The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  Godfrey continued, as they made their way out of the capital, to offer small polite remarks from time to time. But he was not there. He felt the sunshine warm his left side. Later the dust, getting into his nostrils, caused him to sneeze. But he was nevertheless in an unbroken state of not-feeling, not-hearing, not-seeing.

  Afterwards, thinking back over the day, he was able in fact to recall a good deal of that outward journey. The Surrey countryside, fresh and May-verdant, chestnut blossom and cascading laburnum washing in soft colour on the greenness all around. The horses clipping along neatly together. The enormous broad back of John the coachman sturdily upright in front of them. The footmen equally upright behind, rocking to and fro like a pair of pillars with the layers of dust gradually creeping up from stockinged thighs to generous breeches to the hems of their short jackets. And, as they approached Epsom itself, the long line of slowly moving vehicles in which they had to take their place, with across hedges and at cottage gates curious onlookers staring up at them, the men often in smocks, the children nearly naked. All this he was able to recall. But at the time none of it at all seemed to make any impression on him.

  Afterwards he had been able to see how to these lookers-on the barouche must have appeared as just one more peak in a long moving chain of high mountains, of other barouches, of glossy four-in-hands with roofs packed with swaying colourful passengers, of drags, chaises, victorias, phaetons and brakes. And they would have had troughs too, carts that had been scrubbed free of muck for the occasion, lumbering omnibuses packed full as could be, donkey-drawn vans, even walkers who had set out from London at dawn and were now dusty from head to foot and limping but still infrangibly cheerful. Afterwards he had been able to realise that this was a monster holiday, that Parliament was not sitting and that equally many a coster-barrow was absent from its familiar police-persecuted pavements. But at the time nothing that passed before his eyes caused any thought of any sort to rise in his desensitised mind.

  Only with the slower pace and the greater press of people did single events here and there at last force themselves through. Like a flash of sight seen on recovering from a knock-down blow, there suddenly truly impinged on him the spectacle of a public house, with vehicles at rest crammed outside it, with pots of beer winking and flashing in the sun as they were passed from hand to hand, lifted high to omnibus roofs, gigglingly shared with girls in spring carts got up in their utmost finery. Then again blankness. Then as abruptly he saw and savoured a sign proclaiming ‘Stop Here for the Big Pint’. And again oblivion.

  But it lasted less long this time. Quite soon there was another flash of vision, one that drew itself out. A long white fence with the words ‘Lloyds News One Penny’ painted in endless repetition all along it and, above, a swarm of urchins yelling and waving. And not long afterwards in the town itself Benson’s Ham-and-Beef Shop rose up before his eyes out of his sea of unseeingness with its pillars of cooked brisket, its piled hillocks of sausage-rolls, its penny loaves brown and glistening, its glinting sun-touched brass window-rail.

  By the time they got their first glimpse of the course the sheer crowded cramming press of event was forcing apprehension on him in flashes more and more frequent. As the big barouche, its horses pulling hard now, came to the top of the downs, there all before him, vivid and present and making its impact, was the Grand Stand, white and dazzling, the grass spreading away from them till it met, like rocks emerging from a flowing sea, the clumps of bushes and spinneys of trees, the tents and the booths like so many sun-touched wind-filled yachts and pleasure-boats. And now he saw the people. Sharp-faced swaggering betting men, grooms small and neat with cornflowers in their buttonholes, shopmen and factory hands with the pallor of their everyday occupations irredeemably on their faces, apprentices sporting it in flaming neckties with girls on their arms, applewomen active and rosy-cheeked, and aristocrats at ease and affable under tall tilted hats.

  As the carriage nudged and crept its way into the throng, he felt all this boiling and bubbling mass of humanity stirring him, if ever so little. He was still too much an automaton to have any notion what he could say to Elizabeth when he would find himself alone with her, whether that would be in the midst of all this crowd or at a later time. But minute by minute he knew he was more truly present in the crowd, that he was taking part, sharing with costermonger and duke in the immense festival.

  At last Sir Charles shouted up that they were unlikely to find a better position. Then John manoeuvred the big carriage to exactly the angle he thought most advantageous and in a minute the grooms leapt down, one to hold the horses till they could be unharnessed and led away, the other to lower the steps and hold the door open while they got out.

  ‘Marvellous, marvellous,’ exclaimed Sir Charles, taking a little run up and down on the short springy turf.

  He turned to Godfrey.

  ‘You haven’t been to the Derby, if I’m right, since you came with us as a boy?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Then you don’t know what you’ve missed. It’s a truly wonderful occasion.’

  He took Godfrey by the lapels, a suddenly serious expression on his smiling holiday face.

  ‘Do you know, my boy, it’s the nearest I ever get to a feeling of what I believe’s called spirituality? The horseflesh, the jockeys, all the people and—and— Oh, the great swell of the downs. They make me feel— Oh, I don’t know what. Never mind, never mind.’

  ‘No, Charles,’ said Lady Augusta forcefully. ‘You oughtn’t to be abashed by your own feelings. You’re perfectly right. As always. Only you won’t let yourself say what you think. This is a splendid day. It’s unique. Unique. Just look at all the people. All of them. Look.’

  They stood and gazed all round them at the huge throng.

  And certainly it would be hard to imagine seeing more people, and more variety of persons, than there were within fifty or a hundred yards of where they stood. They ranged from an earl—Godfrey recognised him from having had him pointed out at the Private View the year before—to half a dozen rank-smelling gypsies. And one of these latter, a strong-faced, red-scarfed, ragged-skirted creature, did not hesitate to approach the being so far removed from her in the social scale and brazenly propose to ‘tell yer fortune for a little lily shilling’. She got a shilling too, and the flower of Old England heard her with darting interest. There were City merchants, thick of waist and ruby-complexioned, feckless young men with race-glasses and betting-books dangling at their sides, loud-talking and opinion-inflated. There were ladies who were miracles of lightness in gossamer skirts with bobbing floating parasols, and there were barefoot children by the dozen, darting and begging. There were bootblacks and clothes-brushing coves. There was, not far away, a fire-eater at work, holding his flaming brand downwards towards his open mouth while his partnering jolly loudly extolled his art, rang like a maniac on a handbell and thrust an upturned hat at every face. There were bankers and barbers, soldiers and statesmen.

  And all together they thrust themselves on Godfrey’s perceptions as he stood there, masterfully and unanswerably as the tipster he saw thrusting himself on a florid-faced merchant not scrupling to push his feather-crowned old hat into the very nose of the City man and making a sale too, handing over a grubby envelope and receiving in exchange what looked very like a solid half-crown.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lady Augusta, catching the direction of his glance. ‘That’s it. That’s Derby Day. And you should go out and breathe it all in. Take Elizabeth with you. Let her feel what it is to enjoy herself. We shan’t lunch for half an hour.’

  So off they went. Godfrey gave Elizabeth his arm and they stepped into the swirl of jostling humanity.

  Had Lady Augusta, he asked himself, meant to contrive an opportunity for them, hidden in all the noise and confusion, to talk? Or had she meant no more than she had said? The somewhat surprising advice that they should sample in all its luxuriance and riot of growth this outpouring of what seemed to be the whole best an
d worst of mighty London?

  Impossible to tell. But here they were together and, in a way, alone. He knew that he must say something. He was less numbed now than he had been at the day’s start. Derby drunkenness had seen to that. He was sensitive enough to feel for Elizabeth now. To know that he must force himself to find the right words.

  But they stumbled when they came.

  ‘Elizabeth, once again I have to beg your forgiveness.’

  She turned to him. Her eyes that, a moment before had been dancing to the gaiety all round, much as they had danced when he had thought he could paint them for the Venus Verticordia, now changed at once to a light that was as far removed from that excitement as might be. They radiated a luminous passion.

  ‘There should be no occasion for humbug between the two of us,’ she said. ‘I forgive you, Godfrey. You must have known that I have never done anything else. Indeed, I’m not sure that I should not be the one asking forgiveness.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. I told you when you first fled from the thought of our marrying that we could conquer whatever it was that made you fly if only we brought it to the light. I pledged myself to do that with you. And I did not keep my word.’

  He made a movement of protest, but she brushed it aside. Around them the immense crowd shouted and chattered, laughed and yelled. They were in a bubble of silence.

  ‘No, I did not keep my word. Oh, there were excuses. We had so much to do, both of us. We were even, I thought, too happy. But I ought not to have left it in the dark, not even for that much time.’

  He felt her appeal pricking at the numbness that remained within him like the pricking in flesh deprived of blood as the health-giving stream begins to flow again. A feeling sharply, even agonisingly painful, but to be welcomed.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘I must tell—’

  But, like a great black blade slicing down between them, at that moment they were swept apart. It was the most trivial of interruptions, simply a performing boy perched high on a pair of stilts nearly losing his balance and swooping down towards them. Elizabeth, catching sight of him, sprang instinctively back. Godfrey could not run towards her without entangling himself in the long stilts. He jumped a pace clear.

  The boy, a comic fiery ribbon-fluttering mite of perhaps eight or nine waving a coloured dunce’s cap for people to toss pennies into, recovered, straightened up and swung gigantically away. Godfrey hurried over to Elizabeth.

  ‘You’re not hurt?’

  ‘No, no. I got well clear.’

  They looked at each other.

  They both seemed to feel that that momentous exchange could not just be resumed as if it had not been broken off. In Godfrey the painful awakening process had ceased. He could feel the core of numbness in him, thick and convoluted. Elizabeth gave him a look that seemed to be a hand stretching out from a boat fast leaving the shore.

  ‘Godfrey,’ she said. ‘We will talk. Very soon.’

  There was no need for her to say more. He knew that this time her ‘soon’ would be soon, even if she had humanly weakened at this particular moment. It would come. But in the meantime there was no need to force himself into awakened-ness any longer. She had declared her intention, and equally by his very coming here he had made his pledge.

  Now the huge hubbub of the Derby could swallow them up. They wandered on through it all, unable not to see, to hear, even to smell the pulsation on every side. There was the odour of the very grass at their feet, crushed and stamped on by a thousand other feet. There was the sharpness of sweat and the scents cloud-like round the passing women from the simplicity of rosewater to the redolent sensuality of patchouli. There was the sweetness of beer and the fragrance of wine as people began to lunch. There was the pervasive smell of horse-dung, the sudden tang of a peeled orange, and once the raw reek of sausages and fried onions carried past them in a piece of newspaper by a flaunting many-petticoated girl, at present alone but clearly before many minutes more had gone by to secure herself a male companion.

  Godfrey thrust the meaning of her away from him as completely as if she had been a crude colour-printed figure in a cheap illustration and he had taken a pair of scissors and chopped it out. If he was resistant still to the full flood of Elizabeth’s world, he was yet more unwilling now to think of that other one.

  They wandered on, moving down towards the course itself where a racehorse or two, thin and greyhound-like compared with the sturdy carriage-animals tethered back up on the downs, was making its way along, diminutive silk-shirted jockey perched in the saddle. A bumptious swell, green chiffon scarf round his hat, was telling the world how he intended to triumph over the man working the three-card trick on a small tray propped in front of him. A street-singer, shambling and crow-voiced, was chanting a song from his bundle. A seller of race-cards, dressed in shabby hunting pink, was busy touting his marked wares, ‘Buy yer c’rect card ’ere, buy yer c’rect card ’ere.’

  Then, pressing their way through the dense-packed horde, they came back to the barouche for lunch. The footman had spread a generous white cloth and on it there was a display of things to eat worthy of the occasion, a huge glossy-crusted pie, lobsters brilliant red and fresh-smelling, chickens, ducks and guineafowl, a large pink ham crisply coated in browned breadcrumbs, luscious green hothouse melons, deep orange pineapples. And there was Roederer to drink, a small case of it packed in ice.

  Godfrey would have said that he was too removed from life still to be hungry. But Derby Day had worked on him and he ate enormously and drank his fair share, and a little more, of the bubbling light-as-air champagne.

  ‘Now,’ said Lady Augusta when they had done, ‘there’s no need to bother with any of the races before the Derby. We shall go and see the fun of the fair.’

  Elizabeth must have shown by her expression how unlikely she found the thought of her aunt, that landmark in London Society, visiting the hurly-burly of a fair. And Lady Augusta promptly took her up.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed, my dear. No Derby Day is complete for me without seeing the fair. And if I don’t try my hand at winning a pincushion or a musical pear I shall certainly see that Charles does. This is an occasion quite out of the world, you know. And one must take part in it in its own spirit.’

  So they pushed their way up a crowded chalky lane up to where the fair was in full and violent swing, leaving the remains of the lunch to the servants and to a couple of dark slinking figures whom Godfrey saw creeping under the carriage to raid for discarded bones and empty bottles. Soon the sound of the wheezing gasping organ-music of the merry-go-rounds greeted them, and did more than greet them. It enveloped them. Godfrey felt the inroads it was making on the last resistant strands within him of that total blank indifference with which he had set out.

  ‘Watch your pockets and your purses,’ said Sir Charles with immense cheerfulness, as they forced themselves in on the yet more densely packed crowds.

  The colours and the clankings swept over them. Shouts and sounds of every sort assailed them. Stentorian men and raucous-voiced women were screaming at one and all to come and see the peepshows, to ride the helterskelters, to win snuffboxes on the Aunt Sallies and dolls on the hoop-la, to buy the floating bright-coloured balloons, to take their luck on the Wheel of Fortune, to watch the glove-boxing and the bare-fisted sparring, to slaver over the Snake Lady and her twisting writhing coverings, to see the Chicksaw from the Island of High Barbaree eat rats all alive-o. Bells rang, whistles shrieked, drums thumped and screams and laughter fell down on them from the switchbacks of the Railway Ride and emerged echoing from the spectre-painted tent of the Ghost Journey.

  Sir Charles threw a dozen sticks at the coconut shy, and missed every time. Lady Augusta entered the peepshow of the House of Commons with Elizabeth and came out declaring it ‘a great deal better than the real thing’. Godfrey tried the Test-Your-Strength machine and very nearly rang the bell. Elizabeth submitted to have her age guessed—’Do you Carry Your Age Well?’—and laughingl
y declined to take what she ought to have won when the hoarse-voiced yellow-toothed proprietor told her she could not be a day over twenty.

  ‘Come in, come in, come in.’ It was the crier outside the booth advertising not merely ‘The World’s Only Two-Headed Dwarf’ but also ‘See the Pig-Faced Boy’ and ‘The One and Only Elephant-Legged Girl’. They walked on laughing with everybody around them. Then at the tent of the ‘Show of Shows’ with its barker in the full regalia of an Indian brave holding out the promise in purest Cockney of ‘Cold steel against warm flesh, cold steel against warm flesh’ Sir Charles suddenly bawled in Godfrey’s ear, ‘Come on, my boy, we’ll see this.’ They went up to pay their tuppence apiece and the Cockney brave, seeing Godfrey hesitate, whispered confidentially, ‘Naked as the day she was born, sir, naked as the day she was born.’

  He followed Sir Charles into the oven-like airless tent with reluctance. He feared the spectacle would prick up thoughts he was not prepared to harbour, cherishing the last of his numbness. And it turned out that if the barker’s claim was true children were born into this world wearing dirty pink fleshings. So a wave of amusement left that unfeeling centre mercifully intact and he watched happily while another Red Indian threw a dozen knives thunkingly into the board beside the steadfastly indifferent target.

  The shouting, the noise, the conflicting music, the bustle, the heat and the smells enveloped them once more.

  And then, standing to take breath for a moment beside a great clanking music-squealing roundabout, its bright red, yellow and green patterns swirling along past his head, he saw of all the people he had ever known in the wide world the one he would have wanted perhaps to see least of all on this particular day. Lisa.

  She was on the other side of the noisy revolving merry-go-round and some distance beyond it. But even through its bobbing and ducking gold and silver trimmed horses with their thick horsehair tails swinging and swirling, even though dazzled by the mirror-starred central column flashing as it turned in the bright sunlight, he had no doubt that the one glimpse he had had of her before a boy with a bunch of bright gas-filled balloons obscured his view had not betrayed him. It was Lisa.