Snobs: A Novel, page 420
Of course, the danger of the stage world, even for those initially drawn to its glitter, is that there is always a risk that one may grow out of it. It is the choice of high colour over more muted shades in terms of one's daily drama and for many there comes a time when the sobbing in the dressing room, the anti-director cabals, the midnight telephone calls of reassurance, simply become an adolescent bore. Some actors slake this sense of growing emptiness by the discovery of a 'cause' and try to put their need for daily trouble and strife to some use. Nothing is easier than to raise a crowd of furiously indignant actors who will happily protest at almost anything. But causes are a taste not shared by all, certainly not much by the pragmatic.
Besides, there is a risk, not always avoided by some quite famous stage names, of attaching oneself to so many noble struggles against injustice that the weight of one's contribution finally becomes rather flimsy. All in all, the most effective antidote to the palling pleasures of stage gossip is simply to become very successful. Then the money and the status that fame brings are pleasant enough in themselves and lead to a rather broader life willy nilly. Which thought brought me back to the question of Edith's adjustment to her new existence. I attempted to answer honestly.
'I think it would depend on how well Simon does.' Charles shook his head impatiently. 'I'm not saying she'd mind moving in with Jude Law but how successful is this fellow? I've never heard of him. Edith's used to living high on the hog, you know.'
I knew. 'It's difficult to say. He's started picking up some good parts. He might easily get the lead in a series and then he'd be up and running.'
'But he might not.'
This was certainly true. People in the outside world talk of actors being 'successful', which roughly means stars that they have heard of, or 'unsuccessful', which means the bottom 60 per cent who never really make a decent living. You do not need to be a mathematician to work out that there is a large group in between these two, doing quite well, earning reasonable amounts, known within the business, any one of whom can be picked for a new television show and have their fortunes transformed, as the papers like to put it, 'overnight'. This is the trap of the stage life. It is easy to give up something if you are failing, almost impossible to do so if you are almost succeeding. Simon Russell was definitely in this category.
I bought some time as our main course arrived. 'The trouble is, Charles, what argument could I employ that would make any difference? As I have just told you, I think she's quite crazy but she's a grown woman. To give up what you've offered her in order to go and live with an actor of moderate talent and even more moderate means is beyond comprehension to me.
But she already knows all this and so I don't know what I could add to it that would be helpful.'
'I suppose she loves him. I suppose it's sex.' He bit the word out of the air and two men on the next table glanced briefly in our direction.
'It might be sex,' I said. 'But I'm not at all sure that she loves him.'
Charles frowned disapprovingly. 'I can't quite follow you there,' he said, and turned his attention to the bones of his lamb chops, which he began to scrape fiercely, apparently anxious to retrieve every last morsel of edible matter.
It was clear Charles was not prepared to admit that his wife could differentiate between these elements, that she might be able to indulge her body without involving her heart. I loved him for it.
We didn't say much more. All I knew was that by the time I was back in Piccadilly strolling down the Ritz arcade towards Green Park Underground station I had agreed to telephone Edith and attempt to 'reason' with her.
FIFTEEN
As it happened Edith sounded quite eager to meet, 'so long as you don't start to lecture me.' I shouldn't have been surprised.
Freud has some special word for this 'compulsion to reveal' that undermines us all. She longed to discuss everything with someone who knew all the characters involved and given that she would expect some sympathy from her listener, I was probably in a category of one. We decided on a cheap and cheerful little restaurant in Milner Street, alas long gone now, a victim of the developers, that we had occasionally used during her estate agency days. When I arrived I found her already seated in a separate booth in the corner. She wore a scarf tied tightly and pulled forward over her brow. It was all quite exciting.
'I suppose Charles has put you up to this?' she said. I nodded since I supposed he had. 'How is he?'
'How do you think?'
'Poor darling.'
'Indeed.'
She wrinkled her nose crossly. 'Now you're not to make me feel like a beast.'
'But I think you are a beast.' We were interrupted, perhaps just in time, by the arrival of the waitress. Of course it was easy to see that Edith was enjoying the whole adventure tremendously. 'How's Simon?' I said.
'Oh, terribly well. He's having lunch with his new agent. Apparently she thinks he's the natural successor to Simon McCorkindale.'
'And that's good, is it?'
'Very good,' she said crisply with an admonishing glance. 'At any rate, it's much better than his last agent who always seemed to think he was lucky to get a job.'
'Is he working now?'
'He's about to do a play in Bromley. A revival of Rebecca. Apparently they're hoping it might come into the West End.'
'Edith, it'll be a cold day in hell when a revival of Rebecca comes into London from Bromley.'
'Well, that's what they've told him.'
'They say such things for two reasons. One is to tempt you into being in it, and two, so that you have something slightly less pathetic to tell your friends when they ask you what you're doing. This is my world, remember.'
She nodded slightly, 'I imagine that's why Charles has chosen you to talk to me. You're to take the gilt off the gingerbread and show me the dingy lowlife that lies beneath. He's given up trying to remind me of the glories of Broughton although I dare say I've got all that to look forward to when Googie gets in on the act.' She shivered in mock dread.
I felt rather slighted. 'I don't see why I shouldn't remind you of the glories of Broughton,' I said. She shrugged. Suddenly I was irritated by her air of insouciance. I knew, better than most, the effort that had gone into netting Charles and I was damned if I was going to witness Edith playing the part of a jaded aristocrat coming to the end of an arranged marriage.
'Come off it,' I said, driving back the waitress who was approaching with our first courses. 'You loved it. You loved every minute of it. All those cringing shop assistants and sucking-up hairdressers. All that "yes, milady, no, milady". You'll miss it, you know.'
She shook her head. 'No, I won't. You know better than anyone that I didn't grow up with it.'
'It's precisely because you didn't grow up with it that you'll miss it so severely.' I sighed. 'You're in for a terrific setting down, I'm afraid.'
'You don't sound afraid,' she said. 'You sound thrilled.' She took a sip of her Perrier as the plates were laid before us.
'And if Simon becomes a star? What then? Aren't more people interested in meeting a star than some boring old lord?'
It was then that I perceived that Edith, in the full flush of something akin to love, had made two tremendous miscalculations. Firstly, in weighing up the relative merits of aristocracy and stardom she had assumed that the benefits that would accrue to her, as partner, would be roughly equivalent. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The wife of an earl is, after all, a genuine countess. When people meet her it is not solely because they see her as a route to her husband.
Better still, if the family she has married into still possesses its estates, as the Broughtons did, then the landed peer offers his wife a mini-kingdom where she may reign as queen. On the other hand, the wife of a star is… his wife. Nothing more. If she is cultivated by people it is usually only so that they may ingratiate themselves with her husband. He has no land where she may reign. His kingdom is the studio or the stage where she has no place and where in fact, on her rare visits, she is in the way, an unprofessional among working people. She is excluded from the shared jokes between her husband and his workmates, she holds no interest even for his agent except as a method of controlling him. At dinner her opinions only irritate the other professionals present. Finally and worst of all, while a divorced peeress faces the world and the search for a new husband with a dented but legal title, the divorced wife of a star has returned absolutely to square one. As many Hollywood wives have had to learn before now.
Edith's second miscalculation was simpler. The comparison was false. Charles was a lord. Simon was not a star. Nor was he, in my opinion, very likely to become one. I felt myself becoming caustic. 'What makes you think so well of Simon's prospects?'
'You're very acid this morning. Anyway,' she looked at me with a real expression of appeal and I felt myself softening a little, 'the simple fact is I love him. I don't know whether he's worth it, perhaps he isn't, but I do. And there we are. You wouldn't want me to deny the first genuine feeling I've ever had, would you?'
Part of me wanted to scream yes into her stupid ear but I could see that was not what the moment called for. Poor Edith.
She was probably right when she said this passion for Simon was the first real emotion she had ever felt. That was precisely why she knew so little of what she was going through. She never guessed that after a year, however lovely the sex might be, it would no longer obscure from her the life they were leading together. Besides, I knew the strength of the ambition that lurked below Edith's placid surface. Modern psychology constantly harps on the dangers of suppressing one's true sexual nature. It seems to me that it is quite as dangerous to give one's sexual nature free rein and suppress one's worldly aims. Edith was, au fond, the ambitious child of an ambitious mother. Quite unconsciously, she had begun to defend her defection by assuming Simon's eventual stardom and wealth. In her mind's eye she already saw herself at a premiere in white fox (or whatever the glamour equivalent is in these ecological days), blowing a kiss to the waiting crowds and sweeping into a stretch limo with a motorcycle escort.
'Darling Edith,' I tried a softer tone, 'I'm not here to lecture you on your morals. I just want to be sure you understand that the likelihood of Simon being able to give you anything approximate to the life you have tasted since your marriage is more or less nil.'
'Well, hurrah for that,' said Edith.
We were done. For the rest of lunch we gossiped about various topics. Moving into the stage world she had of course crossed paths with a few people I knew so we had a new field for our malice. As we were leaving she asked after Adela. I said she was well. 'And madly disapproving, I suppose?'
'Well, she'd hardly be madly approving. Who is?'
'She should have married Charles. She'd have stuck to him through thick and thin.'
'Am I supposed to think badly of her for that?'
She smiled and ruffled my hair. 'You've earned your living in chaos and married into the system. I've been imprisoned in the system. Can you blame me if I yearn for a bit of chaos?'
We parted amicably enough. I telephoned Charles who was grateful and sounded more resigned, I thought. At any rate about a week later it hit the papers so the chance of sorting everything quietly was gone. Adela laid Nigel Dempster's column before my breakfast eyes and I studied the laughing, bosomy picture of Edith that had been selected. There was a more sombre one of Charles and a perfectly terrible 'cad' shot of Simon, which was presumably a still from some television show.
It was clear from the illustrations and the headline — 'the Countess and the Showboy' that Dempster had already chosen his side. In fairness to him, both pragmatism and decency seemed (for once) to favour the same team and I couldn't see Edith picking up many supporters.
The story itself was a moderately accurate account of the meeting at Broughton with a dignified quote from Simon's wife that did her credit.
'Really!' Adela was always curiously unforgiving about this sort of mess. 'Stupid fools!'
I don't know why she was so offended when people appeared to let their hearts rule their heads. After all, she had chosen to marry me, which her mother, for one, had thought a choice reckless to the point of lunacy.
'Why are you so cross?' I said. 'I think it's all jolly sad.'
'Sad for Charles and for that wretched woman with her children. Not sad for them. They're just wreckers.'
Once Dempster had opened the floodgates, Edith was predictably savaged by those very journalists who had taken such pains to ingratiate themselves with her as a bride only months earlier. The timing didn't help. It was during the period of disenchantment with John Major's government, when New Labour was performing the Dance of the Seven Veils before an increasingly bewitched electorate, and this tale of high corruption suited the public mood exactly. So there were critical columns from Lynda Lee-Potter on the right and snide disparagement from Private Eye on the left. Edith the self-made success story had been replaced by Edith the Social Climber to end all, her greedy, grasping ways apparently a reflection of the heartless society Mrs Thatcher had created. Like the Hamilton scandal or the Spencer divorce, it was soon clear that the actual events and personalities had ceased to have much significance and instead it was simply what the papers decided they stood for that counted. Predictably, it was a nightmare for the Uckfields, who were completely of that school where a respectable woman's name only appears in print three times: hatch, match and despatch — that is to say, when she is born, when she marries and when she dies. Finding their daughter-in-law criticised in column headlines was like being stripped naked and whipped in a public square and if it was ghastly for them it was really horrible for Charles. Slightly illogically, since the press was already limbering up for the Blairocracy that was then in training, they decided that Charles, despite being a worthless aristocrat, was the innocent party (probably because there was no other way of telling the story) but even so, to see his wife's adultery gloated over in newsprint and magazines was a kind of martyrdom for him. The more they telephoned Broughton, urging him to tell 'his side', the more invaded and violated Charles felt. The truth was his horror of scandal was not an affectation but a deeply held belief and here he was in the middle of one. He was being punished and he hadn't done anything wrong. This at least was Charles's view of the whole hideous episode and I do not think it was unjust.
After this circus had been played out for some weeks, it transpired that I had accepted an invitation for both of us to a supper party at the home of an actress I knew who had recently played Simon's mother in a television thriller. I thought there was every likelihood that the lovers might be there.
Adela was very cool when I told her. 'Well, I'm not going to flounce out of the room or cut her dead if that's what you're worried about.'
'I'm not worried. I'm just telling you they might have been invited. I think it's desirable to avoid publicly taking sides.'
'You need have no fear on that score,' she said witheringly. 'However,' she added, giving an unusually searching look in the glass and picking up her lipstick in real earnest, 'I'm not going to kiss her and wish her every happiness either.'
As it happened, I was right and Edith and Simon were on the guest list for that evening. Edith told me later she hadn't really wanted to go as they had been out every night since the scandal broke but Simon was insistent. He suffered from that common illusion among disappointed actors that it is good to be 'seen' at things. The truth is that it is good to be employed.
Whether one is seen at parties is immaterial. However, he had acquired a newsworthy mistress and he probably wanted to get some mileage out of her. If I'm honest and at this distance, I suspect Simon was sorry it had not all been managed without her leaving Charles. That said, since the breach had happened, he would have wanted to profit from the publicity.
Simon Russell was one of those actors whose initial progress had seemed to point inexorably toward a stardom that, somehow, the years had never quite delivered. In the early days he had been given the lead in a series opposite a popular female star but the show had failed. Then he had landed a good part in a Hollywood sequel, which had died at the box office.
And gradually the spotlight had shifted and slid away to those newer, younger, blonder men who seemed to arrive in such limitless supply. He was good — or good enough — and, as I have said, wonderful looking, especially when well photographed, and it could all still have happened for him but, by the point of our story, there was no time to lose. And now, most unexpectedly, his private life had put him into print. Edith had made him a topic.
As for his wife and children, I think it would be wrong to say he didn't worry about them. He did. As much as he was able.
She, Deirdre, had done her best for him and he really loved the kids, but I suppose it had all become a bit dreary over the last few years and so terribly the same. Besides, it was obvious when you saw them together (which we did a couple of times during the early days of the filming at Broughton) that Deirdre had ceased to think of him as a romantic figure and had begun to treat him more and more as a kind of overgrown, recalcitrant boy. He wanted worship and what he got was someone telling him to eat his greens. Of course, I wasn't sure how much unmixed adoration he would be able to count on from Edith. Or for how long.
===OO=OOO=OO===
'Darling, please… we must go…' It was quite unconscious but Simon had fallen into the habit of dealing with Edith in a wheedling tone, a cross between a lounge lizard and a travelling salesman. 'I hate to be naff but you have to get used to the idea that I earn my living. I'm not Charles swanning around giving orders at the Home Farm. I have to be out there. I have to remind people that I exist.'
