Intimations of change

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.