by D. J. Taylor
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.
‘Come, Becca. You ain’t afraid of going to Mrs Venables’, surely? Why, Mr Townend will be there, and Captain Powell that always speaks so pleasant to me in the park.’
‘It’s not that, Harriet.’ And here Miss Gresham’s features looked very keen. ‘Of all things I should like to have luncheon with Mrs Venables.’
And so it was settled and they set off through the fog to Redcliffe Gardens.
*
If anyone had told Mr Gresham that his daughter was lunching with Mrs Venables (whose husband, in addition, was a firebrand radical) he would have been profoundly shocked. If, on the other hand, he had lunched with Mrs Venables himself he would have been profoundly bored. It was one of those absurd, pretentious meals – ‘West End dinners’ they are called, only that they are not quite given in the West End and are not quite dinners – where the talk is all green-room gossip and the food is brought in hot, or tepid as the case may be, from a caterer’s wagon. Miss Gresham, sitting beneath the Etty portrait, which could not have been painted less than twenty years ago, recognised the absurdity and pretension of the occasion but was not insensible to its amenities. The people amused her and she found them witty. There was talk, too, of books and pictures – third-rate talk which the authors of the books and the painters of the pictures would have groaned to hear – but talk nonetheless. All in all Miss Gresham liked it, and for a moment her face lost that look of calculation it had worn over breakfast in Belgrave Square.
Needless to say, Mr Happerton’s arrival at the luncheon was the greatest accident – he had not thought he would be able to get away, he had remembered only at the last moment, &c. – but there he was, standing on Mrs Venables’ Axminster, whose supplier continued to send in his bill, giving his hat to the butler and looking around him with an expression of the keenest interest.
‘Well then, Becky,’ he said, when he saw her, shaking her hand with more than usual politeness. ‘How are things with you?’
‘Really, you must not call me by that name, Mr Happerton,’ Miss Gresham told him, but not looking as if she were particularly outraged.
‘Shouldn’t I? Well – perhaps not. How is Papa?’
‘He is very cross.’
‘Old gentlemen are generally pretty cross, ain’t they?’
‘I know only one old gentleman, and that is Papa.’
And here Mr Happerton stopped in the lighting of his cigar – all the gentlemen smoked at Mrs Venables’, and one or two of the ladies as well – and gave his companion a look of enquiry. It was not quite the reception he had expected, and he wondered at it. He suspected, just as old Mr Gresham had suspected, that some game was being played with him, without quite knowing how it was being played.
‘Here,’ he said, reaching into a canvas bag that had accompanied him into Mrs Venables’ drawing room. ‘Tell me what you think of this.’
It was a watercolour picture, perhaps eighteen inches square and framed behind glass, of a lithe black horse cropping the grass of what might have been Newmarket Heath.
‘What is it?’
‘That is Tiberius.’ For the first time in their conversation, Mr Happerton became thoroughly animated. ‘Won the Biennial Stakes at Bath only the other day. It was in all the newspapers. Though not the kind of newspapers you read I daresay, Bec—— Miss Gresham.’
‘I never saw a copy of Bell’s Life, Mr Happerton.’
‘Eh? No, I don’t suppose you did. Well, you may take it from me, Miss Gresham, that Tiberius is the coming thing. There are men who would pay five thousand to have him running under their name.’
‘And are you one of them, Mr Happerton?’
‘That would be telling too much, Miss Gresham, indeed it would.’ Still Mr Happerton could not make her out. He had an idea that he was being made fun of, but at the same time the humour was very agreeable to him. The part of the room in which they stood was inconveniently crowded, and he had been raising his voice to make it heard, but now he dropped it into what was little more than a whisper.
‘Did your father say that I had seen him, Miss Gresham?’
‘He said that – certainly.’
‘And how did he seem to take it?’
‘You have heard me say – he was very cross.’
Mr Happerton wondered at her. He liked strong-minded women who, as he put it, could say ‘bo to a goose’ but, in truth, he was a little scared of Miss Gresham with her green eyes and her sandy hair.
‘But he could be brought round, Miss Gresham?’
The bell was ringing for luncheon, the men from the pastrycook’s could be seen in the hall carrying in the first of the made dishes and there was a general press of Mrs Venables’ guests to the dining room. ‘No, you cannot be put next to Miss Gresham,’ that lady had told him. ‘I have promised her to Captain Powell.’ Mr Happerton knew that if he had anything else to say, he had better say it now.
‘But he could be brought round, Miss Gresham?’ he asked again. The watercolour was still in his hand, preparatory to being put back in the bag. ‘I tell you what,’ he said, with renewed enthusiasm, ‘if a certain event comes off, Miss G., then I’ll see to it that he wears your colours, indeed I shall.’
Miss Gresham smiled and said something in an undertone, so that Mrs Venables, coming back into the room to chivvy her remaining guests, wondered what it was that that milksop girl with her sandy hair – Mrs Venables had no great opinion of Miss Rebecca – had said to make Mr Happerton laugh so heartily.
*
Such was Mr Happerton’s enthusiasm for his picture, which he confessed to having paid twenty guineas for that morning at a dealer’s in Bond Street, that during the luncheon it was taken out and exhibited to the guests, handed round among them with the same finesse that the pastrycook’s men handed round the dessert and eventually propped up against the epergne so that none of Mrs Venables’ friends could have avoided it even had they wanted to.
Mrs Venables said that she knew nothing of horses, although her husband, had he been present, would certainly have
given an opinion, but that it looked a nice sort of animal.
Captain Powell said that, demmy, he had seen him run at Northampton – long odds, but then they knew nothing of horses in Northamptonshire – and, demmy, he was the sweetest little horse you ever saw.
Mr Chaff, the member for Risborough, and a parliamentary crony of Mr Venables, said that there was some mystery about the horse, that it had been found in a field, surrendered up as part of a debt or some such, and the whole thing was deuced queer.
Captain Powell said that someone should enter him for the Derby, demmy, and if they did, he would back him by Jove.
Mrs Venables, thinking the company was growing tired of horse racing, assumed her sweetest smile and said that no doubt Mr Happerton’s purchase of the watercolour was only a preliminary to purchase of the animal itself.
Miss Gresham, showing a greater animation of spirit than anyone in the room had previously thought her capable of, said that it was a beautiful horse and she hoped Mr Happerton could soon call it his own.
And Mr Happerton, seeing her framed between the looming figure of the pastrycook’s man as he took away the dessert plates and Captain Powell’s titanic jaw as he bent forward to make some further remark about horse racing in Northamptonshire, thought that if there were one finer thing than to watch Tiberius flying around Tattenham Corner, with the ragtag of the Derby in his wake, it would be Miss Rebecca’s soft arm in his as he stepped across the Epsom paddock.
*
‘I declare I never enjoyed myself quite so much,’ Harriet said, as they made their way back to Eccleston Square.
‘Mrs Venables seems to know a very queer set of people. I am sure that Captain Powell is the most odious man I ever met. I don’t believe he ever went anywhere near that Maharani of Cawnpore in the Mutiny that he is always talking about. But of course he smiles at you in the park, so I had better be silent.’
‘I suppose you are cross because you were not sat next to Mr Happerton,’ Harriet suggested.
‘There are things to make me cross beyond sitting next to Mr Happerton. You are a goose, Harriet, to say such things.’
And Harriet, like Mr Happerton half an hour since, thought that she could not make her cousin out.
III
An Addition to the Family
The gentleman who brings an acknowledgment of his preference to a young lady’s father must not be surprised if he is received with no great cordiality. Inadequate birth, dress, demeanour, income – all these things may prejudice the opinion of a paterfamilias, vigilant upon his hearth-rug, in a way that would be very disquieting should the precise dimensions of the gentleman’s falling short ever be publicly conveyed. What is needed on these occasions is good nature, persistence and pertinacity, and the constant recollection that faint heart ne’er won fair lady …
A New Etiquette: Mrs Carmody’s Book of Genteel Behaviour (1861)
A WEEK HAD PASSED since Mrs Venables’ luncheon and Mr Happerton sat in an upper room of the Blue Riband Club smoking a cigar. The chamber in which he found himself was known as the library, and did in fact contain two or three newspapers laid out on a brass salver and two or three dozen books piled up anyhow on a single shelf of a gaping bookcase. It also contained Captain Raff, Mr Happerton’s particular friend, who just at this moment was making a practice stroke into thin air with a billiard cue he had carried up from one of the downstairs rooms, and a couple of coffee cups on a little occasional table with which the two men had been recruiting themselves. There was no one else in the room, which in truth was not much used by members of the Blue Riband Club, and something in Mr Happerton’s expression suggested that he was not very troubled by their absence.
The Blue Riband was an altogether new thing in the way of clubs. To begin with it was not situated in the West End, but in a dingy little square around the back of Thavies Inn, which its founders had reckoned handy for the law courts and the City. Then again, its members were perhaps a shade more heterodox than is generally the case in St James’s or Pall Mall. They tended to be sporting men – the walls of the club were covered with pictures of Mr Gully and the Tutbury Pet – commission agents and persons for whom the provision of stamped paper is an absolute necessity; there was no blackballing at the Blue Riband. People generally said, when they wanted to praise it, that it was not quite disreputable, and perhaps the same thing could have been said of Mr Happerton, who sat now in its library looking rather as if he owned it and wrinkling his face over the last of the grounds from his coffee cup. He was a tallish, rather florid-looking man of thirty-one or thirty-two, well dressed in a showy way, taking his place among the sporting gentlemen by virtue of a pair of top-boots and various pins and ornaments distributed about his clothing in the shape of horses, indolent-seeming but at the same time vaguely restless, and making little assaults on the coffee cups, the copy of the New Sporting Magazine that lay to hand on the brass salver, and Captain Raff, who continued, in a somewhat mournful way, to make his practice shots with the billiard cue.
He was quite a well-off man, people said – the members of the Blue Riband Club certainly said so – yet there was some mystery about how his money was made, whether it came from discounted bills, or commercial speculations, or, as was commonly thought, from the turf. Probably not even Captain Raff could have produced a proper explanation. For all his sojourning in Thavies Inn, Mr Happerton was known in the West End, rode a neat horse in the park, gave bachelor dinners at Richmond, knew a great many ladies and gentlemen from all walks of fashionable and bohemian life and – something that served to deepen the shades of mystery – was a particular friend of Captain Raff’s.
The contrast between the two men was very marked. Captain Raff was a small, dirty and rather ill-favoured former officer, perhaps a dozen years older than his protégé, of whose career and emoluments after he had sold out of the Rifles no one was very sure, except that he occasionally made very bitter remarks about the Bankruptcy Court. But the greater difference between them was this: that Mr Happerton, in his top-boots and his equine pins, was respectable, invited to parties and made much of in the circles in which he moved, and Captain Raff, in his shabby highlows and a scarlet stock that seemed to have hung round his neck since he brought it back from the Crimea, was not. People said that he was Mr Happerton’s jackal – which is not a nice word – that some disreputable bargain bound them together, that Mr Happerton had tried to throw him over but had not dared to, and that Mr Faker the celebrated West End card-sharp knew all about it, but in truth their association was not so very mysterious. Just as a duchess in Hay Hill needs her secretary-companion, so the Mr Happertons of this world need their Captain Raffs. They need their little errands done and their little commissions transacted, their confederates at Tattersall’s and their emissaries at the sporting clubs, and if there are secrets between them, then a Hay Hill duchess has her confidences too.
Just at that moment a servant came into the room and handed Captain Raff a grimy pink envelope. Ripping it open, he read the contents with an expression amounting to not much less than stark horror, while his friend looked humorously on.
‘Who’s your correspondent, Raff? Some demented milliner ruining herself on your account?’
‘Fellows shouldn’t make jokes on such subjects,’ Captain Raff said, folding the envelope into the breast pocket of his coat and altogether failing to disguise that this was pretty much the truth. ‘By heaven, I have behaved badly in the affair I know.’ Captain Raff did not look as if he thought he had behaved badly.
‘I should rather think you have. Here, Raff’ – Mr Happerton threw his arm conspiratorially around his friend’s shoulder – ‘never mind Miss Baker – poor girl, I’ll send her a sovereign, indeed I shall. There is something I particularly want to talk to you about.’
‘Is there now? I suppose it’s that girl you are going to marry.’
‘Well – maybe. But it is not quite settled.’
‘Not quite settled! Last time we talked of Mi
ss What’s-her-name – Miss Gresham – I thought you were going to spout reams of poetry over her. Shelley and that kind of thing.’
‘I don’t think she’s quite the girl for sending verses to, Raff.’
‘Ain’t she though?’ Captain Raff remembered the pink envelope in his breast pocket. ‘Marriage is such a serious thing. You’d have to give up Miss Decamp, you know.’
‘Hush about Miss Decamp. Miss Decamp never existed. No, the truth is, Raff, I can’t quite get to the bottom of her.’
‘What? As to whether she’ll have you?’
‘Well – I suppose that’s the rub of it.’ And Mr Happerton explained, in so far as was consistent with good taste, some of his recent dealings with Miss Gresham.
‘Playing some game of her own, I suppose,’ Captain Raff said sagely. ‘Well, either she’ll take you or she won’t, you can be pretty sure of that. And how much will the old gentleman cut up for?’
‘I don’t know that he’ll cut up for anything. Rich as Dives, but fond of it you know.’
Captain Raff looked doubtful. ‘That horse won’t buy itself.’
‘Well – maybe not. But there are other ways of buying horses. Look at these.’
So speaking, Mr Happerton took a notecase from his pocket, drew out a couple of pieces of stamped paper, written over with a thick, sprawling hand, and waved them under his friend’s nose.
