Return of the Macauleys

Pamela phoned me at ten o’clock this morning. She has taken to phoning me every other day on one pretext or another; she seems to like to have my views on any number of different matters, not least on that of the ‘little party of welcome’ she is trying to organise for Mr Porteous. She calls him ‘dear David’ now, I notice. She wants me to know how charmingly unclerical he is; and with what an engaging candour he had entreated them, Roland and she, to call him by his Christian name. “Quite within an hour of our meeting, you know!” she exclaimed. She seemed to think it exhibited a wonderful degree of informality, in a clergyman.

“Of course he knows it isn’t quite the thing, these days, to talk about one’s Christian name," she informed me next. “He thinks it rather a pity, in what is after all still, he hopes, a Christian country. But there it is – there are just too many people out there who might conceivably be offended by it. He can’t quite see how we have arrived at such a condition – it seems to have happened virtually overnight. Still, he has always thought that when one was among friends one might relax the rules a little … You can’t think what a charming smile he had for it! Mischievous, almost, I’d have called it – were he not of course to all intents and purposes a clergyman still …….”

I have always been surprised by the solemnity (the awe, almost, I’d call it) with which women of Pamela’s sort seem to take their clergymen. I don’t yet quite subscribe to Bill’s view, that the clergy are by the very nature of their calling destined to fall into self-adulation, or worse. I have known some very good and selfless priests, in my lifetime. And I am not entirely free of the belief, born in childhood, that God is there, and is good; and that in times of severe trouble, a little palliative murmuring on a priest’s part, can sometimes help. But to attribute unqualified benificence to the clergy, as a class – to genuflect before them and, figuratively speaking at least, to touch the hems of their garments crying ‘Lord, lord’ or ‘Vicar, vicar!’ - as Pamela and her kind seem wont to do: well, that sort of blanket veneration is quite beyond my reach, I’m sorry to say.

Pamela does seem to ascribe almost equally estimable qualities to my own Bill, mind you. She somehow managed to get on to the subject of him, straight out of that of Mr Porteous. She manages that sort of thing superbly well; the transition was perfectly smooth. Hardly had she completed her enconium of ‘dear David’, than she embarked upon another one remarkably similar, with respect to Bill. She is most eager to have him at her little party, she wants me to know that. Though she quite sees that his health may not permit of anything of that sort just yet, of course. She wishes me to tell him how very much they feel for him in his present affliction, Roland and she. They miss his television reports acutely of course; she hastened to assure me of that. She said that Roland, for one, didn’t see how he could easily be replaced. Such a very large and reassuring British presence, Roland always said; especially when bombs were going off in unpredictable places; when nobody seemed to be playing by the accepted rules of war any longer - and the British reputation for fair play and good soldiery were themselves suddenly being called in question.

“A man like Bill, therefore…” Pamela went on. ( She had warmed to her theme by now; she had a kind of majesty - like a ship at full sail, I thought; even through the medium of the telephone line.) “…. A man like Bill is better than politicians, Roland always says. Better than armies even, at keeping up one’s sense of national pride. One doesn’t have to know him to understand his worth. One has only to have heard his broadcasts, and seen his courage under fire. I have even asked myself, sometimes - I asked Roland only the other day, and he quite concurred - why it is necessary to have politicians at all, when a well-spoken British journalist might do the job of running everything so very much better? We have all somehow looked to Bill in this deplorable affair, I hope you will feel able to tell him that. And of course we wish for his speedy recovery – that is of all things uppermost in our thoughts and prayers.”

It is rather a difficult thing for me, to accept fulsome tributes from stately ladies on Bill’s behalf. There is always the spectre of Bill’s private mirth, lurking somewhere in the background, disturbing the solemnity, and provoking a lapse into hilarity of my own. Bill persists in taking the ironic view of Mrs Baines, you see. Which is not quite to say that he doesn’t enjoy the accounts I give him of her conversations. On the contrary, he tells me there are few things he likes more. He fairly delights in Mrs Baines and Roland, he assures me: he could listen to tales about them all day long. He thinks them simply splendid fellows - but only from a safe distance, behind my covering fire, as it were. I think it highly unlikely he will consent to attend Pamela’s little party for all that. And my chief concern now is to try to find a kindly way of preparing her for it, in advance.

It was only in the last five minutes of her conversation this morning that Pamela suddenly remembered what it was she had actually phoned me about. She couldn’t think how it had slipped her mind – it must have been all the interest of talking about Mr Porteous, and dear Bill! What she had actually meant to let me know was that the Macauleys had returned, and that old Lady Macauley had taken promptly to her bed. “She fancies herself dying again” Pamela explained. “She has a tendency to do that, whenever she has been away for any length of time. I think it has something to do with having had to suffer a scheduled flight from Naples – and of course with the general gloominess of the house … Such a great, dismal barn of a place; impossible either to heat or inhabit. A kind of elevated rabbit warren, Rose calls it, and she should know. It’s doubtless haunted too; nothing seems more likely than that, when one considers all the conspiracies that were once enacted there! Cromwell and the two Charleses, you know – not an easy time to get through safely! The wonder is that the old lady should have consented to stay on there at all, after Sir Jack passed on. Far better to have handed it over to the National Trust at once, in my view……..”

All of this was of genuine interest to me. I remain fascinated by the idea of old Lady Macauley and her daughter Belle. I want very much to see what Theodora could possibly look like now, and was most eager to hear more. I was just on the point of trying to draw Pamela further – I knew it wouldn’t be hard – when a roar from Bill in the attic alerted me to the fact that the window cleaner had arrived. How quickly his time seemed to have come around again! And how inopportune of him to have arrived at that particular moment in time! But that’s the way with window cleaners, I find. Like bad pennies, or cats clamouring to be fed, they always turn up just when you can least be doing with them! Since somebody had to open the gate for him, however – and it most surely wasn’t going to be Bill – I was obliged to relinquish Pamela’s Macauley tidings for today, and see what the window cleaner might be disposed to tell me about them, instead.

Mrs Baines's tea party

I have met Mr Porteous. And am obliged to report , with some embarrassment, that I found myself just as much affected by him as every other woman apparently was, who attended Mrs Baines’s tea party the other day. So entirely unexpected a response was this, on my part (and so much surreptitious glee has it prompted, on Bill’s ), that I am resolved to try to ignore it for the moment if I can, and dwell on other aspects of the little party instead.

In the first place there was Mrs Baines herself. Or Pamela, as she condescended at once to entreat me to call her. What can I tell you about Pamela, I wonder, that wouldn’t be altogether uncharitable on the part of one who has after all enjoyed her hospitality? Suffice it to say that she is a large lady, just as Bill said; and that her manner is one of great stateliness. She’s a stately woman altogether, indeed; who wore, or rather was contained within, a voluminous dress in some kind of blue chiffon, which rustled a good deal when she moved. The dress was amplified, in front, to accommodate her bosom; and had been cleverly conjured, behind, into something softly draped and gently flowing, almost in the manner of a train; and it was this perhaps, which gave her the rustling effect.

Frances has told me that Pamela is known for the constancy of her opinions, and her composure under fire. She is never angry, never extreme, and almost never ruffled, Frances says. Though she has been known to expostulate a little, when talking about the current Labour government, and the iniquity of its policies on immigration and taxation. And it has to be said that I heard her come near to something which almost resembled conversational violence, on Tuesday, when the subject of the Chancellor of the Exchequer just happened to come up.

That was the exception though. For the most part she was hostessly moderation itself, and kept her little party moving forward at a perfectly judged pace. She had earlier greeted me at the cottage door, and kept me standing a while in the tiny hall, where she relieved me of my jacket and performed the essential opening functions of a hostess. There too, she introduced me to Roland, a small man posted somewhere in her wake; whose function it seemed to be to receive the coats of arriving guests, and whom I’d have taken, had she not immediately identified him as Roland, for some kind of visiting functionary. The man who was to oversee the cloakroom arrangements, perhaps; or someone she’d got in from a catering company to hand the plates

My welcome having been accomplished, and Roland having seemed to bow over my hand a little, by way of greeting, she shepherded me into what I can only describe as a sea of chintz; with a great many over-sized bowls of flowers, and padded footstools, and prim little ‘occasional tables’ (and as many as a dozen benignly smiling faces), floating in it. I was conducted about the crowded room and presented individually to her guests, for each of whom she provided a name, and a little potted history, which I suspect her of having prepared in advance. Frances was there of course, perched on the edge of an ottoman, trying to balance her cup. And Mrs Rose Mountjoy; who remained seated when presented to me; who gave me a distant smile, and struck me as being on the glamorous, and exceedingly well made-up side of sixty. Even Bill’s brigadier was there. He sprang to attention before me – it was almost a salute. He mentioned Bill and Monty; and introduced his very small wife, and said his name was Bernard.

The ceremony of tea itself remains something of a blur in my memory. Roland handed plates of tiny, triangular sandwiches, I seem to remember; and buttered scones, and many-coloured cakes. But nobody was able to eat very much, for the difficulty of locating their own allotted occasional tables, and keeping them within reach. There was a great deal of subdued chatter, but very little conversation possible. It was only when the tea things had been cleared away, and Pamela, in a gesture of mercy, had thrown open the doors to the garden, that I found myself suddenly in the presence of Mr Porteous.

He had come up to me very quietly, from behind, and while I was admiring a specially fragrant flowering wisteria, that covered an old shed at the bottom of the garden. “Ah, wisteria…” he said. “It’s early this year, I think – but there’s nothing quite like it, in the right spot, is there?” I‘m not aware that he said anything much else. He had put out his hand, and mentioned that his name was David – but I fear that any chattering which took place between us was likely to have been my own. He has that effect, you see. He has a palpable presence, and looks at you with a quiet grey eye. He’s clearly a man who is not afraid of silences; he has the gift, if you can call it that, of reducing any woman in his presence (even me) to inane babbling, in the space of about two minutes flat. He's smooth as velvet (that image of Bill's, of the gentleman priest in the velvet jacket, is ever present to my mind); and I can quite see how it was that he had all the women of his parish falling at his feet.

I have talked him over with Bill since then, however, and we are agreed that his effects are probably very carefully studied, and that beneath them beats a heart of flint. I’m going to try to hold on to that concept, at any rate. For nothing seems more certain than that David Porteous will work his charm to the utmost here, and almost certainly wreak considerable havoc in the process. To dear little Frances, who is already under the spell, I said only that I had found him perfectly charming, just as she said. But I fear for her more than ever now, and shall make her personal safety the object of my most astute concern.

What Mr Porteous told Miss Fanshawe

I’m just a little worried about Frances. She has acquainted herself with Mr Porteous with what seems to me to to be some precipitancy. She has dispatched her basket, and had it returned; and is now on such terms with him as wouldn’t have seemed possible only three short days ago. She seems to have out-stripped even Mrs Baines, on the getting-to-know-Mr-Porteous front ; so that I have had to go back to Bill, for a re-appraisal of the question of her unworldliness.

Bill sticks to his guns though. It is just her very unworldliness, don’t I see, that enables her to plunge in like that, where wiser, worldlier women would have feared to tread. She’ll come through unscathed, just wait and see: not even a clergyman of what he is convinced is Mr Porteous’s ilk, being quite so cynical as to take advantage of so clearly artless a little woman. I do hope he’s right; though I question his ability to judge Mr Porteous fairly on so brief an acquaintance. And I can’t help fearing a little for Frances. I am impatient for Mrs Baines’s tea-party now; wishing to be in a position to judge Mr Porteous for myself, so as to assess the possible degree of risk for Frances.

I have learnt a good deal about the man myself, by way of Frances. I just happened to have called on her last night, on my way home from a late walk with Florence, and she asked me to come in and have a glass of wine with her. The glass of wine led to a salad and sandwich supper, which we prepared ourselves in the rather cavernous manor house kitchen; Mrs Meade being what Frances called “generally just a little incapacitated” by that time of the evening. And it was over coffee later, in the splendid, panelled library that Frances still seems to speak and think of as her father’s , that she told me how Mr Porteous had come in with her there that morning to look at the books, and had seemed so pleased with her suggestion that it would be an admirable place for him to work and study in, whilst making the initial preparations for his book.

“He plans to write a comparative history of the three great Abrahamic faiths, you see” she explained. I thought she blushed a little for it - for the speed, that is, with which all of this must seem to me to have been accomplished. Pamela had rebuked her for it a little already, as a matter of fact; had said she ought to have waited a little, before rushing in with what might seem to Mr Porteous to be somewhat undue haste.

“But after all” as she was quick to try to explain. “It’s really no more than Pamela herself has done, is it? Inviting him to tea and arranging a party, and all that sort of thing… Though as she points out, she doesn’t do these things alone. She has Roland with her. For backup, she says - though what I think she really means is for propriety. And I daresay she’s right. I have been a little hasty perhaps. But you see, I had sent Mr Jessop round with a basket: no impropriety in that, I thought. And then Mr Porteous called so promptly to return it. And seemed so interested in everything here. I showed him the knot garden, and he loves a knot garden above all things - he had one himself, in the garden of the old rectory in Stroud, though he grew mostly lavender there... Asparagus too. He was most impressed with Mr Jessop’s asparagus bed; he has never managed to grow it successfully himself. One thing seemed to lead to another, at any rate, and before we knew it, we had come in here to the library, and Mrs Meade had been thoughtful enough to prepare coffee …. And it was over coffee that he told me about his book, which was his real reason for retiring rather early from the ministry. Though of course retirement would never have been possible for him, had it not been for his aunt’s unexpected bequest of the house…….. The house had made all the difference in the world. He had only his stipend, you know, so little. And life can be very difficult for a clergyman, still - it isn’t only in the pages of Trollope - when he hasn’t private means ……….. “

I did not think this a very encouraging beginning, and was still more dismayed to learn the further extent of Mr Porteous’s confidences. The idea for the book had evidently been floating in his mind for years. He had actually begun a doctoral thesis on the theme, in his post-graduate days at Cambridge years ago; but had forsaken it then in favour of ordination. It had been only recently, and with the influence of what he called ‘the new kind of terrorism that had begun to stalk the Western world” (so eloquently put, Miss Fanshawe thought), that the idea had begun to re-surface. There was every kind of precedent for such a book, Mr Porteous thought: the Bible – the Old Testament in particular – resounding so, with battles of every kind. The Jews of the Old Testament had actually plundered and slewn their way to Jerusalem – and generally with God to one extent or other at their head. It was very discouraging, Mr Porteous thought, to see how little two thousand years had done, to improve or simplify matters there.

“He has such a clever, and original way of expressing himself” Miss Fanshawe interposed at this point. “He can be quite amusing, even when talking about the Old Testament - he must have been very moving, in his robes and surplice, from the pulpit…”

It is seldom necessary – or indeed possible – to break in on Frances when she is in full narrative flight. She seems to gather an impetus of her own along the way. But I thought she had begun to flounder a little here, so I intervened, to try to bring her back on course. “And his book, then?” I gently prompted her. “Is that to be about the Middle East situation too?”

“Well, not directly of course…..” She seemed grateful for my interest, and able to take up her theme again with renewed eagerness. “What he wants to point up are the similarities, not the differences – he thinks that’s probably where a solution will be found to lie. And he dares to think that he might be able to do it better, or less explosively anyway, than some others who are more directly involved. I think he meant army personnel, you know; and politicians, and people of that general sort…. Meaning no disparagement of dear Bill, of course – whose own contributions have been so very wonderful! But Mr Porteous, being a retired priest, and really quite obscure and elderly … “Putting his grisled head above the parapet for an hour”, was the way he expressed it, to me. So very self-effacing, I thought! What could there possibly be that was risky, or politically volatile, in that…..? “

The evening came to an end soon after that, and I confess that I left her with misgivings very little allayed. It seemed a great deal to have learnt from a man in the course of one short visit. Now, I learn that he is to come to the manor house one morning soon, to try out the experiment of working in her father’s library. I wonder why he can’t set up a study of his own, in old Miss Porteous’s house; he must have rooms enough there, heaven knows! But I have made up my mind to say nothing of all this for the present, to Bill - since who knows what precipitate action of his own he might feel impelled to take?

Mrs Roland Baines 'At Home'

In all the flurry of meeting Frances Fanshawe, and visiting her in her big, chaotic house (and watching Mr Porteous pass by of course, with all its implications of interesting things to come), I have forgotten to mention anything about my new little dog, Florence. Florence is the name that was just discernible on her collar when the Rescue people found her sitting beside a lamp-post in Putney a month ago; and since it is her only worldly possession, and the only word in any language to which she seems able to respond, I have not felt able to deprive her of it. She’s a woe-begone little creature still, it has to be said. She spends most of her time shivering on the edge of the basket I have put under the kitchen table for her, or attaching herself to my lower legs like a second skin when I drag her out for a walk in the mornings. She trembles violently, poor little thing, at sight of every cat or quirrel that passes - and is in mortal terror of Bill’s good-hearted Monty, who would befriend her if he could.

I mean to persevere with her though. I’m convinced there’s a lively, happy dog inside her somewhere, and it’s up to me now, to try to bring her out. It took me a month to acquire her after all; the adoption procedure for stray dogs being every bit as rigorous, it seems, as that for human children. She is here to stay - though Bill takes a very dim view of her I’m afraid. It’s his opinion that if I had been going to get a dog, I might at least have tried to find one that actually looked, and sounded, and conducted itself like a regular dog. I think he fears that the Brigadier’s mastiff might actually eat her (he has established fairly cordial relations with the Brigadier by now); and that he and Monty would lose any credibility they might have established on the common, were they to be associated with a dog that cringed and cowered as my poor Florence does - and that bore, moreover, so entirely un-doglike a name. It does seem to me to indicate a certain smallness of spirit on Bill's part. I’d have expected the survivor of so many war zones to have exhibited just a little more valour. But canine credibility must be taken seriously, I daresay, when so many of a man's usual props in life have been summarily removed. Bill is struggling still, I know, to come to terms with what he calls being permanently 'grounded'. It's a very different kind of battle that he's involved with now. And so just for the moment, I'm taking a different route from Bill's across the common, when I go out with Florence for her walk.

It was on my return from one of those still very half-hearted excursions with Florence yesterday, that I learned from Bill that I'd had another visitor in my absence. A large woman in some kind of outlandish get-up with a hat attached, was his first rather discouraging description of her. And it wasn't improved by his adding, when pressed, that for him she had resembled nothing so much as an armoured vehicle advancing; and that he and Monty had kept their heads down in the attic, until she had posted her note and rumbled away again. “She didn’t ring the bell then?” I asked. To which he replied that she had rung repeatedly; so often and so long indeed, that he and Monty had positively begun to fear for their lives. “I think you’ll find that she’s a very emphatic kind of woman” was his next observation. “There was something about the particular angle of her hat that bespoke emphasis . There was the mark of the dowager about every inch of her, what’s more – and believe me, she covers a lot of inches! So that if you’re absolutely determined to make a friend of her (and I beg you in advance to think very carefully about it before you do) , you’ll be so good, please, as to leave Monty and me out of it.”

He then handed me her note, which was written on a card of cream vellum, and bore a printed inscription at the top that read “Mrs Roland Baines, 3 Willow Cottages, The Common”; beneath which was scrawled, in a large hand, the rather cryptic message “At home Tuesday April 17th at three thirty. Do come and meet some of your neighbours.” This was unfamiliar territory for me, and I was at a loss to know quite how I ought to respond. How long ago was it, I wondered, since women had abjured the tradition of describing themselves by their husband’s name? How long since I had received the kind of invitation which spoke of being “at home”, come to that? And what, precisely should it be taken to mean? My only resource seemed to be phone Frances Fanshawe again, in the hope that she too might have received an invitation to the mysterious repast. Thankfully, Frances was in, and was, as always, wonderfully accommodating.

“Oh yes, it’s to be a little tea-party” she explained. “I’m to go too, and Mr Porteous I believe – and even Rose perhaps, who has returned a day or two ahead of the Macauleys in order to open up the house for them, and see that everything is in perfect readiness for their return. It’s a little service she always performs for them - she’s so obliging. And don’t worry about what to wear, dear – Pamela’s perfectly informal: just a little silk tea dress will do…………”

“So that’s all right then!” I remarked to Bill later. “Just a little silk tea dress – the very sort of thing, of course, with which my wardrobe is simply overflowing!”

Bill's comment about tea dresses is unprintable here, I'm sorry to say. But since it is one of the besetting problems of my life that I never have anything to wear to any occasion that ever presents itself, I have more or less made up my mind to go into John Lewis at the first opportunity, to see what they have in the way of little silk tea dresses.

Enter Mr Porteous

I was making coffee this morning, when Bill called down to me from his little bolthole in the attic. “Good lord, Bea” he roared; “Come and have a look at this!” I rushed upstairs, fearing to find a burst water tank or a missing slate at least, but all I saw, on looking through the window as directed, was the perfectly ordinary spectacle of a man walking in all innocence along our little footpath below. Nothing so very remarkable about that, I thought: people walk along our little footpath at all times of the day and night, and the only thing we have to wonder about them is, how much of our daily lives, and our two little back gardens are they able to peer into, as they pass? This man of Bill’s wasn’t even peering; he was walking with a measured stride, his rather fine, silvering head facing straight ahead, and held at the angle not so much of inquisitiveness, as of a rather quiet contemplation.

“So?” I said. “There’s a man walking along the footpath. I don’t know who he is, and nor, I suspect, do you?” But Bill did know who he was: that was the point. “It’s that parson all the women were in love with back in Stroud!” he explained. “Are you expecting a new vicar? You’ll like this one if so. He’s a splendid example of the type – St Paul himself incarnate, I always thought.”

It would have been vain in me to have pointed out that I was in no position to be looking for a new vicar, since I hadn‘t yet taken the trouble to make myself acquainted with any of the existing ones. But I was just a little intrigued nonetheless; not least by the fact that in his former domestic existence, Bill had evidently taken at least a passing interest in members of the clergy. I thought his metaphor smacked of impiety however, and said so. To which he replied “Oh come, Bea, you know my views on parsons - that they are of all categories of persons probably the most expendable. But this one loomed so very large in my ex-wife’s pantheon, and in that of all her friends, that I was obliged to take some heed of him , whether I would or no.”

I do indeed know Bill’s views on the clergy, having been subjected to an exposition of them on more than one occasion. And though I am not a regular church-goer myself, I have to admit that his remarks about clergymen have sometimes provoked me to indignation on their account; and that there was a moment, in the anxious hours that preceded his open heart surgery, when I went so far as to suggest to him that a quiet half hour with the hospital chaplain might have helped to set his mind at ease. I remember only too well what his reply was then. He had seen the hospital chaplain, and he knew the type; which was that of the gentleman priest wearing the velvet jacket. Of all the possible variants of the class, that was the one he disliked the most. His trouble might be deep, he said, but he was not yet reduced to mouthing platitudes he’d never pretended to believe in. He had seen horrors in his time; too many, and not all of them perpetrated by benighted foreigners living in far-away places. He took my point, but all the same, and my obviously sincere concern for him notwithstanding, he thought it unreasonable of me to ask him to start putting his faith now in parsons.

There had seemed to be no answer to that at the time; any more than there was reason to suppose, now, that Bill could be persuaded to take any other than an ironic view of passing clergymen. I did feel a degree of curiosity about the man myself, though; and when once Bill had drunk his coffee and set off with Monty for his morning walk, I phoned Miss Fanshawe – or Frances, as I really must steel myself to begin to call her. I mentioned to her in passing that we had seen a rather distinguished-looking man walk past, and that Bill had claimed him as a clergyman he’d once known; which prompted in her, just as I had hoped, a little torrent of pertinent information.

“Oh, that must have been Mr Porteous!” she eagerly exclaimed. “He has just moved into old Miss Porteous’s house – you know, the rather dilapidated one, with the broken front gate, that’s next-door but one to Rose Mountjoy's. The old lady died last winter – such a fearsome old thing she was, especially after she took to getting about in that motorised chair of hers. There was simply no avoiding her, if you met her on the street - dogs and children could be seen to scatter, ahead of her! She left the house to Mr Porteous, who is her nephew, and has taken early retirement from his parish in Gloucestershire, to come down here and devote his life to writing books. Very much the same thing as my father did, in fact – it seems to me it will make a connection between us. He has two daughters, one of whom has just opened a little handicrafts shop on the corner of the Common. Such pretty hand-made things she has – such a pretty creature she is, herself, come to that, with a little fair head like a buttercup’s. You must call in to see her…….. Her name is Anne Porteous, and he has another daughter, whose name is Julia, but I don’t know where she lives at present. I daresay you wonder how I know so much about him, since he’s only been here a week. But you see, Mrs Baines and Roland have already called on him, and had him round to tea – and they told me all about him over lunch, yesterday. They were most agreeably impressed with him. He’s everything one expects of a clergyman, Pamela says (that’s Mrs Baines, you know; her name is Pamela); and yet so very easy, and really quite amusing, conversationally. He and Roland took to one another at once, apparently. I’m wondering if perhaps I might send Mr Jessop round to him – with a little basket of fresh things from the garden, you know. It would be a welcoming gesture, don’t you think…..? Though of course Pamela is already planning a little evening party for him, and she does that sort of thing so very much better than I could……….”

So there it is. Mystery solved, clergyman’s identity established. And it’s pleasant to me to know that there’s someone come to live here who is even newer than Bill and me. It makes me feel quite the old hand indeed - what with Miss Fanshawe’s friendship, and the promise of an altogether admirable Mrs Baines and Roland in the very near future. I don’t expect I’ll call on Mr Porteous myself; I’ll leave that to Frances, who is certain to discover everything one needs to know. I might call at the daughter’s shop, though. I have always been very fond of needlework, and it would be good to get some new ideas.

Miss Fanshawe's account concluded

The days are passing, and still the story of Theodora has not been completed. That’s the trouble with trying to tell it in instalments, on a blog – three days can pass between postings and in the blink of an eye, the story line has become disjointed, the original impetus been lost! Without further ado therefore, I take up the story again, as nearly as possible at just that point where Miss Fanshawe left it the other day.

“ Lady Macauley has her little circle of friends of course” was the way I seem to remember her proceeding. “People she has known for many years, and can depend upon – ‘the Faithful’, her daughter calls them; so touching, I’ve always thought…”

For more intimate knowledge of the Macauleys we would need Mrs Mountjoy however, as Miss Fanshawe next explained. “Dear Rose", she called her; “who lives in the little house with the green gate in the wall, on the high street. It’s connected to the Macauley garden directly at the back by way of another little gate, and Rose is in and out of the Macauley house by that route at all times – the old lady can hardly do without her for an hour, or so I believe. She’s away in Italy with them at present, for example – she goes everywhere with them; and is of all the people in the village, the one who most of all has Lady Macauley’s ear. She is an old school-friend of Belle Macauley the daughter; she stepped in one day to rescue her from bullies in the playground of the little local school, and was taken up by the family on that account….”

“She was Rosemary Betts, then” Miss Fanshawe continued; “ She started to call herself Rose much later, after she had married her third husband, who was Curtis Mountjoy of the Foreign Office – she became quite grand herself, after that. There was talk of Curtis’s receiving his knighthood at one point, but alas, he died before it could be accomplished, and Rose never did quite become Lady Mountjoy.. Such a pity; she’d have liked that. In those days though, she was plain Rosie Betts, from the little brick council house on the wrong side of the road … Rose likes to joke about it now, that long walk of hers, across the road to the Macauley house. It was only a matter of fifty yards or so, she says, but it might have been the other side of the world, for all the difference it made to her. Poor Belle had a hard time of it at that school, from all accounts. Being the little girl from the big house, you know, and very tall and awkward, for a girl. In person she resembled her father, you see, who was always thought rugged, rather than handsome. Tall, and strong-boned - which were excellent things in a rich and powerful man, of course, but rather less effective in a young girl…….. Poor Belle suffered at the hands of the bullies, anyway - but Rose was always there, to step in and help her when it was needed.. Sir Jack believed in state education for his daughter, you see; it was a part of his socialist principles. Though they didn’t seem to have extended to his son – the younger Jack Macauley attended Westminster School, his mother having drawn the line at letting him go away to Eton………..”

Miss Fanshawe made quite a long digression at this point, being eager to tell us something more about the younger Jack Macauley. She remembers him most vividly from the time when she was in her early teens, and he several years older, and just down from Oxford. She only ever saw him from afar, but even she had been able to see what a very special kind of glamour he'd had. What was it, she wondered, that very special quality of his? She hardly knew how to express it for us. Except to say that, for her, he had seemed to be the Young Lochinvar, and Sir Lancelot, and even King Arthur himself, all rolled up in one young man – and that where he was, the wide exciting outer world had always seemed to her to be, also. All the girls were in love with him, anyway. Even Rose herself, at one time. There had been some little romantic incident, at a ball in the Macauley garden (the Macauleys threw the most magnificent parties in those days!). Rose had fancied herself in love with him at any rate, and he with her. But it scarcely lasted for more than an hour,the poor little affair, before Lady Macauley herself had stepped in to put an end to it.

That was the thing, didn’t we see? Rose could be family pet, and Sir Jack Macauley’s ‘pretty, feisty little Rosie’ as much as she would – but when it came to marrying the son and heir, she just wasn’t the right sort. It is Miss Fanshawe’s private opinion that Lady Macauley had received her come-uppance over the affair later, for all that. Since in no time at all after Rose had been dispatched, Jack had taken up with the girl his mother called his ‘fine cold Alice’; a Scottish land-owner’s daughter who had married him, and borne him away, the day after the wedding, to some castle her family had up near Caithness, from which she had seldom permitted him to re-emerge.

Miss Fanshawe had become very pre-occupied with her own thoughts by that stage in her story. Her recollections seemed to have taken her to some place far away in the depths of her memory, from which it was difficult to extract herself. And when she did, it was only to tell us, all in a rush, that nothing had ever been quite the same for Lady Macauley after her beloved Jack had married and gone away. Sir Jack himself had died, as a matter of fact, not so very many years later, and Lady Macauley been rendered desolate by it. She had dressed herself in widow’s weeds as black as those of Queen Victoria herself, a century earlier; had closed the house and gone away, not returning for any length of time for more than twenty years. It had been only two years ago in fact, that she and Belle had permanently returned. Lady Macauley had let it be known at the time that she had come home only to die in her husband’s bed. She was old, and she was tired, she said; she had lost both her Jacks, and she didn’t see what else there was to stay on for. But of course not even a Lady Macauley could die to order, no matter now hard she tried – and to the best of Miss Fanshawe’s knowledge, she continued still in excellent health…

Miss Fanshawe suddenly remembered, then, that she must hasten away herself. She had rambled on far too long already; she must have quite worn us out with her chatter! She had friends coming to lunch, besides – Mrs Baines and Roland, from the pretty cottage beside the pond on the Common. Such very good friends of hers, such charming people; she would arrange to have us come and meet them as soon as it could be arranged. Having said which, and thanked us warmly again, she took her leave, hurrying away along our little garden path, her last words fluttering behind her as she went.

Theodora's story, as told by Miss Fanshawe

I have become fond of Miss Frances Fanshawe over the past few days. I have been to the manor house, and seen the kind of mild domestic chaos in which she lives. I have also seen Mrs Meade the housekeeper; who, possible tipsiness aside, seems a slovernly woman, and not at all the sort to whom one would wish to see Miss Fanshawe’s domestic arrangements entrusted. They seem to have established a kind of equilibrium however, in which everything which needs to be is somehow done, and nothing old or precious there (of which there are many objects, large and small) ever quite gets lost or broken. Far be it from me therefore, especially at this early stage, to make judgments too hastily. It seems to me there will be a new kind of happiness anyway, in simply in getting to know Miss Fanshawe as she is. I call her Frances now, because she asked me to. But the name still comes awkwardly, and in my thoughts she remains,unalterably, Miss Fanshawe

Bill has filled me in a little on her background and present way of life. The thing one has to remember most about her is her extreme unworldliness, he tells me. She grew up as a lonely child in a big house filled with books; in the care of a father whose mind was on higher things than little girls (he was some kind of ecclesiastical scholar, so far as Bill can gather), and a grandmother whose mind was on higher things too; only in her case they were stern, external things, like duty, and decorum, and having an eye at all times upon maintaining one’s position in society. So that a day-dreaming little girl had never quite been able to measure up. Somewhere, between the scholastic father and the severe and worldly grandmother, the little girl Frances had managed to tumble up. That was Bill’s way of putting it, and I am happy to accept it from him, since he seems to have developed a peculiarly tender regard for Miss Fanshawe, and must be taken, at least at this early stage, to be her best-informed and most sympathetic advocate.

What he further tells me is that, Miss Fanshawe’s universe being peopled largely by the characters she has met between the covers of the books in her father’s library, I should expect to find a certain ‘other-worldliness’ in her, too. And since this is so very much what I did find, when, as if at the pressing of a switch, I drew her on the subject of the Macauleys the other day, I feel I can do no better than reproduce her narrative for you here, as far as I can recall it and more or less verbatim. It does seem likely to run to several thousand words however, for which I apologise in advance. But since she knows so very much more about the Macauleys than I do myself, and is prepared moreover to be so very much more discursive about them than I would dare to be, I'll go ahead anyway. I shall simply try to ease the load a little, by putting it out in one or two manageable instalments…

“I’m not on personal visiting terms with Lady Macauley myself, of course…” was the way Miss Fanshawe began her account. “She’s rather exclusive you know - I wouldn’t put it more strongly than that. And who would blame her in any case, at her age, and with all the curiosity that has always surrounded her? There was a great deal of talk at one time, but I expect you know all that……. She was so very young, you see, and Sir Jack so very much older, and married, and in the public eye to such a large extent … He was a member of parliament at the time, I believe - though I was a young child myself at the time, and much of it came to me from hearing my grandmother talk about it……She was very disapproving of Sir Jack, and I was never allowed to associate with Belle Macauley or her brother, even though they were much the same age, and looked such fun, and our gardens actually abutted, at their farthest points…….. Sir Jack gave up everything anyway - he was obliged to resign his seat I believe - just to marry Theodora… There were some who said it was almost as great a sacrifice as the king’s had been, a decade earlier ……I expect it was a bitter pill indeed for her parents to have to swallow, though .. The Thanes were very grand, you see, for all that their estates were crumbling and the money running out…. They believed they occupied the very highest plane of the nobility; they recognised few equals in the land, and probably no superiors. I think they hoped that Theodora would have married well, and somehow shored things up for them - though they can hardly have enjoyed being rescued by the man they called the jumped-up shopkeeper……. ‘Sir Nobody from Nowhere’ was the way I think they were accustomed to describe him. Still, there wasn’t a thing they could do about it, when once Theodora’s mind was made up. She was a strong-willed sort of girl, you see – and Jack Macauley’s stores and factories covered five counties by then... He had been knighted by the king besides, the year before, for all manner of philanthropic enterprises in the north; and his wealth, and the range of his influence, must have seemed to that really rather modest rural lord, her father, to extend into regions quite imponderable …….This was not at all the sort of man an outraged father could ‘take out’ in any way; nor one from whom he might seek redress. So they had little alternative but to grit their teeth, and consent to attend the wedding….. And then of course Sir Jack pulled them right back from the brink, afterwards; restoring, unentailing everything ... Though I believe that relations between them never became entirely cordial, and that Theodora herself never forgave them for their condescension towards Jack…..”