by D. J. Taylor
There was no sign of her, and Miss Ellington was about to return to the kitchen, when she heard from Mr Davenant’s study what she imagined to be the noise of wood upon stone, and, remembering that she sometimes crept in there to sit in her father’s chair, the governess determined to roust her out. ‘Evie,’ she began, advancing into the room, ‘you are a bad girl to run off so, when everyone is looking for you.’ Only it was not Evie sitting in Mr Davenant’s oak-backed chair with a sheet of paper before him on the desk and the lamp burning at his side but Mr Happerton. Greatly embarrassed, Miss Ellington made her apologies and was about to retire, when Mr Happerton called her back.
‘A very natural mistake to make, Miss Ellington. You saw a light and assumed it was Miss Davenant. I suppose she has a habit of absenting herself in this way?’
‘I think she likes the upset it brings, though she is always very contrite when we find her.’
‘Is she? Well, who is to tell what goes on in her head, I wonder?’
He looked as if he might be about to say something else, when all of a sudden there was a tap on the door and one of the stable lads – whose presence in the house confirmed the urgency of the request – declared that Captain Raff wished to see him particular in the yard. At this Mr Happerton instantly quitted the room, leaving Miss Ellington in solitary possession. The sheet of paper at which he had been working still lay on the desk, and she could not disallow the curiosity she felt to see what he had been writing. Imagine her surprise, then, to discover that it was not a letter or a schedule of some kind but Mr Davenant’s signature – Samuel R. Davenant – in facsimile ten or twenty times down the page. And then, just as Miss Ellington stood with the paper in her hand – she had taken it up the better to inspect it – there came a cry from the kitchen, announcing that Evie was found, and she hurried away to comfort her, so that the question of why Mr Happerton should want to sit in his host’s study with his host’s lamp at his side contriving versions of his host’s signature vanished altogether from her mind.
VII
Boulogne-sur-mer
No true Englishman goes abroad after the summer. Those that do are an obscure and extravagant breed. They can be seen slinking through the streets of Munich, Pau, Ostend and half-a-dozen other places. No respectable inn will take them; no gentleman wants them at his table. Their particularity is this: that each, singly and severally, has something to hide.
John Bull: A Study in National Temperament (1866)
BOULOGNE OUT OF season is not much of a place. The wind tears in off the sea and sends the masts of the fishing smacks drawn up in the harbour all a-clatter, and, blowing in against the sails hung up for repair in the chandlers’ yards, makes the most melancholy sound ever known. The nursemaids and their charges who were here in summer have packed their boxes and gone home, and the sleek papas come for a month’s recreation from their counting houses or their offices on ’Change have all gone with them. There are no more fashionable preachers to delight the congregation of the English church, and the little circulating library with its three hundred English novels and its guinea subscription is in dusty hibernation. In fact the place is altogether deserted except for half-pay officers, a lady or two who is perhaps no better than she should be, and one or two strange, dilapidated men with devil-may-care moustaches and defiant attitudes in whose whereabouts the sheriff’s officers may possibly take an interest, but about whom nobody else cares a jot. Curiously the disappearance of the English – the English papas with their newspapers and their tall hats, the English children shrieking down to the beach at low tide, the English mamas taking the air on the promenade – has had a lowering effect on the indigenous population. Certain of the shopkeepers in the Haute Ville have closed up their shutters for the winter and gone. The fruit-sellers, whom half a dozen painters have so charmingly taken off, have no fruit to sell. The cobbles look as if they had not been swept for a month. It is all dreadfully dull.
To little Mr Lythgoe, making his way gingerly up the path from the harbour – it had been a heavy crossing from Dover and his feet had a habit of walking off in directions where he did not want them to lead him – it seemed even less of a place. It was a bright, cold morning towards the end of January, with gulls screeching over the tops of the fishing boats, and Mr Lythgoe thought that he had never seen such a spectacle. The Haute Ville and its dirty cobbles had no charms for him. The famous ramparts he dismissed with a glance. He passed the cathedral, whose spire aggrandises over the town, and as a follower of Mr Wesley, was disgusted by it. The column which a great emperor had erected to honour his army disgusted him even more. He had a piece of paper in the breast pocket of his coat to which he kept referring, and this, together with frequent solicitation of passers-by – he would hail them with a pardonnez monsieur and thrust the piece of paper under their noses – impeded his progress, but he laboured on, shielding his face every so often against the wind, at one point losing his grip on the paper and having to chase it into a disreputable courtyard where an old woman feeding sardines to a cat looked at him enquiringly, and made his way past the cathedral and Napoleon’s column to reach the southernmost quarter of the town.
As Mr Lythgoe continued along an esplanade on which marram grass grew over the sand hills and bathing huts with rusting wheels lay waiting for someone to repair them, the houses of the town began to thin out, became no more than a series of tumbledown cottages, made out of wood and plasterboard, with gaps showing in their frontages and stovepipe chimneys tilting at crazy angles to their roofs. The air was decidedly nautical – there were nets hanging out to dry over upturned barrels, with the ends secured by stones from the beach, and rowing boats in need of caulking propped up on wooden stands – and Mr Lythgoe, consulting his piece of paper, thought that he had mistaken the way. ‘An odd sort of place, anyhow,’ he pronounced, looking at the fishing nets and the upturned rowing boats, and a pile of fish-heads – the eyes of which, to his horror, seemed to follow him as he passed – and other nautical leavings over which a couple of cats and a dog were squabbling. But then another habitation, set a little apart from the line of cottages, with smoke drifting from its tin chimney-stack and rank grass rising almost to its door, caught his eye and he moved hesitantly on.
The door of the cottage was half-open and there was a figure standing on the wooden steps, half in and half out under the lintel, so that the front half of his body was exposed to view but his face gathered up in shadow. Mr Lythgoe, squinting up through the wind, saw a tall man, who might perhaps have passed his fiftieth year, hatless, with iron-coloured hair, a protuberant jaw and very hard grey eyes. Mr Lythgoe thought that he did not like those eyes. The eyes and the hair gave way to an equally grey waistcoat, with a watch chain and some seals hanging out of it, a white shirt and a pair of black trousers. All this convinced Mr Lythgoe that the apparition was very probably a gentleman and almost certainly the person he sought.
Seeing Mr Lythgoe, the man gazed down curiously from the steps, and Mr Lythgoe told himself that he did not like that look. But then he remembered that he had been commissioned merely to deliver a message, that the manner in which this message might be received was nothing to him, and that whatever happened, the man could not eat him. Accordingly he put down the case he had been carrying and asked, with an air of genuine enquiry, but in the manner of one who wants an opinion confirmed:
‘Mightn’t your name be Pardew?’
The man moved out of the doorway so that the whole of him could be seen in the frame of light that glowed from the room behind.
‘No one of that name here,’ he said, shortly. ‘Arbuthnot or Harrison might serve, but not that other.’
A yard or two distant now from the grey eyes and the prognathous jaw, Mr Lythgoe could see that there were several buttons missing from the waistcoat and that one of the shirtsleeves inclined to raggedness. He had an idea, too, that the tobacco packed in the bowl of the pipe the man had in the corner of his mouth was of the very cheapest kind, that steved
ores and sailors smoked. All this served to lessen his respect.
‘Gammon,’ he said. ‘Your name’s Pardew or I’m Lord John. Why, I’ve a letter in my pocket from the gentleman who sent me, taking you off to a “T”.’
‘Well, you and that gentleman are mistaken,’ said the man who did not wish to be called Pardew. ‘You ain’t a policeman, are you? Nor a sheriff’s officer?’
‘No, I’m not. And you know I’m not. Policemen and sheriffs’ officers don’t come all polite, or asking a person’s name.’
‘Well – perhaps they don’t. And what might your name be, Mr——?’
‘Lythgoe,’ said Mr Lythgoe, who was growing rather tired of this conversation.
‘And who might be the gentleman that sent you?’
‘Fair’s fair. You didn’t want to tell me your name. I suppose I don’t have to tell you his?’
‘No more you don’t,’ said the man who was not Pardew. ‘But then, if I was that way inclined, I could shut the door in your face. But I’m not that kind of man, you see.’
‘Ain’t you, though?’
‘Perhaps you’d better step inside, Mr Lythgoe. Jemima!’ he called over his shoulder, although every word of his previous conversation would have been clearly audible to any occupant of the room behind him. ‘Here. There is a visitor come.’
Climbing nimbly up the steps, with his case under his arm, and the last of the wind tugging at his legs as if it meant to overcome and subdue him even yet, Mr Lythgoe found himself in a small, untidily furnished chamber, very much cluttered with old boxes and upturned crates, into which the light came haltingly through a single, dusty window. There was a fire burning in the grate – not a coal fire, but one made of odds and ends of wood – and before it, on a wooden chair, sat a young, but not so very young, woman in a print dress with her eye bent upon the flames.
‘My wife,’ the man who did not wish to be called Pardew said, rather brazenly, as if one or two people had previously questioned this relationship. ‘My dear, this is Mr Lythgoe.’
Mr Lythgoe, who thought she was very good-looking, and wondered how she liked living in a hut, took off his hat.
‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs——’
Mr Pardew laughed. ‘Ha! We’ll have no more of that. But the secret’s yours and mine, do you hear? My dear’ – he addressed himself again to the woman in the chair, while Mr Lythgoe looked at an envelope on the mantelpiece plainly sent to R. Pardew, Esq. and thought that if this was a secret it was not very well kept – ‘Mr Lythgoe and I have business to discuss. Perhaps you would oblige.’
‘If you wish it,’ the woman said, and Mr Lythgoe thought that if Mr Pardew might narrowly be described as a gentleman, his wife, if that was what she was, though certainly very good-looking, was probably not a lady. There was a wooden staircase at the back of the room leading to an upper chamber and to this she somewhat hesitantly repaired, giving her master a look – half-meek and half-defiant – that Mr Lythgoe thought very curious. Mr Pardew watched her go.
‘Snug little place you have here,’ Mr Lythgoe said, who could feel the draught rising under his feet. ‘You ain’t in any danger when the tide comes in, I hope?’
‘None I know of,’ said Mr Pardew, who looked at that moment as if he were capable of flinging the sea back personally with his bare hands. ‘Now, who is the gentleman who sent you to me, and what does he say?’
Mr Lythgoe hesitated. ‘On no account give him my name, d’you hear?’ Captain Raff had insisted, but Mr Lythgoe did not think that he was beholden to Captain Raff. ‘Well now,’ he said nervously, ‘I don’t know that I can tell you that.’
‘Can’t you? Well, I don’t think there is anything I can tell you then. What will the gentleman in London – for I take it you’ve come from London, Mr Lythgoe – say when he hears that?’
‘It is – Captain Raff,’ Mr Lythgoe said, feeling a little queasy from the ship and wishing that he could sit down and be given a glass of water.
‘Captain Raff? I don’t think I ever heard Captain Raff’s name,’ Mr Pardew said, rather failing to disguise a suspicion that he and the captain might have had some slight knowledge of each other. ‘What does Captain Raff have to say to me?’
Mr Lythgoe hesitated again, and remembered the conversation he had had with Captain Raff in the library of the Blue Riband Club, whose association with horse racing, being a Wesleyan, Mr Lythgoe very much deprecated. ‘You can just sound him out,’ Captain Raff had said, without explaining what this sounding-out might consist of. ‘Give him a hint, and so forth, you know.’ In the matter of Captain Raff, Mr Lythgoe knew his conscience to be clear. He thought that Captain Raff was a thoroughly bad man, but even thoroughly bad men may have messages taken for them, and he was mindful of Mrs Lythgoe and his children, who were currently living in two rented rooms in Hoxton. In the matter of Mr Pardew, on the other hand, his conscience was deeply uneasy. The only light reading that Mr Lythgoe allowed himself was the Methodist Recorder and one or two of Mr Gilfillan’s celebrated literary portraits, but even he, somewhere in the remote chambers of his mind, had heard dim rumours of Mr Pardew. He could not quite recall what it was that Mr Pardew was supposed to have done – whether he had forged a caseful of cheques or robbed a train, or whether he had somehow forged the cheques and robbed the train together – but he suspected that in dealing with Mr Pardew he was touching pitch. And Mr Pardew, looking at him as he stood nervously on the threadbare carpet, knew that his visitor both feared and despised him.
‘What does Captain Raff have to say to me?’ he repeated. And Mr Lythgoe, who felt that if he did not sit down he would probably faint, cast his mind back again to the conversation in the library of the Blue Riband Club. ‘You’ll have to entice him,’ Captain Raff had said. ‘Flatter him a little, you know. Even money says he’s up to these dodges, but, well, men like it.’ And Captain Raff had impressed on Mr Lythgoe the desirability of persuading Mr Pardew to return to London, which had apparently not had the pleasure of his company these past two years, without at this delicate juncture telling him precisely what it was that he was wanted in London for. ‘You see,’ Captain Raff had said mysteriously, ‘we can’t have him knowing our business and then taking his hook, you know?’ Mr Lythgoe had not known, but he had remembered the two rented rooms in Hoxton and said that he would do his best.
‘I am … That is …’ He stopped, reaching out a hand to steady himself on the mantelpiece. ‘If you’d only give me a glass of water.’
‘A glass of water? Certainly. You look as if you would be better off with brandy.’
‘No, not brandy,’ Mr Lythgoe insisted. He drank off the water slowly, one hand clasped to his forehead. ‘The captain is anxious for you to come to London,’ he said finally.
‘On what errand, I wonder? You see, I’m very comfortable here.’ Mr Pardew waved his fingers airily around the cluttered room, with its upturned cases, its dusty window and its little eddies of draughty air, and Mr Lythgoe could not work out whether he was joking or not. ‘We have been away for nearly two years, Jemima and I. Why should we want to come back? Did Captain Raff have anything to say about that?’ Seeing that the answer was altogether beyond Mr Lythgoe, he went on: ‘No, I don’t suppose he did. He should have come himself instead of sending some d——d proxy. I mean no offence, Mr Lythgoe. I suppose he has your paper?’
Mr Lythgoe gave the barest perceptible nod. ‘There is this,’ he said. ‘I was told to give you this.’
Mr Pardew took the square envelope, which was bound about with twine and fixed up with a red wax seal, placed it on top of one of the packing cases, but did not appear to want to open it.
‘Well, you may thank Captain Raff from me for that – I shall look him up in the Army List and find out all about him – and tell him that I’ll consult it at my leisure. And now, if I were you I should take myself off. There’s a boat sails at three, I believe. And I should take a glass of brandy. It settles the stomach. And the nerves,’
he added, as Mr Lythgoe stepped out of the door.
When his guest had gone, Mr Pardew stood for a long time in the doorway watching the retreating figure pick its way along the marram grass and past the rowing boats that awaited their caulking and eventually gain the esplanade. Then, shutting the door behind him, he went inside. There was more wind blowing in from the sea, and the last thing he saw as the door slammed to was Mr Lythgoe’s hat part company with his head and go careening off over the dunes. It was barely two o’clock in the afternoon, but already the light inside the cottage had the greyness of an aquarium, so that Mr Pardew with his jutting chin and his sharp eye might have been some curious fish gliding through the murk of the ocean floor. He lit a lamp, sat himself down on the chair that Jemima had occupied before the fire, tore open the envelope and spilled the contents out over his lap. ‘Probably some deuced prospectus,’ he said to himself as he did so, but a moment or two’s inspection revealed that the first of the pieces of paper on his lap – there were three of them – was a page torn from a newspaper or magazine.
Looking at it closely, Mr Pardew deduced that it was a trade journal of some kind, probably intended for locksmiths, for it described a safe that had lately been installed in the strongroom of Messrs Gallentin & Co., the Leadenhall Street jeweller, a safe made of solid cast iron, to a depth of two inches, and with a lock, devised by Mr Chubb himself, of such ingenuity that a former safe-breaker, let out of prison for the purpose, had spent a morning trying to negotiate it and declared himself baffled. No such safe, the writer declared, had ever been seen before in London, and Messrs Gallentin reposed every confidence in it. A man had been invited to take a sledgehammer to its springs and done nothing, and even Captain McTurk of the Metropolitan Police Force had signified his approval.