Derby Day (31 page)

Presently there came a noise of footsteps in the passage and a smart double rap on the door. Starting up from his desk, but taking care not to make the slightest sound, Captain Raff made his way not to the door but to an upturned bucket that lay slightly to one side of the door-frame. There was a crack in the uppermost part of the wood, and by mounting the bucket – this, again, he managed without making the slightest noise – he was able to observe the person standing in the passage. This done, he shot the bolt and admitted into the room a fat, dull-featured man wearing a coat that was perhaps too warm for the time of the year, and a very battered tall hat.

‘You’ve been a long time letting me in, Capting,’ this gentleman observed. ‘There’s money owing I suppose?’

‘A trifle. A guinea or so. That man McPherson, you know.’

‘Landlords is always a bother,’ said the visitor, putting his hat down next to the pile of oyster shells. ‘Anyhow, I dare say there is business to do, eh?’

Somebody once remarked that however low a man’s position in life, there is usually to be found some other man prepared to cling to him and do his bidding with a deference that it is very gratifying to his wounded vanity. And so Mr Delaney – this was the visitor’s name – for reasons which no one had ever been able to fathom, clung to Captain Raff. He ran errands for him. He negotiated his little bills – at three months, six months, or even a year – and took sixpenny commissions. He went to race-meetings and hung about the enclosure gates while Captain Raff toadied his acquaintances in the ring. There were people who said that Captain Raff owed Mr Delaney money, but this was not borne out by Captain Raff’s attitude to his protégé – which was at all times patronising – or Mr Delaney’s response to it, which was deferential in the extreme.

‘Well, now,’ Captain Raff said, retreating behind his desk – it was the only chair in the room, and Mr Delaney had to stand – ‘let’s see what you have been up to. I’ve seen all the papers.’

‘Yus indeed, Capting.’ Mr Delaney regarded the copies of
Bell’s Life
and
The Sportman’s Magazine
with professional distaste. ‘But the papers is always so behind-hand. Coming out for Lord Garroway’s Hecate when everyone knows the beast has an habcess on its hock. That McIvor, down at the Bird and Hand …’

‘McIvor?’ Captain Raff must have heard Mr McIvor’s name before. ‘What does McIvor have to say?’

‘Well.’ Mr Delaney looked very knowing. ‘It’s not much of a book that Whalen lets him make up … You know they had the police in there again the other day and a whole heap of slips got thrown out the windy? But he does know what is being said. Now, McIvor has Tiberius at fives.’

‘No more than he ought,’ Captain Raff broke in again.

‘That’s what I said myself, Capting. As nice a hoss as I ever saw. Leave that Belchamber, that everyone was talking about a month since, in its tracks. But then, that’s down from four. Baldino’s at eight. And Septuagint – that’s Lord Trumpington’s horse, that nobody thought would ever run, at nine. And yet there’s money going on Baldino all the time. Why, McIvor swore he knew of a single stake of two thousand pound on Baldino only the other day.’

‘Two thousand pounds! And Tiberius going out from four to five?’

‘I know, sir. And “Nimrod” in
Bell
’s saying how he was the certainest thing he’d seen in a month of Sundays. It’s all very queer.’

‘Very queer,’ said Captain Raff. He was thinking hard about Mr Happerton, and what Mr Happerton might be doing with the capital that had come into his hands in recent weeks. The idea, in so far as Mr Happerton had been prepared to convey it to his associate, had been that the money was to be staked on Tiberius. And yet here was the price lengthening, while someone had placed two thousand pounds on Baldino!

‘What do people say about Mr McWilliam’s horse?’ he now enquired.

‘Baldino?’ Mr Delaney looked as if he was trying to remember a lesson from school. ‘A nice little hoss, certainly. Might do well with a fair wind and someone who knows how to ride him on the seat – he’s got a nasty way of chewing his bit and veering off towards the rail which even Dolly Walker, as rode him in the Two Thousand, could do nothing about, you recall. But he’s no match for Tiberius … Anything the matter, Capting?’ For Captain Raff’s face had turned more than usually pale.

‘One of those confounded oysters, I’ll be bound. You’d better excuse me.’

While Captain Raff was in the water closet parting company with the bad oyster, Mr Delaney made a little tour of the room, leered at the unmade bed, grinned at the laundress’s bill, picked up the sporting newspapers that he had previously disparaged and looked at the marks Captain Raff had made in their margins. ‘A market ’oss if ever I saw one,’ he said to himself. ‘But do the capting know? That’s the question.’ Then, hearing sounds that suggested the captain had finished his ablutions, he returned to his position in the centre of the room.

‘Who’s to have the riding of Tiberius, I wonder?’ he asked, as Captain Raff fell back into his chair.

‘Ugh! I’ll have that man summonsed, indeed I shall … What’s that?’

‘I said: who’s to have the riding of him?’

‘It’s not quite decided,’ said Captain Raff, who had a horrible suspicion that it might have been without his knowledge.

‘Well, it had better be decided quick, with the race to be run in a month, and Sam Collinson already booked for Septuagint, if what I hear’s correct.’

There was just slightly less deference in Mr Delaney’s voice as he said this: perhaps it was the sight of the laundress’s bill that did it.

‘That’s enough of that,’ Captain Raff said. He looked horribly seedy. ‘Here, there is something you can do for me. Did you ever have any dealings with Mr Handasyde, who keeps the Perch in Dean Street?’

‘Know the ’ouse, Capting. Don’t know the gentleman.’

‘Well, take this paper to him, and tell him – in point of fact – tell him I shall be glad to renew at three months.’

Mr Delaney picked up the bill from the shaking hand that Captain Raff extended to him, gave it an odd look that suggested Mr Handasyde might have his own opinion, and put it in his pocket. ‘I shall stick with him till the race,’ he said to himself. ‘But after that, well, there are safer bets, Delaney my boy, and you knows it.’

When he had gone, and the door had been carefully locked behind him, Captain Raff exchanged his dressing gown for the pair of white duck trousers and the royal blue coat with brass buttons that made him look rather like a nautical man and sat down in his chair. The portrait by Anstruther, RA, caught his eye and he thought about the young man he had been. Those had, in fact, been the days. And now he had crows’-feet under his eyes and there was thirty shillings owing to his laundress that he could not pay. It was very hard, Captain Raff thought, as he turned over the matter of Baldino and the two thousand pounds that someone had wagered on him and the subsequent lengthening of Tiberius’s odds. He suspected that Mr Happerton was playing some game from which he was being excluded, but he could not quite see how he was to bring his suspicion out into the light. ‘Two thousand on Baldino,’ he said to himself once or twice. The sunshine, streaming in from the skylight, sparkled off his brass buttons and wreathed the officer’s head in a little golden halo, and in this way Captain Raff’s courage renewed itself.

At about half past twelve he put on his hat, unlocked the door and stepped cautiously out into the passageway. There was no one there and, swaggering a little, with odd shafts of sunlight from stray windows above and behind him gleaming off his brass buttons, Captain Raff went down his three flights of stairs out into the street. There was no one much about at the Blue Riband – it is very quiet on a Saturday, for the sporting men are all gone into the country – but there was a waiter carrying a liqueur glass on a tray up the stairs to the library, and Captain Raff followed hopefully on his heels.

‘Holloa there, Happerton. Fancy seeing you here.’

‘Well, it’s a place I’m generally to be found, I suppose,’ Mr Happerton said. He was sitting in an armchair, his legs encased in a yet more brilliant pair of top-boots, looking at an album of equine prints. ‘Are you going to sea, Raff? You look like a midshipman.’

‘It is just a navy coat that I happen to have,’ Captain Raff said, wishing that he had left his brass buttons at home. He was conscious that Mr Happerton did not think his arrival at the Blue Riband coincidental. ‘Mrs Happerton is well, I take it?’

‘Never saw her better.’ There was a silence.

‘And the old gentleman?’

‘Takes off his milk-and-arrowroot every night like a man. We are getting on famously. But you’re very full of questions, Raff. I’m on my way out, as it happens. Is there anything else you’d care to ask me?’

‘Well –’ Captain Raff thought he might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. ‘I was at Tattersall’s this morning, you know, and some of the fellows were asking who is to ride Tiberius?’

‘Were they? That is very kind of them.’ Captain Raff could not tell if Mr Happerton was annoyed, or satirically amused. ‘Well, I can tell you the answer, and you may tell them. It is – Major Hubbins.’

‘Major Hubbins!’

‘Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of him?’ Mr Happerton was holding the liqueur glass in his right hand, halfway to his mouth, and the sunlight caught the liquid and illumined it.

‘Of course I have heard of him. But …’

Captain Raff had not only heard of Major Hubbins, but met him, talked to him and been bought glasses of brandy-and-water by him. There was no one in the Blue Riband – not even the knife-boy or the girl who laundered the tablecloths – who had not heard of him. His name had been spoken of in sporting circles for nearly thirty years. He was a short, white-haired and very nearly elderly man who had once, riding Lord Fellowes’ Danton, won the Cesarewitch, but the riding of it had been a long time ago.

‘But what?’ Mr Happerton demanded.

‘Well. He … he ain’t very young, you know.’

‘Cantrip won the Derby at fifty-seven.’

‘He’s not so very far short of that, I should say.’ Privately Captain Raff was enraged. A part of him suspected that Mr Happerton was actively conspiring to lose the race, and that the two thousand pounds staked on Baldino had come from the robbing of Mr Gallentin’s safe. The morality of this intrigue did not concern him – Captain Raff had known a great deal worse in the dainty sporting circles in which he moved – but he was furious that it should have been begun without his connivance, and he suspected that this concealment boded very ill for his status as Mr Happerton’s confidential adviser. ‘As you say, Cantrip was fifty-seven. He may do very well.’ Still, though, Captain Raff could not entirely bid farewell to his professional judgement. ‘His knee isn’t strong, you know. Not since he went down under Pyramid that time at Uttoxeter.’

‘I happen to know the bone was reset,’ Mr Happerton said. ‘He is as strong as an ox.’

‘He’ll need to be,’ Captain Raff said, in what might have been taken for a humorous tone, ‘if he’s to ride Tiberius.’

‘Well, that is what has been proposed. In fact, I am just going off to see him. You had better come with me, if the prospect charms you so much.’

Major Hubbins lived in rooms above a public house on the north side of the park, where he was made much of and got his glasses of brandy-and-water gratis. Sitting in the cab as it trundled along High Holborn – Mr Happerton said nothing and stared out of the window – Captain Raff found himself transfixed by misery. He knew that his position in life, such as it was, depended on Mr Happerton, and now it seemed as if Mr Happerton was about to throw him over. Captain Raff thought of the things on which his association with Mr Happerton depended – they included his subscription to the Blue Riband, his rent at Ryder Street and one or two private things which it is not necessary to go into here – and fairly groaned. He was enough of a realist to know that if Mr Happerton abandoned him, the path thereafter could only lead down, down to the debased hostelries where the McIvors of this world plied their trade. In this wretched state his imagination began to play tricks on him. He thought of adamantine rock, dark caverns far underground, white, nacreous jewels in clustered profusion. There was a pair of street acrobats turning somersaults on the pavement, a grey-haired man and a boy who, judging from the set of his features, was his son, and he stared at them unhappily, not liking the patterns they made or the sight of the boy’s head emerging from the space where a split second ago his feet had been. Something of Captain Raff’s unease communicated itself to Mr Happerton, who turned in his seat and said:

‘What’s the matter, Raff? There’s no press-gang come to take you to your ship, surely?’

The dark caverns, far underground, with their clusters of garnets, had been replaced by a flux of black, oily water that rushed over a landscape of bleached and broken stone. Try as he might, Captain Raff could not avoid the water. He ran away from it, stepped smartly out of its path, but still it followed him and threatened to drag him down. It was worse when they came to Bayswater, for Captain Raff swiftly divined that Major Hubbins was a superior version of himself. The rooms were just like his own – the same mess and confusion – only larger and better appointed. There were the same sporting prints on the wall, only the sheen of the panelling gave them respectability, and on the desk, instead of the laundress’s bill, there was an earl’s
carte de visite
. All this depressed Captain Raff horribly. So, too, did the sight of Major Hubbins, who they found not lounging elegantly by his deal table, as Captain Raff remembered him, with a dog-whip dangling out of his pocket and the emerald pin that the Duke of Grafton had given him in his white stock, but sitting with his feet in a hot mustard bath looking simultaneously ancient and comic.