The oldest, yet the latest thing (Part 2)
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Back at Downton, Jimmy gets asked a few questions, of course, but nothing he can’t dodge. Even the girls throwing him worried looks from across the dinner table in the servants’ hall give up after a while. Now, if only Barrow keeps his mouth shut about it, then Jimmy might be able to pretend that nothing’s happened; they will all eventually forget about the whole ordeal with the telegram and chalk it up to some distant cousin of Jimmy’s falling ill or something.
For a brief moment, Jimmy worries if his secret is safe with Barrow. After all, with anyone else the underbutler would probably use it against them should the need suddenly arise. He would give them away or even blackmail them if it were to serve him somehow. But then, the man has probably still got a soft spot for Jimmy a cricket pitch wide and doesn't breathe a word to anyone about it all.
It’s just once - on the next morning - that Jimmy panics briefly, and that’s when Barrow’s usual seat at the breakfast table remains unoccupied.
“Where’s Mr Barrow?” he gets out between two unenthusiastic bites of his breakfast, watching with disgust as Alfred attacks yesterday’s leftover black pudding with more gusto than seems humanly possible.
“Mr Barrow is running errands for His Lordship,” Mr Carson states importantly. “Not that it is any of your concern, James.” Then the butler suddenly inclines his large head in Mrs Hughes’s direction and adds in a still remarkably deep, rumbling undertone, “Apparently, His Lordship’s opera binoculars are broken and needed to be taken into repair … straightaway for some mysterious reason.”
“Well,” the Scotswoman speculates, knife cutting into her meal with practised precision, “with the Dullops joining us from London today, His Lordship will simply have remembered how useful they always come in in a box at one of those London theatres. Wasn’t there this one play he and Her Ladyship used to be so fond of?”
“‘Sweet Lavender’,” Mr Bates offers, slyly peering at Jimmy over his cup of tea. “I think Lord Dullop told him it’d be revived on stage sometime later this year … ‘While there is tea, there is hope’,” he quotes dryly with little inflexion in his voice.
At that, Alfred raises his teacup as if to toast the man. “Now, there’s a notion I can agree with, Mr Bates,” he announces happily around his mouthful of sausage, words almost indiscernible because of his stuffed cheeks, genuine smile playing on his face. Then he washes down the food with a healthy swallow of tea.
“Could you possibly chew any louder?!” Jimmy hisses at him lowly. But inwardly, he feels relieved that Barrow’s absence hasn’t got anything to do with him and their trip to York.
He tries to purge all worries from his mind and concentrate on the tasks of the day, spending the best part of the morning hauling around the luggage of their newly arrived guests, his back aching and his fingers stiff from being outside in the cold.
The rain is even worse today than it was the day before, which is probably down to the fact that the wind has picked up considerably over the course of the night and is throwing gusts of icy air and cold water into his and Alfred’s scrunched up faces as they work side by side to unload the motor car as quickly as possible.
As they drag the valises inside, they track water and mud all over the hand-woven Persian carpet, staining its lavish Oriental arabesques and palmette ornaments. Mr Carson almost blows a gasket at the sight, somehow managing, once again, to look more enraged by Jimmy than by Alfred.
Jimmy’s mood only improves when Barrow turns up sometime after lunch.
He stumbles across the underbutler in the downstairs corridor just as the man shakes the water off his umbrella.
Despite the umbrella, though, a cascade of raindrops has found its way onto his coat, and there are even a few stray droplets glistening diamond-like in his pitch-black hair - which looks rather fetching, some distant part of Jimmy’s brain provides, unasked.
Jimmy’s mood brightens considerably at the sight. (Well, maybe the fact that Barrow is positively beaming contributes to that as well.)
The man quickly looks around, clearing his throat, then pulls Jimmy aside. “Your son sends his love,” he says in a low voice.
“What?! … What the hell are you talking about?” Jimmy hisses, taking a concerned look around the deserted hallway, brows furrowing. “I thought you were getting a pair of binoculars fixed or something.”
“I was. See?” Barrow replies with a wry smile, pulling a pair of small theatre binoculars out of his coat pocket and lifting them up to his eyes for a split second as if to demonstrate that they are back in working order.
It is a short moment in which Jimmy is so transfixed that he forgets to breathe because of the way the underbutler looks all of a sudden.
The man is standing there, face turned to him in profile, dark head tilted slightly to one side, pale hand holding the elegant silver-plated, ivory binoculars up to his eyes, looking, for what it's worth, like an illustration in one of those magazines that the maids love to flick through in the evenings.
Yes, it flashes through Jimmy's mind, standing there like this, Barrow is just one pair of white glacé gloves away from resembling one of those dashing gentlemen depicted in their advertising sections.
Pictures that - whether they entice readers to try out an innovative shaving knife made of stainless Sheffield steel, a new, more effective kind of starch powder for detachable collars or some novel radioactive toothpaste that ‘strengthens your gums and bleaches your teeth, giving your smile that certain glow’ - invariably show dapper gentlemen clad in exquisite bespoke suits, patent leather shoes and white spats, dressed as if they’re about to attend a performance at Covent Garden, their perfectly coiffed hair slicked back and shiny, cigarette dangling casually between their long, elegant fingers, holding themselves with effortless grace, haughty smiles playing on their insanely handsome features …
Yes, as far as Barrow’s looks are concerned, he is easily on par with such legendary dandies as Max Beerbohm and Boni de Castellane, possibly possessing even more handsome poise and distinction. Perhaps the man should consider a career change, Jimmy muses. After all, there must be hundreds of illustrators, and artists in general, licking their chops for a model like him …
“See? They’ve got new lenses now … And anyway, it was a nice excuse to go into York today,” Barrow says with a smile, lowering the binoculars again and making Jimmy snap out of his thoughts.
“And you’ve visited Eddie?” Jimmy asks quickly, feeling guilty for thinking about men in magazine ads instead of his sick son.
Barrow nods. “I thought it’d be a good idea to check up on him on my way back here.”
“Right,” Jimmy clears his throat. “How is he?”
“Much better. He hasn’t needed the doctor; the fever has broken overnight, and he’s got a runny nose now that makes the water garden over at Fountains Abbey look desertlike by comparison. He’s got snot all over my sleeve,” Barrow says proudly, as if that were some kind of achievement.
“Sorry,” Jimmy chuckles, a great sense of relief washing over him. Suddenly, he can picture it all: Barrow drinking tea with Mrs Petersen, the two of them swapping stories and comforting Eddie, trying very hard not to smile at the boy’s whining.
Somewhere deep down, Jimmy also knows that Barrow probably hasn’t taken back the money intended for the doctor, has maybe even gone behind Jimmy’s back and left some more of the folding stuff while Jimmy wasn’t looking. He feels uneasy at the thought, but his relief is too strong right now to argue. “Thank you … thank you for doing all of this for my boy, Mr Barrow,” he says quietly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“I’ll see if I can check up on him tomorrow again,” Barrow replies.
“And how do you want to manage that?”
“Oh, you know …” Barrow shrugs mock-innocently, dimple threatening to show in his cheek. “His Lordship has got a lot more errands to run in York than he’s currently suspecting,” he grins slyly. “Also, I could always break something accidentally … again.”
And suddenly, Jimmy can just see him: the manipulative Mr Barrow, constantly plotting and scheming, always getting people to do what he wants, and he feels himself smile involuntarily at the image. “Anything for the greater good, eh?”
“Exactly,” Barrow says, pretending to be deadly serious, eyes sparkling with mischief, though.
It’s strange, but somehow Jimmy feels better knowing that now there’s someone he can share his secret with, an accomplice to shoulder part of his burden, a secret confidant to talk to should he ever be out of his mind with worry for his son again, or be paralysed with fear of being found out.
“Your boy misses you,” Barrow interrupts his thoughts. “I had to promise him you’d drop by on your next half-day.”
“Of course,” Jimmy replies throatily. “Did he ask you to tell me anything else?”
Barrow seems to hesitate for a moment. “Yes … yes he did. He asked me to tell you something.”
“What?” Jimmy asks, a tad impatiently.
“‘I love you’,” Barrow says softly with a wistful expression on his face that’s something between a flicker of a smile and a shadow of sadness … and disappears down the corridor, taking the smell of rain and cigarette smoke with him.
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Their newly-arrived guests are dull, Jimmy thinks, just the usual rich and mind-numbingly bland aristocrats. Both of them, husband and wife, are condescending, arrogant Londoners, who manage to be so boring that they make polishing silver spoons look interesting by comparison.
Their valet isn’t boring.
At all.
Jimmy senses the man means trouble with every fibre of his body the very moment Mr Wright sets his brogue-shod foot in the house and instantly dislikes him. The girls have started to giggle sillily whenever the visiting valet walks into the servants’ hall, which makes Jimmy want to throttle them with his bare hands. But at least Ivy is so preoccupied with the man now that she temporarily forgets to throw Jimmy her usual dozen or so soulful looks a day. So, at least that’s good news.
The fact that Lord Dullop’s man doesn’t pay her any mind has obviously escaped her attention. It hasn’t escaped Jimmy’s, though.
He’s also noticed that Wright always looks at Mr Barrow whenever he asks something, as if waiting for the underbutler’s approval, and Jimmy doesn’t like this development one bit.
It starts on the first evening when Wright sits down in the servants’ hall to regale the wide-eyed maids with tales of the dazzling, glittering capital … of its night clubs filled with boisterous jazz music, thick smoke and frivolous girls in skimpy dresses, dancing ferociously on the tables, slurping champagne out of their shoes and sniffing cocaine off the naked chests of Negro saxophone players or some equally ridiculous thing … (Jimmy isn’t really paying attention.) Wright is lucky to get away with telling bawdy stories like this, anyway. If Mr Carson were present, he wouldn’t.
In any case, Wright then proceeds to claim that he has once caught sight of Lady Rose dancing the tango in one of those West End clubs.
“And you know,” Wright says with a little wink at the girls, “with the shorter hemlines these days, you could see not just the long seam on the back of her silk stockings …” This draws a shocked gasp from his audience. “… but also the entire length of her legs, all the way up to her suspenders, every time she was executing a sentada,” he adds, after a short pause for emphasis, in that annoying Southern accent of his that has Jimmy gnashing his teeth.
It’s as if Wright were screaming, ‘Look at me, man of the world!’ - so obviously is he showing off.
It makes Jimmy want to throw up.
And anyway … why is everyone at the table looking so scandalised? Jimmy can’t really see what’s so grand about women’s stockings. They’re perfectly ordinary pieces of clothing, aren’t they?
And then it suddenly happens: Wright gives a wry smirk and adds, “Not that I was looking that closely, mind. I’m not that fascinated by women dancing the tango,” giving Barrow an almost shy look out of the corner of his eye as if to gauge the underbutler’s reaction to this remark, like a puppy awkwardly beseeching its owner to pay attention to it.
Barrow, in his corner, doesn’t seem to have noticed it, engrossed in his newspaper as he is.
For Jimmy, however, this is the moment that he officially starts to hate Mr Horace Wright with a burning passion.
To his utter surprise, this sentiment is more than shared by Mr Carson, who, on the first day, takes one look at Wright’s shoes, his gaze travelling down the somewhat loud stripes of the man’s trouser legs, and starts to resemble a very put-out Zeus about to throw a thunderbolt.
The thing is that the visiting valet is sporting a pair of rather flashy wingtip-style black-and-white brogues.
And, to add insult to injury, the man then mistakes Carson’s sharp glance for interest and tells him, with a touchingly sincere smile, that the shoes were, in fact, a generous gift from Lord Dullop (something the old man bought for his valet on a trip to New York, apparently), which in turn makes it virtually impossible for the butler to object to them or to even bring up the topic again.
So, in the end, Mr Carson is forced to resort to just muttering to himself for the next few days whenever he thinks no one is listening.
One evening, Jimmy is just passing the butler in the downstairs hallway when he hears the man grumble in his deep voice, “Well, I never! … Co-respondent shoes in the dining room? Of all the nerve! … What’s next?! Wearing bathing suits to church? Or … cowboy hats to the Royal Albert Hall? Or … or … knickerbockers on the Woolsack? Or … or … or …”
“… vests and caleçons in the King’s Guard,” Barrow finishes his sentence for him as he comes walking round the corner.
“Exactly,” Carson agrees gravely, giving the underbutler a nod. “The gall of it! The impertinence!”
“Unacceptable, yes! I agree: it’s an absolute disgrace,” Barrow tuts disapprovingly, the sombre expression on his face almost convincing, his eyebrows furrowed in mock consternation. (How he even manages to keep a straight face is anyone’s guess. Jimmy, for his part, is furiously biting his lip behind Carson’s back to stop himself from bursting out laughing.)
“That it is, Thomas; that it is,” Carson whispers, still in utter dismay. “I hope I can trust you to keep an eye on this … this individual? I wouldn’t want him to make a spectacle of himself in front of the family.”
“Oh, absolutely, Mr Carson,” Barrow assures him, inclining his head - if only to hide the fact that he can barely contain his grin.
To Jimmy’s surprise, Mr Carson doesn’t seem to notice that Barrow is only feigning indignation (that the man is, in fact, secretly smirking about his superior’s love of decorum) and says, “I knew I could rely on you, Th- Mr Barrow,” throwing his deputy an almost warm parting look, that speaks of his approval of the underbutler’s ever-impeccable attire, and even giving him an awkward, grandfatherly clap on the shoulder, before trudging down the corridor and out of sight.
Apparently, offending footwear beats deviant sexual nature by a mile on Carson’s list of most egregious abominations, Jimmy muses, sniggering inwardly.
‘Men who enjoy kissing other blokes as a pastime? Regrettable, mildly disturbing inconvenience that calls for a discreet, speedy cover-up … Men who are daring in their sartorial choices? Impending apocalypse threatening to plunge mankind into a new dark age,’ he thinks, not even noticing that he is still grinning at Barrow until suddenly Wright comes strolling round the corner like a lost puppy looking for a home.
‘I shouldn’t be smiling about any of this,’ Jimmy realises with a sudden jolt. ‘Barrow’s … ailment is no laughing matter. It was I who got assaulted by him, after all.’ But he simply cannot stop himself. Mr Carson’s outrage is just too funny sometimes. Jimmy can feel a wide grin stretch across his face, and from the way Barrow is smiling brightly back at him, it’s clear that the other man is still inwardly laughing about their superior as well.
Their eyes stay locked like this for what seems like a brief eternity, sparkling with this shared secret joke that only the two of them are in on. And Jimmy counts it as a small personal victory that Barrow doesn’t avert his eyes for even a second, letting the strange Mr Wright pass them by without so much as a sideways glance in his direction.
The Dullops’ valet, for his part, sports a rather befuddled expression on his long face as he disappears down the corridor, probably wondering what has the underbutler and the footman smiling like this in the middle of a hallway, what private joke it is that has the two men wrapped up in this little bubble of theirs, oblivious to the outside world, locked in a perfect moment of silence and light.
When they finally look away from each other, Jimmy is left with a feeling of happy giddiness in his chest, that is followed by a quiver of childish triumph at the realisation that Barrow hasn't even paid attention to Wright’s pleading puppy-eyed look.
But Wright doesn’t seem to give up so easily.
Continued here