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Authors: D.J. Taylor

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

Derby Day (34 page)

BOOK: Derby Day
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Outside the rain has begun to fall in torrents, dancing up from the lawn and almost obliterating the line of currant bushes twenty yards away. Mr Glenister wishes the rain would stop. His wheat can stand or fall. It is of no consequence to him. There are other, immemorial livelihoods at stake. This is an ancient part of the world. There are people here, in this corner of England, next to whom the Davenants are brazen interlopers, people who have farmed land for six hundred years. ‘Scroop’ itself is Old Norse, but there were settlers here before that. A year since, one of Mr Glenister’s men found a coin in an upturned furrow, which a Lincoln antiquary dated to the reign of the Emperor Constantine. It sits on the study mantelpiece, along with a tobacco jar sporting the arms of Mr Glenister’s Cambridge college and the portrait of his mother. Mr Davenant must not lose his estate, Mr Glenister thinks. As to why he must not lose it, he cannot exactly say. Because he is a good man and Mr Happerton a bad one? Who can tell? Not even the paper on Mr Glenister’s desk can answer that. Because something long-standing, infinitesimal in itself but part of that wider pattern of solidity and substance, should not be lightly broken up? Here Mr Glenister thinks he is on firmer ground.

 

*

 

The schoolroom is at the top of the house, under the eaves. As well as being used for educative purposes, it is also a repository. At some point a variety of oddments – two cabin trunks, an harmonium, a saddle – have been dragged up here and pushed into corners where, when there are more than two persons present, they occasionally do service as chairs. There is, additionally, a blackboard, a set of globes, some ends of chalk and a curious instrument, like an inverted dome, which Miss Ellington supposes is an antique sundial. Even if one’s pupil were not Evie, it would be difficult to teach in such a room, she thinks. There is a strong smell of damp, and the rain rattles the windows with an extraordinary violence. The rooks cry in the sodden garden and the wind, coming in through the cracks in the frames, sounds uncannily like a human voice – or a voice that is perhaps not human. Just at this moment the chalk is back in its box and the blackboard dusted over, and Miss Ellington is telling Evie a story of her own devising. It is about a creature who lives on an island in the middle of the Wash and fishes for sprats with a rod made from a parasol. The creature may be human, or may not be: this information Miss Ellington keeps purposely withheld. It is difficult to know what effect this invention is having on Evie, who is unresponsive at the best of times. Just now, she is sitting on a tall, stiff-backed chair with her head on one side and her eyes lowered, making little restless movements with her hands.

The story has ceased to interest Miss Ellington. All her stories do in the end. They start well and then fizzle out: a consequence, she thinks, of her not possessing any true imaginative power. The creature who sits on his little island, fishing with his parasol, is called Lancelot, merely because she has been reading Tennyson, and will not, she thinks, do. Not, she concedes, that Evie is capable of distinguishing between a good story and a bad one. On the other hand all stories, good and bad, seem to awaken an interest, which poetry and recitations on the cracked drawing-room piano have not so far been able to produce. Coming to a passage in which Lancelot, walking the perimeters of his island, is gripped by the suspicion that it is actually a huge, floating fish, Miss Ellington takes a sidelong glance at Evie, who fascinates, depresses and rather scares her. She has a habit of asking questions that bear no relation to the world she inhabits. ‘Is it far?’ ‘Will he come?’ ‘How did it get there?’ She is still interested in Pusskin, a bowdlerised version of whose fate has several times been vouchsafed to her. Taken out on a walk, when the weather permits, she wanders in a kind of dream from plant to plant and gatepost to gatepost. The island, on which Lancelot has so innocently loitered, has started to sink, the waves come lapping menacingly over the rocks and crevices, Lancelot himself hanging terrified from the branches of a tree. Now the water is at his toes. Now at his ankles. Perhaps Evie has registered this transformation, and is moved by it? Who knows. Sometimes Miss Ellington wonders what is to become of Evie.

If it comes to that, what will become of them all? Miss Ellington has several times found herself asking this question, which is in truth of more interest to her than the fate of Lancelot, now assuming his true, bat-like shape and preparing to take wing from the tree-top. Mr Glenister says that the estate is to be sold, that its new owner is Mr Happerton, but that there may be some delay before he comes to claim his property and that he will very likely suffer Mr Davenant to remain as his tenant. This information is troubling, and there is no one with whom she can discuss it, certainly not Mr Davenant. Indeed there is not a great deal that anyone can discuss with Mr Davenant, who keeps mostly to his study, but can sometimes be seen walking in the fields, not seeming to care which way his feet take him. Lancelot has flown off into Yorkshire, taking his dinner from a pastrycook’s tray in an unguarded window, and Miss Ellington decides to leave him there. ‘Where have they gone?’ Evie demands suddenly, and they stare uncomprehendingly at each other, while the rain rattles agitatedly at the window, the pools of water gather in the wild garden and the wind whips under the eaves.

She hears, rather than sees, Mr Glenister arrive – doors opening and closing a long way off; feet drawing steadily nearer on the creaking staircase; the handle turning in the door – but there he is suddenly, nodding his head, smoothing back his hair and giving her his hand to shake. Miss Ellington is not sure what to make of Mr Glenister. The Lincolnshire squires are not generally prepossessing. There is an old man three miles away with seventy acres at his command who is said scarcely to be able to read. Mr Glenister can certainly read – there is usually a book poking from the lip of his coat-pocket – but, still, Miss Ellington does not know precisely what manner of man he is. She is used to complimentary attorneys, crimson-faced boys, clerical gentlemen requiring to be offered sherry. Warwickshire society is very polite. Mr Glenister, who lives in solitary, wifeless comfort, attended by a couple of serving maids, and can sometimes be found sitting on tree-stumps reading a copy of the
Athenaeum
, is a little much for her.

‘How is Evie?’ he asks as he comes into the room, and Evie, who likes Mr Glenister, starts up and says words that might mean
The man has gone into the wood
, or might not, and Mr Glenister smiles and pats her on the shoulder (she puts her hand there after him, as if she does not know what the gesture means). Miss Ellington has been to Glenister Court once – they went as a family party in the days before Mr Happerton’s shadow came to disturb them – and found it odd, full of queer decorations and paintings and pieces of tapestry, and not at all what a Lincolnshire gentleman should have in his house.

‘Tell me,’ Mr Glenister says – he has very long legs that as he sits in a chair rise almost to the level of his chest and make him look like a grasshopper – ‘how is Mr Davenant?’ And Miss Ellington knows that they are to have one of their little coded conversations about Scroop and its prospects, and the peculiarities of its owner, in which more is implied than is stated and less demanded than inferred. ‘Mr Davenant is mostly in his study,’ she says, and Mr Glenister nods into his tea cup, gives Evie something to play with that he finds in his pocket, and goes on:

‘They say there is a man coming to ride Tiberius.’

‘I thought that it was Mr Curbishley who was to ride him?’ Miss Ellington knows only a little about horse racing, which was thoroughly disapproved of in Warwickshire.

‘This is the man who will ride him in the Derby. Major Hubbins, he is called.’

‘And who is Major Hubbins?’

‘Rather a dog in his day,’ Mr Glenister says, with a peculiar little smile. ‘But that day was rather a long time ago. There are people saying that Tiberius is to be used only for the market.’

‘For the market?’

‘Forgive me. It means that a person who enters a horse in a race does so with the aim of talking up its chances, but all the while he is secretly staking his money at better odds on his rival.’

‘Does Mr Davenant know this?’

‘I think not. But it would break his heart if he thought Tiberius was being used for some low game. Though I expect it is all the same to Mr Happerton.’

While Mr Glenister talks, Miss Ellington thinks of other men she has known. Once, in the drawing room at Warwick, one of these – one of the complimentary attorneys – had absolutely taken to his knees and asked her to marry him. Flattered by this declaration, if ultimately disapproving, she had also been startled by its incongruity. It was not, she thought, that complimentary attorneys should not be permitted romantic feelings, merely that the expression of them, in a room full of chintzes and subscription cards and embroidery, seemed so very odd.

Mr Glenister is still talking about Tiberius. ‘He would be certain to win the race if he were ridden properly, Miss Ellington, you see, and that Major Hubbins is fifty-five years old.’

Miss Ellington has forgotten who Major Hubbins is and has to force herself to remember. He is quite animated, she thinks, as she has previously seen gentlemen animated by politics, or Sir Charles Lyell’s discoveries among the stones, or suffrage petitions.

‘And how old should a man be to ride a horse?’

‘Well, there is an old gentleman of eighty still rides to hounds with the Sleaford pack. But fifty-five would be thought rather old for the Derby, for all it is such a short course. Why, if Major Hubbins were to be thrown or ridden down by another horse one would fear for his life.’

Evie is nodding her head, and crooning over the ball of string Mr Glenister has given her. Miss Ellington looks out of the window at the dripping caryatid, the long expanse of gravel drive and the wild fields beyond. She thinks of Pusskin, stretched out on the gamekeeper’s gibbet, with his eyes staring from his head, and his tail pinned up beside him, and another story told to Evie – she does not quite know where this one came from – about a black dog with live coals for eyes and claws like steel talons that prowls the wolds. Lincolnshire, she thinks, is beginning to oppress her. There are live things in the roof – they make a pattering sound that does not sound like any rat or bird that ever lived – which haunt her sleep.

‘It seems to me,’ Mr Glenister says – he is choosing his words carefully, looking at Evie’s white face and the little agitated movements of her hands, like doves, he thinks, pinioned in a net and striving to break free – ‘that Mr Davenant is not quite himself. Men who are in such a condition may do things that they come to regret. They brood upon their misfortunes and feel nothing but their immediate hurt.’ Mr Glenister has never had any misfortunes worth speaking of, and felt no hurt, but still he is sorry for Mr Davenant.

‘I suppose they may,’ Miss Ellington says. She thinks – she is surprised at the snappishness of her thoughts – that she has no patience with men who are not quite themselves, and that ‘being oneself’ is itself a suspect phrase, for of all things that self is horribly uncertain.

‘What will Mr Happerton do?’ she asks.

‘What will he do? Well, I doubt he will come to live here permanently. He is a London man, I believe. A Lincolnshire winter would finish him off, I fear.’

The question that has not been asked, but which hangs in the air between them, is: what shall Mr Davenant do, and his dependants? Mr Glenister gets to his feet, glances at Evie, who is still occupied with the string, takes his pipe out of his pocket, puts it back, and suddenly asks: does she remember the occasion when she discovered Mr Happerton in Mr Davenant’s study and the file of facsimile signatures under his hand?

‘Certainly I remember them,’ Miss Ellington says. She wants nothing to do with Mr Davenant’s signatures, Mr Davenant’s study, or Mr Happerton, but she has been brought up to believe that gentlemen’s questions are there to be answered.

‘There is a great deal of paper in Mr Davenant’s study,’ Mr Glenister says. ‘A great pile of it stacked up next to the desk. Old newspapers. Bills.’ Mr Glenister made a little twist with his face as he said the word ‘bills’. ‘Might they not be there?’

To this Miss Ellington has no answer. Who knows where anything is at Scroop, she thinks, where there is no salt in the salt cellars and no logs in the grate and no one to cut the grass beyond the window.

‘I should give a great deal to have that slip of paper,’ Mr Glenister says. He is not looking at her, but beyond the windows at the fields, where there is a black scarecrow flapping dismally in the wind. ‘Could you find it for me? I cannot go myself, for Davenant is always there. But you – you are not so constrained.’

And rather to her surprise, Miss Ellington finds herself agreeing to examine Mr Davenant’s study for evidence of the sheet of facsimile signatures. It will very probably have to be done at night, Mr Glenister says, and she nods her head, bemused by what seems to her the effrontery of the request, and her own bewildering haste in agreeing to it. ‘Where did it go?’ Evie says suddenly, which for once is rather apposite. They stare across the room, a little conspiratorially, and Miss Ellington thinks of Pusskin with his bloody fur, and Lancelot, parasol in hand, wings sharply extended, taking flight from the island that vanishes beneath his feet over the grey North Sea.

 

*

 

Scroop Hall by night is a mystifying place. The angles disappear. There are great banks of shadow that conceal solid objects or, in certain cases, nothing at all. Some of the passages are so dark that not even a candle can penetrate the murk. There are also inexplicable shafts of light glimmering from banisters and picture-frames, curious scufflings behind the wainscot and, it sometimes seems, in the walls themselves. But still, here she is, in her nightgown and shawl, quietly descending the main staircase to the pitch-dark hall. It is just gone midnight – the grandfather clock in the vestibule struck five minutes ago. The house is asleep. Evie has a queer way of sleeping, half-in and half-out of consciousness, asking questions of the curious people who populate her dreams. Of Mr Davenant there is no sign. The hall is so black as to be almost unnavigable, but gradually her eyes grow accustomed to the lack of light and she presses on. She is not afraid of the dark, but she has a horror of something she cannot see scampering over her feet. Once, in Warwick, someone put a mouse in her bed for a joke and she astonished herself by attacking it with a poker. There were no more mice, and no more jokes.

BOOK: Derby Day
12.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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