A little learning, they say, is a dangerous thing – but too much, I discover, is considerably worse. I’m feeling very uncomfortable about knowing things concerning Rose of which nobody else at the Macauley house appears to have the slightest inkling – not even Bill, who generally has a rather good ear for distant rumblings. Rose herself gives no sign of her duplicitous intentions when in company with Lady Macauley. So entirely matter-of-fact and and usual is she indeed, that I begin to wonder if I perhaps – or Pamela – could have dreamt the whole thing up?
It’s perfectly possible of course, or so I tell myself. But then I look across at Rose; I listen to her talking endlessly with Lady Macauley about the days when ‘darling Jack‘ was still here, and still their own (it’s difficult sometimes to know which Jack they mean, but I have taken it that for present purposes at least, it’s Jack the son who most preoccupies them).... and I have to concede that if she has insurrection in mind, she's doing a very good job of concealing the fact. And after all, it's not so hard to put oneself in Rose’s place. Would I not myself, for example, if I had loved desperately and been spurned; would I not, had I nursed a grievance for years and years, then seen at last the perfect opportunity for redress... would not I too, in such circumstances, be capable of plotting acts of sabotage?
Fortunately, it’s not a question I’m absolutely obliged to answer just now. And meantime, the teacups come out as usual every afternoon, and the talk, when it is not of how, and where to accommodate five extra persons at a moment’s notice, turns irresistibly to Jack. Bill is seldom present at these occasions, I notice. Lady Macauley had spoken of tea-time as a ceremony reserved for herself and Belle and Bill alone, but it’s surprising how often Bill seems to have found cause to absent himself from it. He hasn’t said as much, but I somehow hear him mutter that though life is good, and love bears him up no end, there is nonetheless just so much women’s talk a man can stand without breaking out in some particularly violent fashion - and so tea-time usually turns out to be the time at which he must walk the dogs, or work on a speech, or supervise the men who are currently installing an extra bathroom on the second floor, for the convenience of the expected guests.
In Bill’s place as often as not comes David Porteous, who has been continuing with his rearrangement of the books in the library, and whose presence at tea-time Lady Macauley seems to regard as some sort of substitute for Bill’s. I continue to find that presence disconcerting – though without being able to provide any very satisfactory reason why. He is on the face of it the best possible companion for a group of women at tea-time. He follows the ebb and flow of conversation with ease and apparent enjoyment; leaning forward to listen intently where he ought (folding his hands and looking contemplative a good deal, it’s true: his ‘prayerful look’, I seem to remember Pamela calling it, in the days when he still enjoyed her patronage) - but regularly brightening proceedings with timely little interjections of his own. He is especially good at providing punch-lines - biblical ones, for the most part, but none the less pertinent, and often rather pithy, for that.
Only Rose seems impervious to the Porteous effect. I have often puzzled over that. I would somehow have expected her, if not to have succumbed precisely, for Rose is not the woman easily to succumb to anything, and least of all to any man who seemed to have set himself up to charm, or impress her ... if not to have succumbed, then to have given merit where merit was due at least, and pronounced him just about as admirable as everyone said. But Rose will pronounce no such thing; and if called upon to give an opinion of the man, or his daughters (which Lady Macauley frequently makes it imperative for her to do), will only remark that they are “very well so far as they go – but where are they going?”, that’s the question she’s always asking herself.
I have no particular quarrel with that of course – it’s a question I have often wanted to ask myself. But all the same, it has sometimes produced a jarring note - so that I can’t help but wonder if he has at some time said, or done something which she has found offensive? These are not the sorts of questions to which answers can easily be found over the tea-cups in Lady Macauley’s presence however. The talk at such times is directed by the old lady herself, and her attention these days is altogether taken up with the idea of the visit to come, and more importantly, with what Alice is likely to have ‘done’ to her unfortunate Jack.
She fears she will find him sadly changed; she doesn’t see how a man could have lived with a woman of Alice’s sort all these years without collapsing somewhere. "Round the middle most likely" she said today: she thinks he will almost certainly have grown portly, and dull....
“And to think of what he was!” she fell to lamenting in the next breath. “Before Alice got her hands on him, that was...“ She seemed lost a moment in contemplation of the awfulness of the likely metamorphosis; and she turned to Rose, for reiteration of the splendid figure he had cut in his youth.
“He was a kind of magnet, wasn’t he, for everything thrilling?” she reflected. “He seemed to bring the wide world with him whenever he entered a room. Some sort of a light went out the day Jack left for Scotland; something bright and, yes, glamorous, vanished forever......... But there they still are at any rate, Alice and he. They tell me they live in perfect domestic bliss - they write now and then, and telephone; they even e-mail Belle, I believe. Everyone e-mails these days, it’s an act of wizardry I haven’t yet accomplished......... I hardly know what it is founded upon however, their domestic bliss; since Jack gave up all active interest in Macauley affairs the day he married. Still, the money trickles in, I daresay. There are shares, and other assets - I hardly know what there is, I see so little of it myself!"
"I’m told though, that they have so far compromised their ideals as to make something rather commercial of their own, out of the castle and its lands....... They make honey from the heather, I believe. Or the bees do. The bees up there are said to be better than other people’s bees, you see.... They have entered into an arrangement with one of the major supermarkets to buy their honey. They have a very pretty label, with the castle pictured on it, and a sprig of heather in the foreground. They send us a pot each Christmas. Castle Nectar, they call it: Belle eats it I think, I never touch it myself – but it’s hard to see how anyone could be more commercial than that! And then of course they hire out a part of the castle, for weddings and other functions – it must be galling indeed, to Alice, to have to open up her doors and let hoi polloi come tramping in!"
"They’ve also made something commercial out of the fishing and the game, I believe - it seems as if my poor boy has had to become a sort of toytown laird: dressing up in tartan, you know, and putting on a show for the benefit of visiting Americans........It’s not what his father had in mind for him. He was to have carried the Macauley banner into the second generation. And into London - there’s a store in Kensington which languishes for want of someone to take an interest in it, you know - and an up and coming sort of grandson on what we call the ‘other side’ (my husband’s first family, that is), who seems to have it in mind to try to turn its fortunes round. I daresay we’ll have to give it up to him in the end, the poor old shop - unless Will should see fit to step in on our account at last...”
It’s hard to know where this line of reminiscence might have taken us. Lady Macauley appeared to have gone somewhere very far away, and was, I believe, rather close to tears. Belle and I had been smiling, and Rose nodding our affirmation of all these virtues of Jack’s, probably gone forever. David Porteous had got so far as to fold his fingertips, and look as if he were about to say something rather meaningful – when all at once the door to the drawing room opened wide, and Imogen Porteous came in, accompanied by a tall young man whom she said she had found wandering in the forecourt.
“Here is your grandson come to visit you, Lady Macauley” she said, with her brightest smile. “I found him stranded at the front door - he has been ringing and ringing, but nobody heard.”
Lady Macauley uttered a little cry, as if she thought it must be an apparition that had appeared. “Is that you Jack...?” she vaguely murmured. “How little you have altered after all...”
It was the first time any of us had seen her come near to confusion and collapse. It pulled us up short; seeming as it did to portend future shocks, and adjustments which she might perhaps be going to find it impossible to make. But she had collected herself the next moment; had sat up very straight, and smiling wryly, beckoned the young man to come and receive her embrace.
“And after all it’s only Will” she turned to tell us. “Grown uncommonly like his father it’s true - but only Will. And how is it you have left it so long before coming to see your poor old Granny, you bad young man...?”
Friday, 12 October 2007
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Wrongly Dressed in Tuscany - and What Rose has in Mind
Rose has evidently decided to keep her present intentions a secret. From me at least: for the first time ever I have found myself in the position of waiting for a visit from her, and feeling disappointed when it doesn’t come. I had begun to think I must have imagined it, that conspiratorial look she gave me on leaving Lady Macauley the other day. I was playing my usual game perhaps, of ascribing motive, sniffing subterfuge, where none existed. I had read too much into Rose’s uncharacteristic silence on the subject of Jack and Alice Macauley, and was doomed to find that even she has limits when it comes to plotting acts of sweet revenge... But then I met Pamela on the high street yesterday and the truth - or her interpretation of it at least - was unravelled. I had to wait for it though. Nothing ever occurs in quite straightforward sequence, where Pamela is concerned, and she had a good deal else of which to disburden herself first.
“Well, the knives are out now and no mistake!” was however her first dark observation - which gave me grounds to hope that all was about to be revealed. She had hustled me into a high street cafe and ordered tea and buns before I could protest that the afternoon was warm, and I would really very much rather have had an iced drink. She has been wearing a rather wounded air of late, it seems to me; she appears to think that a week of feeling wrongly dressed in Tuscany was probably too heavy a price to have had to pay for basking in the light of Lady Macauley’s favour –never mind about any little personal remuneration Roland might have expected to receive, for acting as her unofficial adviser.
“Of course we haven’t seen a penny yet” she said. “And Roland thinks it’s entirely on the cards we never will. The honour of the association is supposed to be all in such cases, he believes. Lady Macauley has probably convinced herself, besides, that a holiday in Tuscany was recompense enough, and that we would feel it demeaning to be offered money as well. But it doesn’t seem to us that there can be anything demeaning about receiving payment for services honestly rendered – and just between you and me, the Tuscan experience was a very mixed blessing. You had left by the time we arrived of course, so you missed the worst of it (why did you hurry away like that by the way? We have wondered and wondered about that...). But you can’t think what a bizarre lot they were who wound up the hill every evening in their antiquated limousines! Dripping jewels, and with every kind of trumped-up-looking foreign medal on the men – and this despite the fact that we were supposed to be dining al fresco, and quite informally. Roland found it quite a feat of endurance just to sit it all out, and I must say I was inclined to agree with him. So that what with one thing and another dear, I don’t mind telling you it will be a very long time before we accept another invitation to the Macauley villa!”
I had begun to feel by now that Pamela must have entirely forgotten her opening remark about the knives being out, but she finally made the switch effortlessly enough - digressing only once more, and then only momentarily, to tell me how very smoothly David Porteous and his daughters had been able to adapt themselves to Tuscan conditions.
“You had to marvel at it!” She was prepared to concede that much. “He had all those haughty old dames eating out of his hands in five minutes flat. And his girls were scarcely better – or worse, depending on the way you looked at it. But as Roland said, he was glad it was Imogen Porteous, and no daughter of his who snatched the limelight every evening by talking about Leonardo Da Vinci! She was touching up the frescoes in the porch you know. Making a rather undistinguished job of it, I thought - though to hear her talk about the problems of working before the plaster dried, you’d have thought she must have had studied personally under Leonardo herself... .”
I had heard about all this before of course, from Rose. I mentioned the fact, hoping it would act as a trigger; and when it did not, I went further, coming right out and remarking that Rose had evidently been somewhat dismayed at the prospect of seeing Jack Macauley again.
“Dismayed?” Pamela feelingly replied. “Yes, you could say that – and then go on to magnify it a hundred-fold. She’s all in pieces about it, as a matter of fact. She doesn’t see how she is to get through it at all. He is supposed to have been the great love of her life, you know. You must have heard her talk about it – how each of her husbands was measured against Jack Macauley, and not one of them came even near! The old lady was quick to nip that little affair in the bud. Jack was packed off somewhere abroad immediately; in connection with family business, or so it was said - but it gave Alice her chance to step in. There was a kind of poetic justice about that, I always thought – since in disposing of Rose, the old lady got Alice, whom she never could abide. But it was very unpleasant at the time, I gather, and Rose took it hard. She has been taking it hard for years, if you ask me. She has never forgotten it - and only now, with this new girl coming along for Will, does she see her chance to settle old scores.”
I expressed surprise. I was surprised indeed; having been unaware, until then, that all these things had run so very deep with Rose. I only wondered how it was that she planned to put the scheme in motion?
“Oh well, that’s simple enough!” Pamela’s response was heartfelt, though delivered with a rather unpleasant little laugh. “She means to take the girl in hand. Promote her cause you know, in a hundred clandestine little ways. She will advise her about her clothes, and her hair, and her deportment. She might take the mother on, even: she doesn’t think the poor woman can be quite beyond one’s help."
Rose 'knew the form by now', as Pamela went on to explain to me. “She hasn’t deferred and curtseyed all these years after all, without learning a thing or two. She will befriend the pair, conferring upon them all the wisdom of her own hindsight. She’ll tell them which forks to use, when to fall gracefully silent, and when speak out. She means to endow them with all the little airs and graces she only learnt herself, too late - she’ll polish them up, in short, and show them how to marry a Macauley, in Lady Macauley’s teeth!”
There seemed to me very little one could say in response to all this, so I didn’t try. Pamela’s narration had come to its natural end, and she seemed to be experiencing a little moment of triumph of her own. Which made me wonder if she perhaps meant to take advantage of the situation, for settling scores of her own and Roland’s? I didn’t voice this however, and we parted shortly after that; I having contributed nothing more useful to the conversation than the light-hearted observation that I hoped we weren’t about to see real social violence enacted between the walls of the Macauley house. It was lame of me, I knew; it was timid and inadequate. I ought to have had the courage of my convictions, and come down on one side or the other – but for the life of me, right there on the spot, I wasn’t able to decide which one.
“Well, the knives are out now and no mistake!” was however her first dark observation - which gave me grounds to hope that all was about to be revealed. She had hustled me into a high street cafe and ordered tea and buns before I could protest that the afternoon was warm, and I would really very much rather have had an iced drink. She has been wearing a rather wounded air of late, it seems to me; she appears to think that a week of feeling wrongly dressed in Tuscany was probably too heavy a price to have had to pay for basking in the light of Lady Macauley’s favour –never mind about any little personal remuneration Roland might have expected to receive, for acting as her unofficial adviser.
“Of course we haven’t seen a penny yet” she said. “And Roland thinks it’s entirely on the cards we never will. The honour of the association is supposed to be all in such cases, he believes. Lady Macauley has probably convinced herself, besides, that a holiday in Tuscany was recompense enough, and that we would feel it demeaning to be offered money as well. But it doesn’t seem to us that there can be anything demeaning about receiving payment for services honestly rendered – and just between you and me, the Tuscan experience was a very mixed blessing. You had left by the time we arrived of course, so you missed the worst of it (why did you hurry away like that by the way? We have wondered and wondered about that...). But you can’t think what a bizarre lot they were who wound up the hill every evening in their antiquated limousines! Dripping jewels, and with every kind of trumped-up-looking foreign medal on the men – and this despite the fact that we were supposed to be dining al fresco, and quite informally. Roland found it quite a feat of endurance just to sit it all out, and I must say I was inclined to agree with him. So that what with one thing and another dear, I don’t mind telling you it will be a very long time before we accept another invitation to the Macauley villa!”
I had begun to feel by now that Pamela must have entirely forgotten her opening remark about the knives being out, but she finally made the switch effortlessly enough - digressing only once more, and then only momentarily, to tell me how very smoothly David Porteous and his daughters had been able to adapt themselves to Tuscan conditions.
“You had to marvel at it!” She was prepared to concede that much. “He had all those haughty old dames eating out of his hands in five minutes flat. And his girls were scarcely better – or worse, depending on the way you looked at it. But as Roland said, he was glad it was Imogen Porteous, and no daughter of his who snatched the limelight every evening by talking about Leonardo Da Vinci! She was touching up the frescoes in the porch you know. Making a rather undistinguished job of it, I thought - though to hear her talk about the problems of working before the plaster dried, you’d have thought she must have had studied personally under Leonardo herself... .”
I had heard about all this before of course, from Rose. I mentioned the fact, hoping it would act as a trigger; and when it did not, I went further, coming right out and remarking that Rose had evidently been somewhat dismayed at the prospect of seeing Jack Macauley again.
“Dismayed?” Pamela feelingly replied. “Yes, you could say that – and then go on to magnify it a hundred-fold. She’s all in pieces about it, as a matter of fact. She doesn’t see how she is to get through it at all. He is supposed to have been the great love of her life, you know. You must have heard her talk about it – how each of her husbands was measured against Jack Macauley, and not one of them came even near! The old lady was quick to nip that little affair in the bud. Jack was packed off somewhere abroad immediately; in connection with family business, or so it was said - but it gave Alice her chance to step in. There was a kind of poetic justice about that, I always thought – since in disposing of Rose, the old lady got Alice, whom she never could abide. But it was very unpleasant at the time, I gather, and Rose took it hard. She has been taking it hard for years, if you ask me. She has never forgotten it - and only now, with this new girl coming along for Will, does she see her chance to settle old scores.”
I expressed surprise. I was surprised indeed; having been unaware, until then, that all these things had run so very deep with Rose. I only wondered how it was that she planned to put the scheme in motion?
“Oh well, that’s simple enough!” Pamela’s response was heartfelt, though delivered with a rather unpleasant little laugh. “She means to take the girl in hand. Promote her cause you know, in a hundred clandestine little ways. She will advise her about her clothes, and her hair, and her deportment. She might take the mother on, even: she doesn’t think the poor woman can be quite beyond one’s help."
Rose 'knew the form by now', as Pamela went on to explain to me. “She hasn’t deferred and curtseyed all these years after all, without learning a thing or two. She will befriend the pair, conferring upon them all the wisdom of her own hindsight. She’ll tell them which forks to use, when to fall gracefully silent, and when speak out. She means to endow them with all the little airs and graces she only learnt herself, too late - she’ll polish them up, in short, and show them how to marry a Macauley, in Lady Macauley’s teeth!”
There seemed to me very little one could say in response to all this, so I didn’t try. Pamela’s narration had come to its natural end, and she seemed to be experiencing a little moment of triumph of her own. Which made me wonder if she perhaps meant to take advantage of the situation, for settling scores of her own and Roland’s? I didn’t voice this however, and we parted shortly after that; I having contributed nothing more useful to the conversation than the light-hearted observation that I hoped we weren’t about to see real social violence enacted between the walls of the Macauley house. It was lame of me, I knew; it was timid and inadequate. I ought to have had the courage of my convictions, and come down on one side or the other – but for the life of me, right there on the spot, I wasn’t able to decide which one.
Monday, 1 October 2007
Intimations of change
And after all, I have had little time in which to dwell upon present and future loneliness. I have been taken up by Lady Macauley myself indeed; to the extent that, by virtue of my close connection to Bill, who has been unofficially crowned its head, I am now considered a member of the immediate family, and must be consulted at every moment, about every one of the old lady’s current preoccupations. Chief of these just now is the marriage of Belle and Bill, which she thinks ought to take place sooner rather than later, and which must of course be just as magnificent an affair as our combined imaginations can contrive to make it. Belle quails at the prospect of so much magnificence, and has been doing her best to rein her mother in. Bill on the other hand finds it all rather entertaining, and believes they might just as well give the old lady her head. Since so long as she’s making plans, she isn’t acting, he maintains – and they will end by having the wedding they want themselves in any case.
It had occurred to me that the chief interest of the thing would be in watching to see which of these two conflicting view-points would prevail. I was inclined to put my money on Bill, who wasn’t easy to shift when once he’d made up his mind to something, as I very well knew. Though Lady Macauley would undoubtedly put up a spirited fight; and in the interim, it did seem as if we were likely to go on in this comfortably inconclusive way for many weeks to come. But something occurred on Saturday which changed all that, causing much perturbation in the Macauley household, and sending Lady Macauley’s preoccupations lurching off in quite another direction. Bill phoned me directly after breakfast, and said I had better come over at once – he wouldn’t go into it now, but everything was in uproar at the house, and the wedding plans had been summarily suspended. I found them all sitting in Belle’s little panelled parlour over coffee; Rose was there too, which made me feel that events must have taken a serious turn indeed.
“Ah there you are at last!” Lady Macauley’s greeting to me was rather peremptory, I thought; as if she had read into my absence some calculated attempt at disturbing, or at least delaying proceedings. She gave me a glance of some disapproval; after which, scarcely waiting for me to seat myself, and receive my cup of coffee from Belle, she launched at once into an account of the fresh trials that had come along to beset her.
“A letter from Alice has arrived this morning, would you believe it?” she announced. “It would be an event to be cherished of course in the normal run of things, so rarely does it occur. But what she tells us this time is that they mean to come down to us at any moment, in connection with some entirely impossible girl to whom young Will is threatening to get himself engaged. Nothing but a crisis of that dimension would have driven Alice to the extremity of coming down to us of course, and she’ll be taking it hard. She’ll have had to muster all her resources, just to endure the thought of it – never mind about what it’s going to require of her to drive off the unfortunate girl! But they expect to avail themselves of some of our resources too. They ask to stay with us - I believe the girl herself, and her mother, are expected to come here too, at some point: Alice evidently wants to have them under her eye, the better to demonstrate their awfulness to Will….”
“Heaven alone knows where we’ll put them all, of course!" she went on, after the shortest of pauses for breath. "Or what we’ll give them to eat - or simply do with them, while they’re here! The Mama is certain to be a horror for a start. I can just see her, can’t you? All hair-do, and shiny skirts, and unpleasant little sling-back shoes. She’ll want to tell us how everything here is just like something else she has at home – and will turn the plates up, over luncheon, just to show her knowledge of the makers’ marks. It will be too dreadful ... And the girl will stick like glue! Impossible girls always do - they are born with that accomplishment, and few others that one can think of….. So that in short, Bea dear, and Rose, we’re thrown all in a heap at the prospect before us, Belle and Bill and I, and will be looking to you both at every turn, just to see us through!”
I found this rather a lot to try to take in all at once. I hardly knew at first who Alice was – until I remembered that she was the girl who had ‘marched away’, as Lady Macauley was fond of putting it, with her adored only son, Jack, and had kept him incarcerated at her Scottish castle ever since. This was intriguing – but more intriguing still was watching Rose’s immediate reaction. Rose had a small, tight smile upon her face, and seemed to be thinking hard. She was evidently seeing in all this things which nobody else saw: she had been in love with the younger Jack Macauley herself at one time, after all – and she too had been judged the impossible girl. I thought it likely she was hatching some little plot of her own. I should find out what it was in due time, of course; nothing was more certain than that. But in the meantime, I had the strongest possible suspicion that it would turn out to be something that Lady Macauley wasn’t going to like!
I knew that some direct response was required of me however, so I remarked, as brightly as I could, that perhaps the girl and her mother would turn out not to be quite so bad as Lady Macauley feared? I went further, and suggested that since, as I understood it, she and her daughter-in-law had seldom found agreement over anything, they would be likely to differ in this too – and Lady Macauley might find that in fact she rather liked the girl! It was a bold move, and might have back-fired badly. But I had learnt by now that the old lady liked best those people who seemed least afraid of her, so I stood my ground, smiling as bravely as I could. Astonishingly, she seemed to think that there might be something in what I said. She considered it a while, and then agreed that Alice and she would doubtless see things very differently – and though she remained determined to deplore the mother, she might stretch a point perhaps, and give the girl herself a chance.
She decided that the only way forward now, was to go all over the house together, to see if there were any out-of-the way corners, or closets – or cupboards if it came to that! - in which we could conceivably accommodate all these importunate people. For herself, there was only one stipulation, but it was written in stone – that their rooms should be as far removed as possible from her own. She would join them for dinner at nights, sometimes, she said; and now and then possibly even for luncheon. But at all other times and repasts - and especially over tea, which had become a little ceremony consecrated to Bill and Belle and herself, alone - they would have to shift for themselves.
Having delivered herself of which injunction, and apparently feeling very much more settled about it all, she took hold of Bill’s arm happily enough, and set off for her tour of the house. She seemed to have forgotten my presence by then, so I slipped quietly away. And so did Rose – though not without the kind of meaningful backward glance at me, as we parted, that told me she would be over at the gatehouse giving me her view of the situation, before many hours had passed.
It had occurred to me that the chief interest of the thing would be in watching to see which of these two conflicting view-points would prevail. I was inclined to put my money on Bill, who wasn’t easy to shift when once he’d made up his mind to something, as I very well knew. Though Lady Macauley would undoubtedly put up a spirited fight; and in the interim, it did seem as if we were likely to go on in this comfortably inconclusive way for many weeks to come. But something occurred on Saturday which changed all that, causing much perturbation in the Macauley household, and sending Lady Macauley’s preoccupations lurching off in quite another direction. Bill phoned me directly after breakfast, and said I had better come over at once – he wouldn’t go into it now, but everything was in uproar at the house, and the wedding plans had been summarily suspended. I found them all sitting in Belle’s little panelled parlour over coffee; Rose was there too, which made me feel that events must have taken a serious turn indeed.
“Ah there you are at last!” Lady Macauley’s greeting to me was rather peremptory, I thought; as if she had read into my absence some calculated attempt at disturbing, or at least delaying proceedings. She gave me a glance of some disapproval; after which, scarcely waiting for me to seat myself, and receive my cup of coffee from Belle, she launched at once into an account of the fresh trials that had come along to beset her.
“A letter from Alice has arrived this morning, would you believe it?” she announced. “It would be an event to be cherished of course in the normal run of things, so rarely does it occur. But what she tells us this time is that they mean to come down to us at any moment, in connection with some entirely impossible girl to whom young Will is threatening to get himself engaged. Nothing but a crisis of that dimension would have driven Alice to the extremity of coming down to us of course, and she’ll be taking it hard. She’ll have had to muster all her resources, just to endure the thought of it – never mind about what it’s going to require of her to drive off the unfortunate girl! But they expect to avail themselves of some of our resources too. They ask to stay with us - I believe the girl herself, and her mother, are expected to come here too, at some point: Alice evidently wants to have them under her eye, the better to demonstrate their awfulness to Will….”
“Heaven alone knows where we’ll put them all, of course!" she went on, after the shortest of pauses for breath. "Or what we’ll give them to eat - or simply do with them, while they’re here! The Mama is certain to be a horror for a start. I can just see her, can’t you? All hair-do, and shiny skirts, and unpleasant little sling-back shoes. She’ll want to tell us how everything here is just like something else she has at home – and will turn the plates up, over luncheon, just to show her knowledge of the makers’ marks. It will be too dreadful ... And the girl will stick like glue! Impossible girls always do - they are born with that accomplishment, and few others that one can think of….. So that in short, Bea dear, and Rose, we’re thrown all in a heap at the prospect before us, Belle and Bill and I, and will be looking to you both at every turn, just to see us through!”
I found this rather a lot to try to take in all at once. I hardly knew at first who Alice was – until I remembered that she was the girl who had ‘marched away’, as Lady Macauley was fond of putting it, with her adored only son, Jack, and had kept him incarcerated at her Scottish castle ever since. This was intriguing – but more intriguing still was watching Rose’s immediate reaction. Rose had a small, tight smile upon her face, and seemed to be thinking hard. She was evidently seeing in all this things which nobody else saw: she had been in love with the younger Jack Macauley herself at one time, after all – and she too had been judged the impossible girl. I thought it likely she was hatching some little plot of her own. I should find out what it was in due time, of course; nothing was more certain than that. But in the meantime, I had the strongest possible suspicion that it would turn out to be something that Lady Macauley wasn’t going to like!
I knew that some direct response was required of me however, so I remarked, as brightly as I could, that perhaps the girl and her mother would turn out not to be quite so bad as Lady Macauley feared? I went further, and suggested that since, as I understood it, she and her daughter-in-law had seldom found agreement over anything, they would be likely to differ in this too – and Lady Macauley might find that in fact she rather liked the girl! It was a bold move, and might have back-fired badly. But I had learnt by now that the old lady liked best those people who seemed least afraid of her, so I stood my ground, smiling as bravely as I could. Astonishingly, she seemed to think that there might be something in what I said. She considered it a while, and then agreed that Alice and she would doubtless see things very differently – and though she remained determined to deplore the mother, she might stretch a point perhaps, and give the girl herself a chance.
She decided that the only way forward now, was to go all over the house together, to see if there were any out-of-the way corners, or closets – or cupboards if it came to that! - in which we could conceivably accommodate all these importunate people. For herself, there was only one stipulation, but it was written in stone – that their rooms should be as far removed as possible from her own. She would join them for dinner at nights, sometimes, she said; and now and then possibly even for luncheon. But at all other times and repasts - and especially over tea, which had become a little ceremony consecrated to Bill and Belle and herself, alone - they would have to shift for themselves.
Having delivered herself of which injunction, and apparently feeling very much more settled about it all, she took hold of Bill’s arm happily enough, and set off for her tour of the house. She seemed to have forgotten my presence by then, so I slipped quietly away. And so did Rose – though not without the kind of meaningful backward glance at me, as we parted, that told me she would be over at the gatehouse giving me her view of the situation, before many hours had passed.
Thursday, 27 September 2007
Part Three: One dream or another
Our summer has not yet quite ended, though the weather has suddenly turned colder, and I wonder if I can have missed it yet again - that moment I look for and fail to capture every year, when summer tips over imperceptibly into Autumn? Over on the other side of the Channel though, this year’s Tuscan experience has apparently wound quietly to its close. The Porteouses and the Baineses are already home, and Lady Macauley and the others are to return at any moment. Bill evidently means to go back there again just as soon as he possibly can, however. He has grape, and olive harvests to oversee now, he tells me. He might be a novice at the task, but he’s learning fast – he seemed scarcely able to contain his glee at the prospect, even through the medium of an erratic telephone line.
I too have put away my Tuscan dreams. I have folded them neatly and stowed them in the attic with my suitcases. And there they must remain. At least until I should have some sign from Cesare, that what seemed to have begun for us in the villa garden that night has not ended, but might yet be stirred into fragile life. I am not optimistic on that front however. I don’t believe I am the sort for whom romantic dreams often materialise; and that siren voice which whispers to me now and then from treacherous places, “Why not?”, has been firmly, if not entirely convincingly silenced.
I have twice been back to the Macauley house to replenish the roses in Lady Macauley’s bedroom, and to ensure that everything remains perfectly prepared for her return. I have spring-cleaned Bill’s side of the gatehouse too. A rather melancholy task, as it turned out, since I think it unlikely he will live there again, and I wonder what is to become of it? Those things aside, I have been spending as much time as I can with Frances. I had managed to see so very little of her of late, and I feared she might have been feeling side-lined – especially in light of the fact that, of all those invited to stay at the Macauley villa, only she had been excluded.
She seems not to have minded too much: it's that old feud between Lady Macauley and her grandmother that's behind it all, she believes, and try as she will, she hasn't yet seen any way of resolving it. She's very much preoccupied besides, with the new domestic arrangements at the manor house. Tomek, her Polish builder, has completed his task, and done it splendidly; she hardly knows what to do with all these splendid bedrooms and bathrooms - though Tomek tells her she could accommodate half the Polish population of London if she wished! She assures me it is just a little joke between them, and that Tomek knows quite as well as she does, that she could undertake no such thing. She has apparently remained on very good terms with Tomek, and hopes to persuade him that it would be a very good thing - for him, as well as herself – if he were to consent to slip into Mr Jessop's shoes, when that good old man finally retires in December.
We had made our usual little tour of the latest improvements when I called at the manor house this afternoon. Frances had wanted to show me the new curtains she and Tomek had chosen for one of the upper front bedrooms, and we happened to be standing at its window looking out, at the moment when the Macauley Daimler rolled past, bringing the family home again from Italy. Bill was at the wheel this time, Lady Macauley upright beside him, and Belle leaning towards him from the back. There was a rightness about it which Frances perfectly encapsulated when she cried out “Oh my goodness look, there’s Bill! Looking every inch his splendid self despite having been swallowed up lately by the Macauleys.”
Her remark had been impulsive, and she evidently felt the need to apologise for it at once. “Of course I don’t mean that he’s actually been swallowed up!” she hastened to assure me. “Bill would never be that – he’s far too much his own man to allow any such thing. But you know how it is with Lady Macauley – that when once she finds someone she likes, she simply gobbles him up.”
I laughed, and said I knew exactly what she meant; but that Bill would undoubtedly prove quite a mouthful, even for Lady Macauley.
“I think that on the whole he’s quite happy to have been gobbled up” I replied. “Since it means he can now take up his life with Belle in perfect freedom. And then think of all the benefits that have come to him along with it. Suddenly to have been put in charge of a little wine and olive farm, you know - it must make his patch of vegetables at the gatehouse seem small indeed. I don’t believe that in his wildest dreams he ever expected to find himself in such a position.”
We agreed that it was a splendid thing for Bill – and that all things considered, it couldn’t have happened to a better, or a less corruptible man. “Bill won’t seek to take advantage, that’s the great thing” Frances thoughtfully observed. “Lady Macauley must be rubbing her hands together, don’t you think? When she considers what other kind of man Belle might have taken up with, that is. She might have found someone who would prove greedy and unscrupulous – and then it would be the old lady herself who’d have been swallowed whole!”
The shadow of David Porteous had momentarily seemed to pass between us with these last words, and it pulled me up short. I had often wanted to mention his name, to talk with Frances in all freedom again about the aftermath of her engagement. But there had been an awkwardness about it; a gap had sprung up around it which I had never seen any way of bridging. I was surprised therefore, when Frances took it up herself, with perfect candour and no apparent embarrassment.
“I understand that David tried and failed with Belle....” she volunteered. “I knew he would: it was too great an opportunity for him to pass by. And I think he might have succeeded, had circumstances been different, and Bill hadn’t stepped in..... Bill is so much better for her of course, but even so - Lady Macauley was very fond of David, I believe ; it might have worked.”
There was a wistfulness about it that took me by surprise. I hadn’t expected this degree of continuing goodwill on Frances’s part towards her former lover. I had thought she would be glad to know he had been thwarted in what she must have seen as this new attempt of his at personal advancement – I know I would have been myself! She seemed to shrug herself out of this mood of introspection with some difficulty. Remarking only that David would surprise us all yet, nothing surer; and leaving me with the impression that after all she would be sorry if he didn’t. Which led me to wonder, not for the first time, what it was about women who had loved an unworthy man, that made them want to see him succeed in spite of everything?
“The improvements were meant for David, you know” she went on. “It was so awkward for him to have to go out into corridors to reach the bathroom – and then he felt that Mrs Meade was always lurking about somewhere... He thought she disliked him – installing a bathroom or two seemed a small thing to do to make him happy.”
It occurred to me that it had taken a good deal more than just a bathroom or two to make David Porteous happy. He had required in addition that Mrs Meade should be dismissed, and Frances herself improved and altered beyond all recognition. What he had wanted was nothing less than a full-scale transformation of the manor house, and everything and everyone in it – and even then it hadn’t been enough! I said no such thing to Frances of course; I contented myself with murmuring something palliative, and bland. But I left her half an hour later with the distinct sense that she had not yet entirely relinquished the past. That there was a part of her which clung still to the idea that if things - if she herself perhaps? - had only been different, and there had been no Mrs Meade, or Bill, or Belle Macauley ... her marriage to David might after all have taken place.
I was unsettled when I left her – but back at the gatehouse, I was overjoyed to find Bill. He was sitting in one of my armchairs waiting for me, and had all the appearance of one who had come home again to stay. The appearance was illusory, of course. He had come only to pack a few things, he was quick to tell me that; his old rucksack was bulging on the floor beside him. He was sorrier than he could say to have to do this to me at such short notice, and would stay an hour or two at least, for old times’ sake – I thought he had never looked so reassuringly large, so eminently safe, as when he said it.
But after that – well, he must go where Belle was now, didn’t I see? Since wherever she was, was home. It was a sentiment I thought beautiful in its simplicity. I couldn’t have wished to hear him express a better one – so why was it that when he had gone, I sat down and wept?
I too have put away my Tuscan dreams. I have folded them neatly and stowed them in the attic with my suitcases. And there they must remain. At least until I should have some sign from Cesare, that what seemed to have begun for us in the villa garden that night has not ended, but might yet be stirred into fragile life. I am not optimistic on that front however. I don’t believe I am the sort for whom romantic dreams often materialise; and that siren voice which whispers to me now and then from treacherous places, “Why not?”, has been firmly, if not entirely convincingly silenced.
I have twice been back to the Macauley house to replenish the roses in Lady Macauley’s bedroom, and to ensure that everything remains perfectly prepared for her return. I have spring-cleaned Bill’s side of the gatehouse too. A rather melancholy task, as it turned out, since I think it unlikely he will live there again, and I wonder what is to become of it? Those things aside, I have been spending as much time as I can with Frances. I had managed to see so very little of her of late, and I feared she might have been feeling side-lined – especially in light of the fact that, of all those invited to stay at the Macauley villa, only she had been excluded.
She seems not to have minded too much: it's that old feud between Lady Macauley and her grandmother that's behind it all, she believes, and try as she will, she hasn't yet seen any way of resolving it. She's very much preoccupied besides, with the new domestic arrangements at the manor house. Tomek, her Polish builder, has completed his task, and done it splendidly; she hardly knows what to do with all these splendid bedrooms and bathrooms - though Tomek tells her she could accommodate half the Polish population of London if she wished! She assures me it is just a little joke between them, and that Tomek knows quite as well as she does, that she could undertake no such thing. She has apparently remained on very good terms with Tomek, and hopes to persuade him that it would be a very good thing - for him, as well as herself – if he were to consent to slip into Mr Jessop's shoes, when that good old man finally retires in December.
We had made our usual little tour of the latest improvements when I called at the manor house this afternoon. Frances had wanted to show me the new curtains she and Tomek had chosen for one of the upper front bedrooms, and we happened to be standing at its window looking out, at the moment when the Macauley Daimler rolled past, bringing the family home again from Italy. Bill was at the wheel this time, Lady Macauley upright beside him, and Belle leaning towards him from the back. There was a rightness about it which Frances perfectly encapsulated when she cried out “Oh my goodness look, there’s Bill! Looking every inch his splendid self despite having been swallowed up lately by the Macauleys.”
Her remark had been impulsive, and she evidently felt the need to apologise for it at once. “Of course I don’t mean that he’s actually been swallowed up!” she hastened to assure me. “Bill would never be that – he’s far too much his own man to allow any such thing. But you know how it is with Lady Macauley – that when once she finds someone she likes, she simply gobbles him up.”
I laughed, and said I knew exactly what she meant; but that Bill would undoubtedly prove quite a mouthful, even for Lady Macauley.
“I think that on the whole he’s quite happy to have been gobbled up” I replied. “Since it means he can now take up his life with Belle in perfect freedom. And then think of all the benefits that have come to him along with it. Suddenly to have been put in charge of a little wine and olive farm, you know - it must make his patch of vegetables at the gatehouse seem small indeed. I don’t believe that in his wildest dreams he ever expected to find himself in such a position.”
We agreed that it was a splendid thing for Bill – and that all things considered, it couldn’t have happened to a better, or a less corruptible man. “Bill won’t seek to take advantage, that’s the great thing” Frances thoughtfully observed. “Lady Macauley must be rubbing her hands together, don’t you think? When she considers what other kind of man Belle might have taken up with, that is. She might have found someone who would prove greedy and unscrupulous – and then it would be the old lady herself who’d have been swallowed whole!”
The shadow of David Porteous had momentarily seemed to pass between us with these last words, and it pulled me up short. I had often wanted to mention his name, to talk with Frances in all freedom again about the aftermath of her engagement. But there had been an awkwardness about it; a gap had sprung up around it which I had never seen any way of bridging. I was surprised therefore, when Frances took it up herself, with perfect candour and no apparent embarrassment.
“I understand that David tried and failed with Belle....” she volunteered. “I knew he would: it was too great an opportunity for him to pass by. And I think he might have succeeded, had circumstances been different, and Bill hadn’t stepped in..... Bill is so much better for her of course, but even so - Lady Macauley was very fond of David, I believe ; it might have worked.”
There was a wistfulness about it that took me by surprise. I hadn’t expected this degree of continuing goodwill on Frances’s part towards her former lover. I had thought she would be glad to know he had been thwarted in what she must have seen as this new attempt of his at personal advancement – I know I would have been myself! She seemed to shrug herself out of this mood of introspection with some difficulty. Remarking only that David would surprise us all yet, nothing surer; and leaving me with the impression that after all she would be sorry if he didn’t. Which led me to wonder, not for the first time, what it was about women who had loved an unworthy man, that made them want to see him succeed in spite of everything?
“The improvements were meant for David, you know” she went on. “It was so awkward for him to have to go out into corridors to reach the bathroom – and then he felt that Mrs Meade was always lurking about somewhere... He thought she disliked him – installing a bathroom or two seemed a small thing to do to make him happy.”
It occurred to me that it had taken a good deal more than just a bathroom or two to make David Porteous happy. He had required in addition that Mrs Meade should be dismissed, and Frances herself improved and altered beyond all recognition. What he had wanted was nothing less than a full-scale transformation of the manor house, and everything and everyone in it – and even then it hadn’t been enough! I said no such thing to Frances of course; I contented myself with murmuring something palliative, and bland. But I left her half an hour later with the distinct sense that she had not yet entirely relinquished the past. That there was a part of her which clung still to the idea that if things - if she herself perhaps? - had only been different, and there had been no Mrs Meade, or Bill, or Belle Macauley ... her marriage to David might after all have taken place.
I was unsettled when I left her – but back at the gatehouse, I was overjoyed to find Bill. He was sitting in one of my armchairs waiting for me, and had all the appearance of one who had come home again to stay. The appearance was illusory, of course. He had come only to pack a few things, he was quick to tell me that; his old rucksack was bulging on the floor beside him. He was sorrier than he could say to have to do this to me at such short notice, and would stay an hour or two at least, for old times’ sake – I thought he had never looked so reassuringly large, so eminently safe, as when he said it.
But after that – well, he must go where Belle was now, didn’t I see? Since wherever she was, was home. It was a sentiment I thought beautiful in its simplicity. I couldn’t have wished to hear him express a better one – so why was it that when he had gone, I sat down and wept?
Thursday, 20 September 2007
An hour alone in the Macauley House
I visited the deserted Macauley house today, having been deputed to do so by Rose, who left me with a key and asked me if I would go in there and check that everything was just as it should be before Lady Macauley’s return, which she believes to be imminent. It is a little service that Rose generally performs herself. The elderly Downeys who keep house there are all very well, she tells me, but they are growing old and slipshod, and can no longer be entirely counted upon to get things right.
It’s just a question of seeing that windows have been opened and beds properly aired, I was advised. Of checking that the refrigerator is stocked with essential items, and perhaps of gathering a bunch or two of fresh flowers from Belle’s garden - scented ones if possible, to dispel the mustiness that always seems to accumulate in the old house after an absence of any duration. Oh, and of plumping cushions everywhere, Rose added as an afterthought. There is nothing which offends Lady Macauley quite so much as a cushion that looks as if it had been sat upon lately by someone else!
I was glad enough to go. The days have been hanging rather heavily on me, if the truth be known; and I had a certain curiosity besides, to see just how the old house functions in Lady Macauley’s absence. I have never quite been able to understand how two women can exist comfortably in so large, and inconvenient a place; it seems to me they inhabit just one small corner of it these days, and that it must be the old lady’s indomitable spirit alone, which keeps things going. I went there in the early afternoon, by which time I knew that the Downeys would have completed their own duties and retired, exhausted, to their quarters on the second floor. I entered by way of the heavy black door that opens out of the kitchen yard, and stood a moment in the dim passageway while my eyes adjusted to the change of light.
This part of the house is the old servants’ quarters, now become Belle’s own domain. A series of small, square, dark-panelled rooms opening out of one another; still bearing names like the sewing room, and the housekeeper’s room, and the butler’s parlour – and giving rise, eventually, to the short flight of creaking wooden stairs that leads down to the basement. Where Jack Macauley long ago created what was then his impressively modern and capacious kitchen, and where Belle, these days, is accustomed to seek what hours of respite she can from her mother’s continuing demands.
I could see why Belle is so fond of the basement rooms. The afternoon sun finds its way down there through a series of surprisingly large, if heavily barred windows; they give the basement something of the aspect of a dungeon when viewed from outside, yet seen from within are altogether cheerful and friendly - especially when the sun streams in so very pleasantly, as it did for me today. Here, I thought, standing to gaze and drink in the atmosphere for a while, must Belle have passed so many of the hours of her lonely girlhood and early womanhood. Here, perhaps, had she dreamed what must often have seemed her foolish, fruitless dreams: despaired of at last by her mother, pitied by other, more overtly successful women, especially Rose. Here, had she begun to suppose that life had passed her by forever, and she must end her days alone. And here, lately, had she finally come with Bill. To sit quietly over tea after walking the dogs; to warm themselves beside the open range in winter, and in the sun of summer - and to find friendship, and then love, blossoming unexpectedly at last.
Why then, when the rooms down there were so pleasant ( and there is another, across from the kitchen on the garden side, a bright little room bathed in afternoon light, and scented by the lavender that grows in boxes on the windowsill; Belle uses it as her private sitting room and occasional bedroom, and it was the place, I felt certain,to which she had probably brought Bill, on the afternoon of Lady Macauley’s birthday party) .... Why, when everything there seemed bathed in the light of Belle’s happy change of circumstance, did I have the vague sense that everything was about to change; that events were spinning out of my, out of everyone’s control, and nothing would ever be quite the same again?
I seem to remember that I shivered a little, in the warmth of the sun. And closed the door of Belle’s inner sanctum; feeling I had no place there, but ought to go quietly away, leaving it to await her own return with Bill. I returned, myself, briefly to the kitchen; checking that the refrigerator was stocked with the items Rose had enumerated, that the windows had evidently been opened and closed that day, and that a small bowl of garden flowers stood on the dresser, and another, larger one, in the middle of the table.... The Downeys had evidently done their work a good deal better than Rose had foreseen, I observed; and then I hurried away, back up the creaking stairs, and through the heavy swing door that gave admittance to the hall.
This is the grand, the formal part of the house. Still known to Lady Macauley as the state apartments; where she herself is accustomed to find a cushioned sofa in a sunny corner in which to sit, or hold court in the afternoons - and where Jack Macauley’s improvements seem to have had least, or least sustainable effect. It was curious to me to see how stoutly this part of the house had resisted the effects of modernisation. It must have been extensively altered, and made homely enough once, I thought. The Macauleys had lived here as a family after all, for almost forty years: there must once have been friendly chairs, and well-loved ornaments, and all the cosy accoutrements of ordinary family life. But somehow, the old atmosphere, the old high-backed chairs and pompous cabinets had crept back. So that it was not Macauley shadows, but the shadows of figures from a more distant, forgotten past, that I most seemed to apprehend there today. The house had had its inexorable way, I thought: had reverted back by some unfathomable process of its own to a period that existed long before Jack Macauley came to put his stamp on it.
This is also the part of the house where the old chapel used to be, of course; where patches of coldness still exist, and Lady Macauley had felt the lingering presence of the ghostly priest. And though the chapel itself has long since gone; swept up into the body of the hall, its presence further neutralised lately by lavish application of the cream-coloured paint that David Porteous advocated; and made cheerful enough today by arrangements of expensively authentic-looking artificial flowers in coloured bowls... though all these things have been accomplished and the sun streamed in, yet I sensed the coldness still, and found myself glancing backwards now and then, as I climbed the ornate staircase to the upper rooms.
It was in Lady Macauley’s private apartments on the first floor that I experienced the strongest intimation yet that everything was about to change. How it was going to change I couldn’t have said. Only that everything here seemed poised and waiting – the very tapestries on the wall, the drawn window curtains, and Lady Macauley’s silk negligée, hanging on her dressing room door. It was pure impulse, I think, which prompted me to fold down a corner of the bed-covers, to take up the silk negligée, folding it neatly, and draping it against the massed cushions on her bed. Impulse too perhaps, which drove me down into the garden to gather an armful of late-flowering yellow roses, and make a pretty display of them beside the bed.
The effect was a happy one, dispelling shadows, and restoring a sense of normality to the scene. So that I was able to close the door and take my leave, without any sense that I had intruded; without apprehension, or any looking back. Here at least, I thought, was the presence only of Lady Macauley. The old lady herself was everywhere - and so, in some scarcely calculable way, was her beloved Jack. Which seemed proof enough to me that change might come, and probably would; but that human love and the human spirit were virtually inextinguishable, when only they were strong enough. I let myself out of the back door of the house again with equanimity quite restored. I would never see the old place in just that way again perhaps – but suddenly it no longer mattered, since whatever came next was likely to be so very much better.
On reflection, this seems the better place in which to end Part Two. The third, and final part, will therefore begin with the next instalment.
It’s just a question of seeing that windows have been opened and beds properly aired, I was advised. Of checking that the refrigerator is stocked with essential items, and perhaps of gathering a bunch or two of fresh flowers from Belle’s garden - scented ones if possible, to dispel the mustiness that always seems to accumulate in the old house after an absence of any duration. Oh, and of plumping cushions everywhere, Rose added as an afterthought. There is nothing which offends Lady Macauley quite so much as a cushion that looks as if it had been sat upon lately by someone else!
I was glad enough to go. The days have been hanging rather heavily on me, if the truth be known; and I had a certain curiosity besides, to see just how the old house functions in Lady Macauley’s absence. I have never quite been able to understand how two women can exist comfortably in so large, and inconvenient a place; it seems to me they inhabit just one small corner of it these days, and that it must be the old lady’s indomitable spirit alone, which keeps things going. I went there in the early afternoon, by which time I knew that the Downeys would have completed their own duties and retired, exhausted, to their quarters on the second floor. I entered by way of the heavy black door that opens out of the kitchen yard, and stood a moment in the dim passageway while my eyes adjusted to the change of light.
This part of the house is the old servants’ quarters, now become Belle’s own domain. A series of small, square, dark-panelled rooms opening out of one another; still bearing names like the sewing room, and the housekeeper’s room, and the butler’s parlour – and giving rise, eventually, to the short flight of creaking wooden stairs that leads down to the basement. Where Jack Macauley long ago created what was then his impressively modern and capacious kitchen, and where Belle, these days, is accustomed to seek what hours of respite she can from her mother’s continuing demands.
I could see why Belle is so fond of the basement rooms. The afternoon sun finds its way down there through a series of surprisingly large, if heavily barred windows; they give the basement something of the aspect of a dungeon when viewed from outside, yet seen from within are altogether cheerful and friendly - especially when the sun streams in so very pleasantly, as it did for me today. Here, I thought, standing to gaze and drink in the atmosphere for a while, must Belle have passed so many of the hours of her lonely girlhood and early womanhood. Here, perhaps, had she dreamed what must often have seemed her foolish, fruitless dreams: despaired of at last by her mother, pitied by other, more overtly successful women, especially Rose. Here, had she begun to suppose that life had passed her by forever, and she must end her days alone. And here, lately, had she finally come with Bill. To sit quietly over tea after walking the dogs; to warm themselves beside the open range in winter, and in the sun of summer - and to find friendship, and then love, blossoming unexpectedly at last.
Why then, when the rooms down there were so pleasant ( and there is another, across from the kitchen on the garden side, a bright little room bathed in afternoon light, and scented by the lavender that grows in boxes on the windowsill; Belle uses it as her private sitting room and occasional bedroom, and it was the place, I felt certain,to which she had probably brought Bill, on the afternoon of Lady Macauley’s birthday party) .... Why, when everything there seemed bathed in the light of Belle’s happy change of circumstance, did I have the vague sense that everything was about to change; that events were spinning out of my, out of everyone’s control, and nothing would ever be quite the same again?
I seem to remember that I shivered a little, in the warmth of the sun. And closed the door of Belle’s inner sanctum; feeling I had no place there, but ought to go quietly away, leaving it to await her own return with Bill. I returned, myself, briefly to the kitchen; checking that the refrigerator was stocked with the items Rose had enumerated, that the windows had evidently been opened and closed that day, and that a small bowl of garden flowers stood on the dresser, and another, larger one, in the middle of the table.... The Downeys had evidently done their work a good deal better than Rose had foreseen, I observed; and then I hurried away, back up the creaking stairs, and through the heavy swing door that gave admittance to the hall.
This is the grand, the formal part of the house. Still known to Lady Macauley as the state apartments; where she herself is accustomed to find a cushioned sofa in a sunny corner in which to sit, or hold court in the afternoons - and where Jack Macauley’s improvements seem to have had least, or least sustainable effect. It was curious to me to see how stoutly this part of the house had resisted the effects of modernisation. It must have been extensively altered, and made homely enough once, I thought. The Macauleys had lived here as a family after all, for almost forty years: there must once have been friendly chairs, and well-loved ornaments, and all the cosy accoutrements of ordinary family life. But somehow, the old atmosphere, the old high-backed chairs and pompous cabinets had crept back. So that it was not Macauley shadows, but the shadows of figures from a more distant, forgotten past, that I most seemed to apprehend there today. The house had had its inexorable way, I thought: had reverted back by some unfathomable process of its own to a period that existed long before Jack Macauley came to put his stamp on it.
This is also the part of the house where the old chapel used to be, of course; where patches of coldness still exist, and Lady Macauley had felt the lingering presence of the ghostly priest. And though the chapel itself has long since gone; swept up into the body of the hall, its presence further neutralised lately by lavish application of the cream-coloured paint that David Porteous advocated; and made cheerful enough today by arrangements of expensively authentic-looking artificial flowers in coloured bowls... though all these things have been accomplished and the sun streamed in, yet I sensed the coldness still, and found myself glancing backwards now and then, as I climbed the ornate staircase to the upper rooms.
It was in Lady Macauley’s private apartments on the first floor that I experienced the strongest intimation yet that everything was about to change. How it was going to change I couldn’t have said. Only that everything here seemed poised and waiting – the very tapestries on the wall, the drawn window curtains, and Lady Macauley’s silk negligée, hanging on her dressing room door. It was pure impulse, I think, which prompted me to fold down a corner of the bed-covers, to take up the silk negligée, folding it neatly, and draping it against the massed cushions on her bed. Impulse too perhaps, which drove me down into the garden to gather an armful of late-flowering yellow roses, and make a pretty display of them beside the bed.
The effect was a happy one, dispelling shadows, and restoring a sense of normality to the scene. So that I was able to close the door and take my leave, without any sense that I had intruded; without apprehension, or any looking back. Here at least, I thought, was the presence only of Lady Macauley. The old lady herself was everywhere - and so, in some scarcely calculable way, was her beloved Jack. Which seemed proof enough to me that change might come, and probably would; but that human love and the human spirit were virtually inextinguishable, when only they were strong enough. I let myself out of the back door of the house again with equanimity quite restored. I would never see the old place in just that way again perhaps – but suddenly it no longer mattered, since whatever came next was likely to be so very much better.
On reflection, this seems the better place in which to end Part Two. The third, and final part, will therefore begin with the next instalment.
Thursday, 13 September 2007
What Rose said next
Rose was well into her stride by the time the second pot of coffee had brewed. She told me while she waited for it how much she enjoyed these nice long chats of ours: the great thing about me, she said, being the fact that I have so very little real involvement with events, and therefore no particular axe to grind. I didn’t see that this description did me any great credit – I’d have liked to have been thought just a little more closely involved in events than that! But I resisted the temptation to protest: judging that to have done so would have been an act of folly on my part, since to divert Rose now would be to send her careering off in directions that might have little bearing on the things I really wanted to hear.
I nudged her gently instead in the direction of Bill and Belle. I asked her how she thought they were holding up, beneath the close and continued scrutiny of Lady Macauley and all the others at the villa? Which was perhaps a calculated risk on my part, and might have invoked observations and opinions I’d really rather not have heard - but which in fact had the effect, just as I had hoped, of triggering a fresh conversational torrent from Rose.
“Oh Bill goes from strength to strength in the old lady’s estimation!” she acknowledged. “He can do no wrong whatever. Well, he never could of course, in her eyes, could he? She took to him unreservedly from the first. But now that he’s to be her son-in-law, he’s rocketed into some kind of stratosphere - and the only danger one can foresee is that people will grow bored with hearing about his virtues. It helps of course that Lady M is half in love him herself! She would have to have been, wouldn’t she, for the affair to have had any hope of succeeding at all? It was very clever of Belle to have found herself a man who bears so striking a physical resemblance to Sir Jack! She might have gone for quite another type - she has done so more than once in the past, with results that have been more or less catastrophic. But with Bill on her arm, she has suddenly become a person of importance in her mother’s eyes. The capacity to win and hold an impressive man - it’s the only quality the old lady respects in a woman, say what she will to the contrary. And now that Belle has achieved it, she can hardly be considered, or deferred to enough. It’s dear Belle and darling Belle all over the place now, you know – she’s even talking of engaging a nurse, or a paid companion, just so that Belle is left free to devote herself to Bill!”
This seemed an encouraging development in my eyes – though I was to learn the next moment that it also had its downside. Lady Macauley could become as captious in Tuscany as anywhere else, and her delight in being the mother of a splendidly engaged daughter was beginning to wear just a little thin. She had been charmed by everything for a week - after which she had begun to grow querulous again, and to find fault with most arrangements. This had manifested itself first, and most of all in Florence, which they had visited as a party one day last week, and which, in the absence of Bill and Belle - whom she had she sent off to explore alone, ‘as lovers should' - had suddenly become impossible in her eyes. The streets were devoid of breathable air, she complained; their labyrinthine quality oppressed her, and the cobbles hurt her feet!
There were only so many marble statues one could look at without prostration, besides! She knew them all, the Madonnas and the Davids and the Moseses (“Heavens, what kind of a word was that?”). They were very remarkable of course, and Jack had loved them - but for a tired old woman they had too much about them of the tombstone and the grave. She had quite enough of that to come, she announced to the assembled company, as they sat over iced drinks in a shaded cafe. And she thought it would turn out to be a poor sort of reward indeed, for having lived one’s interminable life, if one were to arrive in heaven only to find it awash with statues by Michelangelo!
All this information was delivered by Rose in her usual deadpan style, with few pauses for breath. She seemed to see in it grounds for supposing that the Tuscan idyll was drawing to its natural end, at least for Lady Macauley; and that if she wished to enjoy any more of it herself, she would have to get a flight as soon as possible, and hurry back. And that there were others in the immediate party who would be sadly disappointed if the experience were to be brought to a premature close, she intimated, and enlarged upon next...
“David Porteous and his daughters have taken to it quite as to the manor born, you know. He’s in his element, as you can imagine; and his girls are making quite a show just now, with their frescoes, never mind about their bikini-clad persons by the pool! Poor Roland hardly seems to know where to put his eyes – and Pamela is quietly fuming. I believe it will be an infinite mercy to her when this whole thing has quietly ended – the strain of keeping up appearances is beginning rather dismally to show. Imogen has meanwhile been experimenting with painting on wet plaster in the loggia. Just as Leonardo did, she says – she has always longed to try it. It has created quite a stir, though I confess the intricacies of it are lost on me, and I think she’d probably have done much better to have let the plaster dry a little, first - the effects are rather blurred, at present.... Her father has gone down a treat of course, with all those old countesses, who think him very comme il faut and charming, and simply can’t get enough of him. There’s one in particular – she claims Medici descent, though from the look of her, I’d say she’s much more likely to have descended from Machiavelli! She has invited him to go and stay with her in Florence – she has some kind of a fantastic house there, apparently, and a daughter whom she’d like him to meet....”
It had begun to seem to me, listening to Rose’s account of the effect that David Porteous and his daughters had had upon life at the villa, that I had perhaps fled the scene at just the right moment. Though when she informed me in the next breath that they all, the Porteous contingent and the Baines one, were shortly to make their departure, and that the last days were to be spent quietly with just the family and herself, I began to have a change of heart, and wonder if I dared return?
Rose herself dispelled such thoughts for me with her next remark however. Again, she seemed to have read my thoughts; and there were all the signs of mischievous, if not distinctly malign intent, when she informed me that “Cesare has been asking where you’ve gone. He seemed quite disappointed when you weren’t of the party at the palazzo to meet his mother. You could do worse than get a foot in that establishment, you know – though I have to confess that I always wonder where the money has come from, in these deep old Italian families. There’s always the whiff of a Mafia connection, don’t you think? Of course that could be pure fantasy on my part - I’ve watched ‘The Godfather’ too many times perhaps? And Lady M tells me not to be absurd, anyway: she has known that family forever, she says, and there’s not a word to be said against them....”
It was vintage Rose, and throwaway stuff enough. But it was also enough to stop me in my tracks. And I quietly decided that an hour or two of thrilling conversation in a garden were not enough; that I was building romantic castles in the air where none existed, and that until I had received further word from Cesare myself, I would take no steps of my own to try to renew acquaintance with him. It depressed me though – and after Rose had finally gone away, I stomped off to the common with the dogs in quite a foul mood.
With some misgiving, I have decided to end Part Two at this point, and to begin the third and final part of the story with the next instalment. I realize now that the existing Part One is much too long, and stands in rather awkward juxtaposition with the two succeeding parts – but I’m confident I shall be able to put this right when I come to edit, and complete the final draft (offline!).
I nudged her gently instead in the direction of Bill and Belle. I asked her how she thought they were holding up, beneath the close and continued scrutiny of Lady Macauley and all the others at the villa? Which was perhaps a calculated risk on my part, and might have invoked observations and opinions I’d really rather not have heard - but which in fact had the effect, just as I had hoped, of triggering a fresh conversational torrent from Rose.
“Oh Bill goes from strength to strength in the old lady’s estimation!” she acknowledged. “He can do no wrong whatever. Well, he never could of course, in her eyes, could he? She took to him unreservedly from the first. But now that he’s to be her son-in-law, he’s rocketed into some kind of stratosphere - and the only danger one can foresee is that people will grow bored with hearing about his virtues. It helps of course that Lady M is half in love him herself! She would have to have been, wouldn’t she, for the affair to have had any hope of succeeding at all? It was very clever of Belle to have found herself a man who bears so striking a physical resemblance to Sir Jack! She might have gone for quite another type - she has done so more than once in the past, with results that have been more or less catastrophic. But with Bill on her arm, she has suddenly become a person of importance in her mother’s eyes. The capacity to win and hold an impressive man - it’s the only quality the old lady respects in a woman, say what she will to the contrary. And now that Belle has achieved it, she can hardly be considered, or deferred to enough. It’s dear Belle and darling Belle all over the place now, you know – she’s even talking of engaging a nurse, or a paid companion, just so that Belle is left free to devote herself to Bill!”
This seemed an encouraging development in my eyes – though I was to learn the next moment that it also had its downside. Lady Macauley could become as captious in Tuscany as anywhere else, and her delight in being the mother of a splendidly engaged daughter was beginning to wear just a little thin. She had been charmed by everything for a week - after which she had begun to grow querulous again, and to find fault with most arrangements. This had manifested itself first, and most of all in Florence, which they had visited as a party one day last week, and which, in the absence of Bill and Belle - whom she had she sent off to explore alone, ‘as lovers should' - had suddenly become impossible in her eyes. The streets were devoid of breathable air, she complained; their labyrinthine quality oppressed her, and the cobbles hurt her feet!
There were only so many marble statues one could look at without prostration, besides! She knew them all, the Madonnas and the Davids and the Moseses (“Heavens, what kind of a word was that?”). They were very remarkable of course, and Jack had loved them - but for a tired old woman they had too much about them of the tombstone and the grave. She had quite enough of that to come, she announced to the assembled company, as they sat over iced drinks in a shaded cafe. And she thought it would turn out to be a poor sort of reward indeed, for having lived one’s interminable life, if one were to arrive in heaven only to find it awash with statues by Michelangelo!
All this information was delivered by Rose in her usual deadpan style, with few pauses for breath. She seemed to see in it grounds for supposing that the Tuscan idyll was drawing to its natural end, at least for Lady Macauley; and that if she wished to enjoy any more of it herself, she would have to get a flight as soon as possible, and hurry back. And that there were others in the immediate party who would be sadly disappointed if the experience were to be brought to a premature close, she intimated, and enlarged upon next...
“David Porteous and his daughters have taken to it quite as to the manor born, you know. He’s in his element, as you can imagine; and his girls are making quite a show just now, with their frescoes, never mind about their bikini-clad persons by the pool! Poor Roland hardly seems to know where to put his eyes – and Pamela is quietly fuming. I believe it will be an infinite mercy to her when this whole thing has quietly ended – the strain of keeping up appearances is beginning rather dismally to show. Imogen has meanwhile been experimenting with painting on wet plaster in the loggia. Just as Leonardo did, she says – she has always longed to try it. It has created quite a stir, though I confess the intricacies of it are lost on me, and I think she’d probably have done much better to have let the plaster dry a little, first - the effects are rather blurred, at present.... Her father has gone down a treat of course, with all those old countesses, who think him very comme il faut and charming, and simply can’t get enough of him. There’s one in particular – she claims Medici descent, though from the look of her, I’d say she’s much more likely to have descended from Machiavelli! She has invited him to go and stay with her in Florence – she has some kind of a fantastic house there, apparently, and a daughter whom she’d like him to meet....”
It had begun to seem to me, listening to Rose’s account of the effect that David Porteous and his daughters had had upon life at the villa, that I had perhaps fled the scene at just the right moment. Though when she informed me in the next breath that they all, the Porteous contingent and the Baines one, were shortly to make their departure, and that the last days were to be spent quietly with just the family and herself, I began to have a change of heart, and wonder if I dared return?
Rose herself dispelled such thoughts for me with her next remark however. Again, she seemed to have read my thoughts; and there were all the signs of mischievous, if not distinctly malign intent, when she informed me that “Cesare has been asking where you’ve gone. He seemed quite disappointed when you weren’t of the party at the palazzo to meet his mother. You could do worse than get a foot in that establishment, you know – though I have to confess that I always wonder where the money has come from, in these deep old Italian families. There’s always the whiff of a Mafia connection, don’t you think? Of course that could be pure fantasy on my part - I’ve watched ‘The Godfather’ too many times perhaps? And Lady M tells me not to be absurd, anyway: she has known that family forever, she says, and there’s not a word to be said against them....”
It was vintage Rose, and throwaway stuff enough. But it was also enough to stop me in my tracks. And I quietly decided that an hour or two of thrilling conversation in a garden were not enough; that I was building romantic castles in the air where none existed, and that until I had received further word from Cesare myself, I would take no steps of my own to try to renew acquaintance with him. It depressed me though – and after Rose had finally gone away, I stomped off to the common with the dogs in quite a foul mood.
With some misgiving, I have decided to end Part Two at this point, and to begin the third and final part of the story with the next instalment. I realize now that the existing Part One is much too long, and stands in rather awkward juxtaposition with the two succeeding parts – but I’m confident I shall be able to put this right when I come to edit, and complete the final draft (offline!).
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
Rose gives her account
The lonely days continue, so that I sometimes wonder what it could have been, precisely, that brought me home ahead of time, and whether the others will ever return from Tuscany at all? I have been tending Bill’s vegetables ( his tomatoes are splendid!), and walking the dogs daily; but from the glances I receive from other dog-walkers on the common, I glean the fact that my presence there is seen as no substitute for Bill’s. People stop me to ask about him, often, and I have been at a loss to know how much I ought to reveal about his change of status.
Only the Brigadier, beneath whose sternly military exterior there evidently beats a rather sentimental heart – only the Brigadier has seen, or guessed the truth. He thinks it an excellent development. “Two people who were made for each other if ever there was such a thing!” he barked at me yesterday ( I remain uncertain as to whether I ought best to curtsey, or salute, at the end of one of his pronouncements). He only wonders if Bill will have the stamina to ‘square up to the old lady’.
I have wondered a good deal about this myself. Sitting alone in the gatehouse in the evenings, I have tried to picture them at the villa; and it has seemed to me that wherever they are, and whatever they should happen to be doing at any given moment, whether breakfasting in the loggia or sitting beneath the plane trees in the heat of the long afternoons, it is Lady Macauley’s voice I hear, and hers the presence which, above all others, decides and manipulates events.
I was engaged in just such reflections over coffee in the kitchen this morning. I was telling myself that if Lady Macauley were ever going to defer to anyone, it would be to Bill, and that, really, I ought to have more confidence in him. I ought to have learnt by now at least, that his is the kind of broad geniality which enables him not so much to engage with obstacles, as simply to fail to notice they are there. I was enjoying my reflections, and had been transported by them so very far, so entirely blissfully away, that the sudden appearance of Rose on the garden path, operated rather as an apparition might have done - or at any rate as a rather disagreeable jolt.
She guessed my thoughts – she always does. “You look as if you had seen a ghost!” she laughed, coming into the kitchen and flopping down, as always, on her favourite stool. “But it’s only me, returned unexpectedly, and only for the least possible number of days.... I had family matters to attend to here, but I mean to return at once. I daren’t turn my back on them all for more than two seconds, if you want to know the truth, events are moving there at such a pace.”
I was prepared on this occasion to let her have her head. That she had much to relate I didn’t doubt; and that she would slant it in such a way as to reflect her own best interests most of all, was doubtless also. But I was prepared, for once, to overlook small irritations – my thirst for information being on this occasion greater than my distaste for what I have come to think of as the ‘Mountjoy twist’.
Her first offering was not altogether to my liking, for all that. There was something patently mischievous, malicious almost, in her announcement that they had all gone, yesterday, to visit ‘my’ Cesare, and his almost inconceivably ancient mother, in what she called their preposterous palazzo, in Lucca.
“You’ve never seen such a place!” she exclaimed. “You have to penetrate deep into the heart of the town to find it – I was amazed at Bill’s courage, in daring to take the car down so many narrow back streets! And then when you do find it, it looks more like a warehouse or a prison, than a house. You know the sort of thing I’m sure. No concession whatever to houses as we know them: just a vast gate in an impenetrable wall, so that if you haven’t got your glasses on, or don’t peer in the right place, you would quite miss the little brass plate that tells you it’s the Palazzo Restorelli, and that you have to ring for entry...”
I fear my face must have betrayed the agitation I felt, as Rose launched without warning into this account of their visit to the Palazzo Restorelli, which I knew to be the home of the man with the deep Italian eyes who had affected me so unexpectedly at the engagement dinner. There was a part of me which urged her on, longing as I did to hear anything – everything – about him. I drank deep, for three minutes, of her account of the beautiful formal garden at the palazzo, of the dim splendour of the indoor rooms, and the way in which Cesare had finally presented his ancient mother, as if she were the most precious being on earth...
But I finally experienced a deep aversion to hearing these things from Rose; who would have liked Cesare for herself, I knew, and who would for that reason be at pains to try to belittle him in my eyes. I pulled her up short therefore – I am hardly able to describe the sheer effort of will it cost me to do it. I switched the subject as adroitly, and apparently casually as I could; I said that Cesare and his aged mother were very well, but that one old countess, one palazzo, were much like any other, when you came right down to it - and that what was of more immediate present interest to me was to know how life in the villa went on, and how Pamela and Roland in particular, were adjusting to it? Mercifully, she took the bait, and swallowed it, almost without appearing to draw breath.
“Oh well, they’re soldiering on you know” she said. “But pretty much out of their depth, as you can imagine. And striking the one false note, if you ask me. Poor Pamela has brought all the wrong sorts of clothes to wear, for a start! She never thought there would be any call for a bathing suit; she turned quite pale at the prospect, and looks most peculiar, sitting beside the pool in her voluminous skirts.... She has never had any experience of sun-screen either, so has turned a very painful-looking shade of puce! And then at dinner, she swathes herself in the usual chiffon – whilst everyone else manages an effect of casual chic. Not the Lucchese grandees of course. They get themselves up pretty spectacularly too - but somehow the achieved effect is entirely different....”
“And Roland...?” But for Roland, Rose felt the need to make a longish pause, evidently momentarily lost for words. “Well, what can one say about Roland, except that when once he has delivered himself of his legal advice - which occupied about one hour, on the very first day - he’s left gasping like a stranded minnow, amongst all those super-refined old Italians whom Lady M will keep inviting up to the villa. He wears a short-sleeved shirt, with tie, at dinner you know. He looks most carefully at his range of cutlery, then tries to follow everyone else without being noticed. I think every mouthful must be an acute ordeal for him. He and Pamela sit mute, at table, for the most part – oh, they open their mouths to speak every now and then, but evidently decide against it. On the grounds, one assumes, of their having nothing whatever to say. Sadly, it only adds to the general fish-out-of-water effect that they create. None of the visiting Nobiltà seems to have the least idea of who they are, or what to make of them....”
Rose was well into her stride by now, and obviously had a great deal more to tell. I despised myself a little for wishing to encourage her – but my own desire for knowledge was acute, so I quietly refilled the coffee pot and settled back, as if for the duration...
This part of the story has run-on almost without my bidding, and still has failed to accommodate all I want to say. Seldom have I felt more in need of the luxury of a full chapter in which to spread myself – so I have decided to send caution to the winds, and let it run to a second instalment.
Only the Brigadier, beneath whose sternly military exterior there evidently beats a rather sentimental heart – only the Brigadier has seen, or guessed the truth. He thinks it an excellent development. “Two people who were made for each other if ever there was such a thing!” he barked at me yesterday ( I remain uncertain as to whether I ought best to curtsey, or salute, at the end of one of his pronouncements). He only wonders if Bill will have the stamina to ‘square up to the old lady’.
I have wondered a good deal about this myself. Sitting alone in the gatehouse in the evenings, I have tried to picture them at the villa; and it has seemed to me that wherever they are, and whatever they should happen to be doing at any given moment, whether breakfasting in the loggia or sitting beneath the plane trees in the heat of the long afternoons, it is Lady Macauley’s voice I hear, and hers the presence which, above all others, decides and manipulates events.
I was engaged in just such reflections over coffee in the kitchen this morning. I was telling myself that if Lady Macauley were ever going to defer to anyone, it would be to Bill, and that, really, I ought to have more confidence in him. I ought to have learnt by now at least, that his is the kind of broad geniality which enables him not so much to engage with obstacles, as simply to fail to notice they are there. I was enjoying my reflections, and had been transported by them so very far, so entirely blissfully away, that the sudden appearance of Rose on the garden path, operated rather as an apparition might have done - or at any rate as a rather disagreeable jolt.
She guessed my thoughts – she always does. “You look as if you had seen a ghost!” she laughed, coming into the kitchen and flopping down, as always, on her favourite stool. “But it’s only me, returned unexpectedly, and only for the least possible number of days.... I had family matters to attend to here, but I mean to return at once. I daren’t turn my back on them all for more than two seconds, if you want to know the truth, events are moving there at such a pace.”
I was prepared on this occasion to let her have her head. That she had much to relate I didn’t doubt; and that she would slant it in such a way as to reflect her own best interests most of all, was doubtless also. But I was prepared, for once, to overlook small irritations – my thirst for information being on this occasion greater than my distaste for what I have come to think of as the ‘Mountjoy twist’.
Her first offering was not altogether to my liking, for all that. There was something patently mischievous, malicious almost, in her announcement that they had all gone, yesterday, to visit ‘my’ Cesare, and his almost inconceivably ancient mother, in what she called their preposterous palazzo, in Lucca.
“You’ve never seen such a place!” she exclaimed. “You have to penetrate deep into the heart of the town to find it – I was amazed at Bill’s courage, in daring to take the car down so many narrow back streets! And then when you do find it, it looks more like a warehouse or a prison, than a house. You know the sort of thing I’m sure. No concession whatever to houses as we know them: just a vast gate in an impenetrable wall, so that if you haven’t got your glasses on, or don’t peer in the right place, you would quite miss the little brass plate that tells you it’s the Palazzo Restorelli, and that you have to ring for entry...”
I fear my face must have betrayed the agitation I felt, as Rose launched without warning into this account of their visit to the Palazzo Restorelli, which I knew to be the home of the man with the deep Italian eyes who had affected me so unexpectedly at the engagement dinner. There was a part of me which urged her on, longing as I did to hear anything – everything – about him. I drank deep, for three minutes, of her account of the beautiful formal garden at the palazzo, of the dim splendour of the indoor rooms, and the way in which Cesare had finally presented his ancient mother, as if she were the most precious being on earth...
But I finally experienced a deep aversion to hearing these things from Rose; who would have liked Cesare for herself, I knew, and who would for that reason be at pains to try to belittle him in my eyes. I pulled her up short therefore – I am hardly able to describe the sheer effort of will it cost me to do it. I switched the subject as adroitly, and apparently casually as I could; I said that Cesare and his aged mother were very well, but that one old countess, one palazzo, were much like any other, when you came right down to it - and that what was of more immediate present interest to me was to know how life in the villa went on, and how Pamela and Roland in particular, were adjusting to it? Mercifully, she took the bait, and swallowed it, almost without appearing to draw breath.
“Oh well, they’re soldiering on you know” she said. “But pretty much out of their depth, as you can imagine. And striking the one false note, if you ask me. Poor Pamela has brought all the wrong sorts of clothes to wear, for a start! She never thought there would be any call for a bathing suit; she turned quite pale at the prospect, and looks most peculiar, sitting beside the pool in her voluminous skirts.... She has never had any experience of sun-screen either, so has turned a very painful-looking shade of puce! And then at dinner, she swathes herself in the usual chiffon – whilst everyone else manages an effect of casual chic. Not the Lucchese grandees of course. They get themselves up pretty spectacularly too - but somehow the achieved effect is entirely different....”
“And Roland...?” But for Roland, Rose felt the need to make a longish pause, evidently momentarily lost for words. “Well, what can one say about Roland, except that when once he has delivered himself of his legal advice - which occupied about one hour, on the very first day - he’s left gasping like a stranded minnow, amongst all those super-refined old Italians whom Lady M will keep inviting up to the villa. He wears a short-sleeved shirt, with tie, at dinner you know. He looks most carefully at his range of cutlery, then tries to follow everyone else without being noticed. I think every mouthful must be an acute ordeal for him. He and Pamela sit mute, at table, for the most part – oh, they open their mouths to speak every now and then, but evidently decide against it. On the grounds, one assumes, of their having nothing whatever to say. Sadly, it only adds to the general fish-out-of-water effect that they create. None of the visiting Nobiltà seems to have the least idea of who they are, or what to make of them....”
Rose was well into her stride by now, and obviously had a great deal more to tell. I despised myself a little for wishing to encourage her – but my own desire for knowledge was acute, so I quietly refilled the coffee pot and settled back, as if for the duration...
This part of the story has run-on almost without my bidding, and still has failed to accommodate all I want to say. Seldom have I felt more in need of the luxury of a full chapter in which to spread myself – so I have decided to send caution to the winds, and let it run to a second instalment.
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