Derby Day (51 page)

Mr Happerton looked. ‘That is Mr Gliddon, Mr Dorling’s secretary. I don’t know why you think a man who writes another man’s letters is particularly distinguished.’

‘Oh, is that all he does?’

Rosa, too, was a little sulky. The heat was rather oppressive, the crowds seemed to surge uncomfortably close, and she was aware, without being in the least able to quantify this awareness, that in some way she had fallen short of the standards expected of her. And so they walked a little more amongst the horses and their grooms, were greeted by one or two faintly disreputable men who remarked ‘Well, Happerton, how are you my boy?’, bickered about matters which no gentleman out walking with a lady at a racecourse should bicker about, and came finally to that part of the course where the bookmakers had set up their poles.

‘Of all things,’ Rosa declared from beneath her parasol, ‘I should like to bet on Tiberius.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Happerton, finding himself suddenly disgusted by the place in which he stood: the drunks lying asleep under the rail; the red-faced men crying odds; a boy acrobat turning somersaults almost under his feet. He told himself that whatever happened in the course of the afternoon, there should be an end to Mount Street. Why had he not brought Rebecca with him to the Derby, who seemed to care only for his interests and who would not have made ridiculous remarks about the horses as they paraded before her in the enclosure or simpered over little Mr Gliddon, Mr Dorling’s secretary? It occurred to him that he had underestimated his wife, that a wiser man would have confided in her, and been less suspicious of her motives. All this chastened him and depressed his spirits. He found himself weighing up a series of inner resolutions. He would be more virtuous, he thought, should the day turn out to his advantage. Perhaps he would go in for politics, as his wife had suggested. And he would certainly cultivate some greater understanding between them. Why, they should be as Darby and Joan together and that little cottage in Hampshire should be their bower of bliss!

For a moment he almost forgot the bafflement which Mrs Rebecca had several times bred up in him and concentrated on this vision of soft words and marital harmony. He would give up Mount Street this very afternoon, he decided. The thought cheered him so much that he resolved, for civility’s sake, to be courteous to the companion whom he intended to throw off in three hours’ time, and so, selecting at random one of the loungers at the rail, a tall old man with a battered hat and a cast in one eye, he twitched Rosa’s sleeve and remarked:

‘Now, there is someone far more distinguished than Mr Gliddon.’

‘Who is it?’

‘I believe it is Mr Cadman from the whips’ office. They say the Earl can do nothing without him.’

And Rosa bridled, as at the wildest compliment.

*

‘Heavens, Johnson, what a time you take. And all to fill a flask … Now, who else is there? Lord John …? No? Well let us say that we have seen him. He is hardly likely to write to the paper and deny it … Mr Disraeli …? I wonder he don’t go and join the other Hebrews shouting odds by the rail … Now, there goes Mr Dorling … Take this down, Johnson …
Among many old friends seen on the course, I had the pleasure of several moments’ conversation – this in a respite from the countless duties that surround him – with Mr Dorling, the Clerk of the Course. To be sure, the racegoer has much to be thankful to Mr Dorling for, in whose family the management of the affair has lain these past forty years. Why, half the myriad who flock to the Downs on the Derby Day would know neither the names of the horses, nor the weight and colours of the riders, were it not for Dorling’s Card, printed feverishly through the night in the shed next to the family’s house and sold the next morning by hoarse vendors stationed at every likely point
… He’s a confounded rogue, you know, Johnson. Why, his father hired out pianos … Leases the grandstand, runs the course, monopolises the entire place … They say Lord George Bentinck lent him £5,000 once … Now, are there any artists here? Not seen any? There is bound to be someone. Take this down …
One of the regular delights of the day is the number of artistic gentlemen come down by early train with an easel determined to take off some aspect of the proceedings. It is ten years, to be sure, since Mr Frith produced his stupendous representation of the concourse, but Mr Phiz has been here too, and I have it on good authority that Mr Doré is about the place with the aim of transferring the contents of his sketchbook onto some exquisite canvas

… All gammon, Johnson, you understand. Why, I saw Cruikshank’s
The Road to the Derby
the day they unveiled it. Six feet long it was, and you would have wept to see the mess he made of it …’

*

Gradually a change comes over the Derby crowd. The drunken men have been woken up, none too kindly, and dragged away from the rails, and the police are at work clearing the course. The voices of the carousel attendants and the rifle-gallery proprietors grow vainer and more wistful, for their patrons are moving off. The road that runs from the station is still black with people, but the hill is swollen to bursting point. Beneath it the crowd stretches out to the grandstand and beyond it. The canopies of the cook-tents and the restaurant rooms sparkle in the sun. Above them, white birds soar and eddy like scraps of paper.

*

In the enclosure Major Hubbins is remarking many an old acquaintance: Jem Sorrel on The Coalman, whom he has raced against these past twenty years; Bulstrode on Pendragon, who was given up for dead once at Newmarket but somehow recovered. There is a boy on an unknown horse who is young enough to be his grandson, he thinks. The jockeys grin, bow in their saddles, press the handles of their whips against their foreheads. ‘Luck, Major!’ ‘Fair play to you, Sorrel!’ Little Tomkins, who is to ride Septuagint, and been compelled – so rumour has it – to lose a stone in the past week, is very pale about the gills and being fortified with brandy. Major Hubbins is grateful for the egg beaten up in a glass of sherry that he consumed half an hour before. His mind focuses, as it always does on these occasions, not on the ordeal before him but on incidentals: the pennants that flutter by the grandstand steps; the shine of his boots; Tomkins, who shakes in the saddle and whose discomfort the Major notes and approves; the rasping breath of the horse beneath him. Some of the other jockeys are demanding how long, staring at the hands of the big clock face on the grandstand’s turret, but Major Hubbins does not follow their gaze. There is plenty of time. And nothing, he knows – they are having to right little Tomkins on Septuagint now, for he is in danger of slipping off – can take place without him.

*

On the Derby, on the Derby, I’ll bet the Derby. To win or a place, to win or a place. Seven to one bar two or three, seven to one bar two or three. The old firm, the old firm …

XXVII

Derby Day: Concluded

… gives all London an airing, an ‘outing’, makes a break in our overworked lives and effects a beneficial commingling of the classes
.

Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold ‘The Derby’,
in
London: A Pilgrimage
(1872)

MR PARDEW STALKS warily through the Derby crowd. He is not quite sure what impetus has driven him here: nonetheless the urge, conceived over the breakfast table in Richmond, has proved quite irresistible. ‘Here is news,’ he had said to Jemima, feigning to read from a circular letter plucked from the morning’s post. ‘Lord Fairhurst wants to know if I will join him at the Derby. Apologises for the short warning, but will meet me at the Bell in Cheam. Well, that is very civil of him.’ ‘Is His Lordship a racing man?’ Jemima had wondered, buttering bread with the loaf clasped under her arm. ‘Indeed yes,’ Mr Pardew had assured her. ‘Ran half a dozen horses from his place in Leicestershire, only I believe his uncle disapproves, you know.’ ‘You must certainly go,’ Jemima had said.

There are times when Mr Pardew wonders if Jemima is quite sane in the matter of Lord Fairhurst, Lord Pevensey, the Earl of Grantham and other bogus noblemen brought out for her edification. Mr Pardew supposes, in his heart, that his coming to the Derby derives from an instinctive curiosity, that he is here because he wishes to see Tiberius, on whose destiny so much in his recent life has hung. On the other hand, the anonymity of the crowd is very comforting to him. He is dressed in his habitual black, with his stick wedged up under his arm like a military man, and the butterfly-pin resplendent on his lapel, but not, he imagines, conspicuous. There are all sorts and conditions here at Epsom: drab, white-faced men who look as if they have spent their lives in tunnels far underground, and have only now been let out into the paralysing light; butchers’ boys in bloody aprons come straight from the slaughter-yard.

All this interests Mr Pardew, while confirming to him his solitariness. His ideas of life admit no solidarity, none at all. He thinks that perhaps he ought to have brought Jemima with him, who loves an outing, but that the business of Lord Fairhurst would have caused a difficulty. The greater question of what he is to do with himself beats down on him with the same vigour as the sun shining over Epsom Hill. For all his talk, there is a part of him that does not wish to leave England. He has a vision of himself in some country village, where the post comes but once a week, but never to him, and there is no trace of his former life to disturb him, no one to summon him back, merely sky and fields and little white houses gathered under the hills. No Lord Fairhurst, no Mr Happerton, no Tiberius, nor any other burden, real or imagined. The sun is getting up now; the carriages are rolling down to the ring. The crowd surges, divides and regroups, and Mr Pardew, stick in hand, follows where it leads.

*

Captain Raff was thinking about his schooldays. He had not thought about them for thirty years, but somehow there they were. It was extraordinary, he thought, how much he could remember: the great grey schoolyard with the bare Cumberland hills rising beyond it and ominous crags brooding in the distance; the stony sky above the lake; the faces of his schoolmates. He wondered where they had all gone and what had become of them: Devereaux, who had wanted to go to sea, and Willoughby, whose father had fought at Trafalgar, and Baker, who was reckoned a great fellow on account of his being able to bring down crows from the roof with a sling-shot. Then he remembered himself playing cricket on the big field, with fat Lakeland cattle looking on from their pasture, and sitting in the schoolroom while rain fell on the window pane. ‘But I was a devilish idle fellow when I was at school,’ he said to himself, thinking of the boys who had not been idle and had presumably won great places for themselves. He supposed that some of them would be … what would they be? Attorneys and clergymen and ships’ captains. Well, they were welcome to these employments. And so he wandered on, brooding over these visions of his former life, and Baldino, the instrument of his destiny, with his blue jacket all pulled down on one side, so that the people who saw him go wondered what heavy object he might have concealed beneath it.

*

Such a quantity of items already lying in trampled profusion on the squashed grass. Remnants of food and their containers. Pocket handkerchiefs. Little trails of buttons which the urchins pick over, thinking them to be coins. Ripped-up copies of Mr Dorling’s racecard. Newspapers. Hairpins. Stout bottles and a spirit-flask. A St George’s medal. A defunct parasol with the spokes hanging out. A Coronation mug. A volume of Praed’s poems dropped out of somebody’s coat-pocket. Fragments of hard-bake off the tart-women’s trays. Opera glasses. A watch-and-chain. Some seals off somebody’s waistcoat. The tattered strings of ladies’ dresses in muslin, taffeta, watered silk and other materials. A shoe. Several walking sticks. A bottle of Daffy’s Elixir. Numberless cigar-ends. A cheap edition of
Pendennis
. A file of legal briefs done up in red string and sealing wax …

*

At Belgrave Square things were very quiet. Old Mr Gresham, having been given his breakfast, went straight off to sleep again: Mrs Rebecca thought he looked very ancient and worn as she pulled the coverlet back from under his chin. Nonetheless, as the old man had chewed his toast and Mrs Happerton moved restlessly around his room picking up little odds and ends and then returning them to their resting places, a conversation had struck up between father and daughter.

‘Where is Happerton?’

‘He is at the Derby, Papa.’

‘Will the horse …’ – it was an effort for Mr Gresham to remember his name – ‘… will Tiberius win?’

‘The people seem to think so.’

Mrs Rebecca had noticed that, in his infirmity, her father had become more direct in his questions to her. Now he looked at her very keenly and demanded:

‘Are you happy? Happy that you married him, I mean?’

‘Heavens, what a question to ask, Papa. I suppose any girl that gets married is happy with her husband, otherwise she would not get married.’

‘But there are plenty who are not.’

‘Well, they must be very foolish,’ Mrs Rebecca said, pulling up the coverlet – it was pulled up very tight, so tight that Mr Gresham could probably not have got out from under it even had he wished to – and hastening away.