It rained tremendously on Lady Macauley's parade

Not even Lady Macauley can command the British bank holiday weather, it seems. But, having failed to still the wind and stop the ceaseless deluge, she turned right round anyway, and commanded her team of caterers and marquee-erectors to perform internal sleights of hand by way of recompense. Into the gloom of the Macauley house came two hundred twinkling candles therefore; came boxloads of fragrant roses, and a host of lilies, five feet tall, to stand on gilded pedestals in every corner. Twenty white-clothed tables and eighty matching chairs arrived; and a small army of smartly uniformed staff to mount guard over them. Garlands of white and yellow roses lit the ancient entrance cloister; spilling over into the hall, where stood Lady Macauley herself, who had been meant to shimmer in the garden in sea-green silk beneath a matching parasol, but had made splendid shift with softest ivory merino, instead.

The sky was dark indeed for all that, when guests began arriving at one o’clock. The heavens opened with a downpour on the hour, so that there was a great deal of scraping of feet and shedding of unceremonious mackintoshes to be got through, before the out-stretched hand of Lady Macauley could be reached. Standing beside her beneath the arch of roses throughout all the little ceremony of greeting stood my own Bill, wearing his broadest smile. So that nobody, admiring him, could have guessed at the string of oaths I’d had to hear an hour earlier, whilst harrying him into his smartest suit. Lady Macauley had asked him to arrive early for that specific purpose. She needed the arm of a big man with a hearty laugh to lean upon if she was to get through it all alive, she said; and he was the nearest equivalent it had been her good fortune to discover, since the day that Jack had left her twenty five years before.

I meanwhile had been left to arrive alone, fifteen minutes later. And I experienced a moment of panic at the door, which had very little to do with the shabby raincoat I wore – or even with the fact that I, too, had been obliged to abandon the little silk tea dress, lately and with stress acquired, in favour of something altogether more unfestive, in well-worn navy-blue wool. I felt seriously under-dressed, it’s true – but then I always do. The source of my anxiety though, lay elsewhere. I was examining Lady Macauley’s head for signs of adornment - having earlier been quite severe with Mrs Baines who, ever optimistic on the hat front, had been out the week before and bought what I can only call a perfect stonker; and who, when I’d ventured to discourage her from that, had wondered if 'a little arrangement of flowers and fernery – like the Queen wore, at Prince Edward’s wedding' might more elegantly fit the bill?

This had seemed to me, if anything, even worse. But I stood my ground and told her that I didn’t believe Lady Macauley went in for flowery arrangements on the head; and that what might have served for an afternoon wedding in Windsor Castle was probably unsuited to lunch in the garden, even at such a fine affair as this. Better, I told her, to err on the side of understatement, and go hatless, as I meant to do myself. I was not absolutely sure of my ground however; and it was not until I actually reached the door, and could confirm that Lady Macauley’s head was free from either flowers or fernery (bore only a gleaming pearl or two), that I was able to feel my caution had been justified, and Pamela could arrive at this, her first Macauley state occasion, without causing any kind of sartorial stir.

Poor Pamela was to find that she created very little stir of any kind in that company, sad to say. Large as she is, and stately; irreproachably chiffoned and with Roland always at her side, she still managed more or less to vanish in the crowd in the first moment, and was not seen again (by me at least), until four o’clock when, having found a liveried minion to collect her rain-cloak, and with Roland firmly gathered, made the stateliest kind of exit that she could. I’m not sure that her first venture into elevated circles can have been entirely to her liking; she looked seriously discountenanced when she left. And I fully expect a phone call from her tomorrow, in which she will tell me that she was rather disappointed with Lady Macauley’s arrangements; that almost everybody there was eighty five at least, that the house was cold and unwelcoming for all the candles, and that Roland’s sorrel soup, when finally he’d got it, was if anything colder still.

Pamela’s discomfort aside, it was a splendid occasion. We stood a while for drinks and canapes in the hall, serenaded by a group of musicians installed in the open gallery above, who made none but the sweetest, softest sounds. So that Lady Macauley, firmly attached to a beaming Bill, could circulate just as softly and sweetly, staying no more than a moment or two with each group, but smiling charmingly to every one; before the moment came at which a gong was sounded in some deep recess, and we must all ascend the rose-strewn staircase to the long gallery, where the twenty tables and eighty chairs had been arranged.

Lunch itself was a formal affair of several courses – and I have to say that my own sorrel soup was exquisite, and of a temperature perfectly judged. Not that Pamela hadn’t got a point, mind you, when she said that everyone there was eighty five at least. My own table companions were an elderly diplomat and his wife; he hard of hearing, so that I was required to lean towards him a good deal over my soup; and she, impressive in moth-balled velvet, of a turn of conversation I could only think to describe as statuesque, like herself. There was a fourth person at our table, a solitary lady whose name I didn’t catch; who wore a kind of jewelled bandana on her head, and whose conversation - save that she turned to me at one moment and observed that the band played very sweetly, did it not? - consisted largely of inaudible murmurs about ‘dear Sir Jack and the good old days’. To the end of my life, I daresay, I shall never discover precisely who that lady was, or from whence she sprang.

Lunch over, we were somehow gathered into several smaller groups, to circulate about the other rooms. I lost my diplomat and his velvet lady at this point – and the other, the one with the bandana, had somehow evaporated, never to be seen again. Belle Macauley it was, with Rose, and another nameless elderly couple, who gave us the tour of what she said were largely still the rooms of state, into which she and her mother seldom cared to venture these days. “We live almost entirely downstairs now” Belle explained. “It wasn’t like this in my father’s day of course. Then, the old bedsteads and the old pictures were stowed away in basements - Daddy couldn't abide the bosomy duchesses for a start! And every room was furnished for comfort and everyday living. But somehow, the old things have managed to creep back... Mummy had some sort of idea that we might open these rooms to the public at some point. Though she can’t bear the thought of it now, and says we might as well leave them to the ghosts.”

It seemed to me a melancholy account to give, and I wondered, again, how it was they could manage to eke out their existence in this echoing place - taking shelter, it was true, largely in ground-floor rooms and sunny basements; but with all the canopied bedsteads, all the spectral cabinets and glowering, painted duchesses, looming above them nevertheless. I was glad when at last another gong sounded, and we were summoned to the gallery again, for coffee and liqueurs. Here, brightness returned with the flickering candles, and even Jack Macauley's bosomy duchesses were subdued. And here too, after a suitable interval, and intensely to my astonishment, Bill rose to his full height from his position on the right-hand of Lady Macauley, to make a gracious, and only moderately humorous little speech of appreciation for the occasion.

After which Lady Macauley herself rose, to bid a final farewell, and leaning heavily upon Bill, was conducted away to her own apartments to rest. The party began to disperse then. Slowly, in groups of two or three, the band still playing, and with a good deal of subdued chatter at the door whilst coats were collected, everyone began to drift away. Until there were only Belle, and Rose Mountjoy and I left , standing beneath the dripping roses in the cloister to wave.

I took my own leave soon after that. Without Bill, who had been detained somewhere in impenetrable regions with the old lady (I do believe he’s halfway in love with her already, for all her advanced years!). It was only when I was home again in the gatehouse, that it occurred to me that Frances and Mr Porteous had not been present at the occasion. I was sure they had been invited, and I wondered why it was they had declined to attend …