The Lady Volunteer

The Lady Volunteer

This story concerns a young man's developing relationship with a much older lady. It is set in the context of a fictional stately home, owned and managed by the UK National Trust.

For readers outside the UK, the National Trust (NT) is a large charitable organisation dedicated to the preservation of historic buildings and monuments and areas of the countryside of great beauty. Many of its historic buildings are stately homes, open to the public, and it relies upon an army of volunteers to act as guides and explain to visitors the history of the houses and the families that built them and the significance of the many artefacts on display.

I was approached some time ago by a reader who asked if I would consider writing a story about a NT volunteer and a younger man, based on a précis that they would provide. I agreed, but no précis was forthcoming and I forgot about the idea until a recent visit to a stately home in Lincolnshire, where an extremely attractive lady guide, in her late fifties or early sixties, gave me a well-informed and interesting tour of the house's library.

I subsequently decided to take the idea of an NT volunteer story forward, basing the fictional female character on my guide. I hope you enjoy the story and I look forward to receiving comments.

Oh, and the story does include anal penetration, so it that's not for you, please pass by.

Sylviafan

At the age of twenty-nine I had a bit of a breakdown. Since leaving university I'd worked for a London-based investment bank and the work ethos was brutal: insanely long hours, weekend working and an atmosphere of unhealthy competition based on greed and fear.

One Saturday morning in September it became too much and I just sat at my desk and cried. I was sent home by the senior manager and later I was interviewed by the company doctor, then by the company psychologist and the upshot of it all was that my services to the bank were no longer required. They didn't tolerate weaklings.

This left me with a yawning chasm in my life. Up till now work had dominated all my waking thoughts and most of my dreams too, so clearly I needed a replacement, but nothing like investment banking, and nothing in London, where I might run into my former colleagues. I couldn't bear the thought of that.

Money wasn't really an issue. I'd been paid a grotesquely inflated salary for years, with mega bonuses on top, and I owned a flat in Canary Wharf which I could let out or sell. I'd also been given a generous golden handshake. I moved back in with my parents, in rural Suffolk, for a few months, which got me out of the city and gave me a chance to think about what I was going to do for the next thirty years or so.

It was an old school friend that suggested the charity sector. Pete and I had kept in touch since school, though we'd met up only very occasionally. I think he was a bit jealous of my career in the city and the money I was earning and the Porsche 911 I drove and now, having fallen from grace, I detected a whisper of schadenfreude. We were having a drink in the local pub and the conversation turned to my future employment.

'What sort of thing are you looking for, Patrick?' he asked, looking at me across the little table in the saloon bar.

'I don't know,' I replied. 'Something stress free.'

'Well if it's stress free it won't pay much,' he pointed out.

'I don't need the money,' I replied. 'I just want something that interests me and doesn't consume my whole life. Something nine to five instead of five to nine.'

'What about the charitable sector?' he suggested. 'They won't make many demands on you. And you can atone for all those years spent screwing the poor to enrich the already rich.'

I dismissed the idea at the time. The notion of the charitable sector conjured images of alternative people who practised yoga and knitted their own yoghurt and little old dears performing good works while they looked down their noses at you. Such was my ignorance.

But one Sunday, after lunch, while I was helping my mother to load the dishwasher and generally set the kitchen to rights, I mentioned it to her.

'Well there's always the National Trust,' she said after a moment's thought. 'They employ salaried staff as well as volunteers and I can't imagine a nicer environment than working in one of those grand old houses like Blickling Hall.'

I did a bit of on-line research on the National Trust and the upshot was that I applied for a job as the Volunteer Coordinator at Cropton Hall, near Ipswich. Rather to my surprise, I was invited for an interview at the Hall one Thursday morning in early November.

By way of preparation I read everything I could find on the National Trust and its properties, and Cropton Hall in particular. And on the Tuesday before my interview I drove the twenty or so miles from my parents' house to the Hall and parked in the extensive visitors car park, sadly no longer in my beloved Porsche but now in an anonymous Ford hatchback. I went through the entrance area, paid my twenty quid for house and garden entry and strolled up the long path towards the house and its outbuildings.

Cropton Hall is the ancestral seat of the hereditary Earls of Hunstanton. The current earl doesn't actually live there anymore of course, he lives in Belgravia in the City of Westminster. The property was acquired by the National Trust in the late nineteen seventies, and fully renovated so that it's now in a far better condition than it was when the Earls of Hunstanton lived there.

It's an impressive sandstone pile, resembling a smaller version of Chatsworth House and standing in more than five hundred acres of parkland. Off to one side there's an extensive stable block surrounding a large courtyard. The stables have been converted into a cafeteria, with outside seating in the courtyard. There's also the inevitable gift shop and a NT bookshop.

There are extensive formal gardens on two sides of the house including a large orangery which is home to an impressive collection of exotic plants that were collected by the fifth earl who fancied himself as a bit of a gentleman botanist. Further away from the house there is a childrens' adventure playground with a miniature railway, a sculpture park and, I discovered later, a small astronomical observatory.

I wandered around the grounds for an hour or so, drinking in the atmosphere, trying to make sense of the layout and what was on offer to the general public. Then I got a coffee and sat in the courtyard. Despite being November it was pleasant sitting in the sun, although most other patrons had opted for the steamy interior of the café.

At length, I got up and walked around two sides of the big house to the main entrance, a grand, porticoed affair flanked by two wings which surrounded a paved, courtyard area with a sundial and an amazing view down a half-mile long, tree-lined approach road culminating in a great big stone entrance arch. The whole thing had been designed to impress.

Just inside the main entrance (I couldn't think of it as a front door) a middle-aged lady stood patiently, greeting visitors. She was about sixty and was dressed in a muted red tweed suit, flesh-coloured tights and low-heeled shoes. Her hair was grey and cut short and her face looked friendly, but vaguely severe. I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that she was a volunteer. Around her neck hung a plastic picture pass on a lanyard, inscribed with her first name, Lucy.

'Good morning, Sir, would you like to join a tour group? There's one starting in twenty minutes, or would you prefer to go around by yourself?'

'I'll just wander round by myself, I think,' I smiled at her.

'Of course,' she said and turned away.

I looked around. The entrance hall was a mammoth affair with a grand staircase that split into two and went up to either side of a gallery. In the centre hung an enormous and complicated chandelier, under that the floor was tiled in black and white squares; dark wood panels and huge oil paintings gave the place a sombre air.

I looked at the paintings before moving on to the next room, a large antechamber with an oak table that could comfortably have seated thirty diners. And this wasn't even the dining room!

I won't try to describe the house as I wandered through it that day. It would take too long and be full of tedious repetition about the size and grandness of everything. Suffice it to say that there were more than thirty rooms on view to the general public, most having a rope barrier so that you couldn't actually wander round the room and touch things. I visited the kitchens, the buttery and scullery, the drawing rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, studies, galleries, nurseries and the chapel. And each room was staffed by a volunteer, sometimes more than one if there were a lot of paintings and artefacts to explain. The volunteers were, without exception, extremely polite and friendly and extremely well informed and I felt humbled that they gave so generously of their time to educate, inform and entertain the general public. A million miles from the greed and venality of investment banking.

I also couldn't help noticing that the volunteers conformed very precisely to my preconceptions; they were all over fifty, some considerably so, and were all very firmly middle-class. Ladies predominated over men to the ratio of about two to one, the men all resembling, to my eyes, retired majors or colonels.

The ladies tended to be comfortably built with grey perms and tweedy clothing that positively screamed country set. They were well-spoken and self-confident and I imagined that they had had successful careers (or successful marriages) and lived in nice big houses in desirable villages. How, I wondered, would they respond to a twenty-nine-year-old wide boy from the City? Did I even want the job?

It was while I was nursing these and similar thoughts that I entered the main library. I love books and reading and this, I knew, would be the high spot of my tour. It was a large space, about forty feet by forty feet. Two big windows looked out over the entrance courtyard and two walls were taken up by bookshelves, right up to the ceiling, twenty-five feet above. The shelves were packed with ancient, leather-bound sets of Encyclopaedia Brittanica, journals of the nobility, politician's diaries, travel guides... the list goes on and on. In the middle of the room were some easy chairs and occasional tables.

The volunteer, who was a blonde lady wearing a dark trouser suit, was talking to a group of elderly visitors and had her back to me, so I looked at the paintings covering one wall and examined some of the books in a locked, glass-fronted bookcase. The old tomes were massive, about eighteen inches high and four inches thick. The faded lettering on the spines showed them to be a set of botanical reference books covering the flora of South America.

When next I looked round, the group of elderly tourists had moved on to the childrens' playroom and the volunteer was standing quietly beside an occasional table with expensive looking pearl inlay. There were no other visitors in the room so I walked over to ask her a few questions. I got to about five feet away from her before almost stopping in my tracks. The lady volunteer was, quite simply, one of the most strikingly attractive women I had ever seen.

I'll give you a full description of her now, although I didn't really take it all in on that first encounter; I was, quite literally, dazzled.

She was almost as tall as me, in her heels, which would make her about five-feet eight inches. She was wearing, as I have said, a dark trouser suit which was clearly expensively tailored and fitted her slender and shapely figure like a model in a mail-order catalogue. Her blonde hair, which was actually a mixture of honey and grey, cascaded from an off-centre parting, over her forehead and was tucked behind her faintly elfin ears before curling up just above the collar of her jacket.

Her hair framed a face that I can only describe as exquisitely pretty: a firm chin above which were the cupid's bow upper lip and full lower lip of an intensely kissable mouth. Above this high, prominent cheekbones flanked a straight nose. The picture was completed by startlingly clear grey-blue eyes below dark eyebrows and a high forehead with only the faintest of horizontal lines. In fact although she was clearly in her fifties, her pale skin was remarkably smooth; a few fine lines below her eyes and between her cheekbones and her chin. Additionally, although I didn't see this at the time, she had the soft, downy hair of middle age on the sides of her face where a man's sideburns would be. Peach fuzz it's called, I believe, and I always felt that it enhanced her appearance rather than otherwise and I urged her not to remove it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In short she was, to me, the epitome of mature elegance and beauty and I found, as I stood next to her in that grand library, that my heart was racing, my stomach was churning, my knees wobbled and my palms were sweating. More like a callow schoolboy than a cynical and seasoned investment banker. And I'd forgotten what I was going to ask her!

'How many books are there here?' I croaked out eventually. It was a pretty pathetic question but maybe she was accustomed to the effect she had on people because she just stood there and talked to me about the library for about ten minutes, telling me which earl had started the collection and what the significant items were, like a complete set of first edition Dickens which she pointed out with a slender finger tipped with a perfect nail coated in clear nail varnish. She spoke with perfect diction in a gorgeously middle-class accent with just a trace of something else, which, when I analysed it later, I realised was probably a lowland Scottish brogue.

While she talked I looked at the shelves of books; I couldn't trust myself to look at her, my mouth would have fallen open and my tongue would have lolled out. By the time she'd finished talking, I'd just about got myself under control.

'Thank you,' I said as she finished. 'It's an amazing collection. And a full set of first editions by Dickens, that must be very rare.'

'We think it's the only one in the world outside the British Library,' she replied.

'So where did the earl keep his crime fiction?'

She smiled. 'That's downstairs in the master study. There are quite a lot of first editions by Agatha Christie there, too.' I sneaked at look at her security badge, which was hanging on a lanyard round her neck, but it had twisted round to the blank reverse so I couldn't see her name.

'Well thank you for your time,' I said.

'You're very welcome,' she replied, smiling at me with that peerless mouth. I walked out of the library, resisting the urge to turn around for a final look at her, and walked through the next five or six rooms in a daze, barely registering what was on display.

I should mention here that my exposure to ladies of that sort of age was limited pretty much to my mother and some of her friends. All the girls I worked with and socialised with had been in their twenties; even the managers were only in their forties. That sort of banking is a young persons' game; you're usually burnt out by thirty-five, or younger, as I had discovered.

So what was it about the lady in the library? I puzzled, as I walked back to my car and drove to my parents' house. She was about my mother's age, I reckoned, but she was stunningly attractive and sexy. Yes, definitely sexy. I would have no reservations about hopping into bed with her I decided. Then I laughed at myself. Fat chance, Patrick. Ladies of that quality are all safely married to successful businessmen and even if she weren't, why would she be interested in a reject from the City, thirty years her junior?

But if I got this job, I would effectively be her boss and even if nothing ever happened between us, I would have the chance to get to know her, perhaps even to become a friend. So I worked hard that evening and the next day, running over potential questions and rehearsing my answers.

The interview was held in the manager's office, a cluttered room in a staff-only part of the stable block conversion. The general manager, Kate, was a strapping, out-doorsy lady in early middle age and she was supported by her deputy, a lad called Donald who wasn't much older than me, and someone from the NT head offices, a rather severe looking lady called Alice.

The interview lasted two hours, the most difficult part being when I had to explain why I was giving up investment banking and applying to work for the NT. I was completely honest with them and I think I gained both their sympathy and approval. All told I thought I had acquitted myself reasonably well, my obvious lack of experience in the volunteer sector being balanced, I thought, by a strong work ethic and the ability to make commonsense decisions. I'd asked a number of questions at the end and we had got into an interesting and lively discussion about the means of recruiting fresh volunteers. This was obviously close to the heart of the NT lady and when the interview was wound up it was smiles and handshakes all round.

A couple of days before I wouldn't have cared much whether I got the job or not, but now I was on tenterhooks, my heart going to my mouth every time my phone rang. Which was silly I told myself, because if I were that desperate to see the vision in the library again I could always pay my twenty quid like all the other visitors. Except that she might not be there that day. Get a grip, I told myself.

The phone call came the following Wednesday afternoon and it was Kate, the general manager, who offered me the job. I accepted without hesitation, thrilled at the prospect of seeing the lady in the library again. Months later Kate happened to mention that I was actually the second-choice candidate; the first choice had turned down the offer.

I started at Cropton Hall on a Monday morning in early December; a crisp winter's day with frost whitening the fields and the trees in the grounds of the Hall. Donald, the deputy manager, spent most of the day showing me around the property, including a guided tour of the house. To my intense disappointment the library was staffed by a middle-aged man with ginger hair turning grey.

Later, in my cubby-hole of an office next to the general manager's, Donald explained that few volunteers could commit to more than two or three days per week. Furthermore the volunteers, who were all at least forty-five, he said, couldn't possibly be expected to stand around and talk to the visitors for more than a couple of hours without a break. So there was a veritable army of people who could be called up, which became obvious when he showed me the in-house management system with its spreadsheet of names and contact numbers, running to over one hundred and fifty entries.

'And someone's always moving away from the area,' Donald told me, 'or their daughter's just had a kid and they need to support them, so recruitment is an ongoing issue, like we discussed at the interview.'

Eventually he left me to it. I scrolled through the names on the spreadsheet, wondering who the mystery lady was. About two-thirty I went back to the house. Last entry during the winter months was at three o'clock; the house was locked up by four o'clock. At the end of each day it was one of my duties to go round the house with a nominated volunteer to ensure all the visitors had left before setting the security alarm and locking the big entrance door.

The nominated volunteer on my first day was a remarkably short lady in her sixties called Susan. Her grey hair was pulled back into a tight bun, giving her a rather unfriendly look, but she was actually very nice, taking me through the locking up procedure, telling me more about the house and its original owners and asking me questions about myself.