The Daughters of Mrs Peacock (16 page)

‘Yes, uncle,' agreed Sarah. ‘I expect there is.'

‘Ah, there's always a lesson,' remarked Aunt Bertha, ‘if only we could find it. But come along, my dear, you'll be ready for your tea,
I‘ll
be bound.'

‘So she will,' said Uncle Druid, ‘and so she should be, seeing the perilous long way she's come, poor soul. After a train-journey, nurridgement. It's the law of nature.'

‘That's very true, Father. You'll find your Cousin Patience in the kitchen, my dear. She'll have wetted the leaves by now, if I'm any judge. We won't wait for Barney. He'll come when he can from the milking.'

Aunt Bertha, unlike her sister, was short and plump. She had the kind of resolutely pious face that one sees in stained-glass windows: the conventional halo was all but visible. She was kind and earnest; spoke with an exaggerated gentleness, as to a backward child; and shared with her husband the habit of sententiousness. Which of them, Sarah wondered, had acquired from the other this talent for investing the obvious with moral glamour? Or had their common possession of it drawn them together? Aunt Bertha was older than Mama by several years. Her cheeks, though plump, were colourless, her eyes soulful, her hair sparse and peppery. Uncle Druid was broad and burly, with ferocious eyebrows, a ruddy complexion, and a forest of black beard. Such conversation as his came oddly from a man whom Nature had designed as a pirate, or a highwayman, but was in fact a working farmer. Out of the strong came forth triteness.

‘A boiled egg will restore the tissues, as the saying goes, so long as it's not too hard nor yet too soft. Too soft is
too
soft, if you take my meaning, and too hard is harder than it should be. Lightly boiled is the rule, some say; but I say,
rightly
boiled.' He repeated the aphorism with solemn relish. ‘Whether it's eggs or no matter what,' he continued, ‘always do right, and you can't go wrong: that's my motto, isn't it, Mother? And that, you know, Sarah my dear, is the trouble with this modern world of ours. We live in an age of hurry and scurry, scamper and
rush, no time for this, no time for that, no time to get anything
right.
But you can trust your aunt. You're safe with her—eh, Mother? And with Patience too. Patience by name and patience by nature, is our Patience. Four and a half minutes, neither more nor less. There's a time for everything, as the Good Book says. A time for laughing and a time for weeping and a time for boiling eggs. Do you follow me, niece?'

‘Yes, uncle. I think I understand.'

‘How many lumps, my dear?' asked Aunt Bertha, sugar tongs in hand.

‘One, please, Aunt Bertha.'

‘Three score years and ten,' said Uncle Druid, rather sternly. ‘And honey from our own bees.'

He looked round the table in a knowing manner, with the air of having clinched a difficult argument.

‘How are they all at home?' asked Cousin Patience, breaking a mystified silence.

‘Quite well, thank you,' said Sarah.

‘Uncle Edmund?'

‘Yes, thank you.'

‘Aunt Emily?'

‘And Julia,' said Sarah, ‘and Catherine. All well, thank you, Cousin Patience.'

‘I do hope dear Barney won't be long,' sighed Aunt Bertha. ‘The tea will be stewed.'

‘That's another thing we can learn from,' said Uncle Druid. ‘The hive. Industry and per-sevverance. Service for others. Busy all day long gathering honey for us.'

‘God's little husbandmen,' interpolated Aunt Bertha.

‘For
us
, uncle? Surely not!'

‘For you and me, Sarah. For your Aunt Bertha. For your Cousin Patience. Milk from the cow, honey from the bee. That's Providence, that is. Isn't it, Mother?'

‘Yes, dear. All good things around us, as the hymn says.'

‘In the comb,' said Uncle Druid. ‘But not till we've finished our eggs.'

‘I see what you mean,' said Sarah meekly, ‘but all the same I'm glad I'm not a bee. For one thing they haven't any sex worth speaking of, except the queen and the poor drones. It seems rather an unfair arrangement.'

‘My dear,' said Aunt Bertha, ‘we don't talk of things like that.' She smiled forgivingly.

‘Don't you, Aunt Bertha? We do,' answered Sarah. She glanced expectantly towards her uncle, hoping for a further instalment of wisdom. He did not disappoint her.

‘Nature,' said Uncle Druid, announcing his new text. ‘You can't go against Nature. Rain and sun. Seedtime and harvest. Take the bees, take the flowers, take anything you choose,' he added generously, ‘and what have you got, what does it all amount to? Nature. Consider the lilies how they grow, said Our Lord. They toil not, neither do they spin. But they're there, there's no denying, and you may depend on it, they're there for a good reason. Why, you may ask. Why are they there? Why do they grow and grow and … in short, why do they grow? The flowers of the field. The poppies in the corn. The buttercups, the dandelions, the daisies. Every spring they appear, every summer they bloom, every autumn they shed their petals, every winter they die down. But they're there, Sarah, they're still there, biding their time, as you might say. Why? I'll tell you. Because of Nature.'

‘And,' said Aunt Bertha, gently corrective, ‘because it's God's will.'

‘Amen, Mother,' said Uncle Druid. Throwing back his head he lifted his cup and poured its contents into a small red gap in his beard. ‘Ah, that's better. There's nothing like a cup of tea.'

In the conversational lull that followed, Sarah had time to take stock of her situation: the low ceiled red-tiled kitchen, the open brick hearth, the chimneypiece with its gleaming array of pots and pans, and the proximity, half-seen, half-heard, of the cobbled yard. Through the narrow sash-window, open three inches at the top, came the rhythmic, resonant sound of warm milk spurting into a pail. To her ears it was a familiar music, but here at Meonthorpe the sense of farm was stronger, more pervasive, than at home. There it was an incidental accompaniment to a more elegant style of living: here it was the prime business of life, to which all other activities were subordinate. As she listened, lost in drowsy reflection, the sound of milking ceased; there was a rattle of loosening chains, a man's voice speaking, the slap of a broad buttock, the soft thud of hooves as the cattle slowly lumbered across the yard; and a few moments later, with a great clatter of boots, Barnabas Druid burst into the kitchen, a lean giant of a man, already going bald, with a small, sharp-featured face, prominent ears, a straggling wisp of sun-coloured moustache. He brought with him a pungent suggestion of farmyard.

‘Daisy's going dry, governor! What d'you make of that?' He dragged a chair up to the table, sat himself down, and began voraciously eating.

‘There's manners for you!' said his mother fondly. ‘Aren't you going to say how-d'you-do to your Cousin Sarah, dear?'

‘Eh? Hullo, cousin! So you've arrived then? Pleasant journey?'

‘Yes, thank you.' If a dog could talk, thought Sarah, it would talk like Cousin Barnabas.

‘That's the style. What about a cup of tea, Mother?'

‘Manners,' said Uncle Druid, ‘are what you like to make of them. The way I look at it, there's good manners and there's bad manners, and what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over, as my old father used to say. When he was alive, that is,' he explained, turning to Sarah. ‘Dead and gone now this many a year, poor soul.'

He proceeded to embroider the theme, but Sarah, though she appeared to give him her full attention, was no longer listening. Fascinated though she was by the quality of her uncle's discourse, and longing for the time when she would be able to share him with Catherine, for the moment she could hold no more.

‘Quite right, Father,' said Aunt Bertha. ‘The important thing, for us all, is to set a good example.'

Patience took no part in the conversation. She attended diligently to the wants of the others, and for the rest sat in silence, munching, sipping, unsmiling: a woman of perhaps forty whose premature greyness and apathetic expression made her seem scarcely younger than her mother. As for Barnabas, he did not open his mouth again except to put food into it or to interrupt his father's flow of words with a curt remark about crops, market
prices, the weather. It was small wonder, Sarah reflected, that Uncle Druid's surviving children were inclined to be taciturn: the three others she had vaguely heard of had no doubt been talked to death in their infancy. The wonder was, not that they were silent, these two, but that dear Uncle Druid, with so much to say, had ever found time to initiate them. Despite these unuttered sarcasms, however, and though already she was counting the days to her return, she did not regret having come. Whether ‘nice' or not, a change it certainly was, to be living in a genuine farmhouse, with full-time farmers, and surrounded by excitingly unfamiliar country. She promised herself some good long walks; she might, it was just possible, meet some new people to add to her collection of human specimens; and there was always a chance that something amusing might happen during the next thirteen days.

What is a man to do when, having wilfully with resolute folly involved himself with a bold-eyed, tenacious Cleopatra, he becomes aware of young Juliet, fair as the morning and sweetly beckoning, and finds himself distracted in his too-successful pursuit of the one by inconvenient visions of the other? Leaving Robert Crabbe to resolve this problem as best he can, for it will take him some time, let us turn in parenthesis to another theme, to Julia: who, like her young sister but from motives more genuinely disinterested, was now engaging in a work of rescue. Death was the adversary she had set herself to circumvent, and Fear, his cunning lieutenant.
She had entered the battle without enthusiasm, animated by nothing but her unsleeping sense of duty, the unarguable necessity of doing the right, the neighbourly thing; but before many weeks were past she had found herself deeply, personally concerned, moving in a region of dark and palpitating mystery; and now, with her mother's consent and approval, she was visiting the vicarage almost every day, leaving Catherine to cope, willy nilly, with the various small household tasks that normally fell to the lot of Mama's Right Hand. That she, Julia, should have been willing to resign that proud office, even for a while, gives the measure of her new zeal.

Nearly every morning then, after breakfast, she set out for the village, a quarter of an hour's brisk walk, carrying with her such edible dainties as she thought might tempt the appetite of an invalid. The vicarage, hidden from the road by tall funereal fir-trees, stood some sixty or seventy yards back from the High Street, surrounded by two acres of neglected garden, a wilderness of rank grass, weed-infested flower-beds, decaying summerhouses, and overgrown laurels; for Roy Tupkin, since the beginning of his master's illness, had abandoned even the pretence of being a gardener, and now spent what time he could spare from more congenial pursuits, such as eating and sleeping and pursuing the village girls, in scrubbing floors and filling scuttles for the formidable Mrs Budge and her fourteen-year-old daughter Gladys. A stranger entering upon the desolate scene would have supposed the place to be uninhabited; nor would his first sight of the house itself, bleak, grimy, uncared-for, have contradicted that impression; but, though the interior too was comfortless
and forbidding, the wallpaper discoloured by damp, the pictures slightly crooked, the upholstery dying of old age, once inside, and confronted by Mrs Budge, no one could doubt that inhabited it was, and by someone who would not be easily dispossessed.

In appearance, as in some of her habits, Mrs Budge resembled a plump, elderly hen; but there was cunning as well as greed in her small, sharp eyes, and her manner, an uneasy mixture of obsequiousness and self-assurance, suggested that she entertained delusions of grandeur and was determined to be taken at her own valuation.

‘Most kind, I'm sure, miss,' she too-carefully articulated, on Julia's first visit. ‘Most kind,' The eyes glittered. The thrusting beak hovered over the basket. ‘Not but what dear Mr Garnish is being well looked after. Anything he fancies. He has only to name it.'

‘Quite so, Mrs Budge. And now, if you please, I should like to see him.'

‘Not today, miss, I fear, if you'll excuse me. It wouldn't, you must understand, be quite convenient.' She switched on a false, deprecating smile. ‘The poor gentleman's in bed.'

‘So I suppose,' said Julia. ‘All the more reason why I should see him. Please tell him Miss Peacock is here. Miss Julia Peacock.'

‘Seeing he's so out of sorts, miss, I don't care to disturb him. But I'll tell him you called. Good morning.'

Julia, on the doorstep, stood firm, refusing the hint. The two stared at each other, the one gravely intent, the other goatishly smiling. Then the face of Mrs Budge withdrew. The door, so narrowly open, began closing. A spasm of
unwonted anger quickened Julia's pulse. Insolence, and from an inferior, was something her mother's daughter would not brook. She stepped quickly forward, put out a hand, and pushed her way into the house.

‘I think perhaps you misunderstood me, Mrs Budge,' she said pleasantly. ‘I wish to see the Vicar. Be so good as to announce me. I shall follow you.'

‘Very good, Miss Peacock. No offence, I hope. I only want to do what's right.'

‘I'm sure you do,' said Julia. ‘Shall we go upstairs then?'

‘And if harm comes of it,' said Mrs Budge, as she turned to lead the way, ‘it can't be laid at
my
door.' Arrived within sight of the bedroom she darted forward and attached herself to the door-handle. ‘I'll see if he's awake,' she said over her shoulder; then entered and shut herself in. Julia waited and listened, still utterly resolved, but fearful of intruding at an awkward moment. After an uncomfortable interval the door opened and Mrs Budge peered round its edge. ‘The Vicar can spare you five minutes, I find.'