by D. J. Taylor
It was by now about a quarter past twelve and the press of people about the Mansion House was very great. Carriages stood waiting on the kerb to scoop up City lordlings as they came out of their temples. A cab-horse had gone down on the corner where Cornhill runs into Leadenhall Street and half a dozen passers-by were offering suggestions as to how it might be righted. All this Mr Pardew saw and noted as he marched up Leadenhall Street. Anyone who saw him pass might have taken him for a gentleman off to see his broker about share-dealings, or a lawyer about his will, but Mr Pardew had no interest in stockbrokers or lawyers. Coming to Mr Gallentin’s shop, a vast expanse of plate glass with a hundred rings and gold chronometers winking in the window, he turned in at the door, went straight to a tray of silverware and began looking at it quite as if he meant to buy something. One of Mr Gallentin’s polite young men, dressed in a suit of black quite as decorous as Mr Pardew’s own, stepped up and, having engaged him in conversation, Mr Pardew intimated that he wished to buy a gold brooch of a kind that might ornament a lady’s hat. As he made this request, and as various brooches and pins were brought on a tray for him to inspect – Mr Gallentin himself stood by the doorway and looked on approvingly as the tray came up – Mr Pardew looked carefully around him.
The shop consisted of three separate chambers: the showroom in which he now stood with Mr Gallentin’s young man and his tray of brooches; a second room behind it, in which Mr Gallentin presumably sat when he was not rallying his troops; and a third room, away to the right, connected to the shop by a metal-plated door. This Mr Pardew assumed to be the strongroom, and his assumption was confirmed when another of Mr Gallentin’s young men, carrying a second tray of medallions, passed into the shop, closing the metal-plated door behind him, but offering for a second the glimpse of a small, shadowy chamber dominated by the outlines of what Mr Pardew knew was a cast-iron safe. Fascinating as all this was to Mr Pardew, he was careful to keep his gaze trained for the most part on the tray of brooches before him. Secretly he was calculating the extent of the strongroom, which he reckoned to be about twelve feet square, and the thickness of the metal plate that separated it from the rest of Mr Gallentin’s premises. Something seemed to strike him, and, looking at his watch, he announced that there was no helping it, he would have to consult with the lady for whom the brooch was intended – Mr Gallentin’s young man would appreciate the difficulty? – and there was nothing for it but to return post-haste on Monday. Whereupon Mr Pardew had himself bowed out of the shop, with even Mr Gallentin condescending to hold the door open for him as he went.
The lunch hour was fast advancing, and the throng of people had begun to lessen. Mr Pardew stood on Mr Gallentin’s doorstep for a moment with his thumbs pressed into the lapels of his coat, and an expression of supreme nonchalance on his face, as if his time was entirely his own and he could buy up the entire City for his private fiefdom if he chose. Then, still with the same casual air, he crossed over to the other side of Leadenhall Street to a point exactly opposite Mr Gallentin’s doorway. Mr Gallentin’s plate-glass frontage, he saw, extended for perhaps twenty feet. To the right was a patch of bare wall, which Mr Pardew assumed to include the strongroom. This suspicion was confirmed by the presence of a single, slit window built into the wall at a height of about six feet and designed, as he knew, to allow any passing constable the means of assuring himself that all was well within. Taking care that there was no one in sight of him, Mr Pardew took out a notebook and made a little sketch of this somewhat unprepossessing vista. Then he stood back and examined the part of Leadenhall Street in which Mr Gallentin’s shop lay in its entirety. To the right of the wall that concealed the strongroom lay what seemed to be a steam-laundry, and beyond this a staircase with a number of brass plates by the door leading up to a suite of offices, the profusion of whose windows suggested that they formed an upper storey beyond Mr Gallentin’s shop.
Mr Pardew shifted his gaze to the left of Mr Gallentin’s shop and saw that it abutted a poulterer’s. He went back across the road, looked into the poulterer’s window, stared at a couple of dead hares, which looked back at him in a very melancholy way, and then, resuming his former station on the farther side of the street, began to walk very deliberately along the pavement, measuring his steps as he went. A walk of thirty paces brought him opposite the staircase and, noting this, he lowered his head and walked rapidly back over the street to the northern side. Here he stood with his thumbs stuck in his lapels once more examining the clutter of brass plates, and finding that they advertised an insurance agent, a pair of attorneys and the offices of the Equatorial Mining Company, walked up the staircase.
Turning a sharp left, he found himself in a bare, tenantless vestibule with a hat-stand and an expanse of gloomy carpet. A series of rooms, some with their doors shut and manifestly in use, others with their doors open and manifestly not, lined a long, shabby corridor that ran away for a distance of fifteen or twenty yards. Fetched up in this clerical wilderness, Mr Pardew was quite at home. He looked at a calendar on the wall and noted that it was two years out of date. He put his finger on the hat-stand and then brushed off the dirt that clung to its tip. An old clerk in a billy hat and a greasy neck-tie, with ink-stained hands, came hurrying by and Mr Pardew put on his brightest smile and asked: were these the offices of Messrs Gilray, the ecclesiastical commissioners? ‘No one of that name here,’ the clerk told him, with a shake of his head, and Mr Pardew smiled again and said that he must have been misdirected.
The clerk continued on his way, bound for Shoreditch Station or the Metropolitan Railway, and Mr Pardew watched him go. There was no one else about. He looked this way and that and then, with a little twist of his feet, like Mme Taglioni executing the pas seul, danced into a little room that lay opposite, empty except for a metal cabinet and an ancient roll-top desk, and concealed himself behind the gaping door. Somewhere in the distance a clock was striking the hour and Mr Pardew listened to the single stroke, and to other noises that could now be heard along the corridor. There was a general sound of bolts being shot, of cash boxes being emptied and locked, and tramping feet. A couple of clerks came and stood on the far side of Mr Pardew’s door and had a bright conversation about Hooky Sam and his chances against the Leicestershire Pippin, and Mr Pardew held his breath and gripped hard on his stick until finally they went away. There was another long silence after which a last pair of feet went scuttling along the passage, like a crab bent on aquarian mischief, and a sound of keys locking the vestibule door.
Mr Pardew waited another five minutes and then stepped out from his hiding place. He was quite alone, with only a little current of chill air blowing along the corridor to disturb the bottoms of his trousers. ‘Hey there!’ he said, quite loudly, and then ‘Hey there!’ once again, but the silence echoed around him and nobody came. Where the corridor went down to the left there were half a dozen doorways and empty rooms, and Mr Pardew walked past them, keeping a count of the number of paces he travelled as he went. Someone had left the door of Messrs Stanway & Co., accountants, slightly ajar and he went inside, flicked through one of the firm’s account books, which had been left open on the desk, and then walked on. At the other end of the corridor he came upon a pair of large rooms with windows looking out onto Leadenhall Street, which by the smell of them had once formed the headquarters of a tea-broker. When he came to the first of these, Mr Pardew bent down and tapped at the floor with his stick once or twice, assured himself that the ceiling was reinforced, and continued to the second room, where a further series of taps revealed only ordinary plaster and lathe. This suggested to him that the first of the rooms lay over Mr Gallentin’s shop, while the second was above the poulterer’s.
Had anyone seen Mr Pardew in the empty rooms, altogether alone except for the mice scurrying in and out of the wainscot, they would have marvelled at the peculiarity of his behaviour. First he walked round the perimeter of the rooms as if to ascertain their length and breadth, writing down the calculations in his notebook
. Then he knelt on the carpet that lay over Mr Gallentin’s ceiling, put his ear to the floor and listened very carefully for several minutes. Then, with a queer smile on his face and the stick gripped tightly in his hand, he stalked back along the corridor, past the melancholy accountant’s office and the dusty sanctum of the Equatorial Mining Co., and came out in the vestibule. There he examined the door-fastening, brought out a little metallic device he had in his pocket, twisted it into the lock, snapped it open and re-emerged onto the stairs. There was a difficulty with the door, which could not very well be allowed to hang open, so he pulled it to and, by prodding very expertly with his piece of metal, contrived to make some small part of the mechanism fall back into place. A locksmith would have noticed immediately that the fastening had been tampered with, but Mr Pardew assured himself that whoever opened it first thing on a Monday morning would probably not. This done, he continued down the staircase with a very jaunty air, stamped his feet on the bottom step and came out again into Leadenhall Street. It was about a quarter to two.
*
‘So this is where you live?’ said Captain Raff, two miles away in Hoxton. ‘And not much of a place, neither.’
‘I’ll thank you to state your business, Captain Raff,’ said Mr Lythgoe from the door of the second-floor back bedroom and parlour which he and his family inhabited, ‘and then be hoff.’
But Captain Raff was still smarting from his ordeal at the hands of Mr Pardew and determined to make the most of this unlooked-for discovery of someone he could patronise. ‘Times is hard, I take it?’ he went on, squinting horribly through the gap between Mr Lythgoe’s shoulders and the peeling door-frame. ‘Bread ain’t cheap, nor sugar neither, and what’s a man to do? But there’s a job here for you, Lythgoe, if you’ll but say the word. Just the ticket for a steady man that’s known to be reliable.’
‘What’s that then?’ Mr Lythgoe opened the door a little wider, allowing a sight of two small children playing with a heap of toy bricks in front of an unmade grate.
‘These your children, Lythgoe?’ Captain Raff asked. ‘Uncommon nice-looking they are.’ Captain Raff lived in rooms in Ryder Street and had no children he cared to acknowledge.
‘Certainly they are. And I’ve a fancy for them to grow up knowing their father’s an honest man. What’s this job that needs a steady hand? No’ – for Captain Raff had made a move towards the door – ‘you shan’t come in. What is it?’
‘Hang it all. A fellow can’t talk properly standing on a doorstep. You remember that Mr – Abernethy you went and saw for us in Boulogne.’
‘His name wasn’t Abernethy,’ corrected Mr Lythgoe, who had done further research on this subject. ‘It was Pardew.’
‘Pardew. Abernethy. It makes no odds,’ Captain Raff said. ‘Well, this Mr Pardew, who you’ll recollect, has need of a man to … accompany him on a little errand.’
‘I’ll not do it,’ Mr Lythgoe said stoutly. ‘And you can tell your Mr Happerton I said so.’
‘Times is hard,’ Captain Raff said. ‘Even harder when a man owes money. There’s paper of yours on Mr Happerton’s desk, Lythgoe, and you know it. What about that twenty-five pound, eh, owing to the place in Clerkenwell?’
‘I’ll not do it,’ Mr Lythgoe said again, with slightly less conviction.
‘What? And be sold up, and end up in the Fleet most likely, and have the family put upon the parish? No, you say yes to this and Mr Happerton’ll say goodbye to the bill and come up with something handsome into the bargain, I shouldn’t wonder. Now, are you with us, or are you not?’
Mr Lythgoe gave a blank nod of his head and Captain Raff, taking this as an assent, said he was glad to hear it and plunged off down the stairs, where the busy life of the street picked him up and obliterated him, so that Mr Lythgoe, looking anxiously out of the window a moment or so later with one of the children in his arm, saw no sign of him amid the tradesmen’s barrows and the cat’s-meat stalls and all the vagrant life that is Hoxton on a Saturday afternoon in springtime.
XI
London and Lincolnshire
Whereupon the sky split asunder, and a black horse, very dreadful to behold, fire-girt, the light around it as red as the sun, did make its way across the country which men call Holdernesse.
Gesta Daemonorum Lincolnensis: Being a new translation:
Rev. Adolphus Symonds, late Fellow of Trinity Coll. Cantab fecit, 1783.
THERE IS ONE person whose part in this narrative we have sadly neglected. How is Mrs Rebecca Happerton, and how has she been getting on? Mrs Rebecca was very well, slept soundly in her bed, had a healthy appetite and despite the responsibilities and cares of the married state was still looking out for her opportunities. Just at this moment – it was about ten o’clock on a morning in late April – she was sitting at the breakfast table with a roll and a cup of tea before her and The Times newspaper to hand, staring at a letter that had been brought to her with the teapot. The letter read as follows:
My dear Cousin Rebecca,
It is too bad of you to throw me over! Even Mama says it is a shame how I am never asked to dinner, and you know how she never notices anything. And a girl, you know, must look out for her chances. There are certainly none in this house, nor anywhere near it. Mr Cadwallader comes to tea sometimes, but he is a retired sea captain, and hideous, and in any case wants only to pay court to Mama. But here, you bad creature, let bygones be bygones, and if there is anything that has separated us in the past, let it not divide us in the future. I long to hear about Mr Happerton, and Rome, and Tiberius!
Your sincerely attached friend
Harriet Kimble
P.S. Mama and I were so sorry to hear of Uncle Tom’s indisposition and trust he is improved.
‘Stuff!’ Mrs Rebecca said to herself, putting the letter down on the tablecloth and resolving not to answer it. There are some explanations of human conduct that cannot be vouchsafed even to one’s most intimate friends, and the explanation of Cousin Harriet’s throwing over was that Mrs Rebecca had grown tired of her, was bored by her conversation, preferred her own boudoir to the dusty drawing room at Eccleston Square, with its amorous sea captains, and had certain schemes of her own to prosecute in which she was anxious that Harriet should not interfere.
A woman who has been married nearly ten weeks may be supposed to have acquired some ideas about the marital state, and so it was with Mrs Rebecca. Turning the matter over in her mind, she thought that there were some things that were satisfactory about it and others that were not. As she saw it, she had married Mr Happerton to escape a mode of life that was uncongenial to her – the life lived out in her father’s drawing room and at her aunt’s house in Eccleston Square – only to find that Mr Gresham’s illness had returned her to much the same existence as before. She acknowledged that this was nobody’s fault, but it did not make her love her father any the better. As for Mr Happerton, she found that she was slightly puzzled by her attitude to him. She liked his vigour and his frank admiration of her, liked even the smell of his tobacco and the whole clubland scent that hung over him, while allowing the vulgarity of his pins and his tremendous top-boots.
As to what Rebecca wanted from her husband, save those comforts which make every marital hearth delightful, it must be said that if any politician had proposed universal suffrage and then asked her how she intended to exercise it, she would have replied that she intended to vote for her party – that party, in fact, having only a single member, which was herself. And so her attitude to Mr Happerton depended entirely on his ability to serve the interests of the Rebecca party. She liked the idea of Tiberius, because it spoke of enterprise, status and ultimately money. She would have liked other ideas, yet more ambitious than this, had they been proposed to her. She was not in the least concerned that Mr Happerton wanted her father’s money, for she fancied that only a very poor specimen of a man marries solely for that reason, and that Mr Happerton was not such a type. Besides, what was old Mr Gresham’s money there for other than t
o supply her wants? What did annoy her was that Mr Happerton seemed to want to take the money and pursue his schemes without taking her into his full confidence. And so she determined that she would set her own schemes in action, not, unless it was absolutely necessary, deflecting Mr Happerton from his chosen path but making sure that she proceeded as far along that path as her resourcefulness and ingenuity could take her.
Meanwhile, there was her cousin’s letter to answer. Going over to the bureau in the corner of the room and taking from it a pen, a sheet of notepaper and an envelope, she wrote the following:
Dear Harriet,
I have not ‘thrown you over’ as you put it, and it is absurd of you to say so. I am afraid papa is very unwell and, in consequence, we are seeing no one. Mr Happerton is at present in Lincolnshire. Rome was very nice [she had been going to write that Rome was very tedious, but did not see why Harriet should not be encouraged to envy her going]. I know nothing of Tiberius.