The Daughters of Mrs Peacock (12 page)

The five minutes passed, and then five more. Mr Flack, stationmaster, porter, ticket-collector, signalman, and diligent cultivator of marigolds and carnations in the narrow strip of garden that ran beside the up-platform, joined Catherine where she stood waiting.

‘Don't fret, missy. He won't be long now.' He fished a plump silver watch from his pocket, laid it snugly in his palm, and stared at it meditatively. ‘Another ten minutes maybe. He's not often later than that.'

Catherine smiled. ‘I've plenty of time,' she assured him.

‘That's right. Hurry's a bad workman, not worth his wages. All well at home, Miss Catherine? A nice lady is Miss Mary Smith, always the pleasant word. And a longish time since we've seen her in these parts.'

‘Nearly three years,' agreed Catherine, amused but not surprised at his knowing who was expected. ‘She lives with a family not far from London now.'

‘Ah,' said Mr Flack. ‘That'll be a place called High-gate. And coming to you for a week's holiday, I fancy, welcomed by one and all…. Dash my brass buttons, just look at that! The signal's against her. If you'll excuse me, miss….'

He sauntered off, to put that matter right. The fall of the great wooden arm, sudden and dramatic even though
expected, delighted Catherine as of old, renewing for a moment her childish persuasion of its being not merely a sign, but the compelling cause, of the train's arrival; and, sure enough, a few minutes later her time of waiting came to a climax and was dissolved in the sight of a woman's face staring eagerly from a carriage window as the train slowed to a standstill, of a door swinging open, and a trim spinsterly figure stepping cautiously out on to the platform. Not seeing Catherine, she stood for a moment as if lost, standing guard over her large leather bag, and looking around uncertainly, as though surprised to find herself the only alighting passenger. Catherine, shy and excited, ran to her rescue.

‘Hullo, Miffy!'

‘
Well!
' cried Miss Smith, wide-eyed with pretended astonishment. ‘Now who can this be, I wonder?'

‘Don't you know me?'

‘I do believe it's my little Catherine!' They leaned towards each other and exchanged a peck, then drew back to resume their mutual scrutiny. ‘But how you've grown, my dear. Quite a young lady.'

‘Lovely to see you, Miffy.'

Lovely, yes, and strange. The queerest sensation, as recognition always is. The image one carries in long absence is shadowy, nebulous, fluid, and its correction by reality brings a momentary shock of surprise. As every parting of lovers or intimate friends is a little death, prefiguring the final inevitable cutting-off, so every meeting after long absence is a resurrection, a re-discovery that is in part a new creation. Miffy, Catherine found, was at once different and the same; but by the time Mr Flack
with a flow of genial gossip had carried the luggage to the waiting trap and seen them safely on their way the difference was already in process of diminishing. As she became gradually used to Miffy's presence at her side she saw that there was little if any outward change in her. She was not visibly older; her eyes were still the same innocent blue, her thin cheeks pale and unlined, the coil of hair projecting under her bonnet a warm brown like beech-leaves in autumn; and her voice had the same slightly exaggerated gentleness, as of one accustomed to dealing with children. Mary Smith in her early thirties was neither young nor old. She was ageless, placid, and in Catherine's conception unalterable, like a character in fiction. She it was who had taught the sisters their alphabet, persuaded them each in turn to interest themselves in a cat that sat on a mat and caught a rat, took them for walks, told them pretty edifying stories, guided their infant steps in arithmetic, read to them carefully selected passages from
Little Arthur's History of England
, and showed them how to draw pictures and work samplers. Since then she had performed the same office for other children, and would continue to do so, if her luck held, until Called Up Higher.

‘I hope your father and mother are well, dear? And Julia? And dear Sarah?'

‘Quite well, thank you.'

‘It's so kind of you to have me. A real joy.'

‘We've been looking forward to it for weeks,' said Catherine. ‘All of us. Me especially.' And but for the distraction of the Robert affair it would have been true.

‘
I
especially,' murmured Miss Smith. ‘And how is Jumbo getting on? Do you still take him to bed with you?'

‘Oh Miffy! Of course not! I'm not a child now.'

‘Dear me, no. I can see that. But you were such a funny little girl. It was a sad day for me when I had to leave you. Never mind. Children have to grow up. It's only right,' she admonished herself, ‘that they should. The next thing, you'll be getting married and have children of your own, God willing.'

‘If I do, Miffy, will you come and governess them?'

‘May I, dear? That would be a wonderful happiness. But your husband will have something to say about that, I expect.' Catherine smiled, but made no answer. Sensing a mystery in her manner Miffy said archly: ‘Is he nice, Catherine?'

‘But of course,' said Catherine, laughing. ‘You don't think I'd marry a nasty man, do you? He hasn't turned up yet, you know, but I can promise you he'll be nice. It's so important in a husband, I always think. He'll be tall, and dark, and not too young. Not old either, but young men are so impudent and conceited, or else cow-eyed—that's Sarah's word—and sentimental. I hate flirts, don't you?'

‘I don't know that I've met any, dear. But no doubt I should have disliked them if I had. Yes, to be sure!'

‘Didn't you when you were young … when you were a girl?' said Catherine, correcting herself. ‘Meet any, I mean?' The idea of Miffy's having once been young, really young, was new to her, a sudden surprising insight; and it seemed a little sad if she had never enjoyed
the nuisance of being dallied with by impudent young men.

‘None that I can recall,' answered Miss Smith, with an indulgent smile. ‘My walk in life was rather different from yours, Catherine. We were never well off, and when my dear father died—he was a clergyman, you know—there was only just enough for mother in her last few years.'

‘Poor you! So you had to be a governess and teach brats like us. But did you never, in one of your posts, encounter a wicked baronet or something, like the young woman in
Pomeroy Towers?
She was a clergyman's daughter too. It was dreadful for her,' said Catherine blithely. ‘What are your present children like, Miffy?'

This was a subject on which Miffy had much to say. It occupied her for the rest of the short drive, and she returned to it again and again during the days that followed. All the Peacocks made much of her, and but that she had no function in the house, no lessons to impart, to have her with them again was like old times. The absence of specific duties, however, was a continual small worry to her. To be of service to others had become second nature: only so could she justify her existence to herself and placate her embarrassed sense of the high privilege of being a guest in this house, where she had once earned her bread. She had to be almost forcibly restrained from scandalizing Alice and Jenny by making the beds and clearing the table after meals, and nothing could prevent her joining the sisters in the various daily tasks that their mother, as was her inflexible habit, found for them. To all their protests, that she was supposed to
be having a holiday, she would answer disarmingly: ‘It's holiday enough, my dears, to be with you again. And anyhow I can't sit in idleness. It was never my way.'

Of Mary Smith's many virtues, which everyone learnt to appreciate anew as the days went by, one of the most important in Catherine's estimation was her talent for attracting letters. A serene humour, a gentle manner, an extravagant delight in the simplest pleasures and a total incapacity for being bored, these in themselves would have sufficed to make her an ideal guest; but that she was also, in spite of her lack of near relatives, an industrious letter-writer who looked eagerly for the postman's coming and loved reading to her breakfast companions what dear little Claud and darling Vera had written to her, perhaps with ‘just a tiny bit of help from their mother', seemed to Catherine the crowning mercy; for it was possible, she thought, that under cover of some such amiable commotion, Miffy performing, the audience fixed in a polite paralysis of attention, Mr Crabbe's anxiously awaited reply might pass unnoticed. This, however, was only her second line of defence, contingent on her failure to be first at the door, and unobserved, when the postman arrived.

Twice every day, for four days, she contrived to do that. But the letter she looked for did not come. Nothing came for her but an enthusiastic invitation from Ellen Skimmer, to whom, without consulting Mama, she had sent a carefully garrulous epistle the point of which was concealed in a casual-seeming postscript. If Ellen could answer so promptly, why not Robert? His silence unnerved her. It was unlike him. It could only mean
that he had no time for her, or, worse, that he thought her a forward miss and was resolved to ignore her simple request. But this she could not in her heart believe: it was impossible that she should have been so mistaken in him. Each disappointment plunged her into despair, but always, within a few minutes, she emerged again, full of hope. It will come this afternoon, it will come tomorrow, she told herself, arguing that every time it did
not
come made it the more not the less probable that the next postal delivery would bring it. At moments she paused to chide herself for making so great a fuss about a small matter, and especially for having embarked on this tiresome campaign of secrecy. She, Catherine, who had never before hesitated to announce her intentions to the world, confident of provoking nothing worse than laughter, what had possessed her that she must labour to hide so innocent a thing as borrowing a book from an old friend of the family? The question was rhetorical: the answer, though she refused to formulate it, made her tremble.

The fifth day dawned. The post arrived. Still nothing. Sadly, angrily, she went back to the breakfast-room and distributed the letters, then resumed her seat at the table. Two minutes later a rat-a-tat-tat at the front door made everyone look up.

‘Who can that be,' said Mrs Peacock, ‘at this hour?'

‘No, Miffy,' exclaimed Sarah, ‘don't disturb yourself. Jenny will answer it. That's what we pay her for.'

‘Do you, Sarah?' inquired Mr Peacock, with an air of courteous interest. ‘Do you indeed? I was under the impression that I did.'

The door opened silently. Jenny came in.

‘A packet for Miss Catherine, m'm. The postman forgot it.'

‘Thank you, Jenny.' Mrs Peacock extended a hand.

Catherine, half-rising, said quickly:' Thank you, Jenny. Will you bring it to me, please?'

The loudness of her voice startled her. She felt slightly sick. The noise of her hurrying pulse filled the room. Everyone except Mama was looking at her, friendly, inquisitive, eager to share her pleasure in this unwonted event. Mama, the packet in her hand, was looking at the postmark, examining the writing on the label, before passing it back to the hovering Jenny for delivery to the dear child, who received it without remark, gave it no more than a glance, and let it lie unopened beside her plate. The blush draining from her cheeks, she helped herself to marmalade, waiting for the interest around her either to die down or to explode into questions. She no longer cared which: the defeat of her ill-conceived unnecessary plan had released her from all anxiety. Let them say or think what they pleased, it was all one: the silly little secret, so soon to be exposed, had become subtly distasteful to her.

‘Well, Catherine?' said Mrs Peacock. ‘Aren't you going to open your nice parcel?'

She answered with specious calm: ‘It can wait. After breakfast will do. It's only a book I'm borrowing … From Mr Crabbe.'

‘Fancy that! I'm sure it's very kind of him.'

‘Yes, isn't it? Are you going to let us go to Ellen's,
Mama, me and Sarah? If not,' said Catherine belligerently, ‘I shall have to think of an excuse.'

No more was said of Mr Crabbe. The anti-climax left her feeling curiously flat. And even his letter, kind but brief, which she read in the seclusion of her bedroom half an hour later, failed at first to reinvigorate her. The book he sent was a new copy, and he had written her name in it. What more had she expected? Not so much. Yet she was unreasonably disappointed; and only gradually, as the day grew older, did her spirits rise and her dream resume its dominion.

The Skimmers, lamentably, were in trade, and retail trade at that. Was this why Mrs Peacock had hesitated so long over Ellen's invitation? If so, she never admitted it, so must be given the benefit of the doubt. Snobbery, to do her justice, played as a rule little conscious part in her mind: in a social order where class distinctions were taken for granted, and everyone ‘knew his place', it was (or could be) an innocent and unaggressive folly; and she thought too well of her own situation to be either timid with her social superiors or overbearing with humbler folk. Though excessively confident in the rightness of her own judgments, and an incorrigible manager of her daughters, she was by no means entirely lacking in common sense: it was perhaps because events so often proved her to be right that she found it difficult to imagine she could ever be wrong. If she did in fact question whether the Skimmers were a suitable family for her daughters to be intimate with, it was no doubt the
shop that gave her pause: the shop, and the recollection of having seen a little old man in shirtsleeves sitting in a corner of the shop-window, his back to the light, bending over his work of watch-mending. But to offset his being a shopkeeper, and somewhat rustic in his speech, was his craftsmanship, for which she had an instinctive respect. Much of what he offered for sale, which included jewelry as well as chronometers, was the work of his own hands, as she knew. His daughter Ellen, moreover, she knew to be a presentable ladylike young person. The unknown factor was his wife, who might, alas, be anything. But even so, she may have argued, the risk was small, and for the girls' sake, Catherine's especially, it had best be taken. Catherine was restive, difficult: it would perhaps do her good to be away from home for a little.