Bill crashes my party

Lady Macauley stayed with me for more than three hours the other day. She leant back in her chair with legs delicately extended, her feet upon a little padded footstool I had provided. She has the slenderest legs, the smallest, prettiest feet. Her feet were encased today in a pair of dove-coloured shoes that buttoned above the ankles; all of a piece they were, with the almost Edwardian elegance of her high-necked dress in finest wool, and of the identical shade of dove grey. She knows just how to dress herself to best effect; accentuating her good points and masking those that are bad. In fact she hasn’t many bad points that I could see - and I hope I shall have learnt something from her style, when once I have reached her advanced age.

She professed herself at home in my sitting room at once, and hoped I’d be kind enough to let her stay a while. There was something unexpectedly pleasant about being in such a very small house, she said; its walls closed in around one so reassuringly, and whatever one might happen to need at any given moment, was scarcely more than an arm’s-length away.

“Only think of it, Belle!” she exclaimed. “Six steps at most, and you’re in the kitchen. With us, there are corridors to cross and flights of stairs to surmount. There’s even a creaking old lift, if one happens to be on the wrong floor! There are dark corners and cold patches - so that I can never be quite sure, when Belle has left me sitting in the panelled parlour and even the sound of her footsteps has vanished, whether it will be ten minutes before she returns, or whether she’ll perhaps have gone forever.“

This seemed to me to create such an arresting image, that my curiosity was aroused at once. I had often wondered how these two women managed alone in so vast and uncompromising a house; and here – especially with the mention of the dark corners and the cold patches – was at least the beginning of an explanation. I took courage in hand, and asked her if with her mention of cold patches, she were suggesting that the house was haunted? It was a remark which might have gone against me, I knew that. I might, with that one rather ill-judged question, have forfeited her good opinion forever. Fortunately, she took it in good part, and gave me much more than I could have hoped for by way of a reply.

“Haunted – oh yes it’s that, undoubtedly!” she said. “You can’t live in a place four centuries old and not be troubled by its former inhabitants now and then. And then you know, it was a place of high political intrigue at one time. They were for the king, the people who built the house and lived there for the first two hundred years. Staunch royalists, all of them– though it’s said that the lady of the house did manage to carry on some sort of amorous association with Mr Cromwell ( who’s not generally known for his amorousness!), whilst secretly supporting Charles. I don’t know how much truth there is in the story. But even if it’s only partly true, one can’t help admiring her, can one? It must have been a very delicate balancing act for any lady to undertake, in any generation."

It is the lady who had the amorous association with Cromwell, apparently, who most often returns to haunt the house. Lady Macauley herself has received no glimpse of her, but Belle has seen her, and so has Rose. Which makes Lady Macauley think that ghosts too, must have their little discriminations. “I daresay they think me too hard a nut to crack” she said. “ For a ghost to function effectively, there must be some vestige of belief at least, in the person whom it’s endeavouring to haunt!” Lady Macauley herself has seen nothing more than a little dog that sometimes runs out ahead of her on wintry nights – and even that apparition, she is inclined to put down to tricks of the light played on dark staircases.

It was not of ghosts we were talking however, when half an hour later, at six o’clock, Bill’s battered old Renault suddenly rattled into our little forecourt. We had moved on by then to that other favoured topic of Lady Macauley’s, the Prime Minister. So that when Bill put his rain-soaked head inside the door, taking in the assembled company with some astonishment, Lady Macauley had just delivered herself of the remark that she supposed we were about to witness the longest goodbye in political history; and that there would almost certainly be a manly tear or two, before it was allowed to end.

“No doubt we shall hear Mr Blair call himself the people’s prime minister” was what she was actually saying at the moment of Bill’s entry. “For all the world as if he thought that democracy itself were something that had been invented by New Labour!”

Bill had heard, and seemed to take it with some exuberance. “Now there’s an interesting idea to come home to!” he said. He was smiling broadly, even as he shook the rain from his overcoat, and threw it over the nearest chair. It all seemed to go on with surprising smoothness from there, and I was rather proud of Bill, to tell the truth. He has a way of filling any room he enters. He’s a big man, with a loud voice and a huge guffaw for a laugh; and his intrusion into this particular little party might very well have caused it to go seriously wrong. It almost did go wrong at one point in fact – though through no fault of Bill’s. Rose it was, who for some reason best known to herself, took it into her head to tackle him over the situation in Iraq.

“I suppose you take the side of Britain and America in all this?” was the way she saw fit to put it. And there was flirtatiousness, as well as challenge in her manner - which was of all approaches she might have made to Bill, the very worst. To my astonishment, he handled it with quiet restraint - though I hoped Rose was too well pleased with her own conversational boldness, to have missed the glance of pure loathing he cast in her direction before he replied. “Oh I never take sides you know” was all he finally said. “If there’s a bad guy in it anywhere, it would be beyond my powers of deduction to say which one.”

He turned away from Rose then, to talk to Lady Macauley and Belle of less inflammatory things. He leant forward and listened, adding something of his own now and then, or throwing his head back to laugh. He was affability itself, and in no time at all had the old lady smiling and nodding back at him, as if she thought him the most delightful man she’d ever met. To Rose he addressed no further word - do her best to draw him though she continued, with visibly growing annoyance, to try to do.

They stayed another hour; and when at last they said they ought to go, it was Bill who held Lady Macauley’s umbrella for her, and conducted her with infinite courtesy to her car. She beckoned me over at the final moment of farewell, and “He does not disappoint one!” she whispered in my ear. “He saw Rose off, and no mistake!” she added, rather less discreetly. “It delighted my old eyes to see it done so well! But you musn’t hide him away in future you know – and must promise to bring him to lunch with us at the earliest possible moment.”

Bill, as I have so often observed, can always spring a fresh surprise on one. And what he said to me of the visit after they’d gone, was not in the least the thing that I’d expected. “That was one entertaining old lady!” he said, when he’d waved the Bentley off around the corner of the common. “ I can’t say as much for her friend of course – I entirely deplore the type as you know. But the old lady and her daughter can call as often as you like.”

Which from Bill, is about as high as personal commendation gets.