The Underside

by H. R. F. Keating

  He remembered her saying once that she longed to go to the Derby and had never been. Had he promised to take her? Almost certainly.

  And with the idea of her having a companion he realised that he had seen more than just Lisa herself. There had been someone beside her, his arm round her waist. He had had an impression, right across the swinging patterns of the roundabout, of a grin, a doggish grin that was faintly familiar. And then he remembered. The carpenter she had been dancing with at the Holborn Casino. What was his name? Joe. Joey. She had said then that the fellow squired her whenever he could afford it.

  But there had been something too about the way he was holding her. He was not, as he had been at the Casino, staking a claim. He was exercising an air of proprietorship.

  They were married. He had a sudden and total conviction of the fact.

  ‘Come on, my dear fellow. Time we went back to the carriage. They’ve rung the bell to clear the course. And I want to give a sov’ or two to the bookmakers.’

  It was Sir Charles.

  ‘Coming, sir, coming.’

  He set off with them. But his thoughts were elsewhere.

  Lisa married. Did that mean she had deserted the world of the underside, her world, the world she had led him to? He felt curiously cheated.

  Had the underside then lost its power over him too, its power to tug him down? He hardly wanted to question himself over it. He did not want to know now whether that pull still existed, no more than he wanted to know how firmly he was once again in the grip of the world of engagements and appointments.

  He wanted not to have to decide. He wanted to be as he was now for ever, in a time removed from that unending struggle between top and miry bottom as this day seemed to be removed from it, a miraculous mingling.

  But he could not see how that could be. Tomorrow indeed, with Elizabeth likely to redeem her promise to search with him into his depths, he would have to make the decision between the two worlds. And it would be a decision that in every day that followed he would have in practice to make again and again. Each day would be a day when he could either live life with Elizabeth, a life looking upwards, or could choose to leave her, to visit St Giles, or some low rents in Wapping or Shadwell or a house like the one in Blue Cross Street. And if he did that he would be opting for the underside.

  He had fallen behind the others and began to push his way through the crowds streaming towards the course in an effort to catch up. But from beside him there came now such an insistent thrusting-in chorus of noise that he could not but give it his full attention. It was the bookmakers. Up on their stools under their broad slogan-painted banners, they were shouting the odds for the great race, dinning it inescapably into his ears that the climax of the day had arrived.

  ‘The Der-bee. The Der-bee. Come on, come on. Roll up, roll up. Place your money here for the Der-bee. The Der-bee. Here. Here. Here.’

  Thin men and fat men, tall men and short men, pale-faced sharp men and bellicose red-nosed men, they were all one. They were all loud, all pressing, all dressed in startlingly dazzling clothes, with coats of screaming checks, with great staring bunches of flowers in their buttonholes, with neckties of the vividest greens, yellows and blues, with tall hats of aggressive whiteness and big bold cards in them proclaiming that here stood Jack Jones of London, that here just as foursquare stood Tom Smith of Epsom, that here stood Harry Brown of Ascot.

  ‘What can I do for you, sir?’ ‘For a win or a place, a win or a place.’ ‘Ten to one bar two.’ ‘Two to one the favourite.’ ‘Place your bets here on the Der-bee.’ ‘The Der-bee.’ ‘The Der-bee.’

  And it was this noise, this insistence, this brute repetition of the mere name of the great event that finally won him completely over. It penetrated him to the very inmost core. It awoke him finally from his numbness to the day and all that it was. To the Derby. An event removed from everything. A thing apart.

  He would bet on the Derby. That was it. He would bet. He must bet.

  But he found that he knew nothing about a single horse in the race. Could he run forward, find Sir Charles and ask him for a likely winner? No, it would betray for his benefactor the spirit of the occasion.

  A name. A name. He must hit on a name.

  And at that moment, diving and plunging his way past, there came a short out-of-breath individual in a green velveteen coat with an expression of frantic anxiety on his puffy red face.

  ‘Chair-o-screwro, Chair-o-screwro,’ he was gasping.

  He almost flung himself in front of one of the bookmakers.

  ‘What are you giving on Chair-o-screwro?’ he demanded.

  ‘Chiaroscuro?’ The bookmaker, after a day of dealing with the name, had his tongue round it rather better. ‘Why, I’ll lay you fifty to one.’

  ‘Done,’ said the red-faced individual.

  And sweating and anxious still he produced half a sovereign from where it had been waiting ready in his pocket. It vanished to join the other coins clinking in the big bag bouncing on the bookmaker’s ample stomach.

  Chiaroscuro, Godfrey thought. A painter’s word. The mingling of light and shade. Well, this day was that. Let it be an omen.

  He took a five pound note from his wallet and went up to the bookmaker.

  ‘You’ll have to be brisk, sir. They’re off in a minute.’

  ‘Yes, yes. All right. Five pounds on Chiaroscuro.’

  ‘To win, sir?’

  ‘Yes, to win. To win.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  They watched the race from the barouche, standing up in it and getting an excellent view over the packed mass of heads stretching down in front of them to the course itself. Godfrey had arrived only just in time. He had felt already enormously excited, far more so than warranted by the risking of five pounds on a mere horse race.

  Hardly had he mounted the barouche than there came one united breath-bated shout, ‘They’re off!’ It was difficult at first to make out much of the progress of the affair and the huge crowd was oddly subdued, not far from total silence. But soon he was able to see the horses in the distance, a long cohering mass appearing for the most part chestnut brown in colour with the brilliant flecks of the jockeys’ silks, purple, green, blue, red, yellow. Then at the front the mass broke up somewhat into individual moving objects. But for the most part it progressed as one body, not seeming at a distance to be going very fast.

  But soon the tense quiet of the crowd rose in a slow crescendo into one long and steady continuing roar. The horses rounded Tattenham Corner. There was a sudden gasp, almost a howl, as one jockey, taking the bend too daringly, had his mount’s hooves slip from beneath him and came crashingly down.

  And then, with unexpected abruptness, the end was near. The roar of the huge throng had become frantic now, urgent, intense, concentrated. Two horses were distinctly ahead of the rest of the field, the two no doubt against which the bookmakers had been offering only short odds. But the pack behind was still within striking distance, and now their speed could be seen, could be felt, as arrow-fast. From their thundering hooves the dust spurted and rose. And behind again the crowd, leaping over the barriers, plunged in their wake, a rushing black river bore. To either side of the pounding speeding field hats rose high everywhere, lifted in hands, raised vehemently on sticks. On the other side, Godfrey was half-aware that the five thousand faces in the Grand Stand had craned forward as one.

  Now—it all happened so quickly that Godfrey hardly knew whether he had seen it or not—just as the finishing-post came within reach the two contending animals out in front seemed to tire and slacken speed almost at the same moment and out of the solid ruck behind a third horse darted, joined them, overtook them in the very instant that they flashed past the post. But had it joined them only, or had it actually got in front?

  But from the sound of the crowd, a sort of appalled joyous miracle-acknowledging mighty yelp spreading across two hundred thousand throats, it seemed that the two universally fancied animals had indeed been be
aten, that the totally unexpected had occurred.

  And then, and then there came to Godfrey’s ears a murmur. It was a low questioning murmur, which just for a little he refused to let himself recognise for what it was. But then he had to admit it: it was the word ‘Chiaroscuro’ repeated in a hundred different pronunciations, tossed this way and that, but undeniably said and there. It was the universally exchanged comment on the out-of-account animal from way down in the list of the thirty or more runners that had been the one to dart forward at the last second, to see the two battling champions tire and to strike. It was the great general marvelling that Chiaroscuro at fifty to one had taken the Derby.

  From behind the Grand Stand a cloud of exploding grey rose up. The pigeons were leaving with their message for every part of the land.

  Thereafter all was revel and confusion. There were other races, but Godfrey was never able really to remember whether he had backed horses in them, though there certainly had been much talk about the importance of choosing names connected with the art of painting. But had there not also been, Godfrey was to ask himself, some reservation in his mind over this. Some notion that it was not a connection with painting that was necessary in a winner’s name but something else? What else? He could not think.

  The day was to vanish for him. Its slow unfolding beginning, that sudden breaking into a state of lucid joy just before the race itself and the long aftermath in which that state had continued, were to disappear in his mind almost from the very next day. They did not vanish away to nothing, but vanished like some object that has been taken, wrapped in tissue and placed in a trunk in a dusty loft, continuing to exist but cut off from the ordinary run of life.

  Odd little sights he had seen were to come back to him at intervals for years afterwards, like small self-contained dreams. An acrobat fantastically whirling round horizontally on top of a tall striped pole. The heir to the Throne himself making his way through the dense crowd in a black carriage, portly and flushed of face. A girl, white-faced, shawled, barefoot, with just under one eye, extraordinarily distinct, the mark of a boot-heel, a bluey-purple impress. A tall thin man wearing, despite the sunshine, a long greenish overcoat, marching about holding high a banner with, stitched on its yellowy-white cloth in red letters, the words ‘Repent In Time’. And, like a thread running through the whole, the accommodation men outside their urine-smelling sacking booths with their insistent parrot cries of ‘’Commodation, ‘Commodation’ as if what they had to sell was the prize buy of all amid the wide people-thronged downs.

  But of the day itself, when he sought to recall it, he had only a general impression of his state of almost disembodied openness, of accepting and taking in everything that went on around him. And he had the impression, too, that Elizabeth, Lady Augusta and Sir Charles had all shared in this feeling. Everything for them as for him was bathed in the same joyous flow.

  Even, when they encountered the impromptu after-the-race fights, the gore seemed stage gore, the peltings with chicken carcases and clumps of snatched turf seemed bubble-battles, the parties clambering down from omnibuses and hammering it out line against line seemed like dancers only, though they left bloody noses and mouths with missing teeth. The drunkenness, from the wild imbibing of port and ale, sherry and stout, all hopelessly intermingled, did not seem anything other than a widespreading gaiety, even when it produced its quota of drooping violently vomiting figures.

  It had been the same on the slow crowded road back, lively at every moment with the over-riding sound of rippling coach-horns, an impossible jumble all the way of vehicles of every kind infinitely worse controlled than on the journey out. There were spills of all sorts. Wheels cracked and crashed in masses of broken spokes. But all that the disasters gave rise to, paradoxically, was a sense of well-being. There were more wild battles, between dandies on the tops of drags armed with pea-shooters and costers on carts down below pelting back all the knock-em-down prizes from the fair. But when these led to bare-fisted brawls, strident curses, the rending of wood and the screaming neighing of horses they seemed only to add again to the joyousness that bubbled everywhere. Men may have been left lying unconscious by the roadside, and women too, but it was the absurdities that called the tune, a brake making its way through the gathering dusk with tiny miniature chamber-pots all a-dangle from strings above it, the dozens of little naked dolls bought on the downs and now decorating hats and coat-lapels or being tossed from one vehicle to another.

  Onwards and homewards they rolled. The soft early summer air, full of sweet night scents, was all around them. Sweeping branches of great trees, still in their light and delicate earliest foliage, brushed revellers on the tops of omnibuses and smart drags alike. Couples clasped each other in mock fear and giggled nuzzlingly.

  But at length the multitude of conveyances of all sorts did thin out and a faster rate of progress became possible. Sir Charles directed them to Richmond where he had booked a room at the Star and Garter for dinner. Godfrey, though never very much in wine, remembered little of this occasion. Flags hanging in the darkness as they arrived, heavy and rich-coloured in the lamplight. A table with a strikingly white cloth and dishes by the dozen being placed upon it. The pop of champagne corks.

  Only one thing stayed firmly in his mind, a counter note at the end of the whole lifted-out-of-time day. As they finished dinner, Sir Charles, leaning across to offer him a cigar, had spoken in a suddenly quiet voice.

  ‘My boy, I’ve been thinking about that date.’

  The wedding. At once he was alert. Sir Charles had said the date must be fixed before this day was over. Very well then, let him fix it. There could be no question of backing away from it now.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Some time in October, I think. Augusta will never have made all her arrangements for anything earlier now. Shall we say the twentieth?’

  ‘The twentieth of October. Yes, sir, that will be admirable for me if it is convenient to Elizabeth.’

  ‘Good. The twentieth. That’s settled.’

  True to a hasty promise he had made to Elizabeth as the barouche set her down after their post-Derby dinner, Godfrey turned into Gower Street at a little before half-past nine next morning.

  Already the day before seemed distant to him. But he had been keenly conscious, as he had walked briskly through the morning streets up from Blackfriars, that the period of time from Derby Day to October the twentieth was short, a little less than five months. In five months’ time he would be married to Elizabeth. He would have made the solemn pledge in the marriage service to cleave to her only. But would he be able to keep that pledge? He knew with certainty this morning that, for all that he would not let himself think of the slightest detail of his life until so recently in St Giles and elsewhere or of the time spent earlier with Lisa, the underside yet held the power tumblingly to seduce him.

  Would Elizabeth’s surgeon-like knife, the promised surgery that he was going now to meet, be able to cut out whatever force it was within him that gave the dark world its power? She had been certain that by bringing searching light to his trouble it would be possible to dispel it utterly. Was she right?

  He walked at a steady pace along the neat-fronted houses of the street. Here and there, as he glanced up at the cheerful sky, he caught glimpses of the steady activity going on behind the trim façades. Windows were being thrown briskly up to let the fresh morning air into bedrooms. He saw sheets billowing high like the sails of sea-sparkling yachts as maids in sturdy-armed pairs shook them up and down before putting them crisply back in place. Once he caught sight of the striped cover of a mattress as it was lumbered into the air in process of receiving its daily turning. He thought with pleasure of this unchanging routine, as it went on in houses like these, as it had gone on in the houses where he had been brought up as a boy. Beds made fresh every morning. The task carried out always to the same exact routine. Sweetness and freshness, order and regularity. Yes, it was a good world. He wanted to belong to it. To belo
ng there as long as beds would continue to be made. But would the black seed of betrayal be able to be excised from him?

  Before very much longer he would see.

  He came to Elizabeth’s house, mounted the steps, rang at the bell.

  The landlady, spruce and brisk in apron and cap, opened promptly.

  ‘Miss Hills told me you would be calling, sir,’ she said. ‘She’s expecting you. Would you have the kindness to walk in? I’m just taking breakfast up to Miss Watkyn. She’s suffering this morning, poor thing, and Miss Hills told her she must stay in bed.’

  Godfrey smiled to himself. Elizabeth had evidently dealt with all her accustomed efficiency with the problem of the unwanted presence of Adelaide Watkyn at their coming tête-à-tête.

  With a quiet knock he entered the sitting-room. It was like coming home after a long and arduous sea-voyage. There was no fire burning in the grate this summery morning but everywhere there was the gleam of fresh polishing and each item was neatly in its exact place. The two armchairs were one on either side of the mantelpiece, Elizabeth’s with her reading-stand to its left, Miss Watkyn’s with her round firescreen to its right. There was the carpet with its familiar pattern, bright and fresh. There was the table with its heavy cloth, shaken no doubt not an hour earlier as it was shaken every morning. And on the table were the well-remembered piles of Reports and Returns, Blue Books and White Papers, different of course from the ones that had been there when he was last in this room but in essence the same.

  And there was Elizabeth. She was standing by the window, wearing a dress in a fine grey-and-white stripe, very businesslike yet serenely pretty.

  ‘Godfrey, good morning,’ she said in that quiet voice with the slight American intonation that seemed to him always like the low music of a clear stream.