The Shooting Party

Isabel Colegate

The Shooting Party

With an Introduction by
JULIAN FELLOWES

Contents

Introduction

The Shooting Party

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THE SHOOTING PARTY

ISABEL COLEGATE’S novels are The Blackmailer (1958); A Man of Power (1960); The Great Occasion (1962); Statues in a Garden (1964); the Orlando trilogy, comprising Orlando King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1971) and Agatha (1973); News from the City of the Sun (1979); The Shooting Party (1980), which won the WHSmith Annual Literary Award and was made into a major feature film; A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory (1985); Deceits of Time (1988); The Summer of the Royal Visit (1992); Winter Journey (1995); and A Pelican in the Wilderness (2002). Isabel Colegate is married with three grown-up children and lives near Bath.

JULIAN FELLOWES, actor, writer, director, producer, was educated at Ampleforth, Magdalene College, Cambridge and The Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. His first screenplay for the cinema was Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. He has adapted his novel, Snobs, for television.

Introduction

New readers should be aware that this Introduction makes details of the plot explicit.

In the late 1950s there was a revolution in England and it started in Sloane Square. When Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court, first unsettling – and then enrapturing – the critics, it was soon clear that, as far as the artistic establishment was concerned, everything had changed. The love affair between the intellectual literati and the working class, or rather their notion of the working class, had begun. Bourgeois drama was dead and, as a by-product of this reversal, it was soon universally accepted that the upper-middle and upper classes were no longer worthy of serious, creative attention. Having dominated the lives and the aspirations of most of Europe’s population for centuries, they were suddenly, at a stroke, irrelevant. Not just out of date but out of touch, unimaginative, dull, devoid of original thought. Within minutes, this blanket dismissal had resulted in a contemptuous stereotype: these sad, posh people weren’t only unadmirable, they were laughable. Their beliefs had no merit and were in fact nothing but codified prejudice, their emotions were banal or, worse, non-existent, and if they had no hearts, they certainly had no brains. From then on, upper-class characters might figure occasionally in idiotic slapstick or comic novels, they might lose their fortunes or their trousers or get caught out in honeymoon hotels, but they did not merit serious, dramatic narrative. The audience could not be expected to believe such paltry goons had the power to think or feel. Throughout the 1960s, all non-working-class subjects were suspect, but upper-class ones were simply absurd. And so was a whole tradition, an entire way of life that had shaped and dominated these islands for centuries, consigned to the dustbin of history. Anything that seemed to symbolize these clowns – white tie and cocktails, country sports and country houses – became, for a time, ridiculous. And the ancillary existences, those individuals who depended on this social group, fared no better. Domestic service, which at the turn of the last century was the greatest source of employment in the United Kingdom, vanished behind a thick curtain. Like collaboration in wartime France, it was something that may have gone on but was best forgotten. In most cases, the servants themselves were perceived as the prey of a hideously unjust system, the victims not the perpetrators of the crime, but even so it would be better if we all simply put it behind us. Seldom can a way of life have vanished from sight and mind so rapidly. In 1939 public and private life in Britain was still almost entirely governed by the scions of noble and gentle families while the whole population came into daily contact with the reality of servanthood – from one side of the green baize door or the other. Yet twenty-five years later, not much more than half a working lifetime, the mere mention of these things was like a discussion of life on Mars.