Miss Fanshawe's Lover

It is one of Bill’s contentions that nothing in the world is ever quite so bad – or so good – as it seems. He has often voiced this opinion, and I guess he ought to know what he’s talking about, since he has seen about as much of the bad as it’s possible for any one man to do in a lifetime. Of the extent to which he has also seen the good, I’m not so sure. The good has a tendency to become submerged, when it is your brief to go about the world reporting from this troubled spot and the next; and I don’t believe I have ever heard Bill talking through his satellite link about Mother Theresa, or the Good Woman of Baghdad (should such a person exist); or even about the hundreds of good, bewildered, frightened, ordinary people whom I believe he must have also have enountered fairly routinely in his travels.

It is not the good frightened bewildered people who make the news, you see. Any more than it is the brave, or the benevolent, or the hopeful – or those who just doggedly, and in the face of hideous adversity, survive. All those other people must be there in the background all the while of course – since if they were not, the world must surely spin to a screeching halt one day, ground up finally in the mill of its own self-perpetuating wickedness.

Bill has another theory though: one that is coupled with, or at any rate closely related to the first. Whatever else there is in the world, he says, there are in the last resort only people. It’s a fairly self-evident fact, but one that is often overlooked. You can go to any place you like, to the best place or the worst. You can go to the most beautiful, or ugly, or awe-inspiring, or simply profoundly dull place - and when you actually get there, what you’ll find are people not so very different from yourself.
Bill has been to what he thinks must have been one of the worst places. He has taken tea with Saddam, in one of his palaces before the fall. He has interviewed the man himself, and found him exuding bonhomie, wearing a Western suit and offering earl grey tea and biscuits, with the cigars.

It was only the glint of madness somewhere behind Saddam’s eyes, Bill says – that, and the little red panic button on the arm of his chair, and the pair of armed ruffians posted outside the door – that reminded him he was in presence here not so much of a man, as a confirmed and unrepentant monster. It was a difficult transition to make at the time, but Bill said he managed to make it. Since if he had not, then all those innocent people must have resisted and fought; must have been imprisoned and tortured and died, entirely in vain.

Bill was reminded of this encounter of his when he saw Ian Paisley sitting down to tea last week with Martin McGuinness. Most things come to tea and handshakes at the end, in Bill's view. T.S Eliot had it just about right, when in The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock he talked about ‘measuring one’s life in coffee spoons’. It was teaspoons with Ian and Martin, and Bill and Saddam, of course – but it might just as well have been coffee spoons. Everything is finally banal and ordinary in the heart of man. It’s just that you sometimes have to travel further, and longer, and more roughly - more bombs must fall, more wholescale meaningless slaughter and suffering occur – before the teacups can come out.

Now you might wonder why I write in this vein this morning? Especially when I write under such a heading as Miss Fanshawe’s Lover. You might think I would have something more momentous to talk about than Bill's experiences with people. But that’s just it, don't you see? Something has happened that has made me see all over again, that when it comes to people, Bill is the wise one, possessing a distinct and natural advantage over me. It required Bill’s presence, for example, to enable me to feel at home with Lady Macauley the other day; and doubtless it will only be because Bill goes with me, that I shall feel comfortable about attending her little luncheon party next week. For I am, I believe, a natural coward – and Bill is precisely the reverse.

There’s more to it even than that, though. What has happened is that Bill has already been out on the common with Monty this morning, and has discovered, in the space of one short walk, all that I have been wanting to know about Frances and Mr Porteous for several weeks, and been too busy, or polite – or just plain timorous – to try to find out! Rose and Pamela were right all along, as it turns out. I thought they exaggerated the situation grotesquely, and accused them in my mind of all manner of unsubstantiated suspicions. But what they darkly feared has come to pass, and Mr Porteous and Frances are lovers.

“She came right out and said it to me” Bill told me – he looked very much affected by it, for Bill. “She looked up at me with all her elderly innocence shining in her face, and told me that Mr Porteous had become her lover. ‘We talked about it a great deal in advance’ she said; ‘And he implored me to consider it very carefully, because of course it was quite a tremendous step to take. But really, I didn’t have to consider it at all, because I already liked and admired him so much. And now it has happened, and he comes in the evenings sometimes as well as the mornings (to work in the library you know). Soon perhaps, he will come to live with me altogether; and though we are not precisely what you would call engaged to be married, we might yet be both those things, and in the meantime we are lovers nevertheless.”

Bill says that he has received many profound shocks in his life, but there was never another that came near to this one. Worse, he said, the whole thing seemed so preposterous, that he was afflicted at once with the almost irresistible impulse to explode in mirth! “She said it all with such a perfect gravity, you see,” he explained. “She stood there talking about Mr Porteous being her lover as if it were the nicest, but after all the most ordinary and natural thing on earth. And all the while I was thinking how absurd it was; hardly knowing whether I most wanted to laugh, and accuse her of playing girlish games with me - or go out and find the wretched man and punch him on the nose!”

All this happened several hours ago now, but I can’t say that I have been able yet to accustom myself to the idea. I shall have to go and see Frances of course – Bill said she particularly asked him to let me hear her news. But what I shall say to her - and how, quite frankly, I shall react if Mr Porteous himself should happen to be with her when I call… Well, these are eventualities about which I haven’t yet been able to think. One thing only remains clear – and that is that if Frances is happy, then I must try to be happy for her too. It won’t be easy though. And the awful thing is that I too, find something almost irresistibly comic about it. I should laugh outright, I fear – if there weren’t something about it that also made me want to weep!