More or less drowning in bliss

I went at last to see the lovers for myself yesterday, and I can’t say I was made any happier by what I found. My expectations had been coloured to some extent in advance, mind you; Rose having called on me beforehand to give me the benefit of her own views on the situation. She came on the dot of ten, and cast a sharp glance around her, I thought, as if in hopes of finding Bill. But she settled herself on a stool in my kitchen in his absence just the same, and with the distinct look of one whose intention it was to spend an hour or two in cosy contemplation of the lovers.

She thinks someone ought to tell Frances not to go around talking to people about her ‘lover’, however. “It creates a rather bizarre impression,” she said. “People feel uncomfortable about it. Not everyone understanding, as you and I do, that it’s a word Frances has been longing to use in connection with herself for as long as she can remember!”.

“She has read too many books, that’s the trouble!” was Rose’s next offering. “She gets all her weird ideas from there. I have a lover! she heard someone cry, in some book or other when she was seventeen. It was Anna Karenin I think…. something Russian and dense, at any rate. And Frances has been practising saying it before the mirror ever since. I think she must have thought the opportunity to say it for real would never come, but now here is Mr Porteous at last, and she’s shouting it out all over the place.”

This was not in fact a piece of information to which I had been made privy, myself, so it surprised me to learn that Rose had. I knew a little of Frances’s other imaginary lovers, who had begun with Huck Finn at the age of ten, and progressed through Holden Caulfield and Mr Rochester all the way to Sir Lancelot; from adoration of whom she had seldom deviated since – though it had sometimes occurred to her to wonder if after all she didn’t adore King Arthur even more. I had assumed anyway, that with the advent of Mr Porteous, Frances had been induced to put away childish things - though I did just wonder how well he might have measured up, by comparison with Lancelot and King Arthur?

I was annoyed with Rose, besides. It seemed to me the very worst kind of betrayal to reveal such confidences made in trust. I gave her fairly short shrift therefore: I told her that it wasn’t anyone Russian whom Frances had taken for her model. It was Madame Bovary in fact, who had cried I have a lover! - and she was the creation of Gustave Flaubert, who was French.

But Rose scarcely even flinched at my little put-down. She has a thick skin, and has perfected the art of seeing and hearing only those things which it suits her to see and hear. It’s a considerable art, and one which I would like to be able to master, at least in part, myself. She went on quite unperturbed, telling me that she gives the affair five months at most. She knows the type of Mr Porteous, she says; and she believes he will find it too difficult a pill to swallow in the end.

“He’ll be seduced for a while” she said. “The grandeur of the manor house itself will see to that. That, and the sheer size of the bank balance it seems to imply! But he’ll finally be unable to stomach any of it. He’ll pull out at some point – oh, he’ll do it beautifully of course, so that she hardly even knows she’s been dropped. He’ll find someone else to impress - and poor Frances will be left with her little love affair lying in tatters at her feet!”

It is Rose’s opinion that we will all be obliged to pick up the pieces when Frances has been abandoned. She left me with that thought; and since I can’t help thinking that there’s probably some truth in her theory, my own heart was filled with trepidation, when at two o’clock that afternoon I presented myself at the gates of the manor house. To my surprise, it was Frances herself who came out to the gate to let me in. She was all of a tremble, but she wanted me to see how entirely composed and happy she was. “Mrs Meade is slow to hear the bell” she explained. “ She lets it ring and ring, and David thinks it creates a bad impression.” She seemed nervous of what she might find my attitude to be, so I hugged her at once, and said how glad I had been to hear of her happy new association.

“Oh, you mean Mr Porteous” she replied; and her relief was visible. “Or David, as I must learn to call him! So foolish of me to be calling him Mr Porteous, now that we are lovers you know. Though David says I oughtn’t to be talking about our being lovers – that creates a bad impression too. It seems as if I’m always creating bad impressions, but with Mr Porteous as my guide, I shall soon be able to overcome all that. We are on the point of becoming an affianced couple, is the way David expresses it – and that should be information enough for anyone, he says. And yes, it has been very remarkable, and I won’t pretend not to be just a little overwhelmed by it all, still. But he is so very good to me, you see – and of course now that he has actually come to live here, there are all sorts of little adjustments that must be made..”

“ … They’re very pleasant ones of course – the adjustments, I mean!” She was quick to add that; she seemed to think it important I should see at once how entirely pleasant everything was. “ And it’s all quite temporary at this stage. David has come here to stay just while Mr Jessop decorates his own house. It will take several weeks – and after that, well we shall have to wait and see how things develop.”

She led me into the drawing room then, where sat David Porteous himself, all at his ease in the largest armchair. He stood to greet me, putting out his hand with his usual perfect urbanity.

“You find me very looking very much at home in my new environment no doubt” he said. “Frances has been good enough to take me in while my own house is being re-decorated. It’s an act of charity on her part, and I hardly know how I’m going to be able to express my thanks.”

It crossed my mind that there was one way in which he might have expressed his thanks – and that would have been to leave the poor little creature alone! But of course one doesn’t say such things: one nods, and smiles, and talks of this and that, until it comes time for tea, and somehow the awkward gap has been bridged. It was a strange hour I spent with them, for all that. I don’t know what I had expected to find in Mr Porteous; but if I had hoped to see signs of embarrassment, or compunction – or any indication of the newly ardent lover - I was to be disappointed on all counts. He calls her ‘my dear’ for a start, which is not what I would call precisely the language of love. He permits her to hover near his chair, anticipating his needs – he even allows her to flutter her hands in his direction now and then. But touch her in return, he does not. For a lover, he is very much in command of himself – it’s only poor little trembling Frances, who seems to be more or less drowning in bliss.