The Daughters of Mrs Peacock (6 page)

‘It's beautifully silly, Papa. But nice too. I'm enjoying it hugely. I've just got up to where Lady Vera discovers that Millicent Brown is her half-sister. Millicent, you
know, is the mysterious beauty she met at the Debenhams' dinner-party.'

‘I didn't know,' said Mr Peacock, ‘but I'm delighted to hear it. Tell me more, dear child.'

‘Well, what makes it so exciting is that they're both in love with the young Earl.'

‘Then his lordship is a very lucky man. He has only to take his choice.'

‘Yes, but the awkward thing is, he's already engaged to be married, to a rather horrid woman that his mother, the Dowager Lady Debenham, has forced on him. It was really she who gave the dinner-party. The Dowager I mean, not the horrid woman.
She
was there too, keeping an eye on him. The horrid woman I mean, not the Dowager. Though of course the Dowager kept an eye on him too.'

‘You relieve my mind,' said Mr Peacock. ‘I was in danger of envying the young gentleman. But don't excite me too much, my dear. My condition won't stand it. Your mother, remember, insists that I've been ill.'

‘When I've finished the book I'll tell you how it goes on,' Catherine promised, with an air of mock-gravity. ‘By then, Papa, you'll have got back your strength.'

‘Thank you, child. That will be very kind. I can see, by what you've told me already, that it's a most talented and distinguished piece of work.'

‘
But
, dear Papa,' said Sarah, wrinkling her brow, ‘is it, do you think, quite suitable reading for the young? Is not my little sister in danger of being led astray?'

‘That is very true, Sarah,' said Mrs Peacock. ‘A true word spoken in jest. I never interfere. Catherine knows
that. But if she
must
fill her head with novels I wish she would choose them with more discrimination. So does her father,' she added firmly, challenging contradiction.

‘Do you, Papa?' inquired Catherine with specious innocence.

‘I do not need to give you my opinion,' Mr Peacock answered. ‘Your mother saves me that trouble.' He smiled on his daughters with complacent affection. ‘You're all wonderfully silly girls, but I daresay you'll come to no harm. Eh, mother?'

‘In
my
young days,' said Mrs Peacock severely, ‘we read Sir Walter and poor Mr Thackeray.' Sir Walter had died during her childhood but was still Sir Walter. Poor Mr Thackeray's death was a comparatively recent event: hence the epithet.

‘You cannot include Julia in your strictures, Papa,' said Sarah. ‘She sets me and Kitty
such
a good example. We can never go wrong if we model our behaviour on hers.'

‘Me?' said Julia. ‘Oh no.' She rebutted the charge indignantly, refusing to be excluded from the communion of sisters. ‘I'm sure I'm as silly as either of you. But I have at least one virtue,' she declared. ‘I never mind being laughed at. Which is just as well,' she sensibly added, ‘for I get plenty of
that
.'

‘So do we all, my dear,' said Mrs Peacock, ‘with Sarah and your father about. They encourage each other.'

‘I think
I
shall write a novel for Kitty,' said Sarah, ‘and see that she reads nothing else. Julia will help me with the pious bits. I shall model it on
Ministering Children.
Or that book about the little motherless girl whose father was in India, and her kind auntie wouldn't let her open
his letter because it came on Sunday. Do you remember, Mama? Something like that will be wonderfully good for Kitty. It's just what she needs, poor child, to set her in the right path.'

‘Why must you talk about me as if I were not here?' Catherine complained. ‘But perhaps you didn't notice I was? This is me, this beautiful young girl with red hair.'

‘When you two have finished talking nonsense,' remarked Mrs Peacock, ‘perhaps one of you will spare time to cut your mother some bread?'

Julia, jumping up from her seat, flung herself upon the loaf. ‘Poor starving Mama!' she cried, infected by the general gaiety. ‘How cruel we are to you!'

When the meal was over, and the family dispersed, Mr Pardew came creeping back into Sarah's thoughts. And now, in his absence, she was drawn to him, remembering his good looks, his good nature, his unhappiness, and thinking she had perhaps been unkind. Painful and absurd as the situation was, there was something of secret gratification to be derived from it: her vanity, little catered for hitherto, could not lightly dismiss the tribute of a man's desire, even such a man as Mr Pardew, who was, when all was said, an eminently respectable, well-bred, eligible person. Nor, though it embarrassed her, did his devotion diminish for her his personal attractions, such as they were. He was good and he was kind, manly in appearance and graceful in his movements; and if only he would consent never to open his mouth, except to put food into it, she half-believed she could have loved him. It could not be denied that marriage would be a triumph,
a solace to self-esteem, and that this first chance might also be her last. In pursuit of the idea that she had perhaps done him some injustice, by being perversely over-critical, her daydreaming imagination, lacking the corrective of his presence, began wilfully endowing him not only with the virtues he might be supposed to possess, sincerity, loyalty, resolute good intentions, but with qualities that bore no relation to what she knew of him. Not wit: she drew the line there. He would never sparkle. He would never set the table in a roar. But humour, yes: she was determined to give him at least a modicum of humour. A man in love, or thinking himself in love, was never, she supposed, at his brightest; but, once his prayer were granted, his ambition achieved, he would surely be bolder, less dog-eyed, more capable of taking a point, or seeing a joke, without having it explained to him. Marriage could not fail to effect that much.

She began to see that her former judgment had been hasty, superficial. He had, after all, shown unusual enterprise. It was greatly to his credit that he had approached her direct, defying convention by not first asking her parents' permission. Though infinitely respectful, endearingly modest, he had been impetuous and brave. He knew what he wanted and was resolved to get it. Behind that mask of diffidence and excessive gravity lived a mature resolute spirit and a mind that refused to be deflected from its purpose by her evasive flippancies. Having thus created a new Mr Pardew, patient, masterful, and of wisdom and irony all compact, she proceeded to endow him with learning and saintliness
for good measure: no sense in scamping the job. He was, she knew, a university man, with an honours degree, and might one day be a bishop. She grew hot and cold remembering how lightly she had dismissed him.

The truth is, she said, I'm frivolous, too fond of making fun. At my age I ought to be more serious, like Julia. Why doesn't he marry
her?
It would be just the thing. As a brother-in-law he would be nearly perfect. Yet, oddly, the idea did not entirely please her. Already she had certain property rights in the lover she did not want. She did not want him, but was not yet quite ready to let him go; and, though she half-dreaded the prospect, she was impatient to see him again.

No woman since the world began—nor man either—has received with perfect indifference a declaration of love, no matter from what source; and even though disdain or repulsion or fear be her dominant emotion, mingling with it, in greater or less degree, is gratification, the response of a caressed vanity of which she may be unaware. Being young and inexperienced, neither Miss Sarah nor Mr Pardew was possessed of this universal truth of human nature. He did not, could not know, that by exposing his desire for her he had made himself for the moment the most interesting person in the world, nor she that her being desired had unsettled her judgment and half-persuaded her that she was fond of him. The seed he had sown, unregarded at the time, blossomed into a gratitude—mingled with compassion—that was dangerously akin to love, or at least could easily be mistaken for it if she
were not careful. Unknowingly, he had added to her stature, transformed her conception of herself, given her a blissful sense of her own value: never again could she think of herself, without qualification, as the ordinary homely one, outshone by her beautiful sisters, with nothing but a lively sense of the ludicrous to offset her unremarkable appearance. Looking at herself in the glass, she tried to see what Mr Pardew presumably saw in her, and though the endeavour was unsuccessful she was more than ready to defer to his masculine and therefore (in this matter) superior judgment. There was, perceptibly, a new sparkle in her eyes, and with the hair done a little differently perhaps something might be made of her, in spite of the comic nose and dumpy figure. It was, at any rate, worth trying.

Catherine, who still shared with her the big bedroom that had once been the night nursery for all three, was more conscious than Sarah herself of the outward change in her. She had noticed uneasily that except at mealtimes, when the family was fully mustered and a special effort was called for, this volatile sister of hers was strangely unlike herself: silent and self-absorbed. The comfortable bedtime chatter which they had enjoyed together all their lives, their voices, disembodied by the darkness, growing drowsier and drowsier till sleep at last supervened, had become, as the days went by, more and more abbreviated.

‘Sarah! … Are you awake?'

‘No,' said Sarah. ‘I'm fast asleep.'

‘Will you promise not to be cross if I ask you something?'

‘Cross? I'm never cross.'

‘You are, you know, sometimes. You have been, lately. Not cross exactly. But sort of.'

‘It's news to me. Since when, pray?' Regretting the incautious question Sarah hastened to add: ‘Can a person be cross without knowing it? I shouldn't have thought so.' There was safety in generalities.

‘Will you promise then?' Catherine persisted.

‘All right. I'm not a dragon, Kitty. What is it?'

‘It's since that game of croquet,' said Catherine, ‘with Mr Pardew.' Her clear young voice, urgent and oddly shy, seemed to hover suspended in the warm darkness. Silence engulfed the words, a long palpitating silence in which their implications echoed and re-echoed. ‘You're not thinking seriously of him, are you?'

‘Why?' said Sarah. ‘What if I were?'

‘Oh, nothing. I only wanted to know.'

‘Does it matter to you so much?'

‘Not,' said Catherine bravely, ‘if you really want him.'

‘Well, you needn't worry, donkey. I said No. Nothing could have been plainer. He won't ask me again.'

‘What on earth makes you think that? Of
course
he will. Men always do.'

‘Not he though,' said Sarah. ‘He hasn't been near us since. It's nearly a fortnight.'

‘And you're disappointed, aren't you?' It was an accusation.

‘Not at all. Why should I be? He's had his answer. It's only logical to keep out of the way.'

‘If you ask me,' said Catherine resentfully, ‘I think it's rather clever of him.'

‘Clever? No, he's not clever. Not in that way.'

‘He's getting you into a state. And then, in his own good time,
you'll
see, back he'll come.'

‘Will he? I don't think so.'

‘Don't you? I do. I'm sure of it. So if you really don't mean to have him, you'd better be prepared.'

‘Thank you for the warning, Kitty. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings … Shall we go to sleep now?'

But sleep tonight did not come quickly to Sarah. The conversation had disturbed her more than she would admit. If he
did
ask her again, what would she say? That she could not confidently answer that question frightened her. She had had only one sight of him since the day of the proposal: in church, tall, unapproachable, priestly, reading the Lessons in a loud, polite, prefectorial voice. To see him so, a public figure, remote and impersonal in cassock and surplice, to hear him enunciating sentences too familiar to engage her thought, gave her the queerest sensation. The contrast between now and then was exciting: she could not forget that between this stranger and herself, whether she would or no, there now existed an intimate relationship, an invisible bond. How strange that a few unwelcome words could have effected so much, and all in a moment of time. Even now, in her fancy, he was thinking of her, as she of him. They shared a secret of which no one else in this crowded church, except Catherine, had any inkling. Except Catherine, sitting next to her. From time to time, waking from a dream, she became conscious of Catherine's curious, wondering, speculative glance.

Another Sunday came and went. At Evensong Mr Pardew occupied the pulpit.

‘Did it make you laugh, the sermon?' Catherine asked, when they were alone again.

‘Not particularly.'

‘I thought not,' said Catherine sadly. Trying again, she ventured: ‘But it was very churchified, wasn't it?'

‘Naturally,' said Sarah. ‘What else could it be? He's not a good preacher. We've always known that.'

‘Never mind. I'm sure you'll brighten him up when you're married.'

‘Are you, donkey?' said Sarah. ‘Then that's all right, isn't it?'

Next day, exactly a fortnight after his former visit, he presented himself at the house half an hour before teatime. Mrs Peacock received him with her customary graciousness. He shook hands with the girls, letting his glance linger for only a moment on Sarah, and after some careful desultory conversation, in which he and Mrs Peacock did most of the talking, took his place at table, smiling gratefully on all the company. At Mr Peacock's entry, a moment later, he leapt to his feet.

‘Good afternoon, sir. The bad penny again.' He laughed selfconsciously, baring white teeth.

‘Afternoon, Pardew. Delighted to see you.'