Derby Day (15 page)

‘Fair’s fair. You didn’t want to tell me your name. I suppose I don’t have to tell you his?’

‘No more you don’t,’ said the man who was not Pardew. ‘But then, if I was that way inclined, I could shut the door in your face. But I’m not that kind of man, you see.’

‘Ain’t you, though?’

‘Perhaps you’d better step inside, Mr Lythgoe. Jemima!’ he called over his shoulder, although every word of his previous conversation would have been clearly audible to any occupant of the room behind him. ‘Here. There is a visitor come.’

Climbing nimbly up the steps, with his case under his arm, and the last of the wind tugging at his legs as if it meant to overcome and subdue him even yet, Mr Lythgoe found himself in a small, untidily furnished chamber, very much cluttered with old boxes and upturned crates, into which the light came haltingly through a single, dusty window. There was a fire burning in the grate – not a coal fire, but one made of odds and ends of wood – and before it, on a wooden chair, sat a young, but not so very young, woman in a print dress with her eye bent upon the flames.

‘My wife,’ the man who did not wish to be called Pardew said, rather brazenly, as if one or two people had previously questioned this relationship. ‘My dear, this is Mr Lythgoe.’

Mr Lythgoe, who thought she was very good-looking, and wondered how she liked living in a hut, took off his hat.

‘Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs——’

Mr Pardew laughed. ‘Ha! We’ll have no more of that. But the secret’s yours and mine, do you hear? My dear’ – he addressed himself again to the woman in the chair, while Mr Lythgoe looked at an envelope on the mantelpiece plainly sent to
R. Pardew, Esq
. and thought that if this was a secret it was not very well kept – ‘Mr Lythgoe and I have business to discuss. Perhaps you would oblige.’

‘If you wish it,’ the woman said, and Mr Lythgoe thought that if Mr Pardew might narrowly be described as a gentleman, his wife, if that was what she was, though certainly very good-looking, was probably not a lady. There was a wooden staircase at the back of the room leading to an upper chamber and to this she somewhat hesitantly repaired, giving her master a look – half-meek and half-defiant – that Mr Lythgoe thought very curious. Mr Pardew watched her go.

‘Snug little place you have here,’ Mr Lythgoe said, who could feel the draught rising under his feet. ‘You ain’t in any danger when the tide comes in, I hope?’

‘None I know of,’ said Mr Pardew, who looked at that moment as if he were capable of flinging the sea back personally with his bare hands. ‘Now, who is the gentleman who sent you to me, and what does he say?’

Mr Lythgoe hesitated. ‘On no account give him my name, d’you hear?’ Captain Raff had insisted, but Mr Lythgoe did not think that he was beholden to Captain Raff. ‘Well now,’ he said nervously, ‘I don’t know that I can tell you that.’

‘Can’t you? Well, I don’t think there is anything I can tell you then. What will the gentleman in London – for I take it you’ve come from London, Mr Lythgoe – say when he hears that?’

‘It is – Captain Raff,’ Mr Lythgoe said, feeling a little queasy from the ship and wishing that he could sit down and be given a glass of water.

‘Captain Raff? I don’t think I ever heard Captain Raff’s name,’ Mr Pardew said, rather failing to disguise a suspicion that he and the captain might have had some slight knowledge of each other. ‘What does Captain Raff have to say to me?’

Mr Lythgoe hesitated again, and remembered the conversation he had had with Captain Raff in the library of the Blue Riband Club, whose association with horse racing, being a Wesleyan, Mr Lythgoe very much deprecated. ‘You can just sound him out,’ Captain Raff had said, without explaining what this sounding-out might consist of. ‘Give him a hint, and so forth, you know.’ In the matter of Captain Raff, Mr Lythgoe knew his conscience to be clear. He thought that Captain Raff was a thoroughly bad man, but even thoroughly bad men may have messages taken for them, and he was mindful of Mrs Lythgoe and his children, who were currently living in two rented rooms in Hoxton. In the matter of Mr Pardew, on the other hand, his conscience was deeply uneasy. The only light reading that Mr Lythgoe allowed himself was the
Methodist Recorder
and one or two of Mr Gilfillan’s celebrated literary portraits, but even he, somewhere in the remote chambers of his mind, had heard dim rumours of Mr Pardew. He could not quite recall what it was that Mr Pardew was supposed to have done – whether he had forged a caseful of cheques or robbed a train, or whether he had somehow forged the cheques and robbed the train together – but he suspected that in dealing with Mr Pardew he was touching pitch. And Mr Pardew, looking at him as he stood nervously on the threadbare carpet, knew that his visitor both feared and despised him.

‘What does Captain Raff have to say to me?’ he repeated. And Mr Lythgoe, who felt that if he did not sit down he would probably faint, cast his mind back again to the conversation in the library of the Blue Riband Club. ‘You’ll have to entice him,’ Captain Raff had said. ‘Flatter him a little, you know. Even money says he’s up to these dodges, but, well, men like it.’ And Captain Raff had impressed on Mr Lythgoe the desirability of persuading Mr Pardew to return to London, which had apparently not had the pleasure of his company these past two years, without at this delicate juncture telling him precisely what it was that he was wanted in London for. ‘You see,’ Captain Raff had said mysteriously, ‘we can’t have him knowing our business and then taking his hook, you know?’ Mr Lythgoe had not known, but he had remembered the two rented rooms in Hoxton and said that he would do his best.

‘I am … That is …’ He stopped, reaching out a hand to steady himself on the mantelpiece. ‘If you’d only give me a glass of water.’

‘A glass of water? Certainly. You look as if you would be better off with brandy.’

‘No, not brandy,’ Mr Lythgoe insisted. He drank off the water slowly, one hand clasped to his forehead. ‘The captain is anxious for you to come to London,’ he said finally.

‘On what errand, I wonder? You see, I’m very comfortable here.’ Mr Pardew waved his fingers airily around the cluttered room, with its upturned cases, its dusty window and its little eddies of draughty air, and Mr Lythgoe could not work out whether he was joking or not. ‘We have been away for nearly two years, Jemima and I. Why should we want to come back? Did Captain Raff have anything to say about that?’ Seeing that the answer was altogether beyond Mr Lythgoe, he went on: ‘No, I don’t suppose he did. He should have come himself instead of sending some d——d proxy. I mean no offence, Mr Lythgoe. I suppose he has your paper?’

Mr Lythgoe gave the barest perceptible nod. ‘There is this,’ he said. ‘I was told to give you this.’

Mr Pardew took the square envelope, which was bound about with twine and fixed up with a red wax seal, placed it on top of one of the packing cases, but did not appear to want to open it.

‘Well, you may thank Captain Raff from me for that – I shall look him up in the Army List and find out all about him – and tell him that I’ll consult it at my leisure. And now, if I were you I should take myself off. There’s a boat sails at three, I believe. And I should take a glass of brandy. It settles the stomach. And the nerves,’ he added, as Mr Lythgoe stepped out of the door.

When his guest had gone, Mr Pardew stood for a long time in the doorway watching the retreating figure pick its way along the marram grass and past the rowing boats that awaited their caulking and eventually gain the esplanade. Then, shutting the door behind him, he went inside. There was more wind blowing in from the sea, and the last thing he saw as the door slammed to was Mr Lythgoe’s hat part company with his head and go careening off over the dunes. It was barely two o’clock in the afternoon, but already the light inside the cottage had the greyness of an aquarium, so that Mr Pardew with his jutting chin and his sharp eye might have been some curious fish gliding through the murk of the ocean floor. He lit a lamp, sat himself down on the chair that Jemima had occupied before the fire, tore open the envelope and spilled the contents out over his lap. ‘Probably some deuced prospectus,’ he said to himself as he did so, but a moment or two’s inspection revealed that the first of the pieces of paper on his lap – there were three of them – was a page torn from a newspaper or magazine.

Looking at it closely, Mr Pardew deduced that it was a trade journal of some kind, probably intended for locksmiths, for it described a safe that had lately been installed in the strongroom of Messrs Gallentin & Co., the Leadenhall Street jeweller, a safe made of solid cast iron, to a depth of two inches, and with a lock, devised by Mr Chubb himself, of such ingenuity that a former safe-breaker, let out of prison for the purpose, had spent a morning trying to negotiate it and declared himself baffled. No such safe, the writer declared, had ever been seen before in London, and Messrs Gallentin reposed every confidence in it. A man had been invited to take a sledgehammer to its springs and done nothing, and even Captain McTurk of the Metropolitan Police Force had signified his approval.

All this Mr Pardew read with great interest. He traced with his finger a little pencilled mark that someone had made beneath Mr Gallentin’s encomium to the safe. He smiled very much over the difficulties of the safe-breaker, and when he came to the mention of Captain McTurk he gave a little start, as if he knew the name but did not wish to be reminded of it. Then, putting the article to one side, he picked up the other slips of paper that had fallen out of the envelope. One of these, he instantly saw, was a ferry ticket from Boulogne to Dover. The other was a letter, bound up in a neat little blue envelope, not very lengthy, as it consisted of no more than a couple of pages of foolscap, with no address or date above it and no signature beneath it, but containing one or two suggestions and pieces of advice that Mr Pardew looked at very keenly. He was a thorough man, and the reading of the article and the letter took him a good quarter of an hour. Then he put article, letter and steamer ticket back into the larger envelope, placed it in the drawer of a little lacquered desk – about the only thing of value in the room – and sat down in the armchair. Grey rain was coming in from the sea – the first drops were already scudding against the window – and he watched it as it fell, and listened to the wind whistling through the ships’ masts in the harbour.

Presently there came the noise of footsteps descending the stair and Jemima appeared in the room beside him.

‘Your friend has gone?’

‘He is not my friend, but he has gone. I daresay he will be on the boat by now. Heaving his stomach over the side, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘He looked rather a timid little man.’

‘Timid? I daresay he is. No doubt when he gets home to his wife and children he is as bold as a lion. It is always the same. Did I ever tell you of the time I met the Earl of Littlehampton?’

‘I don’t think you did,’ said Jemima, the look on whose face suggested that she loved stories of this kind.

‘A man who makes a great noise in the world, of course. But put him in a public room, or with fellows who don’t know him, and he’s as docile as a lamb. They say he eats the countess for his breakfast, though. By the by,’ he went on, the tone of his voice changing as he did so, ‘how much is owing just now?’

‘I think it is about a hundred francs,’ Jemima said, with a readiness that suggested she was quite as interested in domestic economy as the Earl of Littlehampton. ‘And there is that money to the baker.’

Mr Pardew thought – or perhaps did not think – about the money owing to the baker, staring into the embers of the fire. He shot another little glance at the lacquered desk, and then rose to his feet and began to put on a coat that he retrieved from a hook behind the door.

‘You are not going out, surely?’

‘It is only a little rain. There is something I need to do.’

Jemima accepted this with her customary meekness. ‘Shall you be long?’

‘An hour, perhaps. Is there anything in the house?’

‘There is not.’

‘Then I had better get something,’ Mr Pardew said, with his great hand on the door-knob.

Beyond the row of cottages and the marram grass there was a track that followed the line of the sea for a hundred yards or so before rising to the distant cliffs. This Mr Pardew began to follow. He had taken a stick in his hand as he left the house and as he walked he slashed at the bushes that lined his path. The rain fell in torrents around him, driving into his face as he marched, but it could not be said that he noticed it. As he walked, certain incidents in his past life rose unbidden into his head and he found himself thinking about them: a little house he had once rented in St John’s Wood with a princely drawing room ornamented by Mr Etty’s cupids; a meeting in a room in Carter Lane with policemen’s whistles sounding in the street outside; a man who had been Mr Pardew’s business partner, and who had unaccountably died, and whom people said that Mr Pardew had murdered. Mr Pardew remembered them all, and as each bygone face and domicile rose into his consciousness he made another slash with his stick.

For all his pride and his savagery, Mr Pardew was a clever man, and he knew, as he stalked along the clifftop with a flock of seabirds whirling above him quite as if he were their chieftain and they meant to follow him to the ends of the earth, that the sealed room in which he fancied that he lived his life had now been opened to admit a chink of light. He had been gone from England two years, and his wanderings in that time would have astonished even one of Mr Cook’s dragomen. He had spent some months in Italy by the lakes; he had gone to Geneva; he had been seen as far afield as Leipzig. But somehow the schemes he had designed to sustain him on his travels had come to nothing. It would take a history to explain the journeyings that Mr Pardew had made in Old Europe those past two years, the odd places he went to and the queer company he kept. Perhaps Mr Pardew was part of that queer company himself, yet he looked at the shabby French counts he saw taking the cure at Baden, or the knowing gentlemen he played
écarté
with at Munich, with a thoroughgoing contempt. He was a tourist, passing through, and they were a picturesque spectacle got up for his entertainment.