Derby Day (32 page)

He is like a little old clergyman
, Captain Raff thought as he bent to shake Major Hubbins’ hand, and smelt the bear’s-grease on his sleek white hair,
a little old clergyman bobbing up with the sacrament at some altar-rail in a country church with a few old women waiting in the pews
. It was twenty years since Captain Raff had taken the sacrament, but the image was very vivid to him and for a moment the tide of black water ran elsewhere. ‘I think I can do it,’ Major Hubbins was saying in response to some polite enquiry of Mr Happerton’s. ‘Indeed it’s very kind of you to think of me. Lord Mountjoy’ – Major Hubbins was famous for introducing aristocratic names into his conversation – ‘was saying only the other day that he wondered I did not get my chance.’

What weight was he riding at, Mr Happerton innocently wondered, and Major Hubbins said he believed it was eight stone five, and Captain Raff smirked horribly. The smell of the mustard was very strong. They stayed there an hour, without, it seemed to him, discussing anything of note, talking of ancient Pegasuses and their exploits, how Desdemona had won the Oaks, with little Jack Simpson, who weighed only six stone, hanging on to her for dear life, and Lord Fawcett’s seizure, which everyone said was on account of his having backed Gladiolus, only Major Hubbins swore that it was not, for he had seen the paper and it was some other horse, and Captain Raff frankly despaired. The sporting prints nagged him with their splendour, the earl’s
carte-de-visite
winked at him from the table, and he remembered his own room at Ryder Street with the unmade bed, the litter of oyster shells and the providential lock.

When they came out into the street it was well on in the afternoon, and Captain Raff, seeing the bustle and clamour of the streets, thought that there was no world of which he was a part and that the black tide would surely carry him off.

‘We must get him up to Scroop without delay,’ he said. ‘I doubt he’s sat on a horse for a twelvemonth.’

‘I’ve no doubt he’ll come to Scroop,’ Mr Happerton remarked. ‘He told me he is going to stay with Sir Harry Creighton at Towcester. I dare say we shall see him after that.’

‘You know, Happerton,’ Captain Raff said easily, as if he meant it for a joke, ‘there are people who might think that you meant to use Tiberius for the market, and that – well – you favoured some other horse all along.’

‘It is amazing what people will think,’ Mr Happerton said.

‘And yet, you know, it will do you harm if they go on saying it.’

‘They may think what they like,’ Mr Happerton said.

*

Two miles away in Soho someone else was thinking it.

‘No, I won’t renew,’ Mr Handasyde of the Perch in Dean Street was telling Mr Delaney. ‘I don’t want Captain Raff’s paper at three months, nor even at six for twice the interest. I want what’s owing. And if the Captain don’t like it, why, I’ve a friend in Cursitor Street who’ll be happy to make his acquaintance.’

‘There’s no need for bailiffs,’ Mr Delaney said. He was wondering to himself if Captain Raff’s game was worth the playing any more. Then a thought struck him. ‘Now see here,’ he improvised. ‘You renew at two – and if I know the capting and how he’s placed he’ll settle, indeed he will – and I’ll give you a tip for the Derby.’

‘What sort of a tip?’ Mr Handasyde wondered. He had a sneaking regard for Mr Delaney’s opinion that the shadow of Captain Raff had never quite displaced.

‘Shall you sign?’

Mr Handasyde signed his name across the bill with a flourish. ‘What is it?’

‘Well – that Tiberius that everyone talks of so much, it’s my belief that he’s been bred for the market, and that the man who owns him has his money on Baldino.’

‘What? You mean he’ll be ridden to lose?’

‘I mean he won’t be ridden to win.’

Mr Handasyde said something under his breath, and Mr Delaney, grinning in spite of himself, put the bill in his pocket and took it back to Ryder Street.

XVIII

The Triumph of a Modern Man

It is the rain that makes us melancholy – that, and the localities we inhabit
.

A Lincoln memorial (1853)

SITTING IN HIS armchair with a blanket drawn round his knees, drinking his milk-and-arrowroot, preparing to be despatched to his bed for the night, stumbling his way up and down staircases with the old butler supporting his arm, Mr Gresham had ample time to reflect on the question of his daughter. His illness – there was still this fiction that he was getting better from it – had done two things to him. It had made him querulous, very anxious that his blankets should be drawn up properly, that his milk-and-arrowroot should be hot enough – but not too hot. But it also gave him leisure of a kind that no previous part of his life had ever afforded, and he determined to use this leisure to explore one or two mysteries that he had never satisfactorily solved, the greatest of these being his daughter.

First there was the business of her marriage. Mr Gresham did not like Mr Happerton, although he appreciated his courtesy, but he knew the kind of man he was. His daughter he felt he did not know at all. He had watched her once at dinner as Mr Happerton, coming in late with some choice morsel of intelligence that he wished to share, had bounced over and placed his arm on his wife’s shoulder, and Mrs Rebecca had stared at the hand as if it were a bat that had just flown in out of the stilly night. And yet it could not be said that she fell short in most aspects of that wifely regard by which newly married gentlemen set such store. She accompanied Mr Happerton to such social occasions as he proposed happily enough. She liked to hear the horsey talk with which he occasionally favoured her. But all the time, Mr Gresham fancied, there was calculation in her. Worse, perhaps, was the fact that he knew this calculation extended to her dealings with himself. He would catch her looking at him sometimes as they sat in the drawing room – she on her sofa, he in his chair – and he could not help but think that the glance she gave him was not unlike the glance that M. Soyer gives the mock turtle, seen in a provisioner’s window in Piccadilly, that he intends to render into that night’s soup. Her eyes at this juncture seemed very green, and the twists of hair gathered up in the corner of her mouth were very disagreeable.

He tried to conciliate her, to pass small remarks that she might find amusing, but still the green eyes stared calculatingly back. He had nothing to complain of materially. He had his cushions, and his blanket, and his meals brought in hot-and-hot, and his carriage-ride in the park – he was bored by that carriage-ride – and for these he was grateful. But his enfeebled state made him miserable and in his misery he told himself that if his daughter’s peculiarities – her detachment, her calculation – had any root cause, it must lie in his treatment of her. He had not been what he ought to have been to her, and the green eyes staring at him from the sofa were the result. The consciousness of his failings – that was how he saw it – made Mr Gresham indulgent and perhaps explains a conversation between the two of them that took place at this time.

‘Papa,’ Mrs Rebecca said – they were in the drawing room, he with a newspaper, she with a novel – ‘may I ask you something?’

Mr Gresham put down the strong article he had been reading on Irish disestablishment. He could not remember the last time his daughter had asked him anything.

‘What is it?’

‘Do you think that it would be a good thing for George to go in for politics?’

It was all Mr Gresham could do to establish who ‘George’ might be, so outlandish did this proposal seem. But a look at his daughter’s face told him that she was in complete earnest.

‘What do you mean? That he should try for a seat in parliament?’

‘I suppose that is what gentlemen generally do when they go in for politics.’

‘I thought George was more exercised by winning the Derby.’

‘That doesn’t signify at all, Papa. Plenty of people who own horses have a seat in the House.’

Mr Gresham acknowledged that it didn’t signify. He was entirely nonplussed. But still, there were the green eyes staring at him. In ordinary circumstances he would have assumed that his son-in-law had asked his wife to make this intercession. But it now occurred to him – he did not quite know why – that the thought was Mrs Rebecca’s own.

‘Does George know that you have asked me this?’

‘Why should he know? It is not his idea.’

This struck Mr Gresham as so comical that he almost laughed.

‘Great heavens, Rebecca. Gentlemen who take seats in parliament are generally consulted about it the first place, don’t you know. At least that has always been my experience.’

Mr Gresham had never been a political man. Some gentlemen in Hertfordshire with strong views about tariff reform had once invited him to be their candidate against a sitting Liberal and he had declined. That was as far as it had gone. But still he was not insensible of the advantages that a seat in parliament may confer on its incumbent. Privately he could not imagine anyone less likely to distinguish himself in the House than his son-in-law. Then again, he told himself that many persons with much less outward distinction than Mr Happerton had made brilliant careers for themselves there. And all the while, as these thoughts passed through his head, Mrs Rebecca stared at him.

‘Horse racing is all very well,’ she said suddenly. ‘But it won’t do in the long run.’

‘And so you would have him go into the House?’

‘I should like to have him distinguish himself in some way.’ Mrs Rebecca’s expression as she said this was wonderfully stern. ‘Not to sit in an office like cousin Henry, and be made KCB when he is eighty. But to do – something – that the world will take notice of.’

Mr Gresham marvelled at her. He saw that, on the one hand, she was in deadly earnest, and that, on the other, her scheme was entirely vicarious. She wanted Happerton to succeed, whether he himself wanted that success or not, and the nature of that success, even the side of the House on which it was achieved, was indifferent to her. The psychology rather baffled him, but there was no doubting its intensity. A part of him admired this resolution; another part was merely shocked. Still faintly amused by the thought of Mr Happerton in his equine pins attempting to catch the Speaker’s eye, he said:

‘You will find that such things cost a great deal of money.’

Mrs Rebecca did not say anything, but the look on her face suggested that she regarded money as the least of her worries.

‘You have discussed – well – some of this with George – with your husband.’

‘He knows nothing of it,’ Mrs Rebecca said.

And Mr Gresham felt again the twinge of guilt that seemed to afflict all his dealings with his daughter. He did not approve of her, or what she did, but he fancied that the flaws in her character were the result of his neglect.

‘If there is money needed,’ he said, ‘then I suppose it shall be forthcoming.’

‘Thank you, Papa.’

Mr Gresham looked hard at her, but he could see no glint of calculation. He picked up his newspaper once more and went on with Irish disestablishment.

*

In Lincolnshire the weather has changed. The spring gales have been and gone, leaving half a chimney smashed and two trees down in the orchard, and now the rain has set in. The fields are awash in lapping pools of water, grown bigger by the day, and the butts are overflowing and would be emptied if there were anyone to empty them. The sky is mostly gunmetal-grey, salmon-coloured around the edges at dawn, then shading into slate. There is a word for all this, Mr Davenant thinks, though he cannot for the life of him imagine where he found it, a word for all these inundations and damp, mournful air:
deliquescent
. The road beyond Scroop Hall is all but impassable; the sheep are huddled up in the dips at the fields’ ends; even the rooks are hunkered down under the tree-tops. Somehow the horizon seems further away than usual: a grey wall of cloud, out beyond the wolds and the coastland, from which inexplicable protrusions of light occasionally bounce and glimmer, as if there were a battle being fought far out to sea. Like much going on here, it is all faintly mysterious, ineluctable, out of reach.

Mr Davenant watches the rain from his study window. Pinned down by this torrent of water, his estate takes on fantastic shapes, becomes unrecognisable and haphazard. There is a sense that everything is inert, tethered to its foundations. Over the stable doors, where the drainpipe has come away, the water falls in a cataract: he can hear it at night, roaring through his dreams. The trees flap in the wind; the evergreens in the shrubbery have turned livid and arsenical. It has been very quiet at Scroop, although Dora the housemaid has gone, on the excellent grounds that Mr Davenant cannot afford to pay her quarter’s wages, and Evie has been restless. She has a habit of plucking at his sleeve when they meet in the hall before dinner, a way of fussing with the strings of her pinafore dress. Mr Davenant is uncertain about Evie. There are times when he wonders whether he has done his duty by her, whether it might have been better to have sent her elsewhere. But what is ‘elsewhere’? Besides, he has a feeling that Evie’s moon face and her pink eyes – though he is her father he knows that they remind him of the white rats he had as a boy – are a judgement sent by God. It is difficult to tell.