EDWARD DRIFFIELD worked at night, and Rosie, having nothing to do, was
glad to go out with one or other of her friends. She liked luxury and
Quentin Forde was well-to-do. He would fetch her in a cab and take her
to dine at Kettner’s or the Savoy, and she would put on her grandest
clothes for him; and Harry Retford, though he never had a bob, behaved
as if he had, and took her about in hansoms too and gave her dinner at
Romano’s or in one or other of the little restaurants that were becoming
modish in Soho. He was an actor and a clever one, but he was difficult
to suit and so was often out of work. He was about thirty, a man with a
pleasantly ugly face and a clipped way of speaking that made what he
said sound funny. Rosie liked his devil-may-care attitude toward life,
the swagger with which he wore clothes made by the best tailor in London
and unpaid for, the recklessness with which he would put a fiver he
hadn’t got on a horse, and the generosity with which he flung his money
about when a lucky win put him in funds. He was gay, charming, vain,
boastful, and unscrupulous. Rosie told me that once he had pawned his
watch to take her out to dinner and then borrowed a couple of pounds
from the actor manager who had given them seats for the play in order to
take him out to supper with them afterward.
But she was just as well pleased to go with Lionel Hillier to his studio
and eat a chop that he and she cooked between them and spend the evening
talking, and it was only very rarely that she would dine with me at all.
I used to fetch her after I had had my dinner in Vincent Square and she
hers with Driffield, and we would get on a bus and go to a music hall.
We went here and there, to the Pavilion or the Tivoli, sometimes to the
Metropolitan if there was a particular turn we wanted to see; but our
favourite was the Canterbury. It was cheap and the show was good. We
ordered a couple of beers and I smoked my pipe. Rosie looked round with
delight at the great dark smoky house, crowded to the ceiling with the
inhabitants of South London.
“I like the Canterbury,” she said. “It’s so homey.”
I discovered that she was a great reader. She liked history, but only
history of a certain kind, the lives of queens and of mistresses of
royal personages; and she would tell me with a childlike wonder of the
strange things she read. She had a wide acquaintance with the six
consorts of King Henry VIII and there was little she did not know about
Mrs. Fitzherbert and Lady Hamilton. Her appetite was prodigious and she
ranged from Lucrezia Borgia to the wives of Philip of Spain; then there
was the long list of the royal mistresses of France. She knew them all,
and all about them, from Agnes Sorel down to Madame du Barry.
“I like to read about real things,” she said. “I don’t much care about
novels.”
She liked to gossip about Blackstable and I thought it was on account of
my connection with it that she liked to come out with me. She seemed to
know all that was going on there.
“I go down every other week or so to see my mother,” she said. “Just for
the night, you know.”
“To Blackstable?”