Distant Thunder

This strangest and most disappointing of summers drags on. After two days of sunshine the rain has returned; the sky is leaden again, and I heard distant thunder this morning as I sat at the window of the attic, looking out over David Porteous’s gazebo, and Bill’s sodden vegetable garden. I miss Bill badly – and not only because I haven’t the smallest idea of what to do with his vegetables, which have the appearance now of small green islets adrift in a sea of mud. He appears to have forgotten about them, and though the lecture tour is drawing to its end, has no ideas of returning home immediately. He thinks of staying on in Sydney for a week or two, he tells me; and then of ‘going across to Adelaide’, where he has friends whom he has been promising to visit for years.

I don’t know why I should be surprised to hear that Bill has friends in Adelaide, or that they should be entreating him to come and stay. He has friends everywhere; most of them unknown to me, and many of them, it seems, women with whom he has at one time had relationships, and who have never quite gone away. Therein lies the secret of Bill’s success with women, it often seems to me – that he has loved a great many of them, but never for long, and never quite enough; yet that none of those he’s tried to love has held his eventual defection against him, or been willing, when it has happened, quite to relinquish him. So that no matter where he happens to be in the world at any given moment, there will always be some woman eager to take him in, or take him back.

It’s a system that has worked well for him for many years, but I believe it has made him lazy; and I further believe that if he means to try to apply it now to Belle Macauley, it will fail, and he will end by losing the only woman with whom he might have found a true and lasting happiness. I have no real grounds of course, for believing any of these things; I have only the strongest possible instinct that they are so. And if I had wanted reinforcement of that belief, I’d have found it almost daily since Bill’s departure, in the nature and content of the conversations I have had with him every evening on the telephone.

I am growing impatient with him however, and fear that last night I was deliberately obtuse. He had wanted as usual to know what was ‘going on’ – and what ‘that man’ seemed likely to be going to do next. And whilst I knew of course that he referred to David Porteous, and that somewhere implicit in his question was another one that pertained to Belle.... I nevertheless declined to take his point. I only told him rather sharply that I had not the least idea of what ’that man’ might be intending to do; only that he seemed to be playing some very deep game that was presently beyond my powers of wit or deduction to interpret – and that if Bill himself wanted to know what was going on here, he really ought to get on a plane and come home, instead of amusing himself at some poor woman’s expense in Adelaide!

Bill though, had only a laugh for it. “Oh well” he said; “If he’s playing some deep game, he’ll play it better with only women looking on. Far be it from me to come crashing in to spoil the fun.”

He wanted to know how Belle was holding out, for all that. And when I asked him “holding out against what, precisely?, refused to specify; saying only that he had an idea Belle was always made uncomfortable by close proximity with her mother’s protégés, and especially perhaps with those who had recently been separated from other women. Again though, I refused to help him out. I asked him instead if there were actually anything in the world he was prepared to stand up and fight for; and he told me, laughing again, that he couldn’t think what I was getting at, but that he’d fight for the right to lead a quiet life at any rate; particularly when it came to long-distance telephone calls ... At which point there was a tremendous clap of thunder directly overhead here, and the line cut out on us. Leaving me with the suspicion that David Porteous was probably not the only one playing some deep game – but that for the life of me, I couldn’t fathom quite what Bill’s might turn out to be.

Dogs will sometimes unearth things that have remained buried to humans however, and I had reason to remind myself of this when I returned this afternoon from a long, wet walk on the common with Belle. Walking Monty has been one of my regular duties in Bill’s absence, and I have been struck by the number of dog-walking women who have come up to me to inquire after Bill himself. Rose has always said to me that she thought Bill must have a regular little coterie out there among the female dog-walkers, and it seems she was right; though what she evidently hasn’t quite picked up on, and what has come as a considerable surprise, even to me, is that Monty himself seems to know who his real friends are – and that each day, when the walk is over, he has attached himself to Belle’s Labrador, Polly, and taken himself resolutely off, not in the direction of the gatehouse, but in that of the Macauley house, where with one long bound he has descended to the basement, and after a long gulp of water from a bowl that is evidently his own, has promptly settled down to sleep in a basket before the kitchen stove.

“Monty is evidently very much at home here” I observed to Belle today; and was intrigued, though not altogether surprised, to see that she coloured a little before explaining, all in a rush, that yes, it had become a part of the little ritual of the daily walk, that Monty should head home with Polly, and that Bill must, almost as a matter of course, follow in his footsteps and then stay on to have a cup of tea with her in the kitchen. That this was suggestive of a degree of intimacy between Bill and her that I hadn’t as yet divined for myself, was clear – and I’d have done my best to follow it up with a carefully worded question or two; had not Rose at that moment come clattering down the basement stairs, with an urgent request from Lady Macauley that we should immediately forsake the dogs, and come up to the drawing room to help her with the entertainment of Mr Porteous and his daughters.

“You must come at once.” she said. “They have been here an hour already; the conversation has taken every kind of unexpected turn, and your mother has been growing very impatient for your return.”

Just so of course, are the most opportune moments for enlightenment in human affairs often arbitrarily snatched away; and though I had sensed that Belle was on the point of confiding something rather important to me, I was obliged to give it up, and follow her instead to the drawing room, where sat Lady Macauley in splendid state, with a Porteous girl on either side of her, and their father gazing thoughtfully out of the window at the rain.

“Oh, there you are at last!” Lady Macauley exclaimed. “Looking very much the worse for the rain of course, but no matter....though I think you might have removed your boots! We have been talking about the tapestries, which Imogen and Amy are going to be brave enough to try to repair for us. And now we are to go and have a look at the old chapel, to see what David thinks he might be able to do about that troublesome priest, whom some say lingers there...”

Not wiser, but sadder

It is characteristic of Frances that, having decided she is unable to find happiness with David Porteous herself, she should be anxious to do or say nothing that might spoil his chances of finding his own elsewhere. She can even find it in her heart to be glad that he has been taken up by Lady Macauley, whom she believes capable of doing a great deal more for him than she could herself. I confess that this is not the reaction I had hoped to see in her. I had hoped to see her rail against him a little. If she had come right out and told me that he was a cold-hearted egotist who had been interested only in spending her money and enjoying the comforts of her house, I’d have been well pleased. But this alas, is not her way, and she will say only that in the end nothing she could give him was quite enough.

“I was too old for him you see” she confided yesterday. “Oh, I don’t mean that I’m older than he is – in years of course, we are precisely the same. But the difference is that he had this chance to become young again – to shine, and grow great, and somehow live out all the dreams of his youth, that life had seemed to have taken away from him, probably forever. I had thought that I could give him that. I thought we could grow young again together, and that I could be of help to him in the realisation of his dream. But I see now that I was never young, not really - not in the sense that other girls were young. I was never given the chance to be, and now it’s too late to try. I have no greatness of soul either, you see. I could give him every kind of material comfort, but I couldn’t inspire him.... Nor could I even give him the kind of physical joy he craved. It seemed at first we could be happy together as lovers at least - but I watched him every day grow more disappointed in me, so that after a while he could scarcely bring himself to touch me, or even look at me any more, and I had to let him go...”

This was so very far from her initial glad shedding of the shoes that pinched, that I had to restrain myself from shouting aloud that she had been used and abused – that she had put all her faith in an unworthy cause, and that if anyone had let anyone down here, it was David Porteous, and not she herself! I have never wished so much that Bill was there to help me out, and I asked myself what Bill might have said to her to try to breach the gap between her generous intentions and her hopelessly exploited good faith. I’m not sure however that even Bill would have known how to show her the extent to which she has been, and remains mistaken; and I was obliged to leave her with her disappointment directed inwards, as always, upon herself - and her bright dream of the potential greatness of David Porteous more or less intact.

If there was any comfort to be derived anywhere in all this, I could find it only in the fact that she has not abandoned quite every one of her own dreams, but means at least to go ahead with the restoration plans that she and David had drawn up for the manor house. The scaffolding was going up even as I sat with her yesterday, and I believe she will find sufficient interest in the immediate future, just in watching the transformation as it unfolds. First, the roof is to be repaired; and then there are to be several additional bathrooms installed; a new bedroom suite for herself, which was to have involved a dressing room and study for David, though she seems to have relinquished that, and tells me that she will have the luxury of a walk-in wardrobe instead; and a complete modernisation of the kitchen.

The original plan had also been to create an extension of the existing conservatory to make a garden studio for Frances herself. It had been her idea that she would develop her interest in painting, so as to have something of her own to occupy her while David was busy in the library with his great book. And although I have no more faith in the idea of the book than I ever had – believing as I do that he is one of those who talks about his writing a great deal more than he ever actually sits down to accomplish it – I do hope that Frances will go ahead with the studio idea. I believe she will enjoy having a studio of her own, and that she will perhaps be able to create some kind of a little future life for herself around it.

I left her yesterday quite happily involved with settling in her little team of builders; who have arrived only lately from Poland, whose tenuous grasp of English will no doubt tax her ingenuity in the weeks to come, but who are to be provided with every possible convenience while they work, and whom I saw yesterday enjoying their first cups of tea in the spacious recreation room that she has provided for them in one of the larger out-buildings.

For the moment then, I think she will be all right. And I shall find some interest myself, it has to be said, in watching to see how David Porteous comports himself as the spurned and disappointed lover. I daresay he will find some entirely new and original way of demonstrating the part - though he seems to have been very quiet about it to date. Rose talked of his going constantly to the Macauley house, but I believe she has been exaggerating wildly as is her wont; and that as a matter of fact he has been lying rather low in his own house, with only his daughters for company. The girls have given up the idea of the shop in Baker Street, apparently: the lease was too high, or the likely profit margin too slim, something of that general sort – and they are presently staying with their father while they look about for something else to do. Frances takes a great interest in them, and tells me they are very talented; especially Imogen, whose painting shows much promise, and whose quick little line drawings of people she encounters on the street are worthy of publication in a book of caricatures.

I believe that Frances will be perfectly capable of making her new studio freely available to the Porteous girls in the future; it would not surprise me in the least to hear that she had made their artistic development a new and ardent cause. Nothing much can come of that at the present moment however - and in the meantime, though I bear the girls themselves no personal ill-will, I do hope most sincerely that their father is experiencing every kind of inconvenience and difficulty in being obliged to share his house with them.

PART TWO

The Pattern Changes

A great deal can change in the course of just two weeks. I had been feeling quietly pleased with the results of my little party; it seemed to me I had achieved most of the things I set out to achieve – and one or two that I hadn’t, into the bargain. Lady Macauley had been brought in contact with David Porteous after all - and the heavens hadn’t exactly fallen as a consequence! Not even for Belle, it appears. Though Bill warns me not to be complacent in that respect: he evidently still sees cause for concern, and his final words to me before departing last Thursday for a two-week lecture tour of Australia and New Zealand, were “Don’t over-water my tomatoes. Expect surprises from Frances - and keep an eye on Belle!”

I think I know what he meant. The reference to Frances is rather cryptic, of course; and one never knows precisely what he’s getting at when it comes to Belle. But even so, I take his points, and shall maintain a certain vigilance on his behalf where Belle is concerned. Rose tells me though, that so far from feeling threatened by the new association, Belle has begun to talk of the invigorating effect it’s already having upon her mother, who has taken to planning little teas, and lunches, and suppers in the gallery; all with the idea of having David Porteous and his daughters come to them, and quite as if she were fifty again, instead of eighty plus.

For Belle herself – well, the heavens haven't fallen for her either, apparently. She is glad of course, that the presence of Frances, as fiancee, will act as a curb upon her mother's wilder match-making flights; but she now sees that the association with Mr Porteous is probably not going to turn out to be quite the personal ordeal by fire that she had anticipated. I don’t know if Bill would find reassurance in this; but I think that on the whole I’d best say nothing to him about it for the present, when I email.

Then too, there’s Pamela, who has been gathered into the Macauley fold in the most unexpected, yet seemingly natural way. Rose tells me she is still basking in the pleasant afterglow of the encounter; that her conversations are embellished these days with little references to ‘Lady and Miss Macauley’, and that she scatters intimations wherever she goes that Roland is likely at any moment to be summoned to the Macauley house, for a meeting with Lady Macauley’s solicitor in the matter of her financial arrangements. This is the social high ground indeed, for Pamela; and I believe Rose when she says that she goes about the village these days with her head held high, and her shopping basket almost at the angle of jauntiness.

Rose told me all these things from the position of her favourite stool in my kitchen this morning. She arrived at ten o’clock, having come, she said, for a good, long mulling-over of events. There was much to talk about, didn’t I think? Especially since she had it on good authority that David Porteous had lately moved out of the manor house, and back into his own; and that so far as she had been able to gather, Frances had not gone with him. This was disturbing news to me, but I did my best not to seem startled by it. I merely asked Rose what her authority was, and was not greatly reassured when she told me it was the best there was - which was to say the evidence of her own eyes. Anyone going from the manor house to old Miss Porteous’s must pass her own, she pointed out; and she had lately seen David Porteous take that route on several occasions, carrying suitcases, and bags of books - and notably unaccompanied by Frances.

“Oh well, it could be anything of course.” I rather vaguely replied. “It’s only lately after all that Mr Jessop has finished re-furbishing his house – David might simply have been returning some of the things he no longer needed at the manor house ...”

As explanations went it fell very short, I knew; and Rose was quick to capitalise on its inherent flaws. “In the first place” she retorted; “one would have expected him to be moving things out of, not into his own house, if it was his intention to remain permanently at the manor house with Frances. And in the second - well, how do you account for the fact that he is evidently spending his nights, as well as his days, in his own house? I have seen him coming in and out repeatedly – and I can tell you that if he goes anywhere in the afternoons, it is to the Macauley house, and not to that which contains his erstwhile beloved!”

I was unable to account for any of these things, and I disliked intensely the idea that Rose was probably going about the district spreading rumours of this sort. Her facial expression is one of scarcely contained glee – I won’t go quite so far as to call it malice – when she relates such stories. There is nothing she likes better than a good, half-founded conspiracy theory – and though one’s every instinct is to discount them if one can, the unhappy truth is that Rose’s conspiracy theories, like those of the tabloid newspapers, generally turn out to contain a degree of truth.

She had a good deal more to tell me. I was conscious that she had begun to talk about the Porteous daughters, and the fact that Frances seemed to have developed an almost motherly fondness for them... But I found that I wasn’t listening to her any longer; I wanted her to leave, so that I might go at once to visit Frances, and discover the truth of the situation for myself. She did depart, finally; and I waited only long enough to see her disappear around the corner of the common, before making a quick check of my appearance, and hurrying off in the direction of the manor house; taking my way by the back lanes, lest I should encounter Rose again on the high street.

That there would be surprises for me there I fully anticipated; but what I hadn’t, couldn’t possibly have anticipated, was that it would be Mrs Meade who came out to wrestle with the pair of tall black gates to let me in. I was taken very much off guard by her re-appearance there, and hardly knew what to say to her, except to murmur that it was ‘very nice’ to see her back again. She gave me a look which said she would take that as she saw fit - which was with a heavy dollop of scepticism. And there was that about her demeanour, her very gait, as she led me across the courtyard and into the house, that told me more clearly than words could have done, that she believed herself to have been ill-used indeed; but that she was re-instated now, so that I, and all Miss Fanshawe’s other so-called friends, had better try to make the best of it we could.

Frances was sitting in the shaded conservatory before her easel, and the first thing I noticed about her was that she was dressed as she had used to be in the early days of our friendship, in paint-stained smock and crumpled trousers. She wore no make-up, and her hair was dishevelled; but the smile with which she greeted me was unstrained, and I took comfort - I can hardly say why – from the fact that on her feet were the old, familiar, curiously boat-like shoes.

“I can see from your face that Rose has been to see you, and that you must have heard my news” she very quietly said. “I had hoped to tell you myself, but more or less expected that Rose would have got in first. It’s perfectly true anyway – I have released David from his engagement, and he has returned to his own house for good. Please don’t try to say anything dear – there’s really nothing very much to say ....... It was Bill you know, who gave me courage to do it in the end. I had confided in him and he said “Do the thing that makes you comfortable”. And I knew that the only thing that would make me comfortable again would be to have my house, and my old life back.... So here I am, right down to the old shoes – I can’t tell you how the new ones pinched! And the wonderful thing is, that when once I’d stopped crying about it, I began to smile – and have hardly been able to stop smiling since!”

It may have been a bravura performance on Frances’s part, but somehow I didn’t think so. Nor did I seek to press her for any more about the separation than she seemed disposed, at this stage, to tell me. I spent another hour with her, during which time I learnt that one of the first acts of her freedom had been to send for Mrs Meade. Not as a gesture of defiance, as she put it; but more in the spirit in which she had taken to wearing her old shoes again - simply because they didn’t pinch!

I’m sure I shall hear more as the days and weeks go by; but for the moment it is enough to know that she has made the break, and will be able to live with it. I immediately sent a text to Bill saying “Frances has done it and is OK". To which he texted back "Excellent! Now have an eye for Belle."

Progress of the party

“Oh good lord, just look at Mummy now!” cried Belle Macauley, as she and Frances and I carried our trays out into the garden on the afternoon of my tea-party last week. “First she gate-crashed your party, and now she seems to have appropriated it –and is behaving just as if she thought it were her own!”

It was true that in the fifteen minutes or so during which we had been busy in the kitchen, Lady Macauley had succeeded not only in acquainting herself with most of my guests, but also in collecting what had all the appearance of a little coterie around her, at the table in the gazebo. David Porteous was there, and so were his daughters. Amy, the pretty fair-haired younger one was seated beside her on the right, listening, and smiling, and doing her best to seem at ease; while her sister Imogen, dark-eyed and sharply glancing, sat looking distinctly uncomfortable on her left. Imogen at least seemed unmoved by anything that Lady Macauley was saying to her; and there was that about her expression which seemed to say she would exert herself, conversationally, for no old woman, not even the very grandest or most presumptuous; and that she had almost certainly been dragged there by her father entirely against her will.

Imogen’s skirt was very short and her legs, by contrast, very long. So that none of the men present knew quite what to do with their eyes. I noticed Bill’s eyes, and those of the Brigadier, being drawn, and riveted a moment, before they collected themselves, and sharply looked away. Even poor Roland was affected – though a severe sideways glance from Pamela soon pulled him up, and restored his gaze to a more proper contemplation of a clump of trees in the middle distance. Imogen herself seemed oblivious of the attention she was receiving. Or if she saw it, which I thought likely, chose to disregard it; doubtless telling herself there were better ways to spend an afternoon than sitting about in somebody’s garden being ogled by a group of rather dreadful old men.

Rose was in the gazebo too; sitting somewhat behind the others, and looking a little stiff, I thought, as if she believed her rightful place had on this occasion been usurped. She was doing her best to engage the attention of David Porteous; but I could see it was a losing battle, for he was leaning back in his seat with his customary meditative look, and evidently had eyes and ears, and the occasional small, carefully measured smile, only for Lady Macauley and his daughters. Most of my other guests, among whom were Pamela and Roland, stood about in little groups just outside the gazebo, chatting among themselves as apparently nonchalantly as they could, but glancing inwards all the while, as if they hoped at any moment to receive the call to climb the steps and join the inner circle.

Lady Macauley looked up at our approach, and called blithely to us. “I think I’m going to like your Mr Porteous after all!” she cried. “He has all the priestly virtues and none of the drawbacks so far as I can see. Only think of it – we have been together full ten minutes, and he hasn’t raised the question of my immortal soul once!”

Belle winced, and her sigh of resignation was long and deep. “What can you do with her?” she softly wailed. “The fact is, I gave up trying long ago – and can only hope you’ll excuse her impertinence on the grounds of her extreme old age. Though the truth is she has been impertinent all her life, and age has really nothing whatever to do with it!”

Neither Frances nor I knew quite how to respond to this, and were glad to be spared the effort of attempting it, by the arrival in our midst of David Porteous, and Bill, and Bill’s brigadier, who had come to insist upon relieving us of our trays. The trays disposed, and tea laid out, a little flurry of introductions followed. David brought Frances forward to be presented to Lady Macauley, who looked hard at her a moment, before extending a languid hand and murmuring something vague which seemed to contain a reference to her engagement, and her grandmother... This caused a momentary awkwardness: producing on Frances’s part a deep blush, and on Belle’s, another sharp intake of breath. For as each of them knew only too well, there had existed between the Macauleys and Frances’s grandmother, a fierce mutual animosity that had soured relations from the first moment, and had never been resolved.

Lady Macauley chose to ignore old feuds today however; though it was clear that Frances herself held very little interest for her, and she had turned, the next moment, to call Belle over to be introduced to David Porteous. This was the moment Belle had dreaded, of course. I felt for her acutely, and had just time, before moving on to welcome and talk to other guests, to witness her response to it. I had wondered how she would fare beneath that particular considered scrutiny, and I hoped her nerve would hold. I believe it did; though I could not help but see how taken aback she was, by the unexpectedly powerful physical presence of the man. I believe that the momentary touch of his hand produced little shocks in her, just as it had once done in me - and that it had suddenly become of vital importance to her that she should not stumble in his presence, or say anything which he might consider dull, or foolish.

It is the lot of the hostess though, to be able to involve herself only peripherally in her own party. I was obliged to leave the group in the gazebo at that point, to move about among my other guests. Tea must be served, and everyone made as welcome, and as much at their ease as it was in my power to do. Bill helped where he could – especially with Pamela, for whose sake, in a sense, the party had been convened; and with whom he in fact took the kind of trouble that I knew he couldn’t possibly be enjoying. I saw him engaged in long and earnest conversation with Roland, for example – for which act of heroic self-denial I vowed to repay him with especial acts of sisterly kindness in the future.

I was able to return now and then to the gazebo, where Lady Macauley continued to hold court with David Porteous and his daughters. I was glad to see that Frances was now of the group, and that David leant towards her confidingly enough at regular intervals, evidently doing his best to keep her involved in what was mostly Lady Macauley’s conversation. I caught only disjointed snatches of that conversation myself; though was able to observe that Lady Macauley was taking a good deal of trouble with Imogen Porteous, and that the girl herself was perceptibly, if still somewhat reluctantly, unbending. They appeared at one point to be talking about the excitement of living at what Lady Macauley had called ‘the throbbing centre of that great heart, the capital’...

“It must be very thrilling” I heard Lady Macauley say to the girl. “ I can quite see how for a young girl there could be no other life that could match it. Rose is a great one for the capital, you know. She goes up to Covent Garden to the opera constantly – I’m always trying to get my own poor Belle to go with her. The opera is so uplifting, don’t you think? One always comes away from it somehow feeling like Carmen or Violetta....”

Imogen Porteous seemed uncertain of how she ought to respond to this. Her look seemed to say that she had never felt especially like Carmen or Violetta herself – though she murmured something to the effect that she was sure it was very uplifting, but that she seldom found the time herself – much less the hundred pounds – that one seemed to require for going to hear it. It was not much, but it was a beginning,it seemed to me. The girl had not been altogether ungracious in her reply, and I could see that for Lady Macauley at least, there was something here which she thought it would probably amuse her to try to cultivate.

Pamela remained my primary pre-occupation though. I had resolved to grant her an audience with Lady Macauley if I could – the only difficulty lay in finding a way to achieve it without appearing too eager, or too obvious. Bill it was in fact, who finally had the inspiration that was to bring it off. He told me later that it had suddenly come to him that there must be some recompense for having listened for half an hour to Roland Baines drone on about the inequity of the country’s taxation policy, and all the little ruses he’d devised for getting round it... And then it had come to him. Only put them together, he’d thought: Lady M with her obsession about being robbed, posthumously, by the taxman - and Roland Baines with all his dry-as-dust little formulae for avoiding it!

The miracle was, it worked. It involved a kind of gate-crashing of the gazebo on Bill’s part of course. But then Bill has gate-crashed more perilous places than a gazebo in an English garden. And in any case there is nothing in the world that Bill can do that will not bring the light of amusement to Lady Macauley’s eyes. She suffered the curious intrusion of Bill with a Baines on either arm more or less without turning a hair. She did raise a quizzical eyebrow for a moment; but she nonetheless sat perfectly still and listened for a full ten minutes; and it was clear that, dull as he was, she found every word of Roland’s very much to her purpose. She ended almost by enveloping the astonished man in a lavender-scented embrace.

“What an impossibly clever creature you are to have thought-up all that!” she cried. “You have probably saved me more thousands than you can ever imagine, and I and my descendents will have cause to sing your praises forever!”

I doubt that Roland Baines has been the recipient of such extravagant praise from such a source in his life before; and I doubt still more that he will ever receive anything of the kind again. He positively beamed in the glow of it though, and so did Pamela. And if my little party achieved nothing else, it achieved this: that Pamela now has a perfect bi-line for any luncheon party she ever attends. “Dear Lady Macauley!“ she will be in a position to say with perfect impunity wherever she goes; “Such a friend of mine you know – especially since Roland saved her such a deal of money on the question of her inheritance tax...”

So far as Mr Porteous and his daughters are concerned – well, I believe they have already received their first invitation to go to tea at the Macauley house. Whether Imogen will consent to go or not, I can’t be sure - and I confess I’m even less sure about how all this will affect Belle's equanimity, or Frances's engagement. But on the whole I think I can claim that my little party achieved most of its desired ends. And after all, one can’t expect to have got absolutely everything right at just one attempt, can one?


I have amended the text to show that Part One now ends with this instalment rather than with the other, earlier one. Part Two will therefore begin with the next instalment.

Lady Macauley meets Mr Porteous

When Lady Macauley met David Porteous for the first time in my garden one day last week, Bill said it was as if the earth had lurched a moment on its axis, then collecting itself, made a grinding sound and started turning again. I said I thought this far-fetched, even for him; and he admitted that he might have exaggerated a bit. But all the same, he insisted that it had been an arresting moment; during which the assembled company, if not perhaps the earth itself, had held its breath to see which way this particular pair was going to jump.

That Lady Macauley had jumped first, I was not surprised to learn. Nor that she had put out her hand and with a smile that withheld more than it conferred, said “So you are the famous Mr Porteous? I had been wondering what you would look like, and now I see that reports have not been exaggerated. I hope you will come and visit me one day, and tell me what a man does who has given up the Cloth to go adventuring, and abandoned his dog collar for a silk tie.”

I found it difficult to credit that even Lady Macauley could have gone so far as that in the first moments of a meeting. But Bill assured me that it was so – give or take an embellishment or two of his own for the sake of dramatic effect. “The gist of what she said was just as I give it to you. She took the wind right out of his sails for a minute – though I admit that some of the imagery is probably invented, and probably my own. She stood her ground at any rate, and he stood his. I don’t remember precisely what it was he said in reply. Only that he gave her his most effective grey-eyed look, and somehow managed to convey the impression that she might like or dislike him as she would; it was all the same to him, since her approval was not absolutely essential to his happiness.”

I received the distinct impression that Bill had felt a grudging admiration for David Porteous at the moment he described. He would never admit to it of course: he would insist that his personal dislike of the man remained unaltered. But there is something in Bill which delights above all in the irony of a thing - and it was clear to me there had been a moment of exquisite pleasure for him, in seeing Lady Macauley being taken on so effectively at her own game. “What’s obvious is that they will be friends of sorts” he ended by telling me. “It will be something of a battlefield of course - and poor Belle will doubtless be caught in the crossfire. That aspect of it saddens me immeasurably. But all the same, as spectator sports go, it promises to keep us entertained for weeks to come.”

I was glad he'd had the grace at least to think of Belle’s likely discomfort. It proved he was not entirely without heart or scruple, I told him. I only wondered if he had also thought to ask himself how all this was going to affect poor Frances – and am glad to be able to report that at this reminder, his gaiety received a visible check. That Frances must also be rendered uncomfortable by the association was clear even to him. But then everything about this engagement of hers was uncomfortable to Frances, he said; and the only thing we could do was continue to stand by her, and try to see her though whatever events should follow.

All this took place on the one fine afternoon we had last week. It had rained incessantly; we have so far had the most miserable summer. And now the ugly spectre of terrorism has raised its head again, in the form of explosive devices left in cars in London and Glasgow.... Happily, the devices were discovered before harm was done; and in any case it is not of them I mean to write today (or any day) ... The potential bombs were there, but horrible as they were, can hardly be allowed to intrude on the story. All that need concern us here is that on the one afternoon last week upon which I had invited a small group of friends to tea in the garden, the rain was merciful. It ceased for an hour or two, the sun came out and we were able to gather in the garden in the vicinity of what I persist in regarding as ‘David Porteous’s gazebo’.

That this group included Frances, and therefore Mr Porteous, had somehow seemed to dictate that it could not also include Lady Macauley and Belle. It was unfortunate, but inescapable; Belle having herself on several occasions expressed her misgivings about Mr Porteous’s likely impact on her mother, and the awful repercussions it would almost certainly have for her. No amount of his being engaged to someone else would deter her mother, Belle feared, if she should take it into her head that he would be an amusing new acquaintance – or worse, a suitable man for Belle to try to captivate! Belle had been down this road before, many times; and could only entreat us, heart in mouth, to try to keep them apart as long as possible.

It hadn't seemed a great deal to ask. Besides which, neither Bill nor I had reason to wish to promote David Porteous’s cause in the village – though we were at pains not to seem to demote it either of course, for Frances’s sake. My little party had been got together largely in Pamela’s interests, if the truth be known. I had been conscious for some time that she was feeling rather side-lined these days, by the closeness of Bill’s and my new association with the Macauleys. I disliked the idea that factions had grown up in the village; and that to consent to belong to one group, seemed necessarily to preclude one’s also belonging to any other. I had wanted Pamela to see that my friendship with Belle Macauley and her mother in no way interfered with that longer-standing one I had with her; and so I had invited her and Roland to tea in the garden, along with three other couples; among whom, of course, were Frances and David Porteous.

David’s daughters had happened to be staying at the manor house at the time, so Frances had phoned ahead to ask if she might bring them too; and so it was a group of a dozen persons that was gathered in the garden at the moment when the Macauley Daimler pulled up in the road outside. It seemed to hover there a moment; during which Lady Macauley herself peered out, and was seen to enter into some sort of heated discussion with Belle, who was driving. After which the car swung round abruptly, and proceeded to reverse slowly into our little forecourt.

I was in the kitchen with Frances preparing tea at the time, so was able to view proceedings only through the window, and from a distance of something like twenty five yards. But I saw Lady Macauley climb out of the car and make her way without assistance – with considerable speed and agility indeed – through the front gate and all the way along the length of the garden to the spot, right at the bottom, where the little group of my guests was assembled. What happened at the moment of her finally reaching the group was obscured for me by Bill’s pergola, now in splendid full bloom of roses and jasmine. And in any case, Belle herself had suddenly appeared in the kitchen in a state of acute mortification. She was overcome with embarrassment, poor woman; so that I was obliged to turn away from the garden, and give all my attention to her.

"Mummy has done it again!" she cried. ”She has gate-crashed your party, and I hardly know what to say in excuse of her! She would have me pull up outside, just to see if anything was ‘going on’, as she put it.... And then she saw the people gathered, and heard laughter and talk, and that was it. She said she was sure you wouldn’t mind if we came in to join your party – and was halfway up the path before I’d even had a chance to stop the engine! I’ve never seen her gallop off at such speed – it shows she can do it when she wishes! But Rose has followed her in - and will head her off and bring her back, if you’d really much rather we shouldn’t stay...”

In the face of such sincere embarrassment, what could I say, what do – except of course insist that nothing would give me greater pleasure than that they should all stay and join the party? Which in a sense was true. I had a sort of fatalistic feeling about it now, and had come to think that this was a meeting that was bound to have happened sooner or later anyway. I introduced Frances; adding, rather awkwardly I thought, that they were probably acquainted with one another very well by sight, yet had perhaps never quite met... And then I asked Belle if she would mind carrying one of the trays we had prepared, and come down with us to the gazebo to join the other guests....


Alas though, the word count has already exceeded my allotted fifteen hundred! There is no Google ruling that I know of, to limit the number of words one may post – but I am nervous of exhausting the patience of possible readers, and so I pause here; hoping to return tomorrow or thereabouts, to finish relating this really rather pivotal part of the story....

Getting to know Belle Macauley

We have a new Prime Minister. Gordon Brown takes over from Tony Blair today, and Lady Macauley for one is lost in contemplation of the awful possibilities of the transition.

“She can’t help thinking there has been something vaguely unconstitutional about it” Belle told us when she called at the gatehouse this morning. “She wonders at the smoothness of the change, and fears that the British people have been duped into believing they had a hand in it somewhere.”

Bill threw back his head with joy at hearing this. He thanks God for the presence of a Lady Macauley, who can express the misgivings that a deluded nation hasn’t yet quite managed to work out or articulate for itself - and he hopes that she has also expressed them in a letter to The Times! Belle doubts she has gone so far as that: her mother’s misgivings are largely reserved for her own ears alone. Though Rose, who had taken up position as Mummy’s confidante when she left them earlier this morning, was doubtless receiving the benefit of them even as we spoke.

“Mummy doesn’t believe Mr Brown can possibly be even an eighth as good as he says he is” Belle further confided. “She wants to know where he got all his new smiles from, for a start. He was a glowering sort of fellow before – she can’t see how any good can come to the British people from so remarkable a transformation. She has been glued to the television for days – politics has never held so much fascination for her. She thought she was going to miss the presence of the Blairs as a perpetual irritant, but now she sees that Mr Brown is probably going to fulfil that function even more rewardingly. She does just wonder how the Queen will like him however – she thinks he will make a rather uncomfortable kind of house-guest at Balmoral. Still, she supposes that we are all going to be called upon to make sacrifices in the interests of the greater good – and of course, so far as the Queen is concerned, his simply being Scottish will be thought a considerable advantage.”

Bill and I have been surprised lately at the quiet pleasure there is to be had in a developing friendship with Belle Macauley. She had seemed just a little standoffish at first; reserved at least, and not inclined to wish attention drawn to herself. But the more one knows her, the more clearly does one see just how much she has had to suffer all her life from being compared unfavourably with her mother. She put it in words for us herself one day last week, at Flory.

“It is one of the laws of nature” she said; “that Mummy should try and I should fail.” She laughed as she said it; she had been telling us about all the efforts her mother had made over the years to marry her off – and how woeful a showing she had made in that respect, every time. She said that her failure was most marked when viewed in juxtaposition with the success that Rose had achieved on the marital front. “Mummy is somewhat in awe of it you know” she confided. “It constitutes quite the major part of her affection for Rose. She doesn’t see how any woman could be dull who has managed to secure so many husbands – and she never fails of course, to make the melancholy link, by comparing it with my failure to have secured even one!”

I could see what Bill thought of this; and almost feared that he would be unable to restrain himself from giving vent to his own sentiments with respect to Rose. But in this I did him an injustice. He was very quiet about it in fact; saying nothing whatever that was detrimental either to Rose, or to Lady Macauley herself. He knew, as I did, that Belle felt no pity for herself; and that to have commiserated with her to any extent would have been somehow to have compromised both her sympathy, and her continuing friendship. We both liked her for it the more. And I confess that the thought did run through my head that there would be something very pleasant about a liaison between these two people whom I liked so much, Belle Macauley and my brother Bill.

“You could do a lot worse you know, than to fall in love with Belle Macauley!” I ventured to suggest to him in private later. To which he replied - not in wrath as I had expected, but thoughtfully; and with a hint of regretfulness - that to go down that particular road would be to court the most intense, and well-merited opprobrium. There was a taboo associated with such matters, he said; and the lady with the big house was strictly off limits for the impecunious adventurer. He added that there was room in the district for only one man of that sort – and he sure as hell was not about to become a second David Porteous! I saw his point of course, and said nothing further on the subject. And I was relieved, at the later time of our conversation with Belle, when she went on very quickly to drop the subject of herself, and take up that of her cousin Hortense instead.

“Mummy did her a great injustice you know!” she told us. “When she spoke like that about her disappointed love affairs and her cats, that is. It’s true that none of her love affairs has so far brought her very much happiness – though the big old house she presently inhabits was in fact a parting gift from one of her lovers. An old man whom I believe she truly loved for what she saw as his poet’s soul - but who had the misfortune to breath his last, just before the marriage ceremony had been performed. Hortense suffered deeply from that, I know. And has done her very best to transform his rather dismal house into a shrine to his memory. She has formed a kind of artistic commune down there - something of a reconstituted Arts and Crafts Movement, I believe."

"I haven’t been able to visit it myself as yet, but I’d very much like to do so at some point... There are poets, and painters, and potters – there’s the young man who struggles against hideous adversity to produce the Proustian novel; and the sculptor performing unacknowledged wonders with discarded polystyrene. Each of them has somehow failed to achieve the kind of recognition he deserves - and Hortense has dedicated herself and her house to the promotion of their causes. It seems to me a thoroughly worthy, if possibly unrealistic endeavour... And though it’s true of course that Hortense is very fond of cats - well, Mummy exaggerated wildly there too; and I believe she has six or so at most, not twenty!”

All in all, Belle seemed to think that if her cousin Hortense should suggest we go down to Suffolk on a visit, we might actually find some pleasure in the experience. She even thought she might be able to arrange matters with her mother so that she could accompany us. And it was clear to me that, the awkwardness of Hortense’s almost daily emailed avowals of passion for him notwithstanding, Bill did not reject this proposal out of hand. He has encountered impassioned artistic ladies before, he says – and has learnt that their demands seldom progress beyond the purely poetic.

Cousin Hortense

It’s more than a week since I wrote anything here, and suddenly it seems as if events have overtaken me, and I shall be unable to remember and record everything that has happened lately. We have been living here for six months now, Bill and I; and it’s difficult to recall how long the empty days seemed at first, and how I wondered whether I should ever make the acquaintance of any of the neighbours. Now, I am truly in the thick of everything that’s going on, and my chief difficulty is in remembering who is saying precisely what about whom; to which of the several factions each of my new friends belongs – and where my own affection and loyalties ought to be seen to lie.

My affection for Frances remains undimmed of course. But with her engagement, she has entered regions to which I am unable to go, even in imagination. The idea of the life that she and David must lead together there behind the high walls of the manor house day after day, is one before which I find that contemplation stumbles. I simply cannot envisage their life, and so I have given up trying to make the attempt.

Bill is not so cowardly, and has his own theories about it. “She exists to promote the cause of David Porteous, damn it!” he says. That it’s an ignoble cause is of no consequence, he says; since she believes in it herself. "She’s mistaken, but she believes – oh ardently! And until she sees the error of that belief herself there’s not a thing that any of us can do about it.”

Privately, I think he hopes that sooner or later Frances will have a change of heart, and seek escape – and that when that moment comes, he will be called upon to storm the citadel himself, and bring her out. I believe he would welcome such a contingency; I would go further, and suggest that he probably has battle plans already drawn up, and that they will have something at least of a commando raid about them. Though I could be hopelessly mistaken myself about that aspect of it, of course... Bill has always said I have a tendency towards the fantastic.

Bill has other ladies than Frances on his mind at present, as a matter of fact. Something occurred during our stay with the Macauleys in Suffolk that has altered the perspective of our lives somewhat – though Bill says it’s a mere will-o’-the-wisp of an event, and that I’m over-dramatising it, as is my wont. Whether this is true or not, future developments will doubtless show. But I have decided to relate it for you here just as it occurred. As a light little diversionary story perhaps, that will help dispel the present gloom over the affair of David Porteous and Frances.

You will perhaps recall the rather strange nameless lady who shared my table at Lady Macauley’s luncheon party last month? The one who wore a jewelled bandana on her head, and conversed in sudden short bursts, and unconnected observations? There’s no reason in the world why you should remember her of course; I seem to recall thinking at the time that I was unlikely ever to see her again myself, and should probably never discover precisely who she was, or from whence she’d sprung.

But the fact is that she sprang up again last week while we were in Suffolk with the Macauleys, and has since become a rather extraordinary background presence in our lives. I say ‘our’ lives, but really I mean Bill’s. He seems to have ‘landed’ this strange lady - and will perhaps have some difficulty in extricating himself from her. He has a tendency towards that sort of thing: his life has always to some extent been littered with unattached females of a certain age who form passionate attachments to him. He says it’s another of the occupational hazards of being a foreign correspondent – people identify him with the battles he reports, and make a hero of him on the flimsiest evidence.

This latest conquest of his is called Hortense. Yes, really, that is her name: I haven’t invented it! She was one of the half a dozen or so guests who were sitting around the luncheon table last week, at the moment of our arrival at Barton Flory, Lady Macauley’s childhood home in rural Suffolk. We had arrived late, after an awkward car journey with Rose, who’d insisted on sitting in front with Bill, and kept up an animated conversation all the way.

We slid into the seats that had been kept for us, trying not to cause too much of a disruption to the progress of the lunch; and there, on Bill’s right hand was my lady of the bandana; unadorned on this occasion by any such headdress, but launched, at the moment of our arrival upon a solemn-sounding dissertation on the subject of Virginia Woolf. She looks a little like Virginia, as a matter of fact; she certainly has an air of Bloomsbury about her, and is very fond of Vita Sackville-West too, apparently. Bill put her down at once as a raging lesbian – though later events were to prove him wrong on that score, at least.

“The tall woman with the curiously booming voice is my Cousin Hortense!” Lady Macauley informed us in a theatrical whisper during coffee in the drawing room half an hour later. “Be as kind to her as you can; she’s a poor thing, and has led a rather tragic life. She trails disappointed love affairs in her wake as other women trail stale perfume, and will almost certainly fall in love with Bill. She has a great weakness for big men with hearty laughs; she won’t be able to help herself. And having fallen, she will cling – I give you warning of that in advance!”

She went on to advise Bill to steel himself against any advances from Cousin Hortense; who had, as she put it, “ nothing in the world to offer him save her wounded heart and a more or less derelict mansion a hundred miles from anywhere ....” His best resource if Hortense should pounce, she said, would be to let her know he’s allergic to cats. “Tell her you simply loathe the creatures, and her heart will be implacably closed to yours -for she has twenty of them in that great barn she calls a house, and they are at present the solitary passions of her life.”

Bill laughed heartily about it at the time, telling Lady Macauley she was a thoroughly immoral woman, to be talking about her cousin in such terms. But I think he has good reason to remember it more soberly now; since everything that Lady Macauley predicted was actually to come to pass. I believe I was myself witness to the precise moment at which Cousin Hortense fell passionately in love with Bill. It was later that evening, and we were all sitting in the drawing room to listen to Belle playing excerpts from Chopin and Mozart with a surprisingly expert hand.

It was Lady Macauley’s idea that she should switch to ballads and light operetta, and that we should all gather round to sing – and it was while Bill was delivering a fairly spirited rendition of O Sole Mio, that Cousin Hortense was suddenly overcome with emotion. She uttered a soft sort of swooning sound, somehow audible above the music; then, throwing up both arms in a thrilling gesture, cried “Bravo, oh bravo and bravo again!”, and visibly gave up her heart to him.

All this happened over a week ago, and it’s true that Cousin Hortense hasn’t yet forsaken her cats so far as to get on a train and come to visit us. She has taken to e-mailing Bill however – she has a fondness for e-mails, apparently, and has developed quite a rococo electronic style. Bill says it’s harmless enough, so long as it goes no further – but I notice he’s giving rather more thought than hitherto, to that invitation he’s had from the British Council, to deliver a series of lectures in Australia and the Far East.