Derby Day (57 page)

‘I hope,’ he said, as he drew level with her table, ‘that I do not intrude.’

The woman put down her book – it was M. Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin
– and looked at him steadily for a moment. ‘I do not think,’ she said, ‘that there is any law that forbids a gentleman to walk over to a lady’s table. Will you sit down?’

He sat down, and the wind blew a little storm of leaves against his legs. A number of brilliant observations had occurred to him as he made his way across to her, but now they had all vanished from his mind. ‘I always say,’ he declared, ‘that English people who find themselves in foreign parts should stick together.’

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘English people. And Irish people, too.’

He began to wonder if he had made a mistake. The evening was setting in fast, he noticed. Soon she would be going inside.

‘A wonderful sunset,’ he went on, indicating that marvel of nature with an outflung arm. ‘They seem to get them uncommonly fine down here. I wonder why that should be?’

‘I have often wondered it too,’ the lady said. If there was an irony in her tone, he did not notice it. ‘Mr …?’

‘Synnot,’ he said. ‘Synnot is the name.’ There was something in those green eyes that made him horribly nervous, he discovered. ‘You’ll be returning to London soon, I take it?’

‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I never go to London. Or even to Dublin,’ she added.

He knew now that he had made a terrible mistake, but still he thought that a little jocularity might carry it off.

‘Have you a down against the Irish then, Mrs …’ he began, with considerably more of a lilt in his voice that he had ever allowed himself in the presence of Mrs Davies the Lincoln’s Inn barrister’s wife and her four daughters.

‘My name is Happerton,’ the woman said. ‘Do you know who I am?’ She saw the
Racing Calendar
under his arm and gestured at it with her hand. ‘The wife of the man who owned Tiberius that won the Derby. Does that not mean anything to you?’ But Mr Synnot was blinking like a fish hauled out onto the towpath of the River Wensum and awaiting despatch with the end of a hammer. ‘I never go to London,’ Mrs Happerton said, ‘for I find the climate doesn’t agree with me. And neither do the people. But the weather in Dublin is very agreeable, I believe.’

But Mr Synnot had not stopped to answer. He had the look on his face of a man who has trampled on a nest of vipers by mistake, and was in piteous retreat across the terrace.

The darkness was welling up across the terrace gardens; from the windows of the hotel dining rooms, lamplight flickered. Somewhere in the distance a band was playing. And Mrs Happerton threw back her head and did something that she had never done in her father’s house in Belgrave Square, in Venice on her wedding tour, at Mrs Venables’ luncheons in Redcliffe Gardens, or in any other compartment of her adult life – she laughed.

Acknowledgements

I SHOULD LIKE to acknowledge the influence of W. P. Frith,
My Autobiography and Reminiscences
(1887), Christopher Wood,
William Powell Frith: A Painter & His World
(2006), Alan Macey,
The Romance of the Derby Stakes
(1930), Sir George Stephen,
The Guide to Service: The Groom
(1840), Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, ‘The Derby’ in
London: A Pilgrimage
(1872), Nicholas Foulkes,
Gentlemen and Blackguards
(2010) and Donald Thomas,
The Victorian Underworld
(1997). Much of the detail of the race-day itself is taken from George Moore’s novel
Esther Waters
(1894), which is also an invaluable guide to the protocols of off-course betting in late-Victorian London. Certain other fragments have been robbed from A. E. Coppard’s short story ‘Weep Not My Wanton’.

‘Shepherd’s Inn’ is borrowed from W. M. Thackeray,
The History of Pendennis
(1850). There is a Scroop Hall sixteen miles from Lincoln, but it was built in 1885 and could not have been lived in by Mr Davenant and his ancestors. I am grateful to its current owners, Michael and Jilly Worth, for their kind permission to make use of its name and location. I should like to express my gratitude to Tim Cox of the Cox Library who very kindly read the novel in manuscript and made many valuable suggestions.

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