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Authors: D.J. Taylor

Tags: #Fiction, #Horse Racing, #Sports & Recreation, #Historical, #General Fiction

Derby Day (3 page)

BOOK: Derby Day
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Finally, when Miss Gresham showed signs of being ready to quit the room, Mr Gresham laid down his newspaper.

‘I take it you enjoyed yourself last night at Lady Susannah’s?’

‘It went off very well, though I could not imagine what they had put in the negus’ – Miss Gresham was a connoisseur of evening parties and liked criticising their arrangement. ‘They say Mr Hunt’ – Mr Hunt had lately ceased to be Chancellor of the Exchequer – ‘was there, but I can’t pretend to have seen him.’

‘Hunt never goes to evening parties.’

‘Well, you may say that, Papa, but he was certainly supposed to be at this one.’

All this Mr Gresham found that he liked – up to a point. He approved of his daughter attending parties where the Chancellor of the Exchequer might or might not be present. He had never in his life hobnobbed with Cabinet ministers, but he had no objection to his daughter doing so. But he knew that he was no closer to that very serious thing.

‘Was Mr Happerton there?’

Miss Gresham had jumped up out of her chair now, and was standing behind it. The portrait of her mother looked down upon her sandy hair.

‘I declare, Papa, that if you are so interested in Mr Happerton’s whereabouts, you should ask him to supply you with a schedule.’

Mr Gresham thought this was hard. He had an idea that this was not how girls spoke to their fathers – even in jest – and he knew that Miss Gresham had not spoken in jest. He knew, too, that he ought to rebuke her, but he had no idea how the rebuking might be accomplished. Looking up, he saw that she had left her chair-back far behind and was now a yard from the door.

‘You’ll oblige me, Rebecca, by sitting down and hearing what I have to say. You mayn’t like it, but – there it is. Sit down now.’ Seeing that she still stood a yard from the door, he motioned her back to her place at the table with his hand. It was a hand that, flung out theatrically in the Equity Court, had cowed many a junior barrister, but it did not have much effect on Miss Rebecca. ‘The fact is that Mr Happerton has been to see me. I don’t say that I care for the man, but at any rate he has done the proper thing.’

‘What is the proper thing that Mr Happerton has done, Papa?’

‘Well, he has asked – the deuce, Rebecca, you know very well what he has asked.’

Mr Gresham looked his daughter full in the face as he said this and thought that her air of demureness was exaggerated, that she was – there was no other word for it – sly.

‘What did you say to him, Papa?’

There was a pause, artificially prolonged by the butler’s coming in to clear away the sideboard and to present Mr Gresham with a telegram relating to a Chancery case on which he was engaged. Mr Gresham frowned at it. Then he frowned at his daughter who was not, as he had instructed her, seated in her chair but standing behind it with her hands clasping its back. People said that Miss Gresham had very pretty hands.

‘I told him it was out of the question.’

Miss Gresham continued to stand with her hands clasping the chair-back.

‘Why did you tell him it was out of the question, Papa?’

‘He is a man that nobody knows anything of.’

‘That is nonsense, Papa.’ Miss Gresham shifted the position of her hands on the chair-back. ‘Everybody knows all about him. He has an office in Lothbury and goes everywhere. Why, he has been to dinner at Aunt Muriel’s.’

‘That is not what I meant.’ Mr Gresham was not exactly sure what he did mean. ‘I meant that he is a man who scarcely knows who his own grandfather was.’

Mr Gresham’s grandfather had sold hay at Smithfield Market, and his father had made his first money discounting bills for an attorney’s clerk in Hatton Garden, but he had the memory of the marquis’s daughter to appease. At the same time he was conscious that, while thoroughly disliking Mr Happerton, he was not being fair to his daughter. Catching something of this uncertainty, Miss Gresham began at once to play upon it.

‘Gracious, Papa. That kind of thing is going out. Why, Lord Parmenter, whom you make so much of, always says that his grandfather was a crossing-sweeper.’

‘That may very well be. People can’t help their ancestors. But it is not Lord Parmenter that wants to marry you.’

‘If it were, and Lady Parmenter had dropped down dead at Richmond Fair, I daresay you would not be so ill-natured. It is just that you have such a down on Mr Happerton.’

All this was very bad, and Mr Gresham was thoroughly disgusted with himself – not because he had failed to carry his point, but because he knew that he had a duty to his daughter – however vexatious she might be – which he was altogether failing to fulfil.

‘Certainly I don’t like Mr Happerton. I don’t like his manner. I don’t like the men he associates with and I don’t like the way he makes his income. It’s all very well, Rebecca, to talk about things going out and Lord Parmenter’s grandfather – I’m sure he was a very respectable man – but you don’t suppose that a father could be happy knowing his daughter was living on money got from race-meetings?’

‘Well, Papa, he had better not let her marry the Duke of Devonshire then.’

Those Belgravia breakfast rooms are very bleak once the things have been taken off the sideboard and the tea has gone cold. It was by now nearly ten o’clock and Mr Gresham knew that he was needed at his chambers, where Serjeant Havergal proposed to wait upon him about the Tenway Croft case. Outside mist was rising slowly off the plane trees to fog the window. All this affected Mr Gresham with a profound feeling of melancholy. He told himself that the fault was his daughter’s, but he suspected the fault was his. As he watched her – still standing with her hands clasped to the chair-back, with one little slippered foot straying out onto the carpet – he remembered certain incidents from her early life that had seemed to bring home to him his separateness from her. ‘Why do you bully Mary so?’ he had asked her once when she had sent a maidservant flying tearfully from the room. ‘It is not her fault, surely, that she cannot find things you have mislaid?’ ‘Because she is stupid, Papa, and clucks around me like a goose,’ Miss Gresham had replied.

Another time he had watched, fascinated, as she took a pair of scissors and with what seemed to him an extraordinary ferocity slashed at a picture of a young lady, lately affianced to some ducal heir or other, that had appeared in one of the illustrated magazines. ‘My dear,’ he had said, nervous even in his reproof, ‘why is it that you need to tear at that paper?’ ‘It is that Lady Augusta Chinnery, Papa,’ his daughter had replied – and the look in her eye had not been pleasant to see – ‘do you not think she is the ugliest woman in the world?’ All this Mr Gresham recollected. There was one obvious question he had not asked and so, hesitating dreadfully over the words, he asked it.

‘Do you’ – he could not bring himself to use the word that is generally used in such cases – ‘have any regard for this Mr Happerton?’

‘Certainly I have a regard for him, Papa. He talks, and is very amusing. Most men have nothing to say for themselves at all.’

‘And what would you say if – if he were to ask you to marry him?’

‘I can hardly say. Not even to you I cannot. But I think I should like to be asked.’

Mr Gresham heard this with genuine puzzlement. He could not decide if his daughter seriously wished to marry Mr Happerton but had chosen to throw him off the scent, or genuinely did not know her own mind.

‘At any rate it is quite impossible.’

‘But why is it impossible, Papa?’

‘You have heard what I have to say.’ Mr Gresham knew, as he said this, that he was being overbearing, but he had disliked Mr Happerton, when that gentleman had come to call upon him, so very much. ‘There may be men ready to marry their daughters to racecourse touts, but I am not one of them.’

‘I don’t think Mr Happerton is a racecourse tout, papa.’

‘You know nothing about it, Rebecca.’ Mr Gresham was dreadfully unhappy. He would have liked to have reached out and gathered his daughter in his arms, assured her that he wanted only what was best for her, that the imperfections he saw in her were as nothing compared to the ties that bound her to him, but somehow he knew that it was impossible for him to do this. Instead he temporised.

‘Gracious, but it is ten past ten. This is a serious business, Rebecca. I’m not saying I entirely forbid it, but it must be gone into. You’ll grant at any rate that I have a right to advise you, and you to take that advice. But in the meantime, you ain’t to see him. That I couldn’t allow.’

‘What if I were to tell you that you are breaking my heart?’

‘Heavens, Rebecca, you say the oddest things. People don’t break their hearts in my experience. Girls didn’t when I was a young man, and they don’t do it now. At any event you don’t look as if yours was broken.’

‘And yet it may well be for all that.’ The knuckles of Miss Gresham’s hands, as she said this, were quite white upon the chair-back. ‘What if I find myself in his company – in the ordinary course of events, I mean?’

‘That’s easy. You should go nowhere where he might be found. Do you understand me? You were always a good girl,’ Mr Gresham said, without very much conviction.

‘I think I understand.’

‘What shall you do today?’

‘I thought of going to Harriet’s.’ Harriet was Miss Gresham’s cousin, who lived a mile away in Eccleston Square.

And so the father said goodbye to his daughter, the one thinking regretfully that he had been hard done by but overreached himself in his complaints, and the other feeling that she had played her cards very well, and that Mr Gresham was a poor fish whom a few more tugs of the line would soon fetch up bright and gasping on the river bank.

 

*

 

Miss Gresham, once her father had left her, did not have the appearance of a girl whose heart is broken. A letter had come for her from a friend living in the west of England, and she browsed through it for a moment or two thinking that Eliza Sparkes was the stupidest young woman she knew and deserved the curate who wanted to marry her, and that Exeter sounded the dreariest place on earth. There was a French novel on the sideboard by Paul de Kock, which her father would certainly not have wanted her to read, and this, too, she pondered while the tea in her cup grew colder still and the mist climbed further up the windows like a great yellow cat rubbing its back upon the panes. She had read a number of French novels, and was not much shocked by them. A servant came in to clear away the rest of the breakfast things, and still she sat there with her hands resting on Eliza Sparkes’s letter and the French novel, but seeing neither of them. She had a habit of unpinning a strand of hair – this she generally wore bound up behind her head – and sucking it through her teeth, which was very disagreeable to see, and this she did now, with her eyes staring into the embers of the fire and her foot tapping restlessly on the Turkey carpet. A second, a third and then a fourth strand of hair went the same way until, hearing the clock strike the hour, she went up to her room, looked in a mirror, put a shawl over her shoulders, found her hat and set off for her cousin Harriet’s in Eccleston Square.

There was a general feeling in the Belgravia house – never openly stated but certainly assumed by Mr Gresham – that if Miss Gresham left the house she should do so under the protection of her maid. But as she descended the grey stone steps into Belgrave Square and wrinkled her nose against the fog, she told herself that she had not quite liked the sound of the girl’s cough and that she would be better off indoors. Besides, what was there for her maid to do in Pimlico? And so she walked briskly around the eastern side of Belgrave Square, gave a sharp look at a gentleman who raised his hat to her and set off southwards in the direction of Victoria Station, the Pimlico squares that are such a godsend to respectable middle-class people on modest incomes, and her cousin Harriet. When Mr Gresham thought of his niece, which he did not often do, he conceived of her not exactly as a duenna, which no girl of five-and-twenty can be expected to be, but at any rate as a sobering influence. In this he was wrong. Both Harriet’s parents were dead, and she lived with an aunt, and the aunt, though certainly respectable, was preoccupied and vague, all of which allowed Mr Gresham’s duenna a degree of licence which would probably rather have alarmed him, had he known about it. It goes without saying that Miss Kimble was quite harmless – she liked rich people and West End gossip and guardsmen who saluted her in the park – but still, Mr Gresham would have been doubtful.

The house in Eccleston Square was no doubt highly convenient, but it was rather small, and shamed by its association with a Catholic missioner’s office which lay next door. The two girls met in the hall.

‘Heavens, Becca,’ Miss Kimble said. She was rather a languid girl. ‘Walking all this way in the fog. I shouldn’t have cared to myself.’

‘I don’t think a little fog ever hurt anyone. Where is Aunt Muriel?’

‘Oh, I think she is with Cook. But listen! Where do you think we have been asked for luncheon?’

‘I’m sure I don’t know. Lord John’s? Mr Disraeli’s?’

‘It is very wrong of you to quiz me, Becca … To Mrs Venables’.’

This intelligence Miss Gresham received with a respectful nod of her head, for in the circles which she and Miss Kimble frequented, Mrs Venables was very close to being a lion. Having once – nobody quite knew when – been an actress, she was now married to Mr Venables, who sat in the Commons for the Chelsea Districts and when not engaged upon his parliamentary duties occupied a big house in Redcliffe Gardens. However, there was a difficulty in Mrs Venables’ society, and it consisted in her having the reputation of being ‘fast’. No one minds bohemianism, of course – it is the spice of life – but some of the gentlemen entertained in Mrs Venables’ drawing-room, beneath the portrait of her by Etty, were known to have mislaid their wives, and some of the ladies were known to be estranged from their husbands. Mr Swinburne had once read some of his poems there, to general consternation. All this gave Mrs Venables’ establishment a delightful air of naughtiness that was, in truth, quite factitious. The luncheons were the same as one gets anywhere in London, and the conversation just as dreary. But then, not everyone has been painted by Mr Etty or thought to have existed in some semi-intimate relation to a prince of the blood. All this passed through Miss Gresham’s mind as her cousin conveyed the invitation, and there came to her face a look of annoyance, which Miss Kimble noted.

BOOK: Derby Day
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