In search of a little silk tea dress (again)

Bill is not a happy man. He returned from his walk this morning thoroughly disgruntled, and on my inquiring why the black looks, exploded in wrath, telling me that “ The damned man has taken to walking the dog with her now! So I’ve had to change my route - and poor old Monty has been quite down in the mouth about missing his usual wild plunge in pursuit of Luca!”

I understood that he was referring to Frances Fanshawe and her wayward dog Luca; and that the ‘damned man’ in question must be David Porteous, who has apparently extended his range of influence at the manor house by taking on the disciplining of the dog as well. This was unwelcome news to me – especially since my own, still rather woebegone dog, Florence, has formed an unaccountable attachment to Luca, and will be bereft at being denied his company on the common. I would prefer to hear that David Porteous was loosening rather than tightening his grip at the manor house besides – though the fact that there has been to date no engagement announcement does give me grounds for hope.

Mrs Baines is not so sanguine about it, and has phoned me several times to express her dismay. She thinks that Frances ought to have waited a little, before plunging in at the deep end like that. “So foolish of her!” she says. “But then you see, she has never had a chance to be a girl, and now she’s behaving just like any love-struck teenager.” Roland takes a very dim view of it all too, apparently. Roland goes still further indeed: expressing the view that not only must they now suspend their party of welcome for Mr Porteous indefinitely, but ought probably to cut themselves off from his society altogether. At least until they see in which direction events now proceed.

Pamela has other, more propitious things on her mind at present, mind you. She has had the extreme happiness of receiving a card of invitation from Lady Macauley to attend her garden party on bank holiday Monday. It's the very first time she has been included in such an event, and she is all of a flutter to know what she ought to wear, and whether it might include a hat? This put me in a very difficult position as a matter of fact – recalling, as I did, something that Lady Macauley herself had said, when the subject of Mrs Baines and Roland happened to come up. It was around the time when Pamela was still proposing to hold a welcome party for Mr Porteous, and Rose had been deputed to try to persuade the Macauleys to attend.

“Do remind me who she is” was Lady Macauley’s response to an appeal by Rose. “I daresay I ought to know that before I turn her down. Is she by chance the large lady with the hats, and the very much smaller husband……?”

Rose replied, I seem to remember, that Pamela was certainly large, and Roland rather small – but she didn’t remember any occasion at which she had worn a hat. Or none, at least, which Lady Macauley herself had also attended.

“Oh well, the hat is an illusion I daresay” Lady Macauley replied. “ There are women with whom one somehow feels its presence, even when the object itself is missing. There was something that Jack used to say - that you should never trust a woman whose hats seem larger than her husband, since she’s likely to be a dominatrix.”

With this recollection lurking in the back of my mind, I scarcely knew how to advise Pamela on the hat question. Though I did promise to approach Lady Macauley myself on the subject, and let her know the answer in plenty of time. To date, the occasion to do so has not arisen. I have had an old friend staying with me at the gatehouse for several days, and my pre-occupations, when they have not been with her, have been in trying to decide what to wear to the Macauley garden party myself.

Bill tells me not to agonise about it so. But then, the only question, for him, is whether he ought to wear a tie or not. And since this is usually simply enough solved by arriving with a tie, and slipping it in one’s pocket if it turns out to be inappropriate, I hardly see how he is in a position to judge. I on the other hand, have been in and out of John Lewis again, looking for little silk tea dresses…….

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.

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!

Bill crashes my party

Lady Macauley stayed with me for more than three hours the other day. She leant back in her chair with legs delicately extended, her feet upon a little padded footstool I had provided. She has the slenderest legs, the smallest, prettiest feet. Her feet were encased today in a pair of dove-coloured shoes that buttoned above the ankles; all of a piece they were, with the almost Edwardian elegance of her high-necked dress in finest wool, and of the identical shade of dove grey. She knows just how to dress herself to best effect; accentuating her good points and masking those that are bad. In fact she hasn’t many bad points that I could see - and I hope I shall have learnt something from her style, when once I have reached her advanced age.

She professed herself at home in my sitting room at once, and hoped I’d be kind enough to let her stay a while. There was something unexpectedly pleasant about being in such a very small house, she said; its walls closed in around one so reassuringly, and whatever one might happen to need at any given moment, was scarcely more than an arm’s-length away.

“Only think of it, Belle!” she exclaimed. “Six steps at most, and you’re in the kitchen. With us, there are corridors to cross and flights of stairs to surmount. There’s even a creaking old lift, if one happens to be on the wrong floor! There are dark corners and cold patches - so that I can never be quite sure, when Belle has left me sitting in the panelled parlour and even the sound of her footsteps has vanished, whether it will be ten minutes before she returns, or whether she’ll perhaps have gone forever.“

This seemed to me to create such an arresting image, that my curiosity was aroused at once. I had often wondered how these two women managed alone in so vast and uncompromising a house; and here – especially with the mention of the dark corners and the cold patches – was at least the beginning of an explanation. I took courage in hand, and asked her if with her mention of cold patches, she were suggesting that the house was haunted? It was a remark which might have gone against me, I knew that. I might, with that one rather ill-judged question, have forfeited her good opinion forever. Fortunately, she took it in good part, and gave me much more than I could have hoped for by way of a reply.

“Haunted – oh yes it’s that, undoubtedly!” she said. “You can’t live in a place four centuries old and not be troubled by its former inhabitants now and then. And then you know, it was a place of high political intrigue at one time. They were for the king, the people who built the house and lived there for the first two hundred years. Staunch royalists, all of them– though it’s said that the lady of the house did manage to carry on some sort of amorous association with Mr Cromwell ( who’s not generally known for his amorousness!), whilst secretly supporting Charles. I don’t know how much truth there is in the story. But even if it’s only partly true, one can’t help admiring her, can one? It must have been a very delicate balancing act for any lady to undertake, in any generation."

It is the lady who had the amorous association with Cromwell, apparently, who most often returns to haunt the house. Lady Macauley herself has received no glimpse of her, but Belle has seen her, and so has Rose. Which makes Lady Macauley think that ghosts too, must have their little discriminations. “I daresay they think me too hard a nut to crack” she said. “ For a ghost to function effectively, there must be some vestige of belief at least, in the person whom it’s endeavouring to haunt!” Lady Macauley herself has seen nothing more than a little dog that sometimes runs out ahead of her on wintry nights – and even that apparition, she is inclined to put down to tricks of the light played on dark staircases.

It was not of ghosts we were talking however, when half an hour later, at six o’clock, Bill’s battered old Renault suddenly rattled into our little forecourt. We had moved on by then to that other favoured topic of Lady Macauley’s, the Prime Minister. So that when Bill put his rain-soaked head inside the door, taking in the assembled company with some astonishment, Lady Macauley had just delivered herself of the remark that she supposed we were about to witness the longest goodbye in political history; and that there would almost certainly be a manly tear or two, before it was allowed to end.

“No doubt we shall hear Mr Blair call himself the people’s prime minister” was what she was actually saying at the moment of Bill’s entry. “For all the world as if he thought that democracy itself were something that had been invented by New Labour!”

Bill had heard, and seemed to take it with some exuberance. “Now there’s an interesting idea to come home to!” he said. He was smiling broadly, even as he shook the rain from his overcoat, and threw it over the nearest chair. It all seemed to go on with surprising smoothness from there, and I was rather proud of Bill, to tell the truth. He has a way of filling any room he enters. He’s a big man, with a loud voice and a huge guffaw for a laugh; and his intrusion into this particular little party might very well have caused it to go seriously wrong. It almost did go wrong at one point in fact – though through no fault of Bill’s. Rose it was, who for some reason best known to herself, took it into her head to tackle him over the situation in Iraq.

“I suppose you take the side of Britain and America in all this?” was the way she saw fit to put it. And there was flirtatiousness, as well as challenge in her manner - which was of all approaches she might have made to Bill, the very worst. To my astonishment, he handled it with quiet restraint - though I hoped Rose was too well pleased with her own conversational boldness, to have missed the glance of pure loathing he cast in her direction before he replied. “Oh I never take sides you know” was all he finally said. “If there’s a bad guy in it anywhere, it would be beyond my powers of deduction to say which one.”

He turned away from Rose then, to talk to Lady Macauley and Belle of less inflammatory things. He leant forward and listened, adding something of his own now and then, or throwing his head back to laugh. He was affability itself, and in no time at all had the old lady smiling and nodding back at him, as if she thought him the most delightful man she’d ever met. To Rose he addressed no further word - do her best to draw him though she continued, with visibly growing annoyance, to try to do.

They stayed another hour; and when at last they said they ought to go, it was Bill who held Lady Macauley’s umbrella for her, and conducted her with infinite courtesy to her car. She beckoned me over at the final moment of farewell, and “He does not disappoint one!” she whispered in my ear. “He saw Rose off, and no mistake!” she added, rather less discreetly. “It delighted my old eyes to see it done so well! But you musn’t hide him away in future you know – and must promise to bring him to lunch with us at the earliest possible moment.”

Bill, as I have so often observed, can always spring a fresh surprise on one. And what he said to me of the visit after they’d gone, was not in the least the thing that I’d expected. “That was one entertaining old lady!” he said, when he’d waved the Bentley off around the corner of the common. “ I can’t say as much for her friend of course – I entirely deplore the type as you know. But the old lady and her daughter can call as often as you like.”

Which from Bill, is about as high as personal commendation gets.

I receive a visitation

I had a sort of presentiment that something fairly calamitous was likely to happen, on Thursday. Perhaps it was because, after a reasonably promising start to the morning, it rained voluminously again in the afternoon? Or perhaps I was unconsciously preoccupied with something that Rose Mountjoy had said to me when I met her on the high street that morning ?

“Lady Macauley seems to have taken rather a fancy to you” Rose informed me, in that ever-so-slightly superior way she has. I think she must have picked it up from long association with the Macauleys; or from marriage to the almost Sir Curtis Mountjoy - I’m certain it can’t have been the manner she started out with in life. She went on at any rate to let me know that Lady Macauley thinks me a “sensible kind of woman”. Which might not seem high praise to me, she added, but which is in fact Lady-Macauley-speak for her having decided that I might be the sort of person whom it would amuse her to invite to lunch now and then.

“She would prefer it if you were to bring your brother with you of course,” Rose went on to tell me. “She shines most radiantly in the presence of men - and especially those whom she considers to have distinguished themselves in some way or other. She has formed a very high opinion of Bill – who has just that height and general ruggedness, she says, that she adored so in her own Jack! They are not qualities often met with in men today, she feels. And she has never met a foreign correspondent, besides. She thinks it a most original occupation, and is certain Bill would have many highly amusing things to say. I don't think she would expect him to dwell on the more dreadful aspects of his wars, mind you – so perhaps you ought to warn him in advance? And I think she’s likely to invite you first on your own, in any case. Always in the expectation, of course, that the next time, you’ll be prevailed upon to bring Bill along with you.”

I can’t remember exactly what I said in response to all this. I think I probably prevaricated wildly: being conscious that Bill would as soon lunch with Lady Macauley (and with Rose herself), as he would walk over hot coals, or plunge himself in a tankful of piranhas. I seemed to hear him saying something of the sort at any rate - and knew at once that I was going to be called upon to exercise every ounce of my ingenuity, if I were to spare him this new exigency.

Still, it ought to have prepared me for what was to occur later that day. I ought, at the very least, to have known better than to go out into the garden in the rain, wearing baggy trousers and an old sweater of Bill’s that reached almost to my knees and was ragged at the elbows. That was exactly what I did do though; and that my precise garb, when at four o’clock that afternoon an ancient Bentley reversed in stately fashion into our little public parking place, and Belle Macauley herself climbed out, to come across and call to me over the wall.

“I can’t apologise enough for calling on you unannounced like this!” she said – and there was everything about her to suggest she really meant it. “But we just happened to be passing. We had tried to go to Hampton Court, but were rained off, and now Mummy wants to know if you would be kind enough to ask us in? It’s the most frightful imposition, I know, and of course I’ll make your excuses to Mummy, and make her understand, if you really can’t endure the thought…”

She looked so utterly contrite and uncomfortable about it, poor woman, that I took pity on her at once, and said that of course they must come in. Provided they would overlook my own dishevelled state that was, and the horrible condition in which I was afraid I’d left my sitting room. Belle said that it was an act of mercy on my part, and that she’d make sure her mother understood. “I’ll explain that you have been gardening in the rain; and take as long as possible about getting her in! But please don’t mind about your appearance - Mummy's quite accustomed to seeing me in the same condition. And in any case must be prepared to take her chances, if she will come crashing in on people like this!”

She smiled at me in warm and friendly fashion as she said it, and I thought there was everything to like about her, just as I had expected. She was as good as her word, too: it took full five minutes to get Lady Macauley out of the car, and up the garden path beneath a large umbrella. Giving me time to remove boots and sweater, and run a hand rather desperately through my wet hair. Time to plump a cushion or two indeed, and arrange the best armchair, in the best position, for the reception of Lady Macauley.

“How charmingly you have arranged the old place!” was what the old lady exclaimed, on finally being seated, and having a cushion carefully placed behind her, by Belle. “I do believe we’d have been perfectly happy and comfortable here ourselves, don’t you Belle? So very much more convenient, certainly, than our present quarters! I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.”

She went on then to look around at everything in such measured fashion, and with such a discerning eye, that I feared every dusty corner of mine must have been unearthed, and she would be asking me, next, to tell her what it was I paid my housekeeper to do. I was quite ready to explain indeed, that I employed no housekeeper, my means allowing for no such thing – but she forestalled me, having found something at last upon which her eyes could alight with genuine appreciation. “ How pretty they are, those two little samplers of yours!” she exclaimed; going on to ask if they were my own work, and seeming vaguely disappointed when I explained that they were in fact the work of Mr Porteous’s daughter Anne, who had the little handicrafts shop on the corner of the Common.

“Have you met Mr Porteous?” I then inquired. “ He seems to have created quite an interest in the village just lately.”

It was a rather desperate conversational ploy, I knew it; but the best I could come up with at short notice, and disadvantaged as I felt myself to be, hovering there beside her chair, and wondering at what moment I ought to ask if she’d like a cup of tea. Fortunately, she took it up with apparent enthusiasm.

“Oh yes, Mr Porteous!” she said. “It seems to me I hear of no-one else these days. You must meet Mr Porteous, they all tell me, he’s so very comme il faut and charming! But just between you and me, I could have wished he’d been anything other than a clergyman. I have quite enough of that, with the Rev. Mr Wainright coming every month in dreadful state to inquire after the condition of my soul. Just as if he thought there were anything in the world he could do about it, at this advanced stage…..”

There didn’t seem to be anything very meaningful I could say in reply to this. I thought of twenty things that Bill might have said - but feared they would have been inappropriate to the occasion. So I merely smiled, with what I hoped would be just the right degree of sympathetic fellow feeling – I wanted it to appear, I daresay, that I too was accustomed to have to endure the visits of clergymen coming to inquire after the condition of my soul... After which I said I would go away a moment if she didn't mind, to make tea for us all. Leaving Belle and Rose to take up and parry the questions of Mr Wainright and Mr Porteous, as best they could.

Alas though, my daily allotted span has already been exceeded! I don’t know how it is the words pile up so, but there it is, and I feel I must leave you for today. Hoping, perhaps, that you will come back again tomorrow, to hear what next ensued….

Out of the rain of a bank holiday Monday

Oh how it did rain, on Monday! It was bank holiday of course, so what could one expect? Bill’s little vegetable plot was almost washed away, and all evidence of my murderous activities with slug pellets went with it. It was excellent weather for snails however, so I daresay I shall have to commit at least one more act of slaughter before he returns. I have never been fond of bank holidays, to tell the truth. It has always seemed to me that the world and its wife shut up shop and went elsewhere on such days – so that if one didn’t have anything particularly special and wonderful to do oneself , one must somehow have miserably failed at life.

I determined to do something anyway, weather notwithstanding, so I took up my largest umbrella and walked out across the empty common where the rain lashed down, thinking I would perhaps call on Pamela, to put her mind at rest over Frances and Mr Porteous. But when I reached her house, and thought of Roland, and teacups amidst the chintz, my nerve failed me and I strode right past, head down, hoping they wouldn’t catch sight of me and bid me come in. They didn’t – mercifully; so on I went, dismissing the idea of Frances, for some reason, and not yet feeling quite able to call unannounced on Rose, or anyone else. Well, there is no-one else, come to think of it. When I speak of Frances, and Pamela, and Rose Mountjoy, I come to the end of my present acquaintance.

I don’t even mention David Porteous, you will notice. Though the idea of calling upon him unexpectedly out of the rain did intrigue me for a moment. How would he respond, I wondered? And my answer came , swift as the falling rain itself: he would respond as he did to everything else, with perfect urbanity and charm. He would do what he could with his aunt’s teacups and, rising above any inadequacy he might feel over the condition of her armchairs, have me worshipping at the shrine in five minutes flat. I have a natural aversion to worshipping at shrines however – and besides, my boots were muddy and my hair a mess. So I walked past Mr Porteous’s house too, and continued on my random way.

There is something rather pleasant about walking in the rain in fact, when once one has become accustomed to it. So I let my footsteps take me where they would, along this narrow lane and that, enjoying the unaccustomed views of people’s rear gardens; arriving at the main Richmond to Kingston road at last, and crossing it, finding myself all of a sudden at the entrance to a sweet old garden centre. I had heard of this place, which has been transformed lately from pleasantly run-down nursery, to centre of excellence for all things horticultural, and latest place to go for fashionable out-of-Londoners, who want somewhere different for their lunch.

I was charmed with the place at once. What it consists of most of all, is three long old greenhouses , with an Italian-style covered courtyard in between. It has been set up as a commercial enterprise, I knew that, and most of what one sees is actually for sale. But I sensed the hand of a master craftsman here – whoever has made this place, I thought, has done it for the love of beauty alone. The greenhouses have been arranged as a series of extending vistas, with every object, large and small, having been given its own lovingly appointed place. So that interspersed among the towering orchids, and the scented climbers scrambling over roofs, are cabinets of old books and antique table linen; bottles of precious oils and spices; chairs and tables for sale, or simply to sit down upon - and a series of vast ornamental screens, and gates, and doorways, collected, I believe, from all around the world.

The courtyard was drenched and deserted today, so I wandered, charmed, about the greenhouses, picking up little delicacies and putting them in my basket as I went. I was conscious that there were people still sitting animatedly over lunch at one end of the larger greenhouse, but I hurried away from them and found a homelier place in which to buy a pot of steaming coffee and a slice of home-made cake. I could carry them, so the pleasant young man in the café told me, to any spot I would, so I sat down at an ancient table beside a screen - observing, with joy, that neither would have been out of place in the garden of a Tuscan palazzo; and it was here, that Rose Mountjoy found me.

She had come across from the place where the beautiful people sat; she came quietly, and caught me unawares. She was lunching with Lady Macauley and Belle, who had spotted me, she said, and wondered if I wouldn’t bring my coffee over and join them for half an hour? Thus it was that I found myself all at once in presence of Theodora - with only two minutes in which to make the transition between what I remembered of her, and what there is today. I was very excited at the time – but I relate it to you now with the relative quietness of recollection, and with what I hope will be a fair representation of the truth.

Lady Macauley, as Theodora has become, is a very fine, and still rather beautiful old lady. She is beautiful in that way that the Mitford sisters were in old age; which is to say small, and delicately thin, but dressed in palest lavender up to the throat; with facial bone structure more or less intact, and something strangely luminous still, about the eyes. Theodora’s eyes had been celebrated, in their time. Sonnets had been written about them, and nobody had ever been quite able to say whether they were mostly grey, or green, or simply silvery blue. I too found myself wondering about the precise colour of Theodora’s eyes; even as I was receiving Lady Macauley’s rather languid outstretched hand, and murmuring what I could by way of a response to her greeting.

It was only in what she actually said, that the myth of Theodora was finally dispelled for me, and I was able to see that what she had become was a rather spoilt and querulous old woman, who was examining me head to toe, and would be prepared to endure me only if she thought I might amuse her for an hour. “I have been hearing all about you” was what she actually said. “About you and your brother Bill, who is rather famous, they tell me. I gather you live in the old gatehouse, and that your brother is away at present. Which I think a pity, since I should like to have met him.”

It didn’t get very much better than that, to tell the truth. We were together for no more than ten minutes, talking rather desultorily of this and that, before the old lady suddenly decided she was impossibly weary, and ought to be taken home at once. I rose to see her go, but found she had forgotten me already. She didn’t offer me her hand again, and made no mention of a further meeting. And it was only after they had disappeared from sight at the end of the extending vista of the greenhouse, that I realised I had exchanged no word with Belle Macauley, who had sat silent throughout the short exchange, who had looked awkward, but whom I sensed I should have liked.

Bill was not encouraged, by the way, when I described this encounter to him over the telephone later that night. He thinks he’ll probably add an extra week to his fishing trip; since so far as he can see, I am resolved to make his life as uncomfortable as possible, and the dowager count is rising by the hour!

In the garden with Mr Porteous

I have to hold very fast to my scepticism when in presence of Mr Porteous. In particular, must I persist in thinking of him as Mr Porteous, for example; since if I did not, I should probably find myself going all Jane Eyre on you: saying “Reader, he affected me!” - and calling him ‘dear David’, just like all the rest. I had only to be left alone in the garden with him for ten minutes the other day, to be reminded of just how vital it is to keep up one’s guard when in company with him.

He does that to you; he has a way of making you want to fill his silences, make things easy for him. It’s a considerable art. One that he perfected, I daresay, whilst gazing down upon his adoring congregation from the pulpit. He has had years in which to study its effects after all - and for my own part, well, it was only by summoning the image of Bill’s jubilant countenance (Bill would have relished the idea of my being made subject against my will!), that I was spared the ignominy of breaking out at once in foolish chatter again.

He and Frances had been engaged in making little water-colour sketches of the knot garden when I interrupted them. Mr Porteous was poised with brush-stroke in the making, but was quick to stand up from his easel and put out his hand to me in greeting; explaining as he did so that in this enterprise, as in so many others, it was Frances who led, he who entirely ineptly followed. “ I have very little aptitude, I’m afraid” he told me (he had the most engaging small smile for it). “But Miss Fanshawe has been kind enough to take me in hand. She‘s finding it uphill work though. My daughters have considerable skill in all branches of painting and the plastic arts, but it’s a gift they must have inherited from their mother, since I have never been able to lay claim to any such thing myself.”

Frances fluttered some kind of self-deprecatory little response to this. She had been painting in water colour since she was a small girl, she explained; her father had been fond of it too. But she had never received the least tuition, and didn’t believe she had progressed beyond the entirely amateurish stage. She thought Mr Porteous under-estimated himself, besides. “His little sketch of the knots was most accurate,” she said. “And I think he has captured the mood of the garden extremely well.” She took up his picture to show me, wanting to know if I didn’t agree with her? She was very pink beneath her sun-hat, and I thought her hand trembled a little, but she was doing her best to seem perfectly at ease.

She talked with me a little longer – she missed Bill and Monty on the common, but she was so pleased to hear about his fishing trip, and hoped it would help restore him to full health. She remembered then that Mrs Meade had promised to bring tea at four o’clock; and since that hour had already passed, and still no sign, she thought she ought to go and see what had become of her. Having said which, she drifted off in the direction of the house; leaving me in silent confrontation with Mr Porteous across the easels, wondering what I might conceivably say that would be of interest to him.

It occurred to me that Frances’s reference to Bill might provide a start, so I ventured to suggest that it might interest Mr Porteous to know that my brother, too, was writing a book about his experiences in the Middle East? I knew I did Bill no favours in linking his book with that of David Porteous – there could hardly have been any juxtaposition I might have hit upon indeed, that he would actually have disliked more! But if Mr Porteous had heard of Bill, he was prepared to show no sign of it. He only remarked that of course his own small offering was unlikely to cause much of a stir. He did not expect to set the world alight with his musings, he said – but he had dared to think he might kindle a spark or two.

I murmured what I could in response to this. I think I said something to the effect that there was need, in this particular field, for a study from every possible angle. But his message had not escaped me; and it was clear, from the way he removed his eyes from mine to gaze, meditatively, at some point in the middle distance above my head, that he thought there was room in this garden for only one man of distinction at a time.

I tried the subject of his daughter next, mentioning that I had visited her shop, and thought she had arranged it so artistically. “She makes such pretty things too – and all herself, she tells me! I simply couldn’t resist buying two of her samplers, and an embroidered cushion. They look so charming in my little sitting room at the gatehouse. ” I was gushing, I knew it; and was not proud of myself. Nor was I prepared for his response, which came only after a considerable silence, and which I thought, in all the circumstances, just a little sharp.

“Oh yes, the shop…” he said - and it was remarkable to me, how much of pure dismissiveness he could put into that one word. He had collected himself the next moment, though, and went on in more light-hearted vein. “She would have her little shop, you know! It was not in the least what I had hoped for her. And I’m afraid she will make a very poor sort of shop-keeper - giving away all her prettiest things to the first person who expresses an interest in them, and operating at a loss! Personally, I thought it a poor sort of use to which to put her inheritance from her aunt. And a poor sort of return, come to that, for all the money I have been required to expend on her art school education!”

He smiled very pleasantly whilst delivering himself of these remarks. But there was a coldness beneath, which made me sorry I had introduced the subject of Anne and her shop at all. I felt a sudden stab of compassion for the girl indeed: it couldn’t be easy, I thought, to find favour in the eyes of such a father. On the whole I was very glad when at length the clematis curtain parted again, and Frances had returned; followed closely by Mrs Meade, and each of them bearing heavily laden trays. Mr Porteous sprang up at once to do what he could to relieve them of their burdens, and there followed a short period of intense activity, during which tables were arranged and teapots put down. I was glad of the distraction, and found myself able to breath more easily again. The moment had come and gone, I thought, in which I might have heard myself doing the unthinkable - which was to say challenging the unimpeachable Mr Porteous; and on his own home ground at that.

Tea passed pleasantly enough, and I stayed another forty minutes or so. Mrs Meade and Frances between them had gone to a good deal of trouble in the matter of cakes and sandwiches, and I didn’t want to seem ungracious by rushing away too soon. Mr Porteous’s smooth surface had been entirely restored, besides. He chatted amiably about this and that, and was gracious kindness itself, toward Frances. I have to admit that I saw nothing in his conduct or demeanour to suggest that there was anything more than a perfectly innocent friendship between them - and I fully intend to apprise Rose and Pamela of the fact.

I had received a glimpse of something else in him however. I had known it must be there, so it hardly surprised, though did alarm me a little. I mean to hold on to it, at any rate. Mr Porteous is not quite what he seems: Bill insisted on it, and I now believe he was right. I’m not at all sure what I’ll be able to do if Frances takes it into her head to fall in love with him – but I shall continue to try to keep her welfare very closely within my sights.