The Daughters of Mrs Peacock by Gerald Bullet Page A

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 hisenthusiasm 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,