by D. J. Taylor
‘Where is Tiberius?’
He could see that the story interested her, that there were things he might have said he wanted to buy that were a great deal worse.
‘Just at the moment he is in Lincolnshire. If I bought him I should probably want to keep him there.’
‘Papa has always been very down on horse racing.’
‘People used to be very down on slaving, but that never stopped them running blackbirds along the Cape,’ Mr Happerton said bravely. ‘He’ll understand that it is really an investment.’
‘Do you wish me to ask Papa for money?’
Again, he was astonished by her matter-of-factness. If he had produced a corpse and she had suggested that they might bury it together he could not have been more surprised. Only this time he found that her frankness encouraged him. There was something in her tone that suggested she might be his ally, that she was not averse to her father’s money being spent – the idea of its being lent was a polite fiction – on a horse. A horse that might, moreover, do all manner of wonderful things and repay the investment a dozenfold.
‘Well now,’ he said, a shade more confidentially. ‘I don’t think perhaps that it ought to be said outright. But you could talk to him about it in general terms, you know. Give him a hint about the kind of thing I’m engaged upon and so forth. That would be the way to begin, I should say. Old gentlemen don’t like to be flustered, I’ve always heard.’
Mrs Happerton gave him a nod, which might have meant that she knew old gentlemen didn’t like to be flustered, or that the pen nib had better have stayed unbroken, or half a dozen other things, and went away to her room to dress. And Mr Happerton sat amidst the litter of their breakfast, with his top-boots stretched out before him, and the last letter from Captain Raff in his breast pocket, and his eye upon a little statuette of the Madonna that winked at him from a recess in the wall, half triumphant, but half puzzled, thinking that he still could not make her out.
*
Coming back to Belgrave Square in the first week of April, the Happertons found that a great deal had happened in their absence. To begin with, old Mr Happerton had been ill – not so ill as to have been confined to his bed for many days, but ill enough to seriously disturb his professional engagements. In the account given to his daughter and son-in-law of this illness there had been some deception. The old servants at Belgrave Square had represented him as being merely inconvenienced, but calling at the chambers in Stone Building, Mr Happerton discovered the truth. ‘No, sir, he hasn’t been here in a month,’ the old clerk told him, not approving of Mr Happerton, but mindful of the sovereign that had passed between them. ‘Sir Timothy Grogram’ – Sir Timothy was adjutant to the Lord Chancellor – ‘has sent half a dozen messages. And what am I do with the papers in the Tenway Croft case?’
Mr Happerton had no idea what should be done about the papers in the Tenway Croft case. He inspected Mr Gresham’s chambers, which were rather mournful and dusty, took away such letters as he thought material and returned to Belgrave Square shaking his head. On the following morning Mr Gresham did make some attempt to resume his daily routine, put on his black suit and appeared at breakfast, but it was clear that his heart was not in it, and that his hand shook as he laid it on the banister preparatory to his exit. ‘I think, perhaps, that your father had better not go to chambers this morning,’ said Mr Happerton. Mr Gresham was put to bed and the doctor called.
All this necessarily affected Mr and Mrs Happerton’s schemes for the commencement of their married life. There had originally been an idea that they should take rooms while they looked for a house in one of those Kensington squares that are so genteel and so ideally placed for the West End. But Mr Gresham’s illness threw this plan into confusion. ‘I think we had better stay here for the moment, had we not?’ Mr Happerton said to his wife on the day after Mr Gresham’s hand shook on the banister, to which Mrs Happerton replied: ‘Certainly, if you wish it.’ Mr Happerton did wish it. He liked walking up the big grey steps and rapping on the great black door with his stick. He liked the butler’s deference and the housekeeper’s bob. A room was got ready for them and, though nothing was ever said to Mr Gresham about this, Mr Happerton took charge of the key to the plate chest. It must not be thought, however, that this assumption of responsibility in any way lessened his respect for Mr Gresham. The old gentleman had a habit of spending the morning in his room and then coming down to occupy the remaining hours of the day in front of the drawing-room fire. Here, invariably, he would find Mr Happerton, whose solicitousness for his father-in-law’s health was quite charming to see, and whose dexterity with sofa cushions and fire-tongs trumped that of the most attentive domestic.
‘Why, Mr Gresham,’ he began on one of these occasions. ‘You are looking decidedly better, if I may say so, sir.’
‘Am I? Well, I suppose I am. I was never very ill, you know.’
The fiction that Mr Gresham was only very slightly unwell had been kept up a week now.
‘Well – perhaps not. Will you sit in this armchair, sir, or on the sofa?’
Invalids like to be cosseted, and Mr Gresham was no exception. He was, in point of fact, distinctly unwell – not suffering from any organic disease, perhaps, but enfeebled in a way that rather scared him – and it suited him to be told that he looked better and to have the sofa cushions plumped up on his behalf. Mr Happerton noticed this and played upon it.
‘We enjoyed ourselves very much in Rome,’ he remarked, after his father-in-law had shown some faint interest in the wedding tour. ‘You never went there, I think, sir?’
‘No, I never did.’
‘It is a very good place if you wish to look at pictures or see sights, or smell queer smoke coming out of churches, but I don’t think anyone ever did much work there.’
All this accorded exactly with what Mr Gresham thought of Rome, and he began to think that in certain respects he might have misjudged his son-in-law.
‘You’ll be returning to your business soon, I take it?’ Mr Gresham asked, at about this time.
‘Certainly I shall. Sofa cushions are all very well, but they get in the way of a man’s earning his bread.’
This statement, too, Mr Gresham silently approved, and if he did not actively look forward to his afternoons before the drawing room fire with a glass of sherry on the tray before him, and Mr Happerton stationed attentively on the sofa beside him, they were at any rate not the most unhappy portions of his life.
It was the same with the evenings. Mr Happerton could not possibly dine out, he announced, when his father-in-law was ill. Consequently, the three of them dined at eight before returning to the drawing room, where Mr Gresham yawned over the fire while his daughter read novels and Mr Happerton made bright conversation. Never having been ill before in his life, Mr Gresham took a great interest in his infirmities. He thought he should be given hot milk with arrowroot, of an evening – it was what his mother had given him when he was a child. Mr Happerton agreed. ‘The sovereignest thing, milk and arrowroot,’ he said. ‘But you should never let a servant mix it.’ Accordingly, at about ten o’clock each evening Mr Happerton went to the kitchen, brought up the milk and mixed in the arrowroot himself. The servants – the butler, the housekeeper and the tall footman – saw this and approved it. ‘He mayn’t do for Devonshire House,’ the footman said to the housekeeper, ‘him with his pins, but he is a good feller.’
At the same time, Mr Happerton did not neglect that part of his life which took place beyond the drawing room at Belgrave Square. He was seen with his wife at Astley’s and at the theatre. He gave a gentlemen’s dinner down the river at Greenwich at which ever so many bottles of Sauternes were drunk. Miss Decamp of the corps de ballet, Drury Lane, having written him several piteous entreaties, retired into the country for her accouchement with her letters unanswered. And there was time, too, for several conversations in the library of the Blue Riband Club with Captain Raff.
‘Now,’ Captain Raff said, on one of the
se occasions, ‘that fellow is back from Boulogne. Pardew, or whatever his name is.’
It was about the third week in April and the flowers were out in the gardens of Thavies Inn. Someone had taken it upon himself to open the library window to admit a scent that was about a third horse dung, a third curing smoke and a third genuine spring air.
‘Whatever his name is, it is not Pardew,’ Mr Happerton said, rather brusquely. ‘Arbuthnot, or Scatterby. Anything you wish, but not that.’
‘Of course it shall be as you like,’ Captain Raff said, very much intrigued by the phantom Mr Pardew, but affecting to conceal it. ‘There was some story about him, was there not?’
‘No story I ever heard,’ said Mr Happerton, more brusquely than ever. ‘You’ll oblige me, Raff, by not referring to it. Now, perhaps you can oblige me even more by ringing for the servant and seeing if he’ll bring us some curaçao.’
‘Oh certainly,’ Captain Raff replied, thinking that perhaps he knew what the story was. And the curaçao was brought up and drunk, for all that it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, after which the two men felt better.
‘As to that other affair,’ Captain Raff said. ‘I think it should take a couple of thousand.’
‘Don’t forget,’ Mr Happerton said, somewhat mysteriously, ‘that we have Mr Arbuthnot to consider too.’
‘I ain’t forgetting that. But it is all deuced uncertain.’ Captain Raff looked rather anxiously around the room, at the open door, at the shabby curtains that billowed in the breeze and at the picture of Tarantella winning the Oaks that hung from the adjoining wall, but found nothing to alarm him. ‘You’re sure you want to go on with it? We shall have enough to settle with, surely, as it is.’
At this Mr Happerton murmured something about ‘having great hopes of the old gentleman, but not so great as that’. Presently he took his leave – Captain Raff went off to play billiards, which he did with a facility that was rather alarming to watch – and walked in a leisurely way to Holborn Circus and then northwards to a little street that led away from the further end of Hatton Garden. Moving easily between the costers’ barrows and the dry-goods shops, and keeping his boots well clear of the steaming gutter that ran through the middle, he turned eventually into a tiny court, not much bigger than five yards square, and struck his hand on a dirty wooden door whose paint had perhaps been last renewed at the time of the Coronation.
‘Well, Solomons,’ Mr Happerton said, when the door was opened and he was standing in the quaint and almost furnitureless room that lay beyond it, ‘what have you got for me today?’
Mr Solomons was a Jewish-looking gentleman of about sixty, with a hooky nose and very bright eyes, who clearly did not leave his premises very often, unless it was that he was accustomed to go walking off down Hatton Garden in his dressing gown and slippers. Seeing Mr Happerton, whom he recognised and winked at, he went over to a battered desk in the corner of the room and did a great deal of riffling about, during which he was careful to interpose his body between the contents of the drawer and Mr Happerton’s view of them, and came back with a couple of dirty brown envelopes clasped between the thumb and finger of his right hand.
‘There’s these. I had a deal of trouble finding them, as you’d expect, and they ain’t cheap.’
Mr Happerton inspected the first of the papers, a bill in which Samuel Davenant Esq., of Scroop Hall in the County of Lincolnshire, promised to pay Messrs Barstead, saddle-makers, of Sleaford, the sum of £300 on the 30th of June 186–. He knew, as soon as he saw it, that it was a document he burned to possess, but he was anxious not to betray this enthusiasm to Mr Solomons.
‘Well yes,’ he said, casually, looking at the cracked plaster of Mr Solomons’ ceiling and his smeary windows. ‘This is certainly one of Davenant’s. How much do you ask for it?’
Mr Solomons hesitated. He, too, had his schemes. ‘Ah well,’ he began, in what might have been intended as a humorous tone, yet sounded anything but. ‘You’re a sly one, Mr Happerton, indeed you are. If I didn’t know you better, I’d be wondering what you wanted this bill for. There’s no chance of getting it renewed, or selling it on, no indeed. Mr Davenant’s a ruined man, as everybody knows, and there’s not everybody wants his paper.’
‘In that case you can’t have paid so very much for it,’ said Mr Happerton, who thought that he detested Mr Solomons and would never walk up Hatton Garden again.
‘And yet there’s some people that does want it – very badly, it seems. There’s you, and there’s that Mr Christopherson. Perhaps it’s that hoss of his you wants. I’m sure I don’t know,’ Mr Solomons said, failing to disguise a suspicion that he did know very well.
‘I’ll give you a hundred and twenty,’ Mr Happerton said.
‘It can’t be done, sir. Can’t be done. Not with Mr Christopherson being so very pressing. And there’s this, too, sir.’
Mr Happerton picked up the second bill, which was lying in the palm of Mr Solomons’ outstretched hand, and stared at it.
‘Great heavens, man! The signatures don’t even tally. Look how the “a” slopes down over the page. Not that it mightn’t be useful. A hundred and fifty for the two.’
‘It can’t be done, sir.’
There was some further discussion, during the course of which Mr Happerton twice put his hands in his pockets and glanced at the door, whereupon Mr Solomons conceded that it might possibly be done after all. Mr Happerton offered his own bill at three months by way of payment, was stoutly repulsed, and eventually produced fifteen ten-pound notes from the breast pocket of his coat. ‘Cash, sir. Cash is how I likes to deal,’ Mr Solomons said sententiously as he stowed the money away in the folds of his dressing gown. By the time he looked up, Mr Happerton was gone.
That evening, after Mr Gresham had drunk the milk-and-arrow-root that his son-in-law had brought him and been escorted up to bed, the Happertons held a conference before the drawing-room fire. It is always said that young women are changed by their marriage, that certain qualities in them are brought out, while certain other qualities recede into shadow, but Mrs Happerton was not at all changed – except that perhaps her hair seemed a little sandier and her eyes a little greener, and that she was a little quieter and a little more reflective. She had read many novels, she had been taken to Astley’s and the theatre, she had watched the preparation of the milk-and-arrowroot and made one or two sharp little remarks. But still there was a way in which she had become intimate with her husband – not perhaps in any open displays of affection, but in the conversations Mr Happerton initiated about the progress of his business affairs. Hearing him talk with old Mr Gresham over the drawing-room fire, watching him as he administered the hot-milk-and-arrowroot – he made a joke, sometimes, of the patient’s duty to finish it all up – she would sometimes cast him a look of sudden interest. Mr Happerton noticed the looks and was comforted by them. He thought he and his wife were getting on.
‘Your father seems very tired,’ Mr Happerton began comfortably. ‘He will go to sleep at the table one of these days. What does Mr Morris say?’ Mr Morris was the Greshams’ doctor.
‘I don’t know Mr Morris says anything other than that he should not exert himself.’
‘Well, he is certainly following his instructions then,’ Mr Happerton said, a little less comfortably. ‘Has he said anything about returning to chambers?’
‘No, he has said nothing.’
‘Nor of … of that business affair I asked you to mention to him.’
‘He said, when I asked him, that he was not disposed to give you any money. He said’ – Mrs Happerton’s expression as she said this was quite horribly demure – ‘that gentlemen who wanted a thing should find the means of paying for it.’
Mr Happerton stared into the fire. He was not cast down by this information, for he fancied that his position with regard to Mr Gresham was growing stronger by the day.
‘There would be nothing quite so advantageous,’ he began again, ‘as two thousand pounds i
n my account at Overend & Gurney. Of course, if the money is not forthcoming then the plan will have to be given up. You might tell your father that.’
‘Certainly I shall tell him.’
‘And now – well, you could come and sit beside me here if you liked, you know.’
Mrs Happerton went and sat beside him, to the slight disarrangement of her dress. The tall footman, coming into the room for the tea things, saw them from the doorway and went away again. What she said to her father next morning, is uncertain, but two days later a cheque for £2,000 drawn in favour of George Happerton, Esq., and signed by Mr Gresham was presented to one of Messrs Overend & Gurney’s tellers in Lothbury.
Not long after this, one of the sporting newspapers carried a paragraph that assured gentlemen of the racing fraternity that they would be delighted to learn that TIBERIUS, the champion horse formerly owned by Mr Davenant, had been purchased by that well-known sporting gentleman Mr Happerton, known to all patrons of the turf as one of its most doughty supporters, etc.
‘So he has brought it off,’ Captain Raff said to himself, reading the paragraph at the Blue Riband. ‘See here,’ he said to the young man with whom he was playing billiards. ‘There is my friend Happerton coming out for that fellow Davenant’s Tiberius. Let us hope he has the bargain he thought, eh?’
Part Two
VI
A Situation in the Country
It may sometimes happen that a young woman, though of good education and an amiable temper, garlanded with every golden opinion that long exposure to the best families can procure, may find herself not so conveniently situated as she might wish. In these circumstances she will apprehend that her accomplishments, her disposition and her good humour are of little moment, and that only fortitude will see her through.
The Young Lady’s Infallible Guide and Companion (1867)