Derby Day (43 page)

Mount Street and beyond

Who lives in Mount Street? Nobody knows. The directory may be full of the most distinguished names, it is just that none of them is ever at home there. It is, consequently, a shy place, full of maiden ladies in comfortable sequestration, noblemen’s mansions looked after by housekeepers while the family is away, and a quantity of young women whose business there can only be guessed at …

The London Gazetteer
(1868)

‘AND AM I to accompany you to Epsom?’

The room in which this question was asked was a neat little feminine chamber on the first floor of a house in Mount Street. The person who asked it was a young woman of perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four, fashionably dressed and with very white teeth. The person to whom it was addressed, sitting on a little sofa with his hat in his hand and a Pekinese dog sniffing round his ankles, was Mr Happerton. It was about three o’clock on a May afternoon, and from the open window, whose frame glowed picturesquely in the sunshine, came the sound of carriages rolling through Mayfair to the park.

Did Mr Happerton look round the room with a faintly proprietorial air? He certainly seemed at home there. It was one of those rooms that one sees a great deal in the illustrated papers, and over which fashionable decorators swarm. There was fresh paint on the door and new paper on the walls, and everything in it, the pair of lovebirds simpering in the cage by the window and perhaps even the young woman herself, looked as if it had been installed there only the other week. A bookcase by the far wall testified to somebody’s fondness for novels got from Mudie’s circulating library, and a round occasional table hard by confirmed that person’s interest in knick-knacks and ornaments of all kind. An arbiter of domestic fashions would have pronounced it ‘chaste’, but this was not perhaps an adjective that could have been applied to the young woman asking Mr Happerton if he would take her to Epsom. Was there something foreign about her? It was difficult to tell, and perhaps Mr Happerton had not gone into it. She was wearing a dress of watered silk from which the neatest little white slippers stuck out beneath, had very black hair and was as striking as one of Mr Leighton’s Attic portraits.

‘Am I to come with you?’ she asked again.

Mr Happerton gave a half-smile, picked up the Pekinese in one hand and tried to place it on his lap, but got snapped at for his pains. He was looking at the heap of trinkets on the table – tiny bejewelled brooches in the shape of butterflies, little ivory fans from the St James’s arcade – and calculating how much he had paid for them. The smell coming in from the window was a horsey one, mingled with the scent of hay, and that reminded him of Tiberius and a dozen other things that pressed on his mind. Had he overreached himself? And was his presence here in the room in Mount Street, with the sound of the maidservant’s footsteps going down the stair and his feet sprawled out over a Turkey carpet that had come from Mr Delacroix’s shop in Bond Street, a part of that overreaching? Mr Happerton thought not. He was master of himself, and he would come and go as he pleased. But still he did not care to answer the question that had just been put to him. Instead he picked up his tea cup and looked squarely back at the black hair, the red mouth and the white teeth.

‘Am I?’ the young woman asked a third time. She did not look aggrieved, so much as satirical, like the young woman in the play whose fiancé has just been disinherited by his uncle the wicked earl, or shanghaied into the navy.

‘You can go to Epsom any day you like,’ Mr Happerton said comfortably. ‘I shall be going there tomorrow morning, as it happens.’

‘You are very provoking,’ the young woman said. She seemed slightly less satirical and more annoyed. ‘You know very well what I mean.’

‘Well, perhaps I do,’ Mr Happerton said. He had known for a fortnight that this request would come, but had still not decided how to respond.

‘Surely’, the young woman went on, ‘this is a day when anyone can accompany anyone anywhere without the least impropriety?’

Mr Happerton went on staring at the butterfly brooches and the ivory fans. He was not a fool about women, however much the tray of knick-knacks might have cost him, and he knew that to appear at Epsom racecourse on Derby Day with Rosa – that was the young woman’s name – on his arm would involve all manner of subterfuges and deceits.

‘Not the least impropriety,’ he agreed. ‘I suppose Lord John goes there with his scullerymaid. But if you’re expecting to be taken to the Derby in a carriage and picnic on the hill and so forth, then it can’t be done. I’ve a horse to attend to and a jockey to get to the course.’

‘It doesn’t seem,’ Rosa said, rather archly, ‘as if you wished me to come with you at all.’

‘I should like nothing better. You know I should. But you see, I am not there to stroll upon the concourse and shake hands with people. I am there to do business.’

This was not strictly true. In fact, Mr Happerton intended to do a great deal of strolling and to shake hands with everyone he met.

‘Well, it is a great shame,’ Rosa said. ‘Why, London will be all but empty, for the whole town flocks there.’ There was a pause, and the lovebirds scuffled in their cage. ‘I dare say I shall have to join Sir George Archer’s party.’

‘Sir George Archer!’ Sir George was a sporting baronet, who was supposed to have lost two thousand pounds on the previous year’s favourite.

‘Kitty Davey said she was sure they could find a place in the carriage, and Sir George takes her advice on everything.’

‘Sir George is …’ Mr Happerton wondered exactly what Sir George was, and whether some of the baronet’s habits differed greatly from his own, and rather lamely concluded, ‘very dissolute.’

‘Well, I think he is very nice,’ Rosa said. ‘And we are to put up at the Bell at Cheam, Kitty says, and have all kinds of fun.’

‘I absolutely forbid you to go the Derby with Sir George Archer,’ Mr Happerton said, who had no real power to effect this other than having paid for the clothes Rosa stood up in.

‘Well, it is very hard on a young woman if she is to stay in London on a day when everyone else is enjoying themselves. Sir George has a thousand guineas staked on Pendragon, Kitty says.’

‘He’ll lose it then. Pendragon would not beat a donkey on Ramsgate sands.’

When he left Mount Street an hour later, Mr Happerton had agreed to a carriage to the Derby. Indeed, Sir George Archer’s plans, if in fact they ever existed, were quite in disarray. He walked back to Belgrave Square across the park where three or four of the riders and the gentlemen sauntering by the rail nodded at him, but he returned only a faint wave of his hand, and people said that Happerton was preoccupied by the race, and no wonder, as Tiberius’ odds had fallen to six and were expected to fall further still.

*

In Richmond Mr Pardew saw the picture in the evening newspaper and frowned at it. He was not particularly put out by this representation of himself – in fact he had expected something like it to happen – but still the sight of it unnerved him. For a moment he put the paper aside and dared not look at it. Then, telling himself not to be a fool, he picked it up once more and looked at it and the letterpress that ran beneath it with minute interest. It was not quite an accurate portrait – the set of his chin was exaggerated, and the eyes set too far back in the face – but still he knew that it was near enough like him to promote the idea of a resemblance to anyone who saw it. What was he to do? Richmond – its high street, its riverside walks, its verdant hill – had been distasteful to him since the day he had stumbled into his wife. Now he could not bear to set foot in it – at least not by daylight. He had taken to walking at night, with his hat pulled down over his eyes and his stick grasped firmly in his hand. Once a drunk man, reeling out of a culvert, had tried to take his arm, and Mr Pardew had nearly stove in his skull, such was the pit of fear into which he had plunged. After this episode he did no more walking, but sat around the house and sent Jemima out on errands that had formerly been his exclusive province. Policemen were a torture to him. If one walked past the gate he would hide behind his newspaper or, alternatively, stare belligerently from the window as if defying the man to arrest him. Jemima registered neither the nervousness nor the belligerence, but she did take note of the sequestration.

‘I declare,’ she said to him once at about this time, ‘it is three days since you left the house.’

‘Is it? I suppose I have got tired of walking about.’

‘You should go and call upon Lord Margrave, seeing that he is always inviting you.’

It was on the tip of Mr Pardew’s tongue to say that Lord Margrave did not exist, but he saw that this would be wounding not only to his own pride but also to Jemima’s, so he merely shook his head and said that he thought his lordship was sailing off the Norwegian coast. That night they were very comfortable, and had a late supper by the fire, and Mr Pardew did not start up when two men in tall hats went past the house and looked as if they were peering into its garden, but stared out benignly into the evening air. But all the time he was calculating: the amount of money he had at his command; discreet parts of the world that might receive him without enquiring into his history; Jemima, and what he might say to her. That night it rained hard and she complained at the winds that buffeted the house, and Mr Pardew thought that there were other storms brewing up which it would be prudent for him to evade. And on the next day, he went up to London and presented himself once again at the house in Belgrave Square. There was a difficulty with the butler, who perhaps had had orders not to admit Mr Pardew, but in the end he prevailed. ‘It is about the horse,’ he explained, in his civillest manner, which was after all true, if only obliquely, and after a moment or two was shown into the study. Mr Happerton, looking up from the desk as he came into the room, shook his head and sprang to his feet.

‘You cannot come here,’ he said. ‘It is quite out of the question. I shall have you turned out.’

‘Who by, I wonder?’ Mr Pardew said. ‘The policeman in the square? Try calling him, and see what he says.’

‘What do you want?’

Mr Pardew stopped to consider this. What did he want? He was tired of Boulogne, Dresden, Prague, Pau – all the places he had been in Europe, and the other Englishmen who gathered there, nearly all of whom had a tale to tell that was the equal of his own – he might even be tired of Jemima. The stick he had brought with him twitched in his hand.

‘Since you ask,’ he said, ‘I should like five hundred pounds.’

‘You shan’t have a penny. You have had – what is it – nearly twelve hundred already.’

Mr Pardew felt old and tired. Looking at Mr Happerton, whose face spoke of comparative youth, unalloyed prosperity, and the freedom to stay in bed until whatever hour he chose, he felt a pang of envy. The stick twitched in his hand again.

‘There are pictures of me printed in the newspaper,’ he said. ‘Very bad pictures, but pictures nonetheless.’

‘I have seen them,’ Mr Happerton said. He was watching the stick with a fascinated expression. ‘A very bad likeness, I should say. Hadn’t you better take yourself off to a place where such things can’t find you?’

Mr Pardew stared at him. He knew he was playing a dangerous game, and that it would be very difficult to betray Mr Happerton without betraying himself, but he had played many dangerous games in the past and usually emerged triumphant from them. He thought, too – and he was correct in this – that Mr Happerton who was anxiously awaiting the result of a great horse race that might make his fortune or lose it, was a better prospect than a Mr Happerton who knew how it had turned out.

‘I shall be candid with you,’ he said. ‘I am leaving England. There are good reasons why I shouldn’t stay – not all of them to do with our little piece of business. Five hundred will see me gone and settled.’

‘What guarantee do I have that I shan’t see you again? You might come and plague me for the rest of my life.’

‘You will just have to take my word for it. I never betrayed a man yet, you know. Raff can tell you that, if you ask him.’

‘I can ask Raff nothing. He has entirely disappeared. Have you heard of him?’

‘Not a word. He keeps peculiar company, I think. Perhaps it became too peculiar even for him.’ And here Mr Pardew gave a look that was almost frightful in what it insinuated. ‘But Raff is neither here nor there. Five hundred pounds, and you will never hear of me again. Come, you shall have the name of the ship I sail on and the passenger list if it suits you. And then the pictures in the newspaper will be forgotten too.’

‘I won’t have you threaten me,’ Mr Happerton said, but not, Mr Pardew thought, with any great force.

‘No one is being threatened,’ Mr Pardew said, very civilly. ‘If you imagine you are being forced to act against your will, then you had better do something to prevent it. What will you do? Send Captain Raff – if you can find him – to cut off my head? I don’t think Captain Raff could do it. In fact, I fancy Captain Raff might find his own head cut off instead. And the same goes for all those other Captain Raffs.’

There was a silence, and Mr Happerton shot him a look of absolute fury, but Mr Pardew thought he knew his man.

‘You will have to take it in bills,’ he said. ‘There is no money in the house. Really – there is not. Two hundred and fifty now, and the rest in a day or so. Zangwill shall take them. He has enough of my paper.’