Derby Day (35 page)

The door creaks and is difficult to open. Outside the wind is careening over the garden. Mr Davenant’s study is in chaos. There are wineglasses all over the desk, and a map of Lincolnshire has been spread out over the carpet and trampled over by someone with muddy feet; one or two of the pictures on the walls are slightly askew. For a moment she worries that the chaos will extend to the mass of old papers, but there it is, gathered up in shadow, apparently unchanged. Holding the candle in one hand, she bends cautiously down to examine the pile. At first she finds nothing except copies of the
Agricultural Gazette
and old receipts, but after a while there are other things: letters; a Grantham seedsman’s catalogue; a Corn Law pamphlet; pages out of a book that must have displeased Mr Davenant, for they have been ripped halfway through. Moonlight is streaming in through the window now, which makes her job easier, but also alarms her, for there is something ghostly about the prospect before her: the spines of the books gleaming on their shelves, a stuffed falcon under glass gazing cruelly down from a recess in the wall. Once or twice she finds paper on which Mr Davenant has begun, and abandoned, letters, in which he urges his correspondent to certain courses of action, offers
prompt reassurance
, and in one very terrible passage
throws himself on their mercy
. She wonders what effort it took Mr Davenant to write them, here in a room where Davenants have written letters for two hundred years. She is tearing on through the pile – the candle is on the carpet by her side and may very soon go out – as the dates of the newspapers grow more and more ancient, and the receipts more dusty, and then, all of a sudden there it is, half of a foolscap sheet, nearly hidden beneath a newspaper that almost swamps it, in handwriting which is like Mr Davenant’s and then again curiously unlike it, a dozen representations of his name –
samuel Davenant. Sam. Davenant. Samuel Davenant Esq
. – running on to the page’s end. She places the sheet in the fold of her shawl, bends to her knees and restores a little of the fresh disorder she has created.

And then, suddenly, in the passage – she has gone barely two yards and the door is scarcely shut behind her – is Mr Davenant, still in his day-clothes, very pale in the face, bustling towards her. She does not scream, for she has no breath, and even in the split second of apprehending him, she realises that he does not quite see her. There is a little gleam of something in his hand, on which the light shines for an instant, and then nothing. The candle falls to the floor – it is about to go out – and Mr Davenant picks it up and stares wonderingly at the tiny flame. The wind pours against the window and she hears herself making some excuse: a toy of Evie’s needed to quieten her. Mr Davenant stares blankly at her and does not, she thinks, properly take it in. She leaves him standing in the passage, with the queer look still on his face and the light flickering under his nose, and hurries away into darkness.

And so it is done, and in the morning Mr Glenister has a sheet with a dozen approximations of Mr Davenant’s signature on his desk for him to ponder.

Visitors

Even in the best-regulated establishments, where all is sweet amity and conjugal bliss, a gentleman needs his sanctum. The newly married young lady will find that her husband, when sequestered in his study, will be as chary of interruption as a lion in its den …

A New Etiquette: Mrs Carmody’s Book of Genteel Behaviour
(1861)

ON A PARTICULAR Wednesday afternoon, towards the end of April, when there were only five weeks remaining until the day of the great Derby race, Mr Happerton had two unexpected visitors to his study.

The Pardews were gone from Shepherd’s Inn. A butcher’s boy, calling there with a bill for thirty-five shillings, found the door wide open and a cat tearing a newly killed mouse in half on the mat. The porter knew nothing about it. In fact, the Pardews had removed to Richmond – not to the mansion with its bright lawn running down to the Thames which stretched itself through Mr Pardew’s imaginings, but to a terraced house in a little thoroughfare off the high street. There was no carriage, but the woman who called herself Mrs Pardew – there was already a doubt about this in the neighbourhood – sometimes had herself driven about in a fly. All this suggested a need for prudence and quiet economy. Mr Pardew was actually the proud possessor of seven hundred pounds – a lot of money, but not enough for Mr Pardew, and some of it was already spent, not least on the house, which, unlike the rooms at Shepherd’s Inn, had been taken unfurnished. It was a pleasant house to begin with, and by judicious purchases in Richmond High Street Jemima made it more so, but Mr Pardew was uneasy in it. He thought that seven hundred pounds, or rather the six hundred pounds that remained, was a poor reward for the labour put into getting it, not to mention the trouble that might lie in wait. For her part, Jemima was quite happy. She had sent a ten-pound note to her sister in Islington, and did not notice Mr Pardew’s depression of spirits.

Mr Pardew found that the seven hundred pounds – the six hundred pounds – and the move from Shepherd’s Inn, which had been done rather late at night, noiselessly, in a covered wagon, had made him restless. He made one or two trips into the City in an omnibus but did not stay there long, and he joined a club at an institute on Richmond Hill to read its newspapers. He was always reading newspapers, particularly the police reports. He had a habit of sitting in the parlour, or the kitchen, or wherever Jemima had gone to occupy herself, and staring at her as she went about her work. It occurred to him that, in all the years he had known her, he had never inspected her closely, had no real idea of the person she was. He saw, as he watched, that she was very adept at her household tasks. He thought that he liked the way her hands moved over the objects around her. Once at this time he said:

‘We could go away from here, if you wish.’

‘Do you not like Richmond?’ She was shelling peas into a white earthenware bowl, and he watched them as they fell. ‘You always said that you would like to live here.’

‘I like Richmond very well. It is just that – there are other places.’

But Jemima was happy in Richmond. She had a budgerigar in a cage, for which she bought seeds at a naturalist’s shop, and the sound of the hired fly creaking up to the gate was a tonic to her. Seeing this, Mr Pardew determined to conciliate her.

‘By the by,’ he said once, as they sat together in the parlour, ‘I saw Lord Fairhurst the other day.’

‘How did you find him?’ Jemima asked.

‘Oh he is no better, I dare say. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if his uncle, who made him his heir, outlives him. Stranger things have happened.’

‘I expect they have,’ Jemima said.

And so the time went on, spent in omnibus rides to and from the City, in the parlour of the little house off Richmond High Street, and in reading the newspapers at the Institute, and not at all satisfactorily. Mr Pardew had kept but one souvenir from the evening in Cornhill – a quaint blue pin in the shape of a butterfly, which he wore sometimes in the lapel of his black stuff suit.

And then one day something dreadful happened. Coming down Richmond Hill with a bag of provisions in his hand Mr Pardew saw a woman’s figure bent over a shopfront. He knew instinctively that there was danger in this apparition, something to do with the set of her shoulders and the umbrella jutting from her elbow, and the woman turned towards him and he saw that it was his wife. What happened in the next half-minute he could not quite remember. He had an idea that some words had been said, that she might have spoken his name, and he said something in response, but then he was flying down Richmond Hill to the more densely populated streets beyond it – the bag of provisions went rolling off into the gutter – not looking behind him until he reached the safety of his own garden gate. Here he was able to recover himself and, assuming a nonchalance he did not in the least feel, stood for some time looking back the way he had come. There was no one there, and, after another moment or two, with his heart still pounding beneath his ribs, he let himself into the house. Here all was genteel domesticity. The bird was singing in its cage and Jemima was rolling pastry for a pie. When she saw him she said:

‘You are home very soon.’

‘There are too many people about. What is the point of a pavement if one is pushed off it every two minutes by some fellow’s elbow?’

‘Did you call at Grieveson’s?’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Pardew, with a very passable imitation of good humour. ‘I knew there was something I had forgotten. I shall go out again later.’

When he reached his bedroom he found he was very nearly shaking with fear. Looking at his face in the mirror, he saw that it was stark white. He told himself as he sat there that fate had singled him out, that nothing else could explain the monstrous coincidence of walking down Richmond Hill and discovering the one person in the world with the capacity to do him harm. Presumably, he told himself, she lived in Richmond, would now look out for him and, such is the nature of suburban life, be bound to see him again. This thought enraged him so much that he got up from the chair into which he had thrown himself and roamed desperately around the room, pulling at his chin with his fingers, wishing that he were not so conspicuous, that his dark hair and his jutting chin were gone, that he was a meek little man of five feet four with a bald head and spectacles that no one looking into a crowd ever saw. There was a china vase sitting nearby on an occasional table and he seized his stick – he had been carrying it all the while on his walk – brought it down upon the willow-pattern and smashed it into three pieces.

After this he was not so angry. He put the stick down on the bed, tidied up the fragments of the china vase, loosened his collar, sprinkled a little water on his face from the ewer, and settled down to consider the situation. On the whole, he told himself, turning the matter over in his mind, things were not as bad as they might have been. He had seen his wife, who had undoubtedly recognised him – he remembered now that she had spoken his name – for a split second on Richmond Hill. It might be – Richmond being so very full of visitors at this time of the year – that she was passing through the place, might already be gone from it and have no intention of coming back. Even had she wanted to pursue him – and it might very probably be that she did not – she did not know where he lived and had no means of finding out. All this was very consoling and quite cheered Mr Pardew’s spirits. But then what if, having seen Mr Pardew on Richmond Hill, she had decided to share this intelligence with a third party, with Captain McTurk, say, or one of his satellites? For the moment the bedroom in which he sat – it was a pretty room, lined with pink, sprigged paper, with cupids smiling from an embroidered screen – altogether fell away, and he was back in a house in Highgate twenty years ago picking apples in an orchard with a curly-haired child and a woman who … But that way lay madness, Mr Pardew thought, and he sprang up from the bed, rearranged his collar and composed himself.

They were very quiet at supper that night, and if Jemima wondered at the silence, and the absent china vase, she did not say anything about it. Mr Pardew felt that his nerves jangled him. Halfway through the meal there came a knock at the door. It was only a neighbour come to issue an invitation, but he found his hands grasping the table in fright. Several times he turned the encounter on Richmond Hill over in his mind – the woman’s figure in silhouette, her turning towards him, that terrible moment of recognition – but there was no way of recasting it that he found satisfactory. The even tenor of his days had been destroyed and he knew it. Later that night, brooding into the small hours as Jemima slept comfortably beside him, he had decided on two courses of action. The first was that he and Jemima should leave Richmond forthwith. They would go abroad, he thought – to Pau, or Leghorn, to any place, in fact, where Mrs Pardew would not come looking for them. The second was that the money needed for this resettlement should come from the person who, in Mr Pardew’s judgement, was most likely to be induced to supply it. That person was Mr Happerton. And so the next afternoon Mr Pardew put on his best hat, took his stick, walked down to the stand in the high street and took an omnibus into the West End. He was quite nonchalant as he did this, believing that Mrs Pardew was by this time quite likely forty miles away. And then a strange woman, looking up from the corner of the omnibus, seemed to stare at him in a very marked manner, and he took up his newspaper and hid his head for the remainder of the journey.

Mr Pardew was not in the least intimidated by the house in Belgrave Square, and walked up its grey stone steps quite as if he owned it. There was a little trouble with the butler, but rather like Mr Happerton himself Mr Pardew had a way with seneschals and chatelaines. Besides, there were at this time, in the weeks before the Derby, any number of messengers and emissaries going back and forth from Mr Happerton to the City, the Blue Riband and other places, and the butler had decided that if he had to err, it should be on the side of laxity. And so there he was in the doorway of Mr Happerton’s study (or rather Mr Gresham’s study, since expropriated) not at all discountenanced by the domestic who was bringing out Mr Happerton’s breakfast tray – Mr Happerton had taken to breakfasting in the study, as he found it more convenient. The butler waved him in and Mr Happerton looked up from the desk.

‘It is very good of you to see me,’ he began. ‘My name is Pardew.’