The Daughters of Mrs Peacock

by Gerald Bullet

  ‘Sit tight, girls,’ said Mr Peacock, alighting. ‘I’ll handle this … Harry, what’s come over you? Do you want to break all our necks?’

  Harry met the inquiry with a beatific grin. He yammered a little but uttered no word.

  ‘Get down, man. I’ll drive.’

  ‘All good fellows,’ said Harry. ‘All jolly good fellows.’ His eyes closed. His mouth hung open. His head drooped.

  ‘Disgraceful!’ Mrs Peacock had joined her husband on the road. ‘I do believe the man’s drunk.’

  ‘Your conjecture, my love, has much to commend it. Hi! Wake up. You’re not in bed yet.’ Prodding and shaking, he pulled the delinquent driver off his perch and set him, swaying precariously, on the ground. ‘Shall we have him inside?’

  ‘With the girls! Certainly not.’

  ‘Come along,’ said Mr Peacock, taking his arm.

  A glimmer of reason appeared in the fuddled eyes. ‘I dursn’t, master. Not with the ladies. Twouldn’t be right, look.’

  ‘Very proper sentiment, Harry. It does you credit,’ said Mr Peacock. He led him to the grass verge and persuaded him, with less than no difficulty, to lie down. ‘Sleep it off, boy. It’s a warm night. You’ll come to no harm.’

  Seeing his wife safely bestowed again, he picked up the reins and got into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Poor Harry,’ said Sarah, as they drove off. ‘What a surprise he’ll get when he wakes up!’

  ‘It’s a very shocking thing to happen,’ Mrs Peacock declared. ‘I shall ask your father to dismiss him.’

  ‘Oh, Mama,’ protested Catherine, ‘would that be fair? We’ve had our fun. Why shouldn’t he have his?’

  ‘I am not in the habit of arguing with you, Catherine. You know that.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sarah. ‘Kitty knows that, Mama.’

  The journey continued in silence and without further incident. A quarter of an hour later they were home, and on their way to bed. At the head of the stairs, after the parents had gone to their room, the three girls lingered for a moment, all but overcome with sleepiness yet too excited to part without a few last words.

  ‘How did you get on with Captain Beckoning, Catherine?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Oh, him!’ Catherine made a grimace. ‘He kissed me, under the cedar. But you needn’t worry,’ she added, answering Julia’s horrified look. ‘I didn’t much care about it.’

  Chapter Four

  Catherine in Action

  Mr Peacock was not so uninterested in Robert Crabbe’s personal life as it suited him to pretend. He had been surprised to see Mrs Stapleton at Manor Park and suspected that Robert had somehow contrived her invitation. He was not in the habit of minding other people’s business—he left that, he would have told you, to the women—but here he felt himself to be professionally as well as personally concerned. Liking Robert Crabbe, he would be sorry to see him make a fool of himself. Nor did he relish the possibility of a scandal that might in the public mind become associated with his eminently respectable firm. He had therefore observed the growing friendship with misgiving, the more so because Robert maintained an impenetrable reserve about it. That the dear fellow should think of marrying again was natural enough. He had perhaps forty years ahead of him and could hardly be expected to remain a disconsolate widower for the rest of his life, living over the office and resorting to restaurants for all his major meals. But it was a moot point whether marriage was now in question; and if it were, thought Mr Peacock, no good could come of it with such a person as Mrs Stapleton.

  He could not have said why, for it was a matter of principle with him to discount gossip and reject innuendo; but the fact remained that there was something about Olive Stapleton that attracted the wrong kind of man and made women in general fight shy of her. How then, since Robert was not the wrong kind of man, had she succeeded in attaching him? She lived, with two servants and a large-eyed little boy, in a small house on the outskirts of Newtonbury, having arrived there from nowhere a year or two ago. Mr Peacock, unlike some, resolutely believed her to be the widow she professed to be, and that the elderly gentleman of military aspect who visited her from time to time was her uncle. The ground of his distrust of her owed nothing, he told himself, to uncharitable rumours. It was simply that he did not like her face. Yet it was not an unhandsome face: all the constituents of beauty were there, except gentleness: in default of which she had developed, in early middle age, a boldly ingratiating manner and with men a cooing comehitherness that passed for playful. But though the lips smiled, with an effect of childish candour, the eyes remained cold, shrewd, watchful.

  Robert Crabbe, in tribute to his bachelor condition, had a standing invitation to take Sunday luncheon with the Peacocks; and it had become an established routine that he should resort to them at least once a month. He was not a favourite with Mrs Peacock, his manner with her was too reserved, he was always the polite visitor; but this much attention was due to him as her husband’s partner. She thought him deficient in small talk, resented Edmund’s regard for him, was irritated by his enthusiasm for Browning, that so difficult poet, so difficult and so different from dear Mr Tennyson, and suspected him of entertaining unsound opinions on religion, for he had once at luncheon mentioned the name Huxley without visible distaste. He was, in short, a somewhat mysterious character, and Mrs Peacock did not like what she did not understand. She discerned certain merits in him, allowed him intelligence and good manners, accepted her husband’s judgment of his professional capacity, and saw that her younger daughters, if not Julia, found his conversation stimulating. Whether she liked it or not, he was an established friend of the family; and she resigned herself with a good grace to being unable to fit him into a pigeonhole.

  It was the accepted thing that after luncheon the two men would take themselves off, to stroll round the farm together, it being out of the question that Edmund should forgo that weekly pleasure, and Robert being always eager to indulge him. Mrs Peacock, rising, would always say: ‘We shall meet again at teatime, I hope, Mr Crabbe?’ And he, with a bow, would answer: ‘Thank you, Mrs Peacock. You are most kind.’ But today, his first Sunday after the Manor Park affair, the ritual question evoked a different, an unprecedented response.

  ‘Forgive me, but I fear not. So very sorry. I have to be back at Newtonbury by four o’clock.’

  Five pairs of astonished eyes were turned upon him, seeming to demand an explanation. He offered none. Edmund, cutting in on his wife’s polite protest, said quickly: ‘Very well, my dear Robert. But you needn’t go for half an hour. Come into my study and have a talk.’ He shepherded his womenfolk into the drawing-room and left them there.

  The two men left behind them a speculative silence, which Catherine was the first to break.

  ‘I wonder if Papa will get it out of him,’ she said: half to herself, half to Sarah.

  ‘Get what out of him?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Where he’s going. Who he’s going to see.’

  ‘Your father,’ said Mrs Peacock, ‘is too much the gentleman to be inquisitive. I wish his daughters may take after him.’

  ‘Would you wish us to be gentlemen too, Mama?’

  ‘I would wish you to be ladies, Sarah, and not trouble your heads about what doesn’t concern you. Mr Crabbe is not our property, remember. He comes and goes as he pleases.’

  ‘But he always stays for tea, Mama,’ said Catherine. ‘Ever since I can remember, he has.’

  ‘You’re young, my dear. Your memory is short. And why this sudden interest in Mr Crabbe, pray? You realize, I hope, that he’s old enough to be your father?’

  ‘Is he really, Mama?’ asked Sarah, who knew he was not. ‘And ought that to make him less interesting to us? Kitty’s like me. She prefers old gentlemen. Young men are so insipid, aren’t they, Kitty?’

  ‘I said nothing about old gentlemen, Sarah. You deliberately twist my words.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to, Mama. For my part I like Mr Crabbe, however old he is. Why don’t you marr
y him, Kitty? I daresay he’ll have you if you ask him. He’ll read Browning to you in the long winter evenings. Think of that.’ Seeing with astonishment the beginnings of a blush in Catherine’s cheeks she hastened to add: ‘Or perhaps Julia ought to as, she’s the eldest.’

  ‘That’s enough, Sarah. Your jokes go too far. They are very unsuitable, especially on the Lord’s Day.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mama.’ Sarah refrained from asking whether the Lord had no sense of humour. It was a question that sometimes seriously exercised her.

  Catherine contrived to be out of the room when Mr Crabbe returned to take formal leave of Mrs Peacock: a circumstance that made it imperative, she argued, that she should join him and her father in the yard, watch him mount, and wave good-bye to him. He looked well on a horse: easy, upright, quietly masterful. His hired nag was restive almost to friskiness, but he handled her expertly and with style. ‘Steady, girl! Steady!’ His long grave face relaxed into a smile. His voice was dark and gentle.

  But for her father’s presence Catherine would have spoken to him, to make him aware of her. She wanted to ask him if he would lend her a book, one of his many books, whether Browning or another, that she might learn to share his interests and improve her butterfly mind. A month ago, had such an impulse moved her, she would not have hesitated to announce her request in full view and hearing of the whole family. What had happened to her that she should shy away from so simple a thing? And what made her, in the total absence of evidence, so sure that it was Olive Stapleton’s steel-bright eyes and avid mouth that were drawing him untimely back to Newtonbury? As he rode away, transfigured by her fancy into the semblance of a dashing cavalier, she was glad that he had chosen that form of locomotion in preference to his newly acquired boneshaker, ingenious amusing but unromantic machine, and that he had refrained from disturbing her mother by using the railway. Railway-travel on Sunday, because it involved human labour, was a thing Mrs Peacock disapproved of (horses, having no souls, did not matter), and Catherine, for no conscious reason, was anxious that he should do nothing to incur the maternal displeasure.

  ‘Why did he have to go so early, Papa?’ asked Catherine, as they turned towards the house.

  ‘I can only suppose, my dear, that he had another engagement.’

  ‘Didn’t you ask him?’ said Catherine, artfully artless.

  ‘No, Catherine. I did not. One doesn’t catechize one’s friends.’

  ‘I do,’ said Catherine lightly. ‘Specially my friends. With others it would be rude, but not with friends. Not catechize exactly, but I ask questions if I want to know something. It seems the simplest way to find out. Is that wrong, Papa?’

  ‘I don’t say it’s wrong, but it may sometimes be inconsiderate, tactless, and therefore hardly polite.’

  ‘People don’t mind being asked, unless it’s something they’re ashamed of. And it couldn’t be that, with Robert … with Mr Crabbe. Could it?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Mr Peacock laughed shortly. ‘But it’s time you outgrew these nursery notions, my dear child. Civilized life isn’t quite so simple as you seem to imagine. I do declare!’ he exclaimed, halting and looking back. ‘That fellow Harry is asleep again already by the look of him! Did you ever see such a drowsihead? Why doesn’t he go home, since it’s Sunday?’

  ‘Because his mother would find him a job to do,’ said Catherine. ‘He knows where he’s well off, does our Harry.’

  She knew better than to pursue the subject of Robert Crabbe. To do so might provoke an awkward question. They rejoined the rest of the family; nothing more to the point was said; and it was not until some hours later that she inadvertently, but conveniently, overheard a scrap of dialogue not meant for her ears.

  ‘You must speak to him, Edmund.’

  ‘I can hardly do that, my love.’

  ‘It’s your duty. She’s a notorious person.’

  Catherine tiptoed guiltily away. She had heard enough—too much. It was time to take action.

  Action, but how? It was more easily said than done. The first step was obvious: since in the ordinary course of events she would not see him again for four weeks, during which time anything disastrous might happen, she must begin by writing him a letter. That in itself would surprise him, mark an epoch in their relationship, and remind him pointedly of her existence; for she had never had occasion to write to him before. Moreover she would address him, boldly, as ‘Dear Robert’; yet not too boldly, for to sharpen the point, and at the same time hint at shyness, she would first put ‘Mr Crabbe’ and then cross it out and write ‘Robert’ above it. What to say was the next problem, and how to combine decorum with the necessary secrecy. A dawning enthusiasm for literature was the answer. Books, apart from Mrs Stapleton, were his chief preoccupation, so books provided the easiest and most innocent form of approach. Dear Robert (she began in her mind), Will you be very kind and lend me a book, please. Mama does not know I am writing to you, I fear she would disapprove! If you can spare it for a week or two I would so much like to read that poem you told us about, Persian I think you said, about grasping the sorry scheme of things entire, it sounded very nice and rather original. Now I must bring this letter to a close. Yours very sincerely, Catherine.

  Dispatching this letter, marked Private to prevent its being confused with business communications, involved stealing a postage stamp from Mama’s davenport and then making a secret trip to the village: she accomplished both crimes without scruple. When the book arrived, if it arrived, there would be questions and explanations; but in her eagerness to open the campaign she refused to think about that. She had but the vaguest notion of what ‘the sorry scheme of things’ referred to: the only scheme she wished to shatter to bits was the one she attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Mrs Stapleton. She could not doubt that whatever was afoot between those two was Mrs Stapleton’s doing, not Robert’s: he was the innocent predestined victim, like poor Henry Maltravers in Lovers’ Rue, or The Ways of Woman. For Robert was not, like silly Captain Beckoning, a flirt. He was serious and good and full of deep thoughts, no gay deceiver. She remembered, with a belated thrill, the ceremonial hand-kissing in the office three months ago. A perplexing episode, but nothing could have been less alarming or more utterly respectful than that grave salute.

  Not till she stood, letter in hand, confronting the wide mouth of the pillar-box, did she hesitate; and then only to savour more deliberately the high drama of the moment, the delicious frightening sensation of standing on the brink of an irrevocable act of which the consequences could not be foreseen. Her fingers released the letter. It fell, light as a whisper, into the box, and was gone beyond recall. In imagination she went with it on its journey and watched Robert’s face—surprised, gentle, gravely sympathetic—as he read it.

  ‘Hullo! Where have you been?’ asked Sarah, on her return.

  ‘Why? Has there been a hue and cry?’

  ‘Mama was asking for you. Something about doing the flowers.’

  ‘What, again? They’ve been done once today. Have they disarranged themselves, the clever things?’ Catherine brooded for a moment on her wrongs. ‘Of course it had to be me—just because I wasn’t here. Flowers indeed! She might have thought of something more likely.’

  ‘Don’t excite yourself, donkey,’ said Sarah. ‘It was the best she could manage on the spur of the moment.’

  ‘I’m not in the least excited. But I am rather tired of being on a lead. Aren’t you? Sometimes I feel like running away.’ Uneasy in her conscience, she was still rattled, her sense of humour in abeyance.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Sarah, dissembling her surprise at this uncharacteristic outburst. ‘Let’s go together. You can be Rosalind, you’d make a pretty young man, and I’ll be your Celia. And we’ll take Harry Dawkins with us for our Touchstone. But where shall we go? There aren’t any suitable forests hereabouts.’

  The Shakespeare allusion, by reminding her of school, gave Catherine an idea.

  ‘Why can’t we go and stay with El
len Skimmer for a few days? She’s invited us often enough.’

  ‘You, not me,’ Sarah objected. ‘She was your bosom friend, after I’d left. I hardly knew her.’

  ‘At school you didn’t, but you quite liked her when she was here last summer. It was fun having her. I can’t imagine how we came to lose touch. It would be nice to see her again.’ And highly convenient to be domiciled in Newtonbury for a while. The sooner the better if Olive Stapleton’s design was to be frustrated. It was, in fact, she suddenly perceived, the only way.

  Sarah remembered Ellen Skimmer as a plump, cheerful, ordinary girl with nervous ultra-ladylike manners in the presence of her elders and a disposition at other times to excessive enthusiasm and loud laughter. She had accepted her serenely as Catherine’s friend; the visit, though unrewarding, had been accounted a success; but neither Sarah nor Catherine herself had been greatly grieved when it came to an end. Ellen’s chief virtue in Sarah’s eyes, apart from a general amiability, was her evident devotion to Catherine; but it was as much Catherine’s lack of eagerness as Mrs Peacock’s gentle obstructiveness that had made the reciprocal invitation abortive. During the twelve months that had passed since then there had been an occasional exchange of letters between the two girls, but Ellen’s name had occurred but seldom in the family conversation, and she herself had become a shadowy, almost forgotten figure. Her sudden emergence from that semi-oblivion, her promotion to the status of urgently desired companion, was therefore a surprise to Sarah. It was a case of any port in a storm, she supposed; but, being unaware of any storm, of its nature and origin she could have no inkling.

  ‘If that’s how you feel, my child, you’d better go. Why not? If Mama will let you.’

  ‘She’ll never let me go alone,’ said Catherine, frowning. ‘You’d have to come too, to keep an eye on me.’ Seeing a satirical gleam in Sarah’s eye she added quickly: ‘Besides, it would be more fun.’