Mary Postgate

(1915)

Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was 'thoroughly
conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am very sorry to
part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.'

Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for
she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss
Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed
care she did not exhaust her attendant's vitality. On the contrary, she
gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a
minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had
just set its seal on Civilisation made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler's
tales, none the less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young,
and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was
never shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end,
'How interesting!' or 'How shocking!' as the case might be, and never
again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which
'did not dwell on these things.' She was, too, a treasure at domestic
accounts, for which the village tradesmen, with their weekly books,
loved her not. Otherwise she had no enemies; provoked no jealousy even
among the plainest; neither gossip nor slander had ever been traced to
her; she supplied the odd place at the Rector's or the Doctor's table at
half an hour's notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small
children of the village street, whose parents, while accepting
everything, would have been swift to resent what they called
'patronage'; she served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss
Fowler's nominee when Miss Fowler was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis,
and came out of six months' fortnightly meetings equally respected by
all the cliques.

And when Fate threw Miss Fowler's nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven,
on Miss Fowler's hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business
of education as practised in private and public schools. She checked
printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of extras; wrote to Head and
House masters, matrons, nurses and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over
half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by
calling her 'Gatepost,' 'Postey,' or 'Packthread,' by thumping her
between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the
garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a
stiff-necked shamble very like a camel's. Later on he filled the house
with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes
and dislikes, and the limitations of 'you women,' reducing Mary to tears
of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless