Cakes and Ale

  I came across the photographs that Harry Retford, the actor, had had taken of Rosie, and then a photograph of the picture that Lionel Hillier had painted of her. It gave me a pang. That was how I best remembered her. Notwithstanding the old-fashioned gown, she was alive there, and tremulous with the passion that filled her. She seemed to offer herself to the assault of love.

  ‘She gives you the impression of a hefty wench,’ said Roy.

  ‘If you like the milkmaid type,’ answered Mrs Driffield. ‘I’ve always thought she looked rather like a white nigger.’

  That was what Mrs Barton Trafford had been fond of calling her, and with Rosie’s thick lips and broad nose there was indeed a hateful truth in the description. But they did not know how silvery golden her hair was, nor how golden silver her skin; they did not know her enchanting smile.

  ‘She wasn’t a bit like a white nigger,’ I said. ‘She was virginal like the dawn. She was like Hebe. She was like a tea rose.’

  Mrs Driffield smiled and exchanged a meaning glance with Roy.

  ‘Mrs Barton Trafford told me a great deal about her. I don’t wish to seem spiteful, but I’m afraid I don’t think that she can have been a very nice woman.’

  ‘That’s where you make a mistake,’ I replied. ‘She was a very nice woman. I never saw her in a bad temper. You only had to say you wanted something for her to give it to you. I never heard her say a disagreeable thing about anyone. She had a heart of gold.’

  ‘She was a terrible slattern, Her house was always in a mess, you didn’t like to sit down in a chair because it was so dusty, and you dared not look in the corners. And it was the same with her person. She could never put a skirt on straight, and you’d see about two inches of petticoat hanging down on one side.’

  ‘She didn’t bother about things like that. They didn’t make her any the less beautiful. And she was as good as she was beautiful.’

  Roy burst out laughing, and Mrs Driffield put up her hand to her mouth to hide her smile.

  ‘Oh, come, Mr Ashenden, that’s really going too far. After all, let’s face it, she was a nymphomaniac’

  ‘I think that’s a very silly word,’ I said.

  ‘Well, then, let me say that she can hardly have been a very good woman to treat poor Edward as she did. Of course it was a blessing in disguise. If she hadn’t run away from him he might have had to bear that burden for the rest of his life, and with such a handicap he could never have reached the position he did. But the fact remains that she was notoriously unfaithful to him. From what I hear she was absolutely promiscuous.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love.’

  ‘Do you call that love?’

  ‘Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn’t lasciviousness, it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character, she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.’

  Mrs Driffield looked as though she had taken a dose of castor oil and had just been trying to get the taste of it out of her mouth by sucking a lemon.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘But then I’m bound to admit that I never understood what Edward saw in her.’

  ‘Did he know that she was carrying on with all sorts of people?’ asked Roy.

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t,’ she replied quickly.

  ‘You think him a bigger fool than I do, Mrs Driffield,’ I said.

  ‘Then why did he put up with it?’

  ‘I think I can tell you. You see, she wasn’t a woman who ever inspired love. Only affection. It was absurd to be jealous over her. She was like a clear, deep pool in a forest glade, into which it’s heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gipsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.’

  Roy laughed again, and this time Mrs Driffield without concealment smiled thinly.

  ‘It’s comic to hear you so lyrical,’ said Roy.

  I stifled a sigh. I have noticed that when I am most serious people are apt to laugh at me, and indeed when after a lapse of time I have read passages that I wrote from the fullness of my heart I have been tempted to laugh at myself. It must be that there is something naturally absurd in a sincere emotion, though why there should be I cannot imagine; unless it is that man, the ephemeral inhabitant of an insignificant planet, with all his pain and all his striving is but a jest in an eternal mind.

  I saw that Mrs Driffield wished to ask me something. It caused her a certain embarrassment.

  ‘Do you think he’d have taken her back if she’d been willing to come?’

  ‘You knew him better than I. I should say no. I think that when he had exhausted an emotion he took no further interest in the person who had aroused it. I should say that he had a peculiar combination of strong feeling and extreme callousness.’

  ‘I don’t know how you can say that,’ cried Roy. ‘He was the kindest man I ever met.’

  Mrs Driffield looked at me steadily and then dropped her eyes.

  ‘I wonder what happened to her when she went to America,’ he asked.

  ‘I believe she married Kemp,’ said Mrs Driffield. ‘I heard they had taken another name. Of course they couldn’t show their faces over here again.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘Oh, about ten years ago.’

  ‘How did you hear?’ I asked.

  ‘From Harold Kemp, the son, he’s in some sort of business at Maidstone. I never told Edward. She’d been dead to him for many years and I saw no reason to remind him of the past. It always helps you if you put yourself in other people’s shoes, and I said to myself that if I were he I shouldn’t want to be reminded of an unfortunate episode of my youth. Don’t you think I was right?’

  26

  Mrs Driffield very kindly offered to send me back to Blackstable in her car, but I preferred to walk. I promised to dine at Ferne Court next day, and meanwhile to write down what I could remember of the two periods during which I had been in the habit of seeing Edward Driffield. As I walked along the winding road, meeting no one by the way, I mused upon what I should say. Do they not tell us that style is the art of omission? If that is so I should certainly write a very pretty piece, and it seemed almost a pity that Roy should use it only as material. I chuckled when I reflected what a bombshell I could throw if I chose. There was one person who could tell them all they wanted to know about Edward Driffield and his first marriage, but this fact I proposed to keep to myself. They thought Rosie was dead; they erred; Rosie was very much alive.

  Being in New York for the production of a play, and my arrival having been advertised to all and sundry by my manager’s energetic press representative, I received one day a letter addressed in a handwriting I knew but could not place. It was large and round, firm but uneducated. It was so familiar to me that I was exasperated not to remember whose it was. It would have been more sensible to open the letter at once, but instead I looked at the envelope and racked my brain. There are handwritings I cannot see without a little shiver of dismay, and some letters that look so tiresome that I cannot bring myself to open them for a week. When at last I tore open the envelope what I read gave me a strange feeling. It began abruptly:

  I have just seen that you are in New York and

  would like to see you again. I am not living in

  New York any more, but Yonkers is quite close and

  if you have a car you can easily do it in half an

  hour. I expect you are very busy so leave it to you

  to make a date. Although it is many years since

  we last met I hope you have not forgotten your old

  friend Rose Iggulden (formerly Drif
field)

  I looked at the address; it was the Albemarle, evidently an hotel or an apartment house, then there was the name of a street, and Yonkers. A shiver passed through me as though someone had walked over my grave. During the years that had passed I had sometimes thought of Rosie, but of late I had said to myself that she must surely be dead. I was puzzled for a moment by the name. Why Iggulden and not Kemp? Then it occurred to me that they had taken this name, a Kentish one too, when they fled from England. My first impulse was to make an excuse not to see her, I am always shy of seeing again people I have not seen for a long time, but then I was seized with curiosity. I wanted to see what she was like and to hear what had happened to her. I was going down to Dobb’s Ferry for the weekend, to reach which I had to pass through Yonkers, and so answered that I would come at about four on the following Saturday.

  The Albemarle was a huge block of apartments, comparatively new, and it looked as though it were inhabited by persons in easy circumstance. My name was telephoned up by a Negro porter in uniform, and I was taken up in the elevator by another. I felt uncommonly nervous. The door was opened for me by a coloured maid.

  ‘Come right in,’ she said. ‘Mrs Iggulden’s expecting you.’

  I was ushered into a living-room that served also as dining-room, for at one end of it was a square table of heavily carved oak, a dresser, and four chairs of the kind that the manufacturers in Grand Rapids would certainly describe as Jacobean. But the other end was furnished with a Louis XV suite, gilt and upholstered in pale blue damask; there were a great many small tables, richly carved and gilt, on which stood Sevres vases with ormolu decorations and nude bronze ladies with draperies flowing as though in a howling gale that artfully concealed those parts of their bodies that decency required; and each one held at the end of a playfully outstretched arm an electric lamp. The gramophone was the grandest thing I had ever seen out of a shop window, all gilt and shaped like a sedan chair, and painted with Watteau courtiers and their ladies.

  After I had waited for about five minutes a door was opened and Rosie came briskly in. She gave me both her hands.

  ‘Well, this is a surprise,’ she said. ‘I hate to think how many years it is since we met. Excuse me one moment.’ She went to the door and called: ‘Jessie, you can bring the tea in. Mind the water’s boiling properly.’ Then coming back: ‘The trouble I’ve had to teach that girl to make tea properly, you’d never believe.’

  Rosie was at least seventy. She was wearing a very smart sleeveless frock of green chiffon, heavily diamanté, cut square at the neck and very short; it fitted like a bursting glove. By her shape I gathered that she wore rubber corsets. Her nails were blood-coloured and her eyebrows plucked. She was stout, and she had a double chin, the skin of her bosom, although she had powdered it freely, was red, and her face was red too. But she looked well and healthy and full of beans. Her hair was still abundant, but it was quite white, shingled and permanently waved. As a young woman she had had soft, naturally waving hair, and these stiff undulations, as though she had just come out of a hairdresser’s, seemed more than anything else to change her. The only thing that remained was her smile, which had still its old childlike and mischievous sweetness. Her teeth had never been very good, irregular, and of bad shape; but these now were replaced by a set of perfect evenness and snowy brilliance: they were obviously the best money could buy.

  The coloured maid brought in an elaborate tea with pâté and sandwiches and cookies and candy and little knives and forks and tiny napkins. It was all very neat and smart.

  ‘That’s one thing I’ve never been able to do without – my tea,’ said Rosie, helping herself to a hot buttered scone. ‘It’s my best meal, really, though I know I shouldn’t eat it. My doctor keeps on saying to me: “Mrs Iggulden, you can’t expect to get your weight down if you will eat half a dozen cookies at tea.”’ She gave me a smile, and I had a sudden inkling that, notwithstanding the marcelled hair and the powder and the fat, Rosie was the same as ever. ‘But what I say is: A little of what you fancy does you good.’

  I had always found her easy to talk to. Soon we were chatting away as though it were only a few weeks since we had last seen one another.

  ‘Were you surprised to get my letter? I put Driffield so as you should know who it was from. We took the name of Iggulden when we came to America. George had a little unpleasantness when he left Blackstable, perhaps you heard about it, and he thought in a new country he’d better start with a new name, if you understand what I mean.’

  I nodded vaguely.

  ‘Poor George, he died ten years ago, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Oh, well, he was getting on in years. He was past seventy, though you’d never have guessed it to look at him. It was a great blow to me. No woman could want a better husband than what he made me. Never a cross word from the day we married till the day he died. And I’m pleased to say he left me very well provided for.’

  ‘I’m glad to know that.’

  ‘Yes, he did very well over here. He went into the building trade, he always had a fancy for it, and he got in with Tammany. He always said the greatest mistake he ever made was not coming over here twenty years before. He liked the country from the first day he set foot in it. He had plenty of go, and that’s what you want here. He was just the sort to get on.’

  ‘Have you never been back to England?’

  ‘No, I’ve never wanted to. George used to talk about it sometimes, just for a trip, you know, but we never got down to it, and now he’s gone I haven’t got the inclination. I expect London would seem very dead and alive to me after New York. We used to live in New York, you know. I only came here after his death.’

  ‘What made you choose Yonkers?’

  ‘Well, I always fancied it. I used to say to George, when we retire we’ll go and live at Yonkers. It’s like a little bit of England to me, you know. Maidstone or Guildford, or some place like that.’

  I smiled, but I understood what she meant. Notwithstanding its trams and its tooting cars, its cinemas and electric signs, Yonkers, with its winding main street, has a faint air of an English market town gone jazz.

  ‘Of course I sometimes wonder what’s happened to all the folks at Blackstable. I suppose they’re most of them dead by now, and I expect they think I am too.’

  ‘I haven’t been there for thirty years.’

  I did not know then that the rumour of Rosie’s death had reached Blackstable. I dare say that someone had brought back the news that George Kemp was dead, and thus a mistake had arisen.

  ‘I suppose nobody knows here that you were Edward Driffield’s first wife?’

  ‘Oh, no; why, if they had I should have had the reporters buzzing around my apartment like a swarm of bees. You know sometimes I’ve hardly been able to help laughing when I’ve been out somewhere playing bridge and they’ve started talking about Ted’s books. They like them no end in America. I never thought so much of them myself.’

  ‘You never were a great novel-reader, were you?’

  ‘I used to like history better, but I don’t seem to have much time for reading now. Sunday’s my great day. I think the Sunday papers over here are lovely. You don’t have anything like them in England. Then, of course, I play a lot of bridge; I’m crazy about contract.’

  I remembered that when as a young boy I had first meet Rosie her uncanny skill at whist had impressed me. I felt that I knew the sort of bridge player she was, quick, bold, and accurate, a good partner and a dangerous opponent.

  ‘You’d have been surprised at the fuss they made over here when Ted died. I knew they thought a lot of him, but I never knew he was such a big bug as all that. The papers were full of him, and they had pictures of him and Ferne Court; he always said he meant to live in that house some day. Whatever made him marry that hospital nurse? I always thought he’d marry Mrs Barton Trafford. They never had any children, did they?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ted woul
d have liked to have some. It was a great blow to him that I couldn’t have any more after the first.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d ever had a child,’ I said with surprise,

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s why Ted married me. But I had a very bad time when it came, and the doctors said I couldn’t have another. If she’d lived, poor little thing, I don’t suppose I’d ever have run away with George. She was six when she died. A dear little thing she was, and as pretty as a picture.’

  ‘You never mentioned her.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t bear to speak about her. She got meningitis, and we took her to the hospital. They put her in a private room, and they let us stay with her. I shall never forget what she went through, screaming, screaming all the time, and nobody able to do anything.’

  Rosie’s voice broke.

  ‘Was it that death Driffield described in The Cup of Lifer

  ‘Yes, that’s it. I always thought it so funny of Ted. He couldn’t bear to speak of it, any more than I could, but he wrote it all down; he didn’t leave out a thing; even little things I hadn’t noticed at the time he put in, and then I remembered them. You’d think he was just heartless, but he wasn’t, he was upset just as much as I was. When we used to go home at night he’d cry like a child. Funny chap, wasn’t he?’