'

'How long have they been married?'

He shook his head. 'Four, five years, I suppose.'

'Do they have any children?'

He made a wry shape with his mouth. 'Two girls. Poor old Henry. Setchell's got him drinking port and eating cheese and Christ knows what.'

'Why?'

'To get a boy, of course. To get the bloody boy.'

'What happens if they don't have one?'

Charles frowned. 'There are no brothers. I think some bloke in South Africa gets the title although I'm not sure if he or the girls get the swag. Anyway, they're both quite young. They'll bash on for a while longer, I should think.'

'It could get rather expensive.'

'It certainly could. You never know how long to keep going. Look at the Clanwilliams. Six girls before they called it a day and it's worse nowadays.'

'Why?'

'Why do you think? Even the girls have to go to decent schools.'

They danced in silence for a while with Charles occasionally nodding to various acquaintances on the floor. Edith gratefully recognised two girls from her deb season and flashed brilliant smiles at them. Taking in the identity of her partner, they waved back, allowing her to feel less invisible. By the time they returned to the table, she was beginning to feel that she was really having quite a jolly time.

Henry and Jane had not moved and as they approached, Jane jumped up and seized Charles's hand. 'It's time you danced with me. Henry hates dancing. Come on.' She led Charles back to the floor, leaving Edith alone with her porcine husband.

He smiled vaguely. 'She always says that. I don't really hate dancing at all. Would you like to give it a go?'

Edith shook her head. 'Not unless you're dying to, if you don't mind. I'm exhausted.' The thought of being pressed into that pillow of blubber made her shudder.

He nodded philosophically. Being turned down was obviously not a new experience. 'Do you know Charlie well?'

'No. We just met in the country and then again at Ascot and here I am.'

'Where in the country? Who with?' He perked up a bit at the chance of some more Name Exchange.

'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.

That he knew. If Edith had been presented to his mother as the wife of a friend she might have liked her — if she had taken the smallest notice of her — but Edith would not be welcomed as Charles's girlfriend. Still less, should such a thing ever come to pass, would she be encouraged as Lady Uckfield's ultimate successor, as the one to whom his mother must entrust the house, the position, the very county she had worked so hard on and for so long.

This is not to say that Charles was without sympathy for his mama. On the contrary, he loved her very much and he felt he was right to do so. He saw beyond her public image of studied perfection and he liked what he found there. It pleased Lady Uckfield always to give the impression that everything in life had been handed to her on a plate. This was no truer for her than it is for the rest of the human race but she preferred to be on the receiving end of envy rather than pity and all her life had chosen, in the words of the song, to pack up her troubles in her old kit bag and smile. As a rule, this was not too onerous a choice, since she found her own problems as dull as she found everybody else's, but Charles respected this philosophy and he liked her for it. He did not perhaps fully appreciate the extent to which, in her concerted assumption of the 'brave face', she was only being loyal to the tenets of her kind.

The upper classes are not, as a whole, a complaining lot. As a group they would generally rather not 'go on about it'. A brisk walk and a stiff drink are their chosen methods of recovery whether struck in the heart or the wallet. Much has been written in the tabloid press about their coldness but it is not lack of feeling that marks them apart, rather it is lack of expression of feeling. Naturally they do not see this as a failing in themselves and nor do they admire public emotion in others. They are genuinely bewildered by working-class grief, those bereaved mothers being dragged sobbing and supported into church, those soldiers' widows photographed weeping over 'his last letter'. The very word 'counsellor' sends a shudder of disgust down any truly well-bred spine. What they do not appreciate, of course, is that these tragedies, national and domestic, the war casualties, the random killings, the pile-ups on the M3, offer most ordinary bereaved what is probably their only chance of fleeting celebrity. For once in their lives they can appease that very human craving for some prominence, some public recognition of their plight. The upper classes do not understand this hunger because they do not share it. They are born prominent.

The one arena of his mother's struggles that Charles really knew about was Lady Uckfield's war with his grandmother, the dowager marchioness, who had not been an easy mother-in-law. She was the tall, bony, long-nosed daughter of a duke and so not at all impressed with the pretty little brunette her son had brought home with him. Old Lady Uckfield had been Queen Mary to her daughter-in-law's Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and the relationship was never warm. Even after her husband's demise and well into Charles's conscious years, the dowager's behaviour continued unchecked and she was still attempting to countermand orders with the housekeeper, instruct the gardeners directly and cancel groceries with a view to replacing them with more 'suitable' items to the day of her largely unlamented death.

That these attempts were not successful, that her power was broken was a direct result of the one real fight between them, the thought of which always made Charles smile. Soon after her dethronement as chatelaine of Broughton, his grandmother had interfered with a new re-hang of the pictures in the saloon while Lady Uckfield was in London. On her return, Lady Uckfield's discovery that her scheme had been abandoned made her so angry that, for the only time in recorded history, she, in modern parlance, lost it. This resulted in a fully fledged screaming match, surely unique in the history of the room in question — at least since the more rollicking days of the eighteenth century. To the enraptured delight of the listening servants, Lady Uckfield denounced her mother-in-law as an ill-mannered, ill-bred, interfering old bitch. 'Ill-bred?' shrieked the dowager, selecting from the list of insults the only one to pierce her carapace. 'Ill-bred!' and she stalked from the house, determined never to darken its doors again. His mother had told Charles many times that she regretted the incident and it was certainly a relief to her that old Lady Uckfield, having made her point, did eventually return to Broughton for the customary festivals but, even so, the battle had achieved its purpose. Thenceforth the young Marchioness was in charge, and the house, the estate and the village were under no illusions about it.

For these and many other reasons, simple and complicated, Charles admired his mother and the disciplines she lived by.

He even admired the way she lived with her husband's stupidity without ever referring to the fact or showing her exasperation.

He knew that he, himself, while not quite as slow as his father, was not quick. His mother had guided him well without making him too conscious of his shortcomings but he was aware of them all the same. Because of all this, he would have loved to please her when it came to his choice of a mate. He would have been delighted to arrive at some Scottish stalking party, at some London ball, and find exactly the woman his mother wanted for him. It should have been easy. There must surely have been some peer's daughter, from the old, familiar world Lady Uckfield knew and trusted, who was smart and sharp (for his mother was not a fan of the dowdy, county lady with her wispy hair and her charity shop skirts), and this girl would have made him laugh and he would have felt proud of her and safe, and her arrival would have transformed things.

But, try as he might to find her, somehow she had never turned up. There were nice young women who had done their best but… never quite the one. This was probably because Charles had a central, guiding belief. Like himself, it was simple but it was strong. Namely, that if he could only marry for love, if he could just find the partner who would stimulate him in mind (for he did value the albeit limited activities of his mind) and body, then the life that was mapped out for him would be a good and rewarding one. If, however, he married suitably but misguidedly, then there could be no redemption possible. He did not believe in divorce (not at least for the head of the Broughtons) and therefore, once unhappily married, he would remain so to the grave. He was, in short, much more than he knew, a thoroughly moral, straightforward fellow. Which made it all the more disturbing to him that here was a real possibility of his being drawn to a woman who, while not being ludicrously unsuitable, while not being a pop queen or a drug-running trapeze artist, was nevertheless not what his mother was hoping for.

It was therefore with a hint of melancholy in his heart that, a couple of days later, Charles telephoned Edith and asked her out again.

FOUR

To my amusement, it was not long before the fact that Edith and Charles were going about together had begun to attract attention. Gossip columns without a story for the day picked up on it and those tiresome articles in Tatler or Harpers about what up-to-the-minute people eat at weekends or wear in Paris or do for Christmas started to include Edith as Charles's paramour. The fascination with celebrities was in full swing at that time and since, by definition, there are never enough genuine celebrities to supply the market — even in a much less greedy era than the 1990s — journalists are forced to drag out their tired 'It Girls' and ex-television presenters to fill the gaps. It was ironically Edith's very ordinariness that played into this.

Someone saw her as a latter-day Cinderella, the working girl suddenly transported into Dreamland, and wrote an article in one of the Sundays entitled 'The Lavery Discovery', featuring several large and highly coloured photographs. After that, she caught on. At first she was annoyed at being continually described as climbing the social ladder but, gradually, as the original reason for the press interest faded beneath a welter of fashion articles and award ceremonies and invitations onto afternoon television, Edith came to enjoy the attention. The seductive element in being pursued by newshounds is that inevitably one starts to feel that if so many people are interested in one's life, one's life must ergo be interesting and Edith wanted to believe this quite as much as anyone else. Of course, inevitably I suppose, it was not long before she began to lose touch with the fact that she was becoming famous for being famous and nothing more. I was at a charity lunch once when she was invited to give some tabloid award and I remember her saying afterwards how ghastly the other presenters were, all sports commentators and fashion gurus, and why on earth had they been invited? I pointed out that even a lowly sports commentator has earned his or her own celebrity in a way Edith had not. She smiled but I could see she rather resented me for saying it.

She had started at a perilously early stage to believe her own publicity.

These photo-shoots and column inches meant that, slightly mysteriously, she had begun to dress better or more expensively than before. I'm not quite sure how she managed this as I don't think Charles was forking out at that point.

Probably she did one of those deals where designers lend you clothes to wear for the night if there's a likelihood of your getting into the papers. Or perhaps Mrs Lavery was stumping up. If she'd had the money, she wouldn't have minded a bit.

I saw much less of Edith during this time. At this distance, I'm not sure if she was still working in Milner Street but I would think she probably was as she was never one for counting her chickens. However, she was obviously less at a loss as to what to do for lunch. But one day the following March, months after she had started seeing Charles, I spotted her in the corner of the Australian having a tuna sandwich and, after buying myself a drink, I walked over to her table. 'Hello,' I said. 'Shall I join you or are you meditating?'

She looked up with a surprised smile. 'Sit. You're just the person I need.' She was distracted and serious and generally rather unlike the cool blonde I was used to.

'What's up, Doc?'

'Are you, by any chance, going to the Eastons' next weekend?'

'No. Should I be?'

'It would be frightfully convenient if you were.'

'Well, I'm not doing anything else. I suppose I could telephone and invite myself. Why?'

'Charles's mother is giving a dinner party at Broughton on Saturday and I want some of my own people at it. I suppose Isabel and David would come?'

'Are you kidding?'

'That's just it. I want you there to calm them down. Charles likes you.'

'Charles doesn't know me.'

'Well, at least he's met you.' I knew what was worrying her. She was tired of being invisible. Of being entirely surrounded by people who automatically assumed that if she were worth knowing they would already know her. She wanted a friend of hers there whom she didn't have to introduce to Charles.

'I'll come if Isabel can put me up.'

She nodded gratefully. 'I'd ask you to stay at Broughton if I could.'

'Isabel would never forgive me. Have you had them over before?'

'No.' I looked surprised and she shrugged. 'I've only ever been down for the night and usually for something specific and you know what they're like…' I knew. I only had to think of the glint in David's eye at Ascot to know only too well.

'So how's it all going? I keep reading about you in the papers.'

She blushed. 'Isn't it silly?'

'And I saw you on This Morning with Richard and Judy.'

'Christ. Your life must be in serious trouble.'

'I had tonsillitis but anyway I rather like Judy,' I said. 'She always looks harassed and real. I thought you were quite good.'

'Did you?' She seemed astonished. 'I thought I was a total idiot. I don't mind the photographs but whenever I open my mouth, I sound like a complete half-wit. I'm sure they only got me because Tara Palmer-Tomkinson chucked.'

'Did she?'

'I don't know. I'm making it up.'

'Perhaps the answer is not to do any talking.'

'That's what Charles says, but it wouldn't make the smallest difference. They quote you anyway.' This is of course quite true.

'You and Charles make a fetching team. Your mother must be thrilled.'

Edith rolled her eyes. 'She's beside herself. She's afraid she'll find Bobby in the shower and it'll all have been a dream.'

'And will she?'

Edith's face hardened into a worldly mask that seemed more suited to an opera box in the belle époque than the Australian at lunchtime. 'No, I don't think so.'

I raised my eyebrows. 'Are congratulations in order?'

'Not yet,' she said firmly, 'but promise me you'll be there on Saturday. Eight o'clock. Black tie.'

'All right. But you must tell Isabel. Do you want me to write to Lady Uckfield?'

'No, no, I'll do all that. Just be there.'

When I telephoned Isabel that evening Edith had already spoken to her and the matter was swiftly arranged. And so, a few days later, I found myself joining the others in the Eastons' drawing room for a drink before we set off. David was being gauche and grumpy to conceal his palpitating excitement at finally being received within the citadel. Isabel was less excited and consequently less afraid of it showing.

'Well, do we think the dinner's in aid of anything?' she said with a giggle as I entered.

'I don't know,' I said. 'Do we?'

David pushed a glass into my hand. His whiskies were always warm, which was rather tiresome. He had read somewhere that gentlemen don't have ice. 'Isabel thinks they're going to announce their engagement.'

The thought had obviously crossed my mind, which would explain why Edith felt she had to have a few people on her own team but nursery training has made me beware of the obvious. 'Wouldn't her parents have been asked?'

'Perhaps they have been.' That was a thought. The image of Stella Lavery walking up to her room to find her bags unpacked and her evening dress laid out warmed my heart. Everyone deserves a few moments when life is Quite Perfect.

'Well, we'll know soon enough,' I said.

Isabel looked at the clock. 'Shouldn't we be off?'

'Not yet. There's plenty of time.' David could afford to mumble his prey now that he was sure of it. 'What about another drink?'

But Isabel won and we set off for our first but (as we were all secretly thinking) probably not our last private visit to Broughton Hall.