Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  Mr Delaney picked up the bill from the shaking hand that Captain Raff extended to him, gave it an odd look that suggested Mr Handasyde might have his own opinion, and put it in his pocket. ‘I shall stick with him till the race,’ he said to himself. ‘But after that, well, there are safer bets, Delaney my boy, and you knows it.’

  When he had gone, and the door had been carefully locked behind him, Captain Raff exchanged his dressing gown for the pair of white duck trousers and the royal blue coat with brass buttons that made him look rather like a nautical man and sat down in his chair. The portrait by Anstruther, RA, caught his eye and he thought about the young man he had been. Those had, in fact, been the days. And now he had crows’-feet under his eyes and there was thirty shillings owing to his laundress that he could not pay. It was very hard, Captain Raff thought, as he turned over the matter of Baldino and the two thousand pounds that someone had wagered on him and the subsequent lengthening of Tiberius’s odds. He suspected that Mr Happerton was playing some game from which he was being excluded, but he could not quite see how he was to bring his suspicion out into the light. ‘Two thousand on Baldino,’ he said to himself once or twice. The sunshine, streaming in from the skylight, sparkled off his brass buttons and wreathed the officer’s head in a little golden halo, and in this way Captain Raff’s courage renewed itself.

  At about half past twelve he put on his hat, unlocked the door and stepped cautiously out into the passageway. There was no one there and, swaggering a little, with odd shafts of sunlight from stray windows above and behind him gleaming off his brass buttons, Captain Raff went down his three flights of stairs out into the street. There was no one much about at the Blue Riband – it is very quiet on a Saturday, for the sporting men are all gone into the country – but there was a waiter carrying a liqueur glass on a tray up the stairs to the library, and Captain Raff followed hopefully on his heels.

  ‘Holloa there, Happerton. Fancy seeing you here.’

  ‘Well, it’s a place I’m generally to be found, I suppose,’ Mr Happerton said. He was sitting in an armchair, his legs encased in a yet more brilliant pair of top-boots, looking at an album of equine prints. ‘Are you going to sea, Raff? You look like a midshipman.’

  ‘It is just a navy coat that I happen to have,’ Captain Raff said, wishing that he had left his brass buttons at home. He was conscious that Mr Happerton did not think his arrival at the Blue Riband coincidental. ‘Mrs Happerton is well, I take it?’

  ‘Never saw her better.’ There was a silence.

  ‘And the old gentleman?’

  ‘Takes off his milk-and-arrowroot every night like a man. We are getting on famously. But you’re very full of questions, Raff. I’m on my way out, as it happens. Is there anything else you’d care to ask me?’

  ‘Well –’ Captain Raff thought he might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. ‘I was at Tattersall’s this morning, you know, and some of the fellows were asking who is to ride Tiberius?’

  ‘Were they? That is very kind of them.’ Captain Raff could not tell if Mr Happerton was annoyed, or satirically amused. ‘Well, I can tell you the answer, and you may tell them. It is – Major Hubbins.’

  ‘Major Hubbins!’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him?’ Mr Happerton was holding the liqueur glass in his right hand, halfway to his mouth, and the sunlight caught the liquid and illumined it.

  ‘Of course I have heard of him. But …’

  Captain Raff had not only heard of Major Hubbins, but met him, talked to him and been bought glasses of brandy-and-water by him. There was no one in the Blue Riband – not even the knife-boy or the girl who laundered the tablecloths – who had not heard of him. His name had been spoken of in sporting circles for nearly thirty years. He was a short, white-haired and very nearly elderly man who had once, riding Lord Fellowes’ Danton, won the Cesarewitch, but the riding of it had been a long time ago.

  ‘But what?’ Mr Happerton demanded.

  ‘Well. He … he ain’t very young, you know.’

  ‘Cantrip won the Derby at fifty-seven.’

  ‘He’s not so very far short of that, I should say.’ Privately Captain Raff was enraged. A part of him suspected that Mr Happerton was actively conspiring to lose the race, and that the two thousand pounds staked on Baldino had come from the robbing of Mr Gallentin’s safe. The morality of this intrigue did not concern him – Captain Raff had known a great deal worse in the dainty sporting circles in which he moved – but he was furious that it should have been begun without his connivance, and he suspected that this concealment boded very ill for his status as Mr Happerton’s confidential adviser. ‘As you say, Cantrip was fifty-seven. He may do very well.’ Still, though, Captain Raff could not entirely bid farewell to his professional judgement. ‘His knee isn’t strong, you know. Not since he went down under Pyramid that time at Uttoxeter.’

  ‘I happen to know the bone was reset,’ Mr Happerton said. ‘He is as strong as an ox.’

  ‘He’ll need to be,’ Captain Raff said, in what might have been taken for a humorous tone, ‘if he’s to ride Tiberius.’

  ‘Well, that is what has been proposed. In fact, I am just going off to see him. You had better come with me, if the prospect charms you so much.’

  Major Hubbins lived in rooms above a public house on the north side of the park, where he was made much of and got his glasses of brandy-and-water gratis. Sitting in the cab as it trundled along High Holborn – Mr Happerton said nothing and stared out of the window – Captain Raff found himself transfixed by misery. He knew that his position in life, such as it was, depended on Mr Happerton, and now it seemed as if Mr Happerton was about to throw him over. Captain Raff thought of the things on which his association with Mr Happerton depended – they included his subscription to the Blue Riband, his rent at Ryder Street and one or two private things which it is not necessary to go into here – and fairly groaned. He was enough of a realist to know that if Mr Happerton abandoned him, the path thereafter could only lead down, down to the debased hostelries where the McIvors of this world plied their trade. In this wretched state his imagination began to play tricks on him. He thought of adamantine rock, dark caverns far underground, white, nacreous jewels in clustered profusion. There was a pair of street acrobats turning somersaults on the pavement, a grey-haired man and a boy who, judging from the set of his features, was his son, and he stared at them unhappily, not liking the patterns they made or the sight of the boy’s head emerging from the space where a split second ago his feet had been. Something of Captain Raff’s unease communicated itself to Mr Happerton, who turned in his seat and said:

  ‘What’s the matter, Raff? There’s no press-gang come to take you to your ship, surely?’

  The dark caverns, far underground, with their clusters of garnets, had been replaced by a flux of black, oily water that rushed over a landscape of bleached and broken stone. Try as he might, Captain Raff could not avoid the water. He ran away from it, stepped smartly out of its path, but still it followed him and threatened to drag him down. It was worse when they came to Bayswater, for Captain Raff swiftly divined that Major Hubbins was a superior version of himself. The rooms were just like his own – the same mess and confusion – only larger and better appointed. There were the same sporting prints on the wall, only the sheen of the panelling gave them respectability, and on the desk, instead of the laundress’s bill, there was an earl’s carte de visite. All this depressed Captain Raff horribly. So, too, did the sight of Major Hubbins, who they found not lounging elegantly by his deal table, as Captain Raff remembered him, with a dog-whip dangling out of his pocket and the emerald pin that the Duke of Grafton had given him in his white stock, but sitting with his feet in a hot mustard bath looking simultaneously ancient and comic.

  He is like a little old clergyman, Captain Raff thought as he bent to shake Major Hubbins’ hand, and smelt the bear’s-grease on his sleek white hair, a little old clergyman bobbing up with the sacrame
nt at some altar-rail in a country church with a few old women waiting in the pews. It was twenty years since Captain Raff had taken the sacrament, but the image was very vivid to him and for a moment the tide of black water ran elsewhere. ‘I think I can do it,’ Major Hubbins was saying in response to some polite enquiry of Mr Happerton’s. ‘Indeed it’s very kind of you to think of me. Lord Mountjoy’ – Major Hubbins was famous for introducing aristocratic names into his conversation – ‘was saying only the other day that he wondered I did not get my chance.’

  What weight was he riding at, Mr Happerton innocently wondered, and Major Hubbins said he believed it was eight stone five, and Captain Raff smirked horribly. The smell of the mustard was very strong. They stayed there an hour, without, it seemed to him, discussing anything of note, talking of ancient Pegasuses and their exploits, how Desdemona had won the Oaks, with little Jack Simpson, who weighed only six stone, hanging on to her for dear life, and Lord Fawcett’s seizure, which everyone said was on account of his having backed Gladiolus, only Major Hubbins swore that it was not, for he had seen the paper and it was some other horse, and Captain Raff frankly despaired. The sporting prints nagged him with their splendour, the earl’s carte-de-visite winked at him from the table, and he remembered his own room at Ryder Street with the unmade bed, the litter of oyster shells and the providential lock.

  When they came out into the street it was well on in the afternoon, and Captain Raff, seeing the bustle and clamour of the streets, thought that there was no world of which he was a part and that the black tide would surely carry him off.

  ‘We must get him up to Scroop without delay,’ he said. ‘I doubt he’s sat on a horse for a twelvemonth.’

  ‘I’ve no doubt he’ll come to Scroop,’ Mr Happerton remarked. ‘He told me he is going to stay with Sir Harry Creighton at Towcester. I dare say we shall see him after that.’

  ‘You know, Happerton,’ Captain Raff said easily, as if he meant it for a joke, ‘there are people who might think that you meant to use Tiberius for the market, and that – well – you favoured some other horse all along.’

  ‘It is amazing what people will think,’ Mr Happerton said.

  ‘And yet, you know, it will do you harm if they go on saying it.’

  ‘They may think what they like,’ Mr Happerton said.

  *

  Two miles away in Soho someone else was thinking it.

  ‘No, I won’t renew,’ Mr Handasyde of the Perch in Dean Street was telling Mr Delaney. ‘I don’t want Captain Raff’s paper at three months, nor even at six for twice the interest. I want what’s owing. And if the Captain don’t like it, why, I’ve a friend in Cursitor Street who’ll be happy to make his acquaintance.’

  ‘There’s no need for bailiffs,’ Mr Delaney said. He was wondering to himself if Captain Raff’s game was worth the playing any more. Then a thought struck him. ‘Now see here,’ he improvised. ‘You renew at two – and if I know the capting and how he’s placed he’ll settle, indeed he will – and I’ll give you a tip for the Derby.’

  ‘What sort of a tip?’ Mr Handasyde wondered. He had a sneaking regard for Mr Delaney’s opinion that the shadow of Captain Raff had never quite displaced.

  ‘Shall you sign?’

  Mr Handasyde signed his name across the bill with a flourish. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well – that Tiberius that everyone talks of so much, it’s my belief that he’s been bred for the market, and that the man who owns him has his money on Baldino.’

  ‘What? You mean he’ll be ridden to lose?’

  ‘I mean he won’t be ridden to win.’

  Mr Handasyde said something under his breath, and Mr Delaney, grinning in spite of himself, put the bill in his pocket and took it back to Ryder Street.

  XVIII

  The Triumph of a Modern Man

  It is the rain that makes us melancholy – that, and the localities we inhabit.

  A Lincoln memorial (1853)

  SITTING IN HIS armchair with a blanket drawn round his knees, drinking his milk-and-arrowroot, preparing to be despatched to his bed for the night, stumbling his way up and down staircases with the old butler supporting his arm, Mr Gresham had ample time to reflect on the question of his daughter. His illness – there was still this fiction that he was getting better from it – had done two things to him. It had made him querulous, very anxious that his blankets should be drawn up properly, that his milk-and-arrowroot should be hot enough – but not too hot. But it also gave him leisure of a kind that no previous part of his life had ever afforded, and he determined to use this leisure to explore one or two mysteries that he had never satisfactorily solved, the greatest of these being his daughter.

  First there was the business of her marriage. Mr Gresham did not like Mr Happerton, although he appreciated his courtesy, but he knew the kind of man he was. His daughter he felt he did not know at all. He had watched her once at dinner as Mr Happerton, coming in late with some choice morsel of intelligence that he wished to share, had bounced over and placed his arm on his wife’s shoulder, and Mrs Rebecca had stared at the hand as if it were a bat that had just flown in out of the stilly night. And yet it could not be said that she fell short in most aspects of that wifely regard by which newly married gentlemen set such store. She accompanied Mr Happerton to such social occasions as he proposed happily enough. She liked to hear the horsey talk with which he occasionally favoured her. But all the time, Mr Gresham fancied, there was calculation in her. Worse, perhaps, was the fact that he knew this calculation extended to her dealings with himself. He would catch her looking at him sometimes as they sat in the drawing room – she on her sofa, he in his chair – and he could not help but think that the glance she gave him was not unlike the glance that M. Soyer gives the mock turtle, seen in a provisioner’s window in Piccadilly, that he intends to render into that night’s soup. Her eyes at this juncture seemed very green, and the twists of hair gathered up in the corner of her mouth were very disagreeable.

  He tried to conciliate her, to pass small remarks that she might find amusing, but still the green eyes stared calculatingly back. He had nothing to complain of materially. He had his cushions, and his blanket, and his meals brought in hot-and-hot, and his carriage-ride in the park – he was bored by that carriage-ride – and for these he was grateful. But his enfeebled state made him miserable and in his misery he told himself that if his daughter’s peculiarities – her detachment, her calculation – had any root cause, it must lie in his treatment of her. He had not been what he ought to have been to her, and the green eyes staring at him from the sofa were the result. The consciousness of his failings – that was how he saw it – made Mr Gresham indulgent and perhaps explains a conversation between the two of them that took place at this time.

  ‘Papa,’ Mrs Rebecca said – they were in the drawing room, he with a newspaper, she with a novel – ‘may I ask you something?’

  Mr Gresham put down the strong article he had been reading on Irish disestablishment. He could not remember the last time his daughter had asked him anything.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Do you think that it would be a good thing for George to go in for politics?’

  It was all Mr Gresham could do to establish who ‘George’ might be, so outlandish did this proposal seem. But a look at his daughter’s face told him that she was in complete earnest.

  ‘What do you mean? That he should try for a seat in parliament?’

  ‘I suppose that is what gentlemen generally do when they go in for politics.’

  ‘I thought George was more exercised by winning the Derby.’

  ‘That doesn’t signify at all, Papa. Plenty of people who own horses have a seat in the House.’

  Mr Gresham acknowledged that it didn’t signify. He was entirely nonplussed. But still, there were the green eyes staring at him. In ordinary circumstances he would have assumed that his son-in-law had asked his wife to make this intercession. But it now occurred to him – h
e did not quite know why – that the thought was Mrs Rebecca’s own.

  ‘Does George know that you have asked me this?’

  ‘Why should he know? It is not his idea.’

  This struck Mr Gresham as so comical that he almost laughed.

  ‘Great heavens, Rebecca. Gentlemen who take seats in parliament are generally consulted about it the first place, don’t you know. At least that has always been my experience.’

  Mr Gresham had never been a political man. Some gentlemen in Hertfordshire with strong views about tariff reform had once invited him to be their candidate against a sitting Liberal and he had declined. That was as far as it had gone. But still he was not insensible of the advantages that a seat in parliament may confer on its incumbent. Privately he could not imagine anyone less likely to distinguish himself in the House than his son-in-law. Then again, he told himself that many persons with much less outward distinction than Mr Happerton had made brilliant careers for themselves there. And all the while, as these thoughts passed through his head, Mrs Rebecca stared at him.

  ‘Horse racing is all very well,’ she said suddenly. ‘But it won’t do in the long run.’

  ‘And so you would have him go into the House?’

  ‘I should like to have him distinguish himself in some way.’ Mrs Rebecca’s expression as she said this was wonderfully stern. ‘Not to sit in an office like cousin Henry, and be made KCB when he is eighty. But to do – something – that the world will take notice of.’

  Mr Gresham marvelled at her. He saw that, on the one hand, she was in deadly earnest, and that, on the other, her scheme was entirely vicarious. She wanted Happerton to succeed, whether he himself wanted that success or not, and the nature of that success, even the side of the House on which it was achieved, was indifferent to her. The psychology rather baffled him, but there was no doubting its intensity. A part of him admired this resolution; another part was merely shocked. Still faintly amused by the thought of Mr Happerton in his equine pins attempting to catch the Speaker’s eye, he said: