by D. J. Taylor
‘We could go away from here, if you wish.’
‘Do you not like Richmond?’ She was shelling peas into a white earthenware bowl, and he watched them as they fell. ‘You always said that you would like to live here.’
‘I like Richmond very well. It is just that – there are other places.’
But Jemima was happy in Richmond. She had a budgerigar in a cage, for which she bought seeds at a naturalist’s shop, and the sound of the hired fly creaking up to the gate was a tonic to her. Seeing this, Mr Pardew determined to conciliate her.
‘By the by,’ he said once, as they sat together in the parlour, ‘I saw Lord Fairhurst the other day.’
‘How did you find him?’ Jemima asked.
‘Oh he is no better, I dare say. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if his uncle, who made him his heir, outlives him. Stranger things have happened.’
‘I expect they have,’ Jemima said.
And so the time went on, spent in omnibus rides to and from the City, in the parlour of the little house off Richmond High Street, and in reading the newspapers at the Institute, and not at all satisfactorily. Mr Pardew had kept but one souvenir from the evening in Cornhill – a quaint blue pin in the shape of a butterfly, which he wore sometimes in the lapel of his black stuff suit.
And then one day something dreadful happened. Coming down Richmond Hill with a bag of provisions in his hand Mr Pardew saw a woman’s figure bent over a shopfront. He knew instinctively that there was danger in this apparition, something to do with the set of her shoulders and the umbrella jutting from her elbow, and the woman turned towards him and he saw that it was his wife. What happened in the next half-minute he could not quite remember. He had an idea that some words had been said, that she might have spoken his name, and he said something in response, but then he was flying down Richmond Hill to the more densely populated streets beyond it – the bag of provisions went rolling off into the gutter – not looking behind him until he reached the safety of his own garden gate. Here he was able to recover himself and, assuming a nonchalance he did not in the least feel, stood for some time looking back the way he had come. There was no one there, and, after another moment or two, with his heart still pounding beneath his ribs, he let himself into the house. Here all was genteel domesticity. The bird was singing in its cage and Jemima was rolling pastry for a pie. When she saw him she said:
‘You are home very soon.’
‘There are too many people about. What is the point of a pavement if one is pushed off it every two minutes by some fellow’s elbow?’
‘Did you call at Grieveson’s?’
‘Ah,’ said Mr Pardew, with a very passable imitation of good humour. ‘I knew there was something I had forgotten. I shall go out again later.’
When he reached his bedroom he found he was very nearly shaking with fear. Looking at his face in the mirror, he saw that it was stark white. He told himself as he sat there that fate had singled him out, that nothing else could explain the monstrous coincidence of walking down Richmond Hill and discovering the one person in the world with the capacity to do him harm. Presumably, he told himself, she lived in Richmond, would now look out for him and, such is the nature of suburban life, be bound to see him again. This thought enraged him so much that he got up from the chair into which he had thrown himself and roamed desperately around the room, pulling at his chin with his fingers, wishing that he were not so conspicuous, that his dark hair and his jutting chin were gone, that he was a meek little man of five feet four with a bald head and spectacles that no one looking into a crowd ever saw. There was a china vase sitting nearby on an occasional table and he seized his stick – he had been carrying it all the while on his walk – brought it down upon the willow-pattern and smashed it into three pieces.
After this he was not so angry. He put the stick down on the bed, tidied up the fragments of the china vase, loosened his collar, sprinkled a little water on his face from the ewer, and settled down to consider the situation. On the whole, he told himself, turning the matter over in his mind, things were not as bad as they might have been. He had seen his wife, who had undoubtedly recognised him – he remembered now that she had spoken his name – for a split second on Richmond Hill. It might be – Richmond being so very full of visitors at this time of the year – that she was passing through the place, might already be gone from it and have no intention of coming back. Even had she wanted to pursue him – and it might very probably be that she did not – she did not know where he lived and had no means of finding out. All this was very consoling and quite cheered Mr Pardew’s spirits. But then what if, having seen Mr Pardew on Richmond Hill, she had decided to share this intelligence with a third party, with Captain McTurk, say, or one of his satellites? For the moment the bedroom in which he sat – it was a pretty room, lined with pink, sprigged paper, with cupids smiling from an embroidered screen – altogether fell away, and he was back in a house in Highgate twenty years ago picking apples in an orchard with a curly-haired child and a woman who … But that way lay madness, Mr Pardew thought, and he sprang up from the bed, rearranged his collar and composed himself.
They were very quiet at supper that night, and if Jemima wondered at the silence, and the absent china vase, she did not say anything about it. Mr Pardew felt that his nerves jangled him. Halfway through the meal there came a knock at the door. It was only a neighbour come to issue an invitation, but he found his hands grasping the table in fright. Several times he turned the encounter on Richmond Hill over in his mind – the woman’s figure in silhouette, her turning towards him, that terrible moment of recognition – but there was no way of recasting it that he found satisfactory. The even tenor of his days had been destroyed and he knew it. Later that night, brooding into the small hours as Jemima slept comfortably beside him, he had decided on two courses of action. The first was that he and Jemima should leave Richmond forthwith. They would go abroad, he thought – to Pau, or Leghorn, to any place, in fact, where Mrs Pardew would not come looking for them. The second was that the money needed for this resettlement should come from the person who, in Mr Pardew’s judgement, was most likely to be induced to supply it. That person was Mr Happerton. And so the next afternoon Mr Pardew put on his best hat, took his stick, walked down to the stand in the high street and took an omnibus into the West End. He was quite nonchalant as he did this, believing that Mrs Pardew was by this time quite likely forty miles away. And then a strange woman, looking up from the corner of the omnibus, seemed to stare at him in a very marked manner, and he took up his newspaper and hid his head for the remainder of the journey.
Mr Pardew was not in the least intimidated by the house in Belgrave Square, and walked up its grey stone steps quite as if he owned it. There was a little trouble with the butler, but rather like Mr Happerton himself Mr Pardew had a way with seneschals and chatelaines. Besides, there were at this time, in the weeks before the Derby, any number of messengers and emissaries going back and forth from Mr Happerton to the City, the Blue Riband and other places, and the butler had decided that if he had to err, it should be on the side of laxity. And so there he was in the doorway of Mr Happerton’s study (or rather Mr Gresham’s study, since expropriated) not at all discountenanced by the domestic who was bringing out Mr Happerton’s breakfast tray – Mr Happerton had taken to breakfasting in the study, as he found it more convenient. The butler waved him in and Mr Happerton looked up from the desk.
‘It is very good of you to see me,’ he began. ‘My name is Pardew.’
‘Can’t say I know it,’ Mr Happerton said.
‘I think you do,’ Mr Pardew told him. ‘At any rate Captain Raff knows it.’
Mr Happerton sat back in his chair and stared at his visitor. He thought that Mr Pardew was an odd-looking man, like the subject of a painting that has stepped out of its frame. What he saw was a man of middle age, perhaps in his later fifties, but still vigorous, distinctly tall and dressed in a rusty black suit that rather emphasised his
height and a blue butterfly pin sticking incongruously out of his lapel, with a prognathous jaw that a beard and side-whiskers did not at all disguise. He was carrying a stick under one arm, and Mr Happerton thought that he did not like the stick in the least, and that he would have preferred it to be left in the hall with Mr Pardew’s hat. But stick or no stick, Mr Happerton thought he could deal with Mr Pardew.
‘Captain Raff knew that you were not to come here,’ he said. ‘Did he tell you?’
Mr Pardew was looking round Mr Gresham’s study, with its profusion of legal bookcases and its three white wigs on their stands. He knew, or he believed that he knew, that Mr Happerton was an interloper here, and he wondered if there were some way he could remind Mr Happerton of this. The stick twitched in his hand.
‘I suppose,’ Mr Pardew said, setting off on a different track, ‘that everything has been disposed of by now.’
‘I really don’t know what you are talking about,’ Mr Happerton said, wondering whether to ring for the butler.
‘I think you do,’ Mr Pardew told him again. He was examining Mr Happerton as he sat in his chair, wondering what kind of man he was. A thought occurred to him, and he said:
‘I see Tiberius’s price is falling. Really, I think if I were a betting man I should be inclined to put my money on Septuagint.’
And then Mr Happerton knew that he could not ring for the butler, and that he had better be careful. But he also thought that in his time he had met, and dealt with, many visitors more unpleasant than Mr Pardew. Thinking, too, that he knew what Mr Pardew was about, he said in a less hostile tone:
‘Now that you’re here you had better tell me what you want. You have been paid in full, I think?’
‘Certainly I have been paid,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘And no doubt in full. There’s been no chiselling off of percentages, I dare say. Raff is too poor a fish for that.’
‘Then what do you wish me to say? That it was a job well done? That I look forward to offering further opportunities in the future? That I shall be happy to provide a reference? If you have come to blackmail me, you had best say so.’
Mr Pardew grinned. He thought he knew what kind of a man Mr Happerton was. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘I were merely to offer you an honest opinion on which horse I should lay out my money – if, of course, I were a betting man?’
‘You could be d——d,’ Mr Happerton said, in what was really a very friendly way. ‘If you want money, I can tell you that there isn’t any. It’s all disposed of, for the moment. Expose me and you expose yourself. I suppose that has occurred to you.’
‘Well, perhaps it has. Although one of us might be more alarmed by that exposure than the other,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘The fact is, I am minded to go abroad. In fact, there are excellent reasons why I should leave London and not come back. And so, I have come to – throw myself on your mercy.’
Mr Happerton thought about this. A part of him knew that a Mr Pardew who was safe in some continental hiding hole would be far more pleasant to him than a Mr Pardew who stood in his, or his father-in-law’s, study talking about throwing himself on his mercy. He swung his chair round from behind his desk, crossed one of his top-boots over the other, and said, almost confidentially:
‘It’s true about the money. It is all laid out. Heavens, there is a jockey out there sending in his bills who don’t know the meaning of being frugal. I dare say you know the necessity of cutting your coat according to your cloth?’
‘No one better,’ Mr Pardew assured him.
‘How much would do it?’
Mr Pardew had an idea that Mr Happerton was telling the truth. ‘Three hundred.’
‘Can’t be done. There isn’t two hundred in the house.’ Here Mr Happerton may not have been telling the truth. ‘Would you take a bill?’
‘I don’t like paper. Paper never bought anyone a steamer ticket.’
‘No more it did. Look! If I give you a bill and you take it into the City, they may give you two hundred on it, perhaps even two hundred and twenty. Take it to that Jew in Hatton Garden – Solomons – and see what he says. But I’ll not see you again, do you hear? Raff’s a poor fish, as you say, but there are others who’re not.’
The stick twitched again in Mr Pardew’s hand, but he merely nodded his head. And so a piece of paper was produced from Mr Gresham’s drawer on which Mr Happerton attested that he intended to pay Mr R. Pardew of Richmond in the County of Surrey three hundred pounds three months hence, stuck a penny stamp under the words and signed his name across it. Mr Pardew put the paper in his pocket.
‘And so it’s not to be Tiberius?’
‘You can draw what conclusions you like,’ Mr Happerton said, who was doubting whether Mr Solomons really would give him 70 per cent of the bill’s worth.
‘I suppose he has backed Septuagint to the hilt,’ Mr Pardew told himself. Later that morning he took the bill into the City and, if he did not quite raise the sum that Mr Happerton had advertised, at any rate procured enough of it to fulfil Mr Happerton’s chief requirement of their meeting, which was that he never wanted to see him again in his life.
*
The second visitor was Mrs Happerton.
Mr Gresham had now been ailing for nearly three months. His doctor, who came thrice-weekly, pronounced that he was not so very ill, but not so very well either. Indeed, it was difficult to work out what the trouble was, beyond languor and fatigue. He sat about in his room or on chairs in the drawing room, alternately sleeping or waking into querulousness, and the querulousness was a trial. The chambers at Lincoln’s Inn had been shut up and the clerk discharged, and the papers in the Tenway Croft case had been given to Mr Gissing, Mr Gresham’s great rival in the Equity Courts for forty years. Nobody came to dinner, for dinners are troublesome when there is an invalid in the house, and nobody went out to them either (Mr Happerton still being very solicitous of his father’s welfare) and things were very dull. The silverware that was brought out on great occasions lay in its box – Mr Happerton still had the key – and the piano had not been opened since Christmas.
If Mrs Rebecca was made unhappy by this state of affairs she did not say so, but she was certainly very cross, and her crossness had a habit of breaking out in conversations with her father. Perhaps Mr Gresham hardly realised. As his weakness had advanced – and he still did not think it was advancing; he thought he was getting better – his attitude to his daughter had softened. He found, as he now had little with which to occupy his mind, that he was more interested in her, and yet, with the waning of his mental powers, his interest was vaguer and more beneficent. He made little jokes to his daughter about the married state, and his son-in-law’s political career, which were excruciating to her, and got very sharp answers back, which perhaps he did not properly notice. There were times in the afternoons when he slept two or three hours at a time, and when he was not quite lucid. He would say more than he meant, or intended, and not realise that he had said it, and his daughter would say more than she meant, knowing that what she said would not be understood. They were not pleasant, those afternoons in Belgrave Square, with the old servants bringing in the tea with grave faces and Mr Gresham nodding over his blanket, and Mr Happerton, for all his solicitousness, kept away.
‘So, my dear,’ Mr Gresham said on one of these occasions, with a sudden access of paternal spirit, ‘how do you like being a married woman, I wonder?’ There was something almost indelicate about this, which Mrs Rebecca did not at all like: Mr Gresham had never been indelicate in his life. She put down the illustrated magazine she had been reading, or not reading, and said:
‘How do I like being married? It is the same as any other state, I suppose. One sits here, and people come to see one – that is, they don’t come – and because one is a woman nothing is explained to one and life goes on quite mysteriously as if it were all sealed up in a black box, and – in a few years we shall all be dead.’
Mr Gresham understood scarcely the half of this, but he thought that things
like it should not be said. ‘I suppose George is very busy at his work just now.’
‘Oh, George is a prodigy. George is an Admirable Crichton. George has purchased the freehold of Buckingham Palace, and if I am very lucky I shall allowed to see it. Will I ring for tea, Papa, or have you not finished sleeping?’
Mr Gresham drifted back into sleep – there was something intensely pathetic about the sight of him huddled up in the armchair beneath his blanket – and his daughter sat furiously on the sofa staring at the illustrated magazine gripped in her hands. Her fury had a single source. It lay in what she imagined was a want of confidence on her husband’s part. As she saw it, she had done a great deal for Mr Happerton. She had consented to marry him, she had listened to his schemes, she had found him money, and although the finding had certainly produced Tiberius in his stable at Scroop she was wholly ignorant of her husband’s plans. There had been one or two other things which perhaps she did not care to remember. And Mr Happerton, for his part, had kept silent. Or rather there had been a series of little hints and allusions by which his wife had felt patronised, and in the end slighted. Of all things, Mrs Rebecca did not want to be patronised. Suspicious of the motives of nearly everyone who surrounded her, she found, somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to be suspicious of her husband. She found that she approved of his schemes, in so far as she knew what they were. It was the being kept in ignorance that irked her, and to this end she had made enquiries in all kinds of directions that would certainly have alarmed Mr Happerton had he known about them. She had several times consulted Mr Gaffney, and even gone down to the kitchen to borrow a sporting newspaper from the tall footman. And what she had discovered annoyed her even more, for it seemed to her that Tiberius, the horse on which Mr Happerton had set his heart, and which, she had been told, should wear her colours if it ran in the great race, was to be set aside in favour of some other horse, or horses, which Mr Happerton thought would serve him better.