Return of the Macauleys

Pamela phoned me at ten o’clock this morning. She has taken to phoning me every other day on one pretext or another; she seems to like to have my views on any number of different matters, not least on that of the ‘little party of welcome’ she is trying to organise for Mr Porteous. She calls him ‘dear David’ now, I notice. She wants me to know how charmingly unclerical he is; and with what an engaging candour he had entreated them, Roland and she, to call him by his Christian name. “Quite within an hour of our meeting, you know!” she exclaimed. She seemed to think it exhibited a wonderful degree of informality, in a clergyman.

“Of course he knows it isn’t quite the thing, these days, to talk about one’s Christian name," she informed me next. “He thinks it rather a pity, in what is after all still, he hopes, a Christian country. But there it is – there are just too many people out there who might conceivably be offended by it. He can’t quite see how we have arrived at such a condition – it seems to have happened virtually overnight. Still, he has always thought that when one was among friends one might relax the rules a little … You can’t think what a charming smile he had for it! Mischievous, almost, I’d have called it – were he not of course to all intents and purposes a clergyman still …….”

I have always been surprised by the solemnity (the awe, almost, I’d call it) with which women of Pamela’s sort seem to take their clergymen. I don’t yet quite subscribe to Bill’s view, that the clergy are by the very nature of their calling destined to fall into self-adulation, or worse. I have known some very good and selfless priests, in my lifetime. And I am not entirely free of the belief, born in childhood, that God is there, and is good; and that in times of severe trouble, a little palliative murmuring on a priest’s part, can sometimes help. But to attribute unqualified benificence to the clergy, as a class – to genuflect before them and, figuratively speaking at least, to touch the hems of their garments crying ‘Lord, lord’ or ‘Vicar, vicar!’ - as Pamela and her kind seem wont to do: well, that sort of blanket veneration is quite beyond my reach, I’m sorry to say.

Pamela does seem to ascribe almost equally estimable qualities to my own Bill, mind you. She somehow managed to get on to the subject of him, straight out of that of Mr Porteous. She manages that sort of thing superbly well; the transition was perfectly smooth. Hardly had she completed her enconium of ‘dear David’, than she embarked upon another one remarkably similar, with respect to Bill. She is most eager to have him at her little party, she wants me to know that. Though she quite sees that his health may not permit of anything of that sort just yet, of course. She wishes me to tell him how very much they feel for him in his present affliction, Roland and she. They miss his television reports acutely of course; she hastened to assure me of that. She said that Roland, for one, didn’t see how he could easily be replaced. Such a very large and reassuring British presence, Roland always said; especially when bombs were going off in unpredictable places; when nobody seemed to be playing by the accepted rules of war any longer - and the British reputation for fair play and good soldiery were themselves suddenly being called in question.

“A man like Bill, therefore…” Pamela went on. ( She had warmed to her theme by now; she had a kind of majesty - like a ship at full sail, I thought; even through the medium of the telephone line.) “…. A man like Bill is better than politicians, Roland always says. Better than armies even, at keeping up one’s sense of national pride. One doesn’t have to know him to understand his worth. One has only to have heard his broadcasts, and seen his courage under fire. I have even asked myself, sometimes - I asked Roland only the other day, and he quite concurred - why it is necessary to have politicians at all, when a well-spoken British journalist might do the job of running everything so very much better? We have all somehow looked to Bill in this deplorable affair, I hope you will feel able to tell him that. And of course we wish for his speedy recovery – that is of all things uppermost in our thoughts and prayers.”

It is rather a difficult thing for me, to accept fulsome tributes from stately ladies on Bill’s behalf. There is always the spectre of Bill’s private mirth, lurking somewhere in the background, disturbing the solemnity, and provoking a lapse into hilarity of my own. Bill persists in taking the ironic view of Mrs Baines, you see. Which is not quite to say that he doesn’t enjoy the accounts I give him of her conversations. On the contrary, he tells me there are few things he likes more. He fairly delights in Mrs Baines and Roland, he assures me: he could listen to tales about them all day long. He thinks them simply splendid fellows - but only from a safe distance, behind my covering fire, as it were. I think it highly unlikely he will consent to attend Pamela’s little party for all that. And my chief concern now is to try to find a kindly way of preparing her for it, in advance.

It was only in the last five minutes of her conversation this morning that Pamela suddenly remembered what it was she had actually phoned me about. She couldn’t think how it had slipped her mind – it must have been all the interest of talking about Mr Porteous, and dear Bill! What she had actually meant to let me know was that the Macauleys had returned, and that old Lady Macauley had taken promptly to her bed. “She fancies herself dying again” Pamela explained. “She has a tendency to do that, whenever she has been away for any length of time. I think it has something to do with having had to suffer a scheduled flight from Naples – and of course with the general gloominess of the house … Such a great, dismal barn of a place; impossible either to heat or inhabit. A kind of elevated rabbit warren, Rose calls it, and she should know. It’s doubtless haunted too; nothing seems more likely than that, when one considers all the conspiracies that were once enacted there! Cromwell and the two Charleses, you know – not an easy time to get through safely! The wonder is that the old lady should have consented to stay on there at all, after Sir Jack passed on. Far better to have handed it over to the National Trust at once, in my view……..”

All of this was of genuine interest to me. I remain fascinated by the idea of old Lady Macauley and her daughter Belle. I want very much to see what Theodora could possibly look like now, and was most eager to hear more. I was just on the point of trying to draw Pamela further – I knew it wouldn’t be hard – when a roar from Bill in the attic alerted me to the fact that the window cleaner had arrived. How quickly his time seemed to have come around again! And how inopportune of him to have arrived at that particular moment in time! But that’s the way with window cleaners, I find. Like bad pennies, or cats clamouring to be fed, they always turn up just when you can least be doing with them! Since somebody had to open the gate for him, however – and it most surely wasn’t going to be Bill – I was obliged to relinquish Pamela’s Macauley tidings for today, and see what the window cleaner might be disposed to tell me about them, instead.