by D. J. Taylor
Rebecca Happerton
No sooner had she sealed up the letter and written Miss Kimble’s name upon the envelope than her maid slid into the room. It has been said of Mrs Rebecca, by those who did not like her, that she could not keep her maids, and yet curiously between herself and the present incumbent there was a quite marked affinity. It was not that Mrs Rebecca was any softer in her tone, or Nokes any more obsequious in her replies, merely that the looks and gestures exchanged between them were enough to suggest that the junior partner in the transaction knew what the senior partner was about, approved of her wants and would do her best to supply them. Seeing the girl standing before her – she was small and rather sharp-faced – Mrs Rebecca put her head on one side, emptied her tea cup and enquired:
‘Was that all the post?’
‘There was a letter for Mr Gresham, ma’am, that John footman has taken up with his breakfast.’
‘It is odd that Mr Happerton should not have written.’
‘Gentlemen are sometimes shy of sending letters, ma’am,’ said Nokes, who may have had past experience of this failing.
‘How is Mr Gresham this morning?’
Mrs Rebecca was no less assiduous in looking after her father than Mr Happerton had been, took him driving in her carriage most afternoons, brought him his milk-and-arrowroot just as he liked it and afterwards helped him up the stairs to bed with many an injunction to mind his feet against the banister and to beware of the stair-rods.
‘I believe he has ate his broth, ma’am, and shall be getting up.’
After this a silence fell upon the room. Mrs Rebecca stared bleakly at the breakfast things and at The Times newspaper as if their very presence on the table annoyed her. Her maid meanwhile essayed a little rearrangement of a sideboard that did not perhaps need rearranging, while quietly detaching a little jam-pot for her own private use. In the course of these manoeuvrings her eye fell upon the envelope.
‘Perhaps’, Mrs Rebecca said, seeing the eye fall, ‘you might ask John footman to take this round to Eccleston Square when he has leisure.’
This was civil – for Mrs Rebecca – and Nokes acknowledged the civility by bobbing her head as she took up the white oblong and placed it in her apron pocket.
Whereupon the life of Belgrave Square resumed its morning course, which is to say that Mrs Rebecca first took herself off to her room and dressed herself, looked at her sandy hair in the mirror of her dressing table, and then sat in the drawing room reading a novel. When this occupation failed her she went back up the staircase and stepped into a room which Mr Happerton had recently appropriated for his own use, shut the door behind her and sat down in the solitary chair looking interestedly about her. There was an ancient desk whose drawer she tried, but found locked, and a metal cabinet which for some reason Mr Happerton had left open, and here she turned up a pocketbook and a couple of memoranda that she read through with the greatest zeal. The picture of Tiberius stared down from the wall above her as she read. Once or twice as she browsed she gave a little smile that was not very pleasant to see, but that there was no one to see it. The lunch hour came and she went back down the staircase, pecked up a cutlet in the dining room and drank a glass of Marsala, ascertained from Mr Gresham that he did not feel well enough to take his afternoon carriage ride, contemplated the ride herself and then voted against it, and then went back into the drawing room to resume her novel. Just at the moment when she thought she might die of boredom, and that even Cousin Harriet might be preferable to the ticking of the drawing room clock and the copy of Marchionesses and Milliners, there came the butler to announce that Mr Gaffney had called and would the mistress like to see him. The mistress, after thinking about this for a moment or two, said that she would.
Mr Gaffney stood in an unusual relation to the life of Belgrave Square, in that he was the only one of Mr Happerton’s friends regularly invited to the house. Perhaps his age and his comparative lustre had something to do with this. Like the members of the Blue Riband Club, he was a sporting gentleman, but of an older vintage, who remembered Nimrod in his prime, and knew Mr Surtees, and seemed to have attended every horse race that had taken place in these isles since the Accession. In appearance he retained just that amount of sprightliness which allows an old man to appear a middle-aged one. As he was, additionally, the younger brother of a baronet, and practised no vice that anyone knew about, ladies liked having him in their drawing rooms, and Mrs Rebecca liked having him in hers. At the same time she thought that there was information she might glean from him which would be worth the having, and without Mr Gaffney knowing that it had been had.
‘Didn’t know that Happerton was away, upon my honour,’ Mr Gaffney said, who always talked like a walking telegraph. ‘Shouldn’t have come if I’d known. Really.’
‘Mr Happerton is in Lincolnshire,’ Mrs Rebecca explained, giving the coyest little glance as she handed Mr Gaffney his tea. It might have been observed that in Mr Gaffney’s presence Mrs Rebecca was, for her, positively girlish, and the servants who came into the room wondered at it.
‘Oh, so this is to see the famous Tiberius is it?’ Mr Gaffney wondered.
‘Is that its name?’ said Mrs Rebecca. ‘You will think me very foolish, Mr Gaffney, but I really know very little of my husband’s affairs.’
‘Not foolish, ma’am, not at all,’ Mr Gaffney said. He thought Mrs Rebecca a nice, well-conducted young woman, and wished that his own daughter, who had married a Dissenting clergyman and was very serious, was more like her. ‘We must have you at a meeting, and let you see the horse being put through its paces.’
‘I am sure I should be very confused,’ Mrs Rebecca said, ‘and cheer when there was no need for cheering. But I think Mr Happerton said he may enter him for the Derby.’
‘He ought to do it, Mrs Happerton. He really ought. The horse is the right age, you see, and I believe was put down as a yearling. Why, he might carry all before him and make your husband his fortune.’
‘There is only three thousand pounds, I believe, for winning the Derby,’ Mrs Rebecca said very demurely.
‘Well, yes. But there is more to winning a horse race, you see, than the prize money. But perhaps I am boring you?’ Mr Gaffney’s occasional remembrance of where he was, and the duty owed to his hostess, was another reason why the ladies liked him in their drawing rooms.
‘Not at all,’ Mrs Rebecca said.
And so Mr Gaffney talked some more about the Derby, and Mrs Rebecca listened, and Nokes, returning to the room on some pretext – to fetch a tray that was no longer there, or a phantom duster that had probably never been there in the first place – stood and regarded her mistress with a look of the profoundest infatuation. And all the while Mr Gaffney drank his tea and thought that he was spending a very pleasant afternoon.
*
‘So what do you make of it?’ Mr Happerton asked Captain Raff in Lincolnshire.
‘Doosid quiet place.’ They were standing at the lower end of Mr Davenant’s garden at the point where it met the wood. ‘Plenty to eat and drink, mind,’ Captain Raff mused. ‘Fine-looking governess, you know.’
Mr Happerton gave a little snort of disgust and kicked at the turf in front of him. Twenty feet away the rooks were swarming over Mr Davenant’s gibbet. ‘I’ll not have you making eyes at governesses, Raff, nor sticking your head into the dairy half a dozen times a day. It ain’t that kind of place. No, what do you make of the establishment?’
Captain Raff took his pipe out of his mouth and tapped it against the heel of one of his varnished boots. He looked more than usually put-upon and had complained about the climate and the absence of curaçao in Mr Davenant’s wine cabinet.
‘Well now, since you ask, it ain’t the best I ever saw. No doubt Curbishley knows his business …’
‘That was a man that rode Sultana in the Oaks in ’64, as you well remember.’
‘D—— it all,’ said Captain Raff resentfully. ‘You never give a fellow the time to speak. As I say,
Curbishley knows his business. But as for that Jem Claypole, I never saw a boy use a dandy brush so bad. Never pulls his ears neither, not when there’s sweat pouring off ’em on all sides.’ Captain Raff became quite animated as he pronounced these judgements, and a little redness came into his worn white face.
‘Never mind Jem Claypole. We can have fifty Jem Claypoles if need be – or none. What about the horse?’
‘Tiberius? Well, very fair you know. A very nice animal,’ Captain Raff said, beginning to walk down into the outlying quadrant of the wood. ‘Ugh! Why Davenant keeps that gibbet I can’t imagine. If this were my place, you know, I wouldn’t stand for it, and should tell the keeper to go hang.’
‘But it isn’t your place,’ Mr Happerton reminded him. ‘Nor is it ever likely to be. What about Tiberius?’
There was a sound of female voices higher up the garden, and they saw two figures go darting round the side of the house.
‘Well, as I said – very fair you know. (Look – there is that girl off on one of her wanderings. I should sooner look at Davenant’s gibbet than that white hair of hers.) No doubt he’s everything they say he is. Teeth ain’t gone yet. Mouth is very distinct. As to wind, I ain’t seen him recent and neither have you. What does Curbishley say?’
‘Curbishley says they galloped him on the wold the other day and there was nothing amiss.’
‘Hm. (How that girl does shriek. I’d give her something to shriek about, that’s all.) I tell you what it is, Happerton’ – Captain Raff’s tones would have been more authoritative had they issued from a face less pale and scared – ‘we need to put him through his paces. That’s what we need to do. No amount of gallops will get a horse ready for the Derby?’
‘Who said I wished to run him in the Derby?’
‘Ain’t you going to?’ Captain Raff wondered, in utter astonishment. A divine, informed that the Thirty-Nine Articles had been reduced, by general agreement, to Thirty-Eight, could not have affected more surprise. ‘Why, what’s the game?’
‘Let us say that it is not quite decided,’ Mr Happerton said. He was getting tired of explaining himself to Captain Raff. ‘Well, look here. There’s a race at Louth just next week. Just a mile or so. I dare say every carthorse in the vicinity has been entered. But I should like to see it. Curbishley can ride him …’
‘As to that …’ Captain Raff began, who had perhaps harboured faint hopes in this quarter.
‘Indeed Curbishley shall ride him. And as for the dressing of him, why, if Jem Claypole can’t be taught to do it, why I should think you might very well condescend to undertake it yourself.’
Quite crushed, Captain Raff followed Mr Happerton up the hill to the house.
*
It was Mr Davenant’s habit, during his guests’ stay, to keep himself as much out of the way as possible. Although he showed himself at meals, and was occasionally induced to accompany Mr Happerton on tours of the stables or to a neighbouring paddock in which the horse was now and then exercised, at other times he retired to remote parts of the house and was not to be found. Mr Happerton was not in the least put out by these sensitivities. He had things he wished to say to Mr Davenant, and questions he wished to ask. Eventually, having searched fruitlessly in the study and the estate office, he ran him to earth in the gunroom.
‘I hope I don’t disturb you, sir,’ he remarked, extending one glorious top-boot in Mr Davenant’s direction and holding out his hand. ‘Only I particularly wished to speak with you.’
‘No, you do not disturb me,’ Mr Davenant said. He was examining an ancient musket, of the kind that is primed by powder and shot being thrust into its barrel, and looked very bleak and cast-down. ‘What is it that I can do for you?’
‘Well.’ Mr Happerton hesitated, saw the expression in Mr Davenant’s face and perhaps appreciated something of his disquiet. ‘I have been here four days and we have scarcely spoken.’
‘If I have fallen short in the obligations of a host, then I am sorry for it, Mr Happerton.’
‘I did not mean that.’ Mr Happerton wondered for a moment what he did mean. ‘It’s a nice little establishment you have here, Mr Davenant.’
‘It was my father’s, and his father’s before him,’ said Mr Davenant, neither acknowledging or denying the claim.
‘I don’t doubt it was. Mr Curbishley seems an excellent man …’
‘I have always found him so.’
Mr Happerton felt oppressed by the coldness of the room – there was no fire – and the gloominess of the surround. The musket in Mr Davenant’s hand struck him as a terrible old antique which had much better be lent to a museum.
‘How far, I wonder, is it from here to Louth?’
‘About twenty miles.’
‘And there is a racecourse there, I believe?’
‘It is nothing very much. You would not, I think, find it suited to Tiberius.’
‘Wouldn’t I? Well, we shall see.’
And with that, Mr Happerton raised his hand in the most friendly manner, turned on his heel and left Mr Davenant to his cold, damp gunroom, his gathering darkness and his ancient musket.
*
‘That’s a fine red mark you have on the side of your head, Raff,’ Mr Happerton said as they passed one another in the stable yard. ‘I wonder who put it there?’
‘Red mark be hanged,’ Captain Raff said, in what for him was a tone of quite unaccountable fury.
*
Miss Ellington’s father had always said that a young woman should have her resources, and so the governess had hers. There was her Christian Year, which she read at a little in the early mornings, and there was Mrs Brookfield’s novel, which she had by her chair after supper. There were her walks in the garden and in the pasture that lay behind the wood, and there was the drawing-room piano, whose keys, to be sure, were very stiff and yellow. And then, looking through a trunk which sat in the corner of the schoolroom, she found a box of watercolours and an ancient brush or two of black horsehair, which was a source of satisfaction to her, as she had used to paint, both at home – Mr Ellington said she did very well but would do better to clean her brushes – and with her dear girls in Warwickshire. The reds and blues and yellows were all dried up, alas, but as Mr Glenister truly remarked, seeing her at work upon a view of the garden, all one needed for a prospect of Scroop Hall was green, brown and grey. And so with her books, and her walks, and her easel, she had her occupations, which was a comfort.
And then there was Evie, who was the greatest occupation of all. Having had the opportunity to observe her, Miss Ellington could truthfully say that she was a dear, sweet girl – affectionate, confiding, altogether without malice or guile, but that there was nothing to be done with her. Miss Ellington devised a scheme of study that she thought might entice her: a picturesque scene or two from history that might awaken her curiosity; a little parable or two from nature to make her smile. But it was no good at all: she could not understand it, and the pain of this want of understanding reduced Evie to utter misery. And so the scenes from history and the parables from nature had been given up, and they sat and looked at picture books, and played at spillikins, and talked. Or rather Evie asked the most peculiar questions, plucked from nowhere, like a cloud pulled out of the sky, which it was Miss Ellington’s task to answer as best she could. Thus, on a cold morning, with the wind rushing through the tree-tops and the windows rattling in their frames:
‘Where is Pusskin?’
‘Pusskin is dead.’
‘Why is he dead?’
‘Why, Evie, we have spoken of this.’
‘Will Pusskin go to heaven?’
‘Pusskin was a good cat and shall have his reward.’
(Which, by the by, Miss Ellington believed to be true, whatever Mr Fitzgerald may have said in his book about the afterlife being an exclusively human resort.)
Another time – it may have been the same morning, when the wind had abated a little – they were looking at an illustrated paper, full of s
ketches of ladies’ fashions, toxophilites drawing their bows, &c., and she asked, quite mournfully, while pointing at one of these Dianas fixing an arrow to her string:
‘Is that my mama?’
‘You know very well that it is not your mama.’
‘Why does my mama not come?’
‘You know, Evie, that she cannot.’
‘Where is your mama? Is she here?’
‘Alas, she is like your mama, Evie. She is gone from us, and will not come back.’
And then, looking through the trunk in which Miss Ellington had discovered the boxes of watercolours, which was very deep and capacious and would not yield up all its secrets at once, they found a pile of clothing, very ancient, and, she believed, dating from a time sixty or seventy years ago. A time when ladies wore gigots, and paduasoy, and marvellous bonnets from which you would hardly think there were room for a human face to stare out. And so, having nothing else to amuse them, it wanting an hour until tea and the servants gone out, they stopped up the door and arrayed themselves in some of this finery: Miss Ellington in an ivory muslin that might have done for a countess’s daughter in the time of old King George, and Evie in a wide-brimmed hat with an ostrich feather on its brim that, when they touched it, broke into three pieces. They fetched mirrors and stared at themselves in wonder, for it was the drollest sight, after which they hastened to put the things away, for it seemed to Miss Ellington – although she could not say exactly where the fault lay – that they had done wrong, and that it would have been better not to set these ghosts a-caper.
For this was a house of ghosts. There were the pictures of Mr Davenant’s ancestors in their frames, and there was the portrait of Evie’s mama upon the dining-room table. Miss Ellington asked Mrs Castell, who had known her, what manner of woman she was, and received the answer that Missus was the gayest, spiritest lady she ever saw, and, though it was not her place to say so, worth two of Mr D. The wind swept in from the east – from Jutland, Mr Glenister said – with nothing to stand in its way but sea and sky. The trees wavered in the rushing air and the dogs barked in the stable yard. Miss Ellington asked Hester whether she did not think this was a very lonely place and the girl said that she had served at one time in a great house on the coast that had been closed up for the winter while the family was away, with only an old housekeeper for company, and that the two of them went to bed each night at seven and rose at five and saw no one except the grocer with his cart, who called once a week. It seemed to Miss Ellington that such a life must be insupportable, but no, Hester said she had known girls who had gone further and fared worse, and if one trusted in one’s Maker – Hester was a very religious girl – all would be well.
