Mrs Roland Baines 'At Home'

In all the flurry of meeting Frances Fanshawe, and visiting her in her big, chaotic house (and watching Mr Porteous pass by of course, with all its implications of interesting things to come), I have forgotten to mention anything about my new little dog, Florence. Florence is the name that was just discernible on her collar when the Rescue people found her sitting beside a lamp-post in Putney a month ago; and since it is her only worldly possession, and the only word in any language to which she seems able to respond, I have not felt able to deprive her of it. She’s a woe-begone little creature still, it has to be said. She spends most of her time shivering on the edge of the basket I have put under the kitchen table for her, or attaching herself to my lower legs like a second skin when I drag her out for a walk in the mornings. She trembles violently, poor little thing, at sight of every cat or quirrel that passes - and is in mortal terror of Bill’s good-hearted Monty, who would befriend her if he could.

I mean to persevere with her though. I’m convinced there’s a lively, happy dog inside her somewhere, and it’s up to me now, to try to bring her out. It took me a month to acquire her after all; the adoption procedure for stray dogs being every bit as rigorous, it seems, as that for human children. She is here to stay - though Bill takes a very dim view of her I’m afraid. It’s his opinion that if I had been going to get a dog, I might at least have tried to find one that actually looked, and sounded, and conducted itself like a regular dog. I think he fears that the Brigadier’s mastiff might actually eat her (he has established fairly cordial relations with the Brigadier by now); and that he and Monty would lose any credibility they might have established on the common, were they to be associated with a dog that cringed and cowered as my poor Florence does - and that bore, moreover, so entirely un-doglike a name. It does seem to me to indicate a certain smallness of spirit on Bill's part. I’d have expected the survivor of so many war zones to have exhibited just a little more valour. But canine credibility must be taken seriously, I daresay, when so many of a man's usual props in life have been summarily removed. Bill is struggling still, I know, to come to terms with what he calls being permanently 'grounded'. It's a very different kind of battle that he's involved with now. And so just for the moment, I'm taking a different route from Bill's across the common, when I go out with Florence for her walk.

It was on my return from one of those still very half-hearted excursions with Florence yesterday, that I learned from Bill that I'd had another visitor in my absence. A large woman in some kind of outlandish get-up with a hat attached, was his first rather discouraging description of her. And it wasn't improved by his adding, when pressed, that for him she had resembled nothing so much as an armoured vehicle advancing; and that he and Monty had kept their heads down in the attic, until she had posted her note and rumbled away again. “She didn’t ring the bell then?” I asked. To which he replied that she had rung repeatedly; so often and so long indeed, that he and Monty had positively begun to fear for their lives. “I think you’ll find that she’s a very emphatic kind of woman” was his next observation. “There was something about the particular angle of her hat that bespoke emphasis . There was the mark of the dowager about every inch of her, what’s more – and believe me, she covers a lot of inches! So that if you’re absolutely determined to make a friend of her (and I beg you in advance to think very carefully about it before you do) , you’ll be so good, please, as to leave Monty and me out of it.”

He then handed me her note, which was written on a card of cream vellum, and bore a printed inscription at the top that read “Mrs Roland Baines, 3 Willow Cottages, The Common”; beneath which was scrawled, in a large hand, the rather cryptic message “At home Tuesday April 17th at three thirty. Do come and meet some of your neighbours.” This was unfamiliar territory for me, and I was at a loss to know quite how I ought to respond. How long ago was it, I wondered, since women had abjured the tradition of describing themselves by their husband’s name? How long since I had received the kind of invitation which spoke of being “at home”, come to that? And what, precisely should it be taken to mean? My only resource seemed to be phone Frances Fanshawe again, in the hope that she too might have received an invitation to the mysterious repast. Thankfully, Frances was in, and was, as always, wonderfully accommodating.

“Oh yes, it’s to be a little tea-party” she explained. “I’m to go too, and Mr Porteous I believe – and even Rose perhaps, who has returned a day or two ahead of the Macauleys in order to open up the house for them, and see that everything is in perfect readiness for their return. It’s a little service she always performs for them - she’s so obliging. And don’t worry about what to wear, dear – Pamela’s perfectly informal: just a little silk tea dress will do…………”

“So that’s all right then!” I remarked to Bill later. “Just a little silk tea dress – the very sort of thing, of course, with which my wardrobe is simply overflowing!”

Bill's comment about tea dresses is unprintable here, I'm sorry to say. But since it is one of the besetting problems of my life that I never have anything to wear to any occasion that ever presents itself, I have more or less made up my mind to go into John Lewis at the first opportunity, to see what they have in the way of little silk tea dresses.