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.