“You can ’ave what you like,” said Katie. “We ’aven’t got nothing in,
but I’ll run round and get it.”
Knowing English inns, I ordered a fried sole and a grilled chop. Then I
went for a stroll. I walked down to the beach and found that they had
built an esplanade and there was a row of bungalows and villas where I
remembered only windswept fields. But they were seedy and bedraggled and
I guessed that even after all these years Lord George’s dream of turning
Blackstable into a popular seaside resort had not come true. A retired
military man, a pair of elderly ladies walked along the crumbling
asphalt. It was incredibly dreary. A chill wind was blowing and a light
drizzle swept over from the sea.
I went back into town and here, in the space between the Bear and Key
and the Duke of Kent, were little knots of men standing about
notwithstanding the inclement weather; and their eyes had the same pale
blue, their high cheek bones the same ruddy colour as that of their
fathers before them. It was strange to see that some of the sailors in
blue jerseys still wore little gold rings in their ears; and not only
old ones but boys scarcely out of their teens. I sauntered down the
street and there was the bank refronted, but the stationery shop where I
had bought paper and wax to make rubbings with an obscure writer whom I
had met by chance was unchanged; there were two or three cinemas and
their garish posters suddenly gave the prim street a dissipated air so
that it looked like a respectable elderly woman who had taken a drop too
much.
It was cold and cheerless in the commercial room where I ate my dinner
alone at a large table laid for six. I was served by the slatternly
Katie. I asked if I could have a fire.
“Not in June,” she said. “We don’t ’ave fires after April.”
“I’ll pay for it,” I protested.
“Not in June. In October, yes, but not in June.”
When I had finished I went into the bar to have a glass of port.
“Very quiet,” I said to the shingled barmaid.
“Yes, it is quiet,” she answered.
“I should have thought on a Friday night you’d have quite a lot of
people in here.”
“Well, one would think that, wouldn’t one?”
Then a stout red-faced man with a close-cropped head of gray hair came
in from the back and I guessed that this was my host.
“Are you Mr. Brentford?” I asked him.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I knew your father. Will you have a glass of port?”
I told him my name, in the days of his boyhood better known than any
other at Blackstable, but somewhat to my mortification I saw that it
aroused no echo in his memory. He consented, however, to let me stand
him a glass of port.
“Down here on business?” he asked me. “We get quite a few commercial
gents at one time and another. We always like to do what we can for
them.”
I told him that I had come down to see Mrs. Driffield and left him to
guess on what errand.
“I used to see a lot of the old man,” said Mr. Brentford. “He used to be
very partial to dropping in here and having his glass of bitter. Mind
you, I don’t say he ever got tiddly, but he used to like to sit in the
bar and talk. My word, he’d talk by the hour and he never cared who he
talked to. Mrs. Driffield didn’t half like his coming here. He’d slip
away, out of the house, without saying a word to anybody, and come
toddling down. You know it’s a bit of a walk for a man of that age. Of
course when they missed him Mrs. Driffield knew where he was, and she
used to telephone and ask if he was here. Then she’d drive over in the
car and go in and see my wife. ‘You go in and fetch him, Mrs.
Brentford,’ she’d say; ‘I don’t like to go in the bar meself, not with
all those men hanging about’; so Mrs. Brentford would come in and she’d
say, ‘Now Mr. Driffield, Mrs. Driffield’s come for you in the car, so
you’d better finish your beer and let her take you home.’ He used to ask
Mrs. Brentford not to say he was here when Mrs. Driffield rang up, but
of course we couldn’t do that. He was an old man and all that and we
didn’t want to take the responsibility. He was born in this parish, you
know, and his first wife, she was a Blackstable girl. She’s been dead
these many years. I never knew her. He was a funny old fellow. No side,
you know; they tell me they thought a rare lot of him in London and when
he died the papers were full of him; but you’d never have known it to
talk to him. He might have been just nobody like you and me. Of course
we always tried to make him comfortable; we tried to get him to sit in
one of them easy chairs, but no, he must sit up at the bar; he said he
liked to feel his feet on a rail. My belief is he was happier here than
anywhere. He always said he liked a bar parlour. He said you saw life
there and he said he’d always loved life. Quite a character he was.
Reminded me of my father, except that my old governor never read a book
in his life and he drank a bottle of French brandy a day and he was
seventy-eight when he died and his last illness was his first. I quite
missed old Driffield when he popped off. I was only saying to Mrs.
Brentford the other day, I’d like to read one of his books some time.
They tell me he wrote several about these parts.”