The coloured maid brought in an elaborate tea with pâté 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.”
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
