Distant Thunder

This strangest and most disappointing of summers drags on. After two days of sunshine the rain has returned; the sky is leaden again, and I heard distant thunder this morning as I sat at the window of the attic, looking out over David Porteous’s gazebo, and Bill’s sodden vegetable garden. I miss Bill badly – and not only because I haven’t the smallest idea of what to do with his vegetables, which have the appearance now of small green islets adrift in a sea of mud. He appears to have forgotten about them, and though the lecture tour is drawing to its end, has no ideas of returning home immediately. He thinks of staying on in Sydney for a week or two, he tells me; and then of ‘going across to Adelaide’, where he has friends whom he has been promising to visit for years.

I don’t know why I should be surprised to hear that Bill has friends in Adelaide, or that they should be entreating him to come and stay. He has friends everywhere; most of them unknown to me, and many of them, it seems, women with whom he has at one time had relationships, and who have never quite gone away. Therein lies the secret of Bill’s success with women, it often seems to me – that he has loved a great many of them, but never for long, and never quite enough; yet that none of those he’s tried to love has held his eventual defection against him, or been willing, when it has happened, quite to relinquish him. So that no matter where he happens to be in the world at any given moment, there will always be some woman eager to take him in, or take him back.

It’s a system that has worked well for him for many years, but I believe it has made him lazy; and I further believe that if he means to try to apply it now to Belle Macauley, it will fail, and he will end by losing the only woman with whom he might have found a true and lasting happiness. I have no real grounds of course, for believing any of these things; I have only the strongest possible instinct that they are so. And if I had wanted reinforcement of that belief, I’d have found it almost daily since Bill’s departure, in the nature and content of the conversations I have had with him every evening on the telephone.

I am growing impatient with him however, and fear that last night I was deliberately obtuse. He had wanted as usual to know what was ‘going on’ – and what ‘that man’ seemed likely to be going to do next. And whilst I knew of course that he referred to David Porteous, and that somewhere implicit in his question was another one that pertained to Belle.... I nevertheless declined to take his point. I only told him rather sharply that I had not the least idea of what ’that man’ might be intending to do; only that he seemed to be playing some very deep game that was presently beyond my powers of wit or deduction to interpret – and that if Bill himself wanted to know what was going on here, he really ought to get on a plane and come home, instead of amusing himself at some poor woman’s expense in Adelaide!

Bill though, had only a laugh for it. “Oh well” he said; “If he’s playing some deep game, he’ll play it better with only women looking on. Far be it from me to come crashing in to spoil the fun.”

He wanted to know how Belle was holding out, for all that. And when I asked him “holding out against what, precisely?, refused to specify; saying only that he had an idea Belle was always made uncomfortable by close proximity with her mother’s protégés, and especially perhaps with those who had recently been separated from other women. Again though, I refused to help him out. I asked him instead if there were actually anything in the world he was prepared to stand up and fight for; and he told me, laughing again, that he couldn’t think what I was getting at, but that he’d fight for the right to lead a quiet life at any rate; particularly when it came to long-distance telephone calls ... At which point there was a tremendous clap of thunder directly overhead here, and the line cut out on us. Leaving me with the suspicion that David Porteous was probably not the only one playing some deep game – but that for the life of me, I couldn’t fathom quite what Bill’s might turn out to be.

Dogs will sometimes unearth things that have remained buried to humans however, and I had reason to remind myself of this when I returned this afternoon from a long, wet walk on the common with Belle. Walking Monty has been one of my regular duties in Bill’s absence, and I have been struck by the number of dog-walking women who have come up to me to inquire after Bill himself. Rose has always said to me that she thought Bill must have a regular little coterie out there among the female dog-walkers, and it seems she was right; though what she evidently hasn’t quite picked up on, and what has come as a considerable surprise, even to me, is that Monty himself seems to know who his real friends are – and that each day, when the walk is over, he has attached himself to Belle’s Labrador, Polly, and taken himself resolutely off, not in the direction of the gatehouse, but in that of the Macauley house, where with one long bound he has descended to the basement, and after a long gulp of water from a bowl that is evidently his own, has promptly settled down to sleep in a basket before the kitchen stove.

“Monty is evidently very much at home here” I observed to Belle today; and was intrigued, though not altogether surprised, to see that she coloured a little before explaining, all in a rush, that yes, it had become a part of the little ritual of the daily walk, that Monty should head home with Polly, and that Bill must, almost as a matter of course, follow in his footsteps and then stay on to have a cup of tea with her in the kitchen. That this was suggestive of a degree of intimacy between Bill and her that I hadn’t as yet divined for myself, was clear – and I’d have done my best to follow it up with a carefully worded question or two; had not Rose at that moment come clattering down the basement stairs, with an urgent request from Lady Macauley that we should immediately forsake the dogs, and come up to the drawing room to help her with the entertainment of Mr Porteous and his daughters.

“You must come at once.” she said. “They have been here an hour already; the conversation has taken every kind of unexpected turn, and your mother has been growing very impatient for your return.”

Just so of course, are the most opportune moments for enlightenment in human affairs often arbitrarily snatched away; and though I had sensed that Belle was on the point of confiding something rather important to me, I was obliged to give it up, and follow her instead to the drawing room, where sat Lady Macauley in splendid state, with a Porteous girl on either side of her, and their father gazing thoughtfully out of the window at the rain.

“Oh, there you are at last!” Lady Macauley exclaimed. “Looking very much the worse for the rain of course, but no matter....though I think you might have removed your boots! We have been talking about the tapestries, which Imogen and Amy are going to be brave enough to try to repair for us. And now we are to go and have a look at the old chapel, to see what David thinks he might be able to do about that troublesome priest, whom some say lingers there...”