AS OFTEN as the mild Christmas gaieties of Blackstable allowed me I went
to the Driffields’ little house next door to the Congregational chapel.
I always found Lord George and often Mr. Galloway. Our conspiracy of
silence had made us friends and when we met at the vicarage or in the
vestry after church we looked at one another archly. We did not talk
about our secret, but we enjoyed it; I think it gave us both a good deal
of satisfaction to know that we were making a fool of my uncle. But once
it occurred to me that George Kemp, meeting my uncle in the street,
might remark casually that he had been seeing a lot of me at the
Driffields’.
“What about Lord George?” I said to Mr. Galloway.
“Oh, I made that all right.”
We chuckled. I began to like Lord George. At first I was very cold with
him and scrupulously polite, but he seemed so unconscious of the social
difference between us that I was forced to conclude that my haughty
courtesy failed to put him in his place. He was always cordial, breezy,
even boisterous; he chaffed me in his common way and I answered him back
with schoolboy wit; we made the others laugh and this disposed me kindly
toward him. He was for ever bragging about the great schemes he had in
mind, but he took in good part my jokes at the expense of his grandiose
imaginations. It amused me to hear him tell stories about the swells of
Blackstable that made them look foolish and when he mimicked their
oddities I roared with laughter. He was blatant and vulgar and the way
he dressed was always a shock to me (I had never been to Newmarket nor
seen a trainer, but that was my idea of how a Newmarket trainer dressed)
and his table manners were offensive, but I found myself less and less
affronted by him. He gave me the _Pink ’Un_ every week and I took it
home, carefully tucked away in my great-coat pocket, and read it in my
bedroom.
I never went to the Driffields’ till after tea at the vicarage, but I
always managed to make a second tea when I got there. Afterward Ted
Driffield sang comic songs, accompanying himself sometimes on the banjo
and sometimes on the piano. He would sing, peering at the music with his
rather short-sighted eyes, for an hour at a time; there was a smile on
his lips and he liked us all to join in the chorus. We played whist. I
had learned the game when I was a child and my uncle and aunt and I used
to play at the vicarage during the long winter evenings. My uncle always
took dummy, and though of course we played for love, when my aunt and I
lost I used to retire under the dining room table and cry. Ted Driffield
did not play cards, he said he had no head for them, and when we started
a game he would sit down by the fire and, pencil in hand, read one of
the books that had been sent down to him from London to review. I had
never played with three people before and of course I did not play well,
but Mrs. Driffield had a natural card sense. Her movements as a rule
were rather deliberate, but when it came to playing cards she was quick
and alert. She played the rest of us right off our heads. Ordinarily she
did not speak very much and then slowly, but when, after a hand was
played, she took the trouble good-humouredly to point out to me my
mistakes, she was not only lucid but voluble. Lord George chaffed her as
he chaffed everybody; she would smile at his banter, for she very seldom
laughed, and sometimes make a neat retort. They did not behave like
lovers, but like familiar friends, and I should have quite forgotten
what I had heard about them and what I had seen but that now and then
she gave him a look that embarrassed me. Her eyes rested on him quietly,
as though he were not a man but a chair or a table, and in them was a
mischievous, childlike smile. Then I would notice that his face seemed
suddenly to swell and he moved uneasily in his chair. I looked quickly
at the curate, afraid that he would notice something, but he was intent
on the cards or else was lighting his pipe.
The hour or two I spent nearly every day in that hot, poky, smoke-laden
room passed like lightning, and as the holidays drew nearer to their end
I was seized with dismay at the thought that I must spend the next three
months dully at school.
“I don’t know what we shall do without you,” said Mrs. Driffield. “We
shall have to play dummy.”
I was glad that my going would break up the game. While I was doing prep
I did not want to think that they were sitting in that little room and
enjoying themselves just as if I did not exist.
“How long do you get at Easter?” asked Mr. Galloway.
“About three weeks.”
“We’ll have a lovely time then,” said Mrs. Driffield. “The weather ought
to be all right. We can ride in the mornings and then after tea we’ll
play whist. You’ve improved a lot. If we play three or four times a week
during your Easter holidays you won’t need to be afraid to play with
anybody.”
X
BUT THE term came to an end at last. I was in high spirits when once
more I got out of the train at Blackstable. I had grown a little and I
had had a new suit made at Tercanbury, blue serge and very smart, and I
had bought a new tie. I meant to go and see the Driffields immediately I
had swallowed my tea and I was full of hope that the carrier would have
brought my box in time for me to put the new suit on. It made me look
quite grown up. I had already begun putting vaseline on my upper lip
every night to make my moustache grow. On my way through the town I
looked down the street in which the Driffields lived in the hope of
seeing them. I should have liked to go in and say how-do-you-do, but I
knew that Driffield wrote in the morning and Mrs. Driffield was not
“presentable.” I had all sorts of exciting things to tell them. I had
won the hundred-yard race in the sports and I had been second in the
hurdles. I meant to have a shot for the history prize in the summer and
I was going to swot up my English history during the holidays. Though
there was an east wind blowing, the sky was blue and there was a feeling
of spring in the air. The High Street, with its colours washed clean by
the wind and its lines sharp as though drawn with a new pen, looked like
a picture by Samuel Scott, quiet and naïve and cosy: now, looking back;
then it looked like nothing but High Street, Blackstable. When I came to
the railway bridge I noticed that two or three houses were being built.
“By Jove,” I said, “Lord George _is_ going it.”
In the fields beyond little white lambs were gambolling. The elm trees
were just beginning to turn green. I let myself in by the side door. My
uncle was sitting in his armchair by the fire reading the _Times_. I
shouted to my aunt and she came downstairs, a pink spot from the
excitement of seeing me on each of her withered cheeks, and threw her
thin old arms round my neck. She said all the right things.
“How you’ve grown!” and “Good gracious me, you’ll be getting a moustache
soon!”
I kissed my uncle on his bald forehead and I stood in front of the fire,
with my legs well apart and my back to it, and was extremely grown up
and rather condescending. Then I went upstairs to say how-do-you-do to
Emily, and into the kitchen to shake hands with Mary-Ann, and out into
the garden to see the gardener.
When I sat down hungrily to dinner and my uncle carved the leg of mutton
I asked my aunt:
“Well, what’s happened at Blackstable since I was here?”
“Nothing very much. Mrs. Greencourt went down to Mentone for six weeks,
but she came back a few days ago. The major had an attack of gout.”
“And your friends the Driffields have bolted,” added my uncle.
“They’ve done what?” I cried.
“Bolted. They took their luggage away one night and just went up to
London. They’ve left bills all over the place. They hadn’t paid their
rent and they hadn’t paid for their furniture. They owed Harris the
butcher the best part of thirty pounds.”
“How awful,” I said.
“That’s bad enough,” said my aunt, “but it appears they hadn’t even paid
the wages of the maid they had for three months.”