by D. J. Taylor
‘What? Is it all done?’
‘All done,’ Mr Pardew said. He was examining the strongroom door and wondering how that, too, might be made to look as if it had sustained no hurt.
Ten minutes later – it was half past five in the morning – anyone walking down Cornhill into the dawn (but that there was no one) might have seen a tall, grim-looking man and a small, shabby-looking one, each very pale-faced and somewhat dishevelled, coming smartly along its southern edge in the direction of Leadenhall Street, and that, in addition to the carpet-bag slung over his shoulder, the tall man carried two braces of pheasants on his arm.
‘Here now,’ Mr Pardew remarked, as they reached the corner of Leadenhall Street, and prepared to go their separate ways, taking down two of the pheasants. ‘You had better have these.’
It seemed for a moment as if Lythgoe might refuse them, but then he thought better of it and let the birds slide into his grasp. ‘But where am I to say I got them?’ he asked. ‘That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘Where did you get them?’ In the distance the sun was coming up over the pediment of St Paul’s. There was violet sky behind it. Mr Pardew laughed. ‘Why, say that Lord Fairhurst gave them to you.’
Part Three
XIV
Hounds upon the Scent
Dear me, London is the queerest place. A man can live in it twenty years and not understand the spirit that animates it, or the odd conjunctions that bring the people who journey through it fleetingly together …
London: Its Haunts, Homes and Habitations: A Compendium (1867)
ALL MORNING AND for much of the afternoon a harsh April breeze had been blowing stiffly across Clipstone Court. Now, in the early evening, it had grown subdued. The cinder-dirt lay in piles where the wind had carried it, and the fragments of packing case had been swept away to form a matchwood reef that blocked up one of the entrances. A drunk woman sat on a doorstep with her head in her hands, shrewdly observed by the proprietor of what had once been the tobacconist’s shop – now a desperate grocer’s – who stood in his doorway with a look of puzzlement on his face. Beyond the drunk woman and the shopkeeper, the four figures of a street acrobat and his family went slowly over the north-west corner of the court to the culvert that leads into Goodge Street, with the voice of the man occasionally breaking over the noise of their footsteps as he upbraided his little son.
‘You understand me, you bad boy! As long as you’re with me you got to come under collar. And where’ll you be next I dunno, a bad creature like you.’ Of the four, only the father was dressed in his professional costume: a pair of very dirty silk stockings, a buff-coloured tunic and old-fashioned buckle shoes. Curiously these articles, together with the fact that, like the lachrymose woman on the doorstep, he was slightly drunk, gave him an odd sense of dignity. He walked with a slow, mincing step, raising the heel of each foot higher than required and placing his toes very slightly out of kilter.
‘You bad boy,’ he said again. ‘I can’t think what’s coming to you. To go and lose a sixpence like that! A creature like you!’
The father loomed above the tiny figure shuffling under his elbow and kept his eyes fixed on him. He was a very thin, sparse boy of seven or eight, who made no sound but cried quietly as he went. He wore a man’s cap, a dirty sailor’s jacket and a pair of button boots that looked as if they might have been given to him by his mother.
‘To go and lose a sixpence!’ the man said. He had a gaunt, raw face, and had spent five minutes that morning accentuating his eyebrows with burnt cork and rubbing up his cheekbones with rouge. This gave him a frightful but exotic look, like a Red Indian warrior that had just climbed out of a coal-scuttle. As they came near the grocer’s shop, with its mournful display of split-pea sacks, candles, potted tongue and dried beef, he caught the boy a cuff with the side of his hand, and the shopkeeper, thinking that these irruptions of spirit ought to be encouraged, cried out: ‘S’elp me father, that’s a good ’un. Wallop his trousers.’ But the man ignored him, as he ignored the noise of the traffic drifting in from Tottenham Court Road, and the sound of the woman behind him.
‘You bad boy,’ he said once more. ‘Where d’you think you’ll fetch yourself, eh?’
The woman, a frail slip of a woman, walked behind them with the smaller child. She took no interest in the lost sixpence, or the view of Clipstone Court or the drunk woman on the doorstep. None of these things disturbed her. Instead she spoke to the child, whom she held by the hand, half a dozen paces behind the man of anger. Then, as they reached the culvert which ran on in Goodge Street, she yelled, ‘George, George.’
The man turned round.
‘Look after Annie,’ she yelled again.
The idea appealed to the man. With a flourish of his arms, and a motion of his front foot that was almost graceful, he swung the child up onto his shoulders and settled her there. As he did so, the boy sidled up to his mother, reached into his pocket and passed her something that only the two of them saw, and the cortège – silk-stockinged father, lofted child, mother and son – moved on and out of Clipstone Court for ever.
*
‘You can eat them, you know, if you’ve a mind, McIvor,’ Mr Mulligan said, very graciously to his friend, who sat deferentially regarding the plate of boiled cockles, ‘for they aren’t to my taste. Rich food ain’t sometimes.’ There was a moment or two’s silence while McIvor applied himself to the shellfish and Mulligan looked attentively around him. In the months since they had last patronised the establishment, an energising brush had swept out some of the antique corners of the Clipstone Arms. There was a sheet of paper pinned to the wall advertising a Whit Monday excursion to Epping, and the posters giving notice of sporting benefits had all been taken down.
‘Ugh!’ Mulligan remarked, noting this access of sobriety. ‘If Tom Huddleston, as was the Dartford Chancer these fifteen years, can’t tell of his benefit here, then where can he tell of it? And a brake hired for Whit Monday at Epping! Gracious. Ginger beer all round, I shouldn’t wonder, and a prayer meeting to follow. I can’t stand these respectable houses. So, McIvor, how has the world been treating you since we last met? What about those books that you’ve been making up at the Bird in Hand?’
McIvor, whose plate was now a wasteland of cockle shells, and from whose teeth fragments of his meal still hung, did not look as if the world had been treating him particularly well. His coat was dirtier than ever, and there was a raking cut, which perhaps ought to have been stitched, across the back of one of his hands. Seeing the cut for the first time, Mulligan whistled through his teeth.
‘That’s a fair stab someone’s taken at you, McIvor. From the look of it I’d say you’re lucky you weren’t turned into mincemeat.’
‘They’re a dreadful rough crowd at the Bird in Hand,’ McIvor agreed.
‘Ha! Captain McTurk will close the place down one of these fair mornings, and be thanked for doing it. Well, there never was an arrangement that wasn’t the better for being settled. How much did the widder bring in then?’
McIvor had a battered brown pocketbook open on his lap and was running his finger up and down a line of figures.
‘Seventy-three letters. Of course, a few of them didn’t send the full half-crown. Some come in with only a shilling. You’d be surprised, Mr Mulligan, who some of them were from. Two clerical gentlemen, there were. Not to mention Mr Aloysius Barraclough, as is the member for Chadwell Heath.’
‘That Barraclough’ll have a bailiff stepping up to him at the front door of the House one of these days if he’s not careful … How much?’
‘Eight pound thirteen shillings and sixpence,’ McIvor said. There was an odd glint in his eye that Mr Mulligan did not perhaps notice.
‘That’s fair, I will allow. Next time, McIvor, we shall have to lay out more on the advertising. Costs more to begin with, but it pays in the end. There can’t be no more widders though, more’s the pity.’
‘Why’s that, Mr Mulligan?’
&nbs
p; ‘Well –’ Mr Mulligan put a finger between his teeth and looked anxiously around the room. ‘It’s not for me to say, but there’s something wrong about that hoss.’
‘What do you mean “wrong”? Broke its leg or got the pneumony?’
‘You’re green, McIvor, that’s what you are. No, nothing like that. Why, there was a meeting in Lincolnshire where it well-nigh flew over the line. The Pictorial Times had a picture of it in its stall and said it was fit to carry the Prince. But what would you say if I told you Major Hubbins was to ride it?’
‘Major Hubbins!’
‘I know, I know. Saw him ride at Brighton, why it must have been three years ago, and they near enough had to call for a Bath chair for him when he came in.’
‘If you told me you owned a horse and Major Hubbins was to have the riding of it, I should say that you didn’t want it to win.’
‘That’s what folk are saying about Tiberius. But he may do it, you know. That Septuagint is money thrown away.’
‘They are saying Pendragon has a chance.’
‘An old nag from Devon that would be better off carrying children on the sands.’ Mr Mulligan seemed to have lost interest in the Derby. His eye moved restlessly out into the court, where the wind had got up again, and then back to the cover of McIvor’s pocketbook. ‘Anyhow,’ he said. ‘Eight pound thirteen and six is eight pound thirteen and six, so we’d best settle up. I’ve to Clerkenwell at seven, and for once it’s not a hoss that’s taking me there.’ Whatever was taking Mr Mulligan to Clerkenwell was presumably the cause of the green cutaway coat that he wore and the flower that drooped rakishly out of his buttonhole. ‘Three quarters to a quarter, didn’t we say? I make that six pound ten shillings and a penny ha’penny.’
‘It was seventy to thirty,’ McIvor said. ‘And that ain’t fair, neither.’
‘Not fair! What do you mean, it’s not fair? Who was it that put you up to the dodge, I wonder? Wrote the blessed notice for you and told you where to advertise it and all? Three quarters to the quarter it is, or I shall know why.’
McIvor took out an immensely dirty purse and laid it on the table. ‘You can have five sovereigns, Mr Mulligan, seeing that seventy–thirty was what I agreed to, which I was a fool to. Them letters didn’t write themselves.’
‘And neither did the tale that ’ticed em, which you didn’t have the wit to write yourself. Bob McIvor, that drinks up other chaps’ leavings at the Bird in Hand, which folk that go there have told me about.’
‘It’s no more than you do yourself,’ shrieked McIvor. He was very angry. ‘Five sovereigns and not a halfpenny more.’
‘Five sovereigns be d——d.’ Mulligan. Then, seeing the publican come striding through from the public bar to enjoin quiet, he lowered his voice. ‘This house is like a blessed girls’ school,’ he said. ‘They’ll be having ’ymn-singing here on a Sunday night, I shouldn’t wonder, with a collection plate going round. You step outside, McIvor, and we’ll settle this.’
Both talking at the limit of their voices, and gesticulating with free hands, they tumbled out of the door. Here the light had begun to fade and there were flashes of soot drifting in from above the rooftops. The first casualty was Mr Mulligan’s buttonhole, which went into a gutter. The grocer, who had come out to furl up his awning, looked delightedly on. At the court’s south-western corner an assault was made on McIvor’s purse, which he resisted, and the two of them rolled out into the Tottenham Court Road, where a policeman saw them and, blowing a whistle to summon his colleagues, came running to investigate.
*
There are some conversations that are too private even for the library of a gentlemen’s club. And so it chanced that, perhaps a week after the burglary at Mr Gallentin’s shop, Mr Happerton and Captain Raff might have been seen walking towards each other on Westminster Bridge. No one who saw them could have predicted that they meant to meet. Neither gave the other so much as a look, and both kept to opposite sides of the bridge, so that their view was every so often cut off by the passing hay-carts and the other miscellaneous traffic rolling in from Lambeth. But somehow, a moment or two later, they could be found leaning together on the rail and staring down the river towards Battersea, where three or four lighters and small craft were engaged in the task of getting a moribund tug to turn into the current. It was a brisk spring afternoon and the wind had got up, so that in the distance the smoke from the Kennington factory chimneys drifted north in little clouds and eddies, and it was clear from the demeanour of the two persons on the rail that one of them burned to confide some choice piece of information while the other was curiously reluctant to hear it. The person who burned to do the confiding was Captain Raff, who fidgeted, winked at his companion a couple of times and then, apparently defeated, stared down the river again, where the tug was moving slowly upstream towards Putney or Richmond or Teddington Lock – all places that Captain Raff, to judge from the bleakness of his expression, would have preferred to be rather than perched on Westminster Bridge, with the wind blowing into his face. Then, after what seemed an eternity, and the passage of at least a dozen more hay-carts, Mr Happerton remarked:
‘Gracious, Raff, what have you been up to? You look as if you had been dragged through a hedge.’
‘What’s that? What is the matter with me?’
‘Only that your face is all of a colour with your shirtfront.’
Captain Raff rocked uncomfortably on the heels of his boots, one of which looked as if it might be about to part company with the sole. In fact the colour of his shirtfront was grey.
‘Well, it was deuced late I got to bed, I don’t mind telling you. A fellow is bound to look a little pale sometimes, you know.’
‘Never mind that. I daresay you’re not so young as you were.’ Mr Happerton lowered his voice. ‘Where has he gone?’
Captain Raff looked cautious. ‘I hardly like to say.’
‘Well, try anyway. Where?’
‘Vanished! Disappeared!’ Captain Raff said. ‘Won’t show his face.’ And then: ‘Richmond, I believe.’
‘And the goods?’
‘The goods?’ Captain Raff lowered his voice to a level only just commensurable with its being heard. ‘Well, it was the most awkward thing you ever saw. There is that fellow in Whitechapel that has known me a dozen years positively refused to do business. Think of it! A nasty Jew not wanting to do a gentleman a service.’
‘I’m surprised you stood for it, Raff. But go on.’
‘It is that policeman McTurk, you know. They say he has agents everywhere. It was the same in the West End, and that is usually quite a different thing. Quite a different thing,’ Captain Raff repeated, almost piteously, as if the wickedness of the world was altogether beyond him. ‘And that man Savory says he does not deal in stones any more, for the jewellers are all being watched.’
‘Things have come to a pretty pass when a man like Savory won’t deal in stones. What does he deal in, I should like to know?’
‘They have fallen off deplorably,’ Captain Raff said, with a really impressive gravity. The tug was almost out of sight now, moving into the shallows of Battersea Bridge. A flock of gulls sprang up in its wake, like a handful of paper scraps flung suddenly into the air. ‘I tell you what it is, Happerton. Why, if things go on like this a fellow won’t be able to make a living, no matter how hard he tries.’
‘There are other places than the West End,’ Mr Happerton said.
‘And some of them d——d queer,’ Captain Raff said bitterly. ‘Ugh! Those men in Clerkenwell. I don’t know how a fellow is to stand them.’
‘It seems to me you stand most things pretty well, Raff. Never mind. If the goods are disposed of, we needn’t worry. But no one is to do anything foolish, mind.’
‘What? Put them on display in the Commercial Road, or offer them back to Gallentin at discount? I should say not,’ Captain Raff remarked, in pious horror.
There was a silence. The tug had disappeared and the gulls vanished in its wake.
The sun shone through misty, grey-white clouds, very melancholic and mournful. Mr Happerton was thinking about the substantial sum of money that had now come into his hands, and how it might best be laid out. Captain Raff, meanwhile, licking his lips nervously, looked as if he might be about to speak, subsided, was silent for a moment, and then, all in a rush, said:
‘See here, Happerton, now that there are – funds available, I take it you’d like me to lay them out. There is a fellow in Regent’s Park still offering sixes on Tiberius, you know. At least he was when my man Delaney was there the other day.’
Mr Happerton smiled, but it was not a very nice smile. ‘That’s very civil of you, Raff, but I shall be doing the laying out myself. A fellow is always better placed in the matter of odds when he does it himself, I think. Now, are you going anywhere?’
‘I thought – to the club,’ Captain Raff said miserably.
‘Ah well, we had better say goodbye then, for I have to see a man at Tattersall’s.’
And Mr Happerton took his leave, sauntering back across Westminster Bridge with his hat tipped very jauntily on the back of his head, while Captain Raff stood gnawing the inside of his cheek and wondering why a service he had previously performed so punctiliously for his employer should now be so unaccountably denied him.
*
How is a newly married young lady to fill her time when her husband is at his place of work, or in Mr Happerton’s case at the Blue Riband Club or standing by the ring at Tattersall’s? To be sure, there is the management of her house to take an interest in, but the establishment at Belgrave Square was very neatly administered by the old butler and the housekeeper, and as Mrs Happerton could not have cared less what she ate and how often the curtains were taken down and sponged, this sphere was rather closed to her. Then there are one’s relatives to cosset and conciliate, but Mrs Happerton was frankly bored by her father’s company, and her aunt’s house at Eccleston Square was a torture to her. There is, of course, that infallible resort, light reading, but Mrs Happerton thought she had read enough novels to keep Mudie’s in business for a year. And so she was forced back to that time-honoured expedient – as common to a duchess’s mansion as a woodman’s cottage – of inviting her acquaintances to tea.
