Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  *

  What sorts and conditions of men are gathered here! Entire families – meek papa, flustered mama, half a dozen children in short jackets or their best pinafores – come down from Sutton and Cheam and Dorking to see the fun. Grave old North Country gentlemen with faltering steps, very much put out by the glare of the sun, who would surely be much better off by their comfortable hearths with their wives to tend them. Mysterious lonely women, not so very young perhaps, nor yet so very old, whose eyes flit shrewdly around them as they prowl the course. Soldiers in scarlet tunics with gay girls on their arms. A Treasury Lord with a vigilant secretary at his side and a determination to back his friend Lord Trumpington – whose estate adjoins his own in Hampshire, you know – to the hilt. Mr Savory the prize novelist, whose last book, Whimsicalities, Mr Dickens is thought to have admired, is there, and Lorriquer, the fashionable poet, whose Attic Dawns caused such a stir among the reviewers, simpering into Lady Delacave’s carriage and ogling her daughters, together with fifty thousand people whose names will never appear in a newspaper, unless it is the section reserved for court proceedings, whose lives are unsung and whose destinies unworthy of report.

  *

  Major Hubbins was made much of at the Brood Mare. The landlord himself brought him his breakfast muffin, and his whip, cap and colours were reverently returned to him by the landlord’s daughter from the salver on which they had lain for the admiration of the establishment’s guests. There was a crowd of well-wishers at the door to see him off – the landlord absolutely scorned his attempt to settle the bill – an injunction ‘not to forget the old place’ once his victory was won – and a fly to take him to the stables at Cheam. All this was very gratifying to Major Hubbins, but it did not heal the injury that he thought had been done to him. He thought – and one or two enquiries among the cognoscenti at the Brood Mare had convinced him of this – that, in some sense, he had been made a fool of, that Mr Happerton had hired him to ride Tiberius because he expected him to fail. Major Hubbins did not consider himself to be a virtuous man. If asked, he would have declared that the profession he followed excluded virtue by its very nature. Certainly, in his forty years in the saddle he had colluded in various little conspiracies that, in certain company – not necessarily very choice – he would happily have admitted to. He had ridden horses that he knew to be unsound. He had cheerfully lost races that a little more dexterity on his part might have won. Most of that two hundred pounds that lay in the bank had been honestly come by, but a certain proportion of it had not.

  None of this much alarmed Major Hubbins. It was how the world worked, he thought, and he had known worse. One has always known worse. But somehow what he believed to be Mr Happerton’s duplicity infuriated him – not because he considered himself to be Mr Happerton’s moral superior, but because the scheme turned on his own unfittedness as a rider. As the fly brought him to Cheam this feeling grew. He thought that the grooms sneered at him behind his back, and that even the man who swept up the muck in Tiberius’ stall knew of the deception and laughed at it. ‘Here be the horse, Major,’ the head groom said, leading up Tiberius – very smartly got up and as neat as one of his owner’s equine pins – by his bridle, and Major Hubbins rocked a little on his boot-heels and remarked, yes, he had seen a horse before, and immediately began to find fault. He complained of the snaffle, which he said was throttling the horse, he complained of a shoe, which a blacksmith had to be summoned to file down, and he complained of the setting of the stirrups, and the grooms, who had previously thought him a benevolent old gentleman, fell over themselves to set things right. Mr Mountstuart, who had been watching from a window, came down into the stable yard and said sardonically: ‘You are a regular tartar, Major,’ and Major Hubbins gave a faint little smile and said he feared things at the stables had got very slack, and Mr Mountstuart, whose stables they were, goggled at him.

  And so eventually the procession set off – the head groom leading Tiberius on a short rein, and Major Hubbins in the saddle, with the other men to clear a way and Mr Mountstuart following behind, and such passers-by as recognised horse or rider cheering as they went. They came up behind Septuagint, whose groom knew Major Hubbins of old and hailed and chaffed him, but Major Hubbins grasped his whip and stared straight ahead of him, and Mr Mountstuart, seeing the white roof of the grandstand looming before him, wondered for the first time if his friend Mr Happerton had made a mistake.

  *

  Mr Glenister walks idly around the course. He has come over early from Dorking, having stayed the night there with a friend. ‘You won’t mind if I don’t keep you company?’ the friend has asked – he is the vicar of a Dorking church, and a little amused by this excursion – and Mr Glenister has said, no, he does not mind. Mr Glenister is not an unworldly man, by and large, but even so the Derby perplexes him. He supposes, when he thinks about it, that there is something to be said for standing about in the hot sun with your friends while two dozen horses run a race which you cannot properly see lasting all of two and a half minutes, but he cannot precisely imagine what it is. Just lately he has read some remarks of M. Taine’s about the English crowds. M. Taine, being a Frenchman, finds them undemonstrative, bovine, drifting. A French crowd, he implies, would sooner storm a prison, fling a nobleman from his battlements, lay siege to a city.

  Mr Glenister both assumes that there is a communal impulse, and suspects it. As a young man, as a dare, he once attended a public execution at Snow Hill, finding at the moment of despatch that he preferred to look not at the condemned man but at the spectators. There is a horse not far away being led to the saddling enclosure by the grandstand, and for a moment he imagines that it is Tiberius, only for proximity to reveal that the animal is a bay with colours of magenta and light blue – Pendragon, he discovers from the racecard bought from a tout at the entry to the Downs. There is a way, Mr Glenister thinks, watching the swarms of people taking up their places on the hill, and the rattling carriages, in which all this is faintly artificial. Only Lincolnshire is real, with the rooks screaming in the elms, and Miss Ellington and Evie coming towards him over the wet grass. For a moment he tries to recall Evie’s face, but emerges only with a doughy blur of white flesh. Evie has been better of late, but such terms are relative. Miss Ellington, on the other hand, he can remember: light brown hair, a weak chin, blue eyes. No, Mr Glenister tells himself, they are brown.

  *

  At Belgrave Square Mrs Rebecca woke late and languid. Despite repeated tugs upon the bell-rope there was no sign of Nokes, whose loyalty in these matters was generally beyond question, and in the absence of the old servants she was absolutely compelled to descend to the kitchen and rout out the kitchenmaid to have her hot water sent up and set her breakfast bohea to brew. The house was otherwise deserted – Mr Gresham rarely came downstairs before eleven – but Mrs Rebecca, reaching the empty hallway and finding nothing in it but a white cat and a few strands of sunlight moving over the polished floor, was not unduly displeased. She liked silence, and she liked solitude, and she would just as soon eat her breakfast without Nokes to attend her or husband to observe her as she crunched up her toast. So, having received her tray from the kitchenmaid, she took it into the parlour and sat over it considering something which had first occurred to her a day or so before and had continued to exercise her mind through the intervening period. This was the identity of the man she had seen coming out of her husband’s study four days before and whose features she was sure that she vaguely recognised.

  At first this faint air of familiarity had not troubled her. The traffic that passed through her husband’s study was both regular and exotic, and she assumed merely that the man had come this way before and been seen by her on a previous visit. Still, though, there was something about the man – something about his demeanour – that seemed to separate him from the equine ragtag of Mr Happerton’s daily round. Above all, it seemed evident from the way in which he had strode through the vestibule of the house, and from the almo
st contemptuous look on his face, that he regarded Mr Happerton almost as an equal (none of the horsey men would have dared cultivate such a look). This intrigued her, and she found herself wondering half a dozen times where she might have seen him before. Then she thought that she might have seen his picture in an illustrated paper, but there was something in that look that told her he was not a politician, or an actor, or a man of fashion. It was all very mysterious, and Mrs Rebecca could not work it out. The white cat came into the parlour as she drank her tea and she took it onto her lap – why the cat seemed reluctant to be so enticed she could not imagine – petted it for a moment and then gave a little twist with her finger, after which the animal sprang gladly away.

  She was about to give the mystery up in favour of the great race and what might happen in it, when she caught sight of a newspaper lying on the sideboard. In the normal course of events the newspaper, which was several days old, would have been taken away and disposed of, but in Mr Happerton’s absence, and that of the old servants, rather a Saturnalian air had fallen upon the house at Belgrave Square and more than one thing had not been done which perhaps ought to have been done. All this was of less import to Mrs Rebecca than an awareness – a very slight awareness, but suggestive all the same – that something in the newspaper connected it to the man who had walked out of her husband’s study. Putting down her tea cup and rising to her feet – the cat saw her from the doorway and moved a little further out of range – she scooped up the paper and began to riffle through it. Some speculations on the composition of the new Cabinet and a very learned essay on tariff reform were soon dispensed with, along with a criticism of Madame Delacourt’s recitation, but there, suddenly, in a pen-and-ink sketch, not terribly like him, perhaps, but not wholly unlike him either, was the face that she sought. Staring at it, and at the paragraph or two that accompanied it, she learned that it belonged to a man named Pardew, to whom the police were anxious to speak in connection with the assault on Mr Gallentin’s shop, together with yet more picturesque details of a burglary Mr Pardew was supposed to have perpetrated on a mail-train going down to Dover three years previously, and of the murder, many years before, of his then partner in business, a Mr Fardel, of which Mr Pardew had been acquitted but over which some suspicion still hung.

  Naturally all this was set out in the most suggestive manner, and Mrs Rebecca read it with the keenest interest. She had no doubt – not the slightest – that this was the man she had seen. In fact, had someone been able to prove to her satisfaction that this was not the man she had seen, she would have been deeply disappointed. As to why Mr Pardew might have been calling on her husband in his study, she presumed that the visit had something to do with the burglary at Mr Gallentin’s shop. What she thought about this she could not exactly determine. That her husband might have been in league with a jewel-thief hardly troubled her. There was a way in which this recklessness was very agreeable to her. It spoke of a piratical spirit that she admired, and that her father and most of the men she had known before she met Mr Happerton conspicuously lacked. But what if Mr Happerton’s dealings with Mr Pardew should come to the attention of the police?

  Again, this did not greatly trouble her. Her faith in her husband’s capacities was not infinite, but it was very strong. She told herself that Mr Happerton must have known what he was about, that the connection with Mr Pardew could only have been predicated on some greater good, for which money was required. As she thought about it, it occurred to her that this greater good must have something to do with the events at the Derby. All this both excited her, in its suggestion that she sat at the heart of momentous events, and alarmed her, in that she wondered what harm Mr Pardew meant to do her husband, or whether there was any harm that he could do. Thinking this, she gave a little laugh, which there was no one to hear, smoothed out the paper before her on the parlour table and stared at it again with such intensity that the postman knocking at the front door had to go away unconsoled, and Mr Gresham, waking late and fretful, found that his bell, though it rang violently through the house, went unanswered.

  *

  ‘Now who’s this then?’ a voice said. ‘And with a blessed banner showing, too, I’ll be bound.’

  And Mr McIvor, looking up from the two poles he was attempting to secure to the rail on either side of a square of stationer’s card that read Rbt. McIvor, The Bird in Hand, Soho, all bets paid, and which was the pride of his life, saw a raw, red face and a pair of watery eyes staring at him from beneath the irregular brim of an ancient billycock hat.

  ‘You lay a hand on me, Mulligan, and there’s Joey Blacker, whose chaps are up on the hill and is a particular friend of mine, will have something to say about it.’

  But Mr Mulligan, who had perhaps taken a glass of wine, shook his head. He was got up in the most tremendous Derby costume, consisting of a green frock-coat, a neck-tie that dazzled in the sunshine and a silk umbrella that doubled as a shade, and on his arm marched a red-haired lady, not perhaps in her first youth and somewhat deficient in teeth, but quite as strikingly attired in a dress of canary yellow with a bright green sash. ‘As to that affair, McIvor, I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones, if you’ll shake hands. I’ll give you a word of advice even, if you’ll listen to it.’

  ‘What advice might that be?’ Mr McIvor wondered.

  ‘What odds have you for Baldino?’

  ‘Fives,’ McIvor said. ‘Taken a good bit of money, too, for all his foreleg’s not said to be sound.’

  ‘Well take my tip and lay a trifle of it off on Tiberius. A fellow I know has just seen Hubbins down at the paddock and said he looked as fierce as a Bashi-Bazouk, and that no one could understand it.’

  *

  ‘Which is that horse?’

  ‘I believe it is Caractacus, that Lord Rufford owns.’

  ‘And the little black one that is pulling at its groom?’

  Mr Happerton inspected the racecard. ‘That is Bandolero, that Mr Mountjoy bought for a song in Dumfriesshire last autumn. I wish I had been there before him.’

  They were standing by the rail in front of the grandstand watching the horses being paraded up and down, Rosa dandling her short parasol around the back of her pretty neck, Mr Happerton with his hat pulled down low over his forehead. So far they had done all the correct things. They had eaten cold chicken and drunk champagne on the hill and watched the crowd surging round the concourse; they had sauntered along the part of the grandstand where the owners and their entourages are disposed to gather; they had found Major Hubbins and his attendants and shaken his hand; they had watched Tiberius being taken down to be examined and approved by Mr Dorling’s assistants; and Mr Happerton knew that he had made a mistake. As they had resumed their places in Mr Happerton’s gig, having stepped down from it for a moment at Tattenham Corner, a sporting nobleman whom Mr Happerton had met and been recognised by a dozen times at racecourses, at Tattersall’s and several other places, had walked by, nodded his head to Mr Happerton, seen the person beneath the parasol and then marched off without delivering the word of greeting that had clearly sprung to his lips. And Mr Happerton understood that he had done wrong to bring his mistress to the Derby while leaving his wife to amuse herself in Belgrave Square. They had rolled on towards the grandstand, and plenty of other people had come to pay their respects to Rosa – several of the Blue Riband’s finest had hastened across to grant themselves that privilege – but Mr Happerton knew he had made a mistake. This turned him sulky and discontented, and to Rosa’s blithe suggestions that they should shy for coconuts or stroll along the entertainment booths he had returned only shakes of his head.

  ‘Who is that distinguished-looking man at the gate?’

  Mr Happerton looked. ‘That is Mr Gliddon, Mr Dorling’s secretary. I don’t know why you think a man who writes another man’s letters is particularly distinguished.’

  ‘Oh, is that all he does?’

  Rosa, too, was a little sulky. The heat was rather oppressive, the crowds seem
ed to surge uncomfortably close, and she was aware, without being in the least able to quantify this awareness, that in some way she had fallen short of the standards expected of her. And so they walked a little more amongst the horses and their grooms, were greeted by one or two faintly disreputable men who remarked ‘Well, Happerton, how are you my boy?’, bickered about matters which no gentleman out walking with a lady at a racecourse should bicker about, and came finally to that part of the course where the bookmakers had set up their poles.

  ‘Of all things,’ Rosa declared from beneath her parasol, ‘I should like to bet on Tiberius.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Happerton, finding himself suddenly disgusted by the place in which he stood: the drunks lying asleep under the rail; the red-faced men crying odds; a boy acrobat turning somersaults almost under his feet. He told himself that whatever happened in the course of the afternoon, there should be an end to Mount Street. Why had he not brought Rebecca with him to the Derby, who seemed to care only for his interests and who would not have made ridiculous remarks about the horses as they paraded before her in the enclosure or simpered over little Mr Gliddon, Mr Dorling’s secretary? It occurred to him that he had underestimated his wife, that a wiser man would have confided in her, and been less suspicious of her motives. All this chastened him and depressed his spirits. He found himself weighing up a series of inner resolutions. He would be more virtuous, he thought, should the day turn out to his advantage. Perhaps he would go in for politics, as his wife had suggested. And he would certainly cultivate some greater understanding between them. Why, they should be as Darby and Joan together and that little cottage in Hampshire should be their bower of bliss!