Castle Orchard (3 page)

Arthur’s demeanour suddenly changed. He held up his hand and said, ‘Listen, is that Allington going up? Open the door a crack. Quick, do as I say, Rampton.’

Thus appealed to by name, the young man, though bewildered, opened the door just a fraction. He saw nothing but the debt collectors and duns on the landing, but they then parted like the Red Sea and a voice said coolly, ‘Good day, gentlemen.’

All that could be seen was the long shadow of someone going up the stairs to the top floor.

‘Did you wish to speak to him?’ Rampton asked.

‘Certainly not,’ Arthur replied.

‘Well, he is gone. Did you wish
me
to speak to him?’

‘No. As you are not acquainted with him, you could hardly halloo him on the stairs as if he were a servant. He was in the street when we went out. He always gives money to the raggedy one-armed beggar on the corner, late of His Majesty’s 299th Foot.’

Rampton wondered why he had been required to open the door to watch the progress of a man, of whom only his shadow could be seen, going upstairs – and to whom Arthur had no intention of speaking.

‘I keep an eye on him,’ Arthur said. ‘Perhaps your father knows him. He frequents the Travellers’. He makes a living in a peculiar way.’

‘My father would not know a man who had to make a living in any way,’ Rampton replied, laughing.

‘Ah, but it would not be apparent. He plays cards.’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘He wins.’

‘Always?’

Arthur shrugged. ‘He must occasionally lose, if he is dealt a very bad hand.’

‘But he has unbelievable luck?’ Rampton suggested.

‘It’s not luck.’

‘You don’t say he cheats?’

‘I shouldn’t dare say any such thing.’

‘But you believe it?’

‘No, no, besides, he plays no hazard, no games of chance. It is, no doubt, why he prefers the Travellers’, because there they play only whist and ecarté, with no cards before dinner. As you are a member yourself, I hardly need tell you this.’

‘Indeed, I am a member, but I don’t go.’

‘Allington will play piquet, chess, backgammon draughts, but chess is his game.’

‘It would be difficult to cheat at that.’

‘He’s clever – he forgets nothing. I myself give him a game if it is unwise to leave my rooms. There are times when I just can’t get out. Suppose the bailiffs took my snuffboxes? It is my belief Allington makes so much money he can live off it. He has enough to keep a pretty actress.’

Rampton could not help wondering how Arthur could afford to play with this person. After all, if such debts occurred, they were debts of honour: one was required to pay them immediately.

‘It can’t be his sole source of income,’ he said.

‘Oh, he is a half-pay officer but that doesn’t amount to anything. I dare say he got a meagre allowance from his father or his stepfather or whatever he was.’

‘And who was he?’

‘Lord Tregorn.’

‘And he was his stepfather?’

‘So it is said.’ Arthur rolled his blue eyes and smiled. ‘They all say that, don’t they? Except Allington. He says nothing. When I find it judicious to stay at home, I send my servant to ask if he will step down and give me a game. Sometimes he will and sometimes he won’t. From time to time he’s downright rude, which I feel a man in his position has no right to be. If I have a couple of friends in to dine, we ask Allington to join us later in a few rubbers of whist. He won’t always come even then.’ Arthur paused to reflect. He then said, ‘Debts of honour between gentlemen?’ He laid peculiar emphasis on the word ‘gentlemen’. ‘What makes a man a gentleman?’

Rampton had no doubt he was himself a gentleman, but then there was no irregularity attached to his birth.

Arthur continued, ‘But I have not told you the half of his peculiarities. It is, anyway, unfortunate to be in the same lodgings as a military man. I sometimes wish I might change them for that very reason, but I have a good understanding with my landlord, whom I always make sure I pay the moment I get my rents in. Some other might oblige me less.’

‘What’s wrong with a military man?’ Rampton enquired.

‘They are so superior, they have the attitude of one who has seen all. They forget that the rest of us don’t want to see what they have seen, or even to have been to all those foreign places. Think of the blood, the violence, the severed limbs, the floggings, the hardship. We don’t want our sensibilities blunted by fields of corpses.’

‘Perhaps their sensibilities were not very strong in the first place.’

‘How can one tell? Today is the eighteenth day of the sixth month. Had you not considered how we should be celebrating the death of all the young brothers of our friends and acquaintances? I had no younger brother myself, which was a blessing. My father had no one too immediate with whom to compare me. To think a man pays a fortune to buy a commission, say £3,000 for a captain in a respectable cavalry regiment, for a son, solely for the purpose of having the boy’s sensibilities totally deadened before he is butchered. Is it not odd?’

Rampton, who had never before given the matter a moment’s thought, agreed. They were interrupted by Arthur’s servant entering the room with a rose-pink figured-silk waistcoat on his arm.

‘To think,’ Arthur said, ‘when on campaign, they are often unable to change their clothes or wash for weeks. What must that
do
to a man?’

‘It must make him unbearable, but I suppose they are all in it together, a stable full of brute beasts.’ Rampton was casting envious eyes at the waistcoat as he spoke.

‘Not for you, my friend,’ Arthur said, laughing. ‘You are more full in the figure than me and will do best to stick to a darker shade. Your coat needs altering at the shoulder. The cap of the sleeve could be a little less, I suppose, though it’s useless to endeavour to turn you into a seriously fashionable man.’

‘Why ever not?’ Rampton asked, affronted, for he had been under the impression he was already a seriously fashionable man.

‘Not a hope.’ Johnny Arthur gave his customary peal of laughter. He leaped out of his chair, seized one of his canes and darted about the room while making slashing motions, both at Rampton and his valet, the latter dodging and skipping to avoid him. ‘If this were a sabre I could cut off your head.’

He sat down as abruptly as he had got up. His servant settled to rescuing the dressing case that had been dislodged.

‘Allington has a cane,’ he said.

‘Don’t we all?’ Rampton replied abruptly, not pacified.

‘We all have canes but we don’t need them. They are only for show. Allington’s is more of a walking stick.’

‘Mine is for show,’ Rampton said, picking it up and admiring its fine, flexible length and the little gold knob at the top with his engraved initials. ‘My father had it made for me.’

‘Your father is a poet. Why could I not have a poet for a father? How he would have understood and appreciated me. Alack, it was not so and my father has been dead these last ten years without ever knowing what a treasure he had in his only child. Oh, the filial piety I would have expressed in exchange for a few kind words.’

Arthur took the cane and examined it closely. He then said, ‘The only cane my father gave me was one with which to give me a hiding. Well, that’s not true, but it sounds good. I don’t recall he ever beat me much, but he was so stern and so dull. He would have made a good soldier, he had so little feeling. They can have no feeling or they couldn’t do the things they have to do. You listen to the way they talk. A military man will tell you how a bullet did for his best coursing dog at Salamanca and how he had his favourite horse shot from under him at Vitoria and a couple more after that. He might continue by saying the regiment lost a hundred men that day, or the Army several thousand. What he will not mention is the loss of his best friend and both his brothers. No, no, he is more likely to remark that they had only half a chicken for the officers’ mess and nowhere to eat it but a roofless barn while the wolves ate the corpses outside.’

‘And such a man is this Allington?’ Rampton asked, slightly shocked.

‘How should I know? He doesn’t say enough to me that I should ever find out. Indeed, I believe some military men may be retrained for civilisation – I know of a few – and we must have soldiers or Napoleon would have translated us all into French by now. Your father never wanted you to be a soldier?’

‘Certainly not, though he thought it all very well and good for some.’

‘My father thought to be a soldier would make a man of me and I should come home all glorious, if minus a limb or two. If I wouldn’t be a soldier I must at least be a fox hunter. Now the fox hunter is a soldier manqué, but his injuries are self-inflicted. He thinks himself a hero all the same and his broken bones honourable. My father would hunt when he was seventy-three and then coming off, as was inevitable, my mother must nurse him, attend to his whims and his bad temper. Allington is, I believe, a fox hunter, and under his circumstance, I doubt he’s any safer than my father was in advanced old age. God knows who would nurse Allington. His servant, I suppose, if he was sober.’

Arthur’s own servant here emerged from a closet with an armful of clothes and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but you asked me to remind you of the time. You are to meet Sir John.’ He spoke with a French accent.

‘Dear me,’ Arthur said, looking at his watch. ‘It takes me hours to dress. I shall be late.’

Rampton stood up to take his leave but there was something on his mind. ‘I defy anyone to say I am not up to the mark. My tailor is the best, yet you say you couldn’t make a fashionable man of me.’ He tried not to sound as peeved as he felt.

Arthur again laughed. ‘My dear fellow, it wasn’t my intention to offend you. It’s just that you are a married man. Whatever induced you to take a wife so young? A married man is nothing, for he’s saddled himself with the very worst thing – domesticity. Didn’t you tell me you aren’t free this evening, for you take your wife to the opera? Domesticity is the end, the bottom, the disaster, the bills, the housemaids, the whooping cough, the child once a year. A mistress one may have, some charming little nothing – I have had one myself when I have been in funds – but a wife is the ultimate rope by which a fashionable man may hang himself.’

Arthur looked teasingly at his young friend, who went away with a long face to take Mrs Rampton to the opera. Arthur himself spent the next hour in adjusting a fresh white neckcloth, a frill of a shirt, a narrow pair of trousers, a coat nipped in at the waist, puffed at the shoulder and lean at the cuff, and the rose-pink waistcoat.

When satisfied, he peeked through his door and finding that most of his tormentors had gone away for their dinners, he went downstairs and into the street and from thence to his club in St James’, where he might quickly lose the little bit of money lent him.

Captain Allington was craning out of the window as Arthur walked away down Half Moon Street. The sight of this gentleman, or rather the sight of his very tall, very curlybrimmed hat, evinced no change in his expression. He was not interested in Arthur, though occasionally the words of the Irish songwriter passed unbidden through his head:

He was leaning from the window in order to see the trees of Green Park, noting, despite the beautiful blue of the June sky, there was still the wisp of a haze induced by too many coal-burning stoves.

He turned his back on the window and surveyed his room. It contained an armchair, two large watercolours of the Cornish coast, a great many books, a writing desk and a table. On his desk lay an unopened letter, addressed to himself, and on the table a large glass bottle half full of sixpences. He crossed the room, picked up the letter, broke the seal and unfolded it, without any appearance of haste. It was, as such, the third he had received.

Allington screwed this letter up and chucked it in the wastepaper basket without anger or excitement, perhaps disgust. He said, half out loud, ‘Very theatrical, but what should one expect from an actress? No, I won’t see her. There would be tears and she’s not telling the truth.’

His servant came in carrying a jug of hot water. He was a small, neat, middle-aged man with a face screwed up in anxious enquiry.

‘Did you speak, sir?’ he asked.

‘Not really, Nat. Pour me out that water.’ He was still thinking about the letter. Ending such an affair was for the best. It was an expense and he only really wished to spend money that way if it was to lead to something more permanent. He supposed the whole thing had been in the nature of an unsatisfactory experiment. He was, in some ways, an idealist and it had not been ideal, his emotions remaining unscathed when he had rather hoped they might become engaged.