The proprietors of these houses, starting with George Breakspear of Les Cherche-fuites. George believes in God, but only the C. of E. brand, as advertised on television by virtue of the Equal Time Agreement, although he has an Open Mind because he has seen some Pretty Queer Things in India and places like that. His manners are too good to let his religion show, which is as it should be. He is not a fool. You would guess that he had been a brevet major in the War; in fact he was a full and substantive brigadier and holds the DSO, the MC and many another bauble but, here again, his too stringent manners forbid him to use either the rank or the ribandry in civil life. (This is going a little too far, I think: it is subtly rude to keep your honours in your handkerchief drawer along with the french letters. Give me, any day, those jolly European hussar officers who swagger out at night in their splendid comic-opera uniforms, rather than those po-faced English Guardees who change, at the drop of a bowler hat, into sad imitations of solvent stockbrokers. Officers should have dash and debts and drabs and, above all, duns, whom they can horsewhip outside their quarters to give them an appetite for breakfast, don’t you agree?)
George is of middle height, average appearance and normal weight. His friends do not always recognize him, which is what it’s all about, isn’t it. In his favourite armchair in his club they recognize him, of course, because he’s there you see. The better sort of bartenders recognize him, too, but that’s their job.
His clothes are in such quiet good taste that they almost amount to a disguise, a cloak of invisibility, perhaps.
Despite this greyish coloration one somehow knows for certain that, were the Hun or Boche to invade us, George would not only spring capably to arms on the instant but would, without debate or question, assume command by invoking some ancient English password, token or shibboleth which we would all recognize, although hearing it for the first time since King Arthur sank below the waves of that lake near Avalon.
In the meantime, however, here and now in Jersey, one certainly didn’t want not to know him, for he listened to one’s stories; he poured big (but not vulgarly big) drinks; did not smile too unhappily if one swore in front of his wife and, if the party lasted too long for him, he didn’t make going-to-bed noises, he just sort of faded away and re-materialized, one supposes, in his dressing-room.
He drinks quite a lot in a diffident sort of way; there’s no shooting in Jersey, you see, and that makes the winter days rather long unless you happen to be over-sexed.