Derby Day (10 page)

‘What a deuced racket those bells make,’ he exclaimed now, putting down the newspaper and looking at his wife across the breakfast table.

‘I suppose they have to call the people to church.’

‘Horrible popish places. They would be better off staying at home.’

To this Mrs Happerton did not reply. Looking at her, as she reached forward to refill her coffee cup with a long white hand, Mr Happerton wondered what he thought about her. Even now, he discovered, after six weeks’ intimacy, he could not make her out.

‘I have had a letter from Captain Raff,’ he began again. Captain Raff had sent several letters during the course of their stay.

‘Oh indeed. What has Captain Raff to say?’

Captain Raff was rather a joke between them.

‘Oh – nothing very much, you know.’ In fact Captain Raff had had a great deal to say about the man who had been sent to Boulogne, and another man who might be coming back from Boulogne, and a third man who was already offering odds of a hundred to seven on Baldino for the Derby.

‘Then I am surprised Captain Raff took the trouble to write.’

The bells had stopped ringing. The only sound Mr Happerton could hear was the squeak of his boots – he had a new pair of top-boots, bought specially for his wedding tour – as he shifted in his chair.

‘Well,’ he remarked, after another long pause. ‘We have seen all there is to see of Rome, I suppose. I hope you have enjoyed yourself, my dear.’

‘I have enjoyed myself very much,’ Mrs Happerton said.

‘And now we must go home again, eh? One can’t sit around for ever, you know. Not when there is work to be done.’

Mr Happerton knew, as he said this, that he was not making himself plain, that there were things he wanted to say to his wife – about their joint future interests, about one very particular thing that he wanted with regard to his own personal security – that he could not quite bring himself to utter. It was not exactly that she intimidated him, he told himself, merely that the look on her face awoke in him a kind of self-consciousness that he had not experienced before.

‘Your father is rather an old man,’ he began again.

‘I suppose he would be thought – old.’

There was a coolness in the way she said this that almost made Mr Happerton quake in his top-boots. But he persevered.

‘The halest man for his age I ever saw. He’ll be with us for a good many years, I suppose, and a very good thing too.’ Mr Happerton had never quite gauged the relationship between Mr Gresham and his daughter. ‘Do you suppose that he has made a will?’

‘He has never said anything about it.’

‘Well, I suppose not. Only they say a lawyer is always the first to make a will – ha!’ Mr Happerton knew as he made this joke that it was not a very good one. ‘The first to change it, too, when circumstance demands.’

Mr Happerton could not tell why he was proceeding in hints and allusions rather than telling his wife what was really on his mind, but – there it was.

‘I suppose’, Mrs Happerton said, with the asperity of a governess rebuking a young lady of fourteen who has broken a pen nib, ‘that you wish for some of Papa’s money?’

‘Eh?’ Mr Happerton was astonished to hear her say this. He had known many women in his life, and was fond of saying that he could talk to a dairymaid as well as to a duchess, but he had never thought to hear a lawyer’s daughter from Belgrave Square tell him that he wanted her father’s money. For a moment he wondered whether he had made a dreadful mistake. He did not know, such was the sphinx-like stare that Mrs Happerton had turned on him, whether he was being asked for information, rebuked, or connived with, and the confusion flustered him and sent him back to the hints and allusions in which he had previously dealt.

‘I tell you what it is, my girl,’ he said, with a husbandly affability he did not altogether feel. ‘I am thinking of buying – a horse.’

‘A horse?’

‘Well yes. Tiberius, that has been hanging on the wall above us these past six weeks. The owner is embarrassed and will very probably sell if he is dealt with in the right way. Such things don’t come cheap, indeed they don’t. Now, if your father could advance me a little money – merely in the form of a loan – it would help me a great deal in this undertaking.’

‘Where is Tiberius?’

He could see that the story interested her, that there were things he might have said he wanted to buy that were a great deal worse.

‘Just at the moment he is in Lincolnshire. If I bought him I should probably want to keep him there.’

‘Papa has always been very down on horse racing.’

‘People used to be very down on slaving, but that never stopped them running blackbirds along the Cape,’ Mr Happerton said bravely. ‘He’ll understand that it is really an investment.’

‘Do you wish me to ask Papa for money?’

Again, he was astonished by her matter-of-factness. If he had produced a corpse and she had suggested that they might bury it together he could not have been more surprised. Only this time he found that her frankness encouraged him. There was something in her tone that suggested she might be his ally, that she was not averse to her father’s money being spent – the idea of its being lent was a polite fiction – on a horse. A horse that might, moreover, do all manner of wonderful things and repay the investment a dozenfold.

‘Well now,’ he said, a shade more confidentially. ‘I don’t think perhaps that it ought to be said outright. But you could talk to him about it in general terms, you know. Give him a hint about the kind of thing I’m engaged upon and so forth. That would be the way to begin, I should say. Old gentlemen don’t like to be flustered, I’ve always heard.’

Mrs Happerton gave him a nod, which might have meant that she knew old gentlemen didn’t like to be flustered, or that the pen nib had better have stayed unbroken, or half a dozen other things, and went away to her room to dress. And Mr Happerton sat amidst the litter of their breakfast, with his top-boots stretched out before him, and the last letter from Captain Raff in his breast pocket, and his eye upon a little statuette of the Madonna that winked at him from a recess in the wall, half triumphant, but half puzzled, thinking that he still could not make her out.

*

Coming back to Belgrave Square in the first week of April, the Happertons found that a great deal had happened in their absence. To begin with, old Mr Happerton had been ill – not so ill as to have been confined to his bed for many days, but ill enough to seriously disturb his professional engagements. In the account given to his daughter and son-in-law of this illness there had been some deception. The old servants at Belgrave Square had represented him as being merely inconvenienced, but calling at the chambers in Stone Building, Mr Happerton discovered the truth. ‘No, sir, he hasn’t been here in a month,’ the old clerk told him, not approving of Mr Happerton, but mindful of the sovereign that had passed between them. ‘Sir Timothy Grogram’ – Sir Timothy was adjutant to the Lord Chancellor – ‘has sent half a dozen messages. And what am I do with the papers in the Tenway Croft case?’

Mr Happerton had no idea what should be done about the papers in the Tenway Croft case. He inspected Mr Gresham’s chambers, which were rather mournful and dusty, took away such letters as he thought material and returned to Belgrave Square shaking his head. On the following morning Mr Gresham did make some attempt to resume his daily routine, put on his black suit and appeared at breakfast, but it was clear that his heart was not in it, and that his hand shook as he laid it on the banister preparatory to his exit. ‘I think, perhaps, that your father had better not go to chambers this morning,’ said Mr Happerton. Mr Gresham was put to bed and the doctor called.

All this necessarily affected Mr and Mrs Happerton’s schemes for the commencement of their married life. There had originally been an idea that they should take rooms while they looked for a house in one of those Kensington squares that are so genteel and so ideally placed for the West End. But Mr Gresham’s illness threw this plan into confusion. ‘I think we had better stay here for the moment, had we not?’ Mr Happerton said to his wife on the day after Mr Gresham’s hand shook on the banister, to which Mrs Happerton replied: ‘Certainly, if you wish it.’ Mr Happerton did wish it. He liked walking up the big grey steps and rapping on the great black door with his stick. He liked the butler’s deference and the housekeeper’s bob. A room was got ready for them and, though nothing was ever said to Mr Gresham about this, Mr Happerton took charge of the key to the plate chest. It must not be thought, however, that this assumption of responsibility in any way lessened his respect for Mr Gresham. The old gentleman had a habit of spending the morning in his room and then coming down to occupy the remaining hours of the day in front of the drawing-room fire. Here, invariably, he would find Mr Happerton, whose solicitousness for his father-in-law’s health was quite charming to see, and whose dexterity with sofa cushions and fire-tongs trumped that of the most attentive domestic.

‘Why, Mr Gresham,’ he began on one of these occasions. ‘You are looking decidedly better, if I may say so, sir.’

‘Am I? Well, I suppose I am. I was never very ill, you know.’

The fiction that Mr Gresham was only very slightly unwell had been kept up a week now.

‘Well – perhaps not. Will you sit in this armchair, sir, or on the sofa?’

Invalids like to be cosseted, and Mr Gresham was no exception. He was, in point of fact, distinctly unwell – not suffering from any organic disease, perhaps, but enfeebled in a way that rather scared him – and it suited him to be told that he looked better and to have the sofa cushions plumped up on his behalf. Mr Happerton noticed this and played upon it.

‘We enjoyed ourselves very much in Rome,’ he remarked, after his father-in-law had shown some faint interest in the wedding tour. ‘You never went there, I think, sir?’

‘No, I never did.’

‘It is a very good place if you wish to look at pictures or see sights, or smell queer smoke coming out of churches, but I don’t think anyone ever did much work there.’

All this accorded exactly with what Mr Gresham thought of Rome, and he began to think that in certain respects he might have misjudged his son-in-law.

‘You’ll be returning to your business soon, I take it?’ Mr Gresham asked, at about this time.

‘Certainly I shall. Sofa cushions are all very well, but they get in the way of a man’s earning his bread.’

This statement, too, Mr Gresham silently approved, and if he did not actively look forward to his afternoons before the drawing room fire with a glass of sherry on the tray before him, and Mr Happerton stationed attentively on the sofa beside him, they were at any rate not the most unhappy portions of his life.

It was the same with the evenings. Mr Happerton could not possibly dine out, he announced, when his father-in-law was ill. Consequently, the three of them dined at eight before returning to the drawing room, where Mr Gresham yawned over the fire while his daughter read novels and Mr Happerton made bright conversation. Never having been ill before in his life, Mr Gresham took a great interest in his infirmities. He thought he should be given hot milk with arrowroot, of an evening – it was what his mother had given him when he was a child. Mr Happerton agreed. ‘The sovereignest thing, milk and arrowroot,’ he said. ‘But you should never let a servant mix it.’ Accordingly, at about ten o’clock each evening Mr Happerton went to the kitchen, brought up the milk and mixed in the arrowroot himself. The servants – the butler, the housekeeper and the tall footman – saw this and approved it. ‘He mayn’t do for Devonshire House,’ the footman said to the housekeeper, ‘him with his pins, but he is a good feller.’

At the same time, Mr Happerton did not neglect that part of his life which took place beyond the drawing room at Belgrave Square. He was seen with his wife at Astley’s and at the theatre. He gave a gentlemen’s dinner down the river at Greenwich at which ever so many bottles of Sauternes were drunk. Miss Decamp of the corps de ballet, Drury Lane, having written him several piteous entreaties, retired into the country for her
accouchement
with her letters unanswered. And there was time, too, for several conversations in the library of the Blue Riband Club with Captain Raff.

‘Now,’ Captain Raff said, on one of these occasions, ‘that fellow is back from Boulogne. Pardew, or whatever his name is.’

It was about the third week in April and the flowers were out in the gardens of Thavies Inn. Someone had taken it upon himself to open the library window to admit a scent that was about a third horse dung, a third curing smoke and a third genuine spring air.

‘Whatever his name is, it is not Pardew,’ Mr Happerton said, rather brusquely. ‘Arbuthnot, or Scatterby. Anything you wish, but not that.’

‘Of course it shall be as you like,’ Captain Raff said, very much intrigued by the phantom Mr Pardew, but affecting to conceal it. ‘There was some story about him, was there not?’

‘No story I ever heard,’ said Mr Happerton, more brusquely than ever. ‘You’ll oblige me, Raff, by not referring to it. Now, perhaps you can oblige me even more by ringing for the servant and seeing if he’ll bring us some curaçao.’

‘Oh certainly,’ Captain Raff replied, thinking that perhaps he knew what the story was. And the curaçao was brought up and drunk, for all that it was only three o’clock in the afternoon, after which the two men felt better.