Snobs

by Julian Fellowes

‘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.

I knew and understood the Broughton situation and Isabel knew I knew, though, being English, we had naturally never discussed it.

Isabel, like a 1960s Soviet military inspector in the heart of NATO, was determined to miss nothing.

England of the upper-middle and upper classes, is criss-crossed with a million invisible silken threads that weave them together into a brilliant community of rank and grace and exclude everybody else.

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.

Because he was generally seen as a prize, she thought he must share this image of himself but this was not so.

As a rule, this was not too onerous a choice, since she found her own problems as dull as she found everybody else’s,

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.

Naturally they do not see this as a failing in themselves and nor do they admire public emotion in others.

Everyone deserves a few moments when life is Quite Perfect.

She had put in many years work on her daughters for what were to be meagre dividends

I suppose he was handsome in a smooth, over-fed way

Still, she was quite funny and in my experience funny people are seldom stupid.

Like many aggressive parvenus who have climbed the greasy pole, he was under the illusion that the reason people did not point out his social failings was because they were no longer visible.

Edith found herself warmed by the enveloping luxury of privilege. All the years of her growing up she had wanted not just to avoid being a have-not but to be an emphatic have and now, at last, just at the moment when she had begun to face the possibility of failure, here she was, living her dream.

They think it’s rather common to know too much.

He had that odd, mid-Atlantic manner of speech that reminds one of a television chat show where every trivial remark is supposed (a) to denote a caring soul and (b) to bring all reasonable conjecture on the subject to an end.

Weeks of tearful intimacies, to say nothing of sexual liaisons, are lightly discarded without a backward glance. It is inevitable in that the nature of the work generates intimacy and the number of jobs makes the support of all such relationships impossible. But it is strange nevertheless to contemplate how many people are walking the streets of London who know a great deal more about you than anyone in your immediate family.

Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence.

And no one is more aware of this than the Beauties themselves. They have a power they simultaneously respect and take for granted. Despite the moralists who tut about its transience, it is generally a power that is never completely lost.

Of course, what neither Simon nor David ever really grasped was that the key to these people is their familiarity with one another. Most of them are unable to receive anyone as ‘one of their own’ who is not either known to them from early youth or at the very least known to one of their circle. They cannot accept that they would not have come across, at least at one remove, anyone who was entitled to be included in their set.

‘He is handsome, I suppose,’ she said dismissively. ‘But actors are such girls about their looks. I can’t take a man seriously who worries about eye-drops and mascara.’ I turned to her. ‘Who’s asking you to take him seriously?’ I said.