Progress of the party

“Oh good lord, just look at Mummy now!” cried Belle Macauley, as she and Frances and I carried our trays out into the garden on the afternoon of my tea-party last week. “First she gate-crashed your party, and now she seems to have appropriated it –and is behaving just as if she thought it were her own!”

It was true that in the fifteen minutes or so during which we had been busy in the kitchen, Lady Macauley had succeeded not only in acquainting herself with most of my guests, but also in collecting what had all the appearance of a little coterie around her, at the table in the gazebo. David Porteous was there, and so were his daughters. Amy, the pretty fair-haired younger one was seated beside her on the right, listening, and smiling, and doing her best to seem at ease; while her sister Imogen, dark-eyed and sharply glancing, sat looking distinctly uncomfortable on her left. Imogen at least seemed unmoved by anything that Lady Macauley was saying to her; and there was that about her expression which seemed to say she would exert herself, conversationally, for no old woman, not even the very grandest or most presumptuous; and that she had almost certainly been dragged there by her father entirely against her will.

Imogen’s skirt was very short and her legs, by contrast, very long. So that none of the men present knew quite what to do with their eyes. I noticed Bill’s eyes, and those of the Brigadier, being drawn, and riveted a moment, before they collected themselves, and sharply looked away. Even poor Roland was affected – though a severe sideways glance from Pamela soon pulled him up, and restored his gaze to a more proper contemplation of a clump of trees in the middle distance. Imogen herself seemed oblivious of the attention she was receiving. Or if she saw it, which I thought likely, chose to disregard it; doubtless telling herself there were better ways to spend an afternoon than sitting about in somebody’s garden being ogled by a group of rather dreadful old men.

Rose was in the gazebo too; sitting somewhat behind the others, and looking a little stiff, I thought, as if she believed her rightful place had on this occasion been usurped. She was doing her best to engage the attention of David Porteous; but I could see it was a losing battle, for he was leaning back in his seat with his customary meditative look, and evidently had eyes and ears, and the occasional small, carefully measured smile, only for Lady Macauley and his daughters. Most of my other guests, among whom were Pamela and Roland, stood about in little groups just outside the gazebo, chatting among themselves as apparently nonchalantly as they could, but glancing inwards all the while, as if they hoped at any moment to receive the call to climb the steps and join the inner circle.

Lady Macauley looked up at our approach, and called blithely to us. “I think I’m going to like your Mr Porteous after all!” she cried. “He has all the priestly virtues and none of the drawbacks so far as I can see. Only think of it – we have been together full ten minutes, and he hasn’t raised the question of my immortal soul once!”

Belle winced, and her sigh of resignation was long and deep. “What can you do with her?” she softly wailed. “The fact is, I gave up trying long ago – and can only hope you’ll excuse her impertinence on the grounds of her extreme old age. Though the truth is she has been impertinent all her life, and age has really nothing whatever to do with it!”

Neither Frances nor I knew quite how to respond to this, and were glad to be spared the effort of attempting it, by the arrival in our midst of David Porteous, and Bill, and Bill’s brigadier, who had come to insist upon relieving us of our trays. The trays disposed, and tea laid out, a little flurry of introductions followed. David brought Frances forward to be presented to Lady Macauley, who looked hard at her a moment, before extending a languid hand and murmuring something vague which seemed to contain a reference to her engagement, and her grandmother... This caused a momentary awkwardness: producing on Frances’s part a deep blush, and on Belle’s, another sharp intake of breath. For as each of them knew only too well, there had existed between the Macauleys and Frances’s grandmother, a fierce mutual animosity that had soured relations from the first moment, and had never been resolved.

Lady Macauley chose to ignore old feuds today however; though it was clear that Frances herself held very little interest for her, and she had turned, the next moment, to call Belle over to be introduced to David Porteous. This was the moment Belle had dreaded, of course. I felt for her acutely, and had just time, before moving on to welcome and talk to other guests, to witness her response to it. I had wondered how she would fare beneath that particular considered scrutiny, and I hoped her nerve would hold. I believe it did; though I could not help but see how taken aback she was, by the unexpectedly powerful physical presence of the man. I believe that the momentary touch of his hand produced little shocks in her, just as it had once done in me - and that it had suddenly become of vital importance to her that she should not stumble in his presence, or say anything which he might consider dull, or foolish.

It is the lot of the hostess though, to be able to involve herself only peripherally in her own party. I was obliged to leave the group in the gazebo at that point, to move about among my other guests. Tea must be served, and everyone made as welcome, and as much at their ease as it was in my power to do. Bill helped where he could – especially with Pamela, for whose sake, in a sense, the party had been convened; and with whom he in fact took the kind of trouble that I knew he couldn’t possibly be enjoying. I saw him engaged in long and earnest conversation with Roland, for example – for which act of heroic self-denial I vowed to repay him with especial acts of sisterly kindness in the future.

I was able to return now and then to the gazebo, where Lady Macauley continued to hold court with David Porteous and his daughters. I was glad to see that Frances was now of the group, and that David leant towards her confidingly enough at regular intervals, evidently doing his best to keep her involved in what was mostly Lady Macauley’s conversation. I caught only disjointed snatches of that conversation myself; though was able to observe that Lady Macauley was taking a good deal of trouble with Imogen Porteous, and that the girl herself was perceptibly, if still somewhat reluctantly, unbending. They appeared at one point to be talking about the excitement of living at what Lady Macauley had called ‘the throbbing centre of that great heart, the capital’...

“It must be very thrilling” I heard Lady Macauley say to the girl. “ I can quite see how for a young girl there could be no other life that could match it. Rose is a great one for the capital, you know. She goes up to Covent Garden to the opera constantly – I’m always trying to get my own poor Belle to go with her. The opera is so uplifting, don’t you think? One always comes away from it somehow feeling like Carmen or Violetta....”

Imogen Porteous seemed uncertain of how she ought to respond to this. Her look seemed to say that she had never felt especially like Carmen or Violetta herself – though she murmured something to the effect that she was sure it was very uplifting, but that she seldom found the time herself – much less the hundred pounds – that one seemed to require for going to hear it. It was not much, but it was a beginning,it seemed to me. The girl had not been altogether ungracious in her reply, and I could see that for Lady Macauley at least, there was something here which she thought it would probably amuse her to try to cultivate.

Pamela remained my primary pre-occupation though. I had resolved to grant her an audience with Lady Macauley if I could – the only difficulty lay in finding a way to achieve it without appearing too eager, or too obvious. Bill it was in fact, who finally had the inspiration that was to bring it off. He told me later that it had suddenly come to him that there must be some recompense for having listened for half an hour to Roland Baines drone on about the inequity of the country’s taxation policy, and all the little ruses he’d devised for getting round it... And then it had come to him. Only put them together, he’d thought: Lady M with her obsession about being robbed, posthumously, by the taxman - and Roland Baines with all his dry-as-dust little formulae for avoiding it!

The miracle was, it worked. It involved a kind of gate-crashing of the gazebo on Bill’s part of course. But then Bill has gate-crashed more perilous places than a gazebo in an English garden. And in any case there is nothing in the world that Bill can do that will not bring the light of amusement to Lady Macauley’s eyes. She suffered the curious intrusion of Bill with a Baines on either arm more or less without turning a hair. She did raise a quizzical eyebrow for a moment; but she nonetheless sat perfectly still and listened for a full ten minutes; and it was clear that, dull as he was, she found every word of Roland’s very much to her purpose. She ended almost by enveloping the astonished man in a lavender-scented embrace.

“What an impossibly clever creature you are to have thought-up all that!” she cried. “You have probably saved me more thousands than you can ever imagine, and I and my descendents will have cause to sing your praises forever!”

I doubt that Roland Baines has been the recipient of such extravagant praise from such a source in his life before; and I doubt still more that he will ever receive anything of the kind again. He positively beamed in the glow of it though, and so did Pamela. And if my little party achieved nothing else, it achieved this: that Pamela now has a perfect bi-line for any luncheon party she ever attends. “Dear Lady Macauley!“ she will be in a position to say with perfect impunity wherever she goes; “Such a friend of mine you know – especially since Roland saved her such a deal of money on the question of her inheritance tax...”

So far as Mr Porteous and his daughters are concerned – well, I believe they have already received their first invitation to go to tea at the Macauley house. Whether Imogen will consent to go or not, I can’t be sure - and I confess I’m even less sure about how all this will affect Belle's equanimity, or Frances's engagement. But on the whole I think I can claim that my little party achieved most of its desired ends. And after all, one can’t expect to have got absolutely everything right at just one attempt, can one?


I have amended the text to show that Part One now ends with this instalment rather than with the other, earlier one. Part Two will therefore begin with the next instalment.

Lady Macauley meets Mr Porteous

When Lady Macauley met David Porteous for the first time in my garden one day last week, Bill said it was as if the earth had lurched a moment on its axis, then collecting itself, made a grinding sound and started turning again. I said I thought this far-fetched, even for him; and he admitted that he might have exaggerated a bit. But all the same, he insisted that it had been an arresting moment; during which the assembled company, if not perhaps the earth itself, had held its breath to see which way this particular pair was going to jump.

That Lady Macauley had jumped first, I was not surprised to learn. Nor that she had put out her hand and with a smile that withheld more than it conferred, said “So you are the famous Mr Porteous? I had been wondering what you would look like, and now I see that reports have not been exaggerated. I hope you will come and visit me one day, and tell me what a man does who has given up the Cloth to go adventuring, and abandoned his dog collar for a silk tie.”

I found it difficult to credit that even Lady Macauley could have gone so far as that in the first moments of a meeting. But Bill assured me that it was so – give or take an embellishment or two of his own for the sake of dramatic effect. “The gist of what she said was just as I give it to you. She took the wind right out of his sails for a minute – though I admit that some of the imagery is probably invented, and probably my own. She stood her ground at any rate, and he stood his. I don’t remember precisely what it was he said in reply. Only that he gave her his most effective grey-eyed look, and somehow managed to convey the impression that she might like or dislike him as she would; it was all the same to him, since her approval was not absolutely essential to his happiness.”

I received the distinct impression that Bill had felt a grudging admiration for David Porteous at the moment he described. He would never admit to it of course: he would insist that his personal dislike of the man remained unaltered. But there is something in Bill which delights above all in the irony of a thing - and it was clear to me there had been a moment of exquisite pleasure for him, in seeing Lady Macauley being taken on so effectively at her own game. “What’s obvious is that they will be friends of sorts” he ended by telling me. “It will be something of a battlefield of course - and poor Belle will doubtless be caught in the crossfire. That aspect of it saddens me immeasurably. But all the same, as spectator sports go, it promises to keep us entertained for weeks to come.”

I was glad he'd had the grace at least to think of Belle’s likely discomfort. It proved he was not entirely without heart or scruple, I told him. I only wondered if he had also thought to ask himself how all this was going to affect poor Frances – and am glad to be able to report that at this reminder, his gaiety received a visible check. That Frances must also be rendered uncomfortable by the association was clear even to him. But then everything about this engagement of hers was uncomfortable to Frances, he said; and the only thing we could do was continue to stand by her, and try to see her though whatever events should follow.

All this took place on the one fine afternoon we had last week. It had rained incessantly; we have so far had the most miserable summer. And now the ugly spectre of terrorism has raised its head again, in the form of explosive devices left in cars in London and Glasgow.... Happily, the devices were discovered before harm was done; and in any case it is not of them I mean to write today (or any day) ... The potential bombs were there, but horrible as they were, can hardly be allowed to intrude on the story. All that need concern us here is that on the one afternoon last week upon which I had invited a small group of friends to tea in the garden, the rain was merciful. It ceased for an hour or two, the sun came out and we were able to gather in the garden in the vicinity of what I persist in regarding as ‘David Porteous’s gazebo’.

That this group included Frances, and therefore Mr Porteous, had somehow seemed to dictate that it could not also include Lady Macauley and Belle. It was unfortunate, but inescapable; Belle having herself on several occasions expressed her misgivings about Mr Porteous’s likely impact on her mother, and the awful repercussions it would almost certainly have for her. No amount of his being engaged to someone else would deter her mother, Belle feared, if she should take it into her head that he would be an amusing new acquaintance – or worse, a suitable man for Belle to try to captivate! Belle had been down this road before, many times; and could only entreat us, heart in mouth, to try to keep them apart as long as possible.

It hadn't seemed a great deal to ask. Besides which, neither Bill nor I had reason to wish to promote David Porteous’s cause in the village – though we were at pains not to seem to demote it either of course, for Frances’s sake. My little party had been got together largely in Pamela’s interests, if the truth be known. I had been conscious for some time that she was feeling rather side-lined these days, by the closeness of Bill’s and my new association with the Macauleys. I disliked the idea that factions had grown up in the village; and that to consent to belong to one group, seemed necessarily to preclude one’s also belonging to any other. I had wanted Pamela to see that my friendship with Belle Macauley and her mother in no way interfered with that longer-standing one I had with her; and so I had invited her and Roland to tea in the garden, along with three other couples; among whom, of course, were Frances and David Porteous.

David’s daughters had happened to be staying at the manor house at the time, so Frances had phoned ahead to ask if she might bring them too; and so it was a group of a dozen persons that was gathered in the garden at the moment when the Macauley Daimler pulled up in the road outside. It seemed to hover there a moment; during which Lady Macauley herself peered out, and was seen to enter into some sort of heated discussion with Belle, who was driving. After which the car swung round abruptly, and proceeded to reverse slowly into our little forecourt.

I was in the kitchen with Frances preparing tea at the time, so was able to view proceedings only through the window, and from a distance of something like twenty five yards. But I saw Lady Macauley climb out of the car and make her way without assistance – with considerable speed and agility indeed – through the front gate and all the way along the length of the garden to the spot, right at the bottom, where the little group of my guests was assembled. What happened at the moment of her finally reaching the group was obscured for me by Bill’s pergola, now in splendid full bloom of roses and jasmine. And in any case, Belle herself had suddenly appeared in the kitchen in a state of acute mortification. She was overcome with embarrassment, poor woman; so that I was obliged to turn away from the garden, and give all my attention to her.

"Mummy has done it again!" she cried. ”She has gate-crashed your party, and I hardly know what to say in excuse of her! She would have me pull up outside, just to see if anything was ‘going on’, as she put it.... And then she saw the people gathered, and heard laughter and talk, and that was it. She said she was sure you wouldn’t mind if we came in to join your party – and was halfway up the path before I’d even had a chance to stop the engine! I’ve never seen her gallop off at such speed – it shows she can do it when she wishes! But Rose has followed her in - and will head her off and bring her back, if you’d really much rather we shouldn’t stay...”

In the face of such sincere embarrassment, what could I say, what do – except of course insist that nothing would give me greater pleasure than that they should all stay and join the party? Which in a sense was true. I had a sort of fatalistic feeling about it now, and had come to think that this was a meeting that was bound to have happened sooner or later anyway. I introduced Frances; adding, rather awkwardly I thought, that they were probably acquainted with one another very well by sight, yet had perhaps never quite met... And then I asked Belle if she would mind carrying one of the trays we had prepared, and come down with us to the gazebo to join the other guests....


Alas though, the word count has already exceeded my allotted fifteen hundred! There is no Google ruling that I know of, to limit the number of words one may post – but I am nervous of exhausting the patience of possible readers, and so I pause here; hoping to return tomorrow or thereabouts, to finish relating this really rather pivotal part of the story....

Getting to know Belle Macauley

We have a new Prime Minister. Gordon Brown takes over from Tony Blair today, and Lady Macauley for one is lost in contemplation of the awful possibilities of the transition.

“She can’t help thinking there has been something vaguely unconstitutional about it” Belle told us when she called at the gatehouse this morning. “She wonders at the smoothness of the change, and fears that the British people have been duped into believing they had a hand in it somewhere.”

Bill threw back his head with joy at hearing this. He thanks God for the presence of a Lady Macauley, who can express the misgivings that a deluded nation hasn’t yet quite managed to work out or articulate for itself - and he hopes that she has also expressed them in a letter to The Times! Belle doubts she has gone so far as that: her mother’s misgivings are largely reserved for her own ears alone. Though Rose, who had taken up position as Mummy’s confidante when she left them earlier this morning, was doubtless receiving the benefit of them even as we spoke.

“Mummy doesn’t believe Mr Brown can possibly be even an eighth as good as he says he is” Belle further confided. “She wants to know where he got all his new smiles from, for a start. He was a glowering sort of fellow before – she can’t see how any good can come to the British people from so remarkable a transformation. She has been glued to the television for days – politics has never held so much fascination for her. She thought she was going to miss the presence of the Blairs as a perpetual irritant, but now she sees that Mr Brown is probably going to fulfil that function even more rewardingly. She does just wonder how the Queen will like him however – she thinks he will make a rather uncomfortable kind of house-guest at Balmoral. Still, she supposes that we are all going to be called upon to make sacrifices in the interests of the greater good – and of course, so far as the Queen is concerned, his simply being Scottish will be thought a considerable advantage.”

Bill and I have been surprised lately at the quiet pleasure there is to be had in a developing friendship with Belle Macauley. She had seemed just a little standoffish at first; reserved at least, and not inclined to wish attention drawn to herself. But the more one knows her, the more clearly does one see just how much she has had to suffer all her life from being compared unfavourably with her mother. She put it in words for us herself one day last week, at Flory.

“It is one of the laws of nature” she said; “that Mummy should try and I should fail.” She laughed as she said it; she had been telling us about all the efforts her mother had made over the years to marry her off – and how woeful a showing she had made in that respect, every time. She said that her failure was most marked when viewed in juxtaposition with the success that Rose had achieved on the marital front. “Mummy is somewhat in awe of it you know” she confided. “It constitutes quite the major part of her affection for Rose. She doesn’t see how any woman could be dull who has managed to secure so many husbands – and she never fails of course, to make the melancholy link, by comparing it with my failure to have secured even one!”

I could see what Bill thought of this; and almost feared that he would be unable to restrain himself from giving vent to his own sentiments with respect to Rose. But in this I did him an injustice. He was very quiet about it in fact; saying nothing whatever that was detrimental either to Rose, or to Lady Macauley herself. He knew, as I did, that Belle felt no pity for herself; and that to have commiserated with her to any extent would have been somehow to have compromised both her sympathy, and her continuing friendship. We both liked her for it the more. And I confess that the thought did run through my head that there would be something very pleasant about a liaison between these two people whom I liked so much, Belle Macauley and my brother Bill.

“You could do a lot worse you know, than to fall in love with Belle Macauley!” I ventured to suggest to him in private later. To which he replied - not in wrath as I had expected, but thoughtfully; and with a hint of regretfulness - that to go down that particular road would be to court the most intense, and well-merited opprobrium. There was a taboo associated with such matters, he said; and the lady with the big house was strictly off limits for the impecunious adventurer. He added that there was room in the district for only one man of that sort – and he sure as hell was not about to become a second David Porteous! I saw his point of course, and said nothing further on the subject. And I was relieved, at the later time of our conversation with Belle, when she went on very quickly to drop the subject of herself, and take up that of her cousin Hortense instead.

“Mummy did her a great injustice you know!” she told us. “When she spoke like that about her disappointed love affairs and her cats, that is. It’s true that none of her love affairs has so far brought her very much happiness – though the big old house she presently inhabits was in fact a parting gift from one of her lovers. An old man whom I believe she truly loved for what she saw as his poet’s soul - but who had the misfortune to breath his last, just before the marriage ceremony had been performed. Hortense suffered deeply from that, I know. And has done her very best to transform his rather dismal house into a shrine to his memory. She has formed a kind of artistic commune down there - something of a reconstituted Arts and Crafts Movement, I believe."

"I haven’t been able to visit it myself as yet, but I’d very much like to do so at some point... There are poets, and painters, and potters – there’s the young man who struggles against hideous adversity to produce the Proustian novel; and the sculptor performing unacknowledged wonders with discarded polystyrene. Each of them has somehow failed to achieve the kind of recognition he deserves - and Hortense has dedicated herself and her house to the promotion of their causes. It seems to me a thoroughly worthy, if possibly unrealistic endeavour... And though it’s true of course that Hortense is very fond of cats - well, Mummy exaggerated wildly there too; and I believe she has six or so at most, not twenty!”

All in all, Belle seemed to think that if her cousin Hortense should suggest we go down to Suffolk on a visit, we might actually find some pleasure in the experience. She even thought she might be able to arrange matters with her mother so that she could accompany us. And it was clear to me that, the awkwardness of Hortense’s almost daily emailed avowals of passion for him notwithstanding, Bill did not reject this proposal out of hand. He has encountered impassioned artistic ladies before, he says – and has learnt that their demands seldom progress beyond the purely poetic.

Cousin Hortense

It’s more than a week since I wrote anything here, and suddenly it seems as if events have overtaken me, and I shall be unable to remember and record everything that has happened lately. We have been living here for six months now, Bill and I; and it’s difficult to recall how long the empty days seemed at first, and how I wondered whether I should ever make the acquaintance of any of the neighbours. Now, I am truly in the thick of everything that’s going on, and my chief difficulty is in remembering who is saying precisely what about whom; to which of the several factions each of my new friends belongs – and where my own affection and loyalties ought to be seen to lie.

My affection for Frances remains undimmed of course. But with her engagement, she has entered regions to which I am unable to go, even in imagination. The idea of the life that she and David must lead together there behind the high walls of the manor house day after day, is one before which I find that contemplation stumbles. I simply cannot envisage their life, and so I have given up trying to make the attempt.

Bill is not so cowardly, and has his own theories about it. “She exists to promote the cause of David Porteous, damn it!” he says. That it’s an ignoble cause is of no consequence, he says; since she believes in it herself. "She’s mistaken, but she believes – oh ardently! And until she sees the error of that belief herself there’s not a thing that any of us can do about it.”

Privately, I think he hopes that sooner or later Frances will have a change of heart, and seek escape – and that when that moment comes, he will be called upon to storm the citadel himself, and bring her out. I believe he would welcome such a contingency; I would go further, and suggest that he probably has battle plans already drawn up, and that they will have something at least of a commando raid about them. Though I could be hopelessly mistaken myself about that aspect of it, of course... Bill has always said I have a tendency towards the fantastic.

Bill has other ladies than Frances on his mind at present, as a matter of fact. Something occurred during our stay with the Macauleys in Suffolk that has altered the perspective of our lives somewhat – though Bill says it’s a mere will-o’-the-wisp of an event, and that I’m over-dramatising it, as is my wont. Whether this is true or not, future developments will doubtless show. But I have decided to relate it for you here just as it occurred. As a light little diversionary story perhaps, that will help dispel the present gloom over the affair of David Porteous and Frances.

You will perhaps recall the rather strange nameless lady who shared my table at Lady Macauley’s luncheon party last month? The one who wore a jewelled bandana on her head, and conversed in sudden short bursts, and unconnected observations? There’s no reason in the world why you should remember her of course; I seem to recall thinking at the time that I was unlikely ever to see her again myself, and should probably never discover precisely who she was, or from whence she’d sprung.

But the fact is that she sprang up again last week while we were in Suffolk with the Macauleys, and has since become a rather extraordinary background presence in our lives. I say ‘our’ lives, but really I mean Bill’s. He seems to have ‘landed’ this strange lady - and will perhaps have some difficulty in extricating himself from her. He has a tendency towards that sort of thing: his life has always to some extent been littered with unattached females of a certain age who form passionate attachments to him. He says it’s another of the occupational hazards of being a foreign correspondent – people identify him with the battles he reports, and make a hero of him on the flimsiest evidence.

This latest conquest of his is called Hortense. Yes, really, that is her name: I haven’t invented it! She was one of the half a dozen or so guests who were sitting around the luncheon table last week, at the moment of our arrival at Barton Flory, Lady Macauley’s childhood home in rural Suffolk. We had arrived late, after an awkward car journey with Rose, who’d insisted on sitting in front with Bill, and kept up an animated conversation all the way.

We slid into the seats that had been kept for us, trying not to cause too much of a disruption to the progress of the lunch; and there, on Bill’s right hand was my lady of the bandana; unadorned on this occasion by any such headdress, but launched, at the moment of our arrival upon a solemn-sounding dissertation on the subject of Virginia Woolf. She looks a little like Virginia, as a matter of fact; she certainly has an air of Bloomsbury about her, and is very fond of Vita Sackville-West too, apparently. Bill put her down at once as a raging lesbian – though later events were to prove him wrong on that score, at least.

“The tall woman with the curiously booming voice is my Cousin Hortense!” Lady Macauley informed us in a theatrical whisper during coffee in the drawing room half an hour later. “Be as kind to her as you can; she’s a poor thing, and has led a rather tragic life. She trails disappointed love affairs in her wake as other women trail stale perfume, and will almost certainly fall in love with Bill. She has a great weakness for big men with hearty laughs; she won’t be able to help herself. And having fallen, she will cling – I give you warning of that in advance!”

She went on to advise Bill to steel himself against any advances from Cousin Hortense; who had, as she put it, “ nothing in the world to offer him save her wounded heart and a more or less derelict mansion a hundred miles from anywhere ....” His best resource if Hortense should pounce, she said, would be to let her know he’s allergic to cats. “Tell her you simply loathe the creatures, and her heart will be implacably closed to yours -for she has twenty of them in that great barn she calls a house, and they are at present the solitary passions of her life.”

Bill laughed heartily about it at the time, telling Lady Macauley she was a thoroughly immoral woman, to be talking about her cousin in such terms. But I think he has good reason to remember it more soberly now; since everything that Lady Macauley predicted was actually to come to pass. I believe I was myself witness to the precise moment at which Cousin Hortense fell passionately in love with Bill. It was later that evening, and we were all sitting in the drawing room to listen to Belle playing excerpts from Chopin and Mozart with a surprisingly expert hand.

It was Lady Macauley’s idea that she should switch to ballads and light operetta, and that we should all gather round to sing – and it was while Bill was delivering a fairly spirited rendition of O Sole Mio, that Cousin Hortense was suddenly overcome with emotion. She uttered a soft sort of swooning sound, somehow audible above the music; then, throwing up both arms in a thrilling gesture, cried “Bravo, oh bravo and bravo again!”, and visibly gave up her heart to him.

All this happened over a week ago, and it’s true that Cousin Hortense hasn’t yet forsaken her cats so far as to get on a train and come to visit us. She has taken to e-mailing Bill however – she has a fondness for e-mails, apparently, and has developed quite a rococo electronic style. Bill says it’s harmless enough, so long as it goes no further – but I notice he’s giving rather more thought than hitherto, to that invitation he’s had from the British Council, to deliver a series of lectures in Australia and the Far East.

Just One More Thing

“Can there be even one?” I hear you exasperatedly cry. To which the answer is yes, I very much fear there can! I really do apologise for this; it breaks the continuity of the story quite shockingly, I know. But it was always to have been an experiment, this re-telling of the story as a blog; and as such, it has taken on a momentum, and a capacity for fluctuation and change, that I confess I hadn’t foreseen myself at the outset.

My present dilemma concerns the discrepancy that has arisen around the characters (and the names) of Mr Porteous’s daughters. I had originally called them Julia and Anne - but those names no longer seemed quite the right ones, and so they have changed to become Imogen and Amy. Imogen is the elder, dark-eyed, and inclined to be confrontational in her relations with her father; Amy the younger, fairer, and more compliant.

I had already posted an instalment entitled Mr Porteous's Daughter, describing Anne, and the little handicrafts shop she had lately opened in the village. But I have now deleted that entry, and can only ask that those of you who have perhaps already read it, will try to delete it from your memories also?

It’s a great deal to ask I know. I had hoped in fact that the discrepancy might have been noticed, and brought to my attention by way of the Comment box. That it has not done so suggests that nobody has in fact noticed – so perhaps the adjustment won’t present quite so many difficulties as I had feared!

The present situation vis-a-vis the girls is therefore as I described it in the instalment of 15 June entitled “A Blog too far?”. And for those who haven’t read it (and perhaps have no intention of doing so!), the present recorded facts about the girls are these:

1) Imogen is 28, and took her degree at one of the London art colleges, specialising in textile management and care. Amy is 26, and took a degree in English at Bristol.

2) They have drifted about a good deal since graduating, and in fact spent many months in Australia with their mother, trying to decide whether they wanted to stay there or not. They have lately returned to England however, and are sharing a flat above a shop in Baker St (near to the Sherlock Holmes museum); with a view to taking a lease on the shop too, and opening it as an art and handicrafts shop.

3) This is an enterprise of which their father strongly disapproves.


This will I hope be the final alteration, and I apologise again for it.

Mr Porteous and Frances; the early encounters

These are the last of the excerpts from the original novel that I mean to post at this stage. They will I hope provide a little more insight into the characters of David Porteous and Frances Fanshawe - and will perhaps help to prevent readers' becoming too attached to the idea of the new improved Mr Porteous!

(Note: there is a little discrepancy here - in that when David calls at the manor house the second time, he seems to be seeing Frances for the first time! Put it down to carelessness of editing - and be sure that it will be amended in the final draft!)


The first episode takes place shortly after the previous full chapter about David Porteous. He has been in residence in Aunt Floss’s house for about three weeks, has become acquainted with Mrs Baines and Roland – and has lately been the recipient of a basket of fruit and vegetables sent round by Frances from the manor house garden. He is sitting at his desk trying to write, as usual - but he finds his thoughts wandering, and expects at any moment to be disturbed by one of Mrs Baines’s ‘little phone calls’...

“........ And if it were not Mrs Baines who disturbed him, it would be that other rather remarkable new acquaintance of his, Miss Frances Fanshawe; who had lately sent round her man-of-all-work with a basket of fruit and vegetables from her garden, and who, on his calling at her house to express his thanks, had seemed to want to keep him there - had wanted to show him her father’s library, or her display of orchids, or her lavender parterre… David couldn’t remember exactly what it was that Miss Fanshawe had wanted to show him, only that she had seemed oddly insistent about it, for a rather sadly faded little maiden lady……..

He thought he would almost certainly take up her invitation at some point. He hardly saw how he could do otherwise; so anxious had she seemed to further the acquaintance; and so very much struck had he been himself moreover, by the size, and sheer magnificence of the house she lived in. It was called the manor house, and was a perfect example of the architecture of the period of Queen Anne. Its high brick walls enclosed grounds that were only slightly smaller than those of the Macauley house; it occupied what amounted to an entire block, and the only access was by way of a pair of tall, impenetrable-looking black gates that seemed to defy, rather than encourage approach.

“She is as effectively walled-in as any princess in a tower” David reflected, as he stood outside the tall black gates, trying to decide whether or not to press the entry bell. He found amusement in the reflection - but there was something oddly seductive about it too. He was going to have to perform feats of valour perhaps – scale walls, and push his way through thickets of brambles – before he could gain access to his prize? He hesitated a moment longer, then firmly pressed the bell; telling himself, while he waited for a response, that a lady must be small and faded indeed who should altogether fail to excite one’s interest, when she was evidently the sole custodian of what he had already begun to think of as “all this”… “

Ten minutes later, having been admitted at last by a rather surly Mrs Meade, and conducted across a wide courtyard in which a pair of immense cedars blocked out all the light.... he finds himself seated on a high-backed chair in a wide, polished entrance hall, waiting for Frances Fanshawe to appear. Here is what he is thinking:

“.... The signs of wealth and ease were all around him, but he was pleased to see that they were under-stated, and didn't shout at him of recent expenditure or conscious show. “Her chairs and her cabinets and her pictures are old and good” he thought; “But they are not ostentatious. And she evidently hasn’t had to go out and buy them herself!". He was glad of that: he was fond of the high tone and the dismissive attitude. He could easily suppose that such a lady as Miss Fanshawe would wave all these splendid objects aside with a surprised “What – these old things?”. It would be the tone of wealth and privilege, worn lightly. And it was the one, too, which Mr Porteous believed he might have been intended by Nature to adopt himself - had Nature only seen fit to put him down in the kinds of circumstances in which it would have been appropriate.

Here then, he thought, was a lady to whom one could take an honest liking – provided of course that she shouldn’t turn out to be quite the kind of impossible spinster whom one half expected, or feared... He had a momentary vision, awful to him, of a kind of resurrected Aunt Floss, come back to try him again in the person of the lady of the manor. He quickly brushed it aside however; since for all her opinions, Aunt Floss would have been hopelessly out of her depth in conditions such as these. No, Miss Fanshawe must be a very different kind of lady, he decided. He was resolved to like her if he could. He thought she would have to be unlikeable indeed, if she failed to satisfy at least some of the expectations that her furniture seemed to raise!

He was not so vulgar, of course, as to say to himself that here was perhaps the kind of solitary maiden lady who would turn out to represent his best chance yet of being swept away into more propitious circumstances. He declined absolutely to entertain the idea that there was anything in his meditations that could be called venal – or worse still, carnal! Heaven forbid that he should have sunk so low! He was just a little disconcerted, for all that, by that propensity of his (it had arisen only lately) for viewing all reasonably presentable unattached ladies as potential wives or lovers. It wouldn’t do, he told himself; it was in the worst possible taste! He did allow himself a charmed moment or two just the same, in which to wonder how it might feel to have the freedom of such a house? Wives or lovers aside, he thought he would know how to adapt to it. And he did hope – oh, devoutly: it was a kind of prayer! – that Miss Fanshawe wouldn’t turn out to be the kind of lady whose aspect and character would put her quite out of the question in both respects.

The personage who did finally emerge from out of the house’s deepest recesses to cross the wide expanse of the hall and come to greet him, was neither daunting nor large, however. She was in fact the mildest, and smallest of fluttered-looking English maiden ladies. She wore a paisley skirt, and a cardigan that could only be described as drooping; her grey hair was not in any sense what David would have called ‘arranged’, and in her rather large, pale face were only the merest vestigial hints of what might once have been girlish prettiness. Her pearls were probably real, he thought; but she wore them without distinction, and though she held out her hand to him and smiled a greeting, the smile was tremulous, and he saw that for all her ten bedchambers and her rooms of state, she was very much more nervous of meeting him, than he was of her.”

Somehow, having managed to persuade a disgruntled Mrs Meade to delay bringing coffee for them, Frances finds courage to suggest they go out into the garden, where the following passage takes place:

“.... It was clear by now that everything Miss Fanshawe said, even when it was only her instructions to her housekeeper, had a tendency to drift off into inconclusiveness at the end; and so it was with the solicitousness almost of the host - with the practised urbanity of the experienced clergyman, certainly – that David all but shepherded her away, his left arm hovering at a respectful distance from her cardiganed back, in the direction which she said would take them to the herb garden. They passed through many pleasant places on the way. David would have liked to linger a while at the edge of a large ornamental pond, to look at the water-lilies, and watch the frogs jump; or a moment later, to have stopped to admire a splendid rose which tumbled over a pretty summerhouse. But his small companion pushed resolutely on, with scarcely a word or a sideways glance; rather in the manner, he thought, of a small spaniel that was intent on taking him to see a bone it had lately buried. And when at last, having stooped to pass beneath another voluptuous rose which partially blocked an arched gateway in a wall, they came at last upon the box-edged symmetry of the knot garden, it was to no announcement of hers, but only a sharp exhalation, an almost reverent “Ah... a knot garden!”, on David's part.

Miss Fanshawe turned up her face to him in a large, dim smile. She was pleased with his appreciation; but she was evidently no sort of hand, herself, at superlatives.

“Mr Jessop would be so pleased to hear you call it that” was the nearest she could come to it. “He thinks everybody has forgotten the name now – and he worked so hard to make all the little hedges. He’ll allow no-one else to go near them with a pair of clippers you know – and he’d have preferred to have varieties of lavender in all the beds. He says that’s the proper sort of planting – but I would have my herbs......”

It was apparently as near as she could come to a conversational opening of her own; and her drifting off into vagueness at its end seemed to make it incumbent upon David to take up her theme and expand it as best he could.

“I daresay Mr Jessop is right” he thoughtfully said. “ Though it always seems to me one can experience the special delights of a knot garden just as well with fragrant herbs. I’m not sure that wasn’t its original function after all.” He asked her permission then, to pluck a sprig or two. For the pleasure, he said, of crushing them between his fingers to release their fragrance. He sniffed deeply, then held a stalk of rosemary at a little distance from Miss Fanshawe’s face, so that she too might enjoy the aroma. They walked slowly together round all the little paths, David making all the conversational openings, and Miss Fanshawe responding now and then with a small utterance of her own. She had begun to be a little more comfortable with him though; she had grown quite pink with it. And David had begun to find that he was rather enjoying himself. There was a good deal to be said for the company of such an undemanding little lady, he thought: it made the appreciation of all her splendid possessions so very much simpler. He was in no hurry to bring the experience to an end; he even thought he might suggest they wander on to look at other parts of the garden. But Miss Fanshawe had suddenly remembered Mrs Meade and her coffee.

“Oh dear” she said. “We have left it to get cold! We ought to go back at once – if you can spare the time to stay for coffee, that is...?”

“ Oh well, we musn’t disappoint Mrs Meade!” David had the gentlest little smile for it. “And indeed I’d like very much to stay for coffee - if you’re quite sure it won’t be too much of an intrusion into your own morning, that is?”

Miss Fanshawe was quite sure. She had nothing whatever to do, she said. And then as if she suddenly saw how idle, or grand, or unwelcoming that must have sounded, she amended it; telling him, all in a rush, that of course she did have to go out later to see an old friend who was ill, and then to do some shopping; but that there was quite time enough for coffee even so... She added that Mrs Meade would be waiting for them anyway - would probably have gone away to make a fresh pot indeed. And then she led the way - or rather, permitted herself to be led, Mr Porteous’s hand resting an inch or two beneath her elbow - back across the polished expanse of the hall, and into a sunny corner of her father’s library, where Mrs Meade, with a marked disgruntlement of countenance, was waiting with her second tray of coffee....”

So there it is – or rather, there it was. And I can see that I was right, in my suspicions about Mr Porteous and Frances. It was always on the cards that he was going to make himself indispensable to her. It only shocks me a little (I hope it doesn't also shock you!) to see how entirely sure-footed he was about it, from the start!

A Blog too Far?

Not for the faint-hearted anyway: being a 5000-word chapter from the original book.


I have decided to take a calculated risk, and post a complete chapter from the original novel. My aim is to give a more rounded picture of David Porteous - though I quite see that the only thing I might succeed in doing will be to exhaust and alienate those few faithful readers I already have! It's a risk I've decided to take however - if only that I might move on with greater confidence to the next phase in the Blog version of the story.

This chapter follows, in the original, immediately upon David Porteous's first visit to the cottage of Mrs Baines and Roland - and these are his recorded impressions...

"....David Porteous’s impressions of his visit to the cottage beside the pond were a good deal less favourable than Mrs Baines might have hoped. His heart had sunk sharply indeed, when the large lady in the curiously rustling dress had opened the front door to him. She was so very much the mixture as before, that was the trouble. She might easily have been high-nosed Miss Ursula Monckton-Leyes of the Ladies’ Needlework Guild; or tireless Mrs Elsworthy, whose organisational zeal in the matter of the Fete Committee and the Flower Rosta had sometimes made it necessary for him to hide in corners…. It had been difficult not to see in her some rather gruesome mix of the attributes of all his former female parishioners, thrown into the melting pot and re-constituted as one large, intimidating lady! David had experienced a moment of deep dismay therefore, even as he had urbanely smiled, and put out his hand for greeting.

And throughout all the rather tedious little ritual of tea and cakes, the conversational progressions which seemed to have been ordained beforehand, the bland assumptions and the entirely predictable views, his irritation had intensified. Was this the way it was going to be, then? Was he simply to have exchanged one set of blameless matrons for another? Had he gone through all the upheaval of retirement, all the pompous speech-making and protracted farewells - all the sudden panic, even, that he had experienced on closing the doors of his dear old church and charming rectory for the very last time - just so that he might come down here and find everything going along in much the same manner as before?

He admitted that he had hoped for something better. Or something, at least, a little different. He had hoped, when it really came down to it, to have found himself immersed more or less at once in circles which would include those of his very much more promising, and indeed his almost nearest neighbours, the Macauleys. He had even dared to hope that from these circles might emerge (all in the fullness of time of course) that lady who was suited to become the second Mrs Porteous. One who would exemplify in her character and her person all the feminine virtues which had been so notable by their absence in the first. He did not think it too much to ask. He believed he had been ill used indeed, by Laura; who had married him with what had looked like joy, and then gone on to let him down in every conceivable way. He didn’t know how else was he to judge her, when she had made it so clear from the start that she disliked every aspect of the role of clergyman’s wife, and had finally abandoned it altogether; leaving him, and wanting a divorce, after eighteen years of marriage.

He thought he had borne his misfortune with dignity; and that his own judgment of the situation had been a just one. He had looked hard enough, heaven knew, for any shortcomings of his own which might have contributed to what the courts had called the irretrievable breakdown of his marriage. He had searched his conduct and his soul over many a prayerful succession of days and nights, and found nothing in the way of sins or omissions which he thought could account for Laura’s defection. He had ended by exonerating himself from blame: he had married unwisely, that was all – Laura, Dean’s daughter though she was, having been unable, or unwilling, to adapt herself to the role that she had promised before the altar to fulfil. He had never been entirely sure that his daughters shared this view of the situation, however. Julia had been sixteen at the time, Anne fourteen; and they had taken it hard. He feared they had judged him at least in part to blame for the failure of the marriage; though neither had come right out and accused him of any offence, and both, when faced with the agony of a choice between one parent and the other, had elected to stay on in the rectory with their father.

His own, and his daughters’ unhappiness aside – and both had been prolonged, and intense - it had been a very awkward position for a priest of middle years and general high standing to find himself in. The Church of England had not looked kindly then upon the idea of divorce and re-marriage within its own ranks. Its position had been quite uncompromising - its more accommodating twists and turns of conscience were still to come. Marriage was indissoluable, that was its dictum: he might divorce, but could not think about re-marrying. He was going to have to embrace the ideal of abstinence – possibly for life.

‘The time-honoured priestly path’ he had called it, when speaking of it in the parish. Making it, when the moment seemed right, the subject of a little sermon, sad but brave, in which he had done his best to defuse and clarify the situation. He had told his parishioners that he thought he owed them at least that much. He had even managed to raise a little smile for it; ending, as he had done, with the observation that if they were to be saddled with a celibate priest, then they ought to know about it in advance, so that they might decide whether it was something they could live with, or not! They had thought they could live with it perfectly well, of course: they had only been a little vague as to the precise manner and extent to which a congregation ought to try to commiserate with its priest on the question of his celibacy! On the whole, they decided that the least said the better: a discreet little veil had been drawn around the subject, and it was quietly and universally assumed that Mr Porteous would bear his lonely burden, as he did everything else, with perfect priestliness.

One way and another, he thought he had. Twelve years had passed since then. The girls had left school and gone away to college: Anne to read English at Bristol, and Julia, always the more awkward of the two, to pursue a long and complicated course of degrees and diplomas at one of the London Art Schools. Left alone in the rectory for several years, David’s every practical requirement had somehow been met - and his celibacy more or less held out. He was to find that his unofficial vow of abstinence offered him very little protection, however. The time-honoured priestly path apparently allowed a certain latitude: one was almost expected to stray from it now and then – provided of course that any straying should take place outside the parish, and with decorum.

And even within the parish, his path had not been without temptations. A wifeless priest had no defence but his own rectitude, it seemed - and his had been put to a number of fairly stiff tests. He had been just a little shocked indeed, at the lengths to which some of his lady parishioners were prepared to go in the interests of obtaining his special favour - especially when their own circumstances had seemed to conduce to the possibility of their becoming the second Mrs Porteous! Somehow though, he had managed to parry all advances; and if he had gone adventuring, as he liked to put it – he being after all, no more than a man like any other - then he had taken care to do so discreetly, and well outside the eyes and ears, and sensiblilties, of the parish.

Laura had remarried meanwhile, and gone to live in Australia; from where, her new husband being a considerable land owner, with expendable income enough, it seemed, for almost anything, she had met all the girls’ college fees, and in addition dispatched each year at Christmas and in summer time, return tickets for them to go out and spend their long vacations with her. They had gone willingly – joyfully, it had seemed to him. Returning each time with a look of sunshine about them; with eyes that seemed somehow to have grown accustomed to looking out over wide expanses; with sunburnt complexions, and flagrantly augmented wardrobes - and with the merest hint, to his mind, of Antipodean vowels. But they had come back too, with a restlessness of spirit which had sometimes looked to him like grievance only partially suppressed. He had feared they had all the while been making judgements, comparisons, choices – and that it could perhaps be only a matter of time before they would begin to question the wisdom of having elected to stay on with him in England at all, when they might have enjoyed a life of glorious expenditure and endless sunshine, in Australia.

David had been sitting at his desk all the while, on this his third Monday morning, to make these rather discomfiting reflections. He called it his desk, the rather spindle-legged table he had set up for himself in the window recess of Aunt Floss’s ugly boxroom; but it was a miserable affair indeed, when compared with the capacious leather-topped one he had enjoyed in his study at the rectory. And the boxroom itself was more miserable still – quite the smallest and ugliest room in this inordinately ugly and neglected house. He had chosen it, not for its amenities or its size ( since it possessed neither - not even a useable bookshelf); but entirely for the view it commanded, over the roof of the one intervening house (which he understood was that of Mrs Mountjoy), and down into a substantial section of the Macauley gardens. He had sat down resolutely enough, an hour earlier; he had his papers stacked in an orderly pile beside him; his pencils were sharpened and his new laptop switched on, ready to go. He had meant to make a start at once upon the scholarly work which was to be the occupation and the sustenance of his future – he had even dreamt-up a rather arresting opening sentence.

But his thoughts would stray. So that if he was not worrying about the girls, or the repairs that were required to the house, he was steeling himself against the likelihood that Mrs Baines would break in on him at any moment with one of her little phone calls. She had fallen into the habit of calling him every other day on one pretext or another: generally that of the little party of welcome she was arranging for him, which was always just on the point of being fixed for a certain date, only to fall through again unexpectedly at the last minute, involving her (and him!) in another little flurry of apologetic explanatory calls. And when his mind was not straying in any of these directions, he found that his eyes wandered anyway, away from his papers and his laptop, and out of the window to gaze down into the walled expanse of what might once have been the Macauley kitchen garden.

He had been astonished at first to learn that the legendary Theodora still lived on in the big gaunt house at the end of the road. She must be almost a hundred by now, according to any reckoning of his. It was almost as remarkable as to have discovered that Wallis Simpson was still alive. Or Nell Gwynne, or Queen Victoria! David knew the history of Jack Macauley and his Theodora. His Aunt Floss had recounted it many times, with almost total recall, and a scarcely suppressed venom. She had considered it thoroughly disreputable, and had never consented to call Lady Macauley by any other name than Theodora; evidently believing that in speaking of her as the more sensational newspapers of the early days had done, she was reducing her to her proper place in society, and registering her own perfectly legitimate disdain. Her nephew had come to see that in her judgments of Theodora, his Aunt Floss had betrayed more than a little malice of the strictly female sort. Possessing no trace of beauty or charm herself (and, so far as he knew, no man had ever desired her, or sought her out in marriage), it was perhaps no more than natural - no more than human at any rate - that she should have looked for shortcomings in the conduct of those among her sisters who had been better blessed by nature than herself.

Still, Aunt Floss had been a rather dreadful old thing, whose opinions, especially now that she was very soundly dead, could largely be discounted. And there was no denying that the house she had left him was interestingly, nay, fascinatingly situated. He had been inordinately pleased from the start with his close proximity to the Macauley mansion. He thought it quite the best part of his aunt’s no doubt all unwitting gift to him, that she should have put him down almost cheek by jowl with Theodora, a lady who for all her scandalous history and her probably ninety years, still seemed to him to stand at the shining centre of the fascinating social circles which were likely to open up around him in the very near future. He almost felt he ought to offer up a prayer of intercession for his aunt’s immortal soul for that, if for few other benevolences of hers that he could bring to mind.

He had thought it likely he might bump into Theodora, or better still her daughter Isabella, at almost any moment; it had added a certain charmed expectancy to all the other emotions he was currently experiencing. But he had heard from Mrs Baines that the Macauley ladies were away at present, and unlikely to return for several weeks. It had been a sharp disappointment. It had seemed to put back his pleasant expectations by some incalculable period of weeks, or even months - for who knew where a pair of unencumbered wealthy women might have gone, and for how long, when they had taken it into their heads that they required a change of scene?

In the meantime, he was experiencing every kind of misgiving about his new situation. It was all very well to have upped sticks and retired, but one ought to have had a better idea of what it was one was retiring to. He had this house of course, and he was not so dishonest with himself as to fail to acknowledge that he had never expected to be put in possession of a freehold house, and that without it there would have never have any question of early retirement at all. But a house as a means of sustenance was a poor thing, when it came right down to it – one could live in, but could hardly live off it. It was like his Aunt Floss, he thought, to have left him a run-down Victorian villa, and then to have deprived him of the means of making it even decently habitable by leaving all her money to his daughters!

The sum bequeathed had seemed large at first. And indeed, at thirty thousand pounds apiece after tax it was large, at least when set against any sum which had dropped as if from heaven into the girls’ laps before. Julia and Anne had been astonished by it; had spent several happy weeks just glorying in the thought of it, the splendid things they might do with such sums, the wonders they must surely work. Their first generous impulses had been to ignore their great-aunt’s testamentary wishes by dividing her bequest into three unequal parts, and heaping the largest upon their father. He was to have had thirty thousand pounds; they would easily make-do with fifteen each. It had seemed an immense sum to them indeed; more than enough for anything which either of them might dream of doing with it. But in this their father had been adamant, and proud. The money was theirs, he said: their great aunt had wished them to have it, and he was in full concurrence with her. It must be the means by which, wisely spent, they would provide for their own futures - there being precious little, he added, that he was himself going to be able to do for them.

Their first acts upon receiving their bequests had not been encouraging to him; they having gone off almost at once to pay the most prolonged visit yet to their mother in Australia, leaving decisions about their careers hanging in what he thought a rather ill-advised abeyance. He had feared that this time, they must surely decide to stay there; so many months had they lingered, and so ecstatic had been their e-mailed accounts of life in beachside Sydney. But both had eventually drifted back, sun-tanned and cheerful; and were at present sharing a flat above a shop in Baker Street, with a view, they said, to taking a lease of the premises themselves, and opening a little design and handicrafts shop. This seemed to him a poor sort of return for all the money he (or, at any rate, their new step-father) had expended on their college educations, though he forbore from saying so directly. He only told them that he hoped the shop-keeping would be no more than a pleasant little interim occupation - until such time as they should find some better way of utilising the special skills they had acquired at college.

He had assumed that Anne would probably take a teaching post in some superior girls’ school – he still thought it would come to that at last, when once the shop venture had fallen through. And Julia – well, who knew which way Julia would jump? Julia was sharp, was combative and unpredictable: Julia could shrug, and flounce, and take exception (umbrage, he called it) where one least looked for it. All that one could be certain of with Julia was that she would jump, in one possibly undesirable direction or another! He only hoped it would not turn out to be entirely catastrophic.

He had never thought Art school a very good idea. Not when Julia might have taken up a place at his own old college in Cambridge to read Classics, instead. She had worked hard and taken a good degree, it was true: she was said to be genuinely talented. But he had never quite seen where it could all be said to be leading since, talented though she was, it seemed unlikely she would be able to earn any kind of living from her art. He had taken rather a dim view of her numerous qualifications; seeing them as a pretty-ish kind of extra embellishment, at best – though he thought it just possible that, with her expertise in the matter of textiles and old tapestries, she might eventually have found her way into all manner of interesting people’s houses….

Privately, he hoped that it would be the girls’ marriages, rather than anything else, which would intervene to put an end to foolish enterprises. He could not see how any good could come of girls’ being allowed to drift about like that with money in their pockets: there was something rather vulgar about it, to his mind - a want of feminine decorum, at any rate, which he intensely disliked. In this respect he almost found himself wishing that the Macauley daughter hadn’t after all been a son! Never mind that such a son would have been nearer fifty than forty (David had no real way of knowing Belle Macauley’s age, but he guessed he must be near to the mark with fifty): the age would have been of little consequence if everything else was right - and to have seen one of his girls married with all ceremony into that establishment would have been to see her pleasingly launched indeed!

All of which seemed to bring him back full circle to the point at which he had begun his reflections this morning – to this house, these papers, and his own perhaps precipitate plunge into early retirement and an uncertain future. There had been excellent reasons for it of course. Or so it had seemed at the time - though for the life of him he could bring remarkably few of them to mind now. If he were being frank with himself he might have said that he had simply grown tired of being a priest; that his convictions had lost much of the power they had once held over him, and that the sensation of a collar about his neck had begun to be constrictive.

He might have said too, that his aunt having left him a freehold house, there was unlikely ever to be a better reason or opportunity for breaking out. But David Porteous was not often frank with himself; or not at any rate quite so frank as that. It was the result of years of high-minded - oh, the very highest! - dissimulation from the pulpit. He found that he was almost ready to call it dissimulation. He didn’t know what else it was, that obligation one had so often felt to make sense of the paradoxical; to define the indefineable, and mount a spirited defence in favour of ideas which had increasingly come to seem indefensible.

His personal position had been the most difficult of all to define or defend. It would not have sufficed simply to have told the bishop that he wished to try something different; flex a muscle or two that was not inhibited by a surplice; exercise his mind again upon matters which lay outside the purely ecclesiatical. There were matters enough within the purely ecclesiatical, heaven knew, upon which he might have exercised his mind! He had found himself disposed of late to take issue with the Church over any number of points of doctrine, or direction. He privately believed that it had allowed its authority to become dangerously undermined - there had been moments when it must have looked almost hell-bent upon self-destruction, in the eyes of an increasingly sceptical world. It had become increasingly difficult to try to defend such a stance; and though he had briefly entertained the idea of taking the path, fashionable just then, which led from Canterbury to Rome, he had finally dismissed it as a step, and a complication too far. He had stomach just about enough for mild rebellion: for counter-revolution and the defiant grand gesture, he found he had none.

He had thought at one time of calling his change of heart a Damascene Moment. He had tripped and fallen, he might have said, upon his own personal road to Damascus; and on struggling to his feet again had seen the light of a new direction shining in front of him. It was the kind of arresting imagery of which the clergy, and his bishop in particular, were very fond: it might almost have served. But he had finally rejected as distasteful the idea that the Gospels themselves might be called in as witnesses in his defence. He might be experiencing devotional difficulties - might almost be said to have started down the road to scepticism himself. But he was not yet quite an iconoclast, or profane!

There were aspects of his calling, besides, which he still loved with all his heart. There was almost no place in the world he would rather be, for example, than in a quiet old church at start or end of day. It was simply that he had discovered lately that he loved it most of all when it was empty of fellow worshippers. Such a position as that would have been hard to defend with any kind of conviction. The bishop might well have suggested a holiday as a corrective, or a sabbatical; both or either of which, as time-tested formulae, and gestures kindly meant, would have been difficult to depreciate, and still more difficult to try to deflect. He had found in the end that he could summon no enthusiasm for disputes either personal or ecclesiastical: they would have required too much subtlety, subterfuge even - and might have kept him embattled besides, for more weeks, or months, than he had felt he had at his disposal.

Still less had he felt inclined to tell the bishop that he had grown weary of the celibate life he had felt it necessary to impose upon himself since his divorce. In those circumstances, though there would have been no question of his re-marriage of course, within the bishop’s, and indeed his own rather strict application of canon law, he didn’t doubt that the Church would somehow have found the way to be accommodating. There was room in her many mansions for almost anything these days - it was one of the points upon which David had felt most disposed to distance himself from her. There would have been no point in starting up a debate however, at what he had made up his mind was to be his eleventh hour; and so he had decided against candour, and had settled instead for the usual kind of comfortable, all-encompassing vagueness.

He wished to go out into the world to try to make a new life for himself as a thinker and a writer, he said; he had been thought promising in both those respects, in his post-graduate research days at Cambridge. It was a long time ago, he knew, but he hoped it would not prove too late to resurrect a career which he had forsaken, at the time, in favour of ordination. The bishop had professed himself interested, intrigued indeed – though he had wished to know of course just what it was that Mr Porteous proposed to think and write about, which could not have been accomplished from within the Church’s own ranks? It had been here, perhaps, that David had had his best inspiration. It was the troubled outer world itself, he said, with which he wished to try to grapple! And he wished to grapple independently, so to speak – he thought it would be taking too much the easy way, to speak out from behind the Church’s protective mantle. He had gone on then to talk a good deal, and with what he trusted was the ardour of a deeply-held conviction, about the new kind of terrorism which had begun to stalk the western world. If the concept of God was at the root of it (though he had doubts, himself,about the perfect validity of such a claim), then it was the concept of God itself which must be put under scrutiny.

He had added that he was not so vainglorious of course as to suppose that, of all the thinkers and writers in the world, he was going to be the one to shed light in dark places. He hoped that the bishop would take as read his almost overwhelming sense that he might, in the end, prove unequal to the task. But just the same, to feel unequal was not to concede defeat before one had even started. And, fate having all unaccountably put it into his hands to make the break at last (he had mentioned Aunt Floss’s bequest at that point – he had thought it best not to leave it to emerge by accident, and inconveniently, later); and his own thoughts having begun to move irresistibly in that direction anyway, he thought perhaps the moment had come when he ought to go out there and try. He didn’t for a moment expect to set the world alight - but he thought he might strike a spark or two.

He had ended on a note of smiling self-deprecation (the bishop, who liked to think of himself as a man of the world for all his purple shirt and gorgeous gowns, was fond of that sort of thing): he doubted, he said, that any poor efforts of his would go far towards pouring balm the upon the troubled waters of the warring faiths. But on the other hand, who less volatile than an unpretending former priest to put his grisled head above the parapet? He was mixing his metaphors quite shockingly, he knew (the bishop had a smile of infinite indulgence for it); but did not the bishop agree that nobody, not even the most turbulent of Imams or Ayatollahs, could be thought likely to take the kind of offence that would launch a fatwah or a war, over something which an old British ex-cleric might choose to say in all good faith and obscurity?

It had all gone down surprisingly well in the end. The bishop said he had dreamt of independent scholarship himself at one time - and certainly, there had seldom been a moment when the world’s faiths had stood in direr need of a wise and unbiased arbiter. It almost made one wish to throw one’s own hat into the ring! It was too late for the bishop himself of course – he was an old man, who dreamt now only of retiring into his garden. But he wished his old colleague all the good in the world. It was a brave endeavour, he said. And if there should ever be any little extra ray of light which he might himself assist in shedding in the future, then Mr Porteous had only to ask for it.

“Faith can take a man in unexpected directions” was the way in which, solemnly (grandiloquently, as he saw it now) David had announced his retirement, from the pulpit, to his astonished parishioners. There had been tears, but there had also been sympathy, and quite an outrush of passionate fellow feeling. People had stood up in their seats to say that, yes! they too had been troubled by the chasm of fear and uncertainty into which the world had lately been plunged. They too had felt the horror of their own helplessness in the face of an enemy who purported to act in the name of God, but for whom there seemed to be no precedent in either Testament, nor any possible response! It gave them courage, they said, and hope, just to think that one of their own was going to be bold enough to go out there and try to wrestle with it.

The bishop himself had mounted the pulpit to end proceedings on a note almost of jubilation: “Cometh the hour, cometh the man” he had sonorously said, in his rich baritone. It had quite brought the house down. And nobody, as they had filed out in the solemn hush of a collective reverence, had thought to disagree with him; or to wonder at the origins of his splendid quotation, which they supposed to have been drawn from one of the Gospels.

These were the things that David was remembering now, as he rustled among his papers at last, and took up a folder containing some old written thoughts of his on the subject of the concept of God in the historical human consciousness. He read a page or two, without conviction. It all looked rather insubstantial now, he thought. Forlorn, fatuous even. A month ago, from the upholstered ease of his study in the old rectory, it had looked so very different. He had supposed himself then to be riding high, set fair for a braver, brighter future; the bishop had waved him on his way, and the people had cheered. It was only now, in the cold hard light of the actual, that as the mere germ of a brilliant idea, and still more as a means of future sustenance, the whole thing had begun to look almost as ephemeral as the girls’ Baker Street shop .......... If he had gone out to the triumphal organ, he thought, then he had come down to earth again with the dullest and least reverberating of thuds.

That thud was in his ears still. It was not a reassuring sound. It was the sound of his unwise precipitancy and his newly dispossessed state. It was the sound of this ugly house, with its ragged hedges and its broken gate; it was the sound of the house’s leaking gutters, and the slates which seemed likely at any moment to slide from its roof. And it was the sound too – or call it, almost, the smell - of the discouragement which seemed to seep from out of the house’s dark-brown-varnished skirtings, and the uniformly dun-coloured paper on all its indoor walls. His brave promises came back to taunt him now. How, in the world, with no occupation, and nothing more than a small pension and a handful of shares to his name, was he to find the means by which he might put the house to rights, and then go on to live in it with some degree of comfort and decency for the next twenty or twenty five years?

He nevertheless took up his pen and prepared to write. He had before him a loose page from an old, published treatise of his - “If man has made God in his own image” he read; “what does it tell us about the face of God?”. It had been thought bold, and even a little heretical in its day: he thought it still had a certain capacity to arrest the mind. He wondered if he might find the way to take it up again now; expand it, possibly, into a book entitled “Where is God when we need Him? A Study of the Condition of the Faiths Today”? Something of that general sort. He would emphasize of course the fact that it was the Faiths, plural. The days of the single great Faith, if they had ever existed, were over - or if they weren’t, then they ought to be. If man was to survive at all he must learn to take account of the position of his fellows: of that at least he had no doubt. There would be a significance, would there not - a special resonance - attached to the appearance of such a book, at a time when Islam was re-asserting itself as a perplexing and dangerous presence in the world?

“If man has made God in his own image“ he therefore typed in his laborious fashion on to the empty page; “what does it tell us about the face of God?”. But it was no good: he no longer had the smallest idea of what the answer ought to be. He wasn’t even sure whose face it was, God’s or Man’s, that he ought to be considering! There was a failure somewhere in his logic, he thought. He wasn’t twenty five years old, and he didn’t believe any longer in supernatural resolutions to man-made problems. He believed, when it really came down to it, that man was probably godless, and therefore doomed. And besides, his mouse kept sticking - one couldn't easily deconstruct theology with a sluggish mouse!

He went downstairs to the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee instead. A cup of instant coffee - only Julia could manage the ferocious expresso pot. He told himself that, instant or not, the caffeine would activate his mind, so that he might perhaps begin to see what it was he had been getting at all those years ago when he wrote about the Face of God.