Free Snobs by Julian Fellowes by Snobs (V2.0) Page B

'This is only the beginning.'
    At three o'clock the following Saturday a capped and uniformed chauffeur rang my basement bell and seized my waiting suitcase to carry it up to the car. I had treated myself to a new one in honour of the elevated company I was about to keep so it was especially irritating when he caught it on the corner of the cellar steps and wrenched one of the handles off. As a result, despite my reckless extravagance, I felt shabby for the entire trip.
Sic transit gloria mundi,
or, I suppose,
sic transit gloria transit.
    Henry Cumnor was already in the car, his corpulence spilling itself across the back seat in vast folds of Turnbull and Asser-shirted flesh, leaving the barest ledge of vacant leather beside him. As I climbed in, I felt like Carrie Fisher squeezing up against Jabba the Hutt. I knew Henry vaguely, as it so happened that we had attended the same school although in different years, and this afforded me a faint protection against his exclusivity, but only faint. At any rate, I knew what to expect as Edith had made quite a funny story out of her 'first date' with Charles.
    There was another passenger in the front seat who was cursorily introduced as Tommy Wainwright and whom I recognised as a rising Member of Parliament — if any Tory could be said to be rising at that time. So far as I could remember from those profiles beloved of the Sunday colour sections he was the younger son of a Home Counties peer and was consequently a slightly surprising inclusion in the group on whom Mrs Thatcher had smiled — she not being much in favour of the aristocracy. He was tall, almost lanky, with an amiable, round face and thinning hair that made him look like a kind of trainee old buffer, although, as I would learn, this was not at all the case. He turned, smiled and shook my hand, which placed him three-nil in the courtesy stakes against Henry and we set off.
    The talk on the way to the airport was political and I was amused at the contrast between my two companions. Tommy gave his reasons for why the Conservatives had gone so completely down the plug. These were on the whole reasonable and seemed worthy of discussion but Cumnor countered them with a bundle of ridiculous assertions, all smug, all out of date and all apparently received unchewed from his late father (rather like his wardrobe). Feeling that I ought to contribute, I observed that it did not seem to me that the party had been very imaginative in their relationship with the arts.
    Cumnor angled his bulk towards me. 'My dear fellow, how many people constitute what you call "the Arts"? We're talking thousands, not hundreds of thousands, not millions. Do you know how many members there are in the TGWU? The plain truth is, whether you like it or not, your "arts" don't matter.' He sat back, having won his point to his own satisfaction.
    'Forty million people turn on their televisions every night to find out what they think,' said Tommy. 'What could matter more than that?'
    The issue was not important to any of us but I could see that Henry was irritated at Tommy for taking my side, showing that he shared the usual fantasy of the less intelligent members of his class that on every given topic, from port to euthanasia, there is a 'sound' way of thinking and one has only to voice this view to carry the field. Since they are generally only addressing like-minded people, the field is as a rule easy to carry. Tommy Wainwright, in not playing this game, risked creating the impression in Henry's sluggish brain that in some way, ever since Tommy had gone into serious politics, he was 'not quite a gentleman' — the stock response to original thought.
    Having arrived at the airport and gone through the procedures, we were shown to a smallish departure gate where we were hailed by the remaining nine of the party. These included Lord Peter Broughton, Lord Uckfield's much younger half-brother, and Caroline's husband, Eric Chase, whom I had met briefly at the