Read Online Snobs by Julian Fellowes by Snobs (V2.0) - Free Book Online

one associates with wartime newsreels. 'How terribly sweet you all are to be here,' she sparkled, smiling gaily. 'I know you've come down from London.' She directed this to me. The point being to show us that she had done her homework and she knew precisely who we were.
    'How very kind you are to ask us.' I know this game and its responses.
    'Not at all. We're
delighted
to see you here.' Lady Uckfield spoke with a kind of intimate urgency, which punctuated everything she said, as if she were sharing a permanent private joke that only you (or whomever she was talking to) would understand. I think of her now as the most socially expert individual I have ever known at all well. She combined a watchmaker's eye for detail with a madam's knowledge of the world. She was also utterly confident. I knew she had been born the prettiest daughter of a rich earl and I supposed then, young as I was, that her confidence was nothing to be wondered at, but I know now that such things do not always follow and I later learned that, like all of us, she had had her share of troubles. Maybe these had made her strong, maybe she was born strong anyway; whatever the reason, by the time I met her she was a complete and invulnerable perfectionist. Every evening I have ever participated in at her invitation has been constructed as carefully as a Cellini salt-cellar. From the species of potato to the arrangement of the cushions nothing was left to chance or others' judgement.
    Of course, as soon as she said, 'How lovely it is to welcome some friends of our darling Edith,' I could see that she didn't like her future daughter-in-law. Having said that, 'didn't like' is probably not quite accurate. It was amazing to her that her son should be marrying someone she didn't know or even know of. It was fantastic to her that this girl's friends should not be the children of her friends.
Au fond,
it was extraordinary that Edith had got into the house at all. How had it happened? From thoughts like these, unfortunately for Edith, Lady Uckfield had deduced that Charles had been 'caught' and while she later (much later) qualified this impression, she never really changed it. As a matter of fact I'm not at all sure it wasn't true.
    Isabel and I drifted over towards the fireplace. 'Hello, Mrs Lavery,' I said, and Edith's mother turned towards us, revealing in an instant that fatal, diffident graciousness that marks the successful social climber. Their manner invariably conveys to their true equals that the ladder has been pulled up and will never, ever be lowered again. The eager, snobbish Mrs Lavery we had known had gone and been replaced by the Snow Queen. It was as if we were in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and we were talking to a pod. Almost reluctantly, sounding every bit as vague about our identities as Lord Uckfield, she introduced us to our host.
    He shook our hands in a hearty, blank way. 'Jolly good,' he said. 'Did you have a lot of trouble getting here?'
    'We've only come from Ringmer,' said Isabel. 'My husband and I live there.'
    'Really?' said Lord Uckfield. 'Was there a lot of traffic on the road? All those bloody people trying to escape the city if there's a glimmer of sun in the forecast. Was it difficult getting out?'
    Isabel was about to embark on another long explanation of how she had not come from London, which I spared her. 'I came on the train,' I said.
    'Very sensible.' He smiled his expansive, florid smile and nodded us away.
    The Marquess of Uckfield was a dull and stupid man but there was, on the whole, no harm in him. He had been spoiled all his life and surrounded by the kind of toadies that such people find comfort in, garnered from the distant strands of their own families as well as on the highways and byways, and so he had no conception of how dull and stupid he really was. His uneducated banalities were greeted as if they had come from Solomon and his unfunny, old jokes were rewarded with gales of breathless laughter. If it is the