Cakes and Ale

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 him 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 met 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 would 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 Life?”

“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?”

It was The Cup of Life that had raised such a storm of protest; and it was the child’s death and the episode that followed it that had especially brought down on Driffield’s head such virulent abuse. I remembered the description very well. It was harrowing. There was nothing sentimental in it; it did not excite the reader’s tears, but his anger rather that such cruel suffering should be inflicted on a little child. You felt that God at the Judgment Day would have to account for such things as this. It was a very powerful piece of writing. But if this incident was taken from life was the one that followed it also? It was this that had shocked the public of the ’nineties and this that the critics had condemned as not only indecent but incredible. In The Cup of Life the husband and wife (I forget their names now) had come back from the hospital after the child’s death—they were poor people and they lived from hand to mouth in lodgings—and had their tea. It was latish: about seven o’clock. They were exhausted by the strain of a week’s ceaseless anxiety and shattered by their grief. They had nothing to say to one another. They sat in a miserable silence. The hours passed. Then on a sudden the wife got up and going into their bedroom put on her hat.

“I’m going out,” she said.

“All right.”

They lived near Victoria Station. She walked along the Buckingham Palace Road and through the park. She came into Piccadilly and went slowly toward the Circus. A man caught her eye, paused and turned round.

“Good-evening,” he said.

“Good-evening.”

She stopped and smiled.

“Will you come and have a drink?” he asked.

“I don’t mind if I do.”

They went into a tavern in one of the side streets of Piccadilly, where harlots congregated and men came to pick them up, and they drank a glass of beer. She chatted with the stranger and laughed with him. She told him a cock-and-bull story about herself. Presently he asked if he could go home with her; no, she said, he couldn’t do that, but they could go to a hotel. They got into a cab and drove to Bloomsbury and there they took a room for the night. And next morning she took a bus to Trafalgar Square and walked through the park; when she got home her husband was just sitting down to breakfast. After breakfast they went back to the hospital to see about the child’s funeral.

“Will you tell me something, Rosie?” I asked. “What happened in the book after the child’s death—did that happen too?”

She looked at me for a moment doubtfully; then her lips broke into her still beautiful smile.

“Well, it’s all so many years ago, what odds does it make? I don’t mind telling you. He didn’t get it quite right. You see, it was only guesswork on his part. I was surprised that he knew as much as he did; I never told him anything.”