Cakes and Ale

XXIII

WHEN we arrived at Blackstable, Roy and I, a car, neither ostentatiously grand nor obviously cheap, was waiting for him and the chauffeur had a note for me asking me to lunch with Mrs. Driffield next day. I got into a taxi and went to the Bear and Key. I had learned from Roy that there was a new Marine Hotel on the front, but I did not propose for the luxuries of civilization to abandon a resort of my youth. Change met me at the railway station, which was not in its old place, but up a new road, and of course it was strange to be driven down the High Street in a car. But the Bear and Key was unaltered. It received me with its old churlish indifference : there was no one at the entrance, the driver put my bag down and drove away; I called, no one answered; I went into the bar and found a young lady with shingled hair reading a book by Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I asked her if I could have a room. She gave me a slightly offended look and said she thought so, but as that seemed to exhaust her interest in the matter I asked politely whether there was anyone who could show it to me. She got up and, opening a door, in a shrill voice called: “Katie.”

“What is it?” I heard.

“There’s a gent wants a room.”

In a little while appeared an ancient and haggard female in a very dirty print dress, with an untidy mop of gray hair, and showed me, two flights up, a very small grubby room.

“Can’t you do something better than that for me?” I asked.

“It’s the room commercials generally ’ave,” she answered with a sniff.

“Haven’t you got any others?”

“Not single.”

“Then give me a double room.”

“I’ll go and ask Mrs. Brentford.”

I accompanied her down to the first floor and she knocked at a door. She was told to come in, and when she opened it I caught sight of a stout woman with gray hair elaborately marcelled. She was reading a book. Apparently everyone at the Bear and Key was interested in literature. She gave me an indifferent look when Katie said I wasn’t satisfied with number seven.

“Show him number five,” she said.

I began to feel that I had been a trifle rash in declining so haughtily Mrs. Driffield’s invitation to stay with her and then putting aside in my sentimental way Roy’s wise suggestion that I should stay at the Marine Hotel. Katie took me upstairs again and ushered me into a largish room looking on the High Street. Most of its space was occupied by a double bed. The windows had certainly not been opened for a month.

I said that would do and asked about dinner.

“You can ’ave what you like,” said Katie. “We ’aven’t got nothing in, but I’ll run round and get it.”

Knowing English inns, I ordered a fried sole and a grilled chop. Then I went for a stroll. I walked down to the beach and found that they had built an esplanade and there was a row of bungalows and villas where I remembered only windswept fields. But they were seedy and bedraggled and I guessed that even after all these years Lord George’s dream of turning Blackstable into a popular seaside resort had not come true. A retired military man, a pair of elderly ladies walked along the crumbling asphalt. It was incredibly dreary. A chill wind was blowing and a light drizzle swept over from the sea.

I went back into town and here, in the space between the Bear and Key and the Duke of Kent, were little knots of men standing about notwithstanding the inclement weather; and their eyes had the same pale blue, their high cheekbones the same ruddy colour as that of their fathers before them. It was strange to see that some of the sailors in blue jerseys still wore little gold rings in their ears; and not only old ones but boys scarcely out of their teens. I sauntered down the street and there was the bank re-fronted, but the stationery shop where I had bought paper and wax to make rubbings with an obscure writer whom I had met by chance was unchanged; there were two or three cinemas and their garish posters suddenly gave the prim street a dissipated air so that it looked like a respectable elderly woman who had taken a drop too much.

It was cold and cheerless in the commercial room where I ate my dinner alone at a large table laid for six. I was served by the slatternly Katie. I asked if I could have a fire.

“Not in June,” she said. “We don’t ’ave fires after April.”

“I’ll pay for it,” I protested.

“Not in June. In October, yes, but not in June.”

When I had finished I went into the bar to have a glass of port.

“Very quiet,” I said to the shingled barmaid.

“Yes, it is quiet,” she answered.

“I should have thought on a Friday night you’d have quite a lot of people in here.”

“Well, one would think that, wouldn’t one?”

Then a stout red-faced man with a close-cropped head of gray hair came in from the back and I guessed that this was my host.

“Are you Mr. Brentford?” I asked him.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“I knew your father. Will you have a glass of port?”

I told him my name, in the days of his boyhood better known than any other at Blackstable, but somewhat to my mortification I saw that it aroused no echo in his memory. He consented, however, to let me stand him a glass of port.

“Down here on business?” he asked me. “We get quite a few commercial gents at one time and another. We always like to do what we can for them.”

I told him that I had come down to see Mrs. Driffield and left him to guess on what errand.

“I used to see a lot of the old man,” said Mr. Brentford. “He used to be very partial to dropping in here and having his glass of bitter. Mind you, I don’t say he ever got tiddly, but he used to like to sit in the bar and talk. My word, he’d talk by the hour and he never cared who he talked to. Mrs. Driffield didn’t half like his coming here. He’d slip away, out of the house, without saying a word to anybody, and come toddling down. You know it’s a bit of a walk for a man of that age. Of course when they missed him Mrs. Driffield knew where he was, and she used to telephone and ask if he was here. Then she’d drive over in the car and go in and see my wife. ‘You go in and fetch him, Mrs. Brentford,’ she’d say; ‘I don’t like to go in the bar meself, not with all those men hanging about’; so Mrs. Brentford would come in and she’d say, ‘Now Mr. Driffield, Mrs. Driffield’s come for you in the car, so you’d better finish your beer and let her take you home.’ He used to ask Mrs. Brentford not to say he was here when Mrs. Driffield rang up, but of course we couldn’t do that. He was an old man and all that and we didn’t want to take the responsibility. He was born in this parish, you know, and his first wife, she was a Blackstable girl. She’s been dead these many years. I never knew her. He was a funny old fellow. No side, you know; they tell me they thought a rare lot of him in London and when he died the papers were full of him; but you’d never have known it to talk to him. He might have been just nobody like you and me. Of course we always tried to make him comfortable; we tried to get him to sit in one of them easy chairs, but no, he must sit up at the bar; he said he liked to feel his feet on a rail. My belief is he was happier here than anywhere. He always said he liked a bar parlour. He said you saw life there and he said he’d always loved life. Quite a character he was. Reminded me of my father, except that my old governor never read a book in his life and he drank a bottle of French brandy a day and he was seventy-eight when he died and his last illness was his first. I quite missed old Driffield when he popped off. I was only saying to Mrs. Brentford the other day, I’d like to read one of his books some time. They tell me he wrote several about these parts.”