Derby Day (47 page)

‘Were you now?’ said the landlord admiringly. ‘Well, I expect you’ve had thousand-pound notes in your time, Major, and shall do again.’

Major Hubbins smiled. He liked this kind of talk and did not care if it was not scrupulously accurate. And he remembered Thornaby, Mr Maxwell’s colt, and how Custance had just touched him with the whip a furlong from home when the Vizier was in front. All this awakened in Major Hubbins the pleasantest train of recollection, and he sat there in his chair, with the sun streaming in through the window and the noise of the people in the street buzzing beneath him and the glass of negus in his hand, thinking that his affairs could have turned out a great deal worse. There had been a Mrs Major Hubbins, but she was dead in Westmorland twenty years since, and Major Hubbins, recalling her now – he had a memory of her embroidering his caps with her head very low over the needle – smiled again, if not quite so cheerfully, and thought that it was strange how life worked out.

‘And Tiberius,’ the landlord said now. ‘That’s a fine horse if ever I saw one.’

‘It is a nice horse, certainly,’ Major Hubbins said. ‘Indeed, I don’t know when I ever rode a better one.’

‘Although I did hear in
Post and Paddock
that he was very near coming to grief that time in Lincolnshire.’

‘There was nothing much in that,’ Major Hubbins said mildly. ‘A little weakness in the foreleg that a week’s rest soon cured … Have you anything on him?’

‘Why yes I have, Major.’ In his excitement, the landlord seized the metal tray that had held Major Hubbins’ glass and held it before his chest like a cuirass. ‘Five guineas in all, here and there.’

‘Well, I shall do my utmost to see that the five becomes thirty.’

‘And the house will open to you gratis ever after if you do, sir. But it’s not that.’ The landlord lowered his voice. ‘There are people saying that Mr Happerton don’t want the horse to win.’

‘Do they?’ Major Hubbins shook his head. ‘People always say such things. It was said of Cupid’s Delight that Mr Poplar was offered £5,000 not to run – you recollect how they took the linchpins off the box in which he went to Epsom? – and yet he beat Kingmaker by a couple of lengths.’

‘That’s what I thought myself, sir. And in any case, as a gentleman who was in the bar the other evening said: Why, if Mr Happerton don’t want him to win, he’d not have picked yourself to ride him.’

Major Hubbins smiled again, a little more wanly than when he had thought about his dead wife, and the landlord retreated. Though liking his comfort, his two hundred pounds in the bank and the flattery of sporting gentlemen, Major Hubbins was not a fool. He, too, had heard the rumours and in the considerable leisure allowed to him had turned them over in his mind. That the odds on Tiberius had first shortened and then lengthened, he did not think particularly significant. A man can place a thousand pounds on a horse at a whim. He remembered a noble acquaintance of his offering 30,000 to 1,000 against Hecuba in the Oaks six times over, for no other reason than the excitement of the wager. He had ridden Tiberius a dozen times now and knew him to be a good horse, certainly a horse that with a fair wind behind him, and barring accident, would stand as good a chance as any of winning the race.

And yet, turning the matter over in his mind again, he acknowledged that if Mr Happerton did want the horse to fail, then the instrument of that failure could only be himself. Again, Major Hubbins’ fondness for the good things in life did not preclude his being a realist. He knew that men of his age were not often asked to ride champion racehorses. At the same time, in asking him to execute the commission, Mr Happerton had made much of him, told him that Jones and Robinson, and other leading jockeys of the day were as nothing compared to him. This Major Hubbins had been glad to hear. But a small part of him wondered now if he had been made a fool of.

Major Hubbins greeted this suspicion with the equanimity that he brought to every compartment of his life. When he had finished his negus, smoked a cigarette and glanced at a French novel he had lying by, he went down to the Brood Mare’s dining room and had his midday meal in great comfort, and to the delight of the sporting gentlemen who sat nearby entertained them with accounts of Lord Zetland’s Vortigern and how he won the Doncaster Cup, and Priam that lost his syndicate £12,000 in ’34 and other reminiscences from the old king’s day. And yet afterwards, when he stepped down to the stable, it was noted that he cursed the stable boy – something he had never been known to do in his life before – and that Tiberius, whom he had engaged to take for a gentle canter on the Downs, came back with a wild eye and the sweat pouring off his coat. ‘Lor’ bless you, Major,’ the groom had said. ‘The race ain’t until Saturday, you know, not this afternoon,’ and Major Hubbins had given a laugh, which may have signalled to anyone who heard it that, in the matter of the Derby, he was very much in earnest.

*

Captain Raff went south along the Brighton Road. It was about three o’clock in the morning of the day before the great race, but the lateness of the hour had not occurred to him. He supposed that he had been walking all day. He had a dim memory of waking up in a lodging house in Whitechapel and staring very acutely at a man who lay dead drunk on the floor beside him, but he could not have said how he came to the house, nor who the man was. There was a great deal which Captain Raff did not know. He did not know why he walked south along the Brighton Road – there were street signs every now and then which told him that he was not so very far from London – but the walking comforted him, and the noise of his footsteps set up a little rhythm in his head which he rather liked. He did not know if he was aimed for Brighton or some other place. Sometimes the things he saw were the things around him – the houses by which he passed, wide village greens with the water lying black and cold under the moon – and sometimes he saw the things in his head, which were more ominous. Sometimes it seemed to him that he wandered underground, and that the shutting-off of the light would altogether extinguish him. At other times he seemed to traverse some high point, where cold night air hung upon his shoulders and the wind plucked at his forehead. The things in his head fascinated him. It would not have been correct to call them visions, for they had no substance. Rather, they were intimations, hints of other things: a slither beneath a rock; a glint of light on a nest of serpents seething in the darkness; a hatchet-blade descending on a chicken’s neck; a horrible lidless eye with a little nictating membrane at its corner; odd flutters of chill breath and sinister movement.

It was not in the nature of things that Captain Raff’s progress should go unobserved. A policeman watched him stutter down a village street, but, seeing that the shop windows and the door-fastenings that he passed were of no interest to him, allowed him to proceed. Three drunk men rose up out of a hedge, capered around him and would have claimed him as one of their own, but there was something ominous and detached in Captain Raff’s eye that deterred them and they stole away. At about four, just as the first streaks of dawn were showing over the horizon, it began to rain and he took shelter in a grim old churchyard under a canopy of dark, ivy-clad trees, where the moonlight glinted off the flints in the tower and the ferns grew up under the darkling windows. The inscriptions on the graves interested him very much, and he stood staring at them as the rain dripped off his hat and onto his forehead, wondering what, if he were to die, anyone might say about him. The dawn was showing blood-red now, and something cried out brokenly in the hedgerow near by and then fell silent. There was an old man curled up in the church porch who, when he saw Captain Raff among the stones, came out from his lair and began to talk to him, and Captain Raff grinned horribly back, saying nothing, until the old man shook his head and went away. There were shadows moving through the mist beyond the elms, cows huddling together for shelter, and he examined them placidly for a while as if he had never seen a cow before and could not imagine what function in nature it might perform. He had a sudden vision of himself as a figure of antlike insignificance crawling across a stone ledge set at angles to the wind, from which the breeze might soon dislodge him.

And so, as the rain moved off towards the Surrey hills, he went on: through tiny villages asleep in the mist, past ploughed fields full of glistening stones that fell away into the pale aura of the horizon, where scarecrows hung, as it seemed to him, like dancing men on gibbets, by meres and streams and thickets of sedge, very dark and cool in the early light, the original silence of the world ever more prey to noise and disturbance, the ring of a horse’s hoofs on a metalled road, the wheels of a gig rattling towards him, a train’s whistle sounding across the fields, moving on, past the wide, double-fronted gates of great houses facing onto the road, past a workhouse made of neat grey bricks with a double row of bleary porthole windows and a porter yawning at the door, past endless hedges twisted about with loosestrife, past rows of cottages with thatch roofs gleaming with dew and spiders’ webs stretched out across their porches, but all the time with a curious sense of apprehension – doom, destiny, design, a terrible, irremediable fate – that he could not quite fathom, drawing closer to Epsom and the downs that ran beyond it, where something waited for him whose outlines, try as he might, he could not discern.

*

For some reason the vicinity of Epsom Downs on the day before the Derby is the quietest place in the world. The horses are in their stalls, being fed up on oats and fresh hay. Their owners keep to their hotels and lodging houses, dine frugally off porridge and a plate of sprats with only a little brandy-and-water to wash it down, and send anxious messages via their aides-de-camp. The landlords are in their cellars reckoning up the number of beer barrels, hogsheads and so forth, their wives are counting out knives and plates, Epsom High Street is as empty as Charterhouse School on the first day of the holidays, and a coach-and-pair rattling down it in the middle of the afternoon is seen as the height of vulgarity. There are a dozen people at Evensong, and the little whist club at the town reading room sickens and dies for want of custom. One or two young men in loud jackets and top-boots attempt to get up a song at the bar of the Dancing Pony and are quickly shushed. There will be plenty of time for that, the landlord advises them, when the race is done.

*

How many millions of people, preparing for bed on the evening of the great race, are affected by the thought of what the morning may bring? In Epsom everything is in turmoil, with ten thousand visitors crowded into a town that usually holds eight hundred. The inns are crammed to the rafters and there are people sleeping in the fields beyond Cheam and Ewell village. In London and its surround a hundred thousand go to sleep with the thought that at four, five or six o’clock they must rise up and make haste for the railway station, or the cab stand, or the road. Beyond this – beyond the Home Counties, beyond England even – there are sportsmen making uneasy calculations about the procurement of evening newspapers and their proximity to telegraph offices. The court knows about it. Half of parliament at least will be attending it. The bench of bishops will not go unrepresented, and the diplomatic embassies cannot be kept away. M. Dubois, the French ambassador, has announced his intention of being present at the race. The Mayfair dinners and the Belgravia routs have been aflame with it for weeks. A radical politician has condemned it, and a Methodist divine preached against it, but one might think that something which unites a widow in Kensington Square, an apothecary in St John’s Street and the wife of a Hoxton chandler is more democratic than the reverse. Chelsea is going, in carriages and coaches-and-four. Clapham is going in tax-carts and bang-up ponies. Kennington and Brixton are going by way of the Southern Railway or a succession of omnibuses, and Whitechapel and Poplar will be arriving on foot, for what is a sixteen-mile journey under the June sunshine when there is Saturnalia in view?

With such a profusion of people comes, inevitably, a scarcity of resources. There is not a pig or a sheep or a fowl to be purchased anywhere in Cheam or Dorking, for the publicans and the cook-shop proprietors have bought them all. Likewise tea, butter, flour and dried fruit for the delicacies known as ‘Derby Buns’, which every cottage on the road offers to passers-by. What sugar remains in the grocers’ shops on Epsom High Street has been carefully sanded, and the lake of beer distributed among its hostelries stealthily watered down. A newspaper has made a computation of the thousands of loaves, pies and sweet biscuits that will be eaten on the course and the hundreds of thousands of glasses that will be emptied in its near vicinity. A Dissenting chapel has announced that it will be throwing open its door to repentant sinners, but no one much is expected to come. It is as if, all across Surrey and beyond, a great play is in the process of being put together, and although the actors have yet to arrive the scenery lies everywhere about. Five score Gypsy caravans and their owners are camped up on the Downs and have been there a week. So has the fairground with its cockshies, its carousel, its sealed booths advertising werewolves, the corpse of a two-headed baby in a formaldehyde jar, and a pair of young ladies able to recite the multiplication table and speak the French language but joined together at the hip. There are a dozen artists and illustrators from the pictorial papers lodged in Epsom with instructions to take the race, or some part of it, off, and forty or fifty newspaper-writers ready to transmit something of its splendour to the world beyond. There are also three hundred policemen installed in a makeshift barracks at Cheam and a temporary magistrate’s court set up in the corner of the Grandstand for dispensing summary justice.