Derby Day Read online

  II

  Belgrave Square

  TIBERIUS from Paduasoy, by Architrave, whose grandsire was Cotillion. Own. Mr Davenant, of Scroop, Lincolnshire. Captain Coker rode him very prettily in the Lincoln Trial Stakes. A dainty horse, of no size (15h) but strong in the field.

  Fancyman’s Guide to the Turf (1868)

  MR GRESHAM, THE old lawyer who lived on the corner of Belgrave Square where it runs into Chapel Street, had but one disappointment in his life, and that was his daughter. He had married at fifty, and his wife had died very soon after, and the daughter had been intended to console him for his loss. Somehow this had not happened, and Mr Gresham had been made miserable by it. And then, afterwards, his misery had been increased by the fact that he could not quite understand why his daughter – Rebecca – fell short of the expectations that he had of her. She was a slim, sandy-haired girl of twenty-two or twenty-three, with features that, however placidly she composed them, hinted at inward calculation, and one or two people said that she reminded them of that other Rebecca in Mr Thackeray’s novel.

  Mr Gresham had heard something of this, and been wounded by it. He was a hale, thin, unutterably respectable old man of seventy-five, who had worked in the Equity Courts for fifty years, so old that he remembered the Prince Regent in his carriage racketing along Cornhill. He was anxious to stand well with the world, anxious for his daughter’s happiness, if what could make her happy could ever be found, but aware, however obscurely, that in the course of his dealings with her something had gone wrong. Watching her at a tea table, on the staircase at some Pont Street party, or even stepping into the brougham that carried her around the park, he was conscious that there was a – slyness was perhaps too harsh a word – deeper motivation that he could not quite fathom. Mr Gresham liked spontaneity in women, he liked smiling countenances, soft looks and meek attention, and he did not find them in Miss Rebecca. He supposed – and it was a subject that he brooded on – that she had been spoiled, and that he had done the spoiling.

  Old lawyers, even those who have worked in the Equity Courts for fifty years and are as rich as Croesus, seldom come to rest in Belgravia, but Mr Gresham had married a marquis’s daughter and the house at the corner of Chapel Street had been part of the bargain. So, perhaps, had the daily carriage ride in the park. There were times when Mr Gresham regretted both the house and the carriage, and wished that he lived quietly in Manchester Square with a housekeeper and a couple of maidservants to cosset him, but the choice had been made and there was no going back from it. And so the pair of them went on in the big, draughty house, with the carriages rushing in the square beyond, irritating each other as only two people who are united by blood and detached by temperament can do. Sometimes Mr Gresham held out olive branches, and those olive branches were refused. Sometimes, thinking to appease him, his daughter revealed some part of her calculation to paternal gaze and he was disgusted by it. That was all.

  All this had been going on for five years – certainly since that time when Miss Gresham had emerged from the schoolroom, been given her own maid and the keys to the pantry, and generally been charged with the upkeep of Mr Gresham’s household – and it seemed to Mr Gresham, when he thought about it, that the situation needed some bold stroke on his part. He was thinking about it now – it was about nine o’clock on a cold morning in November – over the breakfast table, with his letters before him on a salver and The Times newspaper opened on his knee, but he could not for the life of him imagine what that bold stroke might be. Naturally there was a chance that she might marry, but this, too, was fraught with peril, for she might ally herself with someone Mr Gresham disliked, or someone manifestly unsuitable, and neither of these prospects Mr Gresham thought he could bear. And so he buttered his bread, drank his tea, watched the carriages in the square and was thoroughly miserable. As he did this he thought of his wife, who had sat in this same room with him a quarter of a century ago and who was now lying in Kensal Green Cemetery, and whose grave he did not visit perhaps as often as he ought. He was privately resolving to himself that he would make that journey on the coming Sunday when the door to the breakfast parlour was jerked sharply open, there was a swirl of silks, and Miss Gresham came rapidly into the room.

  ‘Do you know, I never knew such a one for slamming doors as you, Rebecca?’

  ‘Did I? Well, I am very sorry, Papa’ said Miss Gresham, not, however, sounding sorry in the least.

  Mr Gresham and his daughter fell into that category of people whose want of sympathy is made yet more flagrant by their inability to disguise it. They were not at ease with each other, and the civilities of the breakfast table only fuelled their displeasure. And so Mr Gresham read what The Times had to say about Mr Gladstone’s disposition of his Cabinet, and Miss Gresham spread marmalade on a fragment of toast and snapped at it crossly as if she thought it might get away from her, and neither of them, in the matter of temperamental unbending, would give an inch. All this made Mr Gresham unhappy. He was still thinking of his dead wife and the visit to her grave. There was a miniature of her on the mahogany sideboard, done however many years ago, which he peered at surreptitiously from behind his newspaper – thinking that he had failed her, and that a better man would have been able to conciliate the daughter she had left behind. At the same time, he had something very serious he wanted to say to Miss Gresham – something that touched on both their destinies – and he did not in the least know how to say it. And so the father passed miserably from Mr Gladstone’s Secretaries of State to some choice speculations about the income tax, while the daughter crunched up her toast like some white-armed siren feasting on the bones of drowned mariners, and the clock ticked on towards the half-hour.

  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 wh
at 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.