The opening skirmish

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"

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"

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

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

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

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

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.