Bill is doing rather better on the meeting-the-neighbours front than I am. Dogs are a great resource, of course. People will stop to nod and smile at a dog, where they will scarcely spare a second glance, for a human. Bill seems to have collected quite a little coterie around him out there on the common with the other dog-owners, at any rate. Most of his new friends tend to have names like “Poodle Woman”, or "Labrador Man”, it’s true (nothing sexist there, Bill says: it’s just the way things are); and to have prompted little more comment from him than the fact that there they are each day, and that they generally exchange a word or two with him whilst throwing their sticks, or exhorting their dogs to come to heel. One man only has excited anything like vehemence on Bill’s part, and that’s the one he calls Mastiff Man. “An old codger in plus fours and carrying a shooting stick”, is Bill’s description of him. “With a great grumbling brute of a muzzled mastiff on an extended lead.” He’s a retired army officer, apparently. An old brigadier, resident in these parts for many years. Loud, bluff, opinionated - a species of male dowager if ever Bill saw one. And wanting nothing so much as to discuss the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with Bill.
“ Fellow wants to talk strategy, for God’ sake!” was Bill’s expostulation on returning from his walk this morning. “Seems to think that everything would be all right out there, if only the people on the ground would listen to him, and take his advice.”
This is in fact red rag territory, for Bill. He’d hoped to pass unrecognised here, but people do have a tendency to think they know him, from having seen him standing tall against turbulent backgrounds on the television so often, shouting his reports from war zones. His usual response to being accosted on the street is to say that he has no opinions in the matter. Or none, at least, that he’s prepared to go to the stake for. Opinions are the first thing to go, he always says, in his line of work. He has learnt, the rough way, that an opinion expressed today has a way of rearing up to shoot one in the foot, tomorrow; and that to put one’s head above the parapet in any cause is most of all to risk getting it blown off…. It doesn’t seem to have gone down very well with the brigadier, however. “Positively sloped off… “ Bill observed, of Mastiff Man's departure from the scene this morning. “Just the sort to take aim and shoot the messenger, if there’s no-one else within range….”.
I confess I can’t think of any way of helping Bill out of this one. Save perhaps suggesting that he take a different route when going out with Monty in the mornings? With people of the brigadier’s sort, avoidance is usually the only possible course. I’m thinking of getting a dog myself, however – it seems to be the most effective way of getting to know people, round here.
Thursday, 22 March 2007
Monday, 19 March 2007
Here be dowagers
19 March 2007
Here be dowagers
I’ve had my first comment! Discounting those from Bill of course, which tend to be verbal only, and are directed mostly at what he calls my extreme verbosity - which itself falls so very far short, he says, of that altogether shorter, sharper, more staccato kind of thing that is generally thought to be the defining characteristic of a blog…. I respond by telling him that he’s under no obligation whatever to read my entries. And in any case, when was it, precisely, that he became an arbiter of what does, or does not constitute a blog? It’s entirely likely of course that he has been blogging clandestinely himself, for months. What could be more natural after all than that, given his present state of health, and trapped in domesticity as he has lately been reduced to become…. he should have taken to haranguing the politicians, or the MOD, or the Foreign Office (or even the Prince of Wales), with vituperative daily or bi-weekly blogs? I shall have to institute what I think is called a profile search, to see if I can locate him…
My online correspondent was altogether more generous. (It’s absurd, really, the degree of pleasure one can derive, simply from knowing that one person at least has visited one’s site! Is it a question of “by the numbers of your comments shall ye be judged”, I wonder? Or is there some other criterion by which a blog’s success is measured? Time will tell, I expect: that, as everything else). My commenter calls herself Ali, anyway ( I’m taking her to be a woman, largely by virtue of her apparent familiarity with sausages..). And she seems to have been interested most of all in what my butcher has had to tell me about local affairs. I do hope he tells me more; since, quite apart from any curiosity of my own, I should like to be able to please and satisfy Ali. Unfortunately, she left no profile footprint, so I am unable to thank her personally. Or better still, to make a link with her site, if she has one…. But, thank you Ali, wherever you are – you have saved me from nil points ignominy, and made my day.
Nothing much else has happened since yesterday – save that Bill did return rather disgruntled from his walk this morning; complaining that picture-postcard-pretty though the district undoubtedly is, and as Pooh-bear as I will ….. he still finds it lacking in some essential ingredient (tanks, probably; or what I think are now more properly called armoured vehicles); and that what he most foresees in prospect for us here is not so much dragons, as deadly dowagers! The place is fairly heaving with them, he said. He counted a dozen of them on the high street, and another six at least, out on the common with their distinctly dowagerial dogs. He seemed genuinely out of humour over it. And cast a wary eye inside my sitting room as he passed, I noticed; as if he quite expected to see it bristling already, with dowagers drinking tea.
It did occur to me to suggest that he might denounce the local women as much as he liked, yet have had the decency to leave the dogs out of it! I was quite on the point of asking him what he thought there could be, about a dog, that could possibly be construed as dowagerial? But I thought better of it. He’s still a bit morose, as I said. His view of everything and its dog is on the jaundiced side, just now. Restored to his customary good spirits he’ll be the first to acknowledge, I’m sure of it, that what he currently sees as a deadly dowager, is in reality nothing worse than a blameless matron going about her usual business on the streets. Much like me, in fact…
Here be dowagers
I’ve had my first comment! Discounting those from Bill of course, which tend to be verbal only, and are directed mostly at what he calls my extreme verbosity - which itself falls so very far short, he says, of that altogether shorter, sharper, more staccato kind of thing that is generally thought to be the defining characteristic of a blog…. I respond by telling him that he’s under no obligation whatever to read my entries. And in any case, when was it, precisely, that he became an arbiter of what does, or does not constitute a blog? It’s entirely likely of course that he has been blogging clandestinely himself, for months. What could be more natural after all than that, given his present state of health, and trapped in domesticity as he has lately been reduced to become…. he should have taken to haranguing the politicians, or the MOD, or the Foreign Office (or even the Prince of Wales), with vituperative daily or bi-weekly blogs? I shall have to institute what I think is called a profile search, to see if I can locate him…
My online correspondent was altogether more generous. (It’s absurd, really, the degree of pleasure one can derive, simply from knowing that one person at least has visited one’s site! Is it a question of “by the numbers of your comments shall ye be judged”, I wonder? Or is there some other criterion by which a blog’s success is measured? Time will tell, I expect: that, as everything else). My commenter calls herself Ali, anyway ( I’m taking her to be a woman, largely by virtue of her apparent familiarity with sausages..). And she seems to have been interested most of all in what my butcher has had to tell me about local affairs. I do hope he tells me more; since, quite apart from any curiosity of my own, I should like to be able to please and satisfy Ali. Unfortunately, she left no profile footprint, so I am unable to thank her personally. Or better still, to make a link with her site, if she has one…. But, thank you Ali, wherever you are – you have saved me from nil points ignominy, and made my day.
Nothing much else has happened since yesterday – save that Bill did return rather disgruntled from his walk this morning; complaining that picture-postcard-pretty though the district undoubtedly is, and as Pooh-bear as I will ….. he still finds it lacking in some essential ingredient (tanks, probably; or what I think are now more properly called armoured vehicles); and that what he most foresees in prospect for us here is not so much dragons, as deadly dowagers! The place is fairly heaving with them, he said. He counted a dozen of them on the high street, and another six at least, out on the common with their distinctly dowagerial dogs. He seemed genuinely out of humour over it. And cast a wary eye inside my sitting room as he passed, I noticed; as if he quite expected to see it bristling already, with dowagers drinking tea.
It did occur to me to suggest that he might denounce the local women as much as he liked, yet have had the decency to leave the dogs out of it! I was quite on the point of asking him what he thought there could be, about a dog, that could possibly be construed as dowagerial? But I thought better of it. He’s still a bit morose, as I said. His view of everything and its dog is on the jaundiced side, just now. Restored to his customary good spirits he’ll be the first to acknowledge, I’m sure of it, that what he currently sees as a deadly dowager, is in reality nothing worse than a blameless matron going about her usual business on the streets. Much like me, in fact…
Sunday, 18 March 2007
I Beatrice
18 March 2007
Day Two: A road runs through it
I’ve been ‘out there’ almost twelve hours now, and so far, nobody has commented. I daresay I ought to have expected as much, and should be patient. But then, suppose nobody were to comment? Not one person. Not ever. It would be very disgraceful, wouldn’t it? The blog equivalent, so to speak, of nil points in the Eurovision Song Contest! Still, nil desperandum and all that: the only thing seems to be blithely to go on, as if one thought that someone, somewhere must be listening……
To return to the story so far, therefore, and tell you that what the road of the title actually runs through is our house, my brother Bill’s and mine. Though strictly speaking it isn’t so much a road, as a little public footpath. It was once one of the approach avenues to the local stately home: a great, gaunt Jacobean mansion that stands in splendid isolation on the river bank, about a hundred metres from here. The house looks abandoned now, for all the world as if it were peopled only by unfriendly ghosts – though I’m told by my friendly butcher (he being the one person who has so far addressed more than three words to me) that a very old lady and her daughter still live there. The same old lady, the butcher tells me, around whom some ancient scandal was enacted, years ago in my remote girlhood. It seems an unlikely story. That particular old lady would be about a hundred by now! It would be rather like suddenly discovering that Wallis Simpson was still alive. Or Nell Gwynne, or Queen Victoria. It has excited my curiosity however, and I look forward to learning more. Just as soon as I have met someone other than the butcher, whom I might ask.
I began by explaining that the road isn’t so much a road, as a little footpath. And I ought to explain too, that the house isn’t so much a house, as a pair of tiny gatehouses; each one quite complete and separate in itself, but joined to the other at the top by an ornamental superstructure, that conceals the common attic and bestrides the road. It seemed just the thing for Bill and me; we could hardly believe our luck. We had been looking for something that was divisible down the middle in some way, but had hardly expected to be separated by anything quite so emphatic as a little road. Here, we would be able to lead our perfectly separate, independent lives – yet to meet, had only to pop out of our respective little doors like the man and woman in the Swiss weather clocks…….
We make odd housemates, Bill and I. Everybody says so, and none with a more genuine astonishment than we ourselves. It just happened that we found ourselves washed up on the shores of approaching old age alone, and more or less simultaneously (I widowed, he divorced) - so that the sensible thing seemed to be to pool resources, and look for a house to share. I can see it’s not going to be easy though. Brother and sister we may be, but we have never been close, and our lives could hardly have been more different. I have spent the last decade caring for our elderly parents, and then for my first grandchild - whilst Bill has been racketing about the world, as he puts it, in his capacity as foreign correspondent for one of the television channels. He’s not used to sitting about, and certainly not in cottages. He has been accustomed to live his life out of suitcases, always ready at a moment’s notice to fly out of what he calls the danger of the domestic front, into the comparative safety of a war zone. He says that’s why his marriage failed, and his children no longer seem to want to speak to him…..
He’s home from hospital now, settled to some extent in his side of the cottage – though finding all sorts of fault with my arrangements. He has his doubts about the cottage’s perfect capacity to contain him, for a start. He’s a big man, inclined to lounge; he says his legs have a way of coming up against solid objects, no matter in which direction he tries to extend them. His head is in constant contact with the ceilings, besides – I hear his bellowed imprecations, and wonder how long it will be before he learns to duck. He’s rather morose just now for Bill, in fact; I’m told it’s a part of the recovery process. He goes out each day for longish walks of course, but only with his dog. His old Monty has seen it all, he says - is a regular old dog-at-arms himself, and the only possible companion. (I ought to explain at this point that Bill’s imagery always tends to have something of the battlefield about it. It’s only to be expected, I suppose, from one of his experience. Though it can be just a little un-nerving; and I do wonder how well it will go down in so obviously peaceable a district? Or indeed in blogland?).
All these things will settle down in time, I expect. Bill will find some way of extending his legs, and defending his head – and some person just congenial enough, it’s to be hoped, with whom to drink his daily pint in one of the local pubs. And I - well, sooner or later I must begin to meet people, and make friends. Everything will turn out to have been all for the best in the end, I’m sure. It will have to, since what with stamp duty and everything else, there’s not the smallest possibility of our moving yet again…
Day Two: A road runs through it
I’ve been ‘out there’ almost twelve hours now, and so far, nobody has commented. I daresay I ought to have expected as much, and should be patient. But then, suppose nobody were to comment? Not one person. Not ever. It would be very disgraceful, wouldn’t it? The blog equivalent, so to speak, of nil points in the Eurovision Song Contest! Still, nil desperandum and all that: the only thing seems to be blithely to go on, as if one thought that someone, somewhere must be listening……
To return to the story so far, therefore, and tell you that what the road of the title actually runs through is our house, my brother Bill’s and mine. Though strictly speaking it isn’t so much a road, as a little public footpath. It was once one of the approach avenues to the local stately home: a great, gaunt Jacobean mansion that stands in splendid isolation on the river bank, about a hundred metres from here. The house looks abandoned now, for all the world as if it were peopled only by unfriendly ghosts – though I’m told by my friendly butcher (he being the one person who has so far addressed more than three words to me) that a very old lady and her daughter still live there. The same old lady, the butcher tells me, around whom some ancient scandal was enacted, years ago in my remote girlhood. It seems an unlikely story. That particular old lady would be about a hundred by now! It would be rather like suddenly discovering that Wallis Simpson was still alive. Or Nell Gwynne, or Queen Victoria. It has excited my curiosity however, and I look forward to learning more. Just as soon as I have met someone other than the butcher, whom I might ask.
I began by explaining that the road isn’t so much a road, as a little footpath. And I ought to explain too, that the house isn’t so much a house, as a pair of tiny gatehouses; each one quite complete and separate in itself, but joined to the other at the top by an ornamental superstructure, that conceals the common attic and bestrides the road. It seemed just the thing for Bill and me; we could hardly believe our luck. We had been looking for something that was divisible down the middle in some way, but had hardly expected to be separated by anything quite so emphatic as a little road. Here, we would be able to lead our perfectly separate, independent lives – yet to meet, had only to pop out of our respective little doors like the man and woman in the Swiss weather clocks…….
We make odd housemates, Bill and I. Everybody says so, and none with a more genuine astonishment than we ourselves. It just happened that we found ourselves washed up on the shores of approaching old age alone, and more or less simultaneously (I widowed, he divorced) - so that the sensible thing seemed to be to pool resources, and look for a house to share. I can see it’s not going to be easy though. Brother and sister we may be, but we have never been close, and our lives could hardly have been more different. I have spent the last decade caring for our elderly parents, and then for my first grandchild - whilst Bill has been racketing about the world, as he puts it, in his capacity as foreign correspondent for one of the television channels. He’s not used to sitting about, and certainly not in cottages. He has been accustomed to live his life out of suitcases, always ready at a moment’s notice to fly out of what he calls the danger of the domestic front, into the comparative safety of a war zone. He says that’s why his marriage failed, and his children no longer seem to want to speak to him…..
He’s home from hospital now, settled to some extent in his side of the cottage – though finding all sorts of fault with my arrangements. He has his doubts about the cottage’s perfect capacity to contain him, for a start. He’s a big man, inclined to lounge; he says his legs have a way of coming up against solid objects, no matter in which direction he tries to extend them. His head is in constant contact with the ceilings, besides – I hear his bellowed imprecations, and wonder how long it will be before he learns to duck. He’s rather morose just now for Bill, in fact; I’m told it’s a part of the recovery process. He goes out each day for longish walks of course, but only with his dog. His old Monty has seen it all, he says - is a regular old dog-at-arms himself, and the only possible companion. (I ought to explain at this point that Bill’s imagery always tends to have something of the battlefield about it. It’s only to be expected, I suppose, from one of his experience. Though it can be just a little un-nerving; and I do wonder how well it will go down in so obviously peaceable a district? Or indeed in blogland?).
All these things will settle down in time, I expect. Bill will find some way of extending his legs, and defending his head – and some person just congenial enough, it’s to be hoped, with whom to drink his daily pint in one of the local pubs. And I - well, sooner or later I must begin to meet people, and make friends. Everything will turn out to have been all for the best in the end, I’m sure. It will have to, since what with stamp duty and everything else, there’s not the smallest possibility of our moving yet again…
Saturday, 17 March 2007
I Beatrice
All the people and events in this blog are fictitious. The places are real, but even they are likely to be re-named, or moved about a bit
Saturday 17 March 2007
To Blog or not to Blog
I'm not one of life's natural bloggers, that's the first thing to say. What I am is a woman of sixty-something, perfectly quiet and unremarkable, the sort you’d see in the supermarket any weekday afternoon with my re-useable shopping bags and my loyalty card. Sixty-something besides, as everyone who reads the gossip columns or scours the fashion pages will know, is not a fashionable age for a woman to be just now. Not unless she happens to be very famous, or very beautiful, or very rich, that is. Or better still, all three of those things rolled into one - Joan Collins, say, or Elizabeth Taylor. Each of whom is in fact not sixty, but seventy-something! Which makes her even more astonishing to the ordinary woman in the supermarket of course - though it does set the kind of precedent she couldn’t possibly try to follow, herself. To be perpetually beautiful and eternally young. Only think of the vast responsibility of it! The constant daily vigilance it must entail, for a start, just to keep the show on the road. I have to admit to being very thankful, on the whole, that I enjoy the kind of obscurity which exempts me from all that kind of thing.
All of which is to stray from my point somewhat. But then I tell myself that perhaps that will turn out to be the beauty of blogging? That one will be able to stray and stray, and somebody, somewhere, will probably still be out there listening! It’s an enchanting notion. It does remind me though, that I began by explaining that I’m not one of life’s natural bloggers. Which must raise the question, why then am I blogging? It’s a good question, and one to which I’m not sure I know the answer. It could be because there were no emails for me this morning. Nor any yesterday, or the day before that. It induced a kind of panic. I was driven to looking in my spam folder for consolation, and even that was empty.
It could on the other hand be because we have just moved to an unknown part of London, my brother Bill and I. It’s a very lovely part, filled with trees, and towpaths, and unexpected little back lanes leading nowhere very much. There’s a village pond, willow-edged, with a pair of resident swans nesting; there are cottages, and mansions, and extensive areas of wild common land. It’s Pooh Bear territory, if ever I saw it – it should be perfect. Only trouble is, there were no emails for me this morning, as I said… and Bill is hidden away somewhere in his side of the cottage, recovering from recent bypass surgery. And the fact is, a place can be as lovely as you will and still feel rather bleak, if there’s nobody out there who so much as knows your name.
To blog or not to blog though, that was my question. I think that on the whole I’ll probably blog. This is the day of the blogger after all, isn’t it? A glorious golden age in which anyone, anywhere, can say almost anything at all to anyone. One can’t help wondering what Dickens would have made of such a freedom? Or Trollope, or Virginia Woolf, or Shakespeare? The fact that they achieved their marvellous works in the absence of electronic aids, or so staggering an open forum, is evidence most of all of course, of their vastly superior communicative powers. But just the same, one can’t help wondering to what still greater heights they might have soared, had they keyboard and mouse to hand?
All of which having been said…. could this first small tentative step of mine into unpredictable places be said to amount to a blog? And if it does, shall I ‘post’? And if I do, shall I suffer consternation as a consequence in the morning? There’s only one way to find out of course, and that’s by posting. So with my heart in my mouth, or on my sleeve, or on whatever other part of my clothing or my anatomy it happens to be at this precise moment in time, I post….
(I only hope I’ve managed to get the procedure right!)
Saturday 17 March 2007
To Blog or not to Blog
I'm not one of life's natural bloggers, that's the first thing to say. What I am is a woman of sixty-something, perfectly quiet and unremarkable, the sort you’d see in the supermarket any weekday afternoon with my re-useable shopping bags and my loyalty card. Sixty-something besides, as everyone who reads the gossip columns or scours the fashion pages will know, is not a fashionable age for a woman to be just now. Not unless she happens to be very famous, or very beautiful, or very rich, that is. Or better still, all three of those things rolled into one - Joan Collins, say, or Elizabeth Taylor. Each of whom is in fact not sixty, but seventy-something! Which makes her even more astonishing to the ordinary woman in the supermarket of course - though it does set the kind of precedent she couldn’t possibly try to follow, herself. To be perpetually beautiful and eternally young. Only think of the vast responsibility of it! The constant daily vigilance it must entail, for a start, just to keep the show on the road. I have to admit to being very thankful, on the whole, that I enjoy the kind of obscurity which exempts me from all that kind of thing.
All of which is to stray from my point somewhat. But then I tell myself that perhaps that will turn out to be the beauty of blogging? That one will be able to stray and stray, and somebody, somewhere, will probably still be out there listening! It’s an enchanting notion. It does remind me though, that I began by explaining that I’m not one of life’s natural bloggers. Which must raise the question, why then am I blogging? It’s a good question, and one to which I’m not sure I know the answer. It could be because there were no emails for me this morning. Nor any yesterday, or the day before that. It induced a kind of panic. I was driven to looking in my spam folder for consolation, and even that was empty.
It could on the other hand be because we have just moved to an unknown part of London, my brother Bill and I. It’s a very lovely part, filled with trees, and towpaths, and unexpected little back lanes leading nowhere very much. There’s a village pond, willow-edged, with a pair of resident swans nesting; there are cottages, and mansions, and extensive areas of wild common land. It’s Pooh Bear territory, if ever I saw it – it should be perfect. Only trouble is, there were no emails for me this morning, as I said… and Bill is hidden away somewhere in his side of the cottage, recovering from recent bypass surgery. And the fact is, a place can be as lovely as you will and still feel rather bleak, if there’s nobody out there who so much as knows your name.
To blog or not to blog though, that was my question. I think that on the whole I’ll probably blog. This is the day of the blogger after all, isn’t it? A glorious golden age in which anyone, anywhere, can say almost anything at all to anyone. One can’t help wondering what Dickens would have made of such a freedom? Or Trollope, or Virginia Woolf, or Shakespeare? The fact that they achieved their marvellous works in the absence of electronic aids, or so staggering an open forum, is evidence most of all of course, of their vastly superior communicative powers. But just the same, one can’t help wondering to what still greater heights they might have soared, had they keyboard and mouse to hand?
All of which having been said…. could this first small tentative step of mine into unpredictable places be said to amount to a blog? And if it does, shall I ‘post’? And if I do, shall I suffer consternation as a consequence in the morning? There’s only one way to find out of course, and that’s by posting. So with my heart in my mouth, or on my sleeve, or on whatever other part of my clothing or my anatomy it happens to be at this precise moment in time, I post….
(I only hope I’ve managed to get the procedure right!)
Thursday, 1 March 2007
List of Characters
Macauley’s House: Résumé and List of Characters
The Place: A rather picturesque small area between the Thames and Richmond Park, in the county of Surrey, England.
The Time: The present moment
The Characters in order of appearance
1 Macauley's house itself
2 Beatrice and Bill
3 Lady Macauley and her daughter Belle Macauley
4 Miss Frances Fanshawe
5 Mrs Rose Mountjoy
6 Mrs Baines and Roland
7 Mr David Porteous and his daughters, Imogen and Amy
8 Cousin Hortense
9 Jack Macauley the younger, and his wife Alice
10 Will Macauley, their son
11 Angelica Wilmot, and her mother Mrs Avril Wilmot
Macauley's House itself
I had always planned to call this story Macauley’s House - until I began to wonder if perhaps I oughtn’t to be calling it Marrying Mr Porteous instead? It’s true that events have lately moved in such a way as to make the latter perhaps the apter choice. But I shall suspend final judgement for the moment, leaving it to further developments ( if not to readers’ helpful suggestions), to decide which way the entitling hammer should finally fall.
I include the house in my list of characters. I put it first indeed, and give it the longest entry, because of the all-pervasive effect it’s intended to have on everything else. The model for it is an existing 17th century house, currently owned and administered by the National Trust. It is not the most beautiful, or appealing of historic houses – it is a rather bleak, dark, ghost-ridden one, if the truth be known. But it’s the one that I know most intimately, and over a period of forty years or so of visiting there, has come to occupy a special position in my heart. I had often wondered what its life might have been had it remained in private hands, instead of passing to the National Trust; and the story is my attempt to make up a little history for it . The house came first, therefore, and is a major player. All I had to do after that was dream-up Jack Macauley and his Theodora; and half a dozen others to circulate around them – and I was more or less away.
That old love affair haunts the story still. As does the old house, which was its outward expression. A number of people covet the house, but only one, or at the most two, can have it - and their jostling for possession makes up a good deal of the fun of the thing (and oh, I do so hope there will be fun!).
Here is the way I described the advent of the Macauleys:
……. It (the house) had a dynastic name at one time. It was Something’s or Somebody or Other’s House or Hall – a connection, the older villagers would tell you, with the district, or with the family who had owned it almost without interruption since its construction in the time of King James the First. But something happened to it just after the second world war which changed all that. The old family fell on hard times and were obliged to sell. The whole place, house and gardens and avenues and stables and gatehouses; the portraits by Lely and Van Dyck and the tapestries woven in France or at Mortlake; the armchairs which seemed to have been constructed for giants (though the people themselves were said to have been smaller in those days), and the four-poster beds hung with shrieking yellow or funereal purple which had been prepared for kings and queens who were always expected and hoped-for, but who never quite managed to come and stay........... all these things, and the cabinet of priceless miniatures to boot, went under the hammer at auction one day, and were snapped up in the first half hour for an almost legendary sum by a man named Jack Macauley, a retail and manufacturing millionaire from the North, who wanted it for his mistress….”
So it began, in about 1947…. But the story proper doesn’t begin until many years later, in March 2007; at which point Sir Jack Macauley has been dead for twenty five years, and the house has just been re-inhabited after a long absence abroad, by his widow Theodora (now an old lady of 84, and known as Lady Macauley), and her middle-aged daughter Isabella, known as Belle…
The house has fallen into neglect again, by this time. Jack Macauley’s splendid restoration work has languished; the ghosts have come out again (for those who can see them); and Lady Macauley and Belle cling on in rather uneasy occupation of just one small section of it.
2 Beatrice and Bill
Beatrice is a widow of sixty, and the narrator of events as they happen – which is to say in seemingly random sequence (making a brief résumé pretty well impossible!). Bill is her brother, who is a year older, and divorced. They had moved to the village a month earlier, to live together, yet separately, in a pair of twin gatehouses that stand on either side of a little public footpath. Each gatehouse is quite compact and inhabitable in itself, but is joined to the other at the top by a large ornamental superstructure that conceals the common attic and straddles the little road….
The footpath was once one of the three approach avenues to the Macauley house, and the house itself still stands in splendid isolation at the end of it - so that Beatrice and Bill feel they live to a certain extent in its shadow. From having arrived knowing no-one, they have gradually built up a circle of acquaintances, and are now fairly closely involved in village society. (well, Beatrice is, anyway: Bill stands somewhat aloof at this stage.)
Beatrice has been nothing in particular in life (nothing, that is, save wife, mother, widow and carer for aging parents!). But Bill is rather famous: having been until only very recently a foreign correspondent with one of the major broadcasting companies. People feel they know him, from having seen him stand tall against turbulent backgrounds on the television, shouting his reports from war zones. Bill is a big man, who has a way of filling any space he enters. He has a big heart, and a vast guffaw of a laugh. But he also has a sharply ironic spirit – which often disconcerts. He has recently suffered open heart surgery, but is recovered now. He strides about the towpath and the common with his old dog Monty – and his major preoccupations in life are: a) to avoid what he calls the ‘dowager element’ of the village; and b) not under any circumstances to be drawn in conversation about Iraq!
3 Lady Macauley (Theodora) and her daughter Belle (Isabella)
Presently the sole inhabitants of the old Macauley House - apart from an elderly couple who keep house for them, and have an apartment on the second floor. Lady Macauley was once a celebrated beauty, and the subject of a very public scandal associated with the very much older (and married) Sir Jack Macauley, whom she married anyway, and adored for life. Now 85, and long widowed, she is beautiful still - rather in the way that the Mitford sisters were, in old age. She is vain, imperious, spoilt; entertaining when she chooses - and suffers neither fools nor bores. She is also very exclusive in the matter of whom she elects to know and whom she most emphatically does not. Which causes considerable envy and heart-ache in local bosoms. She has lately taken a fancy to Bill, and is intent upon drawing him into her circle. (Fortunately, he finds her rather entertaining, too.)
Belle is 59; much put-upon, and virtually the unpaid servant of her mother. She inherited very little of her mother’s legendary beauty, but in looks, resembles her father instead. And since Jack Macauley was a big, rangy Yorkshireman…. what people called rugged, rather than handsome – which was an excellent thing in a rich and powerful man of course, but rather less effective in a young girl or a woman ….. Belle’s role in life, as the rather plain daughter of an exquisite mother, has not been an easy one. She likes to walk her dogs, and work in the garden when she can – and it is her constant fear that Mummy will produce some eminently eligible man, and try to marry her off to him … She is especially nervous of the idea of Mr Porteous – but so far (mercifully), he hasn’t drifted into her mother’s circle.
4 Miss Frances Fanshawe
‘Poor little Frances’, is the phrase most commonly heard in connection with Miss Fanshawe. Which is rather surprising, given that she owns the largest house in the village after the Macauley House, and commands the sort of income that most people can only dream about. She is however the quintessential unworldly English maiden lady, and the more or less helpless victim of any predator who chooses to come and call. She has led a strange, secluded, motherless, solitary life, in a large house that contained more books than anything else. It is Bill’s account of her, perhaps, which can best be used to sum her up. Bill has developed a ‘tender regard’ for her, and describes her thus: .”She grew up as a lonely child in a big house filled with books; in the care of a father whose mind was on higher things than little girls (he was some kind of ecclesiastical scholar), and a grandmother whose mind was on higher things too; only in her case they were stern, external things, like duty, and decorum, and having an eye at all times upon maintaining one’s position in society. So that a day-dreaming little girl had never quite been able to measure up to either. Ignored among the books - between the scholastic father and the severe and worldly grandmother - the little girl Frances had somehow managed to tumble up….
Frances is at present involved in a relationship with Mr Porteous, which she hopes will lead to a betrothal, at least. She has always longed to have a lover, but her former lovers were always drawn from books. Now, she has a real one at last - but since it is Mr Porteous, the future seems shrouded in uncertainty at best.
5 Mrs Rose Mountjoy
Two things best sum-up the widow of Curtis Mountjoy of the Foreign Office, who had the misfortune to die only months before he was due to receive his knighthood. The first is that she has had three husbands to date – and the second that she is the chosen intimate of the Macauleys. The friendship dates back to Rose’s schooldays, when as pretty, feisty little Rosemary Betts from the council house on the other side of the road from the Macauley house ….. she had the good fortune (or the acumen) to be in a position to rescue the larger, plainer Belle Macauley from bullies in the school playground. From there it was but a short step to being invited to tea at the big house, and becoming adopted, in the shortest possible space of time, as Sir Jack Macauley’s ‘pretty little Rosie’, and general family pet.
The friendship has survived to the present day – though you wouldn’t always know it, from hearing what Rose sometimes has to say about Lady Macauley. Rose was at one time in love with the younger Jack Macauley, but the little love affair was nipped sharply in the bud by his mother – since Rose could be family favourite, and Sir Jack Macauley’s ‘pretty, feisty little Rosie’ as much as she would – but when it came to marrying the son and heir, she just wasn’t the right sort.
Rose is a small, trim, thoroughly well-dressed and well-made-up woman, who totters a little, on heels too high; and who lives in a little green house on the High street, with a green gate in the garden wall at the back that gives her direct access to the Macauley gardens and house. Macauley associations aside, she likes to think of herself as occupying a position of some social pre-eminence in the village – and is always very ready with her views on any subject. She hasn’t yet made direct acquaintance with Mr Porteous - though her house is only three doors from his, and she knows everything there is to know about him. She takes a rather dim view of his present association with ‘poor little Frances Fanshawe’, and is not inclined at present to introduce him to Lady Macauley.
6 Mrs Baines and Roland
Mrs Baines’s name is Pamela, and she is a large and stately lady who lives with her husband Roland in a pretty cottage overlooking the willow-fringed pond on the common. From here, she was accustomed to direct the social affairs of the village until, with the return of the Macauleys, and then of Mrs Mountjoy, she had the unhappiness of seeing her position a good deal eroded. She has never quite managed to penetrate Lady Macauley’s exclusive inner circle, though she lives in hopes of one day doing so.
Roland Baines is a small man, with hair neatly brushed, and seldom seen without jacket and tie. His wife, in conversation, attributes all the wisdom of the world to him – but those who have met him will attest to the fact that he seldom opens his mouth in public at all (least of all in presence of his wife); and that on those rare occasions when he does, it is never to say one profoundly dreary thing, when three would serve him better.
Mrs Baines was the first to extend the hand of welcome to Mr Porteous. She quite took him in, and he was her ‘dear David’ for at least a fortnight. She has been much perturbed lately however, by his taking up with Frances Fanshawe. She thinks it shows a want of proper decorum on the part of a newly-retired clergyman. And so does Roland.
7 David Porteous and his daughters
Came a clergyman, smooth as velvet…. That is the consensus view of David Porteous, newly retired, and long-since divorced clergyman of the Church of England. Little is known of the former Mrs Porteous –though it is rumoured that she didn’t care for the role of clergyman’s wife, and ran off to Australia with a man who looked like a Surfer, but in fact owns vast quantities of land in Queensland. Mr Porteous is said to have born his loss with dignity, and to have lived a celibate life; until, having unexpectedly inherited a house in the village from his aunt, he was released to take early retirement, and to devote his life to writing – in particular to his book ‘comparing the three great Abrahamic faiths’, which he trusts will make its contribution to restoring peace to a troubled world.
Mr Porteous is always described as being quite the most urbane and charming of ex-priests and men. Or was, at least, until he took up with Frances Fanshawe. Now, people are not quite so sure about the best way to describe him….
Imogen, his elder daughter is 28; dark-eyed, spirited, and inclined to be confrontational in her relations with her father; while her 25-year-old sister Amy, by contrast, is fair-haired, sweet-natured and very much more compliant. Both girls have lately taken degrees, Imogen in various branches of Art from one of the London art schools, and Amy in English, from Bristol. They are at present renting a third-floor flat above a shop in London's Baker St, and hope to take out a lease on the shop too, and open it as an art and handicrafts shop. Their father dislikes this idea intensely.
At the moment of compiling this list, there are several characters who have not yet appeared in the story. Their profiles will be updated as soon as they appear.
The Place: A rather picturesque small area between the Thames and Richmond Park, in the county of Surrey, England.
The Time: The present moment
The Characters in order of appearance
1 Macauley's house itself
2 Beatrice and Bill
3 Lady Macauley and her daughter Belle Macauley
4 Miss Frances Fanshawe
5 Mrs Rose Mountjoy
6 Mrs Baines and Roland
7 Mr David Porteous and his daughters, Imogen and Amy
8 Cousin Hortense
9 Jack Macauley the younger, and his wife Alice
10 Will Macauley, their son
11 Angelica Wilmot, and her mother Mrs Avril Wilmot
Macauley's House itself
I had always planned to call this story Macauley’s House - until I began to wonder if perhaps I oughtn’t to be calling it Marrying Mr Porteous instead? It’s true that events have lately moved in such a way as to make the latter perhaps the apter choice. But I shall suspend final judgement for the moment, leaving it to further developments ( if not to readers’ helpful suggestions), to decide which way the entitling hammer should finally fall.
I include the house in my list of characters. I put it first indeed, and give it the longest entry, because of the all-pervasive effect it’s intended to have on everything else. The model for it is an existing 17th century house, currently owned and administered by the National Trust. It is not the most beautiful, or appealing of historic houses – it is a rather bleak, dark, ghost-ridden one, if the truth be known. But it’s the one that I know most intimately, and over a period of forty years or so of visiting there, has come to occupy a special position in my heart. I had often wondered what its life might have been had it remained in private hands, instead of passing to the National Trust; and the story is my attempt to make up a little history for it . The house came first, therefore, and is a major player. All I had to do after that was dream-up Jack Macauley and his Theodora; and half a dozen others to circulate around them – and I was more or less away.
That old love affair haunts the story still. As does the old house, which was its outward expression. A number of people covet the house, but only one, or at the most two, can have it - and their jostling for possession makes up a good deal of the fun of the thing (and oh, I do so hope there will be fun!).
Here is the way I described the advent of the Macauleys:
……. It (the house) had a dynastic name at one time. It was Something’s or Somebody or Other’s House or Hall – a connection, the older villagers would tell you, with the district, or with the family who had owned it almost without interruption since its construction in the time of King James the First. But something happened to it just after the second world war which changed all that. The old family fell on hard times and were obliged to sell. The whole place, house and gardens and avenues and stables and gatehouses; the portraits by Lely and Van Dyck and the tapestries woven in France or at Mortlake; the armchairs which seemed to have been constructed for giants (though the people themselves were said to have been smaller in those days), and the four-poster beds hung with shrieking yellow or funereal purple which had been prepared for kings and queens who were always expected and hoped-for, but who never quite managed to come and stay........... all these things, and the cabinet of priceless miniatures to boot, went under the hammer at auction one day, and were snapped up in the first half hour for an almost legendary sum by a man named Jack Macauley, a retail and manufacturing millionaire from the North, who wanted it for his mistress….”
So it began, in about 1947…. But the story proper doesn’t begin until many years later, in March 2007; at which point Sir Jack Macauley has been dead for twenty five years, and the house has just been re-inhabited after a long absence abroad, by his widow Theodora (now an old lady of 84, and known as Lady Macauley), and her middle-aged daughter Isabella, known as Belle…
The house has fallen into neglect again, by this time. Jack Macauley’s splendid restoration work has languished; the ghosts have come out again (for those who can see them); and Lady Macauley and Belle cling on in rather uneasy occupation of just one small section of it.
2 Beatrice and Bill
Beatrice is a widow of sixty, and the narrator of events as they happen – which is to say in seemingly random sequence (making a brief résumé pretty well impossible!). Bill is her brother, who is a year older, and divorced. They had moved to the village a month earlier, to live together, yet separately, in a pair of twin gatehouses that stand on either side of a little public footpath. Each gatehouse is quite compact and inhabitable in itself, but is joined to the other at the top by a large ornamental superstructure that conceals the common attic and straddles the little road….
The footpath was once one of the three approach avenues to the Macauley house, and the house itself still stands in splendid isolation at the end of it - so that Beatrice and Bill feel they live to a certain extent in its shadow. From having arrived knowing no-one, they have gradually built up a circle of acquaintances, and are now fairly closely involved in village society. (well, Beatrice is, anyway: Bill stands somewhat aloof at this stage.)
Beatrice has been nothing in particular in life (nothing, that is, save wife, mother, widow and carer for aging parents!). But Bill is rather famous: having been until only very recently a foreign correspondent with one of the major broadcasting companies. People feel they know him, from having seen him stand tall against turbulent backgrounds on the television, shouting his reports from war zones. Bill is a big man, who has a way of filling any space he enters. He has a big heart, and a vast guffaw of a laugh. But he also has a sharply ironic spirit – which often disconcerts. He has recently suffered open heart surgery, but is recovered now. He strides about the towpath and the common with his old dog Monty – and his major preoccupations in life are: a) to avoid what he calls the ‘dowager element’ of the village; and b) not under any circumstances to be drawn in conversation about Iraq!
3 Lady Macauley (Theodora) and her daughter Belle (Isabella)
Presently the sole inhabitants of the old Macauley House - apart from an elderly couple who keep house for them, and have an apartment on the second floor. Lady Macauley was once a celebrated beauty, and the subject of a very public scandal associated with the very much older (and married) Sir Jack Macauley, whom she married anyway, and adored for life. Now 85, and long widowed, she is beautiful still - rather in the way that the Mitford sisters were, in old age. She is vain, imperious, spoilt; entertaining when she chooses - and suffers neither fools nor bores. She is also very exclusive in the matter of whom she elects to know and whom she most emphatically does not. Which causes considerable envy and heart-ache in local bosoms. She has lately taken a fancy to Bill, and is intent upon drawing him into her circle. (Fortunately, he finds her rather entertaining, too.)
Belle is 59; much put-upon, and virtually the unpaid servant of her mother. She inherited very little of her mother’s legendary beauty, but in looks, resembles her father instead. And since Jack Macauley was a big, rangy Yorkshireman…. what people called rugged, rather than handsome – which was an excellent thing in a rich and powerful man of course, but rather less effective in a young girl or a woman ….. Belle’s role in life, as the rather plain daughter of an exquisite mother, has not been an easy one. She likes to walk her dogs, and work in the garden when she can – and it is her constant fear that Mummy will produce some eminently eligible man, and try to marry her off to him … She is especially nervous of the idea of Mr Porteous – but so far (mercifully), he hasn’t drifted into her mother’s circle.
4 Miss Frances Fanshawe
‘Poor little Frances’, is the phrase most commonly heard in connection with Miss Fanshawe. Which is rather surprising, given that she owns the largest house in the village after the Macauley House, and commands the sort of income that most people can only dream about. She is however the quintessential unworldly English maiden lady, and the more or less helpless victim of any predator who chooses to come and call. She has led a strange, secluded, motherless, solitary life, in a large house that contained more books than anything else. It is Bill’s account of her, perhaps, which can best be used to sum her up. Bill has developed a ‘tender regard’ for her, and describes her thus: .”She grew up as a lonely child in a big house filled with books; in the care of a father whose mind was on higher things than little girls (he was some kind of ecclesiastical scholar), and a grandmother whose mind was on higher things too; only in her case they were stern, external things, like duty, and decorum, and having an eye at all times upon maintaining one’s position in society. So that a day-dreaming little girl had never quite been able to measure up to either. Ignored among the books - between the scholastic father and the severe and worldly grandmother - the little girl Frances had somehow managed to tumble up….
Frances is at present involved in a relationship with Mr Porteous, which she hopes will lead to a betrothal, at least. She has always longed to have a lover, but her former lovers were always drawn from books. Now, she has a real one at last - but since it is Mr Porteous, the future seems shrouded in uncertainty at best.
5 Mrs Rose Mountjoy
Two things best sum-up the widow of Curtis Mountjoy of the Foreign Office, who had the misfortune to die only months before he was due to receive his knighthood. The first is that she has had three husbands to date – and the second that she is the chosen intimate of the Macauleys. The friendship dates back to Rose’s schooldays, when as pretty, feisty little Rosemary Betts from the council house on the other side of the road from the Macauley house ….. she had the good fortune (or the acumen) to be in a position to rescue the larger, plainer Belle Macauley from bullies in the school playground. From there it was but a short step to being invited to tea at the big house, and becoming adopted, in the shortest possible space of time, as Sir Jack Macauley’s ‘pretty little Rosie’, and general family pet.
The friendship has survived to the present day – though you wouldn’t always know it, from hearing what Rose sometimes has to say about Lady Macauley. Rose was at one time in love with the younger Jack Macauley, but the little love affair was nipped sharply in the bud by his mother – since Rose could be family favourite, and Sir Jack Macauley’s ‘pretty, feisty little Rosie’ as much as she would – but when it came to marrying the son and heir, she just wasn’t the right sort.
Rose is a small, trim, thoroughly well-dressed and well-made-up woman, who totters a little, on heels too high; and who lives in a little green house on the High street, with a green gate in the garden wall at the back that gives her direct access to the Macauley gardens and house. Macauley associations aside, she likes to think of herself as occupying a position of some social pre-eminence in the village – and is always very ready with her views on any subject. She hasn’t yet made direct acquaintance with Mr Porteous - though her house is only three doors from his, and she knows everything there is to know about him. She takes a rather dim view of his present association with ‘poor little Frances Fanshawe’, and is not inclined at present to introduce him to Lady Macauley.
6 Mrs Baines and Roland
Mrs Baines’s name is Pamela, and she is a large and stately lady who lives with her husband Roland in a pretty cottage overlooking the willow-fringed pond on the common. From here, she was accustomed to direct the social affairs of the village until, with the return of the Macauleys, and then of Mrs Mountjoy, she had the unhappiness of seeing her position a good deal eroded. She has never quite managed to penetrate Lady Macauley’s exclusive inner circle, though she lives in hopes of one day doing so.
Roland Baines is a small man, with hair neatly brushed, and seldom seen without jacket and tie. His wife, in conversation, attributes all the wisdom of the world to him – but those who have met him will attest to the fact that he seldom opens his mouth in public at all (least of all in presence of his wife); and that on those rare occasions when he does, it is never to say one profoundly dreary thing, when three would serve him better.
Mrs Baines was the first to extend the hand of welcome to Mr Porteous. She quite took him in, and he was her ‘dear David’ for at least a fortnight. She has been much perturbed lately however, by his taking up with Frances Fanshawe. She thinks it shows a want of proper decorum on the part of a newly-retired clergyman. And so does Roland.
7 David Porteous and his daughters
Came a clergyman, smooth as velvet…. That is the consensus view of David Porteous, newly retired, and long-since divorced clergyman of the Church of England. Little is known of the former Mrs Porteous –though it is rumoured that she didn’t care for the role of clergyman’s wife, and ran off to Australia with a man who looked like a Surfer, but in fact owns vast quantities of land in Queensland. Mr Porteous is said to have born his loss with dignity, and to have lived a celibate life; until, having unexpectedly inherited a house in the village from his aunt, he was released to take early retirement, and to devote his life to writing – in particular to his book ‘comparing the three great Abrahamic faiths’, which he trusts will make its contribution to restoring peace to a troubled world.
Mr Porteous is always described as being quite the most urbane and charming of ex-priests and men. Or was, at least, until he took up with Frances Fanshawe. Now, people are not quite so sure about the best way to describe him….
Imogen, his elder daughter is 28; dark-eyed, spirited, and inclined to be confrontational in her relations with her father; while her 25-year-old sister Amy, by contrast, is fair-haired, sweet-natured and very much more compliant. Both girls have lately taken degrees, Imogen in various branches of Art from one of the London art schools, and Amy in English, from Bristol. They are at present renting a third-floor flat above a shop in London's Baker St, and hope to take out a lease on the shop too, and open it as an art and handicrafts shop. Their father dislikes this idea intensely.
At the moment of compiling this list, there are several characters who have not yet appeared in the story. Their profiles will be updated as soon as they appear.
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