‘They’re most disreputable people,’ said my uncle. ‘I don’t wish you to associate with them.’
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘I’m not going to give you my reasons. It’s enough that I don’t wish it.’
‘How did you ever get to know them?’ asked my aunt.
‘I was just riding along, and they were riding along, and they asked me if I’d like to ride with them,’ I said, distorting the truth a little.
‘I call it very pushing,’ said my uncle.
I began to sulk. And to show my indignation, when the sweet was put on the table, though it was raspberry tart, which I was extremely fond of, I refused to have any. My aunt asked me if I was not feeling very well.
‘Yes,’ I said, as haughtily as I could, Tm feeling all right.’
‘Have a little bit,’ said my aunt.
‘I’m not hungry,’ I answered.
‘Just to please me.’
‘He must know when he’s had enough,’ said my uncle.
I gave him a bitter look.
‘I don’t mind having a small piece,’ I said.
My aunt gave me a generous helping, which I ate with the air of one who, impelled by a stern sense of duty, performs an act that is deeply distasteful to him. It was a beautiful raspberry tart. Mary-Ann made short pastry that melted in the mouth. But when my aunt asked me whether I could not manage a little more I refused with cold dignity. She did not insist. My uncle said grace, and I carried my outraged feelings into the drawing-room.
But when I reckoned that the servants had finished their dinner I went into the kitchen. Emily was cleaning the silver in the pantry. Mary-Ann was washing-up.
‘I say, what’s wrong with the Drifflelds?’ I asked her.
Mary-Ann had come to the vicarage when she was eighteen. She had bathed me when I was a small boy, given me powders in plum jam when I needed them, packed my box when I went to school, nursed me when I was ill, read to me when I was bored, and scolded me when I was naughty. Emily, the housemaid, was a flighty young thing, and Mary-Ann didn’t know whatever would become of me if she had the looking after me. Mary-Ann was a Blackstable girl. She had never been to London in her life, and I do not think she had been to Tercanbury more than three or four times. She was never ill. She never had a holiday. She was paid twelve pounds a year. One evening a week she went down the town to see her mother, who did the vicarage washing; and on Sunday evenings she went to church. But Mary-Ann knew everything that went on in Blackstable. She knew who everybody was, who had married whom, what anyone’s father had died of, and how many children, and what they were called, any woman had had.
I asked Mary-Ann my question, and she slopped a wet clout noisily into the sink.
‘I don’t blame your uncle,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t let you go about with them, not if you was my nephew. Fancy their askin’ you to ride your bicycle with them. Some people will do anything.’
I saw that the conversation in the dining-room had been repeated to Mary-Ann.
‘I’m not a child,’ I said.
‘That makes it all the worse. The impudence of their comin’ ’ere at all!’ Mary-Ann dropped her aitches freely. ‘Takin’ a house and pretendin’ to be ladies and gentlemen. Now leave that pie alone.’
The raspberry tart was standing on the kitchen table, and I broke off a piece of crust with my fingers and put it in my mouth.
‘We’re goin’ to eat that for our supper. If you’d wanted a second ’elpin’ why didn’t you ’ave one when you was ‘avin’ your dinner? Ted Driffield never could stick to anything. He ’ad a good education, too. The one I’m sorry for is his mother. He’s been a trouble to ’er from the day he was born. And then to go an’ marry Rosie Gann. They tell me that when he told his mother what he was goin’ to do she took to ’er bed and stayed there for three weeks, and wouldn’t talk to anybody.’
‘Was Mrs Driffield Rosie Gann before she married? Which Ganns were those?’
Gann was one of the commonest names at Blackstable. The churchyard was thick with their graves.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t ’ave known them. Old Josiah Gann was her father. He was a wild one, too. He went for a soldier, and when he came back he ‘ad a wooden leg. He used to go out doing painting, but he was out of work more often than not. They lived in the next ’ouse to us in Rye Lane. Me an’ Rosie used to go to Sunday school together.’
‘But she’s not as old as you are,’ I said, with the bluntness of my age.
‘She’ll never see thirty again.’
Mary-Ann was a little woman with a snub nose and decayed teeth, but fresh-coloured, and I do not suppose she could have been more than thirty-five.
‘Rosie ain’t more than four or five years younger than me, whatever she may pretend she is. They tell me you wouldn’t know her now all dressed up and everything.’
‘Is it true that she was a barmaid?’ I asked.
‘Yes, at the Railway Arms and then at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham. Mrs Reeves ’ad ’er to ’elp in the bar at the Railway Arms, but it got so bad she had to get rid of her.’
The Railway Arms was a very modest little public-house just opposite the station of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway. It had a sort of sinister gaiety. On a winter’s night as you passed by you saw through the glass doors men lounging about the bar. My uncle very much disapproved of it, and had for years been trying to get its licence taken away. It was frequented by the railway porters, colliers, and farm labourers. The respectable residents of Blackstable would have disdained to enter it and, when they wanted a glass of bitter, went to the Bear and Key or the Duke of Kent.
‘Why, what did she do?’ I asked, my eyes popping out of my head.
‘What didn’t she do?’ said Mary-Ann. ‘What d’you think your uncle would say if he caught me tellin’ you things like that? There wasn’t a man who come in to ’ave a drink what she didn’t carry on with. No matter who they was. She couldn’t stick to anybody, it was just one man after another. They tell me it was simply ’orrible. That was when it begun with Lord George. It wasn’t the sort of place he was likely to go to, he was too grand for that, but they say he went in accidental like one day when his train was late, and he saw her. And after that he was never out of the place, mixin’ with all them common rough people, and, of course, they all knew what he was there for, and him with a wife and three children. Oh, I was sorry for her! And the talk it made. Well, it got so Mrs Reeves said she wasn’t going to put up with it another day and she give her her wages and told her to pack her box and go. Good riddance to bad rubbish, that’s what I said.’
I knew Lord George very well. His name was George Kemp and the title by which he was always known had been given him ironically owing to his grand manner. He was our coal merchant, but he also dabbled in house property, and he owned a share in one or two collieries. He lived in a new brick house that stood in its own grounds and he drove his own trap. He was a stoutish man with a pointed beard, florid, with a high colour and bold blue eyes. Remembering him, I think he must have looked like some jolly rubicund merchant in an old Dutch picture. He was always very flashily dressed, and when you saw him driving at a smart pace down the middle of the High Street in a fawn-coloured covert-coat with large buttons, his brown bowler on the side of his head and a red rose in his buttonhole, you could not but look at him. On Sunday he used to come to church in a lustrous topper and a frockcoat. Everyone knew that he wanted to be made churchwarden, and it was evident that his energy would have made him useful, but my uncle said not in his time, and though Lord George as a protest went to chapel for a year my uncle remained obdurate. He cut him dead when he met him in the town. A reconciliation was effected and Lord George came to church again, but my uncle only yielded so far as to appoint him sidesman. The gentry thought him vulgar and I have no doubt that he was vain and boastful. They complained of his loud voice and his strident laugh – when he was talking to somebody on one side of the street you heard ev
ery word he said from the other – and they thought his manners dreadful. He was much too friendly; when he talked to them it was as though he were not in trade at all; they said he was very pushing. But if he thought his hail-fellow-well-met air, his activity in public works, his open purse when subscriptions were needed for the annual regatta or for the harvest festival, his willingness to do anyone a good turn were going to break the barriers at Blackstable he was mistaken. His efforts at sociability were met with blank hostility.
I remember once that the doctor’s wife was calling on my aunt and Emily came in to tell my uncle that Mr George Kemp would like to see him.
‘But I heard the front door ring, Emily,’ said my aunt.
‘Yes’m, he came to the front door.’
There was a moment’s awkwardness. Everyone was at a loss to know how to deal with such an unusual occurrence, and even Emily, who knew who should come to the front door, who should go to the side door, and who to the back, looked a trifle flustered. My aunt, who was a gentle soul, I think felt honestly embarrassed that anyone should put himself in such a false position; but the doctor’s wife gave a little sniff of contempt. At last my uncle collected himself.
‘Show him into the study, Emily,’ he said. ‘I’ll come as soon as I’ve finished my tea.’
But Lord George remained exuberant, flashy, loud, and boisterous. He said the town was dead and he was going to wake it up. He was going to get the company to run excursion trains. He didn’t see why it shouldn’t become another Margate. And why shouldn’t they have a mayor? Ferne Bay had one.
‘I suppose he thinks he’d be mayor himself,’ said the people of Blackstable. They pursed their lips. ‘Pride goeth before a fall,’ they said.
And my uncle remarked that you could take a horse to the water but you couldn’t make him drink.
I should add that I looked upon Lord George with the same scornful derision as everyone else. It outraged me that he should stop me in the street and call me by my Christian name and talk to me as though there were no social difference between us. He even suggested that I should play cricket with his sons, who were of about the same age as myself. But they went to the grammar school at Haversham and of course I couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them.
I was shocked and thrilled by what Mary-Ann told me, but I had difficulty in believing it. I had read too many novels and had learnt too much at school not to know a good deal about love, but I thought it was a matter that only concerned young people. I could not conceive that a man with a beard, who had sons as old as I, could have any feelings of that sort. I thought when you married all that was finished. That people over thirty should make love seemed to me rather disgusting.
‘You don’t mean to say they did anything?’ I asked Mary-Ann.
‘From what I hear there’s very little that Rosie Gann didn’t do. And Lord George wasn’t the only one.’
‘But, look here, why didn’t she have a baby?’
In the novels I had read whenever lovely woman stooped to folly she had a baby. The cause was put with infinite precaution, sometimes indeed suggested only by a row of asterisks, but the result was inevitable.
‘More by good luck than by good management, I lay,’ said Mary-Ann. Then she recollected herself and stopped drying the plates she was busy with. ‘It seems to me you know a lot more than you ought to,’ she said.
‘Of course I know,’ I said importantly. ‘Hang it all, I’m practically grown up, aren’t I?’
‘All I can tell you,’ said Mary-Ann, ‘is that when Mrs Reeves give her the sack Lord George got her a job at the Prince of Wales’s Feathers at Haversham, and he was always poppin’ over there in his trap. You can’t tell me the ale’s any different over there from what it is here.’
‘Then why did Ted Driffield marry her?’ I asked.
‘Ask me another,’ said Mary-Ann. ‘It was at the Feathers he saw her. I suppose he couldn’t get no one else to marry him. No respectable girl would ’ave ’ad ’im.’
‘Did he know about her?’
‘You’d better ask him.’
I was silent. It was all very puzzling.
‘What does she look like now?’ asked Mary-Ann. ‘I never seen her since she married. I never even speak to ’er after I ’eard what was goin’ on at the Railway Arms.’
‘She looks all right,’ I said.
‘Well, you ask her if she remembers me and see what she says.’
6
I had quite made up my mind that I was going out with the Drifflelds next morning, but I knew that it was no good asking my uncle if I might. If he found out that I had been and made a row it couldn’t be helped, and if Ted Driffield asked me whether I had got my uncle’s permission I was quite prepared to say I had. But I had after all no need to lie. In the afternoon, the tide being high, I walked down to the beach to bathe, and my uncle, having something to do in the town, walked part of the way with me. Just as we were passing the Bear and Key Ted Driffield stepped out of it. He saw us and came straight up to my uncle. I was startled at his coolness.
‘Good afternoon, vicar,’ he said. ‘I wonder if you remember me. I used to sing in the choir when I was a boy. Ted Driffield. My old governor was Miss Wolfe’s bailiff.’
My uncle was a very timid man, and he was taken aback.
‘Oh, yes, how do you do? I was sorry to hear your father died.’
‘I’ve made the acquaintance of your young nephew. I was wondering if you’d let him come for a ride with me tomorrow. It’s rather dull for him riding alone, and I’m going to do a rubbing of one of the brasses at Ferne Church.’
‘It’s very kind of you but –’
My uncle was going to refuse, but Driffield interrupted him.
‘I’ll see he doesn’t get up to any mischief. I thought he might like to make a rubbing himself. It would be an interest for him. HI give him some paper and wax so that it won’t cost him anything.’
My uncle had not a consecutive mind, and the suggestion that Ted Driffield should pay for my paper and wax offended him so much that he quite forgot his intention to forbid me to go at all.
‘He can quite well get his own paper and wax,’ he said. ‘He has plenty of pocket-money, and he’d much better spend it on something like that than on sweets and make himself sick.’
‘Well, if he goes to Hayward, the stationer’s, and says he wants the same paper as I got and the wax, they’ll let him have it.’
‘I’ll go now,’ I said, and to prevent any change of mind on my uncle’s part dashed across the road.
7
I do not know why the Driffields bothered about me unless it was from pure kindness of heart. I was a dull little boy, not very talkative, and if I amused Ted Driffield at all it must have been unconsciously. Perhaps he was tickled by my attitude of superiority. I was under the impression that it was condescension on my part to consort with the son of Miss Wolfe’s bailiff, and he what my uncle called a penny-a-liner; and when, perhaps with a trace of superciliousness, I asked him to lend me one of his books, and he said it wouldn’t interest me, I took him at his word and did not insist. After my uncle had once consented to my going out with the Driffields he made no further objection to my association with them. Sometimes we went for sails together, sometimes we went to some picturesque spot and Driffield painted a little water-colour. I do not know if the English climate was better in those days or if it is only an illusion of youth, but I seem to remember that all through that summer the sunny days followed one another in an unbroken line. I began to feel a curious affection for the undulating, opulent, and gracious country. We went far afield, to one church after another, taking rubbings of brasses, knights in armour, and ladies in stiff farthingales. Ted Driffield fired me with his own enthusiasm for this simple pursuit, and I rubbed with passion. I showed my uncle proudly the results of my industry, and I suppose he thought that whatever my company, I could not come to much harm when I was occupied in church. Mrs Driffield used to remain in the c
hurchyard while we were at work, not reading or sewing, but just mooning about; she seemed able to do nothing for an indefinite time without feeling bored. Sometimes I would go out and sit with her for a little on the grass. We chattered about my school, my friends there, and my masters, about the people at Blackstable, and about nothing at all. She gratified me by calling me Mr Ashenden. I think she was the first person who had ever done so, and it made me feel grown up. I resented it vastly when people called me Master Willie. I thought it a ridiculous name for anyone to have. In fact, I did not like either of my names, and spent much time inventing others that would have suited me better. The ones I preferred were Roderic Ravensworth and I covered sheets of paper with this signature in a suitably dashing hand. I did not mind Ludovic Montgomery either.
I could not get over what Mary-Ann had told me about Mrs Driffield. Though I knew theoretically what people did when they were married, and was capable of putting the facts in the bluntest language, I did not really understand it. I thought it indeed rather disgusting, and I did not quite, quite believe it. After all, I was aware that the earth was round, but I knew it was flat. Mrs Driffield seemed so frank, her laugh was so open, there was in her demeanour something so young and childlike, that I could not see her ‘going with’ sailors, and above all anyone so gross and horrible as Lord George. She was not at all the type of the wicked woman I had read of in novels. Of course I knew she wasn’t ‘good form’, and she spoke with the Blackstable accent, she dropped an aitch now and then, and sometimes her grammar gave me a shock, but I couldn’t help liking her. I came to the conclusion that what Mary-Ann had told me was a pack of lies.
One day I happened to tell her that Mary-Ann was our cook.
‘She says she lived next door to you in Rye Lane,’ I added, quite prepared to hear Mrs Driffield say that she had never even heard of her.
But she smiled and her blue eyes gleamed.
‘That’s right. She used to take me to Sunday school. She used to have a rare job keeping me quiet. I heard she’d gone to service at the vicarage. Fancy her being there still! I haven’t seen her for donkey’s years. I’d like to see her again and have a chat about old days. Remember me to her, will you, and ask her to look in on her evening out. I’ll give her a cup of tea.’