Derby Day (36 page)

‘Can’t say I know it,’ Mr Happerton said.

‘I think you do,’ Mr Pardew told him. ‘At any rate Captain Raff knows it.’

Mr Happerton sat back in his chair and stared at his visitor. He thought that Mr Pardew was an odd-looking man, like the subject of a painting that has stepped out of its frame. What he saw was a man of middle age, perhaps in his later fifties, but still vigorous, distinctly tall and dressed in a rusty black suit that rather emphasised his height and a blue butterfly pin sticking incongruously out of his lapel, with a prognathous jaw that a beard and side-whiskers did not at all disguise. He was carrying a stick under one arm, and Mr Happerton thought that he did not like the stick in the least, and that he would have preferred it to be left in the hall with Mr Pardew’s hat. But stick or no stick, Mr Happerton thought he could deal with Mr Pardew.

‘Captain Raff knew that you were not to come here,’ he said. ‘Did he tell you?’

Mr Pardew was looking round Mr Gresham’s study, with its profusion of legal bookcases and its three white wigs on their stands. He knew, or he believed that he knew, that Mr Happerton was an interloper here, and he wondered if there were some way he could remind Mr Happerton of this. The stick twitched in his hand.

‘I suppose,’ Mr Pardew said, setting off on a different track, ‘that everything has been disposed of by now.’

‘I really don’t know what you are talking about,’ Mr Happerton said, wondering whether to ring for the butler.

‘I think you do,’ Mr Pardew told him again. He was examining Mr Happerton as he sat in his chair, wondering what kind of man he was. A thought occurred to him, and he said:

‘I see Tiberius’s price is falling. Really, I think if I were a betting man I should be inclined to put my money on Septuagint.’

And then Mr Happerton knew that he could not ring for the butler, and that he had better be careful. But he also thought that in his time he had met, and dealt with, many visitors more unpleasant than Mr Pardew. Thinking, too, that he knew what Mr Pardew was about, he said in a less hostile tone:

‘Now that you’re here you had better tell me what you want. You have been paid in full, I think?’

‘Certainly I have been paid,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘And no doubt in full. There’s been no chiselling off of percentages, I dare say. Raff is too poor a fish for that.’

‘Then what do you wish me to say? That it was a job well done? That I look forward to offering further opportunities in the future? That I shall be happy to provide a reference? If you have come to blackmail me, you had best say so.’

Mr Pardew grinned. He thought he knew what kind of a man Mr Happerton was. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘I were merely to offer you an honest opinion on which horse I should lay out my money – if, of course, I were a betting man?’

‘You could be d——d,’ Mr Happerton said, in what was really a very friendly way. ‘If you want money, I can tell you that there isn’t any. It’s all disposed of, for the moment. Expose me and you expose yourself. I suppose that has occurred to you.’

‘Well, perhaps it has. Although one of us might be more alarmed by that exposure than the other,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘The fact is, I am minded to go abroad. In fact, there are excellent reasons why I should leave London and not come back. And so, I have come to – throw myself on your mercy.’

Mr Happerton thought about this. A part of him knew that a Mr Pardew who was safe in some continental hiding hole would be far more pleasant to him than a Mr Pardew who stood in his, or his father-in-law’s, study talking about throwing himself on his mercy. He swung his chair round from behind his desk, crossed one of his top-boots over the other, and said, almost confidentially:

‘It’s true about the money. It is all laid out. Heavens, there is a jockey out there sending in his bills who don’t know the meaning of being frugal. I dare say you know the necessity of cutting your coat according to your cloth?’

‘No one better,’ Mr Pardew assured him.

‘How much would do it?’

Mr Pardew had an idea that Mr Happerton was telling the truth. ‘Three hundred.’

‘Can’t be done. There isn’t two hundred in the house.’ Here Mr Happerton may not have been telling the truth. ‘Would you take a bill?’

‘I don’t like paper. Paper never bought anyone a steamer ticket.’

‘No more it did. Look! If I give you a bill and you take it into the City, they may give you two hundred on it, perhaps even two hundred and twenty. Take it to that Jew in Hatton Garden – Solomons – and see what he says. But I’ll not see you again, do you hear? Raff’s a poor fish, as you say, but there are others who’re not.’

The stick twitched again in Mr Pardew’s hand, but he merely nodded his head. And so a piece of paper was produced from Mr Gresham’s drawer on which Mr Happerton attested that he intended to pay Mr R. Pardew of Richmond in the County of Surrey three hundred pounds three months hence, stuck a penny stamp under the words and signed his name across it. Mr Pardew put the paper in his pocket.

‘And so it’s not to be Tiberius?’

‘You can draw what conclusions you like,’ Mr Happerton said, who was doubting whether Mr Solomons really would give him 70 per cent of the bill’s worth.

‘I suppose he has backed Septuagint to the hilt,’ Mr Pardew told himself. Later that morning he took the bill into the City and, if he did not quite raise the sum that Mr Happerton had advertised, at any rate procured enough of it to fulfil Mr Happerton’s chief requirement of their meeting, which was that he never wanted to see him again in his life.

*

The second visitor was Mrs Happerton.

Mr Gresham had now been ailing for nearly three months. His doctor, who came thrice-weekly, pronounced that he was not so very ill, but not so very well either. Indeed, it was difficult to work out what the trouble was, beyond languor and fatigue. He sat about in his room or on chairs in the drawing room, alternately sleeping or waking into querulousness, and the querulousness was a trial. The chambers at Lincoln’s Inn had been shut up and the clerk discharged, and the papers in the Tenway Croft case had been given to Mr Gissing, Mr Gresham’s great rival in the Equity Courts for forty years. Nobody came to dinner, for dinners are troublesome when there is an invalid in the house, and nobody went out to them either (Mr Happerton still being very solicitous of his father’s welfare) and things were very dull. The silverware that was brought out on great occasions lay in its box – Mr Happerton still had the key – and the piano had not been opened since Christmas.

If Mrs Rebecca was made unhappy by this state of affairs she did not say so, but she was certainly very cross, and her crossness had a habit of breaking out in conversations with her father. Perhaps Mr Gresham hardly realised. As his weakness had advanced – and he still did not think it was advancing; he thought he was getting better – his attitude to his daughter had softened. He found, as he now had little with which to occupy his mind, that he was more interested in her, and yet, with the waning of his mental powers, his interest was vaguer and more beneficent. He made little jokes to his daughter about the married state, and his son-in-law’s political career, which were excruciating to her, and got very sharp answers back, which perhaps he did not properly notice. There were times in the afternoons when he slept two or three hours at a time, and when he was not quite lucid. He would say more than he meant, or intended, and not realise that he had said it, and his daughter would say more than she meant, knowing that what she said would not be understood. They were not pleasant, those afternoons in Belgrave Square, with the old servants bringing in the tea with grave faces and Mr Gresham nodding over his blanket, and Mr Happerton, for all his solicitousness, kept away.

‘So, my dear,’ Mr Gresham said on one of these occasions, with a sudden access of paternal spirit, ‘how do you like being a married woman, I wonder?’ There was something almost indelicate about this, which Mrs Rebecca did not at all like: Mr Gresham had never been indelicate in his life. She put down the illustrated magazine she had been reading, or not reading, and said:

‘How do I like being married? It is the same as any other state, I suppose. One sits here, and people come to see one – that is, they don’t come – and because one is a woman nothing is explained to one and life goes on quite mysteriously as if it were all sealed up in a black box, and – in a few years we shall all be dead.’

Mr Gresham understood scarcely the half of this, but he thought that things like it should not be said. ‘I suppose George is very busy at his work just now.’

‘Oh, George is a prodigy. George is an Admirable Crichton. George has purchased the freehold of Buckingham Palace, and if I am very lucky I shall allowed to see it. Will I ring for tea, Papa, or have you not finished sleeping?’

Mr Gresham drifted back into sleep – there was something intensely pathetic about the sight of him huddled up in the armchair beneath his blanket – and his daughter sat furiously on the sofa staring at the illustrated magazine gripped in her hands. Her fury had a single source. It lay in what she imagined was a want of confidence on her husband’s part. As she saw it, she had done a great deal for Mr Happerton. She had consented to marry him, she had listened to his schemes, she had found him money, and although the finding had certainly produced Tiberius in his stable at Scroop she was wholly ignorant of her husband’s plans. There had been one or two other things which perhaps she did not care to remember. And Mr Happerton, for his part, had kept silent. Or rather there had been a series of little hints and allusions by which his wife had felt patronised, and in the end slighted. Of all things, Mrs Rebecca did not want to be patronised. Suspicious of the motives of nearly everyone who surrounded her, she found, somewhat to her surprise, that she did not want to be suspicious of her husband. She found that she approved of his schemes, in so far as she knew what they were. It was the being kept in ignorance that irked her, and to this end she had made enquiries in all kinds of directions that would certainly have alarmed Mr Happerton had he known about them. She had several times consulted Mr Gaffney, and even gone down to the kitchen to borrow a sporting newspaper from the tall footman. And what she had discovered annoyed her even more, for it seemed to her that Tiberius, the horse on which Mr Happerton had set his heart, and which, she had been told, should wear her colours if it ran in the great race, was to be set aside in favour of some other horse, or horses, which Mr Happerton thought would serve him better.

All this might have been tolerable if Mr Happerton had explained it to her. She sometimes thought that if he had engaged an elephant for the Derby, along with a mahout to ride it, she would have been satisfied had she only been told how he proposed to decorate the beast’s howdah. And so Mrs Rebecca chafed, and fretted, and returned sharp words in answer to her father’s questions, and, able to bear it no longer, appeared in Mr Gresham’s study about ten minutes after Mr Pardew had left the house with Mr Happerton’s bill for three hundred pounds at three months in his pocketbook. Installed in the study, from which Mr Happerton could not very well evict her, where she sat, uninvited, in a chair and looked around her with the keenest interest, Mrs Rebecca began:

‘Who is that man whom John footman has just let out into the street?’

‘He is Mr Pardew,’ Mr Happerton said, not thinking there would be any harm in letting the name be known.

‘And what does he do?’

‘I believe he runs errands for Captain Raff. Certainly that is why he came to see me.’

Mr Happerton looked hard at his wife. Her green eyes were blazing under her sandy hair. He suspected that she was angry, but he could not imagine the source of her anger. Mrs Rebecca, meanwhile, was staring critically at the wall behind his desk.

‘Why has the picture of Trinity Great Court where Papa went as a young man been taken down and that other thing put up in its place?’

Since colonising his father-in-law’s study, Mr Happerton had made one or two little adjustments to its decor. He had substituted a picture of Eclipse in his glory for the print of Trinity College, and there was a dog-whip or two lying on the mantelpiece among the legal invitations.

‘I didn’t know you cared about it,’ he said, rather meekly.

‘Well I do. And Papa would be cross if he knew.’

Mr Happerton was tired of this. There were a dozen things needing his attention. Major Hubbins was in Lincolnshire and complaining piteously about its privations; the livery stables he had engaged to transport Tiberius south wanted ten guineas in advance; he was anxious on account of Captain Raff, who had not been seen for several days. And now his wife was annoyed because a print had been taken off the wall of her father’s study. Raising his voice slightly – but only slightly – he said:

‘Papa does not need to know anything about it.’

‘And I am to be like Papa, I suppose, to be kept in ignorance and made a fool of, and to be put in the dark without candles and told things only when the people think it is safe for me to be told them.’

Mr Happerton thought he would have preferred Mr Pardew back in his study. Mr Pardew had only wanted money.

‘What is all this about?’ he asked weakly.

‘It is about me.’ The fingers of the hands that Mrs Rebecca clasped in front of her were white to the knuckle. ‘How I am never to know.
You do not tell me things
. But people say that you do not want Tiberius to win the race. That it is all a sham, and Major Hubbins could ride him into a ditch and you would be delighted.’