Читать книгу Accident by Design - Edith Caroline Rivett - Страница 10

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On that same sunny June morning when Meriel had asserted to Gerald her determination to return to Australia, Herbert Standish strolled across the gardens at Templedean and went by way of a wrought-iron gate in the clipped beech hedge into the wooded pasture or park which lay beyond the formal gardens.

Standish had been secretary to Sir Charles Vanstead since 1945. He was a man of outstanding ability, who had taken a degree in economics and was a fine mathematician. In addition to this he had a scientific mind and enough training in physics to make him able to follow some of the more recondite research into nuclear fission. Perhaps the fact that he was content with his extremely comfortable post as Sir Charles Vanstead’s secretary was a measure of some weakness of fibre in Standish’s makeup: he preferred a well-paid and comfortable job which gave him the opportunity of studying the results of other men’s research to a less well-paid job in which he could have done research work himself. Sir Charles, who was a shrewd judge of men, had once said to Judith that Herbert Standish tended to the dilettanti—he had too many subsidiary interests. He had a passion for music, not unusual in a mathematician; he was a good field naturalist and an omnivorous reader, but he was also a very good secretary and had a faculty for expounding scientific theory, which Sir Charles found valuable. Standish had his own sitting room and a small naturalist’s lab, but he lived as one of the family at Templedean, and had become almost part of the background, as it were. He was ready to make a fourth at bridge, to play billiards, to drive a car, and generally to assist Judith in her social activities. To some extent Standish took the place of Judith’s elder brothers, who had both been killed during the war. Charles was killed during the bombing of 1941, and James had lost his life in an aeroplane crash in 1945. Standish, a man of observant and analytical mind, did not believe that Judith had had any deep affection for her brothers, but she missed them: missed, perhaps, the things they did for her, and she seemed glad when Standish came to live at Templedean and showed his willingness to be of service to her.

Strolling through the park, glancing occasionally at the beautiful Jersey cows that were pasturing there, Standish meditated on the situation in the Vanstead household. For Gerald he had no use at all: from his first meeting with Sir Charles’s heir, Standish had disliked and despised him. He disliked Meriel, also, but he did not despise her. He recognised her determination and vigour, and the fact that Meriel had loathed him at sight amused rather than annoyed him.