Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  It was an odd kind of life that Mr Happerton led, here in Cheam in the two or three days before the Derby, with its crowds of miscellaneous men – sporting hangers-on, wine-sodden old bucks in green jackets and gaiters – stepping up to his table to confide things heard at the stable door, and the latest sporting intelligence being put into his hand, and Mr Mountstuart coming in to say first that the weather was presumed to be bad and second that it was alleged to be good, and all the time these anxieties about Captain Raff and Tiberius and Major Hubbins and Mr Pardew preying on his mind.

  It was to the inn that there came, only three days before the race was to be run, by train from Victoria and then stepping up along the crowded pavements of the high street, the final source of Mr Happerton’s anxiety. This was his wife. Mr Happerton had not been much at home of late, for the entering of a horse in the Derby requires a great deal of incidental administration, but he had by no means neglected his responsibilities in this department. A basket of little delicacies had been sent back to Belgrave Square, and a note or two, and a nosegay of flowers from a hothouse nearby, and Mr Happerton thought that he had done his duty. There had been some slight question of Mrs Rebecca herself lodging at the inn, but this had been quickly dismissed. Gentlemen did not generally have their wives by them on these occasions, Mr Happerton explained, and besides it would hardly do to leave old Mr Gresham. To these arguments Mrs Rebecca had assented, but now here she was – not quite unexpectedly, for there had been a note sent up the previous evening – laying down her parasol on the table in Mr Happerton’s apartment alongside the copies of Post and Paddock and other fragments of sporting intelligence, casting her eye around the room – which was not, in truth, very genteelly furnished – with that sphinx-like expression on her face which had so perplexed Mr Happerton when she wore it on her wedding tour and caused him to think that he could not make her out.

  What did Mrs Rebecca think as she stood in her husband’s lodgings, looking at the sporting magazines, Mr Happerton’s razors laid out on the dressing table – there was a little touch of blood on one of them that had not been wiped away – and a flamboyant frock-coat, hung up on a hook, that had sent the landlord of the inn into raptures but which frankly disgusted her? There were ways, she thought, in which that recent political marvel the Rebecca Party was coming into its own and threatened to carry all before it, but there were also ways in which its triumphs seemed to her hollow and not worth the having. She thought that in the business of the race, and her father and her father’s money, she had behaved well – very well – and that her connivance at the schemes Mr Happerton had been forced to explain to her did her the greatest credit. But she had an idea that there were other schemes afoot which he had not explained, and this annoyed her. She was conscious, too, that, in the course of her married life, her husband had underestimated her, not given her credit for the things of which she was capable. What he would make of the very significant thing she now proposed to bring to him from her conversation with Mr Dennison she could not quite anticipate, and this annoyed her even more.

  There was a part of him that almost feared her, she realised, and this, while gratifying to her sense of power, offended her feelings about how men ought to stand in relation to the women they had married. The moment when he had explained his plans for Tiberius had been a revelation to her, for she saw that he had expected to be rebuked, and that her silent approval had contradicted certain assumptions that he had made about her. And, although she was thoroughly in favour of the money that might be made from Tiberius’s defeat, a part of her wished for the reflected glory of his triumph. Which was the better, she wondered. To be the wife of the man who had publicly won a small fortune from the Derby, or the wife of a man who had silently acquired a much larger fortune by not winning it? This confusion further annoyed Mrs Rebecca, and explained the tone she brought to her conversation.

  ‘How is your father?’ Mr Happerton asked, when she had offered up her cheek for him to salute.

  ‘He is very tired.’ Rebecca did not want to talk about her father. ‘He has slept most of the time this last day or two.’

  ‘I expect he finds the warm weather troublesome.’

  ‘Papa never minds about the weather. He is just tired.’

  There was a coolness about this that puzzled him. He had never established Mrs Rebecca’s real opinion of her father, and there was something in the way she talked about the old man that discouraged him from making the attempt. Having seated herself in an armchair, and drunk half a glass of iced soda-water which the landlord’s wife had brought up on a tray, and looked round the room again with a gaze that seemed horribly penetrating, she said:

  ‘I suppose everything is in order?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Mr Happerton, half jocularly. He did not know whether to make a joke out of it or not. ‘As in order as it is in my power to arrange.’

  ‘And Septuagint or that other horse will win?’

  For all that the greater part of him wanted this to happen, he wished that she would not say these things.

  ‘There is no guarantee of anything in horse racing, I daresay, but – yes, it seems likely.’

  ‘In the train coming up there was a man who said that he had wagered five guineas on Tiberius. It was on the edge of my tongue to tell him he was a fool and had wasted his money.’

  He did not know what to make of this. He had an idea that she was reproaching him, but her face as she said the words was quite expressionless.

  ‘People who wager money on horses are taking a chance. It is the nature of the thing.’

  She considered this for a moment, and then nodded her head. A wisp of sandy hair had fallen from her chignon onto her shoulder, and reaching for it with her hand she twisted it into the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Am I to accompany you to the race?’

  Mr Happerton gave a start. They were almost the same words that Rosa had used in Mount Street.

  ‘Well … On the whole, I think not. You see, it is not very genteel. I saw Lady Burnett the other day and she said she would not think of letting her girls go. It is such a scrum on the hill, and sometimes the carriages cannot even get through.’

  ‘If that is what you say, then I had better go by it. But I should have liked to see Tiberius. When we were to be married, you said that he was to wear my colours.’

  He wondered if she was teasing him. She did not look as if she was. ‘Surely you would not wish to see Tiberius lose?’ He knew he ought not to have said this, but there it was.

  ‘I should like to see you get the thing which you desire.’

  There was an odd, humble look about her face as she said this that startled him – almost as much as the question about the race. He wondered why on earth he had made that promise in Mount Street and whether, even now, Rosa could not be thrown over. He saw, or he believed that he saw, that she genuinely wished him to succeed in his plans for the race, and the realisation was somehow exhilarating to him, but also rather shocking. He had an idea that women – the women who walked through those high, elegant mansions of his imagining – did not behave like this. A part of him luxuriated in the thought that she wanted him to win the thing he coveted, but another part of him wished she were at home in Belgrave Square fetching old Mr Gresham his milk-and-arrowroot and knowing nothing about it. Not quite knowing what he was doing, he took her hand and pressed it against the lapels of his coat.

  ‘Tell me again,’ she said. ‘If Septuagint should win, or – or that other horse, how much money will there be?’

  ‘It is difficult to say exactly. But perhaps sixteen or seventeen thousand.’

  ‘And what shall you do with it?’

  He thought that he had never seen her like this. ‘I shall see that it is there first.’

  Another strand or two of hair had come loose from her chignon, and she twisted them between her fingers.

  ‘If you wished … If you wanted to become a parliamentary man, I am sure Papa would help.’
<
br />   ‘A parliamentary man! What end would that serve?’

  ‘It is something gentlemen generally wish to do. It is something I would wish you to do.’

  ‘And how might I go about it, I wonder?’ He was smiling as he said this, until he saw the look on her face, after which he ceased to smile.

  ‘There is to a by-election in the Chelsea Districts. They say a Conservative could win it if it were managed correctly. I have spoken to Mr Dennison, who arranges these things.’

  Again, he was quite astonished. He stared at her again, and was struck once more by the look in her eye. It was calculating – that he could see – but the calculation, surely, was on his behalf. He fancied – something he had never previously thought – that he could do anything with her, propose any scheme and have her meekly acquiesce. The sixteen or seventeen thousand pounds was indisputably his. It was as if he saw the money in bright golden shoals laid out before him. And now she wanted him to be a parliament man and had even gone so far as to intervene on his behalf. He did not know if he was angry or flattered by the interference, but something in the scheme appealed to him. He was an ambitious man, who had previously confined his ambitions to making money and owning horses, but there was no reason, he thought, why they should not be carried through into a grander sphere. The house in Grosvenor Square where in his wilder moments he had liked to imagine himself grew more tangible. He could see himself in its orangery, with the bright fruit growing next to his shoulder, and Mrs Rebecca pouring tea at his side.

  ‘D——it, Rebecca,’ he said, again half-smiling. ‘Do you mean to say that you have arranged a constituency for me, and all I have to is present myself at Chelsea Town Hall to shake hands with my electors? And all this without enquiring if it suits?’

  In fact, he was charmed by the idea. He reached out his hand and let it fall on her neck, and she looked back at him and gave a bold little twitch of her sandy hair. He remembered the day he had come upon her in Mrs Venables’ drawing room with the portrait of Tiberius in his hand and itched to return there, and he wished they were in a little cottage in Hampshire with a bright stream running through the meadows beyond and no Mr Mountstuart or Mr Hubbins to torment him.

  ‘You are a dear good girl,’ he said, absolutely meaning it, and stroking her face with his hand. She did not resist. He felt her skin twitch under his fingers, and thought of the cream-coloured walls of their Venetian apartment and the nymphs in Mr Etty’s paintings. ‘But I can’t think of these things now, do you see? Let it wait until after the race, and then we shall see how we are situated. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Have I done wrong by speaking to Mr Dennison?’

  ‘Done wrong? No, I don’t think so. Of course a fellow likes to know what is being arranged for him. You ain’t promised him any money, Rebecca?’

  His wife shook her head.

  Not very much more was said, and presently Mrs Rebecca took her leave, having extracted from her husband a promise that he would telegraph the result of the race directly it was known. Mr Happerton watched her go from the window of his room, a small, intent figure moving by degrees into the crowd, privately resolving that whatever the result of the race, and however much money fell into his hand, and whether or not he became the member for the Chelsea Districts, he would never set foot in Mount Street again.

  *

  In the week before the great race Cheam was very full of people: grooms on bang-up ponies taking messages from stable to stable; horsey-looking gentlemen promenading along the high street with their canes; ladies of no particular reputation being driven in hired barouches. If the tradesmen of Cheam did not especially care for this tumult of visitors, then they were at least prepared to make money out of them. The town’s shops and hostelries had gone Derby mad: there were favours on sale in the haberdashers’ shops; the stationer’s by the omnibus halt had come out in a rash of sporting prints and calendars; and the restaurant rooms next to the station were offering Derby cake alongside their usual confectionery. Everything, in fact, seemed temporarily to have increased in volume. There were more policemen, more red-faced men standing outside public houses with pewter pots in their hands, more traffic on the roads, more Gypsies and their dogs, more odds being shouted by one passing horseman to another, more rowdiness and more expectation. All this Major Hubbins saw from the window of his chamber at the Brood Mare, where he had now been living for nearly a fortnight.

  Above all things, Major Hubbins liked comfort. He liked soft, warm beds and himself asleep in them. He liked a seat at the play and a carriage to take him back to his lodgings afterwards. Although he was not, by the nature of his profession, permitted to eat a great deal – he weighed eight and a half stone and was as vain of his figure as a duchess – he liked hot meals sent up three times a day. He was a spoiled, indolent, lonely man who had made a living out of horses for over forty years – ever since his bankrupt father, having intended to send him to Rugby School, instead apprenticed him to a livery stable – and these deficiencies of character, if such they were, could be safely attributed to his upbringing. He was, for example, entirely mercenary. If one man offered him more than a second man to ride a horse for him, he would incline to the first man. If a sporting nobleman invited him to his country seat, he would cheerfully throw over the friend who had asked him to his suburban villa. But if he was mercenary, he was not duplicitous. He might sooner ride a rich man’s horse than a poor man’s, but once he had made a bargain with the poor man he stuck by it. Having engaged himself to Mr Happerton, he considered himself obliged to do his best, even should his knee – that terrible afflicted knee of his – altogether give way beneath him. He had two hundred pounds in the bank, no living relatives, a cottage in Westmorland where he never went, and no one, knowing what he did for a living, would insure his life. This was Major Hubbins.

  As well as liking comfort, Major Hubbins liked society, and in this he was quite promiscuous. If there was no sporting baronet to be found, he would just as happily talk to the ostlers in the yard. On this particular morning, two days before the race, with a crowd out in the street below his window, and The Sportman’s Magazine reporting a rally to Pendragon and Skylark quite out of the betting, sitting in his room at the Brood Mare, he was indulging this weakness for small-talk and fellow feeling with the landlord, who stood in the doorway holding the empty tray that had borne Major Hubbins’s glass of negus.

  ‘No doubt you’ll remember Thornaby,’ the landlord was saying, ‘that was Windhover’s son out of – was it – Maharini?’

  ‘Andromeda, I think you’ll find,’ Major Hubbins corrected.

  ‘The very same. Second favourite at fours, with threes laid on the Vizier. But then that Sharpe from Russia was brought in to ride the colt, and Matt Dawson, as was his trainer, and Mr Maxwell as owned him came to blows in the paddock before little Custance was given the nod.’

  ‘No they didn’t,’ Major Hubbins said equably. ‘And in any case, Sharpe did very well. Made the running on Northern Light.’

  ‘So he did. And then, when Dawson happened to call on the Monday morning, meaning to be civil, Mr Maxwell give him a thousand pound.’

  ‘That at any rate I can swear to,’ Major Hubbins said, ‘for I was at Tattersall’s when Dawson brought it in.’

  ‘Were you now?’ said the landlord admiringly. ‘Well, I expect you’ve had thousand-pound notes in your time, Major, and shall do again.’

  Major Hubbins smiled. He liked this kind of talk and did not care if it was not scrupulously accurate. And he remembered Thornaby, Mr Maxwell’s colt, and how Custance had just touched him with the whip a furlong from home when the Vizier was in front. All this awakened in Major Hubbins the pleasantest train of recollection, and he sat there in his chair, with the sun streaming in through the window and the noise of the people in the street buzzing beneath him and the glass of negus in his hand, thinking that his affairs could have turned out a great deal worse. There had been a Mrs Major Hubbins, but she was dead in
Westmorland twenty years since, and Major Hubbins, recalling her now – he had a memory of her embroidering his caps with her head very low over the needle – smiled again, if not quite so cheerfully, and thought that it was strange how life worked out.

  ‘And Tiberius,’ the landlord said now. ‘That’s a fine horse if ever I saw one.’

  ‘It is a nice horse, certainly,’ Major Hubbins said. ‘Indeed, I don’t know when I ever rode a better one.’

  ‘Although I did hear in Post and Paddock that he was very near coming to grief that time in Lincolnshire.’

  ‘There was nothing much in that,’ Major Hubbins said mildly. ‘A little weakness in the foreleg that a week’s rest soon cured … Have you anything on him?’

  ‘Why yes I have, Major.’ In his excitement, the landlord seized the metal tray that had held Major Hubbins’ glass and held it before his chest like a cuirass. ‘Five guineas in all, here and there.’

  ‘Well, I shall do my utmost to see that the five becomes thirty.’

  ‘And the house will open to you gratis ever after if you do, sir. But it’s not that.’ The landlord lowered his voice. ‘There are people saying that Mr Happerton don’t want the horse to win.’