Derby Day (28 page)

‘That’s a fair stab someone’s taken at you, McIvor. From the look of it I’d say you’re lucky you weren’t turned into mincemeat.’

‘They’re a dreadful rough crowd at the Bird in Hand,’ McIvor agreed.

‘Ha! Captain McTurk will close the place down one of these fair mornings, and be thanked for doing it. Well, there never was an arrangement that wasn’t the better for being settled. How much did the widder bring in then?’

McIvor had a battered brown pocketbook open on his lap and was running his finger up and down a line of figures.

‘Seventy-three letters. Of course, a few of them didn’t send the full half-crown. Some come in with only a shilling. You’d be surprised, Mr Mulligan, who some of them were from. Two clerical gentlemen, there were. Not to mention Mr Aloysius Barraclough, as is the member for Chadwell Heath.’

‘That Barraclough’ll have a bailiff stepping up to him at the front door of the House one of these days if he’s not careful … How much?’

‘Eight pound thirteen shillings and sixpence,’ McIvor said. There was an odd glint in his eye that Mr Mulligan did not perhaps notice.

‘That’s fair, I will allow. Next time, McIvor, we shall have to lay out more on the advertising. Costs more to begin with, but it pays in the end. There can’t be no more widders though, more’s the pity.’

‘Why’s that, Mr Mulligan?’

‘Well –’ Mr Mulligan put a finger between his teeth and looked anxiously around the room. ‘It’s not for me to say, but there’s something wrong about that hoss.’

‘What do you mean “wrong”? Broke its leg or got the pneumony?’

‘You’re green, McIvor, that’s what you are. No, nothing like that. Why, there was a meeting in Lincolnshire where it well-nigh flew over the line. The
Pictorial Times
had a picture of it in its stall and said it was fit to carry the Prince. But what would you say if I told you Major Hubbins was to ride it?’

‘Major Hubbins!’

‘I know, I know. Saw him ride at Brighton, why it must have been three years ago, and they near enough had to call for a Bath chair for him when he came in.’

‘If you told me you owned a horse and Major Hubbins was to have the riding of it, I should say that you didn’t want it to win.’

‘That’s what folk are saying about Tiberius. But he may do it, you know. That Septuagint is money thrown away.’

‘They are saying Pendragon has a chance.’

‘An old nag from Devon that would be better off carrying children on the sands.’ Mr Mulligan seemed to have lost interest in the Derby. His eye moved restlessly out into the court, where the wind had got up again, and then back to the cover of McIvor’s pocketbook. ‘Anyhow,’ he said. ‘Eight pound thirteen and six is eight pound thirteen and six, so we’d best settle up. I’ve to Clerkenwell at seven, and for once it’s not a hoss that’s taking me there.’ Whatever was taking Mr Mulligan to Clerkenwell was presumably the cause of the green cutaway coat that he wore and the flower that drooped rakishly out of his buttonhole. ‘Three quarters to a quarter, didn’t we say? I make that six pound ten shillings and a penny ha’penny.’

‘It was seventy to thirty,’ McIvor said. ‘And that ain’t fair, neither.’

‘Not fair! What do you mean, it’s not fair? Who was it that put you up to the dodge, I wonder? Wrote the blessed notice for you and told you where to advertise it and all? Three quarters to the quarter it is, or I shall know why.’

McIvor took out an immensely dirty purse and laid it on the table. ‘You can have five sovereigns, Mr Mulligan, seeing that seventy–thirty was what I agreed to, which I was a fool to. Them letters didn’t write themselves.’

‘And neither did the tale that ’ticed em, which you didn’t have the wit to write yourself. Bob McIvor, that drinks up other chaps’ leavings at the Bird in Hand, which folk that go there have told me about.’

‘It’s no more than you do yourself,’ shrieked McIvor. He was very angry. ‘Five sovereigns and not a halfpenny more.’

‘Five sovereigns be d——d.’ Mulligan. Then, seeing the publican come striding through from the public bar to enjoin quiet, he lowered his voice. ‘This house is like a blessed girls’ school,’ he said. ‘They’ll be having ’ymn-singing here on a Sunday night, I shouldn’t wonder, with a collection plate going round. You step outside, McIvor, and we’ll settle this.’

Both talking at the limit of their voices, and gesticulating with free hands, they tumbled out of the door. Here the light had begun to fade and there were flashes of soot drifting in from above the rooftops. The first casualty was Mr Mulligan’s buttonhole, which went into a gutter. The grocer, who had come out to furl up his awning, looked delightedly on. At the court’s south-western corner an assault was made on McIvor’s purse, which he resisted, and the two of them rolled out into the Tottenham Court Road, where a policeman saw them and, blowing a whistle to summon his colleagues, came running to investigate.

*

There are some conversations that are too private even for the library of a gentlemen’s club. And so it chanced that, perhaps a week after the burglary at Mr Gallentin’s shop, Mr Happerton and Captain Raff might have been seen walking towards each other on Westminster Bridge. No one who saw them could have predicted that they meant to meet. Neither gave the other so much as a look, and both kept to opposite sides of the bridge, so that their view was every so often cut off by the passing hay-carts and the other miscellaneous traffic rolling in from Lambeth. But somehow, a moment or two later, they could be found leaning together on the rail and staring down the river towards Battersea, where three or four lighters and small craft were engaged in the task of getting a moribund tug to turn into the current. It was a brisk spring afternoon and the wind had got up, so that in the distance the smoke from the Kennington factory chimneys drifted north in little clouds and eddies, and it was clear from the demeanour of the two persons on the rail that one of them burned to confide some choice piece of information while the other was curiously reluctant to hear it. The person who burned to do the confiding was Captain Raff, who fidgeted, winked at his companion a couple of times and then, apparently defeated, stared down the river again, where the tug was moving slowly upstream towards Putney or Richmond or Teddington Lock – all places that Captain Raff, to judge from the bleakness of his expression, would have preferred to be rather than perched on Westminster Bridge, with the wind blowing into his face. Then, after what seemed an eternity, and the passage of at least a dozen more hay-carts, Mr Happerton remarked:

‘Gracious, Raff, what have you been up to? You look as if you had been dragged through a hedge.’

‘What’s that? What is the matter with me?’

‘Only that your face is all of a colour with your shirtfront.’

Captain Raff rocked uncomfortably on the heels of his boots, one of which looked as if it might be about to part company with the sole. In fact the colour of his shirtfront was grey.

‘Well, it was deuced late I got to bed, I don’t mind telling you. A fellow is bound to look a little pale sometimes, you know.’

‘Never mind that. I daresay you’re not so young as you were.’ Mr Happerton lowered his voice. ‘Where has he gone?’

Captain Raff looked cautious. ‘I hardly like to say.’

‘Well, try anyway. Where?’

‘Vanished! Disappeared!’ Captain Raff said. ‘Won’t show his face.’ And then: ‘Richmond, I believe.’

‘And the goods?’

‘The goods?’ Captain Raff lowered his voice to a level only just commensurable with its being heard. ‘Well, it was the most awkward thing you ever saw. There is that fellow in Whitechapel that has known me a dozen years positively refused to do business. Think of it! A nasty Jew not wanting to do a gentleman a service.’

‘I’m surprised you stood for it, Raff. But go on.’

‘It is that policeman McTurk, you know. They say he has agents everywhere. It was the same in the West End, and that is usually quite a different thing. Quite a different thing,’ Captain Raff repeated, almost piteously, as if the wickedness of the world was altogether beyond him. ‘And that man Savory says he does not deal in stones any more, for the jewellers are all being watched.’

‘Things have come to a pretty pass when a man like Savory won’t deal in stones. What does he deal in, I should like to know?’

‘They have fallen off deplorably,’ Captain Raff said, with a really impressive gravity. The tug was almost out of sight now, moving into the shallows of Battersea Bridge. A flock of gulls sprang up in its wake, like a handful of paper scraps flung suddenly into the air. ‘I tell you what it is, Happerton. Why, if things go on like this a fellow won’t be able to make a living, no matter how hard he tries.’

‘There are other places than the West End,’ Mr Happerton said.

‘And some of them d——d queer,’ Captain Raff said bitterly. ‘Ugh! Those men in Clerkenwell. I don’t know how a fellow is to stand them.’

‘It seems to me you stand most things pretty well, Raff. Never mind. If the goods are disposed of, we needn’t worry. But no one is to do anything foolish, mind.’

‘What? Put them on display in the Commercial Road, or offer them back to Gallentin at discount? I should say not,’ Captain Raff remarked, in pious horror.

There was a silence. The tug had disappeared and the gulls vanished in its wake. The sun shone through misty, grey-white clouds, very melancholic and mournful. Mr Happerton was thinking about the substantial sum of money that had now come into his hands, and how it might best be laid out. Captain Raff, meanwhile, licking his lips nervously, looked as if he might be about to speak, subsided, was silent for a moment, and then, all in a rush, said:

‘See here, Happerton, now that there are – funds available, I take it you’d like me to lay them out. There is a fellow in Regent’s Park still offering sixes on Tiberius, you know. At least he was when my man Delaney was there the other day.’

Mr Happerton smiled, but it was not a very nice smile. ‘That’s very civil of you, Raff, but I shall be doing the laying out myself. A fellow is always better placed in the matter of odds when he does it himself, I think. Now, are you going anywhere?’

‘I thought – to the club,’ Captain Raff said miserably.

‘Ah well, we had better say goodbye then, for I have to see a man at Tattersall’s.’

And Mr Happerton took his leave, sauntering back across Westminster Bridge with his hat tipped very jauntily on the back of his head, while Captain Raff stood gnawing the inside of his cheek and wondering why a service he had previously performed so punctiliously for his employer should now be so unaccountably denied him.

*

How is a newly married young lady to fill her time when her husband is at his place of work, or in Mr Happerton’s case at the Blue Riband Club or standing by the ring at Tattersall’s? To be sure, there is the management of her house to take an interest in, but the establishment at Belgrave Square was very neatly administered by the old butler and the housekeeper, and as Mrs Happerton could not have cared less what she ate and how often the curtains were taken down and sponged, this sphere was rather closed to her. Then there are one’s relatives to cosset and conciliate, but Mrs Happerton was frankly bored by her father’s company, and her aunt’s house at Eccleston Square was a torture to her. There is, of course, that infallible resort, light reading, but Mrs Happerton thought she had read enough novels to keep Mudie’s in business for a year. And so she was forced back to that time-honoured expedient – as common to a duchess’s mansion as a woodman’s cottage – of inviting her acquaintances to tea.

Even here, though, there was a difficulty, for tea parties can only take place if there are people who can be asked to them. Mrs Happerton, looking down the list of her friends’ names which she kept in the neatest little calf-bound book that Mr Happerton had given her, together with sundry other tokens of his regard, on the day of his marriage, was conscious that it was neither particularly extensive nor particularly enticing. A husband, when he marries, generally introduces his wife to the society of his male friends, but Mr Happerton had played her false in this regard. No doubt some of his friends had wives, but they were not the kind of people who were invited to Belgrave Square. The majority of the names in Mrs Rebecca’s book, consequently, belonged to middle-aged ladies who had known her mother in their salad days, and these she did not think she could bear. Accordingly she returned to the milieu in which, for however short a time, she had moved with her cousin Harriet. She invited Mrs Venables, and took great delight in snubbing one or two little suggestions that this lady made about the drawing room and its decor. But there was a limit to the fun that could be got out of snubbing Mrs Venables. And then she remembered Mrs D’Aubigny, whom she had met at one of Mrs Venables’ luncheons in Redcliffe Square, and was a younger, milder version of their hostess, and asked her to tea.

Mrs D’Aubigny came on a cold, wet afternoon in early April, in a carriage which her husband, a lawyer who worked in Mr Screwby’s office on Cheapside, was not supposed to be able to afford. But she was a nice, humble, modest girl who, in addition to her niceness and her modesty, was a fund of interesting information. She knew what the Prince was supposed to have said to his mother when they met at Balmoral. She knew what Mr Dickens might be supposed to be reading to his audiences at Edinburgh. She had an opinion of Mr Frith’s new picture. But best of all she knew a great deal about Mrs Venables and the life of Redcliffe Square.