Miss Frances Fanshawe (Or: Theodora, seen from a different perspective)

We had such a nice little visitor yesterday, Bill and I. I answered a ring at the doorbell at ten o’clock, and there she was; a small lady wearing a camel coat, and followed in grave procession by an elderly man in a flat cap, who carried a large basket. I call her a nice little visitor because there’s really no other way of describing her. She’s so very small and slight, for a start. As far, Bill says, from being a dowager as it’s possible to be (dowagers requiring a certain bulk, it seems, in order to qualify for the status: they must weigh at least thirteen stone, and come accompanied with a husband, living, or at least of distant memory). This lady has not, nor ever has had, a husband. Her name is Miss Frances Fanshawe (Bill thinks it’s almost certainly spelt Featherstonehaugh), and I haven't yet found it possible to think of her without the preliminary ‘Miss’, for she is in every respect what I would call the perfect embodiment of the English maiden lady.

She was actually Bill’s visitor, not mine. To Bill must go the credit of having collected her, since she is one of his new dog-walking friends. She’s the one he always refers to by her dog’s name rather than her own – he calls her ‘Luca’s lady’, on account of the the way her big hybrid dog has, of sending her careering off across the common clinging desperately to his leash. Her dog is called Luca, after the town of that name (with the double c), in Tuscany. She found him sitting deslolate on the wall there, and brought him home. He has only very recently been released from quarantine confinement, apparently, and is not yet house-trained enough to be let free from his leash. Bill has been required to step in to give her ballast on several occasions, during one of Luca’s more headlong plunges across the common; and it has been all in the course of these little rescue missions of his , that their friendship has developed.

There she was on our doorstep yesterday, anyway, and it wasn’t more than five minutes flat, before I’d learnt most of what there is to know about her. She lives in the big Queen Anne house at the village end of high street; it’s called the manor house, and has the appearance of being somewhat down on its heels these days, for all its natural grandeur. Miss Fanshawe owns it outright, having inherited it from her late father; and lives alone there, save for an elderly housekeeper who is usually more than halfway tipsy, Bill says, at eleven o’clock in the morning (Bill has been to the house already, apparently; which was another little shock for me); and the still more elderly Mr Jessop, who accompanied her yesterday, and whom she introduced to us as the very good friend who looks after everything at the manor house for her.

Our own first duty as their hosts seemed to be to find somewhere for Mr Jessop to put down his basket - which contained, as Miss Fanshawe took some moments to explain to us, some “nice little fresh things” from the manor house garden. We invited them into my sitting room, and cleared some table space, then watched in wonder while the old man removed layers of coloured tissue paper to reveal lettuces, and hot-house strawberries; pale young rhubarb, and fine, fat, un-English-looking tomatoes. Miss Fanshawe's conduct towards Mr Jessop is of the utmost gentle courtesy – it seemed a nice quality in her, like all her others. She inherited him from her father too, apparently, almost as a sacred trust – so that it has become one of the more solemn pre-occupations of her life these days, to continue finding meaningful things for him to do…

All this information, and much more in a similar vein, tumbled from Miss Fanshawe’s lips in the first five minutes. She seems to have the gift, not uncommon in English maiden ladies, of perfect recall; she also has a command of the stream-of-consciouness narrative that Virginia Woolf might not have been ashamed to call her own. She saw Mr Jessop safely away with his empty basket, and then she consented to stay and have a cup of coffee with us. She had always wanted to see the interior of one of the gatehouses, she said. As a little girl, playing alone in the manor house garden, the walls of which actually abut those of the Macauley house at a certain point….. she had thought the little gatehouses quite the perfect manifestation of what Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread cottage ought to be. Though of course they had passed out of Macauley hands years ago, Sir Jack having thought it prudent to sell them off… and it had somehow never been possible for her to become acquainted with any of the newer inhabitants who had come and gone.

She professed herself charmed with all that we have done here, which was just the way she might have done it herself, she said. She especially likes our attic, which is in process of being set up as a common sitting room, with one end partitioned off as a study for Bill. “So original” she said; “to be just across the footpath from one another.” “And so companionable too, to be connected at the roof like that.” She had never supposed there could have been a room up there, all those years ago when she had been cycling along the footpath as a girl. And then of course the great thing was, that we each had our particular private ‘side’ to retreat to, whenever we wished to be alone for a while…..

In such a manner as this did she chatter on for an hour, almost without pause for breath. It’s for just that quality of hers Bill likes her, he later told me. For the fact that when you’re with her you haven’t the smallest need to interject, or even to concentrate very much. You just go let it all wash over you, swimming gently with the current, until finally it drifts to its natural end, to evaporate in the upper air. It’s curiously restful, Bill says.

I make a pause at this point; being mindful, always, of the over-long blog, the too-discursive narrative. I haven’t even got as far as Theodora yet, however; which was after all the promised purpose of this page. So I’ll make a short break, and return almost at once, on a fresh page…