Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  Anyone who followed in Mr Pardew’s wake in the next two or three hours would have wondered at his restlessness. He walked up Chancery Lane and looked at the shops there. He stepped into Southampton Buildings and inspected the attorneys’ plates and the carriages waiting to take the Chancery lawyers away to their Saturday retreats at Greenwich and Richmond Hill. He went into a bookseller’s in High Holborn and stood for so long over one of Mr Trollope’s novels that the bookseller asked him somewhat satirically if he intended to buy it. Finally, when all other occupations failed him, he turned through the archway of Warwick Court – very grim and shut up now, with most of its occupants departed – walked through the gates of Gray’s Inn and proceeded towards its gardens. There was no one much about. An old lawyer or two sat taking the air, a pair of ladies was being escorted very ceremoniously around the gravel drives by a grave young man in a black stuff suit, and a porter was wheeling a handcart with a pair of long settles precariously balanced on its rim towards one of the legal doorways. An old man in a frock-coat and a pair of pepper-and-salt trousers came rambling out from among the bushes and, seeing Mr Pardew establishing himself on a bench next to the principal lawn, said in a high, cracked voice:

  ‘Do you know, sir, that I have been coming here seventy years?’

  ‘Seventy years is a very long time,’ said Mr Pardew affably, rather amused by the quaintness of his address.

  ‘A very long time. That was in my grandfather’s day, that won Lady Julia Darby’s case against her husband for false imprisonment. You will recollect it, perhaps?’

  ‘I can’t say that I do. No doubt you can recollect a great many things.’

  ‘That’s about it, sir. A great many. I saw the old king in his coach once.’

  ‘Would that have been King William or the Regent?’

  ‘Neither, sir. It was George III. The German king, we used to call him. That’s a nice-looking bag you have there, sir.’

  ‘I find it very convenient,’ Mr Pardew said. He thought the old man was a little cracked. ‘An old Skimpole,’ he said to himself. ‘Sitting and walking here and pretending he had some connection with the place. I suppose his grandfather was a pork butcher, and as for Lady Julia Darby, I don’t suppose such a creature ever existed.’ There was a pause, while the noise of the porter trundling his handcart of settles receded into the distance and the old man stared gravely at the nearby garden beds.

  ‘A rhododendron is a very splendid flower, sir,’ he said finally.

  ‘There will certainly be a fine display of them here,’ Mr Pardew conceded.

  ‘Why, when I lived at Esher, sir, I had a whole bank of them. One looked out of the window of a morning and there they were. In point of fact – there they were. But all that is over now.’

  ‘Things come and go,’ said Mr Pardew. ‘That is their way.’

  ‘And yet we don’t notice their passing. I’ll bid you a good afternoon, sir, if I may.’

  Mr Pardew watched him move off down the gravel path with a strange loping gait that every so often looked as if it might develop into a run. In a little while he came level with the two ladies and their escort, and could be seen to stop and raise his hand. ‘I’ll wager he is telling them about his grandfather and Lady Julia Darby,’ Mr Pardew said to himself, and managed a little guffaw, but his heart was not in it. He was thinking of his own past: a little office in a cramped thoroughfare where the language spoken by the people going by outside the window was not English, and himself in it, with a pair of ledgers pushed up close to his face; a great hill somewhere in the north of England with sheep grazing on it and the line of the sea a couple of miles distant; a team of bay horses, somewhere in the West Country, and himself in the carriage behind them, though he could not remember how he had come there, or where he was going. The memory of this irked Mr Pardew and he reached out and slashed savagely with his stick at the empty air, so that the phantoms of the little continental office, and the great hill with its sheep, and the carriage bowling along the Bath Road broke away and disappeared, and all that remained was the green grass, grey stone and bright sunshine.

  Presently Mr Pardew rose to his feet and, with the carpet-bag still slung over his shoulder and the stick swishing away at the unseen enemies who barred his path, went out through the south-western gate of Gray’s Inn, through Warwick Court and back into High Holborn. It was about four o’clock, and the place thronging with costers’ barrows and boys selling newspapers. Setting off east, by Holborn Circus, Mr Pardew made his way in a rather desultory fashion along Farringdon Street and through the little maze of courts and alleyways that abuts St Paul’s Churchyard. There was a wedding party, and he stood for a moment with a grim smile on his face – perhaps this, too, reminded him of something – before turning east again to Cannon Street, Poultry and then the approach to Cornhill. Here on the corner there was an eating house with a sign on its gable showing a very fat man in the act of devouring an oyster, and Mr Pardew turned into it, marched up the stair to the upper floor and discovered there, quite on his own at a table at the very end of the room, a small man staring at the remains of a chop.

  ‘Lythgoe, ain’t it?’ said Mr Pardew easily. ‘That came and fetched me from Boulogne. Thank you, miss,’ – this to a young lady with a starched white apron who put her head out of a closet to the rear – ‘I’ll take a cup of tea and some bread and butter if I may.’ While the tea was being brought and the remains of the chop taken away, he stowed the carpet-bag carefully under the table, sat himself down on the further side of it and looked Mr Lythgoe in the face.

  ‘Been here long?’

  ‘I was told – five o’clock,’ Lythgoe said unhappily.

  ‘Well then, you’re a very punctual fellow. Thank you, miss – that’s a very nice thumb you have, only I wish you wouldn’t put it on the bread. I expect you’ve got all kinds of plans for Sabbath morning, isn’t that right? Some Dissenting chapel in Hoxton waiting to receive you, I don’t doubt. Well, you may forget about that, for we shall be here until tomorrow afternoon, like as not.’

  ‘I won’t do it,’ Lythgoe said, under his breath, so that the serving girl, washing her hands at the tap in the closet, wondered what it was that he would not do.

  ‘But I think you will,’ Mr Pardew said. He was tearing up the bread and butter, strip by strip, and plunging the fragments into his mouth, and the glint in his eye was harder than when he had first come into the room. ‘And believe me, there is very little you shall have to do. Why, a young lady from a girls’ school could probably settle to it, if she had a mind.’ Mr Pardew nearly added that the young lady from the girls’ school probably did not have her stamped paper in Captain Raff’s pocket. ‘Now, did you bring those other things that Raff got for you, eh?’ It became apparent that Mr Lythgoe, too, had a bag with him – very capacious and heavy it looked – stuck under his feet, and that the having of it was torture to him. Some of the hardness went out of Mr Pardew’s eye. He drank the last of his tea and tore up the final piece of bread between his fingers. ‘See here,’ he said. ‘You stand with me, and I shall stand with you. As for Captain Raff, well’ – and here Mr Pardew absolutely snapped his fingers – ‘we may outwit him yet.’

  ‘How shall we outwit him then?’ Lythgoe wondered, altogether fascinated by the turn the conversation was taking.

  ‘We shall see,’ said Mr Pardew ambiguously, getting to his feet. ‘One and sevenpence, is it miss? Well, here is a penny for yourself. But you must mind that thumb.’

  Outside in Cornhill the afternoon was falling away and the streets all but deserted. They set off along the pavement, Mr Pardew issuing sotto voce instructions out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Now, you may set off. No, there is nothing between us. Walk to the street corner at the end – there by the tavern sign – and wait for me to join you.’ Lythgoe did as he was told, the sag of his shoulder as he picked up his bag suggesting that it contained nothing lighter than an anvil, and Mr Pardew watched him go, or rather did not watch him, fo
r he very soon took himself and his belongings – shouldered once more, in a very jaunty way – across to the far pavement, where he sauntered lazily for a moment or two before quickening his pace and finally coming to rest at the point where the south side of Cornhill turns into the mighty expanse of Gracechurch Street. Here he looked northwards for a moment, less interested in the sight of Lythgoe standing dismally beneath the sign of the Porter’s Retreat, with a picture on it of a porter so jolly and rubicund that he cannot have existed outside Mr Dickens’ imagination, than in the vista of shopfronts and commercial premises that went away on his left-hand side. These were as he remembered them: the steam-laundry shop, the yawning staircase, the black wall behind which lay Mr Gallentin’s strongroom, the latter’s sparkling frontage, and the poulterer’s shop, in whose window, the early evening now being advanced, no poultry remained.

  Mr Pardew took another keen look, with his jaw jutting out in front of him like a ship’s prow, and saw that the shopmen were at work in Mr Gallentin’s window taking out the trays of jewellery and pulling down the blinds. In another quarter of an hour, he told himself, the place would be shut up. Signalling to Lythgoe – he did this with the faintest motion of his fingers, as if he were adjusting his cuff, only that Lythgoe saw it and nodded in return – he moved a few yards along the pavement and turned into a little alley that ran along Cornhill’s southern side, always keeping the same few yards of Mr Gallentin’s shopfront under a discreet surveillance. Presently the door of Mr Gallentin’s shop swung open and a couple of young men came out, settled their hats on their heads as they stood talking on the step and then plunged away in the direction of Leadenhall Street, and Mr Pardew, remembering his own youth and its constraints, rather thought that he envied them. Then, five minutes after this, the door swung open again and Mr Gallentin himself appeared on the step, quite tremendous in a frock-coat and a tall hat with a black oblong case in his hand, and Mr Pardew wondered what he had in it. It struck him as curious that Gallentin’s did not put up its shutters, but then, as he reminded himself, no jeweller leaves his goods in the window and therefore shuttering of the kind that ornaments a tobacconist’s or a pastrycook’s may be thought superfluous. Mr Gallentin’s figure was now a hundred yards away, and Mr Pardew crossed the road, not looking at Lythgoe but again signalling with his forefinger, and passed into the shadow of the staircase, where he stood hidden from view, waiting for his accomplice to join him.

  ‘Now,’ he said, very briskly and giving his companion’s arm a little tap with his stick, ‘just you go up those stairs and knock on the outer door you’ll find. Nobody will answer it, and when they don’t, and haven’t done for a moment or so, why, give a little whistle and I shall come and join you. If anyone should answer, which they won’t, you’re Messrs Gillray the ecclesiastical commissioners’ legal representative come to the wrong address, or some such. There’s nothing to fear and no danger that can befall you.’ As he uttered these reassuring words, Mr Pardew darted his head out of the staircase’s entry and glanced back along the pavement, but there was no one there. On the instant, just as it had done in the garden at Gray’s Inn, Mr Pardew’s mind jumped back and he remembered himself in the van of a train racketing over the viaduct beyond London Bridge, in the company of a man who had been sent to Australia in a convict ship. Mr Pardew smiled, heard the low whistle from above, and went rapidly up the stairs. The dust rose up in little eddies under his feet, the motes hung in the air and the noise made by his boot-tips echoed in the silence.

  Outside in Cornhill there had been bright sunshine gently diffusing across the pavements and gleaming off the windows of the Porter’s Retreat. Here everything was gathered up in shadow. The door to the set of offices was locked fast and Lythgoe stood uneasily before it, his hand still on the knob. ‘There’s no one there,’ he said superfluously, and Mr Pardew smiled again. ‘I daresay you wish there had been,’ he remarked. He had a little metal cylinder in his hand like a long, thin pencil, and this he now twisted sharply into the lock, jerked once to the right, once to the left, took out, put back again and gave a final jerk and a stamp with his foot. The door flew open and they stepped inside, Mr Pardew immediately turning and pulling it to behind him. Noting the ease with which they had gained entry, Lythgoe seemed to lose something of his disquiet. ‘What kind of place is this?’ he whispered as they stood in the ghostly vestibule, with the dust spreading under their feet. Mr Pardew, who had already begun to make his way towards the corridor, said, ‘What kind of place? Why, offices, attorneys, clerks – that kind of thing. A tea-broker, too, if my nose don’t deceive me. If you’ve a kettle we might easily sit down and recruit ourselves. Ha!’ And Mr Pardew gave an altogether mindless laugh and forged on into the shadow.

  It was not quite as dark as it might have been, for here and there a window in one of the adjoining rooms admitted a stray gleam of light into the passage. ‘Tea,’ Lythgoe said, perhaps recalling certain commercial transactions in which he had taken an interest, ‘now, that’s an item you need a licence for, if I recollect,’ but Mr Pardew did not trouble to answer him. He was calculating the number of hours that it might take to achieve the task before him, and wondering as he did so what aspects of it could be delegated to his assistant. ‘I can stay here until Monday morning,’ he said to himself, and gave a little swish with his stick at some imaginary policeman who lurked in front of the big rooms – the rooms with whose floors he had been so much concerned – whose doors they now negotiated. ‘Not much light in here, is there?’ Lythgoe offered, as they tramped into the second and larger chamber. Mr Pardew ignored him. Again, he was deep in thought. The second room was empty, apart from a chair with only three legs, a pile of sacking, what looked like a cast-iron heating apparatus and a portrait of Her Majesty in her Coronation robes hanging on the wall. A lamp, brought in from one of the adjoining rooms and lit with a sulphur match out of Mr Pardew’s pocket, cast long, eerie shadows. ‘Cheerful kind of place, ain’t it?’ Mr Pardew laughed again. He had taken off his coat – it was the same coat he had worn on the afternoon Lythgoe had surprised him in Boulogne – and dropped it over the three-legged chair. ‘Now, have the goodness to help me lift up this carpet.’

  ‘Help you do what?’

  ‘Lift the carpet – there, by the ends.’

  The carpet was an ancient drugget, much frayed and in places no more than a quarter-inch thick. Peeled back to perhaps half its extent, it revealed a yet more ancient floor, boards stained almost to black by some long-ago exposure to wax. Mr Pardew looked at the boards for a moment, quite judiciously, as if he were a pork butcher planning his first cut, took a piece of chalk from the carpet-bag, which he now put down on the floor beside him, and drew a rough circle, perhaps a couple of feet in diameter, over the wood.

  ‘What’s that you’re about?’ Lythgoe wondered, leaning forward with the lamp in his hand.

  ‘Why, I am sending a telegram to Windsor requesting an audience of Her Majesty. What does it look as if I am doing? You had better give me that bag of yours.’

  Mr Pardew’s expression as he took up the bag was quite wonderful to see. The manager of a penny-gaff who had happened to pass by would probably have engaged him on the spot, in the certainty that the bag contained a dozen bunches of violets and a brace of pouter pigeons. Instead Mr Pardew took out a short hatchet, with which he instantly made a deep incision in the area of the floorboards within the chalk circle.

  ‘Why, the wood is half rotted,’ he exclaimed. ‘We should be thankful we haven’t already fallen to our deaths.’

  Again, it was wonderful to see Mr Pardew at his work. He made one or two dextrous motions with the hatchet, and chopped out a little more of the wood. Then he took an iron spike out of the bag, jabbed it under the protruding surface and twisted it a little more. Somewhere in the middle distance – in Leadenhall Street, say, or Bishopsgate – a clock was striking the hour, and he listened to the chimes with his head on one side. It was six o’clock. There now lay exposed befor
e him an area of off-white plaster, not quite approximating to the area of the chalked circle but perhaps eighteen inches across at its widest point. ‘It will do, I daresay,’ Mr Pardew said, almost to himself, reaching once more into the bag. The reason why Lythgoe’s shoulder had sagged as he picked it up now became clear. Inside, neatly wrapped in a coil of rope, was a twenty-pound hammer. Seizing it in both hands, and bending over the floor like a man hewing wood, Mr Pardew gave the plaster a couple of sharp blows, stepped a pace or two back and, taking the lamp from Lythgoe’s outstretched hand, gazed into the jagged hole that had opened up beneath him. This done, he took the coil of rope, bound one end round the stanchions of the heating apparatus, and let the other end down into the hole.

  Lythgoe, who had watched these manoeuvrings with mounting unease, and now understood what was afoot, said suddenly: ‘I’ll not go down there. You’ll not make me.’

  ‘Maybe I shan’t make you,’ Mr Pardew said, still playing out the rope in his hands. ‘But you’ll go all the same, I fancy.’

  There was a wild look in Lythgoe’s eye. ‘I’ll——’

  ‘You’ll what?’ Mr Pardew said easily. ‘Run out into Leadenhall Street and fetch a policeman? What’s in that bag alone would be enough to send you to the hulks. You’d do much better to stay here. Now, just take a hold of the lamp – like that, do you see? – while I go down. If you don’t care to bring the bag with you, you may lower it.’ So saying, Mr Pardew took a firm grip on the rope and with an agility that was surprising for a man of his years began to lower himself into the murk.