Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  ‘Am I?’ the young woman asked a third time. She did not look aggrieved, so much as satirical, like the young woman in the play whose fiancé has just been disinherited by his uncle the wicked earl, or shanghaied into the navy.

  ‘You can go to Epsom any day you like,’ Mr Happerton said comfortably. ‘I shall be going there tomorrow morning, as it happens.’

  ‘You are very provoking,’ the young woman said. She seemed slightly less satirical and more annoyed. ‘You know very well what I mean.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I do,’ Mr Happerton said. He had known for a fortnight that this request would come, but had still not decided how to respond.

  ‘Surely’, the young woman went on, ‘this is a day when anyone can accompany anyone anywhere without the least impropriety?’

  Mr Happerton went on staring at the butterfly brooches and the ivory fans. He was not a fool about women, however much the tray of knick-knacks might have cost him, and he knew that to appear at Epsom racecourse on Derby Day with Rosa – that was the young woman’s name – on his arm would involve all manner of subterfuges and deceits.

  ‘Not the least impropriety,’ he agreed. ‘I suppose Lord John goes there with his scullerymaid. But if you’re expecting to be taken to the Derby in a carriage and picnic on the hill and so forth, then it can’t be done. I’ve a horse to attend to and a jockey to get to the course.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem,’ Rosa said, rather archly, ‘as if you wished me to come with you at all.’

  ‘I should like nothing better. You know I should. But you see, I am not there to stroll upon the concourse and shake hands with people. I am there to do business.’

  This was not strictly true. In fact, Mr Happerton intended to do a great deal of strolling and to shake hands with everyone he met.

  ‘Well, it is a great shame,’ Rosa said. ‘Why, London will be all but empty, for the whole town flocks there.’ There was a pause, and the lovebirds scuffled in their cage. ‘I dare say I shall have to join Sir George Archer’s party.’

  ‘Sir George Archer!’ Sir George was a sporting baronet, who was supposed to have lost two thousand pounds on the previous year’s favourite.

  ‘Kitty Davey said she was sure they could find a place in the carriage, and Sir George takes her advice on everything.’

  ‘Sir George is …’ Mr Happerton wondered exactly what Sir George was, and whether some of the baronet’s habits differed greatly from his own, and rather lamely concluded, ‘very dissolute.’

  ‘Well, I think he is very nice,’ Rosa said. ‘And we are to put up at the Bell at Cheam, Kitty says, and have all kinds of fun.’

  ‘I absolutely forbid you to go the Derby with Sir George Archer,’ Mr Happerton said, who had no real power to effect this other than having paid for the clothes Rosa stood up in.

  ‘Well, it is very hard on a young woman if she is to stay in London on a day when everyone else is enjoying themselves. Sir George has a thousand guineas staked on Pendragon, Kitty says.’

  ‘He’ll lose it then. Pendragon would not beat a donkey on Ramsgate sands.’

  When he left Mount Street an hour later, Mr Happerton had agreed to a carriage to the Derby. Indeed, Sir George Archer’s plans, if in fact they ever existed, were quite in disarray. He walked back to Belgrave Square across the park where three or four of the riders and the gentlemen sauntering by the rail nodded at him, but he returned only a faint wave of his hand, and people said that Happerton was preoccupied by the race, and no wonder, as Tiberius’ odds had fallen to six and were expected to fall further still.

  *

  In Richmond Mr Pardew saw the picture in the evening newspaper and frowned at it. He was not particularly put out by this representation of himself – in fact he had expected something like it to happen – but still the sight of it unnerved him. For a moment he put the paper aside and dared not look at it. Then, telling himself not to be a fool, he picked it up once more and looked at it and the letterpress that ran beneath it with minute interest. It was not quite an accurate portrait – the set of his chin was exaggerated, and the eyes set too far back in the face – but still he knew that it was near enough like him to promote the idea of a resemblance to anyone who saw it. What was he to do? Richmond – its high street, its riverside walks, its verdant hill – had been distasteful to him since the day he had stumbled into his wife. Now he could not bear to set foot in it – at least not by daylight. He had taken to walking at night, with his hat pulled down over his eyes and his stick grasped firmly in his hand. Once a drunk man, reeling out of a culvert, had tried to take his arm, and Mr Pardew had nearly stove in his skull, such was the pit of fear into which he had plunged. After this episode he did no more walking, but sat around the house and sent Jemima out on errands that had formerly been his exclusive province. Policemen were a torture to him. If one walked past the gate he would hide behind his newspaper or, alternatively, stare belligerently from the window as if defying the man to arrest him. Jemima registered neither the nervousness nor the belligerence, but she did take note of the sequestration.

  ‘I declare,’ she said to him once at about this time, ‘it is three days since you left the house.’

  ‘Is it? I suppose I have got tired of walking about.’

  ‘You should go and call upon Lord Margrave, seeing that he is always inviting you.’

  It was on the tip of Mr Pardew’s tongue to say that Lord Margrave did not exist, but he saw that this would be wounding not only to his own pride but also to Jemima’s, so he merely shook his head and said that he thought his lordship was sailing off the Norwegian coast. That night they were very comfortable, and had a late supper by the fire, and Mr Pardew did not start up when two men in tall hats went past the house and looked as if they were peering into its garden, but stared out benignly into the evening air. But all the time he was calculating: the amount of money he had at his command; discreet parts of the world that might receive him without enquiring into his history; Jemima, and what he might say to her. That night it rained hard and she complained at the winds that buffeted the house, and Mr Pardew thought that there were other storms brewing up which it would be prudent for him to evade. And on the next day, he went up to London and presented himself once again at the house in Belgrave Square. There was a difficulty with the butler, who perhaps had had orders not to admit Mr Pardew, but in the end he prevailed. ‘It is about the horse,’ he explained, in his civillest manner, which was after all true, if only obliquely, and after a moment or two was shown into the study. Mr Happerton, looking up from the desk as he came into the room, shook his head and sprang to his feet.

  ‘You cannot come here,’ he said. ‘It is quite out of the question. I shall have you turned out.’

  ‘Who by, I wonder?’ Mr Pardew said. ‘The policeman in the square? Try calling him, and see what he says.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Mr Pardew stopped to consider this. What did he want? He was tired of Boulogne, Dresden, Prague, Pau – all the places he had been in Europe, and the other Englishmen who gathered there, nearly all of whom had a tale to tell that was the equal of his own – he might even be tired of Jemima. The stick he had brought with him twitched in his hand.

  ‘Since you ask,’ he said, ‘I should like five hundred pounds.’

  ‘You shan’t have a penny. You have had – what is it – nearly twelve hundred already.’

  Mr Pardew felt old and tired. Looking at Mr Happerton, whose face spoke of comparative youth, unalloyed prosperity, and the freedom to stay in bed until whatever hour he chose, he felt a pang of envy. The stick twitched in his hand again.

  ‘There are pictures of me printed in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘Very bad pictures, but pictures nonetheless.’

  ‘I have seen them,’ Mr Happerton said. He was watching the stick with a fascinated expression. ‘A very bad likeness, I should say. Hadn’t you better take yourself off to a place where such things can’t find you?’

  Mr Pardew stare
d at him. He knew he was playing a dangerous game, and that it would be very difficult to betray Mr Happerton without betraying himself, but he had played many dangerous games in the past and usually emerged triumphant from them. He thought, too – and he was correct in this – that Mr Happerton who was anxiously awaiting the result of a great horse race that might make his fortune or lose it, was a better prospect than a Mr Happerton who knew how it had turned out.

  ‘I shall be candid with you,’ he said. ‘I am leaving England. There are good reasons why I shouldn’t stay – not all of them to do with our little piece of business. Five hundred will see me gone and settled.’

  ‘What guarantee do I have that I shan’t see you again? You might come and plague me for the rest of my life.’

  ‘You will just have to take my word for it. I never betrayed a man yet, you know. Raff can tell you that, if you ask him.’

  ‘I can ask Raff nothing. He has entirely disappeared. Have you heard of him?’

  ‘Not a word. He keeps peculiar company, I think. Perhaps it became too peculiar even for him.’ And here Mr Pardew gave a look that was almost frightful in what it insinuated. ‘But Raff is neither here nor there. Five hundred pounds, and you will never hear of me again. Come, you shall have the name of the ship I sail on and the passenger list if it suits you. And then the pictures in the newspaper will be forgotten too.’

  ‘I won’t have you threaten me,’ Mr Happerton said, but not, Mr Pardew thought, with any great force.

  ‘No one is being threatened,’ Mr Pardew said, very civilly. ‘If you imagine you are being forced to act against your will, then you had better do something to prevent it. What will you do? Send Captain Raff – if you can find him – to cut off my head? I don’t think Captain Raff could do it. In fact, I fancy Captain Raff might find his own head cut off instead. And the same goes for all those other Captain Raffs.’

  There was a silence, and Mr Happerton shot him a look of absolute fury, but Mr Pardew thought he knew his man.

  ‘You will have to take it in bills,’ he said. ‘There is no money in the house. Really – there is not. Two hundred and fifty now, and the rest in a day or so. Zangwill shall take them. He has enough of my paper.’

  Mr Pardew said that he should be delighted to do business with Mr Zangwill, knowing that gentleman of old, and the two bills were written, stamped and signed. One of them Mr Pardew stuffed into the inner pocket of his coat. The other Mr Happerton was about to place in his desk drawer, but Mr Pardew shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘If I take a second bill to Zangwill it will be all I can do to raise two hundred. You can send me the rest in cash. After the race.’

  Mr Happerton gave a queer kind of half-smile. ‘You seem very certain of my success.’

  ‘I don’t say that you will win. I said only that you will be successful.’ There was a sheet of blank notepaper on Mr Happerton’s desk, and he picked it up and scribbled something on it. ‘Here is the address.’

  ‘There are people in London who would give a great deal of money for this,’ Mr Happerton said.

  ‘And for things which I could tell them,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘But shall not.’

  XXV

  Inside Information

  It has frequently been remarked how in the days before the Derby race, London society is altogether broken up and dispersed. Gentlemen are no longer at their places of business, but at Epsom; ladies disappear on errands; great houses are given over to cats and caretakers; and servants are everywhere triumphant.

  A History of the Derby (1867)

  IT WAS A Sunday evening in Belgrave Square, a week before the great race, and exceedingly quiet. On the further side, towards Victoria, a carriage was delivering guests to an evening party, and a faint – a very faint – sound of music could be heard drifting on the early summer air. In a house on the eastern corner somebody lay dying, and there was packed straw down in the street and a muffler hung over the doorknob, but these precautions were quite superfluous: it was exceedingly quiet. Northwards in the direction of the park the light was bleeding out of the sky in crimson and purple flourishes in a way that Mr Turner might have painted, but there was no Mr Turner to see it, no one at all, except a pair of elderly ladies with umbrellas over their arms – for May can be so very inclement, you know – and Watts’s hymnals in their hands walking to evening service, and a policeman benevolently surveying them as they passed.

  In Mr Gresham’s mansion, upon whose upper windows the light darted and flashed like knives, something of a holiday spirit prevailed. Mr Happerton had gone down to Epsom two days before and not been seen since. Old Mr Gresham still shuffled about the house, drank his tea in the drawing room and asked after his newspapers, but as the servants remarked to each other, lor’ bless you, he was no trouble. The great dining room was shut up and the chandelier extinguished under brown paper, pending refurbishment. The butler and the old housekeeper were recruiting themselves at Margate, and in their absence Nokes, Mrs Happerton’s maid, reigned supreme. Mr Happerton’s letters – a great many of them – were piled up on a silver salver awaiting his return. Mr Gresham’s newspaper was taken away and ironed the moment it came through the door. There were other accomplishments which perhaps only Mrs Happerton noticed. Miss Nokes’s distinguishing mark, it may be said, was her unobtrusiveness. She came in and out of a room with a step so soft that people wondered how a woman weighing eight stone and standing five feet two inches could move so silently. She hovered in hallways with an almost frightening assiduity. No bell rang without her hearing it; if you walked up a staircase you would see her coming down it, and vice versa – Mrs Happerton found her very useful.

  At present her usefulness to Mrs Happerton was merely vicarious, for Mrs Happerton, too, was away from home. Robbed of its human traffic, the house assumed an aquamarine air: the deep banks of shadow welled up in the hallway like water, and the shafts of sunlight that issued in from the high windows were lost in it and subdued, so that Nokes might have been a fish moving quietly on its placid current, or perhaps only some siren of the seabed, gone off to her silent cavern where the bodies of drowned mariners repose, to gnaw a bone or two. In fact, just at this moment Nokes was not quite alone. She was sitting in the basement kitchen, with a teapot steaming on the table before her and the half of a Dundee cake on a pewter plate, opposite a tall, dark-haired gentleman in a tremendous waistcoat and a billycock hat, which he preferred for some reason to keep on indoors, and exchanging what is known as ‘chaff’.

  ‘Nice little crib,’ the gentleman now said, casting his eye around the table, its profusion of pans, ironmongery and stacked china, and rattling his tea cup in its saucer. ‘Very.’

  ‘Get on with you,’ Nokes retorted. She was not quite easy in her manner, and glanced occasionally at the little cluster of bells that hung over the doorway.

  ‘Nothing like a house that’s shut up,’ the gentleman continued, ‘with the fambly away, the skivvy to gammon about, and no one to answer to except yourself.’

  ‘There’s an old gentleman lying asleep up two pair of stairs.’

  ‘And can ring his bell if he wakes up, and very likely be attended to, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Sauce,’ Miss Nokes said. She was about thirty, with a severe expression somewhat softened by these juvenile flourishes. There was a silence, during which each looked surreptitiously at the other. ‘I dare say you’d sooner be at the Bag o’ Nails along with the other chaps.’

  ‘I can’t say that I should. Too much talk about horses, you know, which is all very well if you’re a betting man. But I’m not, you see. Feminine society, that’s what I prefer. Who’s the old gentleman that’s asleep upstairs?’

  ‘Mr Gresham, his name is, and that’s his tea you’re drinking.’

  ‘Well, fair play to the old gentleman. Thought you said your mistress was called Happerton?’

  ‘So she is. Mrs Happerton is his daughter – lives here with her husband while the old gent’s ill.’ />
  ‘Ill is he? What’s the matter with him?’

  But Miss Nokes was not interested in the infirmities of her employer’s father. Instead she produced an illustrated magazine and drew her friend’s attention to the female costumes depicted within, unpicked a brooch from the front of her dress and invited him to inspect it, and, as these manoeuvrings went on, relaxed the severity of her expression a little.

  ‘That Happerton’s a racing man, isn’t he?’ her friend enquired.

  ‘Owns Tiberius,’ Miss Nokes conceded. ‘That he’s brung down from Lincolnshire.’

  ‘Think he’ll win?’

  ‘Thought you said you weren’t a betting man.’

  ‘I’m not. But there are fellows who’d like to know.’

  ‘The less they know about it the better’ – this very pink-faced.

  All this went on for nearly half an hour, as the bells ringing the faithful to evening service sounded across the square and the shadows rose higher into the stairwells, and the kitchenmaid pursued an errand in the attics, and was very pleasant, but that by the end of it Miss Nokes looked less like a fish and more like an angler. Then, unexpectedly, a bell jangled loudly in its bracket, and Miss Nokes started up guiltily from her comfortable chair.

  ‘That’ll be the old gentleman wanting his tea.’

  ‘Old gentlemen don’t mind being kept waiting, I dare say.’

  But Miss Nokes was determined to do her duty. Pouring some water from a kettle that stood on the range into a teapot and arranging pot, cup, saucer and milk-jug on a tray, she set off up the kitchen stairs. Her friend, whose name was Allardice – though this was not the name Miss Nokes knew him by – smiled to himself, took another piece of Dundee cake and crumbled it between his fingers. Presently, this occupation having failed him, and with his billycock hat jammed down over his forehead, he too set off up the stairs and presently emerged into the great hall of the house. It was quite empty, and having assured himself that Miss Nokes was attending to Mr Gresham, he began on a tour of the lower rooms.