You won’t find Charlie Thompson amongst the pages of Debrett’s Peerage, unless you look especially hard. Thanks to ChatGPT, though, inquisitive researchers can stumble on his name (though inconspicuous enough) bracketed with illustrious, even aristocratic families. His ancestry is not his fault, as he frequently tells himself. Just because a great-grandmother was an Earl’s daughter doesn’t make him a toff. Even so, he lives in perpetual anxiety of being found out.
His colleagues at the large media firm, where he’s worked for 20 years, spend more time bashing ‘posh twats’ and ‘nepo babies’ than he’s entirely comfortable with. After one such discussion, Charlie bleated that the only time his father got anywhere near the media was when he read the Racing Post, but the joke fell flat. When a friend of a friend posted some pictures from Tatler, in which he featured with his arm around a marquess, he watched in horror as droves of internet Marxists called for revolution in the comments underneath. Fortunately, Charlie was wearing large pink sunglasses, and the caption spelled his name Thomson.
Charlie, whose London-tinged accent only slips into the cut-glass vowels of his Ludgrove youth when he’s tipsy, is glad that Leo Woodall in One Day popularised the signet ring, since his co-workers believe the one he wears is a fashion statement. He was baffled, though, when listening to Iqbal from accounts calling Woodall’s character ‘posh’. But, as he’s discovered, poshness is a relative term. Even so, he won’t take his ring off. Occasionally, in meetings, he turns the crest out of sight.
More bafflingly to Charlie, Iqbal let slip that he’d attended Dulwich College, mere hours after he’d done an impression of a ‘stuck up’ person; and Charlie knows that Sally in PR was at Putney High, as he saw her reunion pics on Insta. One year, he carefully sounded them out about Ascot, but his pronunciation confused them and he desisted.
The mild evasions are becoming harder as he grows older. During his twenties, his colleagues assumed that when he was visiting famous country houses at the weekend, he was doing so as a day visitor to National Trust properties. When he talks about seeing his parents, he is careful not to mention croquet lawns and church services. He keeps shtum about the times when he and Annie take the children down to the ‘cottage’ that he and his brothers inherited from their grandmother: they let it out on Radio H-P for a small fortune which, split three ways, seems to vanish before it arrives.
Now that his children are at prep school, he finds it ever harder to explain why they finish for the holidays so bloody early. He never shares snaps of Edward, Sophie and Sebastian on their first day back: the boaters are a giveaway. In the lift the other day, a friendly co-worker asked him whether his eldest was going to senior school at 11 and started talking about catchment areas. Charlie mumbled something about ‘lots of options’ and fled. When emails from Eton and Westminster Admissions appear in his inbox, he furtively deletes them. How could he explain about the family trust which pays for the school fees? He and Annie (a fashion designer, and daughter of a Brigadier) couldn’t manage it on their salaries alone – their joint six figure income, boosted as it is by rent, dividends, and parental handouts, barely covers Consuela the cleaner, let alone the mortgage on their North London town house. Charlie trembles at the thought of Andy Burnham’s 0.48 per cent house tax, which will see him having to scramble about for £10k a year. What can he give up for that?
Recently, at after-work drinks, Charlie ventured a mild opinion on trail hunting. Emboldened by a gin and tonic, he’d explained that hunting should never have been banned anyway, as shooting foxes was worse, since the wounded animals slipped away to die in agony. He was met with denunciation. It was almost as bad as the time when he’d suggested that MPs should be paid more, as £90k wasn’t enough to run two houses, and red-faced Colin from IT shouted at him that what nurses did was much more important.
Sometimes, during endless meetings, Charlie dreams about working in finance, like his best friend from Marlborough, Peregrine, who swans about St James’ in a tailored suit, and wouldn’t dream of concealing that he was going skiing with minor Windsors. Increasingly, Charlie avoids the local Pret a Manger and slips away at lunchtime to the leathery comforts of his club. He takes his old school tie out of his inside jacket pocket on the steps and spends a blissful hour in the company of buffers who natter about where their estates march.
What Charlie doesn’t know is that his boss’s PA reads society magazines and knows exactly who he is; he needs the grand clients Charlie pulls in after all. Nevertheless, he continues to cloak himself. Once, in the pub, he even went as far as saying ‘toilet’. At night, with Annie asleep beside him, this still makes him shudder.
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