Cakes and Ale

forgotten your old friend

ROSE IGGULDEN (formerly Driffield)

I looked at the address; it was the Albemarle, evidently a 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 week-end, 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 circumstances. 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 diamante, 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 pate 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 tootling 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.”