The calm before the storm

“Do you mean to tell me you knew that girl would be coming and going every day – and Will left quite alone there with her, in the house?”

The question was Alice Macauley’s, directed with some sharpness at her mother-in-law this afternoon, as we sat over a late lunch at Barton Flory, Lady Macauley’s childhood home in the Suffolk countryside, to which we have retreated for what Lady Macauley herself calls ‘a few days of rest and composure before the storm’. The ‘storm’, as we all now understand it, being the ball; preparations for which are in fact already in full swing back at the Macauley house. It is to be held in the Orangery – and in an adjoining marquee: Lady Macauley having thought it desirable to provide one venue for the youthful contingent to “perform whatever it is they call a dance these days”; and another for the “more venerable among us, who still enjoy a waltz”. A team of half a dozen men has been set to work there in our absence; their foreman, rather surprisingly, being none other than Frances’s faithful Polish Tomek, whom Lady Macauley has been advised is quite the most reliable pair of hands, when it comes to erecting a marquee, and strengthening an Orangery floor.

Lady Macauley has made no attempt to disguise the fact that the idea of the ball was entirely a spur of the moment thing on her part. She had been stung into producing it, she acknowledges that; but having done so, is resolved to see it through to a spectacular conclusion. It is to be the ball to end all balls; no expense or effort will be spared to make it one of the most successful ever held at the house. An orchestra is to be engaged, and what seems likely to be almost an entire florist’s shop commandeered for the occasion - Rose will see to what heights an old woman is still able to rise, when provoked.

“And will Rose herself be invited to attend?” Alice wanted to know that much, at least. “Given that she has announced her intention of staging an alternative affair.”

But Lady Macauley sets little store by Rose’s alternative affair. That too had been produced entirely out of Rose’s hat, in her opinion. “She had to think of something, and came up with that. Oh, she thinks fast, I’ll grant her that ... But on this occasion she thought to very little purpose – since I had thought faster, and to more immediately realisable effect. And we shall see what becomes of half-baked intentions and village halls, when something altogether more magnificent is in the offing!”

“She will be invited, and she will come” was however her considered judgment of Rose’s likely response. “Bringing her Wilmots with her, I don’t doubt. Though if any of them gets up to try to make an announcement – especially one that has to do with an engagement - she will find her path securely blocked.”

Alice seemed to think that this disposed satisfactorily enough of the question of the ball – and indeed of that of the importunate Mrs Mountjoy, whom she had never yet condescended to speak of as Rose, and whose recent put-down at her mother-in-law’s hands she had evidently found not altogether displeasing. But on that other question, the one which concerned her son’s present proximity to Imogen Porteous (of whom she “personally knew nothing – or nothing at any rate that she found especially encouraging”), she remained resolutely unappeased.

“I’d like to know just what it was you were thinking of, mother-in-law?” she inquired next. “When you left them alone in the house together for a period of several days? If it was your idea that she might succeed in wresting him away from the other girl, then of course I can see your point. Though I confess I don’t think it a specially good one - since so far as I have been able to see there is little to choose between the two. The Porteous girl is if anything more dangerous than the Wilmot one – as being a good deal more likely to succeed!”

“And if she should succeed, what then?” Lady Macauley tossed it back at her with something that looked suspiciously like positive enjoyment: it seemed to me entirely on the cards she might have staged the whole thing, just on the off-chance of its annoying Alice. “You can have no objection to the girl herself that I can see. She’s quite as good as he in every respect – she’s better in some, in my opinion. She’s a great deal more talented, for a start. There’s almost nothing she couldn’t accomplish, artistically - given her head, and just a little material support.”

But this was going altogether too far for Alice.

“And is it also your idea that we should be the means of supplying her with the material support she requires?” she very coldly asked.. “You take my breath away if so. I would do much, as you know, to remove my son from the clutches of the Wilmot girl. I have come down here at all, it might be said, very much for that purpose alone. But if in doing so I should succeed only in throwing him into the arms of another - who by your own admission would probably ruin us all with her artistic requirements - why, there I would simply have to draw the line!”

Where Alice’s drawing the line might have taken us – and what Lady Macauley’s spirited response to it might have been – was unfortunately denied us, by the arrival at that moment of a contingent of late luncheon guests; in the flurry of seating and introducing whom, all other conversational threads were lost, and Lady Macauley in fact had herself quietly spirited away to her rooms by Bill and Belle. It was left to me therefore, and even more to Jack Macauley (Alice having icily dissociated herself from further conversation for the moment) to see the luncheon through to some kind of hospitable conclusion.

It was several hours later, when everyone else had gone to their rooms to rest, and I had found a quiet window-seat in which to relax, while looking out over the pleasant gardens where sullen rain had begun to fall... it was while I sat there, reflecting upon what had earlier been said, and where it was likely to take us all, that I saw a taxi from the village pull up in the driveway, and a distracted-looking Frances Fanshawe get out, struggling to put up a large umbrella. I hurried out to greet her; she was cold and tired, and obviously very much distressed and agitated by what she called the “outlandishness of her coming down all unannounced and uninvited like this!” She would hardly have dared to come at all, she attempted to explain, all in a rush as is her way when there is much on her mind. She would certainly have phoned ahead to announce her intention, at least - had she not something of so much gravity to tell me, that she hadn’t seen how it could possibly wait another hour!

She had alarmed me somewhat, I confess it. I couldn’t imagine what it could be that had driven her to taking what was, for her, so unprecedented a step as to come all the way down here, alone and unannounced. She was all for embarking upon her tale at once, right there in the wet driveway; she went so far as to demand of me, all incoherently, whether after all I “hadn’t guessed what was going on under my nose all this long while.....?”

But I had guessed nothing – and had discovered besides that, suddenly, I didn’t want to hear. There had been enough shocks for one day, it seemed to me – one more, and the whole edifice might be in danger of tumbling down. Frances’s own distress was such, in any case, that I insisted she should come into the house and warm herself a little, before embarking upon whatever it was she had come all the way down here to tell me.

“There’s nobody else about” I assured her. “Everyone is upstairs resting – we have the whole place entirely to ourselves. And you shall have a cup of tea at least, before you say another word....”