I Beatrice. The Novel as Blog; an Online Experiment

End Piece

2007-12-31T10:33:00.000Z

Three months have passed since those dreadful hours that followed the ball. It is almost April now, and we have passed, ourselves, through every kind of emotion, beginning with the naked shock and grief of the first hours, ranging through disbelief, and the recurring bouts of self recrimination, in which we have reproached ourselves over and over again with our failure to recognise the signs, and perhaps forestall the awful event - and only now, with the arrival of another year, another Spring, have we reached that state of quiet acceptance in which we feel able to take up our lives again, and carry on.

We were sustained, at first, by the sheer impetus of everything there was to do. There was never an hour in which we could sit down and indulge our grief; since scarcely had we got through the funeral, which was a large and joyous affair, as such occasions often are, than we were required to decide what to do with the house, in the light of Lady Macauley’s own hastily made arrangements with the National Trust. I remember how we returned to the house at nightfall on the afternoon of the funeral, only to find that Lady Macauley’s own presence had already left it, just as she had said it would. We were shocked, yet somehow borne up by this fact, since it enabled us to go about the business of emptying the house of her possessions without too much distress; and then of leaving it, a week later – more or less just locking the door and walking away - to whatever future it might have in the hands of its new owners.

That its new ownership included a residual family interest, in the persons at present of Jack and Alice, but ultimately in those of Will, as legatee - this aspect of it brought us some consolation: we were content to leave it in their hands, and they had picked up the burden of it without complaint. For ourselves, for Bill and Belle and me, there was nothing to do but return to the gatehouse for a bewildered day or two – after which we retreated together to Flory, which had become Belle’s own, and where we celebrated Christmas as best we could.

It is not my intention to dwell further on those bleak, early weeks. We huddled together at Flory a good deal in the beginning, I seem to remember; though we had collected quite a large party around us for the Christmas week, and were sustained by the presence of Pamela and Roland, of Frances and her excellent Tomek – and more surprisingly perhaps, by the resourceful Cousin Hortense, who had come across from her own house nearby, bringing a large and colourful group of assorted struggling artists, and musicians, and aspiring writers with her. We have reason to feel a lasting gratitude to the good Hortense in fact – since it was largely through her loud and unremitting cheerfulness, and that of her curiously assorted little band of artistic followers (her ‘ragbag of hangers-on’, as we seemed to hear Lady Macauley calling them, which always raised a smile among us) - it was largely through Hortense’s efforts, that we were able to get through Christmas and the new year with some degree of festive spirit.

Jack and Alice had been invited to join us at Flory, but had opted, when once the closing of the house had been accomplished, to return to their own beloved castle, where they were joined for the holiday period by Will and Imogen – Alice having ‘come round’ to Imogen, as we have since been reliably informed, to such an extent that an early summer wedding at the castle is already in the planning stage. We have reason to believe that Alice’s having come round to Imogen has not yet extended so far as to her having also drawn Imogen’s father into the fold - though Pamela tells us now that she is sure this will follow; since not even Alice would be so heartless as to exclude the girl’s closest living relative from her wedding ceremony.

It is to be quite a year for weddings, as it turns out. Bill and Belle are to be married in early summer, at the little church on the hill in Tuscany, flying in as many friends and family for the occasion as the villa, and the tiny church will accommodate. And Frances and Tomek will marry in the summer too. Very quietly, they say; though with a reception to be held in the manor house garden, and a considerable Polish contingent expected, the quietness of that occasion seems somewhat in doubt.

To the wedding which has already taken place – to that one conducted in Richmond Register Office, in which David Porteous took Rose Mountjoy unto himself as his bride, only Pamela herself, and Roland, consented to go along as representatives of the old circle. Pamela tells us that it was an affair of somewhat muted joyfulness, and that the newly wed pair were in no apparent hurry to leave the scene of their nuptials – the honeymoon having already been accomplished, as she put it, months ago!

The new Mr and Mrs David Porteous are currently living in Rose’s house, but are negotiating the sales of both their homes, in order to set up married life in something altogether more suited to their needs. They mean to remain in the district however, and they hope that in the fullness of time, all their old friends will begin to drift back to them. I daresay I shall call on them myself at some point. Curiosity itself will drive me, I’m not ashamed to admit it. And in any case, I seem to hear Lady Macauley’s voice, gleefully urging me on. “Belle must stay away of course” I have fancied I hear her saying; “But you can go. Go for me dear – oh, do go! Just to see how they get along!” She expresses my own sentiments precisely – though just for the moment, I have no heart for visiting them, or even for thinking about them very much, but am content to leave them to whatever they can find of married bliss.

We removed ourselves from the immediate scene shortly after Christmas anyway. We left Flory at the end of January to come to Tuscany, where Bill has already thrown himself with tremendous gusto into his new role as custodian of the little wine and olive farm, and where Belle is happily involved with transforming the villa into the kind of homely place in which she and Bill can spend the rest of their days in perfect contentment. Their own married bliss seems assured – and it’s just the oddest thing, that Lady Macauley’s presence, so swift to leave the house in Ham, seems to have established itself very happily here; so that although she has gone, yet we see and hear her everywhere, and find nothing but solace in the fact.

I speak of “we” – as if I were going to be content to make a third person in this happy marriage! And though it’s true that Bill and Belle have offered me a home with them there, and at Flory – and have even put a little Tuscan gate lodge, and a cottage entirely at my disposal - I have no intention of intruding upon them more often, or longer, than for the duration of a little holiday now and then. I have returned to the gatehouse, and here I mean to stay. And if I tell you that the present occupant of Bill’s old quarters is my own recovered Cesare; that Cesare is taking the heartiest possible pleasure in ‘learning how to be an Englishman’, and that he and I will probably be married later in the summer too.... you will understand perhaps that he has been there in the background for me all along, and that the reason for my reticence is that this was never really my own story I was telling, at all.

Just in Passing....

2007-12-17T09:31:00.000Z

If any of you have been watching the BBC's recent dramatisation of "Cranford" it might be of some little interest to you to know that I have been watching it too. With great delight - not least because it has suggested that there is still a fondness for that sort of thing, which is also, to a certain modest extent, my sort of thing...

That wasn't actually what I wanted to tell you though. What I actually wanted to tell you was that in watching Francesca Annis's splendid portrayal of Lady Ludlow, it began to seem to me that here was the face and manner I had always somehow had in mind for my own Lady Macauley!

So, if it would please you to be able to envisage her at all, that is what I believe she would have looked like, and that her demeanour......

I shall be back later to end the story on a happier note. In the meantime, I can tell you that they have buried the poor old lady in the cold ground of the little churchyard where Jack has lain these almost thirty years - and are now gone down to Flory, where they mean to try to celebrate their first Christmas without her. In the spring, they will go to Tuscany.....

When the music stopped

2007-12-13T09:46:00.000Z

What I have to tell you now must be told quickly, for I have not words or emotions left to tell it any other way. The ball has ended and everyone has gone home; and we are huddled here together in the house in the icy chill of a December dawn - Bill and Belle and I; Jack and Alice and Will. We have neither slept nor eaten, and we have nothing whatever to say to one another at this moment, so recent and so violent has been the shock which encompassed us in the night. For what has happened is that the ball has been over these seven hours – and Lady Macauley herself has lain lifeless on her bed for four of them.

Yes, she has died; and here, to the utmost of my ability to tell it to you, is how it happened. We had come back so happily across the garden, all of us in the highest possible spirits, and looking forward to a quiet hour discussing the evening’s events, before the others joined us for a final brandy. We had even joked a little, over the idea that Mrs Wilmot might perhaps have been persuaded to drag herself away from the scene of her daughter’s triumphs, and join us in that final drink...

“She will have to come back at some point I daresay” Lady Macauley had herself said with much amusement. “Since how on earth else is she to be got home, if not in the car with Bill?”

We had been content to leave that matter hanging temporarily unresolved however; and in any case, as Belle had pointed out, they could always in the last resort spend what remained of the night here, in the bedrooms they had occupied before. On we went then, just about as pleased with everything as we could be. And though it’s true Lady Macauley did stumble momentarily, on the steps leading up to the south terrace door, she was quick to recover herself, and neither she, nor we thought anything more about it.

That we ought to have done so; that we ought to have seen it as a sign of what was to come is now all too terribly clear. If we had called the ambulance then perhaps, we might have fore-stalled the major attack which was to occur little more than an hour later. We have reproached ourselves with that, over and over again. But after all, how could we have guessed, when she had seemed to be in such wonderful spirits, and in the very best of health? Belle had made coffee, and we were drinking it together in Lady Macauley’s favourite little panelled parlour when, on getting up to help herself to more milk, she stumbled again, this time uttering a little cry, and falling seemingly lifeless in a heap of crumpled silvery drapery on the floor. Nobody moved at first; each of us was frozen into immobility for a moment. But then Bill cried to Belle to call an ambulance at once, and himself gathered Lady Macauley in his arms and carried her to the nearest sofa, where he with infinite carefulness laid her down.

The ambulance was slow in coming, and while we waited for it Lady Macauley rallied a little, seeming to be regaining consciouness, and finally opening her eyes. She smiled at us once, a beautiful, lingering smile, in which she seemed to embrace us all. “You have all made me so very happy” she said. After which she relapsed again, and was still for what can only have been five minutes, though it felt to us like several hours. It was in a moment of sudden stillness a little later - we only realized afterwards that it was the moment at which the music from the ball had finally stopped – that she opened her eyes again, and sitting bolt upright all at once, seemed staring into the darkness near the door. After which she put out both her hands, and cried in a loud voice “Is that you Jack....?”

We had heard her ask that question before – but this time there was no answer to it; and what she was looking at in the darkness near the door was something that none of us could see. She had gone in that moment, though we didn’t grasp the fact at first. We tried every desperate way we could to revive her, but nothing could do so. And by the time the ambulance arrived, she had gone far beyond the help of human hands.

It is bright morning now. There will be sunshine later – but what is sunshine to us now, when Lady Macauley has gone? She lies at present perfectly serene, upon the bed she shared with Jack for all those many years. Bill himself carried her up there; we knew it was where she would want to be, and we arranged her as tenderly as we could. And now we sit in silence round her bed; each of us trying to grasp the impossible, and asking ourselves hopelessly now and then, just how it is we are going to be able to carry on our lives without her?.

For those of you who have perhaps not caught up with this comment I left on the previous post, here are my closing remarks:
And now I am about to post the very bleak penultimate piece, and I hope that some of you at least will be able to forgive me.

It was always going to have to end this way - and I tried every way I could to prepare you for it.

But perhaps after all I failed, and you will be as shocked and saddened as I have been these last several days, as I tried to find the courage to do it at last.

I shall return one more time (in 'real time': perhaps before Christmas, perhaps just after) - and try to restore some little bit of happiness to the scene.

In the meantime, I can only say a heartfelt thank to you all, for supporting me so faithfully and so well. I could never have come all this way without you.

And, if it's not in the very worst possible taste at such a moment, I wish a very Merry Christmas to you all!

It has only been a story after all...

At the ball; part two

2007-12-12T14:14:00.000Z

What happened next was that the lull in the dancing continued, to allow us to complete our progress across the hall to the table that had been reserved for us; and that our way took us past Rose, and David Porteous, who had indeed decided to brazen it out in public, and who had managed to get up some kind of a little party of their own, in an effort no doubt, to deflect attention from the fact that they were no longer of that one which contained Lady Macauley. That this was a situation entirely unprecedented for Rose, and that she had been made deeply uncomfortable by it, was evidenced by her unusually high colour, and the fact that there was a little glitter of something like defiance in her eyes, as she did her best to glance nonchalantly at us as we passed.

Lady Macauley had paused a moment beside their table, and seemed on the point of saying something; but had evidently decided against it, and moved on, having vouchsafed nothing more by way of recognition than the smallest, coldest little inclination of her head. Belle did stop however; Belle looked directly at Rose, and her voice it was that rang out with perfect clarity in a moment of silence to say, in what seemed to me an almost perfect replication of what her mother’s tone might have been, “How you must have hated us all these years – to have felt it necessary to go to such lengths to deceive us!”

She said no more than that, and she waited for no reply. But it seemed as if everyone in the room must have heard her – and though it may have been my imagination, I thought I saw Rose flinch, and David Porteous cast a look of sharp annoyance, almost of dislike, in her direction, at what was perhaps, for him, the most audible, and calculated public snub to which he had ever been subjected. Lady Macauley turned to give Belle a smile of approval; she was surprised, but evidently thought that on the whole it had been well said. Mrs Wilmot had heard it too, and uttered a little gasp, more of admiration than alarm. She was in strange company, it seemed to say; but she was sailing high, oh high indeed, and she wouldn’t have missed a minute of it! Bill and I had meantime exchanged the kind of quick glance which said that those two, Rose Mountjoy and David Porteous, had made their bed, and were probably going to have to lie in it together for the rest of their days – but that the pleasure of it was unlikely to be entirely unalloyed, for either of them.

It hardly seemed necessary to think much more about either of those two, after that. Even though their group contained Imogen of course; and Imogen was looking svelte and stunning in a silver gown that Mrs Wilmot let it be known Rose had helped her choose. Imogen was the centre of much attention among the younger contingent whom Will himself had invited along; she laughed, and danced, and shone; she was determined to carry everything before her - and Will Macauley’s despairing glance was constantly being dragged in her direction, in spite of all his grandmother’s strictures.

Will himself danced dutifully with this one and that. With Angelica, uncomfortably, at first; until she too was discovered by the younger group, and his attentions were no longer required; and after that with his grandmother, his aunt, his mother – and with me. Poor Will’s personal penance involved his dancing even with Mrs Wilmot; upon whom however, the music, and the occasion - her daughter’s sudden success among the elegantly turned-out young men, and several glasses of good champagne - had together wrought such an effect that she was evidently prepared to forgive him everything. Lady Macauley’s little strategy was working perfectly. Mrs Wilmot, whom everybody was suddenly, and with some degree of awkwardness, calling Avril – Mrs Wilmot was quite simply having the time of her life. She had been elevated all at once to the ranks of the grand and glorious; she was being danced-with by Bill, and Jack Macauley, and Tomek; she consented even to stand up with Roland Baines, who did his modest best by her - and every last shred of her resistance had fallen away.

We were all having a splendid time of it in fact; Mrs Wilmot was not the only one to be carried away. Ours was the largest, merriest party of all, and we quite gave ourselves up to the joyousness of the occasion. Pamela fairly swooped about the floor in the majesty of her black velvet; somehow carrying Roland with her, in her almost intoxicating sense of their being on this occasion, distinguished guests. Jack and Alice were obviously enjoying themselves heartily too – Alice, relaxed and happy, came as near to being charmingly convivial as I think it could have been possible for her, in her mother-in-law’s company, to do. And Bill and Belle, Frances and Tomek, none of whom had yet received the blessing of a marriage ceremony, yet danced as honeymooning lovers might; with eyes, and ears, and rapt attention, entirely for each other. Lady Macauley herself was in sparkling form; and though after the first few dances – with her son, her grandson, and then with Bill – she pleaded the weariness of age, and said she would happily sit out the rest; still, her pleasure in the occasion remained undimmed, and she vowed to remain until midnight at least.

I too was enjoying myself without reserve, and somehow managing to find a partner for almost every dance. And if there was a low point in the evening for me, it came at supper time when, in a moment at which our table was temporarily deserted, even by Lady Macauley, who had been assisted away to the table in the next room, I found myself being invited to dance by David Porteous. He had come up to me quietly from behind, and he gave what almost amounted to a low bow before me as, solemnly, though in no kind of spirit of compunction, he asked if in spite of everything I would do him the honour of consenting to dance with him.

I agreed in spite of myself. To have done otherwise would have seemed somehow petty, and out of the spirit of the occasion. I was not comfortable about it though: I had never before been in such close proximity to him, and I felt the impact of his presence with all the old unease. Gabble foolishly in his presence again however, I would not; and so we danced in silence, until at last he found the words to express what was obviously weighing heavy on his mind.

“We have reached a most unfortunate impasse”he said. “I fear that relations between ourselves and Lady Macauley have irretrievably broken down – though I’m not without hope that time will somehow find a way of enabling us to be friends again. I have been judged severely for breaking with Frances perhaps – though I think everyone would have to agree that her obvious new happiness with her builder, must be seen as ample justification for that. I'm delighted for her of course, as who would not be? There is however one important matter which remains unresolved - and that is the attachment which has grown up lately between my own Imogen, and Will Macauley. I hope Lady Macauley will find it in her heart to overlook differences, at least in their case. She seemed fond of Imogen at one time - I hope she will not hold her father’s perceived indiscretions against her ... Though I rather fear that even if she does so, true love will find its way, and those two will be together in spite of everything...”

Had he put it almost any other way, I might have felt obliged to offer him a word or two of comfort. But since he seemed both to have put his question, and answered it too – and because his inflexion over the word ‘builder’ had been so objectionable to me - I felt no such obligation. I merely replied that I could not answer for Lady Macauley, and nor could I promise to put his case before her – since to have done so would have been to spoil for her what had been the happiest possible evening.

The music stopped at that moment, and the dance was ended. He conducted me back to my seat, and relinquished me, with marked stiffness; and I had the small but considerable satisfaction of seeing him return to his own table, and to Rose, thoroughly displeased and unsatisfied. He had cast a blight over my evening nonetheless, and I was not sorry when, half an hour later, Lady Macauley admitted fatigue at last, and our little party broke up. Will decided to come back to the house with us; he had evidently had enough of watching Imogen go from triumph to triumph - and even Angelica had no need of him any longer. Jack and Alice, and all the others, elected to stay on a while; promising to return in time to drink a last glass of brandy with us, before we retired for the night. Mrs Wilmot thought she would stay right on till the end however, if we didn’t mind - since her darling girl was having such an absolutely splendid time!

At the ball; part one

2007-12-10T09:54:00.000Z

In the little green ante-room to which Lady Macauley led Bill and Belle and me at the end of the dinner sat Will Macauley all alone; looking rather charmingly dishevelled in his young man’s version of the dinner jacket and black tie - but also looking distinctly woeful.

“I can see from your face that you have done what you had to do” his grandmother observed – adding, for our benefit, that Will had been required to go and explain himself to the Wilmots, mother and daughter, and that from the look of him, he had not been made any happier by the experience. “But have you convinced them of your change of heart?” she demanded to know next. “And more to the point, have you managed to bring them back here with you?”

Will said that he had; they were waiting downstairs in the library. “But they’re not a bit happy about it. They’re about as unhappy as they can be, in fact. Angelica cried awfully - and her mother was very fierce. She said the whole thing has been a shame and a sham – especially now they know that Mrs Mountjoy has been working against them too! Mrs W. wanted to know how much I had known about all that. Had I been deceiving them too - and what did I think could possibly be achieved by bringing them back here to face the enemy all over again?”

But Lady Macauley was equal to the unhappiness of the Wilmots. She was equal to almost anything in her present exhilarated state. She thought it a pity they had lumped her, too, into the category of the enemy; but that it was not to be wondered at perhaps, and that she would in any case go downstairs herself, in just a moment, to fetch them. It might take her another ten minutes or so to bring them round - but she thought she knew how it was to be done; and if we would only wait there for her another short while all would be well, and we should be able to make our combined entrance to the ball in triumph – and in the face of Rose’s more or less complete mortification.

“Rose will think there is to be an engagement announcement after all!” she almost gleefully cried. “It will do me no end of good to see her face. And that of her secret lover too of course. Though I can’t say it doesn’t sadden me a little, to have to give him up to her – I believe we might have made something of him, had he only stayed with us. Still, it will be amusing to see if they try to keep up their little secret – or whether they’ll have decided to brazen it out in the open at last.”

She seemed to think that on the whole they were likely to brazen it out. What other option was there for them after all, now that the whole thing had been exposed? She sent Will down to the library ahead of her to pave the way with the Wilmots, and when he was safely out of earshot, took another moment to regret with us the fact that her victory over Rose would after all be only partial...

“We are backing the same girl of course, which is a pity. We each mean Imogen to succeed - for very different reasons of course, and I could have wished it might have been almost any other way. But there it is, she’s the right girl in spite of everything. Will himself is convinced of it: he’s almost stupefied with love of her at present, unfortunate boy - and even Alice will be brought to accept her in the end. Will has promised to forswear her company for the duration of the ball however. He is neither to dance, nor talk with, nor even look at her – the Wilmots are to be spared that final ignominy at least. And Rose will fear that in spite of all her mystifications, her most cherished plot has failed!”

It took Lady Macauley rather longer than the promised ten minutes to persuade the Wilmots; but they emerged at last, the mother evidently only partially placated, the daughter somewhat red-eyed still, and avoiding Will with what might in any other girl have been called a flounce, but was with her the merest little flutter of residual indignation. We made a rather awkward party, crossing the lamplit garden in virtual silence – though Bill did his best with Mrs Wilmot, whom he had personally taken under his wing, and whose defensive stance seemed to be crumbling a little, with every step they took.

Our entry to the ballroom coincided with the last moments of a lively Scottish reel, and we were all caught up at once by the brightness of the lights, the almost breathless thrill in the air - and the way in which the ranks of dancers fell away to make a path for us, as we crossed to our table at the far end of the room. Poor Mrs Wilmot can never before have found herself in such a situation. To be a member of what must have seemed to her the presiding, the regal party: to be made way for, and deferred to – and find that all the glittering personages present had turned their heads to stare, as if she were suddenly being perceived as the elect, the chosen companion of Lady Macauley! She was almost rigid with the honour, the sheer publicity it, and required the steadying hand of Bill, just to hold her up.

I turned to glance at her, and believe I caught the moment when the last of her defences fell away. I had seen this sort of thing happen before of course – but never perhaps so swiftly, or to such startling effect. Mrs Wilmot had meant to stand her ground to the end. She had been wronged - oh grievously; and she had intended that everyone there should know it. But she was no match for the smoothness of an operation of this kind: she had been rendered harmless from the moment when, swept into the room in Lady Macauley’s wake, she had suddenly found herself at the centre of a rapt attention. She had become Lady Macauley’s entirely willing votary – and everything that happened afterwards was simply to consolidate, and indeed intensify that effect....

It has not been my intention to prolong matters in this way. I am almost ashamed of myself indeed. But this is the way it has seemed to happen - and I promise a denouement as quickly as possible, in the entirely unpremeditated part two.

Before the ball we dined in state

2007-12-03T11:27:00.000Z

By six o’clock that evening the Macauley house was alive with lights, and with the low excited murmur of the twenty invited guests who were to attend the formal dinner in the gallery that was to precede the ball. I had dressed early, so as to be on hand with Belle, to assist Lady Macauley in her own preparations; and I have to admit that I did not feel especially fine, or festive. My gown was perfunctory at best: something which, unable on this occasion to face the horrors of the dress-shop, I had resurrected from the depths of an old trunk in the attic, and had expensively cleaned. It had a stately, if rather antique look; and I had told myself it would do. Belle though – Belle was glorious in midnight blue satin, cut low to carry off the family sapphires and diamonds, and falling into an elegant little train at the back. Belle had drawn the line at a tiara, but wore a row of matching sapphires, woven into the intricate upsweep of her hair; and if my own gasp of admiration was not enough – or her mother’s warmly approving embrace – she had Bill’s look of purest pride and adoration, to tell her that tonight she was beautiful, as she had perhaps never been before.

Alice was be-jewelled too; overwhelmingly so, I thought. She seemed to me almost weighed-down by priceless gems: she was brooched, and braceleted, and necklaced, and tiara-ed, within an inch of her life. Though in her case the jewels were diamonds alone, to offset the elaborate dress of ivory lace that, exposing a quite breath-taking expanse of almost equally ivory bosom, she so magnificently wore. Pamela and I exchanged wry glances over the diamonds: we are in company here to which we can’t personally aspire, we mutely said – but we shall hold our heads up nonetheless, just as bravely as we can.

Pamela was on this occasion faultlessly attired in smooth black velvet, that somehow managed to glide over her ample curves without accentuating them. She owned few jewels, so hadn’t tried: nor was her admirably coiffed head adorned by anything more theatrical than a nodding flower or two. She had learnt much from her association with the Macauleys, I saw that now – and even Roland had acquired a certain stature, from his position as Lady Macauley's honorary counsellor, and his exemplary black tie. Frances was there; and Frances too wore family jewels, and a shining new gown. But Frances’s chief adornment was her broadly beaming Tomek, who with his height and his bulk, and his ever so slightly exaggerated Polish gallantry, came near to eclipsing every other man there. Save of course, in my eyes at least - and still more in those of Belle – for our own unsurpassable Bill.

Bill’s role it was to appear last, with Lady Macauley on his arm – though a concession had been made to family on this occasion, and Jack Macauley, splendid too in his black tie, had been allowed to take her other arm. Lady Macauley’s entrance had been timed to occur only when everyone else was seated. She wore finest silvery aquamarine - her naiad look, as Jack had used to call it. It was the colour she had worn when he first saw her, and she shimmered tonight, almost ethereally. She was very beautiful, and her face had lost every sign of the strain it had worn earlier in the day. She had accomplished everything she needed to accomplish, it seemed to say; and she paused, queenlike, a moment, at the top of the gallery, before making her slow progress along the ranks of smiling, nodding guests, to take her seat between Bill and Jack, at the farthest end of the glittering table.

We dined merrily, and long. Course after course appeared, and though the hour of the ball approached, and we began to hear sounds of instruments being tuned in the Orangery, nobody was in any hurry to depart the table, and begin the ball. It occurred to me that Lady Macauley herself was waiting for something, though I had not as yet discovered what it was. Cars had been coming and going in the forecourt in the last half hour; we had seen their lights, and heard their engines slowly silencing as we dined. People were already arriving for the ball, it was clear; but since lady Macauley herself seemed in no hurry to end the dinner, we took our cue from her and laughed, and ate and drank, and chatted on.

Not until eight o’clock, and at a sign from Bill, who seemed to have received a message on his mobile phone, did Lady Macauley rise from the table, and make a short announcement to the effect that dinner must now end, and would people please be kind enough to make their way, first to the cloakrooms that had been provided for them, and then across the lighted garden to the Orangery, where in fifteen minutes' time, the ball would begin. She did not herself go immediately to the Orangery however, but to a small room opening out of the gallery, where she was to rest a while. Bill and Belle and I were to accompany her there – she had just one last essential thing to do, she said.

Jack and Alice on the other hand, who had earlier received their starters’ orders, were to hurry across to the Orangery in advance of all the others, and to stand in the receiving line of guests, in Lady Macauley’s stead. The exodus from the gallery was not hurried. People had dined well, and were in mellow mood. The cloakrooms provided were luxurious, moreover; they would take their time, and saunter pleasantly across to the Orangery, to join all those others, who had not been dinner guests.

Only Alice had a rather stiff look for her mother-in-law as, evidently feeling herself unduly ordered about – and perhaps excluded from something important that was to happen in the ante-room in her absence - she took Jack’s arm, and more or less stalked across the garden to the ball...

Author's Note

2007-11-29T11:20:00.000Z

I can only offer my profound apology to readers, for subjecting them to yet another ‘eve of the ball’ instalment! I had thought I could do it in one – but there’s just too much to ‘get in’. I hadn’t thought it properly through, and there’s the truth of it. It being one of the penalties of the blog-method of telling a story, that things don’t always happen as quickly, or in the kind of orderly sequence that one would wish.

And for those readers for whom the story of Jack Macauley’s Milly may not be entirely clear, I can only suggest that the latter part of the instalment dated 05/27- 06/03, “A Little Tale of Long Ago” may assist in shedding the necessary light

The day of the ball

2007-11-29T10:53:00.000Z

The day of the ball began before dawn, with Belle coming into my room with stricken face at four o’clock (I having spent that night at the Macauley house), to tell me that her mother had ‘had some kind of turn’: had cried out her husband’s name in her sleep; had then wakened, insisted upon dressing fully - and was at present emptying all the drawers in her bedroom in frantic search of an old photograph that she said Jack had used to carry his wallet.

“She’s quite beside herself!” Belle urgently whispered, as I struggled to try to remember where I was, and what was happening. “She knows it’s somewhere; she put it somewhere very carefully herself, years ago – and now she must find it, or the ball can’t go ahead, the Orangery will have to be dismantled, and everything will be ruined!”

It took me several moments, but I was finally able to bring to mind that old story: the one about the young Jack Macauley, and the girl called Milly, whom he had worshipped from afar in the days when he was still an awkward grocer’s boy, ashamed of his clumsy boots. I struggled to recall the detail of it; how Jack Macauley had carried an old newspaper photograph of Milly in his wallet for years afterwards; and how Theodora, as his young bride, had stumbled on it, never admitting the fact to him, but remaining haunted by it, at intervals, ever since. I had assumed it must have gone away, years ago; yet here was Belle now, in deep distress, bringing it sharply back into the present, and leaving me wondering what on earth there was that I could usefully say.

“And does it still exist, do you think...?” was the best I could manage, in my still only half-awake state. But “Oh good heavens, no!” Belle exclaimed in reply. “Daddy himself destroyed it years ago. He had gone looking for Milly you see, years afterwards. He had happened to be on business in the area, and he looked her up. Not because he still had feelings for her, but just because he needed to lay that particular ghost. It was idiocy on the part of a grown man, he said, to carry about with him the image of a girl he had once supposed he loved! But he found her grown fat and frumpy anyway! A silly, garrulous woman; not a trace left of that disdainful girl who had stalked his dreams! So that there was no longer the smallest need to keep her picture, and he tore it up. I remember how he laughed at his own foolishness, and said that there was no need to trouble Mummy about it.”

“But did you never tell her this yourself?” was my next, rather inadequate offering. To which Belle replied that no, she never had: supposing, mistakenly as it now turned out, that it would be better if her mother didn’t know that Jack had gone off in search of his long- lost Milly.

“Well, I think you probably ought to tell her now” I suggested. “How else, after all, can you possibly put her mind at rest?”

Bill was up now; had come stumbling into my room to know what the rumpus was; and being apprised of the state of things, agreed with my suggestion; so that together we went to Lady Macauley, and calming her as best we could, put the whole story before her. She listened in silence, unable at first to believe we weren’t making the whole thing up. We were trying to humour a silly old woman, she cried: it was quite the cruellest form of deception! But then she suddenly seemed to think that, yes, that would be just the way it would have been likely to happen! Jack would have felt himself bound to act - and in acting, would have found the truth. The effect was near miraculous. Her face, which had been contorted with grief the moment before, relaxed suddenly; she uttered the longest sigh, and said simply “Oh, thank God then - it was me he loved after all!”

We said all the things that people do say, in such situations. We said that of course he had loved her – only her. How could he not have loved her, when she was everything that Milly had been, and a thousand better things as well!

“He adored you Mummy, as you well know” Belle ended by assuring her. “No woman was ever adored as you were – he thought you just the most beautiful, most perfect woman in the world. And I at least know for sure that he never gave Milly another thought, from that day on.”

It was enough. We could start the day of the ball now; and we started it with a cheerful breakfast of coffee and toast, taken there together in Lady Macauley’s room, while a cold grey dawn slipped in through the slats of the window blinds. We three remained troubled though, by Lady Macauley’s earlier collapse; and Bill at least, was all for calling a doctor – just to make perfectly sure that all was well. But Lady Macauley insisted that no such thing was necessary; she would not hear of it, was perfectly well and calm - and we should see what she was able to accomplish during the course of this day, before the ball began.

What she accomplished was indeed remarkable. She had another long list of people with whom she wished to talk; beginning with Will, alone, at nine o’clock, and progressing, at intervals during the morning, with Jack and Alice, with the Baineses, with Imogen – and even with Frances and Tomek, whom she summoned last; wishing, she said, to thank them for the part they had played in bringing matters to a head, and to entreat them to come to the ball. She spent an hour with Frances and Tomek, in fact – and Frances herself emerged at the end of it quite flushed with happiness, at the hand of friendship that had been extended to her at last..

Lady Macauley would have liked too, to talk with Mrs Wilmot and her daughter. She had become reconciled to them at last, she said. Oh, not that she saw the girl as a contender for Will’s hand – never that! But simply that she saw their part in all this as suddenly rather heroic.

“She stood her ground against all the odds, poor woman!” she observed, of the formerly impossible Mrs Avril Wilmot. “It can’t have been easy for her, received with hostility as she was, on all sides. She must know by now besides, that she too has been the dupe of Rose’s nasty little plot. I want to let her know that I understand that – and that I respect her courage, at least... But perhaps after all it will do better to wait for the ball – when I shall be able to single her out, choose her over Rose, you know, and let her down as gently as I can. Will must speak to her of course - I have told him that. He has created this mess and now he must extricate himself from it. Together, we shall enable that unfortunate woman and her daughter to make their exit with dignity intact - and Rose shall see that every plan of hers has gone hideously awry!”

We wished her to rest then, and she said she would. Just as soon as she had made her last inspection of the Orangery, and seen for herself that everything was just as perfect as it could be for the events that were to unfold. She had earlier dispensed with the idea of a separate venue for youthful dancing. No marquee had after all been erected - the young must make shift with the old, she had decided: there were not so many of them after all - she just hoped that some at least of them, would have learnt how to waltz! We went then in solemn procession to the Orangery, where darkness had wrought a magical effect. Everything was beautifully in its place: the instruments for the orchestra stood covered on a dais at the top of the larger of the two adjoining rooms; the new floor sparkled, with the thousand reflected lights - and all the little gilded chairs and tables, the flowers, the scented stillness of the air itself, seemed poised and waiting, for the night’s events to begin...

Eve of the Ball

2007-11-23T14:14:00.000Z

We returned from Flory yesterday, to find everything at the Macauley house in a state of chaos. Well, not quite everything perhaps: Tomek and his team have wrought wonders in the Orangery, where a thousand coloured lights bounce down upon the newly laid floor, and the caterers and florists come and go already, unloading gilded chairs and tables, and filling the air with the headiness of rose, and orange blossom, and jasmine. No, the chaos is largely in my own head, I think – though a good deal, too, in the steady stream of solemnly suited men who have been coming and going all day to consult with Lady Macauley; and in the fact that Roland Baines, who has remained closeted with them almost constantly, is looking even more than usually portentous. Something is very definitely ‘in the air’; and Pamela, who alone among us all must have an inkling of what it is - Pamela is keeping her own counsel with surprising rectitude.

Jack and Alice had remained at Flory until this evening, which made things a little easier for us here; since young Will seems to have no other occupation at present than to drift rather unhappily about the house in the wake of Imogen Porteous - who herself, though still busy with her restoration work, and plying her needle with what seems to be a remarkably steady hand, has nonetheless the look about her of a girl who nurses a lovely secret, which she is resolved for the moment to keep strictly to herself.

I had been personally requested by Alice before we left, to ‘tackle Will’. “Find out what he’s been up to if you can, and report back’ was her brief to me; and though it’s perfectly clear that what he’s been ‘up to’, has been to fall headlong in love with Imogen, and almost certainly to have pledged that emotion with more than just a snatched embrace or two, in corners of the house ... though it’s clear as day that those two have arrived at an understanding with one another, yet off Will went at two o’clock this afternoon just the same; to keep an assignation with Angelica that ‘for the life of him’, as he put it to me with woeful countenance, he didn’t see how he could possibly break. “She has been buying a dress for the ball and all that kind of thing” he explained. “And I’m sure her mother has too. They’ve gone to no end of trouble and expense - I’d have to be the very worst sort of brute to desert them now.”

It is my fate of course as narrator of these events, to be relating them always in retrospect. I have often felt the disadvantage of this – though never quite so acutely as I do today, when things have moved at such speed, and so unpredictably, that I haven’t yet managed to come properly to grips with any of them. It’s late evening now, and I am back in the gatehouse, alone with my disordered thoughts. I have not yet had heart or opportunity to phone Alice with any kind of report of Will. What could I have told her indeed, save that he has apparently fallen hopelessly in love with one girl, only to feel himself still inextricably linked with another? That even loving Imogen as he does, he still seems likely to be dragooned into announcing his engagement to Angelica, tomorrow at the ball – could I have told his mother that? No, decidedly I could not. Nor have I - events having since then taken such a turn in other directions anyway, as to put possible engagement announcements entirely out of my head.

What happened in fact, was that at four o’clock this afternoon, Lady Macauley summoned the three of us, Belle and Bill and me, to her rooms; where, having seen off the last of the solemnly suited men, and in presence only of a still more solemnly visaged Roland Baines, she announced to us that she was in a position at last to reveal what she had been doing all day; to explain, in short, the arrangements she had just now put in place for securing the house against what she called ‘possible predators in the future’.

“I have been in consultation all this day” she told us – and it may have been my imagination, but it seemed to me she suppressed a tear with difficulty as she spoke; ”with representatives from the National Trust. I should perhaps have consulted first with you, who are nearest and dearest to me, but it seemed better this way.... You will understand why I have felt it necessary to act, and will have no objection, I’m sure – when you hear that what I have done this afternoon is simply to have signed the papers which will put in motion the procedure by which the house and all its contents will pass – well, to the Nation you know, on my death. Please try not to be shocked – it is something that has been in my mind for many years. It has always seemed to me that the house was Jack’s, and mine therefore, only because of him - and that when we are both gone, so will the spirit of the place have departed too; and it will be better that someone else should have the responsibilty of deciding its future....”

To say that we were stunned by this announcement, is not to come even near to what we actually experienced at that moment. Belle I think, was stricken with twenty painful emotions all at once – and Bill was silent too, for simple want of knowing what to say. Yet scarcely had we even tried to absorb its import - and then listened for another five minutes to Roland, who was deputed to explain to us the corollary facts, which seemed to have to do with accompanying bequests to the Trust for future upkeep, and the provision of a residual family interest, which would enable ‘Jack Macauley or his legatee’ (whom we understood to be Will), to continue to inhabit a part of the house... Hardly had we time to take in any of this, before Lady Macauley’s mood took a sudden swing in another direction; and she told us, with tears falling freely this time, that though the hour was late, and darkness had already fallen, she would like, if we would be so kind as to assist her, to visit her husband’s grave, for the purpose of explaining to him why she had acted in the way she had just done.

It was a strange, sad, silent and bewildered group, who made the short car journey to the cold little nearby churchyard, where Jack Macauley had lain buried for more than twenty five years. Lady Macauley had visited his grave before of course; had come there regularly every month in fact – but never before so impulsively, or in such strange conditions as these. We three stood back in darkness, holding a torch for her while she made her murmured explanation over the grave of her beloved Jack. She took full ten minutes over it; and looked close to death herself, when finally she had said all she wished, and we were able to lead her, weeping and shivering, back to the waiting car. Strangely too, her mood on the way home suddenly lightened; she became almost buoyant again, and was able to tell us, smiling now, that she was quite sure Jack would have approved of what she had done.

“He’ll have seen the need” she said. “He always saw the need of things, when once I’d been able to explain them to him. He was very fond of Rose – but he wouldn’t have liked her for what she is trying to do now.”

We passed a rather pleasant evening after that. Lady Macauley was in better spirits than we have seen her for many days; we enjoyed a rather splendid meal, which she gaily described as an eve-of-the ball event. And even Alice, who had returned with Jack from Flory while we were in the churchyard, and had been told nothing yet about the day’s events - even Alice was unable to spoil the mood, with her constantly reiterated anxieties over Will.

I returned home an hour ago; it is almost midnight now, and the day of the ball will shortly dawn. I have tried and tried to foresee what will happen there – whether Will Macauley will end the night with this girl or that, or neither; and what Rose will do, and if there will be an ugly scene....?

But just for the moment I give it up. I leave it in the lap of the gods, as the saying goes, and shall go gladly to my rest.

She SHALL come to the ball

2007-11-20T11:55:00.000Z

Lady Macauley thinks that all things considered, we will probably do best to let Rose come to the ball believing her secret is still safe.

“She has done her worst” she remarked yesterday, sitting in her private room upstairs with Bill and Belle and me; Frances having already called another cab, and fled the scene; and Jack and Alice being relegated on this occasion to taking tea alone, downstairs in the drawing room. “And I agree her worst is very bad..... though if it ends in her having assisted me in bringing Will and Imogen together, well, all cannot be said to have been entirely lost.”

She had seemed to take the news of Rose’s double-dealing rather well; had scarcely gulped or blinked indeed - though there had been a moment, just one, and just after the full facts had been put before her, when she had covered her face with her hands, and looked as if she might be going to be crushed by it. Bill had warned us to be on our guard against just such a reaction. “We must never forget how old she is” he had reminded Belle and me, while we waited for Lady Macauley herself to come and join us. “I agree it’s not always easy to see her that way, given her tremendous fighting spirit. But that’s what she is nonetheless – an old lady approaching ninety. And we should be wary of delivering the blow that fells her.”

Bill had earlier exploded with rage himself. Not on his own account, as he furiously pointed out to Frances and me, when we had given him our account of how matters stood. Not even, particularly, on that of Lady Macauley, who might be disturbed, and even a little hurt by it all, but who had after all not been personally attacked, and who would find her relief in swift retaliation anyway. No, his rage was all for Belle, who would see in this an act of treachery against a friendship she had believed was based on long affection and mutual trust. I have seldom seen him so angry – and Frances, who never has, was actually rather alarmed by what she seemed to have set in motion.

We were glad though, that we had taken the precaution of catching him alone first; since we were able, by that means, not only to calm his rage, and prevent his immediately rushing home to strike a blow at Rose and her ‘damnable parson’ – but also to suggest to him that there were some aspects of the story that would be better withheld from Belle. He was all in agreement with that - there was no earthly reason why she should be burdened with every sorry detail! He would be *******d for example (my apologies; but Bill’s expletives, which tend to be of the old-fashioned sort, have nonetheless no proper place on these pages, and so you must conjure them for yourself) .... Bill would be damned anyway – put it no more violently than that - if he’d let Belle know of the part that had been designed for her to play in this sordid affair! There was evidence enough to heap against the duplicitous pair, God knew, without recourse to anything as hideously wounding as that.

And so it was, that with Frances gone home again, and the story wholly in our own hands, Bill and I were able to present a reasonably calm concerted front when relaying it, first to Belle, and then to Lady Macauley, half an hour later. Belle was indeed hurt and bewildered, even by the censored version, and had found at first nothing to say - save for the rather wan observation that “it would be a pity if the daughter had to suffer for the father’s sins – especially since Imogen is so very much Mummy’s favourite contender too”. Her mother however, whose first reaction had suggested possible collapse, was quick to rally, and come up with what appeared to be her considered response.

“She is a great deal more devious than I ever suspected” she finally, somewhat meditatively said. “And it’s true I suspected her of many things. I always knew she was self-seeking of course; always playing some little game that reflected her own best interests most of all. But I had supposed, at least, that she was playing them one at a time – so it comes as quite a shock to know she was playing so many, all at once! I probably even knew that she secretly detested me. There was that frigid little smile she always had, at moments of severest personal trial – I always understood, I think, that if she hadn’t been smiling at me so assiduously, she’d have been getting her knife out, ready to plunge it in my back. That, I have always been able to live with – so long as she continued to amuse, and make herself useful to me. I am not such a good woman myself – I believe I am in many respects a very bad one - as to have right to the moral high ground where others are concerned. But that she should have hated Belle too – or should at least have thought so little of their long friendship as to be prepared to sacrifice it at the altar of her own avarice – well, that is not to be forgiven; and I for one am not prepared to let it pass without a fight. Now she shall see what we can do by way of redress. Or call it for civility’s sake, if you like - since I believe we are on the whole a civilised people - quid pro quo.”

Lady Macauley had in fact a great deal more than that to say. That we should take the time to consider this thing very carefully from every angle, was her first concern; especially in light of the fact that Alice, when she was told – as one supposed she must be, at some point - would undoubtedly put some very different construction on it all.

“Alice will want to cancel the ball and send the whole lot packing”she decided. “Which will not serve my purposes - oh, not at all! No, the ball must go ahead just as planned. And everyone must be there, including Rose. Including even the Wilmots, who must be brought to see the absurdity of their own plan, and be persuaded to go home! I think we shall all breathe a little more easily when that foolish, and largely irrelevant pair has gone.”

She told us to leave her then. She would have her own tea brought up to her there; she had much thinking to do, and she would do it best alone. We should go down to the drawing room and do what we could to keep Alice from discovering the truth of what had just transpired.

“You won’t do anything precipitate Mummy, like phoning Rose....?” Belle had wanted to be assured of that, before she would consent to leave. But Lady Macauley had only the highest disdain for such an idea.

“What kind of a foolish old woman do you think I am, that you should suspect me of any such thing?” she fairly snapped back at Belle. “Do you think me likely to blow my own cover before I have even properly worked out what it’s going to be? No, of course I won’t be phoning Rose! Though it’s possible I might have to phone the Baineses...... I believe there is something I can do you see, to stop Rose and David Porteous in their tracks. But I shall need Roland’s help to put it in motion.... I shall probably need the help of several other people too; I’ll give you a list of their names, when I have thought them out. Meantime, there is much to be done – and the ball might have to be postponed by a day ....”

She dismissed us then; having not the slightest further need, as she put it, for our presence. We must go downstairs and do what we could to keep Alice from interfering. And with that, just for the moment, we had to be content.

A rather shocking revelation

2007-11-15T12:47:00.000Z

The rain had stopped, and half-hearted sunshine begun to filter into the rather cavernous Barton Flory kitchen, by the time Frances had drunk her tea and become composed enough to resume her story. I found the sunshine an intrusion on the whole: I had a feeling this was going to be a tale I’d have preferred to hear while rain was falling.

Frances was beginning to have misgivings about it all herself now, it seemed. There were some things one ought to have been strong enough to keep to oneself perhaps, she saw that now. Burdening others with one’s own misfortunes – it was the coward’s way, wasn’t it? She might have done very wrong in rushing down here like this with her sorry tale. Since when all was said and done, it hadn’t been Rose’s, or Lady Macauley’s, or anyone else’s fault, if she had herself been just too dull, to hold David Porteous to her as a lover!

“I ought to have known from the start.” She finally came right out and acknowledged that. “I ought to have understood that even though he had agreed to marry me, he would have had sooner or later to look elsewhere for his - well, his bodily fulfilments you know... I just didn’t know that he had looked so soon!”

I had begun to see where this was taking us, and my own heart had taken a sharp downward lurch at the sheer unpleasantness of what I feared I was about to hear. I told her she was going to have to help me though, since for the life of me, I still hadn’t quite been able to guess.

“You mean you really didn’t know – you didn’t see?” Frances was genuinely incredulous: it seemed to give her the courage she required.

“I think it happened very early in my friendship with David ...” she finally continued – but reflectively, sadly, as if she were still trying to grasp all the facts herself. “Perhaps even before we had become friends? I have thought and thought about it, and it sometimes seems to me they might have planned it all beforehand – might have decided, you know, that though their own combined circumstances were not enough to marry on – not enough for them, that is.... they might still have had each other, whilst making a convenience of me.... And then of course I made it so very easy for them, just wanting him on any terms as I did!”

She made a long pause; she quite saw how foolish she had been, but was resolved to do the situation all the justice that she could. For my own part, I was thinking that in all my life I had probably never felt quite as uncomfortable as I did at that moment. I had the strongest possible aversion to hearing more - yet still, I knew I had to try to help her out.

“You mean to say that all the time you were making marriage plans with David Porteous, he was ...” I began to say it, then stopped: there were words here that I found it almost impossible to pronounce. Frances supplied them for me however; she was perfectly in command of her story by now.

“Sleeping with Rose?” She at least was able to bring it out: there was even a kind of quiet triumph for her in being able to state the truth at last. “Yes, that precisely. Oh, he was sleeping with me too of course. Now and then, for appearances’ sake - it didn’t involve so very much effort after all: I was content with very little. But she was his lover and his love, and that was the way it was always going to be.”

"But how... and when....?” I heard myself stammering foolishly. It seemed to me there were still many more questions unanswered here, than I could properly comprehend.

“Oh well, practically all the time" Frances replied. "Certainly at the time we announced our engagement – and probably well before that too.....”

She was able by now to dismiss it almost with a shrug - and to take pity on me in my desperate struggle to understand.

“It was David who finally broke our engagement, you know. Oh, he allowed me to seem to have done it myself – he could afford that much generosity. But he had had another idea by then. Or Rose had – it was hard to know which of them was doing the thinking, they had become so very close ... They had seen that he might have a chance with Belle, at any rate. She had seemed to like him at one time – and her mother had shown herself not entirely opposed to the idea. They might have gone along together perfectly comfortably with that, Rose and he - Belle would probably have been as grateful as I was, for any little scraps of affection he threw her way. But then Bill stepped in. Dear Bill – I never loved or thanked him as much as I did at that moment! Though I had to love and thank him without saying a word – there was the pity of it. But I somehow thought that he at least, must have had some inkling of what was going on.”

I saw it all now; and in seeing, understood why Frances must have marvelled so, at our combined failure to comprehend. I thought I could vouch for Bill’s complete ignorance, however.

“I don’t believe Bill can have seen any of this” I told her. “Oh, he saw how the land lay with David Porteous and Belle of course – had it not been for that, I don’t think he would have been anything like so quick to declare himself. But of an affair between Rose and David, I’m sure he guessed nothing. We none of us knew, or dreamt any such thing. Certainly Lady Macauley herself can’t have done so, or she’d have had them both out of the house at once!”

So many things had suddenly become clear – grotesquely so. And though I had thought I knew the depths to which Rose’s cynicism would take her, I confess I hadn’t thought of this; and much less had I supposed that a former clergyman would have sunk so low! There remained one important thing still unexplained however: I could understand Frances’ wishing to unburden herself at last – but why at this particular moment?

Frances had asked herself the same question, apparently; and was not entirely sure, even now, that she had done the right thing as a consequence.

But: “I had talked to Tomek about it at length. He’s very wise, and we have become close... We shall probably be married quite soon - without any kind of publicity; I have quite done with that sort of thing. And then you see, Tomek had been working at the house, and had opportunity to see what was developing there between Will Macauley and Imogen. And then I heard that Lady Macauley was planning to hold a ball, and was probably deciding to promote Imogen Porteous herself – and all the while in total ignorance of the fact that that was precisely what Rose and David were promoting too! So I thought I really must come down and tell her – though I was very fearful about it of course, and am profoundly relieved to have been able to tell you first. You will be able to talk it over with Bill and Belle perhaps – and then decide together what is the best way to proceed from here...?”

But Frances had gone one step ahead of me again, and still I struggled to understand.

“But I thought it was Angelica whom Rose was promoting...?” I must have sounded very foolish. I felt very foolish indeed - and nor do I believe I improved my position much, by adding that Pamela had told me of Rose’s secret plan for exacting revenge upon Lady Macauley...

“As I understood it" I nonetheless rather lamely went on; "Rose was to have taken the girl and her mother in hand. Advised Angelica in all sorts of clever little ways. Dressed her up and made her irresistible - just so that Will would insist upon engaging himself to her! That, at least, was the way that I, and I think everyone else, had understood it to have been...”

Frances’s reply, when it came, was not triumphant, as it might have been in any other woman, but only rather sad.

“That was what they wanted everyone to think” she explained. “I thought it myself, for a while. But after all, what would there have been for them, in that? No, they had something altogether better in mind - the Wilmots were mere pawns in their game, just as I had been myself. And you have to admit they have been rather clever. You have only got to think about it after all - that where the daughter goes, the father must be expected to follow. And if Imogen got Will, and Will got the Macauley inheritance and the house - well, you can see for yourself where they saw themselves as going with that!”

I saw, and in seeing was shocked, as I think I have never been before. But it was suddenly too much for me to try to handle alone. And in my usual fashion, I decided to call Bill, and let him decide what we ought to consider doing next..

The calm before the storm

2007-11-13T11:36:00.000Z

“Do you mean to tell me you knew that girl would be coming and going every day – and Will left quite alone there with her, in the house?”

The question was Alice Macauley’s, directed with some sharpness at her mother-in-law this afternoon, as we sat over a late lunch at Barton Flory, Lady Macauley’s childhood home in the Suffolk countryside, to which we have retreated for what Lady Macauley herself calls ‘a few days of rest and composure before the storm’. The ‘storm’, as we all now understand it, being the ball; preparations for which are in fact already in full swing back at the Macauley house. It is to be held in the Orangery – and in an adjoining marquee: Lady Macauley having thought it desirable to provide one venue for the youthful contingent to “perform whatever it is they call a dance these days”; and another for the “more venerable among us, who still enjoy a waltz”. A team of half a dozen men has been set to work there in our absence; their foreman, rather surprisingly, being none other than Frances’s faithful Polish Tomek, whom Lady Macauley has been advised is quite the most reliable pair of hands, when it comes to erecting a marquee, and strengthening an Orangery floor.

Lady Macauley has made no attempt to disguise the fact that the idea of the ball was entirely a spur of the moment thing on her part. She had been stung into producing it, she acknowledges that; but having done so, is resolved to see it through to a spectacular conclusion. It is to be the ball to end all balls; no expense or effort will be spared to make it one of the most successful ever held at the house. An orchestra is to be engaged, and what seems likely to be almost an entire florist’s shop commandeered for the occasion - Rose will see to what heights an old woman is still able to rise, when provoked.

“And will Rose herself be invited to attend?” Alice wanted to know that much, at least. “Given that she has announced her intention of staging an alternative affair.”

But Lady Macauley sets little store by Rose’s alternative affair. That too had been produced entirely out of Rose’s hat, in her opinion. “She had to think of something, and came up with that. Oh, she thinks fast, I’ll grant her that ... But on this occasion she thought to very little purpose – since I had thought faster, and to more immediately realisable effect. And we shall see what becomes of half-baked intentions and village halls, when something altogether more magnificent is in the offing!”

“She will be invited, and she will come” was however her considered judgment of Rose’s likely response. “Bringing her Wilmots with her, I don’t doubt. Though if any of them gets up to try to make an announcement – especially one that has to do with an engagement - she will find her path securely blocked.”

Alice seemed to think that this disposed satisfactorily enough of the question of the ball – and indeed of that of the importunate Mrs Mountjoy, whom she had never yet condescended to speak of as Rose, and whose recent put-down at her mother-in-law’s hands she had evidently found not altogether displeasing. But on that other question, the one which concerned her son’s present proximity to Imogen Porteous (of whom she “personally knew nothing – or nothing at any rate that she found especially encouraging”), she remained resolutely unappeased.

“I’d like to know just what it was you were thinking of, mother-in-law?” she inquired next. “When you left them alone in the house together for a period of several days? If it was your idea that she might succeed in wresting him away from the other girl, then of course I can see your point. Though I confess I don’t think it a specially good one - since so far as I have been able to see there is little to choose between the two. The Porteous girl is if anything more dangerous than the Wilmot one – as being a good deal more likely to succeed!”

“And if she should succeed, what then?” Lady Macauley tossed it back at her with something that looked suspiciously like positive enjoyment: it seemed to me entirely on the cards she might have staged the whole thing, just on the off-chance of its annoying Alice. “You can have no objection to the girl herself that I can see. She’s quite as good as he in every respect – she’s better in some, in my opinion. She’s a great deal more talented, for a start. There’s almost nothing she couldn’t accomplish, artistically - given her head, and just a little material support.”

But this was going altogether too far for Alice.

“And is it also your idea that we should be the means of supplying her with the material support she requires?” she very coldly asked.. “You take my breath away if so. I would do much, as you know, to remove my son from the clutches of the Wilmot girl. I have come down here at all, it might be said, very much for that purpose alone. But if in doing so I should succeed only in throwing him into the arms of another - who by your own admission would probably ruin us all with her artistic requirements - why, there I would simply have to draw the line!”

Where Alice’s drawing the line might have taken us – and what Lady Macauley’s spirited response to it might have been – was unfortunately denied us, by the arrival at that moment of a contingent of late luncheon guests; in the flurry of seating and introducing whom, all other conversational threads were lost, and Lady Macauley in fact had herself quietly spirited away to her rooms by Bill and Belle. It was left to me therefore, and even more to Jack Macauley (Alice having icily dissociated herself from further conversation for the moment) to see the luncheon through to some kind of hospitable conclusion.

It was several hours later, when everyone else had gone to their rooms to rest, and I had found a quiet window-seat in which to relax, while looking out over the pleasant gardens where sullen rain had begun to fall... it was while I sat there, reflecting upon what had earlier been said, and where it was likely to take us all, that I saw a taxi from the village pull up in the driveway, and a distracted-looking Frances Fanshawe get out, struggling to put up a large umbrella. I hurried out to greet her; she was cold and tired, and obviously very much distressed and agitated by what she called the “outlandishness of her coming down all unannounced and uninvited like this!” She would hardly have dared to come at all, she attempted to explain, all in a rush as is her way when there is much on her mind. She would certainly have phoned ahead to announce her intention, at least - had she not something of so much gravity to tell me, that she hadn’t seen how it could possibly wait another hour!

She had alarmed me somewhat, I confess it. I couldn’t imagine what it could be that had driven her to taking what was, for her, so unprecedented a step as to come all the way down here, alone and unannounced. She was all for embarking upon her tale at once, right there in the wet driveway; she went so far as to demand of me, all incoherently, whether after all I “hadn’t guessed what was going on under my nose all this long while.....?”

But I had guessed nothing – and had discovered besides that, suddenly, I didn’t want to hear. There had been enough shocks for one day, it seemed to me – one more, and the whole edifice might be in danger of tumbling down. Frances’s own distress was such, in any case, that I insisted she should come into the house and warm herself a little, before embarking upon whatever it was she had come all the way down here to tell me.

“There’s nobody else about” I assured her. “Everyone is upstairs resting – we have the whole place entirely to ourselves. And you shall have a cup of tea at least, before you say another word....”

The gauntlet thrown - and taken up

2007-11-09T11:29:00.001Z

Some alterations in human affairs take weeks and months, or even years to accomplish - others happen in the blinking of an eye. Just so, it seemed to me, did the friendship between Lady Macauley and Rose Mountjoy audibly crack, and then begin to disintegrate before my own eyes the other day, at the entrance to the Macauley long gallery.

Several days have now passed since that momentous encounter, and my account of what followed Lady Macauley’s opening remarks will no doubt benefit to some extent from hindsight. But that a challenge was made, and taken up, there was not the smallest doubt; and what the immediate consequences will be, I am unable at present to predict. My recollections of the exchange itself, and its immediate consequences, are actually rather vague; I having been too much caught up in the unexpected drama of it at the time, to be capable of taking it in objectively.

But I do remember that Rose was momentarily caught off guard by Lady Macauley’s opening challenge. She had not expected to be brought quite so summarily to account, and my recollection is that she opened and closed her mouth several times, before finding presence of mind to reply. I believe she knew that what she said next would make or break her relations with Lady Macauley, and that the whole history of her association with the family probably flashed before her eyes in that instant. She had come a long way from Rosie Betts to Mrs Mountjoy, after all; she had invested most of what she had in becoming Lady Macauley’s trusted friend, and she must have seen that cherished status recede before her even as she opened her mouth to speak.

I actually found it in my heart to feel sorry for her: she had much to lose, and only the flimsiest possible hope of personal gain. I would not have been surprised to see her gulp, and hurriedly back down. She might still have retrieved the situation if she would – it required only a conciliatory word or two on her part, and the moment of peril would have passed. But she evidently felt she had already gone too far for that. And since she is in any case never so bold as when in possession of an idea – and since it must still have seemed to her that the idea she had was rather a good one... she took a deep breath, and uttered the words which she knew would seal her fate.

“Oh well...” was what she finally brought out – and if there was concession in it, and a brave little smile, there was defiance too; so that Lady Macauley could have been in little doubt as to the stand she meant to take. “We only thought, you know, that you might not like to hold the party here. I believe we thought we were acting entirely out of consideration for you. And for Will too a little, of course - he having promised a party, and being so anxious to try to keep his word...”

Lady Macauley’s look showed what she thought of this. She swept Rose up and down with it, and seemed, for a moment, to be going to move on, without even troubling to reply. She smiled up at Bill with perfect confidence, and went so far as to adjust the pressure of her arm in his, as a sign that she wished him to continue with her along the room. But then she apparently had another thought – and it seemed to me she had never thought so quickly, or to quite such remarkable effect. She paused a moment, looking back over her shoulder at Rose.

“It’s very good of you to think of so many people all at once” she said. “And I’m sure we’re all very grateful to you. But oh, my poor dear Rose, there was always going to be a party, you know – only we prefer on the whole to call it a ball. Such a pity you didn’t think to wait a little, before hiring the village hall. I take it the hall is already hired.....? Oh well, you must let me know the date of your own little party - it will be the greatest misfortune if the two dates should happen to coincide! But there you are, these things do happen, even in the best-arranged affairs...”

So there it was. She had picked up the gauntlet thrown all inadvertently by Rose. She had looked at it a moment, had found it an incriminating object on the whole, then tossed it back. After which she continued with her queenly progress down the room; nodding and smiling to people right and left as she went, but pausing nowhere, until she reached the group around the piano, where she embraced her son (without enthusiasm, I thought), before sinking down against the cushions of an armchair which somebody had hastily vacated for her.

“Do play on dear” she very sweetly said to Imogen Porteous, who had jumped up from the piano stool at her approach. “A soft song to soothe the nerves I think – there are some rather jangled ones here just now. And then it will be time for tea. You must rest from your labours a while then, and sit down here beside me, to tell me what you plan to wear to the ball....”

The subdued murmur of the party continued to rise and fall for at least another hour after that, but my recollections of it have become indistinct. I remember that I trailed rather uncomfortably in Lady Macauley’s wake after she had left the group by the door; but that I was detained as I went, first by Pamela, who wanted to know, in shocked tones, what Lady Macauley had said to Rose, and was there “really going to be a rumpus – and a ball....?” ; and then by Alice Macauley, who drew me aside and kept me full ten minutes, attempting to elicit from me whatever she could about what “mother-in-law could possibly be proposing to do now?” It was the first she had heard of any ball, she told me – did I really believe the old lady meant to go through with it; and was it possible that an engagement was expected to be announced? But since it was also the first that I, or to the best of my knowledge anyone else had heard of a ball, or any possible announcement, I was unable to satisfy her curiosity on either count.

I didn’t care for Alice, who has the kind of cold, bland, superior air that I have always found off-putting in a certain kind of Englishwoman. I’m not proud to admit it, but women like Alice Macauley have always had a rather intimidating effect on me, ever since my first days as a colonial newly arrived in London. And though I have learnt to see through them, and even to parry their innate condescension to some extent, I have never been able to like them very much. I could quite see why Lady Macauley had always resisted her daughter-in-law so very fiercely. Jack’s ‘fine cold Alice’, she had always called her – though with them, as I now saw and understood, it was more a case of like opposing like than anything else.

Her husband Jack on the other hand, I found delightful. He had early settled himself in the group surrounding Imogen Porteous and her piano, and there he had remained, enjoying himself tremendously. It’s hard to see in him now the gorgeous youth whom Rose had adored. He has grown stout, just as his mother said; he looks well-fed, substantial, rather than glamorous - but it's clear that his capacity for honest, jovial enjoyment of life has remained intact. Had Rose been looking for cracks in his marriage to Alice though, I believe she’d have been hard-pressed to find them; for he gives every appearance of being entirely, and entirely comfortably devoted to her, and perfectly happy to defer to her at every turn.

It was only in the last ten minutes of the party that I suddenly noticed the chairs at the entrance end of the gallery had been vacated, and that Rose, with Mrs Wilmot and Angelica, had gone. Lady Macauley had noticed it too: “I see the birds have flown....” she said. But she said it distractedly; being too much preoccupied just then with present company, to mind too much. She had all her favourite men around her: she had Bill, and Jack – and even David Porteous and Will Macauley had somehow managed to detach themselves from the other group, and were circulating happily around her, along with everyone else.

And if there was a surprise at the end of it all, it was only to be expected perhaps, in a party that had started out so very badly. It certainly came as a shock to me, and I believe to Lady Macauley too, who had spotted it even at the moment I did so myself. It was just this – that young Will Macauley, who had half an hour ago been hopelessly entwined with the lovely Angelica, appeared now to have eyes and ears for no-one but Imogen Porteous, grown vivid suddenly, in her very red dress...

Though where that leaves, or is likely to lead us, I have neither wit nor words at present to try to foretell.

The opening skirmish

2007-11-04T11:33:00.000Z

The scene which greeted me when I finally entered the long gallery the other day, bore very little resemblance to a battlefield. Few scenes could have been more pleasant indeed, few pictures have composed themselves more charmingly, than did that elongated room, where the small groups of softly murmuring people seemed to have been put there by an artistic hand, and the late sun made golden pools of light at one end, the reddening western sky cast rosy shadows on dark panelling, at the other. I was reminded of something Bill once said – how it was that in his experience most things, no matter how large or small or potentially life-changing, were finally decided, not on the battlefield but over the teacups; that wars are waged and won or lost, but that sooner or later the opposing sides must meet and talk, and everything comes down to tea and biscuits in the end. I trusted that this would be the case today. Bill had told me to expect a battle – but had omitted to add that the missiles involved would after all be only words, the weapons mostly teaspoons. Very little harm could come to anyone here, I thought - though doubtless somebody would have to win something, somewhere, and somebody lose.

The low hum of conversation ceased a moment at my entrance, and everyone seemed to have turned to look my way. They had evidently been expecting Lady Macauley, and the smiles of welcome they had prepared for her subsided awkwardly, before they turned to one another again, and resumed what I saw now was their rather desultory talk. There were a good many people there whom I didn’t know, but a quick glance around revealed Pamela and Roland, imprisoned in a pair of vast armchairs somewhere in the middle. They looked uncomfortable, I thought; and were in not altogether easy conversation with a tall, elegantly dressed woman who seemed to be responding to them but vaguely, whose own glance was directed at some point above, and beyond them, and whom I took to be Alice Macauley. Following her glance to its source, I found the man who must be her husband Jack. He was part of a largeish group which had gathered at the far end of the room; he was leaning over the piano there, and singing lustily, while at the same time very happily engaged in turning the pages for Imogen Porteous, who wore a vivid red dress, and was playing a lively tune.

This was quite the jolliest group of all, and the one towards which any sensible person would have gravitated, I thought. I was instantly drawn to it myself, and would have made my way down there as quickly and discreetly as I could - had not the one which contained Mrs Avril Wilmot and her daughter stood immediately in my way. There they sat, on a pair of armless chairs just inside the door; flanked on one side by Will Macauley, and on the other by Rose and - more surprisingly perhaps - David Porteous; so that anybody entering must pause to talk with them a while, or seem to have delivered a resounding snub. Rose stood to introduce me – Will would have jumped to his feet too, I thought, and did give me the friendliest possible smile; but was so much intertwined at that moment with Angelica, who had snuggled as close to him as she could, a good deal more on his seat than her own... that the physical act of rising to greet me was temporarily beyond his powers.

Mrs Wilmot gave me a tight little ‘how do you do?’, and something which passed for her as a smile; then closed her lips again, looked down, and resumed her knitting. It was not an encouraging beginning, and had seemed to tell me more clearly than further words could do, that she supposed, from the look of me, I must be of the enemy brigade; that I found her more or less marooned there in hostile territory, but that after all she was not entirely without allies - she had Mrs Mountjoy, and Mr Porteous in her camp for a start; and was in any case prepared to stand her ground until she had got what she had come for.

What she had come for was still the dance that Will had promised her, apparently; though it fell to Rose to give me an account of how matters stood on that particular front at present. They had evidently been talking it over before I arrived, and had reached their own conclusions as to what would be the best way forward now. Rose had a bright little spot of colour in either cheek, and a peculiarly steely glitter in her eyes. David Porteous, sitting immediately behind her, had for once nothing whatever to say; though had folded his hands in the customary manner, and wore his most contemplative smile. Angelica had wriggled a little closer to Will if that were possible; she was pretty, I thought – oh, startlingly so: she had the bluest eyes, the purest, loveliest complexion. But it seemed to me she was the clinging, simpering sort; she would cloy in time, I thought – and I wondered if Rose had perhaps decided against taking her in hand, for the purpose of exacting revenge? Of them all, only Will Macauley – kind, well-meaning, but ultimately rather blundering Will - had the grace to look just a little discomfited by it all. His smile held a kind of mute apology, and seemed to tell me he would put matters right at once, if only he knew how.

Rose spoke at last, and her tone was brisk. “Avril and Angelica have decided to come to me for a day or two” she informed me. “They are packed and ready, and will make the move directly after tea. We thought it better that way. Not everyone here is in favour of the dance, you see – but Will has given his promise on it, and so of course it must take place. We propose to hire the village hall if necessary, and hold it there – so that people may attend or not, just as they see fit.”

As declarations of open warfare went, I thought it breath-taking. I was uncertain of how to respond to it however, and must have stood gaping a little - but was spared the necessity of an immediate reply by the arrival at that moment of Bill, and Belle, and Lady Macauley, who came in splendid procession, with the Meades, and tea-trays following.

“And what is it, pray, that people may attend or not as they see fit....?” Lady Macauley had caught the last part of Rose’s remarks, and her answering challenge came clear as a bell for all the room to hear. There was a sudden hush, even the notes of Imogen Porteous’s piano abruptly fading away. I’m not sure that I had ever felt as fond, or as proud of Lady Macauley as I did at that moment. She was the oldest person there, and must have seen herself as suddenly beleaguered in her own house. It can only have come as an unpleasant shock to her to know that David Porteous, and even Rose, had apparently decamped to the other side; but if she felt it she gave no sign, and stood proud, and indomitable as any queen.

The hush in the room was of but a moment’s duration, before people resumed their positions and began discreetly murmuring to one another again. David Porteous stepped gallantly forward to relieve the Meades of one or another of their trays; Mrs Wilmot knitted fiercely on, while Rose, who had winced a little at the direct assault, seemed girding herself for a bold response. Belle was mortified - and Alice Macauley, at a distance, had thrown looks of deep annoyance, first at her husband, then her son. Angelica wound an arm through Will’s, and did her best to hold him captive with her lovely eyes....

And Bill - I can’t be absolutely sure of this, but it seemed to me he looked my way, and broadly winked.

"Let battle begin"

2007-10-31T12:24:00.000Z

The remark was Bill’s, delivered to me in the hall of the Macauley house this afternoon, just before I made my way upstairs to the long gallery, where I had been told that tea was shortly to be served. He had been down in the kitchen helping Belle prepare the tea-trays, but had dashed upstairs to the hall when he saw me coming, just to prepare me for what I was likely to find.

"The two opposing sides are gathered.” he told me. Which was to say, apparently, that Alice Macauley sat queen-like and immovable in her corner, and Mrs Avril Wilmot, doggedly knitting, in hers. A stretch of something like twenty feet of gallery floor separated the two: it was symbolic, Bill said, of the ideological gulf which lay between them; Mrs Wilmot having resolved that her girl should have the promised ‘dance', come what may - and Alice being equally determined that she shouldn’t. Lady Macauley hadn’t yet appeared; but she had made up her mind to do so at last, and in fact Belle had just that moment gone upstairs to fetch her. Bill guessed that when she did come, it would be to take up station somewhere in the middle; since, although her loyalties might be thought to have lain with Alice in this affair, she’d have the deepest possible aversion to acknowledging the fact, and would be at pains to make it clear that she aligned herself with neither side.

Bill seems to take the jocular view of the situation on the whole. Well, what else in the world could a fundamentally peace-loving man do, he wanted to know, when beset by warring women on every side? The old lady had drafted in a contingent of relative outsiders for today’s occasion, he went on to tell me; presumably in the belief that her greatest safety lay in numbers, and that the dreadful Mrs Wilmot might actually take fright, and run away. For his own part, Bill thought this highly unlikely. “She has sat it out these seven days” he observed; “She has weathered befriendment by Rose Mountjoy, and church with David Porteous - she sure as hell isn’t going to give the game up now.” He seemed to have formed a sneaking admiration for Mrs Avril Wilmot; who, though out-gunned and out-numbered on every front, had nevertheless kept staunchly to her post. “She’s nothing if not a trooper” he laughed. “She sees the glittering prize still within her grasp, and she’ll be damned if she’s going to give it up without a fight.”

I told him that I thought his levity rather misplaced on this occasion. “There is the happiness of two young people at stake here after all” I reminded him. “It’s not just some game got up for your personal amusement.“

But “Oh come now Bea, don’t go all judgmental on me now!” was all he had to say to that. “There have to be some perks you know. Especially when you consider that if it were not for this little shindig of the old lady’s, Belle and I might have been married by now – and all at our ease in Tuscany, seeing the grapes brought in! I tell you, it takes a lot to keep me sitting here watching which way this contentious woman or that might jump! And for what purpose in the end, after all? Since it’s entirely on the cards that young Will himself will get bored with the whole thing, and take up with some other girl entirely.”

I confessed that I hadn’t seen in quite that light myself, but that after all there was probably something in what he said - though I wondered if he had any other girl in particular, in mind? I didn’t want to quarrel with him over it anyway – and especially not at the very moment in which I must go up and confront the scene in question myself. I had just one last thing to ask him before I took the plunge and went upstairs: I wanted to know if he hadn’t found an ally in Jack Macauley? Another man, after all – had there not been solidarity of a sort, in that? But Bill replied that he thought he could probably look for little support from Jack; who though a thoroughly affable fellow, and one who seemed very well contented with his lot in life, had nevertheless discovered that to take sides in a family like this was without exception fatal, and had long ago settled for a quiet life.

“He’ll take the line of least resistance, sensible man” was Bill’s view of the position of Jack Macauley. “Which means that whatever he might think in private, he’ll agree publicly in every essential with his wife.”

He said he must leave me at that point; he had tea-trays to see to – for to just such banalities as those, had his life been temporarily reduced! He said it with good humour though; and I could see that, much like Jack Macauley, he was not entirely discontented with his present lot. For my own part, nothing remained but that I must climb the stairs and brave the confrontation. I had just time, before making my way across the series of empty rooms that led to the long gallery, to reflect that Bill’s account of the Jack Macauley marriage had differed in several important respects from the one I had received yesterday, from Rose.

Rose seldom visits me these days, for reasons which I understand only too well; but she did call yesterday, awash with indignation at what she called ‘the emasculation of poor Jack by Alice’. She had always known it would happen of course, she was quick to tell me that. With women like Alice – high-handed, possessive women who gobbled up their men ... with women of that sort a man must either sink or swim; and she knew of few who, once seized, had ever made it back to shore. But she could weep, she said, to see all Jack’s youthful ‘gorgeousness’, all that glamour and splendid joie de vivre, reduced to this! What ‘this’ was, she hadn’t heart quite to particularise for me: I would see it soon enough for myself, she said. But she wanted me to know that the Jack Macauley who sat stolidly in his mother’s drawing room today (“he’s grown rather portly, you know!”) was but a sad remnant of the young man she had known and adored.

Of Alice herself, Rose had had little to say – save that she had aged, as one would have expected her to do, ‘pretty well’. “The perfect cheekbones don’t collapse” as Rose put it. “And the fair hair turns grey imperceptibly – so that you can’t tell if she colours it or not. And then, what has she ever had to trouble her after all? She has all that she ever wanted in life; which is to say her husband, her castle, and her son – in that order!”

Only on the question of Alice’s attitude to Mrs Wilmot and Angelica, did Rose’s account bear any resemblance to Bill’s. “She’s quite as implacably opposed to the match as her mother-in-law is” was Rose’s view. “And she means to see it through to the bitter end. Oh, she’ll do nothing violent, that’s not her way. But she’ll see the Wilmots routed, or she’ll be damned!”

It was with these words of Rose’s echoing in my ears, and with the knowledge that I should require every ounce of courage and diplomacy I might possess, that I finally pushed open the door of the long gallery, and entering, took the measure of the assembled guests.

"A thin little, grim little woman with a penchant for knitted skirt suits"

2007-10-23T10:39:00.000Z

That was Pamela’s account of the appearance and character of Mrs Avril Wilmot, whose arrival at the Macauley house two days ago has upset Lady Macauley to such an extent that she has taken to her rooms threatening not to re-emerge, not even for the occasional tea-time. She hopes there will not be too many tea-times for anyone to have to endure, in fact. She can’t see how she has been brought to such a strait, and she holds Jack and Alice entirely responsible for it. It is like Alice, she says, to have introduced a horror into somebody else’s house, and then taken her own sweet time about coming down to pick up the burden of it. But until she does; until, that is, she deigns to appear herself, and take this preposterous personage off one’s hands - well, Lady Macauley declines to have any further part in it, and means to keep strictly to her own apartments.

It’s hard to see how such an impasse could have been reached so quickly; but Pamela believes it was probably accomplished within the first five minutes, shortly after Mrs Wilmot had stationed herself beside her small wheel-along suitcase at the foot of the stairs, and then looked about as if she expected to see a host of servants come running to try to wrest it from her. Pamela doesn’t know what it can have contained – the family silver, she had supposed, from the manner in which Mrs Wilmot had clung to it, insisting upon trying to bump it up the stairs herself, and then only with extreme reluctance being persuaded to give it up to Bill.

Nor were her opening remarks calculated to endear her to her hostess – she having seemed to sniff the air in the hall and find it objectionable on the whole; before casting a sceptical eye from floor to ceiling and up the stairs, and remarking, to no-one in particular, that it must be “very cold and inconvenient” to inhabit such a house; and that for her own part, a house with the ordinary number of living and bedrooms had always seemed quite sufficient.

“She wonders why she has been invited there at all” Pamela tells me. And I should point out that Pamela did not actually witness any of these events herself. She was not a member of the welcoming party for Mrs Wilmot and her daughter, and has had to take her impressions second hand from Rose. Which makes one marvel at her apparent omniscience, whilst at the same time doubting its absolute veracity.... Still, for what her remarks are worth, I give them to you; they being at present all I have.

“She doesn’t say as much of course” Pamela went on, quite as if she had been privy to it all herself. “She doesn’t have to, apparently - her sniffs, and the fierce offended air she maintains at lunch, and tea tables, saying it all for her.... But she conducts constant stage-whispered conversations with her daughter behind her hands; she glares at poor Will at every opportunity, as if challenging him to tell her what he has meant by introducing her and her innocent girl into this hostile house – and altogether she creates the impression that she hasn’t yet got so far as to unpack her bags, and is ready to leave at a moment’s notice and in the highest possible dudgeon, if matters don’t soon improve.

Will has been very rash and foolish, according to Pamela; making all kinds of promises he can’t possibly hope to see fulfilled. “He’s clearly quite besotted with the girl, and determined to get himself engaged to her - it was probably the only way he could see of getting her mother to bring her there at all!“ He had promised them among other things, ‘a dance’, apparently; and Mrs Wilmot had come there altogether in the expectation of that. Rather, Pamela fears, in the manner of one who had supposed that the visit was to be a kind of old-fashioned debutante affair, and she the mother of the most promising girl.... Pamela suspects that her little suitcase is probably stuffed with clothes for every kind of magnificent occasion. For Angelica, at least: Angelica, as heroine of the hour, must shine with unsurpassable radiance – whilst for Angelica’s mother, well, the ubiquitous little knitted skirt suit (“she has one in every colour; she has almost certainly has knitted them herself”)... the 'rather horrid little knitted skirt suit' must suffice.

It had begun to seem to me by now, that whilst I knew a good deal about Will Macauley, and most of what there was to know about Mrs Avril Wilmot, of the girl herself I had heard very little. I ventured a question or two therefore. Was she as pretty as everyone said, I wanted to know? And did Pamela feel that she returned Will’s affection?

“Oh well ....” Pamela had a rather conspiratorial look for it now. “She is extremely pretty of course, I’ll give her that. She has a head of fluffy blonde curls, and the kind of complexion that makes you want to look, and look again. Rose puts it down to expert makeup – and Rose should know! She’s one of those girls who intimidates you from behind the cosmetics counter in Selfridges you know – it was there that Will found her in fact: he was looking for something to buy for his mother.... But, so far as returning his affection goes – well, returning it is one thing, Rose says; demonstrating the fact quite another...”

“I have only Rose’s word for it of course, having witnessed none of it for myself...” Pamela was thoroughly into her conversational stride by now, and would clearly have been impervious to any interjections of mine. “But Rose is positively of the opinion – and just between you and me, was rather coarse about it in fact... Rose has somehow got hold of the idea that Angelica is withholding her favours until marriage itself. ‘Playing the Anne Boleyn card’, Rose calls it. Leading poor, lovelorn, lusting Will the kind of dance that can end only in marriage - or nothing whatever. She has taken some kind of a vow of virginity, Rose thinks. She wears a little bracelet to that effect – it’s a current craze among young girls apparently; especially those who have taken up with the Evangelical belt.... Rose thinks it likely that Mrs Wilmot belongs to an evangelical movement of one kind or another. It would be the sort of thing she’d do – though it’s hard to see her engaging in the happy, clappy sort of thing required...“

“Rose thinks it rather clever of the girl, at any rate. Or, clever of her mother, if such a thing could be thought possible – which Rose is inclined to doubt. Very much more likely, in her view, that Mrs Wilmot takes the jaded, or in her case simply the sceptical view of men’s intentions generally, and of Will Macauley’s in particular. She has probably been badly used by some man herself – she has that look, and to date there has been no mention of a Mr Wilmot! She has raised her daughter with the idea that all men are ‘after one thing and one only’, and has urged her to ‘hold out’. Till marriage itself, if possible; but at least until an announcement has been made, and she has a ring very firmly on her finger.“

It occurred to me at this point to wonder what Rose's own intentions might be? If, that was, she still meant to take Mrs Wilmot and Angelica under her wing, for the purpose of wreaking revenge upon Lady Macauley? It was an intriguing question. But on the whole, I thought I had probably learnt enough at second (or call it third) hand for one day. There was a degree of prurience about it, to my mind; I had a sudden need to hear it from a different angle – preferably from Bill’s. My cold is very much better, besides; I have been judged fit to go into Lady Macauley’s presence again, and tomorrow, I shall doubtless see some of these wonderful things enacted, and be in a position to judge them for myself.

Lady Macauley takes the alarm

2007-10-18T09:17:00.000Z

I stayed only ten minutes or so after Will Macauley had appeared so unexpectedly the other day. It was long enough to tell me that he was a tall young man with charming eyes, and a rather unruly mop of dark brown hair; that he smiled with what looked like genuine warmth at everyone to whom he was introduced – but that he was constructed, physically, along the kinds of long, lean, loose-jointed lines more suited to the sporting field perhaps, than to his grandmother’s drawing room. His grandmother herself however,was instantly so very absorbed and pleased with him, that it seemed to me the kindest thing a mere outside observer could do was simply to murmur her farewells, and slip quietly away. I have since then developed the kind of wretched, sneezing, streaming cold that makes it essential I stay far away from Lady Macauley, and have had to depend for further bulletins upon visits from Bill, who breezes in here every morning to bolster my spirits, and make sure I have everything I need.

He gives me an engaging picture of young Will Macauley; who is an amiable youth, he says, with an easy, uncomplicated character, and an apparently boundless fund of goodwill for all men. His only fault, so far as Bill can see (apart, that is, from his determination to introduce his grandmother to a girl whom she’s certain to deplore), is that way he has of entering a room as if it were a rugby field, and then of crossing it with his eyes fixed resolutely on the ball. The ball in this case being the person or persons towards whom he happens to be advancing at the time: he takes the most direct route, Bill says; it’s an endearing trait, but one that has little regard for objects likely to be encountered on the way – so that cabinets, and chairs, and random coffee tables are always more or less at peril of a direct hit. It’s an affliction Bill recognises, having suffered from something very similar throughout his own life; and it does seem to have inclined him very firmly in favour of the young man.

He sees its possible downside very clearly nonetheless. “He gives the old lady a scare whenever he enters a room” he told me when he called this morning. “And with good reason, as it turns out. A marble head went flying yesterday – the poor lad had only bumped a table as he passed, and off it went. It was a fraught moment – Lady M uttered a little shriek, I seem to remember, and Belle obviously feared the worst. Luckily, Will caught it just before it hit the ground - he’s an accomplished cricketer apparently, and his catching skills served him well on that occasion...

"But his granny has taken fright, and given orders that every free-standing object in his path be moved, lest irreparable damage should be done. It’s clear she simply dotes on him for all that. He apologises profusely for every mishap, and you see her melting. He has just that habit his father and grandfather had before him, she says, of running his hands through his hair whenever he fears he’s made a gaffe. He makes it stand on end, just as they did – and then he throws at you a smile of such regret, of so much honest penitence, and desire to make amends, that you forgive him everything on the spot, and the whole thing is forgotten.”

Will’s stock of goodwill has been put to its severest test, apparently, in his efforts to prepare his grandmother for what she will find when his girlfriend and her mother arrive tomorrow. He has come down a day or two ahead of them just for that. “It’s not so much Angelica herself” he tells them: she being well named, in that she is “beautiful as an angel, and just as good” - his granny and his Aunt Belle will adore her on sight! No, it’s her mother, Mrs Avril Wilmot, who might take what Will calls quite a bit of getting used to. He’s sure they’ll ‘come round to her’ in the end however: she barks a bit, he says, but has never been known to bite!

He is at pains to assure them that what might seem to them at first like gruffness - by which he means that she never seems especially pleased with anything you do: that she has a certain way of looking at you as if she thought you’d said a mouthful, and had really much better have shut up.... Well, it could be disconcerting, that was all; he’d discovered that for himself. But really, it was just her way of trying to look out for her daughter’s interests, didn’t Granny and Aunt Belle see? She’d been the most ‘amazing’ mother, and that was a fact: there was absolutely nothing in the world she wouldn’t do for her darling girl! Everything she did and said arose from that - to most marvellous effect, as they would see when they saw Angelica. So that what might seem to them like surface gruffness, actually concealed a heart of gold.

Bill had seemed to find all this rather entertaining, but Lady Macauley was apparently very little reassured by Will’s stout defence of the lady whom he hopes will become his mother-in-law. She thinks he made a very poor show of it in fact, and fears it does not augur well for any legal career he might have it in mind to follow (he has recently been called to the Scottish bar); since so far as she could see, he succeeded only in sinking his client deeper in the mire with every word he uttered.

She has taken deep alarm at the idea of the lady who ‘barks a bit but doesn’t bite’. This was not the sort of thing she had been expecting at all. She had expected plumpness, garrulity - extreme vulgarity even; and with all or any of these she would have known how to cope. But with someone angular and grim, who would come down to breakfast punctually every morning, the better to glower at one over the coffee pot .... why, with such a one as that there was simply no way that she knew, of contending; and she’s wondering what kind of dreadful mistake they must have made, in consenting to open their doors to her?

She has already drawn up contingency plans for getting rid of her, should she prove quite impossible. Bill could take the car to fetch her every day, she thinks – or at least for as many days as her presence was considered essential to anyone’s happiness. Or, she and her daughter could take a bus – or as many buses as it might take to get them from wherever it was they lived, which was in a part of London of which Lady Macauley herself had never even heard ... And if those measures failed, well they would both, the girl and her mother, simply have to go and stay with Rose. She had a spare bedroom, hadn’t she? She had two spare bedrooms in fact; and had always said how glad she would be to help out in any way required....

Bill seems to think that on the whole, the Rose option will provide the most satisfactory outcome. Which only goes to prove, to me at least – though also to Pamela, who called here later to give me her version of events - how little men understand the nuances of these things, and how very gravely all at sea we should be, if the entire range of social intercourse were to be left to them.

Surprised at tea-time

2007-10-12T12:01:00.000Z

A little learning, they say, is a dangerous thing – but too much, I discover, is considerably worse. I’m feeling very uncomfortable about knowing things concerning Rose of which nobody else at the Macauley house appears to have the slightest inkling – not even Bill, who generally has a rather good ear for distant rumblings. Rose herself gives no sign of her duplicitous intentions when in company with Lady Macauley. So entirely matter-of-fact and and usual is she indeed, that I begin to wonder if I perhaps – or Pamela – could have dreamt the whole thing up?

It’s perfectly possible of course, or so I tell myself. But then I look across at Rose; I listen to her talking endlessly with Lady Macauley about the days when ‘darling Jack‘ was still here, and still their own (it’s difficult sometimes to know which Jack they mean, but I have taken it that for present purposes at least, it’s Jack the son who most preoccupies them).... and I have to concede that if she has insurrection in mind, she's doing a very good job of concealing the fact. And after all, it's not so hard to put oneself in Rose’s place. Would I not myself, for example, if I had loved desperately and been spurned; would I not, had I nursed a grievance for years and years, then seen at last the perfect opportunity for redress... would not I too, in such circumstances, be capable of plotting acts of sabotage?

Fortunately, it’s not a question I’m absolutely obliged to answer just now. And meantime, the teacups come out as usual every afternoon, and the talk, when it is not of how, and where to accommodate five extra persons at a moment’s notice, turns irresistibly to Jack. Bill is seldom present at these occasions, I notice. Lady Macauley had spoken of tea-time as a ceremony reserved for herself and Belle and Bill alone, but it’s surprising how often Bill seems to have found cause to absent himself from it. He hasn’t said as much, but I somehow hear him mutter that though life is good, and love bears him up no end, there is nonetheless just so much women’s talk a man can stand without breaking out in some particularly violent fashion - and so tea-time usually turns out to be the time at which he must walk the dogs, or work on a speech, or supervise the men who are currently installing an extra bathroom on the second floor, for the convenience of the expected guests.

In Bill’s place as often as not comes David Porteous, who has been continuing with his rearrangement of the books in the library, and whose presence at tea-time Lady Macauley seems to regard as some sort of substitute for Bill’s. I continue to find that presence disconcerting – though without being able to provide any very satisfactory reason why. He is on the face of it the best possible companion for a group of women at tea-time. He follows the ebb and flow of conversation with ease and apparent enjoyment; leaning forward to listen intently where he ought (folding his hands and looking contemplative a good deal, it’s true: his ‘prayerful look’, I seem to remember Pamela calling it, in the days when he still enjoyed her patronage) - but regularly brightening proceedings with timely little interjections of his own. He is especially good at providing punch-lines - biblical ones, for the most part, but none the less pertinent, and often rather pithy, for that.

Only Rose seems impervious to the Porteous effect. I have often puzzled over that. I would somehow have expected her, if not to have succumbed precisely, for Rose is not the woman easily to succumb to anything, and least of all to any man who seemed to have set himself up to charm, or impress her ... if not to have succumbed, then to have given merit where merit was due at least, and pronounced him just about as admirable as everyone said. But Rose will pronounce no such thing; and if called upon to give an opinion of the man, or his daughters (which Lady Macauley frequently makes it imperative for her to do), will only remark that they are “very well so far as they go – but where are they going?”, that’s the question she’s always asking herself.

I have no particular quarrel with that of course – it’s a question I have often wanted to ask myself. But all the same, it has sometimes produced a jarring note - so that I can’t help but wonder if he has at some time said, or done something which she has found offensive? These are not the sorts of questions to which answers can easily be found over the tea-cups in Lady Macauley’s presence however. The talk at such times is directed by the old lady herself, and her attention these days is altogether taken up with the idea of the visit to come, and more importantly, with what Alice is likely to have ‘done’ to her unfortunate Jack.

She fears she will find him sadly changed; she doesn’t see how a man could have lived with a woman of Alice’s sort all these years without collapsing somewhere. "Round the middle most likely" she said today: she thinks he will almost certainly have grown portly, and dull....

“And to think of what he was!” she fell to lamenting in the next breath. “Before Alice got her hands on him, that was...“ She seemed lost a moment in contemplation of the awfulness of the likely metamorphosis; and she turned to Rose, for reiteration of the splendid figure he had cut in his youth.

“He was a kind of magnet, wasn’t he, for everything thrilling?” she reflected. “He seemed to bring the wide world with him whenever he entered a room. Some sort of a light went out the day Jack left for Scotland; something bright and, yes, glamorous, vanished forever......... But there they still are at any rate, Alice and he. They tell me they live in perfect domestic bliss - they write now and then, and telephone; they even e-mail Belle, I believe. Everyone e-mails these days, it’s an act of wizardry I haven’t yet accomplished......... I hardly know what it is founded upon however, their domestic bliss; since Jack gave up all active interest in Macauley affairs the day he married. Still, the money trickles in, I daresay. There are shares, and other assets - I hardly know what there is, I see so little of it myself!"

"I’m told though, that they have so far compromised their ideals as to make something rather commercial of their own, out of the castle and its lands....... They make honey from the heather, I believe. Or the bees do. The bees up there are said to be better than other people’s bees, you see.... They have entered into an arrangement with one of the major supermarkets to buy their honey. They have a very pretty label, with the castle pictured on it, and a sprig of heather in the foreground. They send us a pot each Christmas. Castle Nectar, they call it: Belle eats it I think, I never touch it myself – but it’s hard to see how anyone could be more commercial than that! And then of course they hire out a part of the castle, for weddings and other functions – it must be galling indeed, to Alice, to have to open up her doors and let hoi polloi come tramping in!"

"They’ve also made something commercial out of the fishing and the game, I believe - it seems as if my poor boy has had to become a sort of toytown laird: dressing up in tartan, you know, and putting on a show for the benefit of visiting Americans........It’s not what his father had in mind for him. He was to have carried the Macauley banner into the second generation. And into London - there’s a store in Kensington which languishes for want of someone to take an interest in it, you know - and an up and coming sort of grandson on what we call the ‘other side’ (my husband’s first family, that is), who seems to have it in mind to try to turn its fortunes round. I daresay we’ll have to give it up to him in the end, the poor old shop - unless Will should see fit to step in on our account at last...”

It’s hard to know where this line of reminiscence might have taken us. Lady Macauley appeared to have gone somewhere very far away, and was, I believe, rather close to tears. Belle and I had been smiling, and Rose nodding our affirmation of all these virtues of Jack’s, probably gone forever. David Porteous had got so far as to fold his fingertips, and look as if he were about to say something rather meaningful – when all at once the door to the drawing room opened wide, and Imogen Porteous came in, accompanied by a tall young man whom she said she had found wandering in the forecourt.

“Here is your grandson come to visit you, Lady Macauley” she said, with her brightest smile. “I found him stranded at the front door - he has been ringing and ringing, but nobody heard.”

Lady Macauley uttered a little cry, as if she thought it must be an apparition that had appeared. “Is that you Jack...?” she vaguely murmured. “How little you have altered after all...”

It was the first time any of us had seen her come near to confusion and collapse. It pulled us up short; seeming as it did to portend future shocks, and adjustments which she might perhaps be going to find it impossible to make. But she had collected herself the next moment; had sat up very straight, and smiling wryly, beckoned the young man to come and receive her embrace.

“And after all it’s only Will” she turned to tell us. “Grown uncommonly like his father it’s true - but only Will. And how is it you have left it so long before coming to see your poor old Granny, you bad young man...?”

Wrongly Dressed in Tuscany - and What Rose has in Mind

2007-10-06T09:17:00.000Z

Rose has evidently decided to keep her present intentions a secret. From me at least: for the first time ever I have found myself in the position of waiting for a visit from her, and feeling disappointed when it doesn’t come. I had begun to think I must have imagined it, that conspiratorial look she gave me on leaving Lady Macauley the other day. I was playing my usual game perhaps, of ascribing motive, sniffing subterfuge, where none existed. I had read too much into Rose’s uncharacteristic silence on the subject of Jack and Alice Macauley, and was doomed to find that even she has limits when it comes to plotting acts of sweet revenge... But then I met Pamela on the high street yesterday and the truth - or her interpretation of it at least - was unravelled. I had to wait for it though. Nothing ever occurs in quite straightforward sequence, where Pamela is concerned, and she had a good deal else of which to disburden herself first.

“Well, the knives are out now and no mistake!” was however her first dark observation - which gave me grounds to hope that all was about to be revealed. She had hustled me into a high street cafe and ordered tea and buns before I could protest that the afternoon was warm, and I would really very much rather have had an iced drink. She has been wearing a rather wounded air of late, it seems to me; she appears to think that a week of feeling wrongly dressed in Tuscany was probably too heavy a price to have had to pay for basking in the light of Lady Macauley’s favour –never mind about any little personal remuneration Roland might have expected to receive, for acting as her unofficial adviser.

“Of course we haven’t seen a penny yet” she said. “And Roland thinks it’s entirely on the cards we never will. The honour of the association is supposed to be all in such cases, he believes. Lady Macauley has probably convinced herself, besides, that a holiday in Tuscany was recompense enough, and that we would feel it demeaning to be offered money as well. But it doesn’t seem to us that there can be anything demeaning about receiving payment for services honestly rendered – and just between you and me, the Tuscan experience was a very mixed blessing. You had left by the time we arrived of course, so you missed the worst of it (why did you hurry away like that by the way? We have wondered and wondered about that...). But you can’t think what a bizarre lot they were who wound up the hill every evening in their antiquated limousines! Dripping jewels, and with every kind of trumped-up-looking foreign medal on the men – and this despite the fact that we were supposed to be dining al fresco, and quite informally. Roland found it quite a feat of endurance just to sit it all out, and I must say I was inclined to agree with him. So that what with one thing and another dear, I don’t mind telling you it will be a very long time before we accept another invitation to the Macauley villa!”

I had begun to feel by now that Pamela must have entirely forgotten her opening remark about the knives being out, but she finally made the switch effortlessly enough - digressing only once more, and then only momentarily, to tell me how very smoothly David Porteous and his daughters had been able to adapt themselves to Tuscan conditions.

“You had to marvel at it!” She was prepared to concede that much. “He had all those haughty old dames eating out of his hands in five minutes flat. And his girls were scarcely better – or worse, depending on the way you looked at it. But as Roland said, he was glad it was Imogen Porteous, and no daughter of his who snatched the limelight every evening by talking about Leonardo Da Vinci! She was touching up the frescoes in the porch you know. Making a rather undistinguished job of it, I thought - though to hear her talk about the problems of working before the plaster dried, you’d have thought she must have had studied personally under Leonardo herself... .”

I had heard about all this before of course, from Rose. I mentioned the fact, hoping it would act as a trigger; and when it did not, I went further, coming right out and remarking that Rose had evidently been somewhat dismayed at the prospect of seeing Jack Macauley again.

“Dismayed?” Pamela feelingly replied. “Yes, you could say that – and then go on to magnify it a hundred-fold. She’s all in pieces about it, as a matter of fact. She doesn’t see how she is to get through it at all. He is supposed to have been the great love of her life, you know. You must have heard her talk about it – how each of her husbands was measured against Jack Macauley, and not one of them came even near! The old lady was quick to nip that little affair in the bud. Jack was packed off somewhere abroad immediately; in connection with family business, or so it was said - but it gave Alice her chance to step in. There was a kind of poetic justice about that, I always thought – since in disposing of Rose, the old lady got Alice, whom she never could abide. But it was very unpleasant at the time, I gather, and Rose took it hard. She has been taking it hard for years, if you ask me. She has never forgotten it - and only now, with this new girl coming along for Will, does she see her chance to settle old scores.”

I expressed surprise. I was surprised indeed; having been unaware, until then, that all these things had run so very deep with Rose. I only wondered how it was that she planned to put the scheme in motion?

“Oh well, that’s simple enough!” Pamela’s response was heartfelt, though delivered with a rather unpleasant little laugh. “She means to take the girl in hand. Promote her cause you know, in a hundred clandestine little ways. She will advise her about her clothes, and her hair, and her deportment. She might take the mother on, even: she doesn’t think the poor woman can be quite beyond one’s help."

Rose 'knew the form by now', as Pamela went on to explain to me. “She hasn’t deferred and curtseyed all these years after all, without learning a thing or two. She will befriend the pair, conferring upon them all the wisdom of her own hindsight. She’ll tell them which forks to use, when to fall gracefully silent, and when speak out. She means to endow them with all the little airs and graces she only learnt herself, too late - she’ll polish them up, in short, and show them how to marry a Macauley, in Lady Macauley’s teeth!”

There seemed to me very little one could say in response to all this, so I didn’t try. Pamela’s narration had come to its natural end, and she seemed to be experiencing a little moment of triumph of her own. Which made me wonder if she perhaps meant to take advantage of the situation, for settling scores of her own and Roland’s? I didn’t voice this however, and we parted shortly after that; I having contributed nothing more useful to the conversation than the light-hearted observation that I hoped we weren’t about to see real social violence enacted between the walls of the Macauley house. It was lame of me, I knew; it was timid and inadequate. I ought to have had the courage of my convictions, and come down on one side or the other – but for the life of me, right there on the spot, I wasn’t able to decide which one.

Intimations of change

2007-10-01T13:36:00.000Z

And after all, I have had little time in which to dwell upon present and future loneliness. I have been taken up by Lady Macauley myself indeed; to the extent that, by virtue of my close connection to Bill, who has been unofficially crowned its head, I am now considered a member of the immediate family, and must be consulted at every moment, about every one of the old lady’s current preoccupations. Chief of these just now is the marriage of Belle and Bill, which she thinks ought to take place sooner rather than later, and which must of course be just as magnificent an affair as our combined imaginations can contrive to make it. Belle quails at the prospect of so much magnificence, and has been doing her best to rein her mother in. Bill on the other hand finds it all rather entertaining, and believes they might just as well give the old lady her head. Since so long as she’s making plans, she isn’t acting, he maintains – and they will end by having the wedding they want themselves in any case.

It had occurred to me that the chief interest of the thing would be in watching to see which of these two conflicting view-points would prevail. I was inclined to put my money on Bill, who wasn’t easy to shift when once he’d made up his mind to something, as I very well knew. Though Lady Macauley would undoubtedly put up a spirited fight; and in the interim, it did seem as if we were likely to go on in this comfortably inconclusive way for many weeks to come. But something occurred on Saturday which changed all that, causing much perturbation in the Macauley household, and sending Lady Macauley’s preoccupations lurching off in quite another direction. Bill phoned me directly after breakfast, and said I had better come over at once – he wouldn’t go into it now, but everything was in uproar at the house, and the wedding plans had been summarily suspended. I found them all sitting in Belle’s little panelled parlour over coffee; Rose was there too, which made me feel that events must have taken a serious turn indeed.

“Ah there you are at last!” Lady Macauley’s greeting to me was rather peremptory, I thought; as if she had read into my absence some calculated attempt at disturbing, or at least delaying proceedings. She gave me a glance of some disapproval; after which, scarcely waiting for me to seat myself, and receive my cup of coffee from Belle, she launched at once into an account of the fresh trials that had come along to beset her.

“A letter from Alice has arrived this morning, would you believe it?” she announced. “It would be an event to be cherished of course in the normal run of things, so rarely does it occur. But what she tells us this time is that they mean to come down to us at any moment, in connection with some entirely impossible girl to whom young Will is threatening to get himself engaged. Nothing but a crisis of that dimension would have driven Alice to the extremity of coming down to us of course, and she’ll be taking it hard. She’ll have had to muster all her resources, just to endure the thought of it – never mind about what it’s going to require of her to drive off the unfortunate girl! But they expect to avail themselves of some of our resources too. They ask to stay with us - I believe the girl herself, and her mother, are expected to come here too, at some point: Alice evidently wants to have them under her eye, the better to demonstrate their awfulness to Will….”

“Heaven alone knows where we’ll put them all, of course!" she went on, after the shortest of pauses for breath. "Or what we’ll give them to eat - or simply do with them, while they’re here! The Mama is certain to be a horror for a start. I can just see her, can’t you? All hair-do, and shiny skirts, and unpleasant little sling-back shoes. She’ll want to tell us how everything here is just like something else she has at home – and will turn the plates up, over luncheon, just to show her knowledge of the makers’ marks. It will be too dreadful ... And the girl will stick like glue! Impossible girls always do - they are born with that accomplishment, and few others that one can think of….. So that in short, Bea dear, and Rose, we’re thrown all in a heap at the prospect before us, Belle and Bill and I, and will be looking to you both at every turn, just to see us through!”

I found this rather a lot to try to take in all at once. I hardly knew at first who Alice was – until I remembered that she was the girl who had ‘marched away’, as Lady Macauley was fond of putting it, with her adored only son, Jack, and had kept him incarcerated at her Scottish castle ever since. This was intriguing – but more intriguing still was watching Rose’s immediate reaction. Rose had a small, tight smile upon her face, and seemed to be thinking hard. She was evidently seeing in all this things which nobody else saw: she had been in love with the younger Jack Macauley herself at one time, after all – and she too had been judged the impossible girl. I thought it likely she was hatching some little plot of her own. I should find out what it was in due time, of course; nothing was more certain than that. But in the meantime, I had the strongest possible suspicion that it would turn out to be something that Lady Macauley wasn’t going to like!

I knew that some direct response was required of me however, so I remarked, as brightly as I could, that perhaps the girl and her mother would turn out not to be quite so bad as Lady Macauley feared? I went further, and suggested that since, as I understood it, she and her daughter-in-law had seldom found agreement over anything, they would be likely to differ in this too – and Lady Macauley might find that in fact she rather liked the girl! It was a bold move, and might have back-fired badly. But I had learnt by now that the old lady liked best those people who seemed least afraid of her, so I stood my ground, smiling as bravely as I could. Astonishingly, she seemed to think that there might be something in what I said. She considered it a while, and then agreed that Alice and she would doubtless see things very differently – and though she remained determined to deplore the mother, she might stretch a point perhaps, and give the girl herself a chance.

She decided that the only way forward now, was to go all over the house together, to see if there were any out-of-the way corners, or closets – or cupboards if it came to that! - in which we could conceivably accommodate all these importunate people. For herself, there was only one stipulation, but it was written in stone – that their rooms should be as far removed as possible from her own. She would join them for dinner at nights, sometimes, she said; and now and then possibly even for luncheon. But at all other times and repasts - and especially over tea, which had become a little ceremony consecrated to Bill and Belle and herself, alone - they would have to shift for themselves.

Having delivered herself of which injunction, and apparently feeling very much more settled about it all, she took hold of Bill’s arm happily enough, and set off for her tour of the house. She seemed to have forgotten my presence by then, so I slipped quietly away. And so did Rose – though not without the kind of meaningful backward glance at me, as we parted, that told me she would be over at the gatehouse giving me her view of the situation, before many hours had passed.

Part Three: One dream or another

2007-09-27T10:34:00.000Z

Our summer has not yet quite ended, though the weather has suddenly turned colder, and I wonder if I can have missed it yet again - that moment I look for and fail to capture every year, when summer tips over imperceptibly into Autumn? Over on the other side of the Channel though, this year’s Tuscan experience has apparently wound quietly to its close. The Porteouses and the Baineses are already home, and Lady Macauley and the others are to return at any moment. Bill evidently means to go back there again just as soon as he possibly can, however. He has grape, and olive harvests to oversee now, he tells me. He might be a novice at the task, but he’s learning fast – he seemed scarcely able to contain his glee at the prospect, even through the medium of an erratic telephone line.

I too have put away my Tuscan dreams. I have folded them neatly and stowed them in the attic with my suitcases. And there they must remain. At least until I should have some sign from Cesare, that what seemed to have begun for us in the villa garden that night has not ended, but might yet be stirred into fragile life. I am not optimistic on that front however. I don’t believe I am the sort for whom romantic dreams often materialise; and that siren voice which whispers to me now and then from treacherous places, “Why not?”, has been firmly, if not entirely convincingly silenced.

I have twice been back to the Macauley house to replenish the roses in Lady Macauley’s bedroom, and to ensure that everything remains perfectly prepared for her return. I have spring-cleaned Bill’s side of the gatehouse too. A rather melancholy task, as it turned out, since I think it unlikely he will live there again, and I wonder what is to become of it? Those things aside, I have been spending as much time as I can with Frances. I had managed to see so very little of her of late, and I feared she might have been feeling side-lined – especially in light of the fact that, of all those invited to stay at the Macauley villa, only she had been excluded.

She seems not to have minded too much: it's that old feud between Lady Macauley and her grandmother that's behind it all, she believes, and try as she will, she hasn't yet seen any way of resolving it. She's very much preoccupied besides, with the new domestic arrangements at the manor house. Tomek, her Polish builder, has completed his task, and done it splendidly; she hardly knows what to do with all these splendid bedrooms and bathrooms - though Tomek tells her she could accommodate half the Polish population of London if she wished! She assures me it is just a little joke between them, and that Tomek knows quite as well as she does, that she could undertake no such thing. She has apparently remained on very good terms with Tomek, and hopes to persuade him that it would be a very good thing - for him, as well as herself – if he were to consent to slip into Mr Jessop's shoes, when that good old man finally retires in December.

We had made our usual little tour of the latest improvements when I called at the manor house this afternoon. Frances had wanted to show me the new curtains she and Tomek had chosen for one of the upper front bedrooms, and we happened to be standing at its window looking out, at the moment when the Macauley Daimler rolled past, bringing the family home again from Italy. Bill was at the wheel this time, Lady Macauley upright beside him, and Belle leaning towards him from the back. There was a rightness about it which Frances perfectly encapsulated when she cried out “Oh my goodness look, there’s Bill! Looking every inch his splendid self despite having been swallowed up lately by the Macauleys.”

Her remark had been impulsive, and she evidently felt the need to apologise for it at once. “Of course I don’t mean that he’s actually been swallowed up!” she hastened to assure me. “Bill would never be that – he’s far too much his own man to allow any such thing. But you know how it is with Lady Macauley – that when once she finds someone she likes, she simply gobbles him up.”

I laughed, and said I knew exactly what she meant; but that Bill would undoubtedly prove quite a mouthful, even for Lady Macauley.

“I think that on the whole he’s quite happy to have been gobbled up” I replied. “Since it means he can now take up his life with Belle in perfect freedom. And then think of all the benefits that have come to him along with it. Suddenly to have been put in charge of a little wine and olive farm, you know - it must make his patch of vegetables at the gatehouse seem small indeed. I don’t believe that in his wildest dreams he ever expected to find himself in such a position.”

We agreed that it was a splendid thing for Bill – and that all things considered, it couldn’t have happened to a better, or a less corruptible man. “Bill won’t seek to take advantage, that’s the great thing” Frances thoughtfully observed. “Lady Macauley must be rubbing her hands together, don’t you think? When she considers what other kind of man Belle might have taken up with, that is. She might have found someone who would prove greedy and unscrupulous – and then it would be the old lady herself who’d have been swallowed whole!”

The shadow of David Porteous had momentarily seemed to pass between us with these last words, and it pulled me up short. I had often wanted to mention his name, to talk with Frances in all freedom again about the aftermath of her engagement. But there had been an awkwardness about it; a gap had sprung up around it which I had never seen any way of bridging. I was surprised therefore, when Frances took it up herself, with perfect candour and no apparent embarrassment.

“I understand that David tried and failed with Belle....” she volunteered. “I knew he would: it was too great an opportunity for him to pass by. And I think he might have succeeded, had circumstances been different, and Bill hadn’t stepped in..... Bill is so much better for her of course, but even so - Lady Macauley was very fond of David, I believe ; it might have worked.”

There was a wistfulness about it that took me by surprise. I hadn’t expected this degree of continuing goodwill on Frances’s part towards her former lover. I had thought she would be glad to know he had been thwarted in what she must have seen as this new attempt of his at personal advancement – I know I would have been myself! She seemed to shrug herself out of this mood of introspection with some difficulty. Remarking only that David would surprise us all yet, nothing surer; and leaving me with the impression that after all she would be sorry if he didn’t. Which led me to wonder, not for the first time, what it was about women who had loved an unworthy man, that made them want to see him succeed in spite of everything?

“The improvements were meant for David, you know” she went on. “It was so awkward for him to have to go out into corridors to reach the bathroom – and then he felt that Mrs Meade was always lurking about somewhere... He thought she disliked him – installing a bathroom or two seemed a small thing to do to make him happy.”

It occurred to me that it had taken a good deal more than just a bathroom or two to make David Porteous happy. He had required in addition that Mrs Meade should be dismissed, and Frances herself improved and altered beyond all recognition. What he had wanted was nothing less than a full-scale transformation of the manor house, and everything and everyone in it – and even then it hadn’t been enough! I said no such thing to Frances of course; I contented myself with murmuring something palliative, and bland. But I left her half an hour later with the distinct sense that she had not yet entirely relinquished the past. That there was a part of her which clung still to the idea that if things - if she herself perhaps? - had only been different, and there had been no Mrs Meade, or Bill, or Belle Macauley ... her marriage to David might after all have taken place.

I was unsettled when I left her – but back at the gatehouse, I was overjoyed to find Bill. He was sitting in one of my armchairs waiting for me, and had all the appearance of one who had come home again to stay. The appearance was illusory, of course. He had come only to pack a few things, he was quick to tell me that; his old rucksack was bulging on the floor beside him. He was sorrier than he could say to have to do this to me at such short notice, and would stay an hour or two at least, for old times’ sake – I thought he had never looked so reassuringly large, so eminently safe, as when he said it.

But after that – well, he must go where Belle was now, didn’t I see? Since wherever she was, was home. It was a sentiment I thought beautiful in its simplicity. I couldn’t have wished to hear him express a better one – so why was it that when he had gone, I sat down and wept?

An hour alone in the Macauley House

2007-09-20T14:21:00.000Z

I visited the deserted Macauley house today, having been deputed to do so by Rose, who left me with a key and asked me if I would go in there and check that everything was just as it should be before Lady Macauley’s return, which she believes to be imminent. It is a little service that Rose generally performs herself. The elderly Downeys who keep house there are all very well, she tells me, but they are growing old and slipshod, and can no longer be entirely counted upon to get things right.

It’s just a question of seeing that windows have been opened and beds properly aired, I was advised. Of checking that the refrigerator is stocked with essential items, and perhaps of gathering a bunch or two of fresh flowers from Belle’s garden - scented ones if possible, to dispel the mustiness that always seems to accumulate in the old house after an absence of any duration. Oh, and of plumping cushions everywhere, Rose added as an afterthought. There is nothing which offends Lady Macauley quite so much as a cushion that looks as if it had been sat upon lately by someone else!

I was glad enough to go. The days have been hanging rather heavily on me, if the truth be known; and I had a certain curiosity besides, to see just how the old house functions in Lady Macauley’s absence. I have never quite been able to understand how two women can exist comfortably in so large, and inconvenient a place; it seems to me they inhabit just one small corner of it these days, and that it must be the old lady’s indomitable spirit alone, which keeps things going. I went there in the early afternoon, by which time I knew that the Downeys would have completed their own duties and retired, exhausted, to their quarters on the second floor. I entered by way of the heavy black door that opens out of the kitchen yard, and stood a moment in the dim passageway while my eyes adjusted to the change of light.

This part of the house is the old servants’ quarters, now become Belle’s own domain. A series of small, square, dark-panelled rooms opening out of one another; still bearing names like the sewing room, and the housekeeper’s room, and the butler’s parlour – and giving rise, eventually, to the short flight of creaking wooden stairs that leads down to the basement. Where Jack Macauley long ago created what was then his impressively modern and capacious kitchen, and where Belle, these days, is accustomed to seek what hours of respite she can from her mother’s continuing demands.

I could see why Belle is so fond of the basement rooms. The afternoon sun finds its way down there through a series of surprisingly large, if heavily barred windows; they give the basement something of the aspect of a dungeon when viewed from outside, yet seen from within are altogether cheerful and friendly - especially when the sun streams in so very pleasantly, as it did for me today. Here, I thought, standing to gaze and drink in the atmosphere for a while, must Belle have passed so many of the hours of her lonely girlhood and early womanhood. Here, perhaps, had she dreamed what must often have seemed her foolish, fruitless dreams: despaired of at last by her mother, pitied by other, more overtly successful women, especially Rose. Here, had she begun to suppose that life had passed her by forever, and she must end her days alone. And here, lately, had she finally come with Bill. To sit quietly over tea after walking the dogs; to warm themselves beside the open range in winter, and in the sun of summer - and to find friendship, and then love, blossoming unexpectedly at last.

Why then, when the rooms down there were so pleasant ( and there is another, across from the kitchen on the garden side, a bright little room bathed in afternoon light, and scented by the lavender that grows in boxes on the windowsill; Belle uses it as her private sitting room and occasional bedroom, and it was the place, I felt certain,to which she had probably brought Bill, on the afternoon of Lady Macauley’s birthday party) .... Why, when everything there seemed bathed in the light of Belle’s happy change of circumstance, did I have the vague sense that everything was about to change; that events were spinning out of my, out of everyone’s control, and nothing would ever be quite the same again?

I seem to remember that I shivered a little, in the warmth of the sun. And closed the door of Belle’s inner sanctum; feeling I had no place there, but ought to go quietly away, leaving it to await her own return with Bill. I returned, myself, briefly to the kitchen; checking that the refrigerator was stocked with the items Rose had enumerated, that the windows had evidently been opened and closed that day, and that a small bowl of garden flowers stood on the dresser, and another, larger one, in the middle of the table.... The Downeys had evidently done their work a good deal better than Rose had foreseen, I observed; and then I hurried away, back up the creaking stairs, and through the heavy swing door that gave admittance to the hall.

This is the grand, the formal part of the house. Still known to Lady Macauley as the state apartments; where she herself is accustomed to find a cushioned sofa in a sunny corner in which to sit, or hold court in the afternoons - and where Jack Macauley’s improvements seem to have had least, or least sustainable effect. It was curious to me to see how stoutly this part of the house had resisted the effects of modernisation. It must have been extensively altered, and made homely enough once, I thought. The Macauleys had lived here as a family after all, for almost forty years: there must once have been friendly chairs, and well-loved ornaments, and all the cosy accoutrements of ordinary family life. But somehow, the old atmosphere, the old high-backed chairs and pompous cabinets had crept back. So that it was not Macauley shadows, but the shadows of figures from a more distant, forgotten past, that I most seemed to apprehend there today. The house had had its inexorable way, I thought: had reverted back by some unfathomable process of its own to a period that existed long before Jack Macauley came to put his stamp on it.

This is also the part of the house where the old chapel used to be, of course; where patches of coldness still exist, and Lady Macauley had felt the lingering presence of the ghostly priest. And though the chapel itself has long since gone; swept up into the body of the hall, its presence further neutralised lately by lavish application of the cream-coloured paint that David Porteous advocated; and made cheerful enough today by arrangements of expensively authentic-looking artificial flowers in coloured bowls... though all these things have been accomplished and the sun streamed in, yet I sensed the coldness still, and found myself glancing backwards now and then, as I climbed the ornate staircase to the upper rooms.

It was in Lady Macauley’s private apartments on the first floor that I experienced the strongest intimation yet that everything was about to change. How it was going to change I couldn’t have said. Only that everything here seemed poised and waiting – the very tapestries on the wall, the drawn window curtains, and Lady Macauley’s silk negligée, hanging on her dressing room door. It was pure impulse, I think, which prompted me to fold down a corner of the bed-covers, to take up the silk negligée, folding it neatly, and draping it against the massed cushions on her bed. Impulse too perhaps, which drove me down into the garden to gather an armful of late-flowering yellow roses, and make a pretty display of them beside the bed.

The effect was a happy one, dispelling shadows, and restoring a sense of normality to the scene. So that I was able to close the door and take my leave, without any sense that I had intruded; without apprehension, or any looking back. Here at least, I thought, was the presence only of Lady Macauley. The old lady herself was everywhere - and so, in some scarcely calculable way, was her beloved Jack. Which seemed proof enough to me that change might come, and probably would; but that human love and the human spirit were virtually inextinguishable, when only they were strong enough. I let myself out of the back door of the house again with equanimity quite restored. I would never see the old place in just that way again perhaps – but suddenly it no longer mattered, since whatever came next was likely to be so very much better.

On reflection, this seems the better place in which to end Part Two. The third, and final part, will therefore begin with the next instalment.

What Rose said next

2007-09-13T11:34:00.000Z

Rose was well into her stride by the time the second pot of coffee had brewed. She told me while she waited for it how much she enjoyed these nice long chats of ours: the great thing about me, she said, being the fact that I have so very little real involvement with events, and therefore no particular axe to grind. I didn’t see that this description did me any great credit – I’d have liked to have been thought just a little more closely involved in events than that! But I resisted the temptation to protest: judging that to have done so would have been an act of folly on my part, since to divert Rose now would be to send her careering off in directions that might have little bearing on the things I really wanted to hear.

I nudged her gently instead in the direction of Bill and Belle. I asked her how she thought they were holding up, beneath the close and continued scrutiny of Lady Macauley and all the others at the villa? Which was perhaps a calculated risk on my part, and might have invoked observations and opinions I’d really rather not have heard - but which in fact had the effect, just as I had hoped, of triggering a fresh conversational torrent from Rose.

“Oh Bill goes from strength to strength in the old lady’s estimation!” she acknowledged. “He can do no wrong whatever. Well, he never could of course, in her eyes, could he? She took to him unreservedly from the first. But now that he’s to be her son-in-law, he’s rocketed into some kind of stratosphere - and the only danger one can foresee is that people will grow bored with hearing about his virtues. It helps of course that Lady M is half in love him herself! She would have to have been, wouldn’t she, for the affair to have had any hope of succeeding at all? It was very clever of Belle to have found herself a man who bears so striking a physical resemblance to Sir Jack! She might have gone for quite another type - she has done so more than once in the past, with results that have been more or less catastrophic. But with Bill on her arm, she has suddenly become a person of importance in her mother’s eyes. The capacity to win and hold an impressive man - it’s the only quality the old lady respects in a woman, say what she will to the contrary. And now that Belle has achieved it, she can hardly be considered, or deferred to enough. It’s dear Belle and darling Belle all over the place now, you know – she’s even talking of engaging a nurse, or a paid companion, just so that Belle is left free to devote herself to Bill!”

This seemed an encouraging development in my eyes – though I was to learn the next moment that it also had its downside. Lady Macauley could become as captious in Tuscany as anywhere else, and her delight in being the mother of a splendidly engaged daughter was beginning to wear just a little thin. She had been charmed by everything for a week - after which she had begun to grow querulous again, and to find fault with most arrangements. This had manifested itself first, and most of all in Florence, which they had visited as a party one day last week, and which, in the absence of Bill and Belle - whom she had she sent off to explore alone, ‘as lovers should' - had suddenly become impossible in her eyes. The streets were devoid of breathable air, she complained; their labyrinthine quality oppressed her, and the cobbles hurt her feet!

There were only so many marble statues one could look at without prostration, besides! She knew them all, the Madonnas and the Davids and the Moseses (“Heavens, what kind of a word was that?”). They were very remarkable of course, and Jack had loved them - but for a tired old woman they had too much about them of the tombstone and the grave. She had quite enough of that to come, she announced to the assembled company, as they sat over iced drinks in a shaded cafe. And she thought it would turn out to be a poor sort of reward indeed, for having lived one’s interminable life, if one were to arrive in heaven only to find it awash with statues by Michelangelo!

All this information was delivered by Rose in her usual deadpan style, with few pauses for breath. She seemed to see in it grounds for supposing that the Tuscan idyll was drawing to its natural end, at least for Lady Macauley; and that if she wished to enjoy any more of it herself, she would have to get a flight as soon as possible, and hurry back. And that there were others in the immediate party who would be sadly disappointed if the experience were to be brought to a premature close, she intimated, and enlarged upon next...

“David Porteous and his daughters have taken to it quite as to the manor born, you know. He’s in his element, as you can imagine; and his girls are making quite a show just now, with their frescoes, never mind about their bikini-clad persons by the pool! Poor Roland hardly seems to know where to put his eyes – and Pamela is quietly fuming. I believe it will be an infinite mercy to her when this whole thing has quietly ended – the strain of keeping up appearances is beginning rather dismally to show. Imogen has meanwhile been experimenting with painting on wet plaster in the loggia. Just as Leonardo did, she says – she has always longed to try it. It has created quite a stir, though I confess the intricacies of it are lost on me, and I think she’d probably have done much better to have let the plaster dry a little, first - the effects are rather blurred, at present.... Her father has gone down a treat of course, with all those old countesses, who think him very comme il faut and charming, and simply can’t get enough of him. There’s one in particular – she claims Medici descent, though from the look of her, I’d say she’s much more likely to have descended from Machiavelli! She has invited him to go and stay with her in Florence – she has some kind of a fantastic house there, apparently, and a daughter whom she’d like him to meet....”

It had begun to seem to me, listening to Rose’s account of the effect that David Porteous and his daughters had had upon life at the villa, that I had perhaps fled the scene at just the right moment. Though when she informed me in the next breath that they all, the Porteous contingent and the Baines one, were shortly to make their departure, and that the last days were to be spent quietly with just the family and herself, I began to have a change of heart, and wonder if I dared return?

Rose herself dispelled such thoughts for me with her next remark however. Again, she seemed to have read my thoughts; and there were all the signs of mischievous, if not distinctly malign intent, when she informed me that “Cesare has been asking where you’ve gone. He seemed quite disappointed when you weren’t of the party at the palazzo to meet his mother. You could do worse than get a foot in that establishment, you know – though I have to confess that I always wonder where the money has come from, in these deep old Italian families. There’s always the whiff of a Mafia connection, don’t you think? Of course that could be pure fantasy on my part - I’ve watched ‘The Godfather’ too many times perhaps? And Lady M tells me not to be absurd, anyway: she has known that family forever, she says, and there’s not a word to be said against them....”

It was vintage Rose, and throwaway stuff enough. But it was also enough to stop me in my tracks. And I quietly decided that an hour or two of thrilling conversation in a garden were not enough; that I was building romantic castles in the air where none existed, and that until I had received further word from Cesare myself, I would take no steps of my own to try to renew acquaintance with him. It depressed me though – and after Rose had finally gone away, I stomped off to the common with the dogs in quite a foul mood.

With some misgiving, I have decided to end Part Two at this point, and to begin the third and final part of the story with the next instalment. I realize now that the existing Part One is much too long, and stands in rather awkward juxtaposition with the two succeeding parts – but I’m confident I shall be able to put this right when I come to edit, and complete the final draft (offline!).

Rose gives her account

2007-09-11T09:31:00.001Z

The lonely days continue, so that I sometimes wonder what it could have been, precisely, that brought me home ahead of time, and whether the others will ever return from Tuscany at all? I have been tending Bill’s vegetables ( his tomatoes are splendid!), and walking the dogs daily; but from the glances I receive from other dog-walkers on the common, I glean the fact that my presence there is seen as no substitute for Bill’s. People stop me to ask about him, often, and I have been at a loss to know how much I ought to reveal about his change of status.

Only the Brigadier, beneath whose sternly military exterior there evidently beats a rather sentimental heart – only the Brigadier has seen, or guessed the truth. He thinks it an excellent development. “Two people who were made for each other if ever there was such a thing!” he barked at me yesterday ( I remain uncertain as to whether I ought best to curtsey, or salute, at the end of one of his pronouncements). He only wonders if Bill will have the stamina to ‘square up to the old lady’.

I have wondered a good deal about this myself. Sitting alone in the gatehouse in the evenings, I have tried to picture them at the villa; and it has seemed to me that wherever they are, and whatever they should happen to be doing at any given moment, whether breakfasting in the loggia or sitting beneath the plane trees in the heat of the long afternoons, it is Lady Macauley’s voice I hear, and hers the presence which, above all others, decides and manipulates events.

I was engaged in just such reflections over coffee in the kitchen this morning. I was telling myself that if Lady Macauley were ever going to defer to anyone, it would be to Bill, and that, really, I ought to have more confidence in him. I ought to have learnt by now at least, that his is the kind of broad geniality which enables him not so much to engage with obstacles, as simply to fail to notice they are there. I was enjoying my reflections, and had been transported by them so very far, so entirely blissfully away, that the sudden appearance of Rose on the garden path, operated rather as an apparition might have done - or at any rate as a rather disagreeable jolt.

She guessed my thoughts – she always does. “You look as if you had seen a ghost!” she laughed, coming into the kitchen and flopping down, as always, on her favourite stool. “But it’s only me, returned unexpectedly, and only for the least possible number of days.... I had family matters to attend to here, but I mean to return at once. I daren’t turn my back on them all for more than two seconds, if you want to know the truth, events are moving there at such a pace.”

I was prepared on this occasion to let her have her head. That she had much to relate I didn’t doubt; and that she would slant it in such a way as to reflect her own best interests most of all, was doubtless also. But I was prepared, for once, to overlook small irritations – my thirst for information being on this occasion greater than my distaste for what I have come to think of as the ‘Mountjoy twist’.

Her first offering was not altogether to my liking, for all that. There was something patently mischievous, malicious almost, in her announcement that they had all gone, yesterday, to visit ‘my’ Cesare, and his almost inconceivably ancient mother, in what she called their preposterous palazzo, in Lucca.

“You’ve never seen such a place!” she exclaimed. “You have to penetrate deep into the heart of the town to find it – I was amazed at Bill’s courage, in daring to take the car down so many narrow back streets! And then when you do find it, it looks more like a warehouse or a prison, than a house. You know the sort of thing I’m sure. No concession whatever to houses as we know them: just a vast gate in an impenetrable wall, so that if you haven’t got your glasses on, or don’t peer in the right place, you would quite miss the little brass plate that tells you it’s the Palazzo Restorelli, and that you have to ring for entry...”

I fear my face must have betrayed the agitation I felt, as Rose launched without warning into this account of their visit to the Palazzo Restorelli, which I knew to be the home of the man with the deep Italian eyes who had affected me so unexpectedly at the engagement dinner. There was a part of me which urged her on, longing as I did to hear anything – everything – about him. I drank deep, for three minutes, of her account of the beautiful formal garden at the palazzo, of the dim splendour of the indoor rooms, and the way in which Cesare had finally presented his ancient mother, as if she were the most precious being on earth...

But I finally experienced a deep aversion to hearing these things from Rose; who would have liked Cesare for herself, I knew, and who would for that reason be at pains to try to belittle him in my eyes. I pulled her up short therefore – I am hardly able to describe the sheer effort of will it cost me to do it. I switched the subject as adroitly, and apparently casually as I could; I said that Cesare and his aged mother were very well, but that one old countess, one palazzo, were much like any other, when you came right down to it - and that what was of more immediate present interest to me was to know how life in the villa went on, and how Pamela and Roland in particular, were adjusting to it? Mercifully, she took the bait, and swallowed it, almost without appearing to draw breath.

“Oh well, they’re soldiering on you know” she said. “But pretty much out of their depth, as you can imagine. And striking the one false note, if you ask me. Poor Pamela has brought all the wrong sorts of clothes to wear, for a start! She never thought there would be any call for a bathing suit; she turned quite pale at the prospect, and looks most peculiar, sitting beside the pool in her voluminous skirts.... She has never had any experience of sun-screen either, so has turned a very painful-looking shade of puce! And then at dinner, she swathes herself in the usual chiffon – whilst everyone else manages an effect of casual chic. Not the Lucchese grandees of course. They get themselves up pretty spectacularly too - but somehow the achieved effect is entirely different....”

“And Roland...?” But for Roland, Rose felt the need to make a longish pause, evidently momentarily lost for words. “Well, what can one say about Roland, except that when once he has delivered himself of his legal advice - which occupied about one hour, on the very first day - he’s left gasping like a stranded minnow, amongst all those super-refined old Italians whom Lady M will keep inviting up to the villa. He wears a short-sleeved shirt, with tie, at dinner you know. He looks most carefully at his range of cutlery, then tries to follow everyone else without being noticed. I think every mouthful must be an acute ordeal for him. He and Pamela sit mute, at table, for the most part – oh, they open their mouths to speak every now and then, but evidently decide against it. On the grounds, one assumes, of their having nothing whatever to say. Sadly, it only adds to the general fish-out-of-water effect that they create. None of the visiting Nobiltà seems to have the least idea of who they are, or what to make of them....”

Rose was well into her stride by now, and obviously had a great deal more to tell. I despised myself a little for wishing to encourage her – but my own desire for knowledge was acute, so I quietly refilled the coffee pot and settled back, as if for the duration...

This part of the story has run-on almost without my bidding, and still has failed to accommodate all I want to say. Seldom have I felt more in need of the luxury of a full chapter in which to spread myself – so I have decided to send caution to the winds, and let it run to a second instalment.

With one foot still in Tuscany

2007-09-07T12:47:00.000Z

Early morning in the gatehouse, usually the most pleasant time of day for me; and I am doing my best to adjust to life at home again. But the hum of the refrigerator has the sound, to my ears, of the cicadas in Tuscany; the smell of coffee brewing reminds me that this will not be the coffee of Italy; and the idea that the sweet, charmed life of the villa goes on even in my absence – that breakfast will be in process of being laid out on white-clothed tables in the shade of the old loggia even as I sit here writing; that Bill and Belle will soon be walking together along rows of vines, or in the olive groves, making their plans for the future; and that somewhere must be the distant sound of farm dogs barking, and machinery starting up.... all these things have such a hold on my imagination still, that I am finding it hard to resist the impulse to phone an airline and book another flight to Pisa.

Bill’s vegetable garden has a melancholy look now, since I doubt that he will ever return to it. Oh, he will come home again of course, all in the fullness of time. But it is unlikely he will take up residence again in his side of the gatehouse. He has been taken up by the Macauleys now; he is their man, with all that it implies of being the overseer of grapevines, and of fields of olives, and the newly acknowledged Grand Seigneur of the Villa Jack Macauley.

I am filled with joy for him, of course. Doting sister that I am, I had feared a little, lately, for his future. It had seemed unlikely that he would find love again, after the deeply unpleasant collapse of his marriage; and I had suspected that, with the restoration of his health, and in the absence of anything better to do, he would inevitably drift back again, into the perilous, shifting life of the roving reporter. That he will do no such thing now; that he has found new directions and an absorbing new way of life, as well as lasting and fulfilling love – these things ought to be of the greatest possible sisterly satisfaction to me. And are indeed – or will be, just as soon as I have adjusted to the thought (and I acknowledge it as a selfish, an unworthy one) that in them is no real place that I can presently think of, for me.

Bill phoned last night to tell me that a new party of guests has arrived at the villa. David Porteous is there now, doing his best to look unperturbed by recent events. But failing a little in the attempt, Bill observes – since it cannot have escaped his notice that he has slipped sideways somewhat, in Lady Macauley’s regard; and that the position of acknowledged suitor to Belle he had hoped would be his own, is now very firmly occupied by Bill himself. His daughters are there too; and very pretty they look, Bill tells me, especially when reclining beside the pool in their bikinis.

Lady Macauley is evidently very fond of them; especially of pretty Amy, whom she seems to think will provide an interest for her grandson Will, Jack and Alice's boy, when he comes to visit her in London in the Autumn. For Imogen, her sentiments are evidently rather more mixed – though she likes the way the girl stands up to her in conversation, which shows a commendable spirit, she thinks. And she has already engaged her in another connection, to take up her painter’s palette, and see what she can do to restore the faded frescoes in the loggia. Bill seems to think she is making a rather good job of it, so far.

Pamela had something to say about all these things when I called on her yesterday. “Rose tells me that our dear David is smarting visibly over the failure of his plans” she informed me. “It can’t be easy for him, seeing another man slipping into the shoes he’d hoped would be his. He will require every bit of his practised urbanity to see him through. But I expect he’ll prove himself equal to it – he's equal to most things. And perhaps dear Lady Macauley will find something else for him out there after all? I’m told she has any number of distinguished Italian friends – perhaps she will produce some fascinating countess out of her hat, to compensate him for his loss?"

"Roland and I look forward to meeting some of these people ourselves in fact, when we go out there next week." Pamela went on almost without pause for breath; she was certainly not interested in any contribution I might have wished to make to the conversation. "Roland is Lady Macauley’s acknowledged solicitor now, you know. Such an unexpected distinction for him, late in life. He had thought himself retired, but has been very much involved, with drafting all kinds of new documents for her – he has hardly had a moment to spare in several weeks. But I daresay I shouldn’t be discussing this sort of thing with you - since it most of all pertains to Bill, and to Lady Macauley’s determination to make him joint heir with Belle - at least on the Italian side of things.... She had believed she would have to sell the villa and all its lands, you know, none of the men in her family having any interest in running it. But now here has come Bill, cast so in the mould of her own Jack, she says; so splendidly large, so reassuringly capable - and with such a taste for agriculture, that the villa's future seems assured again. ”

Pamela’s manner was lofty, arch almost, as she delivered herself of all this information. She is very much assured of her position at the Macauley court these days. It has enabled her to hold her head very high; she has dispensed entirely with any feelings of slight she might have suffered in the past - especially those involving David Porteous, whom she now sees as entirely yesterday’s man. She seems to think, too, that her new position gives her leave to be ever so faintly – oh, indiscernibly almost! - patronising towards me. She is at pains of course, to conceal the fact: she wouldn’t like me to think that she gives herself airs of any kind! And she does concede to me the distinction, at least, of being the sister of Bill; whom she evidently holds in the highest possible regard, as the real, and really rather glorious hero of the hour. She parted from me yesterday with the hope that I too, would have the happiness of being able to rejoin them all for another few days at the Macauley villa.

“Do think of coming out again dear, while we’re there!” she entreated. “I’m sure Lady Macauley would be delighted to receive you – and from all I hear, there’s room enough for all of us in that splendid house! “

But there is nothing that Pamela can tell me about that splendid house that I haven’t already seen, and experienced for myself. I yearn for it, in truth. I yearn for the splendour, and yet the simplicity of it. I believe that if the conditions were right, and Lady Macauley, or Bill and Belle, were to suggest it, I could easily shed every aspect of my present life; could close the door of the gatehouse and jump on a flight to Pisa tomorrow, with only a single suitcase in my hand, and with the idea of giving myself up to the charm of the Tuscan lifestyle forever.

That I have a special reason for feeling this way is a fact, yet no part of my brief as narrator of these events. Properly speaking, I am not expected to have a life, and still less any kind of a dream of my own. Yet sooner or later I believe I shall be impelled to reveal the astonishing truth – that there was one especially enchanted evening in which a stately fleet of old cars wound its way up the hill to the villa; that jewels and medals sparkled, and ancient bosoms were exposed to moonlight, as we dined at tables set up beneath a tremendous plane tree to celebrate the engagement of Bill and Belle; and that my own designated partner at table was a tall man with an elegant air, and the deep, deep, old Italian eyes for which I’ve always had a special weakness....

But now I'm being arch myself! An unforgiveable lapse on a narrator's part; I shall forswear it utterly, and go and visit Frances instead. I have other tales than my own to tell, after all, and have no business slipping off in inadmissable directions. Though I won’t pretend there isn’t something more than just Tuscany which haunts my thoughts at present. I have been touched by something else; I never expected it, and am not at all sure about how I shall handle it. But nor can I absolutely guarantee that I won’t be irresistibly drawn back to it, at some future, more appropriate moment.

At the Macauley Villa

2007-09-05T12:37:00.000Z

I have returned to the gatehouse alone; Bill having stayed on in Tuscany with Lady Macauley and Belle for what has every appearance of being an indefinite period. How this came about – and how it came about moreover at Lady Macauley’s own insistence, she having sprung a bombshell upon us in the very first hour in the villa, which led to her protesting that ‘the lovebirds’ should remain in Italy for as long as possible, Italy itself being the only possible place in which to enjoy a prolonged, if somewhat premature honeymoon... how this rather remarkable state of affairs came about, I shall describe in detail later. Just as soon as I have absorbed the fact that in two weeks, everything has changed beyond recognition; and when I have adjusted to life in the gatehouse again, to shrunken rooms and contracted vistas, and the rough feel of carpet beneath my feet, instead of the cool smoothness of marble.

I should have known that, even without Lady Macauley’s bombshell, Italy would have rendered me unfit for ordinary life; that I should pine for sunken gardens and marble balustrades, and be incapable of looking at an ordinary painting again without distaste - or without, at least, recalling the faded frescoes of Giotto in Santa Croce, or the (to me) still more glorious ones of Fra Angelico, in the dim little monks’ cells of the Monastery of San Marco, in Florence.

I have been ruined, I fear, by the experience of spending two weeks in the Macauley villa. Nothing in real life will ever quite be able to measure up to that. The very act of travelling by scheduled flight with Lady Macauley should have alerted me to the fact that, as Scott Fitzgerald so succinctly put it, “the rich are different” – that they have ways and ways of making life as comfortable as possible; and that a very old lady with an imperious manner can always be assured of boarding an aeroplane first, by the simple expedient of calling ahead to order a wheelchair.

We reached Pisa in the heat of the afternoon, and not even Lady Macauley could do much to ease the tiresome wait for baggage to appear. But from the moment we emerged into sunlight again, with baggage intact, our way was eased by the smooth appearance of an air-conditioned limousine, and our journey north-eastwards into the hills above the walled city of Lucca, was serene and cool.

The Villa Madrigali (or the Villa Jack Macauley, as it is apparently known locally now - though Lady Macauley assured us we would hardly recognise the name, they pronounce it so charmingly) - the villa itself stands upon a high plateau and is visible everywhere for several miles as you approach it. Only when you come near to it does it disappear again, shrouded by the trees which cover the hillside from which it rises; so that its sudden re-emergence at the end of a poplar and cypress-lined avenue comes as a kind of shock, and you feel you are in the presence of something very old and quite magnificent. Vast, four-square, in perfect symmetry, it rises above you; its green-shuttered windows conferring an air of mystery, and the faded ochre of its walls bathed dappled gold in the afternoon sunshine.

That life was going to be be easy, tranquil, here, was evident from the first moment. A little army of chattering, welcoming men and women was at hand to take our bags, conducting us up the double flight of steps and through the echoing grand salon, to the cool chambers with the many-shuttered windows beyond, that had the immensity of ballrooms to my eyes, but that were apparently our appointed bedrooms, each with adjoining marble bathroom. I can conjure it still, that state of almost dream-like wonder with which I took the measure of my new abode; parting long white window curtains to open shutters one by one, for the sheer joy of letting in the light, and then of leaning far out, to look upon landscapes that might have been painted by Leonardo, and of hearing the drowsy sound of cicadas and distant dogs barking, which I now recognise as the characteristic, the unmistakeable sound of Tuscany.

This was never meant to be a travelogue though. Tuscany has a quality of enchantment that loosens the tongue and makes one want to rhapsodise - but I have a story to continue after all, and it was in fact scarcely more than half an hour before we were all gathered together again, in the shade of an open loggia of many handsome portals at the rear of the villa; and Lady Macauley was dropping her little bombshell, calling for glasses of chilled champagne before we took our tea, and asking us to drink the health of that new pair of lovers, Bill and Belle.

“Did you really think I hadn’t noticed?” she gaily cried. “Or that, having noticed, I wouldn’t be overjoyed at the development? How could you think me so blind or so foolish as to have been deceived? And how, come to that, could you have supposed that I wouldn’t welcome with open arms the glorious fact that my daughter has found for herself a man who need not be ashamed to tread in the footsteps of her father, and my own beloved Jack? Oh, I daresay Bill was feeling uncomfortable about the money aspect – and I like him all the better for it, I have to admit. But we have money enough heaven knows! And since the only thing we lack is the one that he supplies, which is to say a man who will carry Jack’s banner into the future – well, don’t you see how avidly we will grab him, and how we will refuse ever to let him go?”

She had known from the first moment, she then explained. A mother could guess such things just by looking, and feeling the little changes in the air. She had known, and she had gloried in the knowledge. But it had amused her to keep them in suspense a little longer; and she had wanted to wait, besides, for the perfectly right moment in which to reveal her knowledge. That moment had come, she said; and now that we were all together here, and the beautiful days stretched ahead of us indefinitely, she could see no reason on earth why the whole world should not be brought in to enjoy the secret. She meant to invite all her old Florentine and Lucchese friends over to join the celebrations. She had an elderly count and countess or two (or six) up her sleeve; who, though largely moth-balled now, would doubtless get their family jewels out again for a night, and bestow a certain faded grandeur upon the occasion.

Nor was there any conceivable reason that she could see why Bill and Belle should not live together as man and wife now, in the villa. She had arranged for the larger of the gatehouses to be prepared to just that effect, indeed - they would have to move their joint belongings over there, directly after tea. And in the meantime we should all have the pleasant occupation of plotting and planning together to dream up some kind of perfectly magnificent wedding for them. She only wondered if they’d like to have it here, at the villa - Jack would have loved that of course. Or whether they’d prefer to wait and have something on an altogether grander scale, in London ?

Bill and Belle were overwhelmed of course, by this sudden public acknowledgement of their situation. Bill took it as he takes everything, with a fairly robust enjoyment – it seemed to amuse him no end that Lady Macauley had been watching him ‘hide in cupboards’ all the while. He embraced her warmly for her words of welcome, however; then raised his own glass, asking us to drink the health of a remarkably astute and generous lady. Belle, on the other hand, seemed a little bewildered by it all. It had all happened too quickly for her; she could not adjust on the spot, as Bill had done, and she entreated her mother not to leap too far ahead in making wedding plans. I think she secretly feared that Bill would find all this just a little precipitate; I saw her glance rather anxiously in his direction once or twice.

We dined quietly beneath the stars on the terrace that evening, and retired early to our respective rooms. We were all weary from travelling, Lady Macauley said: the plans for celebration could wait a day or two. And it seemed, over breakfast in the loggia next morning, that one night in what Lady Macauley now smilingly referred to as ‘the married quarters’, had worked its magic in restoring Belle’s faith in herself, and Bill. She emerged looking happier than I had ever seen her, and no longer seemed to feel the least need to conceal the extent to which she liked to keep physically close to Bill. Lady Macauley too, came down to breakfast in buoyant spirits. And indeed the only member of our little party whose joy seemed in any way alloyed that morning, was Rose. Who had had little real part to play in these proceedings; who must have felt herself rather side-lined, and who perhaps saw in Belle’s sudden ascent into radiant happiness, some vague, unaccountable diminution of her own.

To be continued...

A Taste for Marble (Preface)

2007-09-02T10:28:00.000Z

I have returned in body, but my heart and soul seem to have been left behind in Italy. It happens every year, and memory reassures me that it will be only temporary; so that by tomorrow or the next day, I shall have accustomed myself to looking out upon a London street and not the Tuscan hills, my feet will have become inured to the rough warmth of carpeted floors instead of the cool smoothness of marble - and I shall be in a frame of mind from which to write and post a new instalment of the story.

It was Mutley I think, who doubted that I should be able to write a word when once the charm of Tuscany had taken hold, and I have to admit that he was absolutely right. I did try, but the enchantment was too great – and even had I been able to get an internet connection for more than three minutes at a time, I doubt that I’d have been able to do much more than endlessly (and tediously) rhapsodise.

I have returned to find many kind comments from friends however, and I thank you all most warmly for not forgetting me. Soon, I shall be back among you whole-heartedly again, telling my own story, and doing my best to catch up on all the interesting and exciting things that you must all have been writing and posting in my absence.

Before that can happen though, I have an explanation and an apology to make. I committed a rather serious topographical error when I spoke of the hills above Florence. I had intended to site the Macauley villa there, as it is a place I love well. But our own villa was situated in the Lucchese, not the Florentine hills; and I now feel that for authenticity’s sake I ought to stick with what I know best, and must therefore ask readers who know the areas in question, to be kind enough to make the required locational leap from Florence to Lucca.

A Taste for Marble, the instalment proper, will follow shortly...

After the party

2007-08-16T09:50:00.000Z

Hortense has gone away again, to loud farewells and in a flutter of drapery. Back to what we are told are the echoing chambers and chilly corridors of her house in Suffolk; having first extracted from us a promise that we would go down and visit her just as soon as we could.

Lady Macauley was not sorry to see her go. “Well thank goodness for that!” was what she in fact said, after the black cab had borne Hortense away. “I can remove my ear-plugs now. My favourite cousin’s child she may be, but she grows more preposterous with every year that passes. I never was able to understand a word she said, not even when she was a child - and nor I think were her unfortunate parents, whom I suspect of believing there must have been some sort of foul play or accident surrounding the circumstances of her birth.”

Several days have passed since Lady Macauley’s birthday party. The sunshine has vanished again, and squally rain returned; it has been the most dismal of summers. And Bill: is Bill in a blissful dreamlike state over his declared and newly consummated love? Well, yes and no, is the only answer I can give. He suffers no afterthoughts or pangs of doubt; he has made a commitment at last, and he says that it feels better, and wiser, than anything he's done in many years. But Bill is not a patient man, nor one who likes to have to try to conceal his intentions. It has taken him precisely three days to grow impatient with what he calls ‘hiding in cupboards to try to dodge the old lady’; he has begun muttering imprecations against her, and threatens to stage a confrontation just as soon as a suitable moment presents.

I have advised him against it. Unless, that is, he should have reached the sort of understanding with Belle that would make it the natural thing to do?

“An understanding to marry her – I suppose that’s what you mean?” He was bellowing at me now, in a way to which I had been accustomed since our early childhood, but which could still make it necessary for me to hold on to something solid within reach, just to stand my ground. Then as now though, the storm was quick to pass; and it wasn’t many minutes before he was quiet again, assuring me that of course he would do nothing violent that would make life difficult for Belle - but that it was a ‘damned awkward’ thing for all that, and a grotesquely invidious position in which to find oneself, when the wealth of the woman one loved was so vastly in excess of one’s own!

I saw his dilemma, and admitted that it was deep. But all the same I said, I had an idea that Belle would give it all up tomorrow, if it meant the difference between being with him, or not.

“She’s not to inherit anyway” I said. “She has told me so herself. The house, and all the companies and business interests will pass to Jack – and after him to his son Will. And there are several sons and grandsons on what Lady Macauley calls ‘the other side’ besides - by which I have always taken her to mean the offspring of Sir Jack’s first marriage - who will stand to inherit before she does.”

Bill conceded that this was so – but that it still left Flory, Lady Macauley’s family home in Suffolk, which he happened to know had been pledged to Belle.

“And you know as well as I do, Bea” he added. “that with dynasties of this sort there are always assets and properties hidden away. There’s a house in Italy for a start - and that's just the one we know about. And then think of all the millions which must have accrued in companies and shares over the years! No, which ever way you look at it, Belle is an exceedingly wealthy woman – so that if anyone is to propose marriage, it’s probably going to have be her!”

He did take my point though – and agreed that to stage a rumpus with the old lady now would be the most invidious thing of all. What would it look like after all – if not the tantrum of a callow youth who was out to grab the goods? Even the wily parson would have found a better way of proceeding than that! At which point he stomped off with Monty to the Common, where I didn’t doubt he would be meeting Belle in some degree of privacy and comfort; and I went in another direction with my own dog Florence, so as to avoid the risk of intruding upon them.

Bill’s resolve was to be put to a stern test later that afternoon however. Lady Macauley had phoned to ask us to come over on a matter of some importance; and no sooner had we arrived, finding her seated in the little panelled parlour with Belle and Rose, than she saw fit to treat us to one of her more provocative remarks.

“Belle is looking peculiarly radiant just at present, don’t you think?” she observed; thereby directing all our eyes toward Belle, who did indeed have a radiance about her, and had exchanged her usual trousers for a pretty dress. “ I have been asking myself about its possible cause. And wonder if she has perhaps taken Mr Porteous for her lover at last?”

Bill uttered an explosive sound, and seemed likely to break out; so that I prepared myself for the confrontation which, despite his best intentions, must surely now follow. But Belle had kept her head, if no-one else had. She was sharply embarrassed, but she cast the kind of imploring look at Bill which stayed his hand; and so the perilous moment passed. It was observed at all in fact only by Rose, who laughed – rather immoderately, I thought – and remarked that if Belle and Mr Porteous were lovers, they had a curious way of showing it, since she happened to know that David had gone off two days ago on a short visit to his old parish.

It was the sort of throwaway reaction that one has come to expect of Rose, and I confess I didn’t like her any the better for it. But it was enough to defuse the situation. The air in the room, which had seemed suspended for a moment, resumed its natural progress; I breathed again, and so did Bill. And Lady Macauley herself had dismissed the whole thing from her mind the next moment, and was telling us what it was that she had really called us over to talk about.

“I have grown weary of all this rain and want some sunshine” she announced, addressing herself to Bill. “So we have decided to go to Italy, Belle and Rose and I; and would very much like it if you and Bea would join us for a week or two. There’s a villa we have in Tuscany, you know. It’s quite a plain affair – no painted ceilings or anything of that sort. But it’s very spacious, and there’s a pool in the garden. It’s up in the hills above Florence, so the air is pleasant and the views are good. We leave tomorrow – but you can take your own time about arriving, if only you’ll agree to come.... “

So there it is. It required just four minutes for treacherous situations to be by-passed; and the moment of possible confrontation has gone away, at least for the moment. And we have already made our flight plans, and are to go up into the hills of Tuscany on Saturday, by way of Gatwick, Pisa and Florence....

Moving Figures in a Garden ( with guest appearance by Cousin Hortense)

2007-08-12T13:16:00.001Z

That was the way it composed itself for me, yesterday’s unexpected little party in the garden of the Macauley house. The late afternoon sunshine was of that exquisite pale gold sort that comes in early Autumn, and the shadows were long on the smooth lawn. The strolling guests seemed to me like figures in a painting, sometimes still, sometimes moving imperceptibly from their positions in one group to make up different, but equally picturesque formations in another - though from where I sat, with Lady Macauley in a flowered pavilion just below the terrace, the moving figures were blurred by distance, making it hard for me to know precisely who was who, and where in particular at any given moment Bill was, especially in his possible proximity to Belle.

If Bill had come rushing home from Darwin with the idea of wresting Belle from out of the clutches of David Porteous (and it’s my belief he had), he was to find little opportunity for doing so on this occasion. Belle herself had phoned us the evening before, to say that her mother was holding a little impromptu party in the garden to celebrate her birthday ( we were not permitted to inquire which one); and that, having heard Bill had returned, was especially anxious to know that he would be there.

“She has invited everyone we know, and a good many we don’t” Belle explained. “ And she insists that she will need Bill there to see her through. My cousin Hortense is here on a visit you see, and Mummy feels that it will require a large company to dilute her presence, and drown what she calls her extraordinary great owl's-hoot of a voice.”

Hortense’s voice was the first that Bill and I heard indeed, as we passed through the arched gate which separates the kitchen garden from the formal south lawn, and saw the large company assembled there. Hortense had called loudly, before swooping down upon us from a distance like some great bird, with wings out-stretched and colourful plumage flying. I say she called to us, but really her cry was for the company at large: uttered, as Lady Macauley says she utters everything, as if from a great height – from a belfry, say, or a high tower - and for the benefit of a breathless audience probably seated below.

“Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters!” was Hortense's theatrical cry. “Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man!”

Lady Macauley was irritated by this outburst. “What in the world is she talking about?” she grumbled, after we had both leant down to receive her welcoming embrace. “She really is the most absurd creature. She should be in vaudeville - or a circus! But even she ought to know better than to bellow at poor Bill like that, about bridegrooms!”

“Don’t worry Aunt, it’s only a quotation – and probably a poorly rendered one at that!” Hortense had entered the pavilion by now; had enveloped first me, then Bill in extravagant embrace. After which she held Bill off from her a long moment, as if to drink deep of every remembered physical aspect of him with her eyes. “But Bill knows his Sappho and his Song of Songs, I’m sure!" she went on. " Not to mention his Salinger - he knows everything. And understands my ways by now, besides; so that he knows I mean no personal threat to him with my quotations. I am sick with love of him of course – oh but my dear good people, simply prostrate! But I also know that he can never be mine.”

“You’d do very much better then to keep your more bizarre quotations to yourself!” Lady Macauley sharply returned. "Sappho indeed - you torment and embarrass the poor man beyond belief! You torment and embarrass me, if you want to know – which is a quite intolerable thing to have to suffer at one’s own party!” But Hortense had drifted away out of earshot by then; drawing Bill’s arm within her own and taking him off with her across the wide expanse of lawn to join the other guests. So that Lady Macauley’s last words were lost beneath the receding rise and fall of her continuing monologue.

I would have liked to have gone off with them. I had spotted Belle at last, walking slowly along a shaded path with David Porteous; stopping at intervals to admire the flowers, and to turn towards one another to exchange what seemed to be pleasantly comfortable remarks. I was disturbed by the apparent increase of intimacy between them, and anxious to see if Bill would find her. But Bill had gone off in another direction with Hortense; they had passed into a hedged and secluded area at the far end of the garden that was called the Wilderness, and were presently obscured from view.

It was evidently to be my lot to remain closeted with Lady Macauley inside the flowered tent, where she had collected about her the usual little group of carefully selected guests. Rose was there of course, immaculate in cream linen; Imogen Porteous was there, looking prettier and more relaxed than I remembered - and so, surprisingly, were Roland Baines; and Pamela, leaning attentively in her hostess’s direction, benignly smiling beneath a nodding hat.

It must have been three quarters of an hour that passed pleasantly enough in general conversation, with most of the entertainment coming from bright exchanges between Lady Macauley and Imogen Porteous, who seemed to have perfected quite a line in lively banter with the old lady since I’d seen her last. Rose was not altogether pleased with this development; seeing in it perhaps some erosion of her own position as Court Favourite. She looked bored in fact – she yawned openly at one point; and then found opportunity to lean close to my ear and whisper that Pamela was quite ‘the chosen one’ these days. “It’s because of Roland” she added; “Lady M thinks he’s quite the most astonishingly useful little man to have about. It’s like having a trusty calculator always to hand, she says; so that one no longer has to do any of the difficult sums oneself. She doesn’t see how she could ever have managed without him!”

Lady Macauley seemed to have caught the tail end of this whispered aside, but if she were annoyed by it, chose to give no sign. She had been telling Pamela and Roland about the marvels that ‘clever Imogen and her equally clever sister’ were working with the tapestries; but she was suddenly weary of it all; she had remembered that there was to be a little ceremony with candles and champagne at six o’clock, and she was looking about for Bill.

“What can he have been doing down there in the wilderness with Hortense all this time?” she wanted to know. “ It's not as if they can have been making love after all, is it? I don't believe that, with that extraordinary husband of hers now gone, there can be a man left in the world who could possibly achieve the feat of making love to poor Hortense! I do think it’s too bad of her just the same, to have carried him off like that! She knew I particularly wished to have him with me for the cutting of the cake.”

She wanted Belle too. Belle was to have brought the cake and lit the candles; and with six o'clock drawing near, Rose was dispatched to go and find them both, and bring them back. I thought it fortunate that Rose had gone off in quite the wrong direction. Not having been attentive, as I had, to the changing patterns of people on the lawn, she had missed the moment at which Bill had emerged with Hortense from behind the hedges of the wilderness, to join Belle and David Porteous, and a group of others, beside the roses. Nor had Rose caught the moment, as I had, when Bill had drawn Belle aside, then detaching her from the group, moved off with her slowly in the direction of the house. That had happened at least half an hour earlier, and I hadn’t seen them since; so I suggested to Lady Macauley that two seekers would be better than one, and that I would therefore go off in the opposite direction from Rose, and see if I could locate them somewhere else.

I found them coming out of the house together, carrying between them the tall cake, and another tray with glasses, and several bottles of iced champagne. They looked ordinary, unconspiratorial enough; but it was clear to me that something momentous had occurred between them in that short half hour of their absence. They were close, close. Not touching just then, obviously, on account of the trays they carried, yet together in a way which suggested that nothing would ever separate them again. Bill looked – not triumphant exactly, that was not his style; but buoyant somehow, happy and light of heart, in a way which I hadn’t seen him look for years. And Belle was lovely, suddenly. Her eyes and skin were glowing (she has her mother’s eyes – why hadn’t I noticed that before?). She was smiling too, as if she thought she would never be able to stop - so that I wondered how anyone could ever have thought her plain!

They had a plea to make to me, for all that. They could see I had guessed what had passed between them, and they admitted they couldn’t be happier, and knew that I would be happy for them too. But would I please, just for the moment, keep that knowledge to myself? “We’re not sure how Mummy will take it, you see” Belle explained. “ She has been accustomed to think of Bill as her own – it will be hard for her to have to let go. And besides, we want to enjoy it all in private for as long as we possibly can....”

I promised, of course; I had the greatest possible joy in doing so. And the ceremony of cake and candles passed off without sign that anything remarkable had happened. It did seem to me however that Lady Macauley glanced rather sharply once or twice at Belle’s altered countenance. And that David Porteous had guessed, and was gravely discountenanced. And Hortense did take me aside to whisper ( well, hoot sotto voce would be a fairer description), that if she couldn’t have Bill herself, then there wasn’t a woman in the world she’d rather see him with, than her cousin Belle!

Holiday Season

2007-08-06T11:23:00.001Z

Author's note:

It seems that quite a number of people are being directed to this post by way of the quotation "Raise high the roofbeam Carpenters" - and that having got here, they must be disappointed to find there is no reference to it. Unless that is, they have also gone to the comment section at the end of the post, in which there is a discussion of the quote, and its origins in the poetry of Sappho.

My own 'roofbeam' reference actually came in another instalment of the story - ie in that one entitled "Moving Figures in a Garden", in which I put it in the mouth of the larger-than-life character,"Cousin Hortense"... This instalment was posted on 12/08/07, and anyone interested enough might go to that post by clicking on the link in the List of Posts archive on the opening page...

So many of my blogger friends seem to be away on holiday at present, that I have deferred posting the next instalment of the story for another few days. I have instead posted a piece on my other page, "Just Blogging", which I hope might be of some interest to anyone who is still around.

I shall be going on holiday myself in ten days' time - but I hope to post at least one more instalment before I go.

Bill returns!

2007-08-01T10:35:00.000Z

I have had a rather strange and unsettling few days of it. In the first place was Rose, who wanted to know how I thought Belle was reacting to David Porteous. “Do you think she has succumbed yet to the Porteous effect?” was the way she put it. “Or is she perhaps waiting for the go-ahead from Mummy?”

We were sitting in her kitchen at the time: a rare enough event in itself, as Rose is not especially fond of her own house, which she feels lets her down rather badly in terms of peeling paint and out-dated kitchen units. Rose’s house ought in the nature of things to be more like Rose herself – which is to say well appointed, and beautifully manicured and maintained. But alas, dear Curtis left her with just enough to live by: for luxuries she must look elsewhere, as she’s very fond of pointing out. I thought her question rather spitefully phrased, and must have looked at her rather hard; for she had corrected herself the next moment, explaining that of course she had known the Macauleys ‘forever’, and that I musn’t mind if she seemed to disparage the old lady now and then.

“Lady Macauley herself expects no less of me” she said. “She finds it entertaining - and of course gives as good as she gets, as you know. But even allowing for all that, you have to admit that she has been monopolising David – so that one wonders if she means to keep him for herself? I’ve seen her do that before too – you can’t think of all the hopelessly smitten young men she liked to keep dangling about her in the old days. ‘The Freddies’, she used to call them. After a certain Lord Freddie Livesey, an extravagant youth who languished for love of her for several years. Sir Jack turned a blind eye to it all of course – he knew where her heart lay, and I think it rather amused him to see the young men falling about at her feet. But I never saw her set herself up in opposition to Belle before. The lines in the sand were always very clearly drawn. Which makes me ask myself if we’re going to be treated for once to the spectacle of a contest between mother and daughter for the same man? I mean, you must have seen for yourself how Belle looks at him, and how anxious she is to seem sensible in conversation ...? I tell you, this is a situation quite unprecedented, and I for one can’t even begin to fathom how it’s likely to turn out.”

I replied that if she couldn’t foresee an outcome, it was unlikely that I, as a relative outsider, would be able to do so. But she had alarmed me somewhat, I confess; and I left her, half an hour later, wondering if after all I had misread the situation, and Belle were indeed listening to David Porteous when he leaned towards her in that quietly respectful way he has - and listening, at that, rather more closely than I had thought. Bill asked much the same thing of me, when he phoned later that evening.

“You tell me he’s talking to her – but is she listening?” he wanted to know. To which I replied that I couldn’t possibly say; though it did seem to me that Belle was not exactly turning her head the other way when David Porteous leaned in her direction. Bill greeted this remark with a rather long silence, before moving on to talk of other things. He is in Darwin now. For what particular purpose I haven’t yet been able to discern – though he tells me that he wanted to see for himself if reports he’d heard were true, that it’s possible in certain conditions to see crocodiles swimming along High Street, Darwin. I told him I thought the crocodile story just sufficiently fantastic to be true. But not quite fantastic enough, for all that, to keep him dawdling there indefinitely; and that if he wanted to know if Belle were listening to David Porteous, then he really ought to jump on a plane and come home to find out for himself.

I had further reason for disquiet the next day, when I went to the manor house to call on Frances. I hadn’t seen her for some time, and had wondered if she thought I was neglecting her; but was pleased to find her apparently very happily absorbed with her team of Polish builders, and all the marvels they are accomplishing in the house. “See how many bathrooms I’m to have!” she gaily cried, shortly after greeting me. “Tomek tells me that once you have the pipe-work in for one, you might just as well have half a dozen – so I’m having four upstairs; and another nice little cloakroom off the hall.” She gave me a conducted tour of the bathrooms, during the course of which she introduced me to Tomas (‘Tomek’ is the Polish diminutive form, she tells me), who is a large, grave, intensely blue-eyed, late-middle-aged Pole, and apparently the overseer of the team.

“Tomek is a surprisingly talented artist” Frances confided, after he had bowed over my hand and gone away. “I discovered that quite by chance, when he left a little drawing of his lying about among the building requisitions. He had sketched the cedar in the yard – such a noble old tree, he said. I thought that so very sensitive of him...”

She had forgotten Tomek however, by the time we sat down over coffee in the conservatory – brought to us by Mrs Meade, who still seems to regard me with suspicion, and just a hint of frostiness. “I hear that David has been taken up by Lady Macauley now” Frances said then; she seemed to be measuring her words with intense care. “I’m very glad for him of course – though I do think he ought to be accepting payment for his work in the library. He has very little to live by you know – he really can't afford to give up too much of his time unpaid.”

But she too wanted to know if I thought he was ‘making up to Belle’? She said it with some embarrassment, colouring deeply; but seemed resolved to go on nonetheless, so that before I knew it, she had begun to confide to me all the reasons why, if David were making up to Belle, she thought it would be very much better for Belle herself if he were not! I was very much taken aback, both by her confidences, and the unaccustomed vehemence with which she expressed them.

“He will start very quietly with her, just as he did with me.” she went on. “He will be courtesy and respect themselves; and only when he thinks he has gained her trust – or call it her adoration if you will! – only then will he begin to let her see what it is he really expects of her! “

This seemed to me such potentially explosive material that I was loath to stop her; and let her go on to tell me how it was that life with Mr Porteous had gradually enclosed, and finally imprisoned her – so that the day had come when, for what she called 'sheer panic, and shortness of breath', she had felt impelled to summon every drop of her courage, and break free. “It got in the end so that I could only breath freely when he was absent” she said. “When you feel like that in your own house; and when you know in addition that nothing you ever say or do - not even the clothes you wear, or the way you arrange your hair - will ever quite satisfy him .... Why, then, you know that you must flee for your life, or remain subject forever!”

I knew it couldn’t have come easily to Frances to admit such things to me. And I understood, without her having to tell me, that she was admitting them for the very good reason that in doing so she might spare Belle from possibly making the same mistake. In another woman – in one like Rose Mountjoy, say – one might have suspected envy and ulterior motive here; but not in Frances. Frances had loved in good faith and been horribly disillusioned. She had been deeply hurt, and now she wanted me to warn Belle off - though she couldn’t of course come right out and say it in so many words.

This was the message I took away from her, at any rate. I felt profoundly disturbed by it, and uncertain as to what action I should take in response. In the end I could see nothing better to do with it than pass it on to Bill. It would be an ungodly hour in Darwin, but still I made the call - and Bill’s long silence on receiving the intelligence seemed to vindicate my decision. He said little to me at the time; he only muttered something to the effect that he thought ‘that chap’ (it required several expletives to convey the depth of his sentiment here) - 'that chap had taken too much upon himself this time, by God!'

But he had evidently taken the message very much to heart. Since it was scarcely more than twenty four hours later that I heard the rattle of his old car in the yard; and there, all bleached and sun-tanned and visibly jet-lagged, with his worldly goods stuffed into the ancient hold-all he carries everywhere he goes - there he was!

It’s foolish of me perhaps, but I do feel unaccountably easier about everything now that Bill is home. I haven’t the least idea of what it is he means to do – but it seems likely we shall all be the happier and the better for it, whatever it is.

Sweet Thames, run softly

2007-07-27T09:28:00.000Z

The complete line from Edmund Spenser, is of course Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. But since I am not yet quite in a position to talk of ending my song (though I do have an ending firmly in sight, that much I promise!), I have borrowed the first part only, to reflect the mood of unease and melancholy with which this most brutal of summers seems to have afflicted us all at present.

For many, the floods are already a reality, and the daily routine has become a question simply of retrieving what they can of the ordinary little props of life. Things like chairs, and tables, and sofas; and having enough water to drink – the idea of water to bathe, or shower with, having become for the moment but a cherished memory. For those beside the Severn, ordinary life has more or less been washed away with the rising water; and the promises of politicians, who come to stand knee-deep in flood water to talk bravely about ‘what lessons can be learned from all this’, and ‘what can be done’ ( by the year 2010, say!) to ‘prevent such calamities from occurring in the future’.... the promises of politicians, and newsmen, and Weather and Water Board officials, must ring hollow indeed.

For those of us down here beside the lower reaches of the Thames, the expected surge of water has not yet arrived. Though it has reached Oxford already, and we scan our own part of the river daily, making our little contingency plans for moving what we can of our lives to safety if the surge should come. Lady Macauley wishes Bill were here to advise her. Bill would know what to do, she says. Bill would tell her if she should move pictures, and tapestries, and ancient bedsteads, from basements to the upper floors – or if she should concentrate instead simply on staying alive, and dry herself. Leaving the fate of ancient artefacts in the hands of the old River God, whose ivy-wreathed statue lies mercifully land-locked still in the front forecourt.

In Bill’s absence, she has found David Porteous and his daughters a considerable resource however. And for this she acknowledges the debt she owes to that ‘rather odd little person’, Miss Frances Fanshawe, who had the good sense to release him from an ill-advised engagement before real harm was done. She thinks he is bearing up quite nobly in presence of what must have been, for him, a considerable loss of dignity and face - never mind about all the splendid material comforts he has glimpsed, and been obliged to relinquish. “Only think what it must be for him to have had to give up the luxury of her father’s library, for a start!” she observed to Belle and Rose and me yesterday. “One might have expected that for that reason alone, he’d have clung fast to his engagement in the face of no matter what little local difficulty.”

I was glad that Lady Macauley was the one to put into words what I at least had more or less been thinking. It had occurred to me too, that the loss of the library for working in must have brought home to David Porteous, as nothing else could quite have done, all that he had given up when he allowed Frances to terminate their engagement. I have had opportunity to study him quite closely in the past few days, he and I having both been Lady Macauley’s guests at this and that little impromptu gathering at the old house. And though I persist in my theory that he is the most studied of men, and that nothing he says or does is ever to be taken quite at its surface value – by which I mean that his effects are always carefully calculated so as to show him in the most advantageous possible light; yet I have had to accept that the public face he shows at present is impeccable; and that no-one, simply looking at or listening to him, could possibly say that here was a man who had recently had the unhappiness of seeing his best possible opportunity for social advancement abruptly snatched away.

Bill has continued to find much to amuse him in my little nightly telephone bulletins about the situation here. Bill is presently in Adelaide, enjoying the hospitality of some woman whose husband seems to hold no grudge against him for amorous past associations with his wife. He tells me he is enjoying himself hugely - but he keeps up an interest in the conduct of David Porteous just the same; and wants to know, in particular, if he has yet been successful in ‘laying the ghost of the old monk in the Macauley chapel’?

The old monk had become a familiar presence to Bill and me. Well, presence is hardly the word to use, since neither of us has actually seen him – and nor, we believe, has Lady Macauley herself, or Belle. Others claim regularly to have done so however. Which has prompted in Lady Macauley an anxious pre-occupation with the idea that the brown-robed figure does still on occasion return to haunt that part of the ground floor which had once been consecrated as a chapel. Bill and I had felt uncomfortable about that part of the hall ourselves, as a matter of fact; and had quite seen how easily spectral images might have been conjured there. For it remains windowless, and dark - and unaccountably cold – in spite of all the efforts that have been made to incorporate it into the body of the hall.

Bill has been very taken with the idea that David Porteous might have been brought in as exorcist. Never can such opportunity have been brought by God or Man, he says – or by their opponent in the other place – for unexpected personal advancement on the part of Mr David Porteous! But on this front I have had to disappoint him; since although Mr Porteous has indeed stood gravely with Lady Macauley in that dark and gloomy part of the hall on several occasions, no ghostly presence has yet manifested itself to him. And he has explained that though the Church of England does still embrace certain ancient rituals for the banishment of evil spirits, he is not versed in them himself; so that his advice to Lady Macauley has thus far been no more occult than that the introduction of a window into the space might help. Or failing that - given the restrictions imposed by English Heritage or other ruling bodies - the simple expedient of covering every surface with fresh white paint, and of putting something cheerful in there, like the pretty piano from the morning room, or a painted pillar with fresh garden flowers atop ..... would probably have the effect of neutralising past associations, no matter how malevolent, or deep-rooted.

Lady Macauley thinks this excellent advice, and has called in a man to paint the walls in gentle shades of pale blue and ivory. And has meanwhile drafted David Porteous in to assist her on another front. He is to sift through all the books in her own scattered library, with a view to collecting them together in one carefully selected and vastly superior place that she will be able to call a library. She thinks this will to some extent compensate him for the loss of Miss Fanshawe’s father’s library – “He will be able to come and work there himself, when it’s done” she said. “Quite apart of course, from all the advantages the possession of a proper library will have for us.” It was her idea that he should be paid in cash or kind for his trouble, but he has waved this aside, protesting that the pleasure of the occupation will be compensation more than enough.

His daughters Imogen and Amy are to be properly remunerated however, for their advice and practical assistance in the matter of fraying tapestries and abandoned pictures. A workroom has been set up for them in the old Orangery, and they go there daily to stitch, and stretch, and do their best to clean some of the worst affected tapestries and paintings. Lady Macauley has taken a great liking to both the girls – especially to pretty Amy, whom she thinks likely to take the eye of her grandson Will, when he comes to stay with her next month. Will has apparently attached himself to some impossible girl – Alice, his mother, is aghast at the association. And though Lady Macauley has never had the smallest interest in trying to gratify her chilly daughter-in-law, she does think that in this instance a concerted family effort is called for; and that if anyone can divert Will from the impossible girl, it will probably be pretty Amy Porteous. Of Amy’s sister Imogen she is less certain – though she believes the girl has spirit, and a latent gaiety; and it amuses her at present to try to ‘bring them out’.

“Mummy is very happily involved with all her Porteouses” Belle told me yesterday, when we returned as usual with the dogs. “She thinks Mr Porteous is rather erudite – he mentioned God, and Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More all in the space of one paragraph; which in her book is a sure sign of erudition. She likes erudition in a man - provided it isn’t all he’s got. She thinks erudition on its own would be very tiresome. But Mr Porteous has a breadth of shoulder which suggests what she calls a just sufficient muscularity as well.... She has taken it into her head lately, besides, that the house will probably have to pass to the National Trust when she has gone; since neither Jack nor Will shows the least interest in it, and it certainly can’t be allowed to pass to me! She thanks heaven therefore, for the advent of such a group of highly personable, useful people to help her get the process underway.”

How Belle herself views the association has not yet become clear. Though I have observed that she is always very quiet in David Porteous’s presence; as if she were perhaps afraid of putting a foot wrong in some particularly glaring way. I know how she feels of course – he has the same effect on us all, do what we will to try to withstand it! I have observed too that his own conduct towards Belle is exemplary. He treats her in much the same way as he treats her mother; which is to say with perfect courtesy, and the least perceptible little distance, denoting deep respect. So that if Bill had been hoping to hear he had been caught out in something flagrant or unguarded - or better still, thoroughly ignoble! - then I’m afraid he is to be disappointed on both counts; at least for the present.

The Thames meanwhile continues to flow sweetly enough along these stretches. And although the local water meadows are flooded, bringing the river to within fifty yards of the Macauley gates, the old River God perches safely high and dry still. And I have been obliged to report to Bill that everything goes along here quite satisfactorily, despite his unnecessarily prolonged, and possibly pre-meditated absence.

Distant Thunder

2007-07-21T10:07:00.000Z

This strangest and most disappointing of summers drags on. After two days of sunshine the rain has returned; the sky is leaden again, and I heard distant thunder this morning as I sat at the window of the attic, looking out over David Porteous’s gazebo, and Bill’s sodden vegetable garden. I miss Bill badly – and not only because I haven’t the smallest idea of what to do with his vegetables, which have the appearance now of small green islets adrift in a sea of mud. He appears to have forgotten about them, and though the lecture tour is drawing to its end, has no ideas of returning home immediately. He thinks of staying on in Sydney for a week or two, he tells me; and then of ‘going across to Adelaide’, where he has friends whom he has been promising to visit for years.

I don’t know why I should be surprised to hear that Bill has friends in Adelaide, or that they should be entreating him to come and stay. He has friends everywhere; most of them unknown to me, and many of them, it seems, women with whom he has at one time had relationships, and who have never quite gone away. Therein lies the secret of Bill’s success with women, it often seems to me – that he has loved a great many of them, but never for long, and never quite enough; yet that none of those he’s tried to love has held his eventual defection against him, or been willing, when it has happened, quite to relinquish him. So that no matter where he happens to be in the world at any given moment, there will always be some woman eager to take him in, or take him back.

It’s a system that has worked well for him for many years, but I believe it has made him lazy; and I further believe that if he means to try to apply it now to Belle Macauley, it will fail, and he will end by losing the only woman with whom he might have found a true and lasting happiness. I have no real grounds of course, for believing any of these things; I have only the strongest possible instinct that they are so. And if I had wanted reinforcement of that belief, I’d have found it almost daily since Bill’s departure, in the nature and content of the conversations I have had with him every evening on the telephone.

I am growing impatient with him however, and fear that last night I was deliberately obtuse. He had wanted as usual to know what was ‘going on’ – and what ‘that man’ seemed likely to be going to do next. And whilst I knew of course that he referred to David Porteous, and that somewhere implicit in his question was another one that pertained to Belle.... I nevertheless declined to take his point. I only told him rather sharply that I had not the least idea of what ’that man’ might be intending to do; only that he seemed to be playing some very deep game that was presently beyond my powers of wit or deduction to interpret – and that if Bill himself wanted to know what was going on here, he really ought to get on a plane and come home, instead of amusing himself at some poor woman’s expense in Adelaide!

Bill though, had only a laugh for it. “Oh well” he said; “If he’s playing some deep game, he’ll play it better with only women looking on. Far be it from me to come crashing in to spoil the fun.”

He wanted to know how Belle was holding out, for all that. And when I asked him “holding out against what, precisely?, refused to specify; saying only that he had an idea Belle was always made uncomfortable by close proximity with her mother’s protégés, and especially perhaps with those who had recently been separated from other women. Again though, I refused to help him out. I asked him instead if there were actually anything in the world he was prepared to stand up and fight for; and he told me, laughing again, that he couldn’t think what I was getting at, but that he’d fight for the right to lead a quiet life at any rate; particularly when it came to long-distance telephone calls ... At which point there was a tremendous clap of thunder directly overhead here, and the line cut out on us. Leaving me with the suspicion that David Porteous was probably not the only one playing some deep game – but that for the life of me, I couldn’t fathom quite what Bill’s might turn out to be.

Dogs will sometimes unearth things that have remained buried to humans however, and I had reason to remind myself of this when I returned this afternoon from a long, wet walk on the common with Belle. Walking Monty has been one of my regular duties in Bill’s absence, and I have been struck by the number of dog-walking women who have come up to me to inquire after Bill himself. Rose has always said to me that she thought Bill must have a regular little coterie out there among the female dog-walkers, and it seems she was right; though what she evidently hasn’t quite picked up on, and what has come as a considerable surprise, even to me, is that Monty himself seems to know who his real friends are – and that each day, when the walk is over, he has attached himself to Belle’s Labrador, Polly, and taken himself resolutely off, not in the direction of the gatehouse, but in that of the Macauley house, where with one long bound he has descended to the basement, and after a long gulp of water from a bowl that is evidently his own, has promptly settled down to sleep in a basket before the kitchen stove.

“Monty is evidently very much at home here” I observed to Belle today; and was intrigued, though not altogether surprised, to see that she coloured a little before explaining, all in a rush, that yes, it had become a part of the little ritual of the daily walk, that Monty should head home with Polly, and that Bill must, almost as a matter of course, follow in his footsteps and then stay on to have a cup of tea with her in the kitchen. That this was suggestive of a degree of intimacy between Bill and her that I hadn’t as yet divined for myself, was clear – and I’d have done my best to follow it up with a carefully worded question or two; had not Rose at that moment come clattering down the basement stairs, with an urgent request from Lady Macauley that we should immediately forsake the dogs, and come up to the drawing room to help her with the entertainment of Mr Porteous and his daughters.

“You must come at once.” she said. “They have been here an hour already; the conversation has taken every kind of unexpected turn, and your mother has been growing very impatient for your return.”

Just so of course, are the most opportune moments for enlightenment in human affairs often arbitrarily snatched away; and though I had sensed that Belle was on the point of confiding something rather important to me, I was obliged to give it up, and follow her instead to the drawing room, where sat Lady Macauley in splendid state, with a Porteous girl on either side of her, and their father gazing thoughtfully out of the window at the rain.

“Oh, there you are at last!” Lady Macauley exclaimed. “Looking very much the worse for the rain of course, but no matter....though I think you might have removed your boots! We have been talking about the tapestries, which Imogen and Amy are going to be brave enough to try to repair for us. And now we are to go and have a look at the old chapel, to see what David thinks he might be able to do about that troublesome priest, whom some say lingers there...”

Not wiser, but sadder

2007-07-18T12:09:00.000Z

It is characteristic of Frances that, having decided she is unable to find happiness with David Porteous herself, she should be anxious to do or say nothing that might spoil his chances of finding his own elsewhere. She can even find it in her heart to be glad that he has been taken up by Lady Macauley, whom she believes capable of doing a great deal more for him than she could herself. I confess that this is not the reaction I had hoped to see in her. I had hoped to see her rail against him a little. If she had come right out and told me that he was a cold-hearted egotist who had been interested only in spending her money and enjoying the comforts of her house, I’d have been well pleased. But this alas, is not her way, and she will say only that in the end nothing she could give him was quite enough.

“I was too old for him you see” she confided yesterday. “Oh, I don’t mean that I’m older than he is – in years of course, we are precisely the same. But the difference is that he had this chance to become young again – to shine, and grow great, and somehow live out all the dreams of his youth, that life had seemed to have taken away from him, probably forever. I had thought that I could give him that. I thought we could grow young again together, and that I could be of help to him in the realisation of his dream. But I see now that I was never young, not really - not in the sense that other girls were young. I was never given the chance to be, and now it’s too late to try. I have no greatness of soul either, you see. I could give him every kind of material comfort, but I couldn’t inspire him.... Nor could I even give him the kind of physical joy he craved. It seemed at first we could be happy together as lovers at least - but I watched him every day grow more disappointed in me, so that after a while he could scarcely bring himself to touch me, or even look at me any more, and I had to let him go...”

This was so very far from her initial glad shedding of the shoes that pinched, that I had to restrain myself from shouting aloud that she had been used and abused – that she had put all her faith in an unworthy cause, and that if anyone had let anyone down here, it was David Porteous, and not she herself! I have never wished so much that Bill was there to help me out, and I asked myself what Bill might have said to her to try to breach the gap between her generous intentions and her hopelessly exploited good faith. I’m not sure however that even Bill would have known how to show her the extent to which she has been, and remains mistaken; and I was obliged to leave her with her disappointment directed inwards, as always, upon herself - and her bright dream of the potential greatness of David Porteous more or less intact.

If there was any comfort to be derived anywhere in all this, I could find it only in the fact that she has not abandoned quite every one of her own dreams, but means at least to go ahead with the restoration plans that she and David had drawn up for the manor house. The scaffolding was going up even as I sat with her yesterday, and I believe she will find sufficient interest in the immediate future, just in watching the transformation as it unfolds. First, the roof is to be repaired; and then there are to be several additional bathrooms installed; a new bedroom suite for herself, which was to have involved a dressing room and study for David, though she seems to have relinquished that, and tells me that she will have the luxury of a walk-in wardrobe instead; and a complete modernisation of the kitchen.

The original plan had also been to create an extension of the existing conservatory to make a garden studio for Frances herself. It had been her idea that she would develop her interest in painting, so as to have something of her own to occupy her while David was busy in the library with his great book. And although I have no more faith in the idea of the book than I ever had – believing as I do that he is one of those who talks about his writing a great deal more than he ever actually sits down to accomplish it – I do hope that Frances will go ahead with the studio idea. I believe she will enjoy having a studio of her own, and that she will perhaps be able to create some kind of a little future life for herself around it.

I left her yesterday quite happily involved with settling in her little team of builders; who have arrived only lately from Poland, whose tenuous grasp of English will no doubt tax her ingenuity in the weeks to come, but who are to be provided with every possible convenience while they work, and whom I saw yesterday enjoying their first cups of tea in the spacious recreation room that she has provided for them in one of the larger out-buildings.

For the moment then, I think she will be all right. And I shall find some interest myself, it has to be said, in watching to see how David Porteous comports himself as the spurned and disappointed lover. I daresay he will find some entirely new and original way of demonstrating the part - though he seems to have been very quiet about it to date. Rose talked of his going constantly to the Macauley house, but I believe she has been exaggerating wildly as is her wont; and that as a matter of fact he has been lying rather low in his own house, with only his daughters for company. The girls have given up the idea of the shop in Baker Street, apparently: the lease was too high, or the likely profit margin too slim, something of that general sort – and they are presently staying with their father while they look about for something else to do. Frances takes a great interest in them, and tells me they are very talented; especially Imogen, whose painting shows much promise, and whose quick little line drawings of people she encounters on the street are worthy of publication in a book of caricatures.

I believe that Frances will be perfectly capable of making her new studio freely available to the Porteous girls in the future; it would not surprise me in the least to hear that she had made their artistic development a new and ardent cause. Nothing much can come of that at the present moment however - and in the meantime, though I bear the girls themselves no personal ill-will, I do hope most sincerely that their father is experiencing every kind of inconvenience and difficulty in being obliged to share his house with them.

PART TWO

2007-07-15T11:29:00.000Z

The Pattern Changes

A great deal can change in the course of just two weeks. I had been feeling quietly pleased with the results of my little party; it seemed to me I had achieved most of the things I set out to achieve – and one or two that I hadn’t, into the bargain. Lady Macauley had been brought in contact with David Porteous after all - and the heavens hadn’t exactly fallen as a consequence! Not even for Belle, it appears. Though Bill warns me not to be complacent in that respect: he evidently still sees cause for concern, and his final words to me before departing last Thursday for a two-week lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand, were “Don’t over-water my tomatoes. Expect surprises from Frances - and keep an eye on Belle!”

I think I know what he meant. The reference to Frances is rather cryptic, of course; and one never knows precisely what he’s getting at when it comes to Belle. But even so, I take his points, and shall maintain a certain vigilance on his behalf where Belle is concerned. Rose tells me though, that so far from feeling threatened by the new association, Belle has begun to talk of the invigorating effect it’s already having upon her mother, who has taken to planning little teas, and lunches, and suppers in the gallery; all with the idea of having David Porteous and his daughters come to them, and quite as if she were fifty again, instead of eighty plus.

For Belle herself – well, the heavens haven't fallen for her either, apparently. She is glad of course, that the presence of Frances, as fiancee, will act as a curb upon her mother's wilder match-making flights; but she now sees that the association with Mr Porteous is probably not going to turn out to be quite the personal ordeal by fire that she had anticipated. I don’t know if Bill would find reassurance in this; but I think that on the whole I’d best say nothing to him about it for the present, when I email.

Then too, there’s Pamela, who has been gathered into the Macauley fold in the most unexpected, yet seemingly natural way. Rose tells me she is still basking in the pleasant afterglow of the encounter; that her conversations are embellished these days with little references to ‘Lady and Miss Macauley’, and that she scatters intimations wherever she goes that Roland is likely at any moment to be summoned to the Macauley house, for a meeting with Lady Macauley’s solicitor in the matter of her financial arrangements. This is the social high ground indeed, for Pamela; and I believe Rose when she says that she goes about the village these days with her head held high, and her shopping basket almost at the angle of jauntiness.

Rose told me all these things from the position of her favourite stool in my kitchen this morning. She arrived at ten o’clock, having come, she said, for a good, long mulling-over of events. There was much to talk about, didn’t I think? Especially since she had it on good authority that David Porteous had lately moved out of the manor house, and back into his own; and that so far as she had been able to gather, Frances had not gone with him. This was disturbing news to me, but I did my best not to seem startled by it. I merely asked Rose what her authority was, and was not greatly reassured when she told me it was the best there was - which was to say the evidence of her own eyes. Anyone going from the manor house to old Miss Porteous’s must pass her own, she pointed out; and she had lately seen David Porteous take that route on several occasions, carrying suitcases, and bags of books - and notably unaccompanied by Frances.

“Oh well, it could be anything of course.” I rather vaguely replied. “It’s only lately after all that Mr Jessop has finished re-furbishing his house – David might simply have been returning some of the things he no longer needed at the manor house ...”

As explanations went it fell very short, I knew; and Rose was quick to capitalise on its inherent flaws. “In the first place” she retorted; “one would have expected him to be moving things out of, not into his own house, if it was his intention to remain permanently at the manor house with Frances. And in the second - well, how do you account for the fact that he is evidently spending his nights, as well as his days, in his own house? I have seen him coming in and out repeatedly – and I can tell you that if he goes anywhere in the afternoons, it is to the Macauley house, and not to that which contains his erstwhile beloved!”

I was unable to account for any of these things, and I disliked intensely the idea that Rose was probably going about the district spreading rumours of this sort. Her facial expression is one of scarcely contained glee – I won’t go quite so far as to call it malice – when she relates such stories. There is nothing she likes better than a good, half-founded conspiracy theory – and though one’s every instinct is to discount them if one can, the unhappy truth is that Rose’s conspiracy theories, like those of the tabloid newspapers, generally turn out to contain a degree of truth.

She had a good deal more to tell me. I was conscious that she had begun to talk about the Porteous daughters, and the fact that Frances seemed to have developed an almost motherly fondness for them... But I found that I wasn’t listening to her any longer; I wanted her to leave, so that I might go at once to visit Frances, and discover the truth of the situation for myself. She did depart, finally; and I waited only long enough to see her disappear around the corner of the common, before making a quick check of my appearance, and hurrying off in the direction of the manor house; taking my way by the back lanes, lest I should encounter Rose again on the high street.

That there would be surprises for me there I fully anticipated; but what I hadn’t, couldn’t possibly have anticipated, was that it would be Mrs Meade who came out to wrestle with the pair of tall black gates to let me in. I was taken very much off guard by her re-appearance there, and hardly knew what to say to her, except to murmur that it was ‘very nice’ to see her back again. She gave me a look which said she would take that as she saw fit - which was with a heavy dollop of scepticism. And there was that about her demeanour, her very gait, as she led me across the courtyard and into the house, that told me more clearly than words could have done, that she believed herself to have been ill-used indeed; but that she was re-instated now, so that I, and all Miss Fanshawe’s other so-called friends, had better try to make the best of it we could.

Frances was sitting in the shaded conservatory before her easel, and the first thing I noticed about her was that she was dressed as she had used to be in the early days of our friendship, in paint-stained smock and crumpled trousers. She wore no make-up, and her hair was dishevelled; but the smile with which she greeted me was unstrained, and I took comfort - I can hardly say why – from the fact that on her feet were the old, familiar, curiously boat-like shoes.

“I can see from your face that Rose has been to see you, and that you must have heard my news” she very quietly said. “I had hoped to tell you myself, but more or less expected that Rose would have got in first. It’s perfectly true anyway – I have released David from his engagement, and he has returned to his own house for good. Please don’t try to say anything dear – there’s really nothing very much to say ....... It was Bill you know, who gave me courage to do it in the end. I had confided in him and he said “Do the thing that makes you comfortable”. And I knew that the only thing that would make me comfortable again would be to have my house, and my old life back.... So here I am, right down to the old shoes – I can’t tell you how the new ones pinched! And the wonderful thing is, that when once I’d stopped crying about it, I began to smile – and have hardly been able to stop smiling since!”

It may have been a bravura performance on Frances’s part, but somehow I didn’t think so. Nor did I seek to press her for any more about the separation than she seemed disposed, at this stage, to tell me. I spent another hour with her, during which time I learnt that one of the first acts of her freedom had been to send for Mrs Meade. Not as a gesture of defiance, as she put it; but more in the spirit in which she had taken to wearing her old shoes again - simply because they didn’t pinch!

I’m sure I shall hear more as the days and weeks go by; but for the moment it is enough to know that she has made the break, and will be able to live with it. I immediately sent a text to Bill saying “Frances has done it and is OK". To which he texted back "Excellent! Now have an eye for Belle."

Progress of the party

2007-07-07T09:40:00.000Z

“Oh good lord, just look at Mummy now!” cried Belle Macauley, as she and Frances and I carried our trays out into the garden on the afternoon of my tea-party last week. “First she gate-crashed your party, and now she seems to have appropriated it –and is behaving just as if she thought it were her own!”

It was true that in the fifteen minutes or so during which we had been busy in the kitchen, Lady Macauley had succeeded not only in acquainting herself with most of my guests, but also in collecting what had all the appearance of a little coterie around her, at the table in the gazebo. David Porteous was there, and so were his daughters. Amy, the pretty fair-haired younger one was seated beside her on the right, listening, and smiling, and doing her best to seem at ease; while her sister Imogen, dark-eyed and sharply glancing, sat looking distinctly uncomfortable on her left. Imogen at least seemed unmoved by anything that Lady Macauley was saying to her; and there was that about her expression which seemed to say she would exert herself, conversationally, for no old woman, not even the very grandest or most presumptuous; and that she had almost certainly been dragged there by her father entirely against her will.

Imogen’s skirt was very short and her legs, by contrast, very long. So that none of the men present knew quite what to do with their eyes. I noticed Bill’s eyes, and those of the Brigadier, being drawn, and riveted a moment, before they collected themselves, and sharply looked away. Even poor Roland was affected – though a severe sideways glance from Pamela soon pulled him up, and restored his gaze to a more proper contemplation of a clump of trees in the middle distance. Imogen herself seemed oblivious of the attention she was receiving. Or if she saw it, which I thought likely, chose to disregard it; doubtless telling herself there were better ways to spend an afternoon than sitting about in somebody’s garden being ogled by a group of rather dreadful old men.

Rose was in the gazebo too; sitting somewhat behind the others, and looking a little stiff, I thought, as if she believed her rightful place had on this occasion been usurped. She was doing her best to engage the attention of David Porteous; but I could see it was a losing battle, for he was leaning back in his seat with his customary meditative look, and evidently had eyes and ears, and the occasional small, carefully measured smile, only for Lady Macauley and his daughters. Most of my other guests, among whom were Pamela and Roland, stood about in little groups just outside the gazebo, chatting among themselves as apparently nonchalantly as they could, but glancing inwards all the while, as if they hoped at any moment to receive the call to climb the steps and join the inner circle.

Lady Macauley looked up at our approach, and called blithely to us. “I think I’m going to like your Mr Porteous after all!” she cried. “He has all the priestly virtues and none of the drawbacks so far as I can see. Only think of it – we have been together full ten minutes, and he hasn’t raised the question of my immortal soul once!”

Belle winced, and her sigh of resignation was long and deep. “What can you do with her?” she softly wailed. “The fact is, I gave up trying long ago – and can only hope you’ll excuse her impertinence on the grounds of her extreme old age. Though the truth is she has been impertinent all her life, and age has really nothing whatever to do with it!”

Neither Frances nor I knew quite how to respond to this, and were glad to be spared the effort of attempting it, by the arrival in our midst of David Porteous, and Bill, and Bill’s brigadier, who had come to insist upon relieving us of our trays. The trays disposed, and tea laid out, a little flurry of introductions followed. David brought Frances forward to be presented to Lady Macauley, who looked hard at her a moment, before extending a languid hand and murmuring something vague which seemed to contain a reference to her engagement, and her grandmother... This caused a momentary awkwardness: producing on Frances’s part a deep blush, and on Belle’s, another sharp intake of breath. For as each of them knew only too well, there had existed between the Macauleys and Frances’s grandmother, a fierce mutual animosity that had soured relations from the first moment, and had never been resolved.

Lady Macauley chose to ignore old feuds today however; though it was clear that Frances herself held very little interest for her, and she had turned, the next moment, to call Belle over to be introduced to David Porteous. This was the moment Belle had dreaded, of course. I felt for her acutely, and had just time, before moving on to welcome and talk to other guests, to witness her response to it. I had wondered how she would fare beneath that particular considered scrutiny, and I hoped her nerve would hold. I believe it did; though I could not help but see how taken aback she was, by the unexpectedly powerful physical presence of the man. I believe that the momentary touch of his hand produced little shocks in her, just as it had once done in me - and that it had suddenly become of vital importance to her that she should not stumble in his presence, or say anything which he might consider dull, or foolish.

It is the lot of the hostess though, to be able to involve herself only peripherally in her own party. I was obliged to leave the group in the gazebo at that point, to move about among my other guests. Tea must be served, and everyone made as welcome, and as much at their ease as it was in my power to do. Bill helped where he could – especially with Pamela, for whose sake, in a sense, the party had been convened; and with whom he in fact took the kind of trouble that I knew he couldn’t possibly be enjoying. I saw him engaged in long and earnest conversation with Roland, for example – for which act of heroic self-denial I vowed to repay him with especial acts of sisterly kindness in the future.

I was able to return now and then to the gazebo, where Lady Macauley continued to hold court with David Porteous and his daughters. I was glad to see that Frances was now of the group, and that David leant towards her confidingly enough at regular intervals, evidently doing his best to keep her involved in what was mostly Lady Macauley’s conversation. I caught only disjointed snatches of that conversation myself; though was able to observe that Lady Macauley was taking a good deal of trouble with Imogen Porteous, and that the girl herself was perceptibly, if still somewhat reluctantly, unbending. They appeared at one point to be talking about the excitement of living at what Lady Macauley had called ‘the throbbing centre of that great heart, the capital’...

“It must be very thrilling” I heard Lady Macauley say to the girl. “ I can quite see how for a young girl there could be no other life that could match it. Rose is a great one for the capital, you know. She goes up to Covent Garden to the opera constantly – I’m always trying to get my own poor Belle to go with her. The opera is so uplifting, don’t you think? One always comes away from it somehow feeling like Carmen or Violetta....”

Imogen Porteous seemed uncertain of how she ought to respond to this. Her look seemed to say that she had never felt especially like Carmen or Violetta herself – though she murmured something to the effect that she was sure it was very uplifting, but that she seldom found the time herself – much less the hundred pounds – that one seemed to require for going to hear it. It was not much, but it was a beginning,it seemed to me. The girl had not been altogether ungracious in her reply, and I could see that for Lady Macauley at least, there was something here which she thought it would probably amuse her to try to cultivate.

Pamela remained my primary pre-occupation though. I had resolved to grant her an audience with Lady Macauley if I could – the only difficulty lay in finding a way to achieve it without appearing too eager, or too obvious. Bill it was in fact, who finally had the inspiration that was to bring it off. He told me later that it had suddenly come to him that there must be some recompense for having listened for half an hour to Roland Baines drone on about the inequity of the country’s taxation policy, and all the little ruses he’d devised for getting round it... And then it had come to him. Only put them together, he’d thought: Lady M with her obsession about being robbed, posthumously, by the taxman - and Roland Baines with all his dry-as-dust little formulae for avoiding it!

The miracle was, it worked. It involved a kind of gate-crashing of the gazebo on Bill’s part of course. But then Bill has gate-crashed more perilous places than a gazebo in an English garden. And in any case there is nothing in the world that Bill can do that will not bring the light of amusement to Lady Macauley’s eyes. She suffered the curious intrusion of Bill with a Baines on either arm more or less without turning a hair. She did raise a quizzical eyebrow for a moment; but she nonetheless sat perfectly still and listened for a full ten minutes; and it was clear that, dull as he was, she found every word of Roland’s very much to her purpose. She ended almost by enveloping the astonished man in a lavender-scented embrace.

“What an impossibly clever creature you are to have thought-up all that!” she cried. “You have probably saved me more thousands than you can ever imagine, and I and my descendents will have cause to sing your praises forever!”

I doubt that Roland Baines has been the recipient of such extravagant praise from such a source in his life before; and I doubt still more that he will ever receive anything of the kind again. He positively beamed in the glow of it though, and so did Pamela. And if my little party achieved nothing else, it achieved this: that Pamela now has a perfect bi-line for any luncheon party she ever attends. “Dear Lady Macauley!“ she will be in a position to say with perfect impunity wherever she goes; “Such a friend of mine you know – especially since Roland saved her such a deal of money on the question of her inheritance tax...”

So far as Mr Porteous and his daughters are concerned – well, I believe they have already received their first invitation to go to tea at the Macauley house. Whether Imogen will consent to go or not, I can’t be sure - and I confess I’m even less sure about how all this will affect Belle's equanimity, or Frances's engagement. But on the whole I think I can claim that my little party achieved most of its desired ends. And after all, one can’t expect to have got absolutely everything right at just one attempt, can one?

I have amended the text to show that Part One now ends with this instalment rather than with the other, earlier one. Part Two will therefore begin with the next instalment.

Lady Macauley meets Mr Porteous

2007-07-01T18:27:00.000Z

When Lady Macauley met David Porteous for the first time in my garden one day last week, Bill said it was as if the earth had lurched a moment on its axis, then collecting itself, made a grinding sound and started turning again. I said I thought this far-fetched, even for him; and he admitted that he might have exaggerated a bit. But all the same, he insisted that it had been an arresting moment; during which the assembled company, if not perhaps the earth itself, had held its breath to see which way this particular pair was going to jump.

That Lady Macauley had jumped first, I was not surprised to learn. Nor that she had put out her hand and with a smile that withheld more than it conferred, said “So you are the famous Mr Porteous? I had been wondering what you would look like, and now I see that reports have not been exaggerated. I hope you will come and visit me one day, and tell me what a man does who has given up the Cloth to go adventuring, and abandoned his dog collar for a silk tie.”

I found it difficult to credit that even Lady Macauley could have gone so far as that in the first moments of a meeting. But Bill assured me that it was so – give or take an embellishment or two of his own for the sake of dramatic effect. “The gist of what she said was just as I give it to you. She took the wind right out of his sails for a minute – though I admit that some of the imagery is probably invented, and probably my own. She stood her ground at any rate, and he stood his. I don’t remember precisely what it was he said in reply. Only that he gave her his most effective grey-eyed look, and somehow managed to convey the impression that she might like or dislike him as she would; it was all the same to him, since her approval was not absolutely essential to his happiness.”

I received the distinct impression that Bill had felt a grudging admiration for David Porteous at the moment he described. He would never admit to it of course: he would insist that his personal dislike of the man remained unaltered. But there is something in Bill which delights above all in the irony of a thing - and it was clear to me there had been a moment of exquisite pleasure for him, in seeing Lady Macauley being taken on so effectively at her own game. “What’s obvious is that they will be friends of sorts” he ended by telling me. “It will be something of a battlefield of course - and poor Belle will doubtless be caught in the crossfire. That aspect of it saddens me immeasurably. But all the same, as spectator sports go, it promises to keep us entertained for weeks to come.”

I was glad he'd had the grace at least to think of Belle’s likely discomfort. It proved he was not entirely without heart or scruple, I told him. I only wondered if he had also thought to ask himself how all this was going to affect poor Frances – and am glad to be able to report that at this reminder, his gaiety received a visible check. That Frances must also be rendered uncomfortable by the association was clear even to him. But then everything about this engagement of hers was uncomfortable to Frances, he said; and the only thing we could do was continue to stand by her, and try to see her though whatever events should follow.

All this took place on the one fine afternoon we had last week. It had rained incessantly; we have so far had the most miserable summer. And now the ugly spectre of terrorism has raised its head again, in the form of explosive devices left in cars in London and Glasgow.... Happily, the devices were discovered before harm was done; and in any case it is not of them I mean to write today (or any day) ... The potential bombs were there, but horrible as they were, can hardly be allowed to intrude on the story. All that need concern us here is that on the one afternoon last week upon which I had invited a small group of friends to tea in the garden, the rain was merciful. It ceased for an hour or two, the sun came out and we were able to gather in the garden in the vicinity of what I persist in regarding as ‘David Porteous’s gazebo’.

That this group included Frances, and therefore Mr Porteous, had somehow seemed to dictate that it could not also include Lady Macauley and Belle. It was unfortunate, but inescapable; Belle having herself on several occasions expressed her misgivings about Mr Porteous’s likely impact on her mother, and the awful repercussions it would almost certainly have for her. No amount of his being engaged to someone else would deter her mother, Belle feared, if she should take it into her head that he would be an amusing new acquaintance – or worse, a suitable man for Belle to try to captivate! Belle had been down this road before, many times; and could only entreat us, heart in mouth, to try to keep them apart as long as possible.

It hadn't seemed a great deal to ask. Besides which, neither Bill nor I had reason to wish to promote David Porteous’s cause in the village – though we were at pains not to seem to demote it either of course, for Frances’s sake. My little party had been got together largely in Pamela’s interests, if the truth be known. I had been conscious for some time that she was feeling rather side-lined these days, by the closeness of Bill’s and my new association with the Macauleys. I disliked the idea that factions had grown up in the village; and that to consent to belong to one group, seemed necessarily to preclude one’s also belonging to any other. I had wanted Pamela to see that my friendship with Belle Macauley and her mother in no way interfered with that longer-standing one I had with her; and so I had invited her and Roland to tea in the garden, along with three other couples; among whom, of course, were Frances and David Porteous.

David’s daughters had happened to be staying at the manor house at the time, so Frances had phoned ahead to ask if she might bring them too; and so it was a group of a dozen persons that was gathered in the garden at the moment when the Macauley Daimler pulled up in the road outside. It seemed to hover there a moment; during which Lady Macauley herself peered out, and was seen to enter into some sort of heated discussion with Belle, who was driving. After which the car swung round abruptly, and proceeded to reverse slowly into our little forecourt.

I was in the kitchen with Frances preparing tea at the time, so was able to view proceedings only through the window, and from a distance of something like twenty five yards. But I saw Lady Macauley climb out of the car and make her way without assistance – with considerable speed and agility indeed – through the front gate and all the way along the length of the garden to the spot, right at the bottom, where the little group of my guests was assembled. What happened at the moment of her finally reaching the group was obscured for me by Bill’s pergola, now in splendid full bloom of roses and jasmine. And in any case, Belle herself had suddenly appeared in the kitchen in a state of acute mortification. She was overcome with embarrassment, poor woman; so that I was obliged to turn away from the garden, and give all my attention to her.

"Mummy has done it again!" she cried. ”She has gate-crashed your party, and I hardly know what to say in excuse of her! She would have me pull up outside, just to see if anything was ‘going on’, as she put it.... And then she saw the people gathered, and heard laughter and talk, and that was it. She said she was sure you wouldn’t mind if we came in to join your party – and was halfway up the path before I’d even had a chance to stop the engine! I’ve never seen her gallop off at such speed – it shows she can do it when she wishes! But Rose has followed her in - and will head her off and bring her back, if you’d really much rather we shouldn’t stay...”

In the face of such sincere embarrassment, what could I say, what do – except of course insist that nothing would give me greater pleasure than that they should all stay and join the party? Which in a sense was true. I had a sort of fatalistic feeling about it now, and had come to think that this was a meeting that was bound to have happened sooner or later anyway. I introduced Frances; adding, rather awkwardly I thought, that they were probably acquainted with one another very well by sight, yet had perhaps never quite met... And then I asked Belle if she would mind carrying one of the trays we had prepared, and come down with us to the gazebo to join the other guests....

Alas though, the word count has already exceeded my allotted fifteen hundred! There is no Google ruling that I know of, to limit the number of words one may post – but I am nervous of exhausting the patience of possible readers, and so I pause here; hoping to return tomorrow or thereabouts, to finish relating this really rather pivotal part of the story....

Getting to know Belle Macauley

2007-06-27T10:43:00.000Z

We have a new Prime Minister. Gordon Brown takes over from Tony Blair today, and Lady Macauley for one is lost in contemplation of the awful possibilities of the transition.

“She can’t help thinking there has been something vaguely unconstitutional about it” Belle told us when she called at the gatehouse this morning. “She wonders at the smoothness of the change, and fears that the British people have been duped into believing they had a hand in it somewhere.”

Bill threw back his head with joy at hearing this. He thanks God for the presence of a Lady Macauley, who can express the misgivings that a deluded nation hasn’t yet quite managed to work out or articulate for itself - and he hopes that she has also expressed them in a letter to The Times! Belle doubts she has gone so far as that: her mother’s misgivings are largely reserved for her own ears alone. Though Rose, who had taken up position as Mummy’s confidante when she left them earlier this morning, was doubtless receiving the benefit of them even as we spoke.

“Mummy doesn’t believe Mr Brown can possibly be even an eighth as good as he says he is” Belle further confided. “She wants to know where he got all his new smiles from, for a start. He was a glowering sort of fellow before – she can’t see how any good can come to the British people from so remarkable a transformation. She has been glued to the television for days – politics has never held so much fascination for her. She thought she was going to miss the presence of the Blairs as a perpetual irritant, but now she sees that Mr Brown is probably going to fulfil that function even more rewardingly. She does just wonder how the Queen will like him however – she thinks he will make a rather uncomfortable kind of house-guest at Balmoral. Still, she supposes that we are all going to be called upon to make sacrifices in the interests of the greater good – and of course, so far as the Queen is concerned, his simply being Scottish will be thought a considerable advantage.”

Bill and I have been surprised lately at the quiet pleasure there is to be had in a developing friendship with Belle Macauley. She had seemed just a little standoffish at first; reserved at least, and not inclined to wish attention drawn to herself. But the more one knows her, the more clearly does one see just how much she has had to suffer all her life from being compared unfavourably with her mother. She put it in words for us herself one day last week, at Flory.

“It is one of the laws of nature” she said; “that Mummy should try and I should fail.” She laughed as she said it; she had been telling us about all the efforts her mother had made over the years to marry her off – and how woeful a showing she had made in that respect, every time. She said that her failure was most marked when viewed in juxtaposition with the success that Rose had achieved on the marital front. “Mummy is somewhat in awe of it you know” she confided. “It constitutes quite the major part of her affection for Rose. She doesn’t see how any woman could be dull who has managed to secure so many husbands – and she never fails of course, to make the melancholy link, by comparing it with my failure to have secured even one!”

I could see what Bill thought of this; and almost feared that he would be unable to restrain himself from giving vent to his own sentiments with respect to Rose. But in this I did him an injustice. He was very quiet about it in fact; saying nothing whatever that was detrimental either to Rose, or to Lady Macauley herself. He knew, as I did, that Belle felt no pity for herself; and that to have commiserated with her to any extent would have been somehow to have compromised both her sympathy, and her continuing friendship. We both liked her for it the more. And I confess that the thought did run through my head that there would be something very pleasant about a liaison between these two people whom I liked so much, Belle Macauley and my brother Bill.

“You could do a lot worse you know, than to fall in love with Belle Macauley!” I ventured to suggest to him in private later. To which he replied - not in wrath as I had expected, but thoughtfully; and with a hint of regretfulness - that to go down that particular road would be to court the most intense, and well-merited opprobrium. There was a taboo associated with such matters, he said; and the lady with the big house was strictly off limits for the impecunious adventurer. He added that there was room in the district for only one man of that sort – and he sure as hell was not about to become a second David Porteous! I saw his point of course, and said nothing further on the subject. And I was relieved, at the later time of our conversation with Belle, when she went on very quickly to drop the subject of herself, and take up that of her cousin Hortense instead.

“Mummy did her a great injustice you know!” she told us. “When she spoke like that about her disappointed love affairs and her cats, that is. It’s true that none of her love affairs has so far brought her very much happiness – though the big old house she presently inhabits was in fact a parting gift from one of her lovers. An old man whom I believe she truly loved for what she saw as his poet’s soul - but who had the misfortune to breath his last, just before the marriage ceremony had been performed. Hortense suffered deeply from that, I know. And has done her very best to transform his rather dismal house into a shrine to his memory. She has formed a kind of artistic commune down there - something of a reconstituted Arts and Crafts Movement, I believe."

"I haven’t been able to visit it myself as yet, but I’d very much like to do so at some point... There are poets, and painters, and potters – there’s the young man who struggles against hideous adversity to produce the Proustian novel; and the sculptor performing unacknowledged wonders with discarded polystyrene. Each of them has somehow failed to achieve the kind of recognition he deserves - and Hortense has dedicated herself and her house to the promotion of their causes. It seems to me a thoroughly worthy, if possibly unrealistic endeavour... And though it’s true of course that Hortense is very fond of cats - well, Mummy exaggerated wildly there too; and I believe she has six or so at most, not twenty!”

All in all, Belle seemed to think that if her cousin Hortense should suggest we go down to Suffolk on a visit, we might actually find some pleasure in the experience. She even thought she might be able to arrange matters with her mother so that she could accompany us. And it was clear to me that, the awkwardness of Hortense’s almost daily emailed avowals of passion for him notwithstanding, Bill did not reject this proposal out of hand. He has encountered impassioned artistic ladies before, he says – and has learnt that their demands seldom progress beyond the purely poetic.

Cousin Hortense

2007-06-23T08:16:00.000Z

It’s more than a week since I wrote anything here, and suddenly it seems as if events have overtaken me, and I shall be unable to remember and record everything that has happened lately. We have been living here for six months now, Bill and I; and it’s difficult to recall how long the empty days seemed at first, and how I wondered whether I should ever make the acquaintance of any of the neighbours. Now, I am truly in the thick of everything that’s going on, and my chief difficulty is in remembering who is saying precisely what about whom; to which of the several factions each of my new friends belongs – and where my own affection and loyalties ought to be seen to lie.

My affection for Frances remains undimmed of course. But with her engagement, she has entered regions to which I am unable to go, even in imagination. The idea of the life that she and David must lead together there behind the high walls of the manor house day after day, is one before which I find that contemplation stumbles. I simply cannot envisage their life, and so I have given up trying to make the attempt.

Bill is not so cowardly, and has his own theories about it. “She exists to promote the cause of David Porteous, damn it!” he says. That it’s an ignoble cause is of no consequence, he says; since she believes in it herself. "She’s mistaken, but she believes – oh ardently! And until she sees the error of that belief herself there’s not a thing that any of us can do about it.”

Privately, I think he hopes that sooner or later Frances will have a change of heart, and seek escape – and that when that moment comes, he will be called upon to storm the citadel himself, and bring her out. I believe he would welcome such a contingency; I would go further, and suggest that he probably has battle plans already drawn up, and that they will have something at least of a commando raid about them. Though I could be hopelessly mistaken myself about that aspect of it, of course... Bill has always said I have a tendency towards the fantastic.

Bill has other ladies than Frances on his mind at present, as a matter of fact. Something occurred during our stay with the Macauleys in Suffolk that has altered the perspective of our lives somewhat – though Bill says it’s a mere will-o’-the-wisp of an event, and that I’m over-dramatising it, as is my wont. Whether this is true or not, future developments will doubtless show. But I have decided to relate it for you here just as it occurred. As a light little diversionary story perhaps, that will help dispel the present gloom over the affair of David Porteous and Frances.

You will perhaps recall the rather strange nameless lady who shared my table at Lady Macauley’s luncheon party last month? The one who wore a jewelled bandana on her head, and conversed in sudden short bursts, and unconnected observations? There’s no reason in the world why you should remember her of course; I seem to recall thinking at the time that I was unlikely ever to see her again myself, and should probably never discover precisely who she was, or from whence she’d sprung.

But the fact is that she sprang up again last week while we were in Suffolk with the Macauleys, and has since become a rather extraordinary background presence in our lives. I say ‘our’ lives, but really I mean Bill’s. He seems to have ‘landed’ this strange lady - and will perhaps have some difficulty in extricating himself from her. He has a tendency towards that sort of thing: his life has always to some extent been littered with unattached females of a certain age who form passionate attachments to him. He says it’s another of the occupational hazards of being a foreign correspondent – people identify him with the battles he reports, and make a hero of him on the flimsiest evidence.

This latest conquest of his is called Hortense. Yes, really, that is her name: I haven’t invented it! She was one of the half a dozen or so guests who were sitting around the luncheon table last week, at the moment of our arrival at Barton Flory, Lady Macauley’s childhood home in rural Suffolk. We had arrived late, after an awkward car journey with Rose, who’d insisted on sitting in front with Bill, and kept up an animated conversation all the way.

We slid into the seats that had been kept for us, trying not to cause too much of a disruption to the progress of the lunch; and there, on Bill’s right hand was my lady of the bandana; unadorned on this occasion by any such headdress, but launched, at the moment of our arrival upon a solemn-sounding dissertation on the subject of Virginia Woolf. She looks a little like Virginia, as a matter of fact; she certainly has an air of Bloomsbury about her, and is very fond of Vita Sackville-West too, apparently. Bill put her down at once as a raging lesbian – though later events were to prove him wrong on that score, at least.

“The tall woman with the curiously booming voice is my Cousin Hortense!” Lady Macauley informed us in a theatrical whisper during coffee in the drawing room half an hour later. “Be as kind to her as you can; she’s a poor thing, and has led a rather tragic life. She trails disappointed love affairs in her wake as other women trail stale perfume, and will almost certainly fall in love with Bill. She has a great weakness for big men with hearty laughs; she won’t be able to help herself. And having fallen, she will cling – I give you warning of that in advance!”

She went on to advise Bill to steel himself against any advances from Cousin Hortense; who had, as she put it, “ nothing in the world to offer him save her wounded heart and a more or less derelict mansion a hundred miles from anywhere ....” His best resource if Hortense should pounce, she said, would be to let her know he’s allergic to cats. “Tell her you simply loathe the creatures, and her heart will be implacably closed to yours -for she has twenty of them in that great barn she calls a house, and they are at present the solitary passions of her life.”

Bill laughed heartily about it at the time, telling Lady Macauley she was a thoroughly immoral woman, to be talking about her cousin in such terms. But I think he has good reason to remember it more soberly now; since everything that Lady Macauley predicted was actually to come to pass. I believe I was myself witness to the precise moment at which Cousin Hortense fell passionately in love with Bill. It was later that evening, and we were all sitting in the drawing room to listen to Belle playing excerpts from Chopin and Mozart with a surprisingly expert hand.

It was Lady Macauley’s idea that she should switch to ballads and light operetta, and that we should all gather round to sing – and it was while Bill was delivering a fairly spirited rendition of O Sole Mio, that Cousin Hortense was suddenly overcome with emotion. She uttered a soft sort of swooning sound, somehow audible above the music; then, throwing up both arms in a thrilling gesture, cried “Bravo, oh bravo and bravo again!”, and visibly gave up her heart to him.

All this happened over a week ago, and it’s true that Cousin Hortense hasn’t yet forsaken her cats so far as to get on a train and come to visit us. She has taken to e-mailing Bill however – she has a fondness for e-mails, apparently, and has developed quite a rococo electronic style. Bill says it’s harmless enough, so long as it goes no further – but I notice he’s giving rather more thought than hitherto, to that invitation he’s had from the British Council, to deliver a series of lectures in Australia and the Far East.

Just One More Thing

2007-06-20T08:12:00.000Z

“Can there be even one?” I hear you exasperatedly cry. To which the answer is yes, I very much fear there can! I really do apologise for this; it breaks the continuity of the story quite shockingly, I know. But it was always to have been an experiment, this re-telling of the story as a blog; and as such, it has taken on a momentum, and a capacity for fluctuation and change, that I confess I hadn’t foreseen myself at the outset.

My present dilemma concerns the discrepancy that has arisen around the characters (and the names) of Mr Porteous’s daughters. I had originally called them Julia and Anne - but those names no longer seemed quite the right ones, and so they have changed to become Imogen and Amy. Imogen is the elder, dark-eyed, and inclined to be confrontational in her relations with her father; Amy the younger, fairer, and more compliant.

I had already posted an instalment entitled Mr Porteous's Daughter, describing Anne, and the little handicrafts shop she had lately opened in the village. But I have now deleted that entry, and can only ask that those of you who have perhaps already read it, will try to delete it from your memories also?

It’s a great deal to ask I know. I had hoped in fact that the discrepancy might have been noticed, and brought to my attention by way of the Comment box. That it has not done so suggests that nobody has in fact noticed – so perhaps the adjustment won’t present quite so many difficulties as I had feared!

The present situation vis-a-vis the girls is therefore as I described it in the instalment of 15 June entitled “A Blog too far?”. And for those who haven’t read it (and perhaps have no intention of doing so!), the present recorded facts about the girls are these:

1) Imogen is 28, and took her degree at one of the London art colleges, specialising in textile management and care. Amy is 26, and took a degree in English at Bristol.

2) They have drifted about a good deal since graduating, and in fact spent many months in Australia with their mother, trying to decide whether they wanted to stay there or not. They have lately returned to England however, and are sharing a flat above a shop in Baker St (near to the Sherlock Holmes museum); with a view to taking a lease on the shop too, and opening it as an art and handicrafts shop.

3) This is an enterprise of which their father strongly disapproves.

This will I hope be the final alteration, and I apologise again for it.

Mr Porteous and Frances; the early encounters

2007-06-18T12:51:00.000Z

These are the last of the excerpts from the original novel that I mean to post at this stage. They will I hope provide a little more insight into the characters of David Porteous and Frances Fanshawe - and will perhaps help to prevent readers' becoming too attached to the idea of the new improved Mr Porteous!

(Note: there is a little discrepancy here - in that when David calls at the manor house the second time, he seems to be seeing Frances for the first time! Put it down to carelessness of editing - and be sure that it will be amended in the final draft!)

The first episode takes place shortly after the previous full chapter about David Porteous. He has been in residence in Aunt Floss’s house for about three weeks, has become acquainted with Mrs Baines and Roland – and has lately been the recipient of a basket of fruit and vegetables sent round by Frances from the manor house garden. He is sitting at his desk trying to write, as usual - but he finds his thoughts wandering, and expects at any moment to be disturbed by one of Mrs Baines’s ‘little phone calls’...

“........ And if it were not Mrs Baines who disturbed him, it would be that other rather remarkable new acquaintance of his, Miss Frances Fanshawe; who had lately sent round her man-of-all-work with a basket of fruit and vegetables from her garden, and who, on his calling at her house to express his thanks, had seemed to want to keep him there - had wanted to show him her father’s library, or her display of orchids, or her lavender parterre… David couldn’t remember exactly what it was that Miss Fanshawe had wanted to show him, only that she had seemed oddly insistent about it, for a rather sadly faded little maiden lady……..

He thought he would almost certainly take up her invitation at some point. He hardly saw how he could do otherwise; so anxious had she seemed to further the acquaintance; and so very much struck had he been himself moreover, by the size, and sheer magnificence of the house she lived in. It was called the manor house, and was a perfect example of the architecture of the period of Queen Anne. Its high brick walls enclosed grounds that were only slightly smaller than those of the Macauley house; it occupied what amounted to an entire block, and the only access was by way of a pair of tall, impenetrable-looking black gates that seemed to defy, rather than encourage approach.

“She is as effectively walled-in as any princess in a tower” David reflected, as he stood outside the tall black gates, trying to decide whether or not to press the entry bell. He found amusement in the reflection - but there was something oddly seductive about it too. He was going to have to perform feats of valour perhaps – scale walls, and push his way through thickets of brambles – before he could gain access to his prize? He hesitated a moment longer, then firmly pressed the bell; telling himself, while he waited for a response, that a lady must be small and faded indeed who should altogether fail to excite one’s interest, when she was evidently the sole custodian of what he had already begun to think of as “all this”… “

Ten minutes later, having been admitted at last by a rather surly Mrs Meade, and conducted across a wide courtyard in which a pair of immense cedars blocked out all the light.... he finds himself seated on a high-backed chair in a wide, polished entrance hall, waiting for Frances Fanshawe to appear. Here is what he is thinking:

“.... The signs of wealth and ease were all around him, but he was pleased to see that they were under-stated, and didn't shout at him of recent expenditure or conscious show. “Her chairs and her cabinets and her pictures are old and good” he thought; “But they are not ostentatious. And she evidently hasn’t had to go out and buy them herself!". He was glad of that: he was fond of the high tone and the dismissive attitude. He could easily suppose that such a lady as Miss Fanshawe would wave all these splendid objects aside with a surprised “What – these old things?”. It would be the tone of wealth and privilege, worn lightly. And it was the one, too, which Mr Porteous believed he might have been intended by Nature to adopt himself - had Nature only seen fit to put him down in the kinds of circumstances in which it would have been appropriate.

Here then, he thought, was a lady to whom one could take an honest liking – provided of course that she shouldn’t turn out to be quite the kind of impossible spinster whom one half expected, or feared... He had a momentary vision, awful to him, of a kind of resurrected Aunt Floss, come back to try him again in the person of the lady of the manor. He quickly brushed it aside however; since for all her opinions, Aunt Floss would have been hopelessly out of her depth in conditions such as these. No, Miss Fanshawe must be a very different kind of lady, he decided. He was resolved to like her if he could. He thought she would have to be unlikeable indeed, if she failed to satisfy at least some of the expectations that her furniture seemed to raise!

He was not so vulgar, of course, as to say to himself that here was perhaps the kind of solitary maiden lady who would turn out to represent his best chance yet of being swept away into more propitious circumstances. He declined absolutely to entertain the idea that there was anything in his meditations that could be called venal – or worse still, carnal! Heaven forbid that he should have sunk so low! He was just a little disconcerted, for all that, by that propensity of his (it had arisen only lately) for viewing all reasonably presentable unattached ladies as potential wives or lovers. It wouldn’t do, he told himself; it was in the worst possible taste! He did allow himself a charmed moment or two just the same, in which to wonder how it might feel to have the freedom of such a house? Wives or lovers aside, he thought he would know how to adapt to it. And he did hope – oh, devoutly: it was a kind of prayer! – that Miss Fanshawe wouldn’t turn out to be the kind of lady whose aspect and character would put her quite out of the question in both respects.

The personage who did finally emerge from out of the house’s deepest recesses to cross the wide expanse of the hall and come to greet him, was neither daunting nor large, however. She was in fact the mildest, and smallest of fluttered-looking English maiden ladies. She wore a paisley skirt, and a cardigan that could only be described as drooping; her grey hair was not in any sense what David would have called ‘arranged’, and in her rather large, pale face were only the merest vestigial hints of what might once have been girlish prettiness. Her pearls were probably real, he thought; but she wore them without distinction, and though she held out her hand to him and smiled a greeting, the smile was tremulous, and he saw that for all her ten bedchambers and her rooms of state, she was very much more nervous of meeting him, than he was of her.”

Somehow, having managed to persuade a disgruntled Mrs Meade to delay bringing coffee for them, Frances finds courage to suggest they go out into the garden, where the following passage takes place:

“.... It was clear by now that everything Miss Fanshawe said, even when it was only her instructions to her housekeeper, had a tendency to drift off into inconclusiveness at the end; and so it was with the solicitousness almost of the host - with the practised urbanity of the experienced clergyman, certainly – that David all but shepherded her away, his left arm hovering at a respectful distance from her cardiganed back, in the direction which she said would take them to the herb garden. They passed through many pleasant places on the way. David would have liked to linger a while at the edge of a large ornamental pond, to look at the water-lilies, and watch the frogs jump; or a moment later, to have stopped to admire a splendid rose which tumbled over a pretty summerhouse. But his small companion pushed resolutely on, with scarcely a word or a sideways glance; rather in the manner, he thought, of a small spaniel that was intent on taking him to see a bone it had lately buried. And when at last, having stooped to pass beneath another voluptuous rose which partially blocked an arched gateway in a wall, they came at last upon the box-edged symmetry of the knot garden, it was to no announcement of hers, but only a sharp exhalation, an almost reverent “Ah... a knot garden!”, on David's part.

Miss Fanshawe turned up her face to him in a large, dim smile. She was pleased with his appreciation; but she was evidently no sort of hand, herself, at superlatives.

“Mr Jessop would be so pleased to hear you call it that” was the nearest she could come to it. “He thinks everybody has forgotten the name now – and he worked so hard to make all the little hedges. He’ll allow no-one else to go near them with a pair of clippers you know – and he’d have preferred to have varieties of lavender in all the beds. He says that’s the proper sort of planting – but I would have my herbs......”

It was apparently as near as she could come to a conversational opening of her own; and her drifting off into vagueness at its end seemed to make it incumbent upon David to take up her theme and expand it as best he could.

“I daresay Mr Jessop is right” he thoughtfully said. “ Though it always seems to me one can experience the special delights of a knot garden just as well with fragrant herbs. I’m not sure that wasn’t its original function after all.” He asked her permission then, to pluck a sprig or two. For the pleasure, he said, of crushing them between his fingers to release their fragrance. He sniffed deeply, then held a stalk of rosemary at a little distance from Miss Fanshawe’s face, so that she too might enjoy the aroma. They walked slowly together round all the little paths, David making all the conversational openings, and Miss Fanshawe responding now and then with a small utterance of her own. She had begun to be a little more comfortable with him though; she had grown quite pink with it. And David had begun to find that he was rather enjoying himself. There was a good deal to be said for the company of such an undemanding little lady, he thought: it made the appreciation of all her splendid possessions so very much simpler. He was in no hurry to bring the experience to an end; he even thought he might suggest they wander on to look at other parts of the garden. But Miss Fanshawe had suddenly remembered Mrs Meade and her coffee.

“Oh dear” she said. “We have left it to get cold! We ought to go back at once – if you can spare the time to stay for coffee, that is...?”

“ Oh well, we musn’t disappoint Mrs Meade!” David had the gentlest little smile for it. “And indeed I’d like very much to stay for coffee - if you’re quite sure it won’t be too much of an intrusion into your own morning, that is?”

Miss Fanshawe was quite sure. She had nothing whatever to do, she said. And then as if she suddenly saw how idle, or grand, or unwelcoming that must have sounded, she amended it; telling him, all in a rush, that of course she did have to go out later to see an old friend who was ill, and then to do some shopping; but that there was quite time enough for coffee even so... She added that Mrs Meade would be waiting for them anyway - would probably have gone away to make a fresh pot indeed. And then she led the way - or rather, permitted herself to be led, Mr Porteous’s hand resting an inch or two beneath her elbow - back across the polished expanse of the hall, and into a sunny corner of her father’s library, where Mrs Meade, with a marked disgruntlement of countenance, was waiting with her second tray of coffee....”

So there it is – or rather, there it was. And I can see that I was right, in my suspicions about Mr Porteous and Frances. It was always on the cards that he was going to make himself indispensable to her. It only shocks me a little (I hope it doesn't also shock you!) to see how entirely sure-footed he was about it, from the start!

A Blog too Far?

2007-06-15T08:58:00.001Z

Not for the faint-hearted anyway: being a 5000-word chapter from the original book.

I have decided to take a calculated risk, and post a complete chapter from the original novel. My aim is to give a more rounded picture of David Porteous - though I quite see that the only thing I might succeed in doing will be to exhaust and alienate those few faithful readers I already have! It's a risk I've decided to take however - if only that I might move on with greater confidence to the next phase in the Blog version of the story.

This chapter follows, in the original, immediately upon David Porteous's first visit to the cottage of Mrs Baines and Roland - and these are his recorded impressions...

"....David Porteous’s impressions of his visit to the cottage beside the pond were a good deal less favourable than Mrs Baines might have hoped. His heart had sunk sharply indeed, when the large lady in the curiously rustling dress had opened the front door to him. She was so very much the mixture as before, that was the trouble. She might easily have been high-nosed Miss Ursula Monckton-Leyes of the Ladies’ Needlework Guild; or tireless Mrs Elsworthy, whose organisational zeal in the matter of the Fete Committee and the Flower Rosta had sometimes made it necessary for him to hide in corners…. It had been difficult not to see in her some rather gruesome mix of the attributes of all his former female parishioners, thrown into the melting pot and re-constituted as one large, intimidating lady! David had experienced a moment of deep dismay therefore, even as he had urbanely smiled, and put out his hand for greeting.

And throughout all the rather tedious little ritual of tea and cakes, the conversational progressions which seemed to have been ordained beforehand, the bland assumptions and the entirely predictable views, his irritation had intensified. Was this the way it was going to be, then? Was he simply to have exchanged one set of blameless matrons for another? Had he gone through all the upheaval of retirement, all the pompous speech-making and protracted farewells - all the sudden panic, even, that he had experienced on closing the doors of his dear old church and charming rectory for the very last time - just so that he might come down here and find everything going along in much the same manner as before?

He admitted that he had hoped for something better. Or something, at least, a little different. He had hoped, when it really came down to it, to have found himself immersed more or less at once in circles which would include those of his very much more promising, and indeed his almost nearest neighbours, the Macauleys. He had even dared to hope that from these circles might emerge (all in the fullness of time of course) that lady who was suited to become the second Mrs Porteous. One who would exemplify in her character and her person all the feminine virtues which had been so notable by their absence in the first. He did not think it too much to ask. He believed he had been ill used indeed, by Laura; who had married him with what had looked like joy, and then gone on to let him down in every conceivable way. He didn’t know how else was he to judge her, when she had made it so clear from the start that she disliked every aspect of the role of clergyman’s wife, and had finally abandoned it altogether; leaving him, and wanting a divorce, after eighteen years of marriage.

He thought he had borne his misfortune with dignity; and that his own judgment of the situation had been a just one. He had looked hard enough, heaven knew, for any shortcomings of his own which might have contributed to what the courts had called the irretrievable breakdown of his marriage. He had searched his conduct and his soul over many a prayerful succession of days and nights, and found nothing in the way of sins or omissions which he thought could account for Laura’s defection. He had ended by exonerating himself from blame: he had married unwisely, that was all – Laura, Dean’s daughter though she was, having been unable, or unwilling, to adapt herself to the role that she had promised before the altar to fulfil. He had never been entirely sure that his daughters shared this view of the situation, however. Julia had been sixteen at the time, Anne fourteen; and they had taken it hard. He feared they had judged him at least in part to blame for the failure of the marriage; though neither had come right out and accused him of any offence, and both, when faced with the agony of a choice between one parent and the other, had elected to stay on in the rectory with their father.

His own, and his daughters’ unhappiness aside – and both had been prolonged, and intense - it had been a very awkward position for a priest of middle years and general high standing to find himself in. The Church of England had not looked kindly then upon the idea of divorce and re-marriage within its own ranks. Its position had been quite uncompromising - its more accommodating twists and turns of conscience were still to come. Marriage was indissoluable, that was its dictum: he might divorce, but could not think about re-marrying. He was going to have to embrace the ideal of abstinence – possibly for life.

‘The time-honoured priestly path’ he had called it, when speaking of it in the parish. Making it, when the moment seemed right, the subject of a little sermon, sad but brave, in which he had done his best to defuse and clarify the situation. He had told his parishioners that he thought he owed them at least that much. He had even managed to raise a little smile for it; ending, as he had done, with the observation that if they were to be saddled with a celibate priest, then they ought to know about it in advance, so that they might decide whether it was something they could live with, or not! They had thought they could live with it perfectly well, of course: they had only been a little vague as to the precise manner and extent to which a congregation ought to try to commiserate with its priest on the question of his celibacy! On the whole, they decided that the least said the better: a discreet little veil had been drawn around the subject, and it was quietly and universally assumed that Mr Porteous would bear his lonely burden, as he did everything else, with perfect priestliness.

One way and another, he thought he had. Twelve years had passed since then. The girls had left school and gone away to college: Anne to read English at Bristol, and Julia, always the more awkward of the two, to pursue a long and complicated course of degrees and diplomas at one of the London Art Schools. Left alone in the rectory for several years, David’s every practical requirement had somehow been met - and his celibacy more or less held out. He was to find that his unofficial vow of abstinence offered him very little protection, however. The time-honoured priestly path apparently allowed a certain latitude: one was almost expected to stray from it now and then – provided of course that any straying should take place outside the parish, and with decorum.

And even within the parish, his path had not been without temptations. A wifeless priest had no defence but his own rectitude, it seemed - and his had been put to a number of fairly stiff tests. He had been just a little shocked indeed, at the lengths to which some of his lady parishioners were prepared to go in the interests of obtaining his special favour - especially when their own circumstances had seemed to conduce to the possibility of their becoming the second Mrs Porteous! Somehow though, he had managed to parry all advances; and if he had gone adventuring, as he liked to put it – he being after all, no more than a man like any other - then he had taken care to do so discreetly, and well outside the eyes and ears, and sensiblilties, of the parish.

Laura had remarried meanwhile, and gone to live in Australia; from where, her new husband being a considerable land owner, with expendable income enough, it seemed, for almost anything, she had met all the girls’ college fees, and in addition dispatched each year at Christmas and in summer time, return tickets for them to go out and spend their long vacations with her. They had gone willingly – joyfully, it had seemed to him. Returning each time with a look of sunshine about them; with eyes that seemed somehow to have grown accustomed to looking out over wide expanses; with sunburnt complexions, and flagrantly augmented wardrobes - and with the merest hint, to his mind, of Antipodean vowels. But they had come back too, with a restlessness of spirit which had sometimes looked to him like grievance only partially suppressed. He had feared they had all the while been making judgements, comparisons, choices – and that it could perhaps be only a matter of time before they would begin to question the wisdom of having elected to stay on with him in England at all, when they might have enjoyed a life of glorious expenditure and endless sunshine, in Australia.

David had been sitting at his desk all the while, on this his third Monday morning, to make these rather discomfiting reflections. He called it his desk, the rather spindle-legged table he had set up for himself in the window recess of Aunt Floss’s ugly boxroom; but it was a miserable affair indeed, when compared with the capacious leather-topped one he had enjoyed in his study at the rectory. And the boxroom itself was more miserable still – quite the smallest and ugliest room in this inordinately ugly and neglected house. He had chosen it, not for its amenities or its size ( since it possessed neither - not even a useable bookshelf); but entirely for the view it commanded, over the roof of the one intervening house (which he understood was that of Mrs Mountjoy), and down into a substantial section of the Macauley gardens. He had sat down resolutely enough, an hour earlier; he had his papers stacked in an orderly pile beside him; his pencils were sharpened and his new laptop switched on, ready to go. He had meant to make a start at once upon the scholarly work which was to be the occupation and the sustenance of his future – he had even dreamt-up a rather arresting opening sentence.

But his thoughts would stray. So that if he was not worrying about the girls, or the repairs that were required to the house, he was steeling himself against the likelihood that Mrs Baines would break in on him at any moment with one of her little phone calls. She had fallen into the habit of calling him every other day on one pretext or another: generally that of the little party of welcome she was arranging for him, which was always just on the point of being fixed for a certain date, only to fall through again unexpectedly at the last minute, involving her (and him!) in another little flurry of apologetic explanatory calls. And when his mind was not straying in any of these directions, he found that his eyes wandered anyway, away from his papers and his laptop, and out of the window to gaze down into the walled expanse of what might once have been the Macauley kitchen garden.

He had been astonished at first to learn that the legendary Theodora still lived on in the big gaunt house at the end of the road. She must be almost a hundred by now, according to any reckoning of his. It was almost as remarkable as to have discovered that Wallis Simpson was still alive. Or Nell Gwynne, or Queen Victoria! David knew the history of Jack Macauley and his Theodora. His Aunt Floss had recounted it many times, with almost total recall, and a scarcely suppressed venom. She had considered it thoroughly disreputable, and had never consented to call Lady Macauley by any other name than Theodora; evidently believing that in speaking of her as the more sensational newspapers of the early days had done, she was reducing her to her proper place in society, and registering her own perfectly legitimate disdain. Her nephew had come to see that in her judgments of Theodora, his Aunt Floss had betrayed more than a little malice of the strictly female sort. Possessing no trace of beauty or charm herself (and, so far as he knew, no man had ever desired her, or sought her out in marriage), it was perhaps no more than natural - no more than human at any rate - that she should have looked for shortcomings in the conduct of those among her sisters who had been better blessed by nature than herself.

Still, Aunt Floss had been a rather dreadful old thing, whose opinions, especially now that she was very soundly dead, could largely be discounted. And there was no denying that the house she had left him was interestingly, nay, fascinatingly situated. He had been inordinately pleased from the start with his close proximity to the Macauley mansion. He thought it quite the best part of his aunt’s no doubt all unwitting gift to him, that she should have put him down almost cheek by jowl with Theodora, a lady who for all her scandalous history and her probably ninety years, still seemed to him to stand at the shining centre of the fascinating social circles which were likely to open up around him in the very near future. He almost felt he ought to offer up a prayer of intercession for his aunt’s immortal soul for that, if for few other benevolences of hers that he could bring to mind.

He had thought it likely he might bump into Theodora, or better still her daughter Isabella, at almost any moment; it had added a certain charmed expectancy to all the other emotions he was currently experiencing. But he had heard from Mrs Baines that the Macauley ladies were away at present, and unlikely to return for several weeks. It had been a sharp disappointment. It had seemed to put back his pleasant expectations by some incalculable period of weeks, or even months - for who knew where a pair of unencumbered wealthy women might have gone, and for how long, when they had taken it into their heads that they required a change of scene?

In the meantime, he was experiencing every kind of misgiving about his new situation. It was all very well to have upped sticks and retired, but one ought to have had a better idea of what it was one was retiring to. He had this house of course, and he was not so dishonest with himself as to fail to acknowledge that he had never expected to be put in possession of a freehold house, and that without it there would have never have any question of early retirement at all. But a house as a means of sustenance was a poor thing, when it came right down to it – one could live in, but could hardly live off it. It was like his Aunt Floss, he thought, to have left him a run-down Victorian villa, and then to have deprived him of the means of making it even decently habitable by leaving all her money to his daughters!

The sum bequeathed had seemed large at first. And indeed, at thirty thousand pounds apiece after tax it was large, at least when set against any sum which had dropped as if from heaven into the girls’ laps before. Julia and Anne had been astonished by it; had spent several happy weeks just glorying in the thought of it, the splendid things they might do with such sums, the wonders they must surely work. Their first generous impulses had been to ignore their great-aunt’s testamentary wishes by dividing her bequest into three unequal parts, and heaping the largest upon their father. He was to have had thirty thousand pounds; they would easily make-do with fifteen each. It had seemed an immense sum to them indeed; more than enough for anything which either of them might dream of doing with it. But in this their father had been adamant, and proud. The money was theirs, he said: their great aunt had wished them to have it, and he was in full concurrence with her. It must be the means by which, wisely spent, they would provide for their own futures - there being precious little, he added, that he was himself going to be able to do for them.

Their first acts upon receiving their bequests had not been encouraging to him; they having gone off almost at once to pay the most prolonged visit yet to their mother in Australia, leaving decisions about their careers hanging in what he thought a rather ill-advised abeyance. He had feared that this time, they must surely decide to stay there; so many months had they lingered, and so ecstatic had been their e-mailed accounts of life in beachside Sydney. But both had eventually drifted back, sun-tanned and cheerful; and were at present sharing a flat above a shop in Baker Street, with a view, they said, to taking a lease of the premises themselves, and opening a little design and handicrafts shop. This seemed to him a poor sort of return for all the money he (or, at any rate, their new step-father) had expended on their college educations, though he forbore from saying so directly. He only told them that he hoped the shop-keeping would be no more than a pleasant little interim occupation - until such time as they should find some better way of utilising the special skills they had acquired at college.

He had assumed that Anne would probably take a teaching post in some superior girls’ school – he still thought it would come to that at last, when once the shop venture had fallen through. And Julia – well, who knew which way Julia would jump? Julia was sharp, was combative and unpredictable: Julia could shrug, and flounce, and take exception (umbrage, he called it) where one least looked for it. All that one could be certain of with Julia was that she would jump, in one possibly undesirable direction or another! He only hoped it would not turn out to be entirely catastrophic.

He had never thought Art school a very good idea. Not when Julia might have taken up a place at his own old college in Cambridge to read Classics, instead. She had worked hard and taken a good degree, it was true: she was said to be genuinely talented. But he had never quite seen where it could all be said to be leading since, talented though she was, it seemed unlikely she would be able to earn any kind of living from her art. He had taken rather a dim view of her numerous qualifications; seeing them as a pretty-ish kind of extra embellishment, at best – though he thought it just possible that, with her expertise in the matter of textiles and old tapestries, she might eventually have found her way into all manner of interesting people’s houses….

Privately, he hoped that it would be the girls’ marriages, rather than anything else, which would intervene to put an end to foolish enterprises. He could not see how any good could come of girls’ being allowed to drift about like that with money in their pockets: there was something rather vulgar about it, to his mind - a want of feminine decorum, at any rate, which he intensely disliked. In this respect he almost found himself wishing that the Macauley daughter hadn’t after all been a son! Never mind that such a son would have been nearer fifty than forty (David had no real way of knowing Belle Macauley’s age, but he guessed he must be near to the mark with fifty): the age would have been of little consequence if everything else was right - and to have seen one of his girls married with all ceremony into that establishment would have been to see her pleasingly launched indeed!

All of which seemed to bring him back full circle to the point at which he had begun his reflections this morning – to this house, these papers, and his own perhaps precipitate plunge into early retirement and an uncertain future. There had been excellent reasons for it of course. Or so it had seemed at the time - though for the life of him he could bring remarkably few of them to mind now. If he were being frank with himself he might have said that he had simply grown tired of being a priest; that his convictions had lost much of the power they had once held over him, and that the sensation of a collar about his neck had begun to be constrictive.

He might have said too, that his aunt having left him a freehold house, there was unlikely ever to be a better reason or opportunity for breaking out. But David Porteous was not often frank with himself; or not at any rate quite so frank as that. It was the result of years of high-minded - oh, the very highest! - dissimulation from the pulpit. He found that he was almost ready to call it dissimulation. He didn’t know what else it was, that obligation one had so often felt to make sense of the paradoxical; to define the indefineable, and mount a spirited defence in favour of ideas which had increasingly come to seem indefensible.

His personal position had been the most difficult of all to define or defend. It would not have sufficed simply to have told the bishop that he wished to try something different; flex a muscle or two that was not inhibited by a surplice; exercise his mind again upon matters which lay outside the purely ecclesiatical. There were matters enough within the purely ecclesiatical, heaven knew, upon which he might have exercised his mind! He had found himself disposed of late to take issue with the Church over any number of points of doctrine, or direction. He privately believed that it had allowed its authority to become dangerously undermined - there had been moments when it must have looked almost hell-bent upon self-destruction, in the eyes of an increasingly sceptical world. It had become increasingly difficult to try to defend such a stance; and though he had briefly entertained the idea of taking the path, fashionable just then, which led from Canterbury to Rome, he had finally dismissed it as a step, and a complication too far. He had stomach just about enough for mild rebellion: for counter-revolution and the defiant grand gesture, he found he had none.

He had thought at one time of calling his change of heart a Damascene Moment. He had tripped and fallen, he might have said, upon his own personal road to Damascus; and on struggling to his feet again had seen the light of a new direction shining in front of him. It was the kind of arresting imagery of which the clergy, and his bishop in particular, were very fond: it might almost have served. But he had finally rejected as distasteful the idea that the Gospels themselves might be called in as witnesses in his defence. He might be experiencing devotional difficulties - might almost be said to have started down the road to scepticism himself. But he was not yet quite an iconoclast, or profane!

There were aspects of his calling, besides, which he still loved with all his heart. There was almost no place in the world he would rather be, for example, than in a quiet old church at start or end of day. It was simply that he had discovered lately that he loved it most of all when it was empty of fellow worshippers. Such a position as that would have been hard to defend with any kind of conviction. The bishop might well have suggested a holiday as a corrective, or a sabbatical; both or either of which, as time-tested formulae, and gestures kindly meant, would have been difficult to depreciate, and still more difficult to try to deflect. He had found in the end that he could summon no enthusiasm for disputes either personal or ecclesiastical: they would have required too much subtlety, subterfuge even - and might have kept him embattled besides, for more weeks, or months, than he had felt he had at his disposal.

Still less had he felt inclined to tell the bishop that he had grown weary of the celibate life he had felt it necessary to impose upon himself since his divorce. In those circumstances, though there would have been no question of his re-marriage of course, within the bishop’s, and indeed his own rather strict application of canon law, he didn’t doubt that the Church would somehow have found the way to be accommodating. There was room in her many mansions for almost anything these days - it was one of the points upon which David had felt most disposed to distance himself from her. There would have been no point in starting up a debate however, at what he had made up his mind was to be his eleventh hour; and so he had decided against candour, and had settled instead for the usual kind of comfortable, all-encompassing vagueness.

He wished to go out into the world to try to make a new life for himself as a thinker and a writer, he said; he had been thought promising in both those respects, in his post-graduate research days at Cambridge. It was a long time ago, he knew, but he hoped it would not prove too late to resurrect a career which he had forsaken, at the time, in favour of ordination. The bishop had professed himself interested, intrigued indeed – though he had wished to know of course just what it was that Mr Porteous proposed to think and write about, which could not have been accomplished from within the Church’s own ranks? It had been here, perhaps, that David had had his best inspiration. It was the troubled outer world itself, he said, with which he wished to try to grapple! And he wished to grapple independently, so to speak – he thought it would be taking too much the easy way, to speak out from behind the Church’s protective mantle. He had gone on then to talk a good deal, and with what he trusted was the ardour of a deeply-held conviction, about the new kind of terrorism which had begun to stalk the western world. If the concept of God was at the root of it (though he had doubts, himself,about the perfect validity of such a claim), then it was the concept of God itself which must be put under scrutiny.

He had added that he was not so vainglorious of course as to suppose that, of all the thinkers and writers in the world, he was going to be the one to shed light in dark places. He hoped that the bishop would take as read his almost overwhelming sense that he might, in the end, prove unequal to the task. But just the same, to feel unequal was not to concede defeat before one had even started. And, fate having all unaccountably put it into his hands to make the break at last (he had mentioned Aunt Floss’s bequest at that point – he had thought it best not to leave it to emerge by accident, and inconveniently, later); and his own thoughts having begun to move irresistibly in that direction anyway, he thought perhaps the moment had come when he ought to go out there and try. He didn’t for a moment expect to set the world alight - but he thought he might strike a spark or two.

He had ended on a note of smiling self-deprecation (the bishop, who liked to think of himself as a man of the world for all his purple shirt and gorgeous gowns, was fond of that sort of thing): he doubted, he said, that any poor efforts of his would go far towards pouring balm the upon the troubled waters of the warring faiths. But on the other hand, who less volatile than an unpretending former priest to put his grisled head above the parapet? He was mixing his metaphors quite shockingly, he knew (the bishop had a smile of infinite indulgence for it); but did not the bishop agree that nobody, not even the most turbulent of Imams or Ayatollahs, could be thought likely to take the kind of offence that would launch a fatwah or a war, over something which an old British ex-cleric might choose to say in all good faith and obscurity?

It had all gone down surprisingly well in the end. The bishop said he had dreamt of independent scholarship himself at one time - and certainly, there had seldom been a moment when the world’s faiths had stood in direr need of a wise and unbiased arbiter. It almost made one wish to throw one’s own hat into the ring! It was too late for the bishop himself of course – he was an old man, who dreamt now only of retiring into his garden. But he wished his old colleague all the good in the world. It was a brave endeavour, he said. And if there should ever be any little extra ray of light which he might himself assist in shedding in the future, then Mr Porteous had only to ask for it.

“Faith can take a man in unexpected directions” was the way in which, solemnly (grandiloquently, as he saw it now) David had announced his retirement, from the pulpit, to his astonished parishioners. There had been tears, but there had also been sympathy, and quite an outrush of passionate fellow feeling. People had stood up in their seats to say that, yes! they too had been troubled by the chasm of fear and uncertainty into which the world had lately been plunged. They too had felt the horror of their own helplessness in the face of an enemy who purported to act in the name of God, but for whom there seemed to be no precedent in either Testament, nor any possible response! It gave them courage, they said, and hope, just to think that one of their own was going to be bold enough to go out there and try to wrestle with it.

The bishop himself had mounted the pulpit to end proceedings on a note almost of jubilation: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” he had sonorously said, in his rich baritone. It had quite brought the house down. And nobody, as they had filed out in the solemn hush of a collective reverence, had thought to disagree with him; or to wonder at the origins of his splendid quotation, which they supposed to have been drawn from one of the Gospels.

These were the things that David was remembering now, as he rustled among his papers at last, and took up a folder containing some old written thoughts of his on the subject of the concept of God in the historical human consciousness. He read a page or two, without conviction. It all looked rather insubstantial now, he thought. Forlorn, fatuous even. A month ago, from the upholstered ease of his study in the old rectory, it had looked so very different. He had supposed himself then to be riding high, set fair for a braver, brighter future; the bishop had waved him on his way, and the people had cheered. It was only now, in the cold hard light of the actual, that as the mere germ of a brilliant idea, and still more as a means of future sustenance, the whole thing had begun to look almost as ephemeral as the girls’ Baker Street shop .......... If he had gone out to the triumphal organ, he thought, then he had come down to earth again with the dullest and least reverberating of thuds.

That thud was in his ears still. It was not a reassuring sound. It was the sound of his unwise precipitancy and his newly dispossessed state. It was the sound of this ugly house, with its ragged hedges and its broken gate; it was the sound of the house’s leaking gutters, and the slates which seemed likely at any moment to slide from its roof. And it was the sound too – or call it, almost, the smell - of the discouragement which seemed to seep from out of the house’s dark-brown-varnished skirtings, and the uniformly dun-coloured paper on all its indoor walls. His brave promises came back to taunt him now. How, in the world, with no occupation, and nothing more than a small pension and a handful of shares to his name, was he to find the means by which he might put the house to rights, and then go on to live in it with some degree of comfort and decency for the next twenty or twenty five years?

He nevertheless took up his pen and prepared to write. He had before him a loose page from an old, published treatise of his - “If man has made God in his own image” he read; “what does it tell us about the face of God?”. It had been thought bold, and even a little heretical in its day: he thought it still had a certain capacity to arrest the mind. He wondered if he might find the way to take it up again now; expand it, possibly, into a book entitled “Where is God when we need Him? A Study of the Condition of the Faiths Today”? Something of that general sort. He would emphasize of course the fact that it was the Faiths, plural. The days of the single great Faith, if they had ever existed, were over - or if they weren’t, then they ought to be. If man was to survive at all he must learn to take account of the position of his fellows: of that at least he had no doubt. There would be a significance, would there not - a special resonance - attached to the appearance of such a book, at a time when Islam was re-asserting itself as a perplexing and dangerous presence in the world?

“If man has made God in his own image“ he therefore typed in his laborious fashion on to the empty page; “what does it tell us about the face of God?”. But it was no good: he no longer had the smallest idea of what the answer ought to be. He wasn’t even sure whose face it was, God’s or Man’s, that he ought to be considering! There was a failure somewhere in his logic, he thought. He wasn’t twenty five years old, and he didn’t believe any longer in supernatural resolutions to man-made problems. He believed, when it really came down to it, that man was probably godless, and therefore doomed. And besides, his mouse kept sticking - one couldn't easily deconstruct theology with a sluggish mouse!

He went downstairs to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee instead. A cup of instant coffee - only Julia could manage the ferocious expresso pot. He told himself that, instant or not, the caffeine would activate his mind, so that he might perhaps begin to see what it was he had been getting at all those years ago when he wrote about the Face of God.

The Novel as Blog

2007-06-15T06:10:00.000Z

This is not Part Two

It is an explanatory non-fiction piece, which I shall eventually move to the other page - just as soon as I have got all this off my conscience (and my chest)!

I apologise for the italics in the final paragraphs. I didn't put them there. Somehow they just sprang up, and I have been unable to get rid of them.)

It was always to have been an experiment, this telling of my old half-written novel as a blog by instalments. I had reached the stage of discouragement in writing a long and complicated novel alone, and entirely for myself. I had begun to see I was going nowhere very much; I had been going nowhere very much for more years than I cared to count indeed, and had begun to think I ought to be looking for a more direct approach.

The blog seemed the thing. Others were doing it after all, and a look at Google suggested that it wasn’t such a very difficult matter to get started; so off I went. I began with a great deal of trepidation, it has to be said - I daresay every blogger starts that way. But in my case, since it was not so much my daily thoughts and activities as my heart and soul - my very life’s blood, if you like, in the shape of my attempt at a novel! - that I was going to be posting, then the risk seemed greater still. I wasn’t even sure I would have courage enough to post the first instalment! And when I had done so, there were several weeks in which it seemed as if I was destined to remain perpetually unread, and un-commented-upon, and should probably abandon the whole enterprise at once, before more harm was done.

But the blog world is wide, and generous of spirit, and it was not so very long before I began to collect a reader or two; and to find – greatly to my astonishment –that there was a sense in which the thing was to become not only read, but reader-driven. That was the first surprise – that people hitherto unknown to me would visit my pages, and begin to seem as if they were taking my fictional characters, if not yet quite to their hearts, then at least into their own hands to some extent.

This was a little disconcerting at first. There was a moment in which I found myself inclined to try to throw a protective mantle round my characters, just to keep their development firmly in my own hands. But then, suddenly, it began to seem like fun! Where were the limits to this, I began to ask myself? Or better still, what was the range of its possibilities - when readers were all at once showing themselves interested enough to want to take a hand in the onward progress of the story? This was the way forward for the novel perhaps? A twenty-first century version of the old practice of telling it by weekly magazine instalments? At all events, it seemed a useful experiment, and worthy of a try.

There were disadvantages and possible pitfalls too of course. The first, and most perilous of which was that I no longer seemed to be writing quite the story I had started out with! My original concept had been of a house, Macauley’s house; which was indeed to have been the title of the book. I was seduced perhaps by the excitement of unexpected reader response? I was at any rate buoyed-up and carried along by it enough, to wish to give readers what they seemed to want. So that what was to have been Theodora’s story - hers and that of her house - had suddenly changed to become the story of Frances Fanshawe and Mr Porteous instead!

This was the first shock. And the extent to which it was never really intended, can be best demonstrated by my quoting a short passage from the opening chapter of the original, third-person narrative. I had begun this chapter by describing the present derelict appearance, and more glorious past history of Macauley's house. I had introduced Jack Macauley and his Theodora, and given an account of their marriage, and early life together. After which I had summarily killed-off poor Jack, I fear (well, he was 85 by then!). And sent the widowed Theodora fleeing into long exile abroad, accompanied by her daughter Isabella, known as Belle.

Only in the final paragraph or two did I bring them back to the old Macauley house. And it seems worth quoting from that early version now, if only to show the extent to which I have departed, in the blog, from what was my original concept. I had called that opening chapter “Before it all Began“; it was fifteen pages long, and here is how it came to an end:

>“..... Thus came Theodora home again, to the house which Jack Macauley had bought for her at such high price more than sixty years before. There was no brass band this time; the old house scarcely blinked a light, or raised a blind, in welcome. And Theodora herself had not the least idea of any kind of a return to glory. She was old, and she was tired. She had lost both her Jacks, the second almost as irretrievably as the first. For Jack her son had been married young to the girl she called his ‘fine cold Alice’, a Scottish landowner’s daughter, who had carried him off the day after the wedding to some old castle her family had up near Aberdeen; from which fastness she had seldom permitted him to re-emerge.

Theodora would have liked to see Jack and his boy again, but she doubted that Alice would view her impending death as a sufficient emergency. She hadn’t the strength to take up the cudgels again with Alice, she said. She asked Belle for a cup of tea instead; and then she sank back upon the pillows of the big bed she had shared with Jack for forty years, and sighed, as if it were the end.

Just so might it all have ended. Not with a peal of bells and a wedding, as in the best fairy stories, but with the sad expansive sigh of a very old woman who had come home to die in her husband’s bed. The old house might have closed its walls around her and sighed its last, even as she did. Except that this is not quite a fairy story; and Theodora is not quite an ordinary woman, nor Macauley’s quite an ordinary house. There was life in both of them yet, whatever they may have supposed. So that what might seem to be the end is only in fact the beginning……”

And so it began, in the original version. The first, blog-induced change came with my idea of writing it from the first-person point of view. And from the point of view of Beatrice and her brother Bill, at that; both of whom had started out as fairly minor characters in the book. As indeed had Mrs Baines and Roland; and poor little Frances Fanshawe, with her tipsy housekeeper and her splendid Queen Anne house. These people had been intended to form a kind of supporting cast – a ‘chorus’ if you like, whose function it was to elaborate and comment upon events as they unfolded. (They do this in the blog too, of course, with their conversations. But that is only one of the devices to which a writer must resort, when employing a first-person narrator.)

David Porteous had been intended from the start for higher things, it’s true. But he was to have been largely Lady Macauley’s creature; she was to have taken him up first, and held on to him pretty fast. He was to have had several adventures, but had never for a moment been expected to run off like that with Frances Fanshawe! (Or had he? There's a sense in which it was always going to be on the cards that he would. But that is for tomorrow's blog-piece!)

Here is the manner in which Mr Porteous made his first appearance in the original story:

“.... The clergyman’s name was David Porteous. He was approaching his sixtieth year, but had lost few of the splendid physical attributes of his youth, being broad of shoulder, straight of back and candid, clear-gazing of eye. He had recently retired as rector of a pleasant parish in rural Gloucestershire, a position in which there had been little to trouble or perplex him, and much, always, to keep up his already highly developed sense of his own worth. He had come to take up residence in the rather run-down Victorian villa lately bequeathed to him by old Miss Florence Porteous, a lady who had been a kind of village gorgon while she lived, but who also happened to have been his aunt....”

The Macauleys were away in Florence at the time of his arrival, and so his meeting with them was delayed ; and the account continued, a little later, with this:

"..... This, then, was the man who all unbeknown to Lady Macauley at present, had lately arrived to invest the village with the manifold advantages of his presence. In the normal course of events it might have been Lady Macauley herself, or Mrs Mountjoy perhaps, in her capacity as the old lady’s unofficial representative, who would have been expected to extend the hand of welcome to the interesting new man. And even in their absence, it was not many days before his arrival had started little ripples of excitement in the village. In those parts of it, at least, in which dwelt ladies of sober habits and mature years, whose susceptibilities these days were mostly for fine manners and an air of distinction; who admired a military bearing in a man, and could be moved almost to little flutters of the kinds of emotions they had thought long dead, by the sight of a fine full head of elegantly silvering hair, and the hint of a clerical collar only recently shed.

A Mrs Pamela Baines was the first to take the field; a large and stately lady who lived in a pretty cottage overlooking the pond on the common....”

So there it was. The glorious freedom, as I see it now, of the expansive, third-person narrative approach. And it’s only in looking back over those early passages that I fully understand the limitations of writing it in the first-person, and within the length-constraints of a blog. In the early version, for example, I had been able to ‘get inside the heads’ of my characters as much as I would. Which must have made them more convincing – or at least more reader-friendly - versions of their present selves.

Where Mr Porteous in particular was concerned - well, I had been able, for a start, to account for the failure of his marriage, and his subsequent divorce. With all that they involved of his searching his soul for possible shortcomings of his own - and finding none! I had been able, too, to write about what Mr Porteous said to the Bishop to account for his early defection from the Church – and what the Bishop said to him in response. And so it was that he arrived in the village fairly well written-up and accounted-for from the start!

These were the luxuries of the third-person narrative approach, I see that very clearly now. And it’s a fact that the moment one shifts to the first-person method, one comes up against all the problems of how to show what characters are actually thinking; and the range of possibilities for both character development and narrative diversity shrink on the spot, in accordance with that.

I do wonder if this long exposition of my present difficulties is pure indulgence on my part, though? I daresay it is. I have opted to tell the story as a blog after all, and ought to be doing the best I can to succeed within the particular limitations I have imposed upon myself. But I can’t quite escape the suspicion that in making the transition from book to blog, I have somehow sold readers short too. And if, by giving an account of some of the things I’ve had to omit I can I can somehow manage to redress the balance, then it seems to me to be worth a try at least.

It’s entirely possible I shall find I’m writing all this purely for myself! But equally, since this is an experiment in the practice of writing a novel by instalments as a blog - and since there might be others out there who are making a similar attempt..... it did seem worth the effort of trying to identify some of the problems, at least. And it will, if nothing else, assist me in deciding how I can best and most effectively start out on Part Two.

There will be a little more in this vein tomorrow, for those whom it might interest or concern... There will be an account of how it was always more or less on the cards that Frances Fanshawe would 'take off' like that with David Porteous, for a start!

Ill-matched by moonlight?

2007-06-10T15:43:00.000Z
“You know of course that they have separate bedrooms, don’t you?” Rose Mountjoy suddenly announced yesterday; adding, that she referred of course to David Porteous and Frances, just as if she thought I mightn't have guessed. She was sitting on one of Grandmother Fanshawe’s Edwardian garden chairs beneath the roses in Mr Porteous's arbour; drinking the cup of coffee I had just made her, and giving the impression, as she always does, that she meant to stay for hours.

I call it Mr Porteous’s rose arbour because that seems to be its indelible character and its name. It is not in fact the one which was originally intended, and which caused Bill so much sharp annoyance the other day. That earlier trellis one has gone; was dismantled at Mr Porteous’s own instruction (he having come here in all state to inspect it); and another, altogether more ‘period-sensitive’, has been erected in its place.

The new one is very beautiful; even Bill has had to concede that. It came here ready-constructed yesterday, a poetic-looking rustic belvedere, cast in wrought iron. It’s an altogether more elegant structure than the trellis one was; and has been supplied with a fully developed white rose to clamber up its sides, and make a fragrant mantle for its roof. Inside, are a table and chairs sufficient for four persons, a pair of ornamental urns from which a riot of white and blue campanula tumbles; and a solar-powered lantern suspended from its dome.

Rose thinks it rather impressive too. Though she does just wonder to which particular period it ought to be thought sensitive - whether the one in which the gatehouse and the garden were themselves created, or some other got up to Mr Porteous’s own specifications? “He’s quite the impresario though, isn’t he?” she observed. “And can never have had quite such a pocketful of cash from which to draw, for realising his aesthetic intentions.”

After which, just as if this hadn’t been indiscreet, and spiteful enough on its own, she went on to make her rather startling announcement about the bedroom arrangements at the manor house. She gave me no pause for response, but went on at once to explain precisely how it was that Frances and Mr Porteous were conducting their rather irregular pre-conjugal relations.

"Oh no," she said; "Nothing so vulgar as a shared bedroom for them!Frances has her suite and he has his. Adjoining of course – or they will be, when Mr Porteous’s team of builders have arrived to carry out the necessary alterations. At present they are separated by a solid wall, and the apartment which Mr Porteous calls his dressing room - which is to become just that, and his private bathroom to boot, when the alterations are complete. He has suffered grievously in the interim, from encounters with the half-tipsy Mrs Meade in passages late at night - though all that has ended now of course, with the poor old thing having been summarily pensioned off."

"Frances thinks it all intensely romantic in the old-fashioned way, at any rate." Rose next informed me. "It’s just the sort of arrangement Mr and Mrs Churchill had, she tells me.... She read about the Churchill domestic arrangements in some biography or other – she gets all her romantic notions from books, as you know… Clementine Churchill too, it appears, had to wait for the tap upon the door to tell her when a bedtime assignation impended - and Frances doesn’t see how any situation could easily be less predictable, or more thrilling, than that!”

I have never been absolutely sure about Rose’s sources, when it comes to information of this sort. It’s hard to believe that anyone, even she, could be so cynical as to have invented it on the spot. Yet equally, it’s hard to credit that Frances would have confided in her to quite such an extent. It’s Bill’s theory that Rose doesn’t so much invent, as muscle her way into people's houses, then nose around, drawing her own conclusions as she goes. And I think he’s probably right; he usually is. But whatever the facts of the matter, Rose hadn’t finished with them yet; and went on to let me know just what she thought it was that Frances ‘saw’ in Mr Porteous.

“She believes he is a great man” is Rose's interpretation. “Or she believes at least that he is in process of becoming one, by creating a great book. It's to shake the earth with its wisdom you know - and probably deliver lasting peace to troubled nations, all at one fell swoop. Frances grew up as the amanuensis of that other great man, her father, you see – it was the only kind of occupation she was ever allowed to enjoy. And now she believes she is performing the same sacred duty for Mr Porteous - she hardly sees how there could be any higher, or more rewarding function for a woman than that.“

Rose is of the opinion that it’s as well Frances is satisfied to be Mr Porteous’s amanuensis however ("Or call it his adoring and entirely subservient hand-maiden!”). Since she doesn’t suppose for a moment that the taps on the bedroom door come more often than once a fortnight at most. “Oh, he’s doing the best he can in difficult circumstances” she observed. “But he’s a man with a considerable appetite in that respect it seems to me (I don't believe a word of all those stories about the years of priestly abstinence!). And I think it likely he's finding Frances rather uphill work.”

This seemed crude to me, even by Rose's standards. But it did ring discomfitingly true for all that; and I have to admit to having entertained similar suspicions myself. I found Rose’s words repeating themselves in my head to jarring effect later that evening though, when the dozen or so guests began arriving for my little impromptu party. It had changed to become an evening event, I forgot to mention that. Mr Porteous, standing in the garden to consider the proportions of the completed arbour - and somehow envisaging it with candles lit and starry skies above - had decided that an evening party would be altogether more fitting to the occasion. And a little flurry of apologetic phone calls on Frances’s part had alerted everyone to the altered time.

It turned out to have been the right decision. The party went beautifully – and I have to say that nobody, in the event, could have conducted himself more perfectly throughout the whole affair than Mr Porteous did. The man has style, as well as presence, I have to hand him that. He was courtly charm itself; as with a tremulously smiling Frances attached to his arm, he made his carefully considered progress round the garden, bestowing his smiles, and a short conversation, upon each small group in turn.

And Bill – did Bill too succumb to the Porteous effect? Well no, he did not. But then neither did he offend too blatantly by protest or omission. I was rather proud of him in fact; I thought he stood his own ground to rather impressive effect. He seemed to be amusing people too; his own great laugh boomed out often - which added a note of light-heartedness that might otherwise have been missing. I daresay I have a sister's prejudice in his favour - but it does seem to me that even in the perfectly-judged, quiet-eyed presence of Mr Porteous, Bill has his own way of creating little flutters in female bosoms. Pamela in particular seemed quite overcome by the emotion of it all, at one point.

The big surprise of the evening came at midnight. A clock in Bill’s side of the gatehouse had just finished striking the hour when Mr Porteous, having somehow managed to clear the arbour of all others, took Frances with him to a position of prominence beneath the lighted lantern, and announced, with all the splendid resonance of one accustomed to projecting his voice from pulpits, that they had been going to wait a while, Frances and he; but that after all this seemed to be the perfect hour ... in which to let all their good friends know that the sweet and gentle lady at his side had just done him the inexpressible honour of consenting to become his wife.

So there it was. The deed was accomplished; and I wish I could say that it was received with instant, unanimous joy. It was received with every attempt at the appearance of just that of course. People tried hard indeed to simulate it, they really did. There was a moment though, just one, when awkward silence broke out; and everyone seemed holding their breaths to know quite which way they ought to be trying to respond. Bill it was, I’m proud to say, who saved the situation: enveloping a trembling Frances in one of his great bear-hugs, and professing his loud, unqualified delight.

It broke the silence and dispelled the appearance of doubt. There were congratulations all round after that; and the evening ended, just as had been intended, on a note of something almost like high jubilation. Only Pamela stood back from it all a little stiffly - with Roland doing his best to mirror her misgivings from behind.

And Rose? Well, Rose couldn’t help herself of course; but must take me aside at the first opportunity, to observe that there'd be a tap on Frances's bedroom door that night, for certain!”

Footnote: This instalment marks the end of Part One. Beatrice and Bill are now going to be away for a few days; having been invited to visit the Macauleys at their place in Suffolk. They are to travel there in company with Mrs Mountjoy, which won’t make for the most comfortable of journeys. But all being well, they should have returned to begin Part Two, by the end of the week

Not quite Sir Lancelot or the King

2007-06-07T10:04:00.000Z
Pamela has evidently conferred with Roland on the subject of the party I am to hold for Frances, and has decided that on the whole they think they will probably attend. Not that Pamela herself quite sees the point of it, mind! She says - or rather Roland does - that it will turn out be just another in a long line of carefully constructed prevarications.

“It will be just one deferral after another, don’t you see?” is the way Pamela sees it. “Oh, he is nothing if not ingenious with his reasons, I’ll give him that! He’s had years of practice in prevaricating from the pulpit for a start – and what better preparation for an indefinitely prolonged engagement could there possibly be than that? But Roland says – and I’m inclined to agree with him – that when it comes to actually marrying Frances, there’ll always be just one more important thing to be accomplished first.”

These remarks came as something of a shock to me, I have to admit it. It seems to me that Pamela must be nursing a bruised spirit indeed, when she can talk about clergymen prevaricating from the pulpit! There was a time, and not so very far distant at that, when no such anti-clerical aspersion would have passed her lips. Nor do I give any credence to the idea that Roland could have soared to such conversational flights as the ones she attributes to him: it’s very much more likely that Pamela herself has sat down to prepare them for my benefit in advance.

No, I think that what Pamela actually sees in the party is a genuine hat opportunity. A sunny afternoon in a garden after all – and in my garden at that, where no dress code prevails, and there are no unwritten rules. What better opportunity could there possibly be for her to sally forth in her largest and best? And who would I be to deny her the joy of it, after her humiliation at the hands of the Macauleys? She does just wonder if Lady and Miss Macauley will be attending the pre-engagement party though? But on that score I have had to disappoint her; the old lady and Belle having all inconveniently gone away to their place in the country for two weeks.

My own little garden is meanwhile in process of being transformed into something resembling the Vauxhall Gardens – or a stage set for the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Frances’s grandmother’s tables and chairs arrived yesterday; and very pretty indeed in the Edwardian style they look, arranged at intervals all the way down the lawn. An arbour of roses is just about to be constructed, too. Some men arrived with a lorry-load of trellis panels early yesterday – I awoke to hear Bill in altercation with them at the gate. ”Over his dead body”, I heard him bellow, was any such contrivance going up in either of our gardens! And where was their written authority anyway, for delivering trellises at such an ungodly hour?

Going up they are, nonetheless. Frances herself arrived all pink and apologetic hot on the heels of the delivery men, and somehow managed, if not entirely to silence, then at least to mollify Bill’s loud explosion of wrath. The idea had been all her own, she hurriedly explained. She had hoped to be able to warn us before the delivery men arrived; and in her failure to do so hardly knew how to apologise enough! But she had had this little idea, you see - or rather, David had had it: he was so original when it came to matters of this sort… Between them, at any rate, they had come up with the idea of making the garden look like the old Orchard at Grantchester - where David had been so fond of sitting to meditate, in his Cambridge undergraduate days.

She was sure Bill would be glad when he saw how entirely charming it would look when completed. They had had this vision of the garden as a series of extended vistas, culminating in a rose arbour, didn’t he see? So pleasant for people to wander about in, they’d thought - taking their refuge beneath the roses in the arbour when they would. And of course Bill could always have it pulled down afterwards if he wished. Frances would undertake its demolition herself indeed: he would have nothing whatever to worry about on that score.

I could see only too clearly what Bill thought of the idea of David Porteous’s taking it upon himself to recreate the Old Orchard at Grantchester in my garden. Further even than that, I could see that the unpleasant suspicion must have arisen in his mind that he and David Porteous had probably been undergraduates at Cambridge at roughly the same time – so that he might actually be expected to sit down and engage in reminiscence with the man! But Bill’s rages tend to be short-lived, and in any case he has never been able to refuse Frances anything. She asks for so very little after all; and so he finally gave way gracefully enough. He only turned to mutter, as he went off to collect Monty for his walk, that we could what we would with the garden (I noted that I had become complicit in its transformation now.) We could erect a full-blown fantastic Victorian conservatory plumb in the middle of it if that was what we wished. Just so long as we didn’t ask him to stand round to watch it going up!

I went off with Frances to the manor house after that; she wanted me to see all the 'little improvements’ that David has instituted there. David himself was absent at the time; having gone up to London to visit his elder daughter Julia, who has moved into what her father considers a thoroughly unsuitable flat. “She’s a rather wayward girl apparently” Frances explained as we went. “Inclined to be confrontational you know. So different from gentle Anne, who has never given him a moment’s trouble in her life. But poor David finds Julia quite a trial. And the flat, you know – above a shop in Baker Street; what could possibly be noisier, or more impractical than that?”

I rejoiced, I confess it, at the idea that there was a confrontational daughter who would now and then stand up to Mr Porteous; there seemed a kind of justice in the idea that he had produced a sprig quite as high-handed as himself. But my joy was short-lived; it quite evaporated indeed, when I saw the range and scale of Mr Porteous’s ‘little improvements’ at the manor house. It had possessed an endearing shabbiness before, but it shone now with the kind of magnificence that suggested many expert hands had been at work. “How has all this been achieved in so short a space of time?” I wondered aloud. And was not surprised when Frances told me that they had more or less dispensed with the services of Mrs Meade; who had not been dismissed, so much as gently pensioned off…

“We have a team who come in once a week now” Frances explained. “They undertake everything, French polishing and all – and of course it’s so much pleasanter for David, not having to encounter Mrs Meade in corridors, when he’s coming from the bathroom and that sort of thing..”

I wondered where Mrs Meade had actually gone; and was reassured to hear that she had not quite been cast alone into a hostile world, but set up with a nice little flat in Brighton, and what Frances described as “quite enough to live on, for the rest of her life.” The transformation seems to be complete therefore; and Mr Porteous has established himself on a footing at the manor house that can’t conceivably be undone.

The real surprise came for me right at the end of the visit however, when Frances remarked that of course she quite saw why everyone thought she had acted rather precipitately in all this.
“They think it won’t last, I know that.” she all unaccountably confided. “ But after all I don’t see why not. It’s not as if I expected his undying passion, you know. I think we’re both too old for that. But so long as he’s happy to stay with me - well it will be enough.”

I can’t quite explain why it was that I drew comfort from this little chance remark. There was sadness in it, as well as resignation. But there was a kind of wisdom too, that I hadn’t looked for in Frances. She seemed to have accepted her lot, yet kept her girlish dream intact. And one thing I knew for certain, that whatever else Mr Porteous might or might not be, for Frances he was neither quite Sir Lancelot nor the King.

To hear a nightingale

2007-06-03T08:56:00.001Z
I was wakened at first light yesterday by a bird call of such piercing sweetness – such a joyful crescendo of rising and falling notes - that I rose at once and rushed out into the garden to see what bird it was that made it. It came from high in the banches of a tall conifer where squirrels nest, so I thought it must be a large bird indeed that would dare to linger there. Its song was loud too – louder by far, than any average garden bird could make. I stood perfectly still to hear it as on it sang, a full five minutes of matchless sound. Before a pair of magpies landed with a squawk nearby, and drove it off.

And did I catch a glimpse of it before it flew away? No I did not. Since even with my glasses on, I’m unable to identify disappearing birds at such a distance. And could it have been a nightingale? I like to think it could, though I’ve never heard one, and can’t say for sure. Nightingales sound rather like blackbirds, people say: the difference is, they sing at night, when other birds are silent. This nameless bird of mine was like no blackbird I have ever heard though, nor any thrush. So I have told myself it must have been a nightingale - having long dreamt that I might hear one before I die.

I’m feeling the need for a little solitude just at present. And had been enjoying several days of it, until Frances came yesterday with her rather extraordinary request. Before that, Bill and I had been staying quietly at home, unwilling for the moment to be involved in neighbourhood activities. Flawless summer days have returned, and we have been spending them in our gardens; finding respite there perhaps, from Rose’s conversations, and Lady Macauley’s secrets - and the nagging little anxieties about Frances herself. Our two little gardens are long and narrow; each more or less a replica of the other, and straggling, low-hedged, for fifty yards or so on either side of the little public path.

Bill’s has been given over mostly to his vegetable plot, where everything flourishes so admirably now that he has lately been able to turn his attention to mine. Here, there are neglected borders to be cleared and re-planted; and the remains of an ancient pergola have given Bill the idea of constructing a flowering, fragrant walk. It was there, beneath the half-constructed pergola, that Frances came upon us unexpectedly at three o'clock yesterday. Bill was tying rustic poles together with willow for the framework, and I struggling with the tangled lengths of rose and jasmine that are to climb its poles and make a flowering canopy above.

“How very industrious you look!” Frances gaily cried. But her demeanour somehow belied her words. There was very little of gaiety about her; she looked vaguely troubled, if anything, and this despite the fact that her hair was arranged in a new and rather becoming way, and that she wore a crisp linen dress and a neat little pair of matching shoes. Frances’s shoes had tended to be rather boatlike in the past, making a kind of flapping sound when she walked. I remembered it now as a friendly sound, and wished that it hadn't gone away.

She seemed happy to linger a while with us in the garden, admiring our efforts. She thought the pergola an enchanting idea - and would have Mr Jessop look out for sturdy climbers of theirs that would assist us in our enterprise. She had clearly come here with a definite idea of some sort however; she fairly seemed to quiver with it, and so I soon found reason to suggest she come up with me to the house, while I prepared a jug of iced lemonade for us all.

What she wants of us is on the face of it perfectly simple and straightforward – yet it took the breath from me momentarily just the same. She wants us to ask David and her to come to tea here one afternoon, in company with half a dozen other invited guests. She thinks it important they should be seen together in public as a couple at last: it would 'seem to put the formal seal of approval on their union’, didn’t I see? And she can think of no happier way of accomplishing it than through the sort of little informal party that might seem to have happened just by chance. She had thought that my nice little sitting room would provide the perfect backdrop – but now that she had seen Bill’s pergola, she wondered if tea beneath the roses wouldn’t perhaps be better still?

She wouldn’t think of imposing on me to provide anything of course – she would have Mrs Meade make sandwiches and cakes. She had a number of small chairs and tables stored in one of her outhouses, besides; they were remnants from the days when her grandmother had used to hold little musical soirees in the garden, and were rather pretty, in the Edwardian style. She would have Mr Jessop fetch them out of storage; he would spruce them up, as she put it, and see that they were delivered here in plenty of time.

It occurred to me that it had evidently been planned ahead in perfect detail, this apparently spontaneous little party of theirs. I saw the mind and hand of David Porteous at work here; and was angered by it, feeling an almost irresistible impulse to protest. I didn't protest of course. Though I did go so far as to suggest that her own garden (for the life of me I couldn’t also call it his!) might provide a more fitting backdrop for the occasion? But this she waved aside in a manner which was, for her, almost peremptory. That was just it, didn’t I see? They might entertain in their own garden every day of the week - they would certainly do so, would hold a great party, when the moment to announce their engagement finally came. But until somebody else had done it for them first, they wouldn’t be seen formally as an acknowledged couple, nor be able to feel that they had been accepted, and 'arrived'.

There seemed to me a deal of sophistry in this view of the situation, and I knew for sure that Frances hadn’t reasoned it out for herself. I wished that Bill had been with us – I had a feeling that he would have known how to parry and deflect. But in presence of Frances alone – of Frances standing there in mute appeal before me; not quite meeting my eyes, but with every ounce of her rather grotesquely duped good faith somehow shining in her own – I confess that I took the line of least resistance. I said that of course I would arrange her little party for her – it was only a question of our deciding between us when, and with whom, and how.

So there it is. I am to arrange a carefully choreographed yet apparently extemporaneous little party – and set the seal of approval upon a union I more and more dislike. Bill exploded later when I told him about it. He’ll be damned if he’ll be there himself, he said! Though I know that when the moment comes, he will.

I heard my unknown bird singing again in the conifer this morning. But there was a note of sadness in its song this time – and I no longer believe it is a nightingale

A little tale of long ago

2007-06-01T10:19:00.000Z
Rose Mountjoy called here yesterday; teetering up the garden path on her three-inch heels, perfectly dressed, and coiffed, and made-up as usual. I was reminded of something I’d heard Lady Macauley say about her: that it remains one of life’s mysteries to Belle and her, that feat of transformation by which Rose manages to make sixty look like forty every morning, from the application of something she gets out of jars and bottles. Privately, Lady Macauley is glad there’s no longer a husband in the case - since she fears it must involve some rather startling disclosures at bedtime.

I had time to think of this while I waited for Rose; she having first spotted Bill at work in his vegetable garden, and called blithely across to him to come and join us for coffee in the kitchen. She is a woman quite without any of the ordinary scruples in life, and can make these large assumptions. She was quite oblivious of the look of pure dislike Bill cast in her direction; and nor did it seem to have occurred to her that I might not have wished to be broken in upon unannounced, at ten o’clock in the morning. She wanted to mull the party over with me; which was sufficient grounds for her. So that, having been rather brusquely dismissed by Bill, she simply teetered on up the path to me anyway, settling herself on her favourite kitchen stool, as if for the duration.

Not that she didn’t finally make it worth my while to give up my morning to her, mind you. She has a breezy style of conversation, and is in possession of all the facts. She told me that Pamela is nursing a wounded spirit, having felt herself and Roland rather snubbed at Lady Macauley’s party. Roland doesn’t think they ought to accept, the next time an invitation comes, apparently. “Which is quite a joke of course” Rose observed. “ since they were only ever invited at all at my special invocation, and it’s a feat I’m unlikely to be able to accomplish a second time.” She also told me why it was that Frances and Mr Porteous had not attended the party. “We don’t go everywhere we are invited” was what Frances had said, in answer to Rose’s direct question on the subject. Rose had thought it just a little stiff, for Frances. “She speaks with his voice now, you’ll note” she observed. “She expresses his very sentiments.” It’s Rose’s idea that the invitation had in fact arrived rather late, affronting Mr Porteous’s ideas about what is due to Frances as lady of the manor. “Not to mention those that he thinks are due to himself!” she added; “In whatever capacity it is he now sees himself in occupancy there!”

All this was sufficiently indiscreet - and just sufficiently interesting - to make me feel my morning was not being entirely ill-spent. Though I did experience a certain culpability, in consenting to discuss Frances like that, with Rose. And I was glad Bill was not there to hear it, since I feared he might have felt impelled to pull us both up rather short. I’m not sure how we made the transition from Frances to the Macauleys. But make it we somehow did, and swiftly; so that I was suddenly hearing a rather remarkable little story about the early Jack Macauley, and my attention was engaged at once.

“You know of course that Theodora wasn’t Jack Macauley’s first or greatest love, don’t you….?” was the way that Rose embarked on her story. I hadn't known, but was eager to do so; and what followed was a little tale of such piquancy – such poignancy almost – that I can do no better than try to reproduce it here word for word, just as she told it to me…

“ Oh no, his great love had come much earlier, when he was only a boy. He was a poor boy, a miner’s son – that much all the world knows, so it’s nothing new. But what the world doesn’t generally know is the little love story that probably kicked-off his rise to riches. His father was incapacitated in the mines when Jack was only twelve, you see; and he, as the eldest of six, was obliged to leave school and find work that would support the family. His mother resisted the idea of his going down the mines himself, so he was apprenticed to the local grocer instead. He started as errand boy, in which capacity he had to make up the baskets for delivery each morning, and then cycle about the village on a large bicycle with an oversized basket in front, to dispatch them in the afternoons. He had never owned a bicycle before, so there was a certain glamour about it at first – though he soon came to hate it, for the foolish figure it seemed to make of him..."

"One of his regular deliveries was to the rectory, a big house on the outskirts of the village, where lived the local rector and his wife and daughter. The rector himself was of the old school, and rather grand - quite the Trollopian sort, I believe. But he’d married beneath himself; carried away in a moment of madness, or so the story goes, by the golden ringlets and winning smiles of the prettiest and silliest of little local girls. Little Miss Ringlets carried him off, and in no time acquired all the airs and graces she thought befitted a rector’s wife. So that by the time it came Jack Macauley’s lot to fall in her way, she was quite the finest, proudest, most condescending woman in the village.”

“Nothing that Jack Macauley brought in his basket was ever good enough for the discerning Mrs Rector. She would make him stand holding his bicycle while she peered into boxes and examined eggs and carrots - and as often as not her young daughter peered and examined right along with her, quite as impossible to please as she. The girl’s own look told Jack clearly enough what she thought of him – that he was a great gallumphing ungainly fellow, and probably smelt bad, to boot. She would draw her little skirts about her to avoid contact with him if he came too near. And when she was not busying herself with finding fault with his groceries, she would cast scornful glances at his out-at-the-elbow jacket, and big, scuffed, horribly over-sized boots..."

"The little girl’s name was Milly - though I’ve always somehow seen her as Estella from Great Expectations … it seems she had just that same proud disdainful air … But she also had her mother’s enchantingly light blue eyes, and a head of shining ringlets tied with ribbons; she wore the crispest, prettiest little dresses, and a pair of tiny lace-up boots. And big, shambling, tongue-tied Jack Macauley was smitten from the first moment, worshipping her from afar...”

“He would lie awake at nights, trying to think of ways in which he might appear more manly in Milly’s eyes. He would have a haircut, acquire a better pair of boots….. But somehow there was never money enough left over, and so he must shamble on, ill-shod and despised. This state of affairs lasted for about a year – after which a new errand boy was taken on, and Jack Macauley progressed to slicing bacon, and serving behind the counter of the shop. He seldom saw Milly after that, though he always looked for her, and hoped that one day she would come into the shop … "

"It was an infatuation that was never to leave him. And there are those who say that his later success was founded entirely on that. It can certainly have been no accident that the first articles of his manufacture were boots and shoes – and that only later did he move into the world of department stores. He was always hoping that Milly and her mother might come into one of his stores one day, and find something there that was good enough for them at last…”

Rose had got up from her stool at this point, to pour herself another cup of coffee. But she quickly climbed up again to resume her tale; and I was not disposed to do anything to stop her.

“It sounds an improbable story perhaps – and yet I’ve never thought it so myself. A man could construct an empire on something rather less than the want of a pair of shiny boots, it seems to me – though whether Milly or her mother ever did walk into one of his stores to be impressed, remains unknown. And Jack Macauley himself moved on at speed after that of course. His stores covered five counties in the end - there must have come a day when he thought himself good enough even for proud Milly and her mother!"

"But by then it was too late. Milly had grown up and married, and gone away. Jack Macauley himself was married too, soon after that - to his childhood sweetheart from the same village. But he carried the image of Milly all his life. He was always more or less looking for her – and when, more than thirty years later, a man of vast fortune and considerable substance by then, he caught sight of the young Theodora in somebody’s drawing room one night, it was not her face, but that of his lost, remembered Milly that he saw. That was why he pursued her so, you see. She had the very look, the very eyes, of Milly. So that in the face of no matter what obstacles, he must have her. He was a big enough man to do it now – and he wasn’t going to let fate cheat him of his prize a second time…”

So absorbed had I become in Rose’s story that it came as a jolt to me, when suddenly she broke off from it, turning to me with her own, everyday, rather superior smile. There was just one more thing I had to know though, before I could let her move on to other things.

“Does Lady Macauley herself know all this?” I asked her - conscious as I did so that I had been moved beyond the realms of ordinary speech by her story, and probably sounded all agog and foolish.

Rose though, was well enough acquainted with it all to be able to be quite blase about it by now. “Oh yes, she knows it well enough!” she said. “It has haunted her every day of her married life, and since. She was never able to be absolutely sure you see, whether it was herself or Milly that he loved. A man with a dream is an uncomfortable sort to live with though – and it’s my belief that Theodora never quite knew, even at the moment of his death, if Jack had quite relinquished his.”

There were a great many other questions I would have liked to put to Rose about this rather extraordinary story. But she was suddenly bored with it; had looked at her watch and cried “Heavens where has the morning gone? I ought to have been at Pamela’s half an hour ago!” - had collected her bag, and left.

All this took place yesterday, but I’m still very much pre-occupied with it. I’m not sure that I’m altogether happy to have been acquainted with Lady Macauley’s most intimate secrets. I think she would deeply dislike the idea herself - and it will certainly affect my response to her when next we meet. Rose’s indiscretions know no bounds, it seems to me: I was glad to hear her story, but all the same, she ought to have kept it to herself!

Yet now that I know it, what in the world am I to do with it? And how, come to that, am I to explain it all to Bill?

It rained tremendously on Lady Macauley's parade

2007-05-29T09:06:00.000Z
Not even Lady Macauley can command the British bank holiday weather, it seems. But, having failed to still the wind and stop the ceaseless deluge, she turned right round anyway, and commanded her team of caterers and marquee-erectors to perform internal sleights of hand by way of recompense. Into the gloom of the Macauley house came two hundred twinkling candles therefore; came boxloads of fragrant roses, and a host of lilies, five feet tall, to stand on gilded pedestals in every corner. Twenty white-clothed tables and eighty matching chairs arrived; and a small army of smartly uniformed staff to mount guard over them. Garlands of white and yellow roses lit the ancient entrance cloister; spilling over into the hall, where stood Lady Macauley herself, who had been meant to shimmer in the garden in sea-green silk beneath a matching parasol, but had made splendid shift with softest ivory merino, instead.

The sky was dark indeed for all that, when guests began arriving at one o’clock. The heavens opened with a downpour on the hour, so that there was a great deal of scraping of feet and shedding of unceremonious mackintoshes to be got through, before the out-stretched hand of Lady Macauley could be reached. Standing beside her beneath the arch of roses throughout all the little ceremony of greeting stood my own Bill, wearing his broadest smile. So that nobody, admiring him, could have guessed at the string of oaths I’d had to hear an hour earlier, whilst harrying him into his smartest suit. Lady Macauley had asked him to arrive early for that specific purpose. She needed the arm of a big man with a hearty laugh to lean upon if she was to get through it all alive, she said; and he was the nearest equivalent it had been her good fortune to discover, since the day that Jack had left her twenty five years before.

I meanwhile had been left to arrive alone, fifteen minutes later. And I experienced a moment of panic at the door, which had very little to do with the shabby raincoat I wore – or even with the fact that I, too, had been obliged to abandon the little silk tea dress, lately and with stress acquired, in favour of something altogether more unfestive, in well-worn navy-blue wool. I felt seriously under-dressed, it’s true – but then I always do. The source of my anxiety though, lay elsewhere. I was examining Lady Macauley’s head for signs of adornment - having earlier been quite severe with Mrs Baines who, ever optimistic on the hat front, had been out the week before and bought what I can only call a perfect stonker; and who, when I’d ventured to discourage her from that, had wondered if 'a little arrangement of flowers and fernery – like the Queen wore, at Prince Edward’s wedding' might more elegantly fit the bill?

This had seemed to me, if anything, even worse. But I stood my ground and told her that I didn’t believe Lady Macauley went in for flowery arrangements on the head; and that what might have served for an afternoon wedding in Windsor Castle was probably unsuited to lunch in the garden, even at such a fine affair as this. Better, I told her, to err on the side of understatement, and go hatless, as I meant to do myself. I was not absolutely sure of my ground however; and it was not until I actually reached the door, and could confirm that Lady Macauley’s head was free from either flowers or fernery (bore only a gleaming pearl or two), that I was able to feel my caution had been justified, and Pamela could arrive at this, her first Macauley state occasion, without causing any kind of sartorial stir.

Poor Pamela was to find that she created very little stir of any kind in that company, sad to say. Large as she is, and stately; irreproachably chiffoned and with Roland always at her side, she still managed more or less to vanish in the crowd in the first moment, and was not seen again (by me at least), until four o’clock when, having found a liveried minion to collect her rain-cloak, and with Roland firmly gathered, made the stateliest kind of exit that she could. I’m not sure that her first venture into elevated circles can have been entirely to her liking; she looked seriously discountenanced when she left. And I fully expect a phone call from her tomorrow, in which she will tell me that she was rather disappointed with Lady Macauley’s arrangements; that almost everybody there was eighty five at least, that the house was cold and unwelcoming for all the candles, and that Roland’s sorrel soup, when finally he’d got it, was if anything colder still.

Pamela’s discomfort aside, it was a splendid occasion. We stood a while for drinks and canapes in the hall, serenaded by a group of musicians installed in the open gallery above, who made none but the sweetest, softest sounds. So that Lady Macauley, firmly attached to a beaming Bill, could circulate just as softly and sweetly, staying no more than a moment or two with each group, but smiling charmingly to every one; before the moment came at which a gong was sounded in some deep recess, and we must all ascend the rose-strewn staircase to the long gallery, where the twenty tables and eighty chairs had been arranged.

Lunch itself was a formal affair of several courses – and I have to say that my own sorrel soup was exquisite, and of a temperature perfectly judged. Not that Pamela hadn’t got a point, mind you, when she said that everyone there was eighty five at least. My own table companions were an elderly diplomat and his wife; he hard of hearing, so that I was required to lean towards him a good deal over my soup; and she, impressive in moth-balled velvet, of a turn of conversation I could only think to describe as statuesque, like herself. There was a fourth person at our table, a solitary lady whose name I didn’t catch; who wore a kind of jewelled bandana on her head, and whose conversation - save that she turned to me at one moment and observed that the band played very sweetly, did it not? - consisted largely of inaudible murmurs about ‘dear Sir Jack and the good old days’. To the end of my life, I daresay, I shall never discover precisely who that lady was, or from whence she sprang.

Lunch over, we were somehow gathered into several smaller groups, to circulate about the other rooms. I lost my diplomat and his velvet lady at this point – and the other, the one with the bandana, had somehow evaporated, never to be seen again. Belle Macauley it was, with Rose, and another nameless elderly couple, who gave us the tour of what she said were largely still the rooms of state, into which she and her mother seldom cared to venture these days. “We live almost entirely downstairs now” Belle explained. “It wasn’t like this in my father’s day of course. Then, the old bedsteads and the old pictures were stowed away in basements - Daddy couldn't abide the bosomy duchesses for a start! And every room was furnished for comfort and everyday living. But somehow, the old things have managed to creep back... Mummy had some sort of idea that we might open these rooms to the public at some point. Though she can’t bear the thought of it now, and says we might as well leave them to the ghosts.”

It seemed to me a melancholy account to give, and I wondered, again, how it was they could manage to eke out their existence in this echoing place - taking shelter, it was true, largely in ground-floor rooms and sunny basements; but with all the canopied bedsteads, all the spectral cabinets and glowering, painted duchesses, looming above them nevertheless. I was glad when at last another gong sounded, and we were summoned to the gallery again, for coffee and liqueurs. Here, brightness returned with the flickering candles, and even Jack Macauley's bosomy duchesses were subdued. And here too, after a suitable interval, and intensely to my astonishment, Bill rose to his full height from his position on the right-hand of Lady Macauley, to make a gracious, and only moderately humorous little speech of appreciation for the occasion.

After which Lady Macauley herself rose, to bid a final farewell, and leaning heavily upon Bill, was conducted away to her own apartments to rest. The party began to disperse then. Slowly, in groups of two or three, the band still playing, and with a good deal of subdued chatter at the door whilst coats were collected, everyone began to drift away. Until there were only Belle, and Rose Mountjoy and I left , standing beneath the dripping roses in the cloister to wave.

I took my own leave soon after that. Without Bill, who had been detained somewhere in impenetrable regions with the old lady (I do believe he’s halfway in love with her already, for all her advanced years!). It was only when I was home again in the gatehouse, that it occurred to me that Frances and Mr Porteous had not been present at the occasion. I was sure they had been invited, and I wondered why it was they had declined to attend …

In search of a little silk tea dress (again)

2007-05-26T09:40:00.000Z
Bill is not a happy man. He returned from his walk this morning thoroughly disgruntled, and on my inquiring why the black looks, exploded in wrath, telling me that “ The damned man has taken to walking the dog with her now! So I’ve had to change my route - and poor old Monty has been quite down in the mouth about missing his usual wild plunge in pursuit of Luca!”

I understood that he was referring to Frances Fanshawe and her wayward dog Luca; and that the ‘damned man’ in question must be David Porteous, who has apparently extended his range of influence at the manor house by taking on the disciplining of the dog as well. This was unwelcome news to me – especially since my own, still rather woebegone dog, Florence, has formed an unaccountable attachment to Luca, and will be bereft at being denied his company on the common. I would prefer to hear that David Porteous was loosening rather than tightening his grip at the manor house besides – though the fact that there has been to date no engagement announcement does give me grounds for hope.

Mrs Baines is not so sanguine about it, and has phoned me several times to express her dismay. She thinks that Frances ought to have waited a little, before plunging in at the deep end like that. “So foolish of her!” she says. “But then you see, she has never had a chance to be a girl, and now she’s behaving just like any love-struck teenager.” Roland takes a very dim view of it all too, apparently. Roland goes still further indeed: expressing the view that not only must they now suspend their party of welcome for Mr Porteous indefinitely, but ought probably to cut themselves off from his society altogether. At least until they see in which direction events now proceed.

Pamela has other, more propitious things on her mind at present, mind you. She has had the extreme happiness of receiving a card of invitation from Lady Macauley to attend her garden party on bank holiday Monday. It's the very first time she has been included in such an event, and she is all of a flutter to know what she ought to wear, and whether it might include a hat? This put me in a very difficult position as a matter of fact – recalling, as I did, something that Lady Macauley herself had said, when the subject of Mrs Baines and Roland happened to come up. It was around the time when Pamela was still proposing to hold a welcome party for Mr Porteous, and Rose had been deputed to try to persuade the Macauleys to attend.

“Do remind me who she is” was Lady Macauley’s response to an appeal by Rose. “I daresay I ought to know that before I turn her down. Is she by chance the large lady with the hats, and the very much smaller husband……?”

Rose replied, I seem to remember, that Pamela was certainly large, and Roland rather small – but she didn’t remember any occasion at which she had worn a hat. Or none, at least, which Lady Macauley herself had also attended.

“Oh well, the hat is an illusion I daresay” Lady Macauley replied. “ There are women with whom one somehow feels its presence, even when the object itself is missing. There was something that Jack used to say - that you should never trust a woman whose hats seem larger than her husband, since she’s likely to be a dominatrix.”

With this recollection lurking in the back of my mind, I scarcely knew how to advise Pamela on the hat question. Though I did promise to approach Lady Macauley myself on the subject, and let her know the answer in plenty of time. To date, the occasion to do so has not arisen. I have had an old friend staying with me at the gatehouse for several days, and my pre-occupations, when they have not been with her, have been in trying to decide what to wear to the Macauley garden party myself.

Bill tells me not to agonise about it so. But then, the only question, for him, is whether he ought to wear a tie or not. And since this is usually simply enough solved by arriving with a tie, and slipping it in one’s pocket if it turns out to be inappropriate, I hardly see how he is in a position to judge. I on the other hand, have been in and out of John Lewis again, looking for little silk tea dresses…….

More or less drowning in bliss

2007-05-18T11:04:00.000Z
I went at last to see the lovers for myself yesterday, and I can’t say I was made any happier by what I found. My expectations had been coloured to some extent in advance, mind you; Rose having called on me beforehand to give me the benefit of her own views on the situation. She came on the dot of ten, and cast a sharp glance around her, I thought, as if in hopes of finding Bill. But she settled herself on a stool in my kitchen in his absence just the same, and with the distinct look of one whose intention it was to spend an hour or two in cosy contemplation of the lovers.

She thinks someone ought to tell Frances not to go around talking to people about her ‘lover’, however. “It creates a rather bizarre impression,” she said. “People feel uncomfortable about it. Not everyone understanding, as you and I do, that it’s a word Frances has been longing to use in connection with herself for as long as she can remember!”.

“She has read too many books, that’s the trouble!” was Rose’s next offering. “She gets all her weird ideas from there. I have a lover! she heard someone cry, in some book or other when she was seventeen. It was Anna Karenin I think…. something Russian and dense, at any rate. And Frances has been practising saying it before the mirror ever since. I think she must have thought the opportunity to say it for real would never come, but now here is Mr Porteous at last, and she’s shouting it out all over the place.”

This was not in fact a piece of information to which I had been made privy, myself, so it surprised me to learn that Rose had. I knew a little of Frances’s other imaginary lovers, who had begun with Huck Finn at the age of ten, and progressed through Holden Caulfield and Mr Rochester all the way to Sir Lancelot; from adoration of whom she had seldom deviated since – though it had sometimes occurred to her to wonder if after all she didn’t adore King Arthur even more. I had assumed anyway, that with the advent of Mr Porteous, Frances had been induced to put away childish things - though I did just wonder how well he might have measured up, by comparison with Lancelot and King Arthur?

I was annoyed with Rose, besides. It seemed to me the very worst kind of betrayal to reveal such confidences made in trust. I gave her fairly short shrift therefore: I told her that it wasn’t anyone Russian whom Frances had taken for her model. It was Madame Bovary in fact, who had cried I have a lover! - and she was the creation of Gustave Flaubert, who was French.

But Rose scarcely even flinched at my little put-down. She has a thick skin, and has perfected the art of seeing and hearing only those things which it suits her to see and hear. It’s a considerable art, and one which I would like to be able to master, at least in part, myself. She went on quite unperturbed, telling me that she gives the affair five months at most. She knows the type of Mr Porteous, she says; and she believes he will find it too difficult a pill to swallow in the end.

“He’ll be seduced for a while” she said. “The grandeur of the manor house itself will see to that. That, and the sheer size of the bank balance it seems to imply! But he’ll finally be unable to stomach any of it. He’ll pull out at some point – oh, he’ll do it beautifully of course, so that she hardly even knows she’s been dropped. He’ll find someone else to impress - and poor Frances will be left with her little love affair lying in tatters at her feet!”

It is Rose’s opinion that we will all be obliged to pick up the pieces when Frances has been abandoned. She left me with that thought; and since I can’t help thinking that there’s probably some truth in her theory, my own heart was filled with trepidation, when at two o’clock that afternoon I presented myself at the gates of the manor house. To my surprise, it was Frances herself who came out to the gate to let me in. She was all of a tremble, but she wanted me to see how entirely composed and happy she was. “Mrs Meade is slow to hear the bell” she explained. “ She lets it ring and ring, and David thinks it creates a bad impression.” She seemed nervous of what she might find my attitude to be, so I hugged her at once, and said how glad I had been to hear of her happy new association.

“Oh, you mean Mr Porteous” she replied; and her relief was visible. “Or David, as I must learn to call him! So foolish of me to be calling him Mr Porteous, now that we are lovers you know. Though David says I oughtn’t to be talking about our being lovers – that creates a bad impression too. It seems as if I’m always creating bad impressions, but with Mr Porteous as my guide, I shall soon be able to overcome all that. We are on the point of becoming an affianced couple, is the way David expresses it – and that should be information enough for anyone, he says. And yes, it has been very remarkable, and I won’t pretend not to be just a little overwhelmed by it all, still. But he is so very good to me, you see – and of course now that he has actually come to live here, there are all sorts of little adjustments that must be made..”

“ … They’re very pleasant ones of course – the adjustments, I mean!” She was quick to add that; she seemed to think it important I should see at once how entirely pleasant everything was. “ And it’s all quite temporary at this stage. David has come here to stay just while Mr Jessop decorates his own house. It will take several weeks – and after that, well we shall have to wait and see how things develop.”

She led me into the drawing room then, where sat David Porteous himself, all at his ease in the largest armchair. He stood to greet me, putting out his hand with his usual perfect urbanity.

“You find me very looking very much at home in my new environment no doubt” he said. “Frances has been good enough to take me in while my own house is being re-decorated. It’s an act of charity on her part, and I hardly know how I’m going to be able to express my thanks.”

It crossed my mind that there was one way in which he might have expressed his thanks – and that would have been to leave the poor little creature alone! But of course one doesn’t say such things: one nods, and smiles, and talks of this and that, until it comes time for tea, and somehow the awkward gap has been bridged. It was a strange hour I spent with them, for all that. I don’t know what I had expected to find in Mr Porteous; but if I had hoped to see signs of embarrassment, or compunction – or any indication of the newly ardent lover - I was to be disappointed on all counts. He calls her ‘my dear’ for a start, which is not what I would call precisely the language of love. He permits her to hover near his chair, anticipating his needs – he even allows her to flutter her hands in his direction now and then. But touch her in return, he does not. For a lover, he is very much in command of himself – it’s only poor little trembling Frances, who seems to be more or less drowning in bliss.

Miss Fanshawe's Lover

2007-05-15T12:47:00.000Z
It is one of Bill’s contentions that nothing in the world is ever quite so bad – or so good – as it seems. He has often voiced this opinion, and I guess he ought to know what he’s talking about, since he has seen about as much of the bad as it’s possible for any one man to do in a lifetime. Of the extent to which he has also seen the good, I’m not so sure. The good has a tendency to become submerged, when it is your brief to go about the world reporting from this troubled spot and the next; and I don’t believe I have ever heard Bill talking through his satellite link about Mother Theresa, or the Good Woman of Baghdad (should such a person exist); or even about the hundreds of good, bewildered, frightened, ordinary people whom I believe he must have also have enountered fairly routinely in his travels.

It is not the good frightened bewildered people who make the news, you see. Any more than it is the brave, or the benevolent, or the hopeful – or those who just doggedly, and in the face of hideous adversity, survive. All those other people must be there in the background all the while of course – since if they were not, the world must surely spin to a screeching halt one day, ground up finally in the mill of its own self-perpetuating wickedness.

Bill has another theory though: one that is coupled with, or at any rate closely related to the first. Whatever else there is in the world, he says, there are in the last resort only people. It’s a fairly self-evident fact, but one that is often overlooked. You can go to any place you like, to the best place or the worst. You can go to the most beautiful, or ugly, or awe-inspiring, or simply profoundly dull place - and when you actually get there, what you’ll find are people not so very different from yourself.
Bill has been to what he thinks must have been one of the worst places. He has taken tea with Saddam, in one of his palaces before the fall. He has interviewed the man himself, and found him exuding bonhomie, wearing a Western suit and offering earl grey tea and biscuits, with the cigars.

It was only the glint of madness somewhere behind Saddam’s eyes, Bill says – that, and the little red panic button on the arm of his chair, and the pair of armed ruffians posted outside the door – that reminded him he was in presence here not so much of a man, as a confirmed and unrepentant monster. It was a difficult transition to make at the time, but Bill said he managed to make it. Since if he had not, then all those innocent people must have resisted and fought; must have been imprisoned and tortured and died, entirely in vain.

Bill was reminded of this encounter of his when he saw Ian Paisley sitting down to tea last week with Martin McGuinness. Most things come to tea and handshakes at the end, in Bill's view. T.S Eliot had it just about right, when in The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock he talked about ‘measuring one’s life in coffee spoons’. It was teaspoons with Ian and Martin, and Bill and Saddam, of course – but it might just as well have been coffee spoons. Everything is finally banal and ordinary in the heart of man. It’s just that you sometimes have to travel further, and longer, and more roughly - more bombs must fall, more wholescale meaningless slaughter and suffering occur – before the teacups can come out.

Now you might wonder why I write in this vein this morning? Especially when I write under such a heading as Miss Fanshawe’s Lover. You might think I would have something more momentous to talk about than Bill's experiences with people. But that’s just it, don't you see? Something has happened that has made me see all over again, that when it comes to people, Bill is the wise one, possessing a distinct and natural advantage over me. It required Bill’s presence, for example, to enable me to feel at home with Lady Macauley the other day; and doubtless it will only be because Bill goes with me, that I shall feel comfortable about attending her little luncheon party next week. For I am, I believe, a natural coward – and Bill is precisely the reverse.

There’s more to it even than that, though. What has happened is that Bill has already been out on the common with Monty this morning, and has discovered, in the space of one short walk, all that I have been wanting to know about Frances and Mr Porteous for several weeks, and been too busy, or polite – or just plain timorous – to try to find out! Rose and Pamela were right all along, as it turns out. I thought they exaggerated the situation grotesquely, and accused them in my mind of all manner of unsubstantiated suspicions. But what they darkly feared has come to pass, and Mr Porteous and Frances are lovers.

“She came right out and said it to me” Bill told me – he looked very much affected by it, for Bill. “She looked up at me with all her elderly innocence shining in her face, and told me that Mr Porteous had become her lover. ‘We talked about it a great deal in advance’ she said; ‘And he implored me to consider it very carefully, because of course it was quite a tremendous step to take. But really, I didn’t have to consider it at all, because I already liked and admired him so much. And now it has happened, and he comes in the evenings sometimes as well as the mornings (to work in the library you know). Soon perhaps, he will come to live with me altogether; and though we are not precisely what you would call engaged to be married, we might yet be both those things, and in the meantime we are lovers nevertheless.”

Bill says that he has received many profound shocks in his life, but there was never another that came near to this one. Worse, he said, the whole thing seemed so preposterous, that he was afflicted at once with the almost irresistible impulse to explode in mirth! “She said it all with such a perfect gravity, you see,” he explained. “She stood there talking about Mr Porteous being her lover as if it were the nicest, but after all the most ordinary and natural thing on earth. And all the while I was thinking how absurd it was; hardly knowing whether I most wanted to laugh, and accuse her of playing girlish games with me - or go out and find the wretched man and punch him on the nose!”

All this happened several hours ago now, but I can’t say that I have been able yet to accustom myself to the idea. I shall have to go and see Frances of course – Bill said she particularly asked him to let me hear her news. But what I shall say to her - and how, quite frankly, I shall react if Mr Porteous himself should happen to be with her when I call… Well, these are eventualities about which I haven’t yet been able to think. One thing only remains clear – and that is that if Frances is happy, then I must try to be happy for her too. It won’t be easy though. And the awful thing is that I too, find something almost irresistibly comic about it. I should laugh outright, I fear – if there weren’t something about it that also made me want to weep!

Bill crashes my party

2007-05-14T15:01:00.000Z
Lady Macauley stayed with me for more than three hours the other day. She leant back in her chair with legs delicately extended, her feet upon a little padded footstool I had provided. She has the slenderest legs, the smallest, prettiest feet. Her feet were encased today in a pair of dove-coloured shoes that buttoned above the ankles; all of a piece they were, with the almost Edwardian elegance of her high-necked dress in finest wool, and of the identical shade of dove grey. She knows just how to dress herself to best effect; accentuating her good points and masking those that are bad. In fact she hasn’t many bad points that I could see - and I hope I shall have learnt something from her style, when once I have reached her advanced age.

She professed herself at home in my sitting room at once, and hoped I’d be kind enough to let her stay a while. There was something unexpectedly pleasant about being in such a very small house, she said; its walls closed in around one so reassuringly, and whatever one might happen to need at any given moment, was scarcely more than an arm’s-length away.

“Only think of it, Belle!” she exclaimed. “Six steps at most, and you’re in the kitchen. With us, there are corridors to cross and flights of stairs to surmount. There’s even a creaking old lift, if one happens to be on the wrong floor! There are dark corners and cold patches - so that I can never be quite sure, when Belle has left me sitting in the panelled parlour and even the sound of her footsteps has vanished, whether it will be ten minutes before she returns, or whether she’ll perhaps have gone forever.“

This seemed to me to create such an arresting image, that my curiosity was aroused at once. I had often wondered how these two women managed alone in so vast and uncompromising a house; and here – especially with the mention of the dark corners and the cold patches – was at least the beginning of an explanation. I took courage in hand, and asked her if with her mention of cold patches, she were suggesting that the house was haunted? It was a remark which might have gone against me, I knew that. I might, with that one rather ill-judged question, have forfeited her good opinion forever. Fortunately, she took it in good part, and gave me much more than I could have hoped for by way of a reply.

“Haunted – oh yes it’s that, undoubtedly!” she said. “You can’t live in a place four centuries old and not be troubled by its former inhabitants now and then. And then you know, it was a place of high political intrigue at one time. They were for the king, the people who built the house and lived there for the first two hundred years. Staunch royalists, all of them– though it’s said that the lady of the house did manage to carry on some sort of amorous association with Mr Cromwell ( who’s not generally known for his amorousness!), whilst secretly supporting Charles. I don’t know how much truth there is in the story. But even if it’s only partly true, one can’t help admiring her, can one? It must have been a very delicate balancing act for any lady to undertake, in any generation."

It is the lady who had the amorous association with Cromwell, apparently, who most often returns to haunt the house. Lady Macauley herself has received no glimpse of her, but Belle has seen her, and so has Rose. Which makes Lady Macauley think that ghosts too, must have their little discriminations. “I daresay they think me too hard a nut to crack” she said. “ For a ghost to function effectively, there must be some vestige of belief at least, in the person whom it’s endeavouring to haunt!” Lady Macauley herself has seen nothing more than a little dog that sometimes runs out ahead of her on wintry nights – and even that apparition, she is inclined to put down to tricks of the light played on dark staircases.

It was not of ghosts we were talking however, when half an hour later, at six o’clock, Bill’s battered old Renault suddenly rattled into our little forecourt. We had moved on by then to that other favoured topic of Lady Macauley’s, the Prime Minister. So that when Bill put his rain-soaked head inside the door, taking in the assembled company with some astonishment, Lady Macauley had just delivered herself of the remark that she supposed we were about to witness the longest goodbye in political history; and that there would almost certainly be a manly tear or two, before it was allowed to end.

“No doubt we shall hear Mr Blair call himself the people’s prime minister” was what she was actually saying at the moment of Bill’s entry. “For all the world as if he thought that democracy itself were something that had been invented by New Labour!”

Bill had heard, and seemed to take it with some exuberance. “Now there’s an interesting idea to come home to!” he said. He was smiling broadly, even as he shook the rain from his overcoat, and threw it over the nearest chair. It all seemed to go on with surprising smoothness from there, and I was rather proud of Bill, to tell the truth. He has a way of filling any room he enters. He’s a big man, with a loud voice and a huge guffaw for a laugh; and his intrusion into this particular little party might very well have caused it to go seriously wrong. It almost did go wrong at one point in fact – though through no fault of Bill’s. Rose it was, who for some reason best known to herself, took it into her head to tackle him over the situation in Iraq.

“I suppose you take the side of Britain and America in all this?” was the way she saw fit to put it. And there was flirtatiousness, as well as challenge in her manner - which was of all approaches she might have made to Bill, the very worst. To my astonishment, he handled it with quiet restraint - though I hoped Rose was too well pleased with her own conversational boldness, to have missed the glance of pure loathing he cast in her direction before he replied. “Oh I never take sides you know” was all he finally said. “If there’s a bad guy in it anywhere, it would be beyond my powers of deduction to say which one.”

He turned away from Rose then, to talk to Lady Macauley and Belle of less inflammatory things. He leant forward and listened, adding something of his own now and then, or throwing his head back to laugh. He was affability itself, and in no time at all had the old lady smiling and nodding back at him, as if she thought him the most delightful man she’d ever met. To Rose he addressed no further word - do her best to draw him though she continued, with visibly growing annoyance, to try to do.

They stayed another hour; and when at last they said they ought to go, it was Bill who held Lady Macauley’s umbrella for her, and conducted her with infinite courtesy to her car. She beckoned me over at the final moment of farewell, and “He does not disappoint one!” she whispered in my ear. “He saw Rose off, and no mistake!” she added, rather less discreetly. “It delighted my old eyes to see it done so well! But you musn’t hide him away in future you know – and must promise to bring him to lunch with us at the earliest possible moment.”

Bill, as I have so often observed, can always spring a fresh surprise on one. And what he said to me of the visit after they’d gone, was not in the least the thing that I’d expected. “That was one entertaining old lady!” he said, when he’d waved the Bentley off around the corner of the common. “ I can’t say as much for her friend of course – I entirely deplore the type as you know. But the old lady and her daughter can call as often as you like.”

Which from Bill, is about as high as personal commendation gets.