Complete Stories of Eveyln, Page 49
Evelyn Waugh
All the time they were speaking Miles had been aware of a bulky, sheeted object on a table in the window. Miss Flower now unveiled it. Miles gazed in awe.
The object displayed was a familiar, standard packing case, set on end.
“A rush job,” said the Minister of Welfare. “You will be provided with something more elaborate for your tour.”
Miles gazed at the box.
It fitted. It fell into place precisely in the void of his mind, satisfying all the needs for which his education had prepared him. The conditioned personality recognized its proper pre-ordained environment. All else was insubstantial; the gardens of Mountjoy, Clara’s cracked Crown Derby and her enveloping beard were trophies of a fading dream.
The Modern Man was home.
“There is one further point,” continued the Minister of Welfare. “A domestic one but not as irrelevant as it may seem. Have you by any chance formed an attachment in Satellite City? Your dossier suggests that you have.”
“Any woman trouble?” explained the Minister of Rest and Culture.
“Oh, yes,” said Miles. “Great trouble. But that is over.”
“You see, perfect rehabilitation, complete citizenship should include marriage.”
“It has not,” said Miles.
“That should be rectified.”
“Folks like a bloke to be spliced,” said the Minister of Rest and Culture. “With a couple of kids.”
“There is hardly time for them,” said the Minister of Welfare. “But we think that psychologically you will have more appeal if you have a wife by your side. Miss Flower here has every qualification.”
“Looks are only skin deep, lad,” said the Minister of Rest and Culture.
“So if you have no preferable alternative to offer . . . ?”
“None,” said Miles.
“Spoken like an Orphan. I see a splendid career ahead of the pair of you.”
“When can we get divorced?”
“Come, come, Plastic. You mustn’t look too far ahead. First things first. You have already obtained the necessary leave from your Director, Miss Flower?”
“Yes, Minister.”
“Then off you both go. And State be with you.”
In perfect peace of heart Miles followed Miss Flower to the Registrar’s office.
Then the mood veered.
Miles felt ill at ease during the ceremony and fidgeted with something small and hard which he found in his pocket. It proved to be his cigarette lighter, a most uncertain apparatus. He pressed the catch and instantly, surprisingly, there burst out a tiny flame—gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious.
BASIL SEAL RIDES AGAIN
or THE RAKE’S REGRESS
I
“ Yes.”
“What d’you mean: ‘Yes’?”
“I didn’t hear what you said.”
“I said he made off with all my shirts.”
“It’s not that I’m the least deaf. It’s simply that I can’t concentrate when a lot of fellows are making a row.”
“There’s a row now.”
“Some sort of speech.”
“And a lot of fellows saying: ‘Shush.’ ”
“Exactly. I can’t concentrate. What did you say?”
“This fellow made off with all my shirts.”
“Fellow making the speech?”
“No, no. Quite another fellow—called Albright.”
“I don’t think so. I heard he was dead.”
“This one isn’t. You can’t say he stole them exactly. My daughter gave them to him.”
“All?”
“Practically all. I had a few in London and there were a few at the wash. Couldn’t believe it when my man told me. Went through all the drawers myself. Nothing there.”
“Bloody thing to happen. My daughter wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
Protests from neighbouring diners rose in volume.
“They can’t want to hear this speech. It’s the most awful rot.”
“We seem to be getting unpopular.”
“Don’t know who all these fellows are. Never saw anyone before except old Ambrose. Thought I ought to turn out and support him.”
Peter Pastmaster and Basil Seal seldom attended public banquets. They sat at the end of a long table under chandeliers and pier-glasses, looking, for all the traditional brightness of the hotel, too bright and too private for their surroundings. Peter was a year or two the younger but he, like Basil, had scorned to order his life with a view of longevity or spurious youth. They were two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers who might have passed as exact contemporaries.
The frowning faces that were turned towards them were of all ages from those of a moribund Celtic bard to the cross adolescent critic’s for whose dinner Mr. Bentley, the organizer, was paying. Mr. Bentley had, as he expressed it, cast his net wide. There were politicians and publicists there, dons and cultural attachés, Fulbright scholars, representatives of the Pen Club, editors; Mr. Bentley, homesick for the belle époque of the American slump, when in England the worlds of art and fashion and action harmoniously mingled, had solicited the attendance of a few of the early friends of the guest of honour and Peter and Basil, meeting casually a few weeks before, had decided to go together. They were celebrating the almost coincident events of Ambrose Silk’s sixtieth birthday and his investiture with the Order of Merit.
Ambrose, white-haired, pallid, emaciated, sat between Dr. Parsnip, Professor of Dramatic Poetry at Minneapolis, and Dr. Pimpernell, Professor of Poetic Drama at St. Paul. These distinguished expatriates had flown to London for the occasion. It was not the sort of party at which decorations are worn but as Ambrose delicately inclined in deprecation of the honeyed words that dripped around him, no one could doubt his effortless distinction. It was Parsnip who was now on his feet attempting to make himself heard.
“I hear the cry of ‘silence,’” he said with sharp spontaneity. His voice had assumed something of the accent of his place of exile but his diction was orthodox—august even; he had quite discarded the patiently acquired proletarian colloquialisms of thirty years earlier. “It is apt, for, surely?, the object of our homage tonight is epitomized in that golden word. The voice which once clearly spoke the message of what I for one, and many of us here, will always regard as the most glorious decade of English letters, the nineteen-thirties,” (growls of dissent from the youthful critic) “that voice tardily perhaps, but at long last so illustriously honoured by official recognition, has been silent for a quarter of a century. Silent in Ireland, silent in Tangier, in Tel Aviv and Ischia and Portugal, now silent in his native London, our guest of honour has stood for us as a stern rebuke, a recall to artistic reticence and integrity. The books roll out from the presses, none by Ambrose Silk. Not for Ambrose Silk the rostrum, the television screen; for him the enigmatic and monumental silence of genius. . . .”
“I’ve got to pee,” said Basil.
“I always want to nowadays.”
“Come on then.”
Slowly and stiffly they left the hotel dining room.
As they stood side by side in the lavatory Basil said: “I’m glad Ambrose has got a gong. D’you think the fellow making the speech was pulling his leg?”
“Must have been. Stands to reason.”
“You were going to tell me something about some shirts.”
“I did tell you.”
“What was the name of the chap who got them?”
“Albright.”
“Yes, I remember; a fellow called Clarence Albright. Rather an awful chap. Got himself killed in the war.”
“No one that I knew got killed in the war except Alastair Trumpington.”
“And Cedric Lyne.”
“Yes, there was Cedric.”
“And Freddy Sothill.”
“I never really considered I knew him,” said Basil.
“This Albright married someone—Molly Meadows, perhaps?”
“I married Molly Meadows.”
“He doesn’t look like anyone’s son.”
“People always are,” said Basil, “sons or daughters of people.”
This truism had a secondary, antiquated and, to Peter, an obvious meaning, which was significant of the extent by which Basil had changed from enfant terrible to “old Pobble,” the name by which he was known to his daughter’s friends.
The change had been rapid. In 1939 Basil’s mother, his sister, Barbara Sothill, and his mistress, Angela Lyne, had seen the war as the opportunity for his redemption. His embattled country, they supposed, would find honourable use for those deplorable energies which had so often brought him almost into the shadows of prison. At the worst he would fill a soldier’s grave; at the best he would emerge as a second Lawrence of Arabia. His fate was otherwise.
Early in his military career, he lamed himself, blowing away the toes of one foot while demonstrating to his commando section a method of his own device for demolishing railway bridges, and was discharged from the army. From this disaster was derived at a later date the sobriquet “Pobble.” Then, hobbling from his hospital bed to the registry office, he married the widowed Angela Lyne. Hers was one of those few, huge, astutely dispersed fortunes which neither international calamities nor local experiments with socialism could seriously diminish. Basil accepted wealth as he accepted the loss of his toes. He forgot he had ever walked without a stick and a limp, had ever been lean and active, had ever been put to desperate shifts for quite small sums. If he ever recalled that decade of adventure it was as something remote and unrelated to man’s estate, like an end-of-term shortness of pocket money at school.
For the rest of the war and for the first drab years of peace he had appeared on the national register as “farmer”; that is to say, he lived in the country in ease and plenty. Two dead men, Freddy Sothill and Cedric Lyne, had left ample cellars. Basil drained them. He had once expressed the wish to become one of the “hard-faced men who had done well out of the war.” Basil’s face, once very hard, softened and rounded. His scar became almost invisible in rosy suffusion. None of his few clothes, he found, now buttoned comfortably and when, in that time of European scarcity, he and Angela went to New York, where such things could then still be procured by the well-informed, he bought suits and shirts and shoes by the dozen and a whole treasury of watches, tie-pins, cuff-links and chains so that on his return, having scrupulously declared them and paid full duty at the customs—a thing he had never in his life done before—he remarked of his elder brother, who, after a tediously successful diplomatic career spent in gold-lace or starched linen allowed himself in retirement (and reduced circumstances) some laxity in dress: “Poor Tony goes about looking like a scarecrow.”
Life in the country palled when food rationing ceased. Angela made over the house they had called “Cedric’s Folly” and its grottoes to her son Nigel on his twenty-first birthday, and took a large, unobtrusive house in Hill Street. She had other places to live, a panelled seventeenth-century apartment in Paris, a villa on Cap Ferrat, a beach and bungalow quite lately acquired in Bermuda, a little palace in Venice which she had once bought for Cedric Lyne but never visited in his lifetime—and among them they moved with their daughter Barbara. Basil settled into the orderly round of the rich. He became a creature of habit and of set opinions. In London finding Bratt’s and Bellamy’s disturbingly raffish, he joined that sombre club in Pall Mall that had been the scene of so many painful interviews with his self-appointed guardian, Sir Joseph Mannering, and there often sat in the chair which had belonged prescriptively to Sir Joseph and, as Sir Joseph had done, pronounced his verdict on the day’s news to any who would listen.
Basil turned, crossed to the looking glasses and straightened his tie. He brushed up the copious grey hair. He looked at himself with the blue eyes which had seen so much and now saw only the round, rosy face in which they were set, the fine clothes of English make which had replaced the American improvisations, the starched shirt which he was almost alone in wearing, the black pearl studs, the buttonhole.
A week or two ago he had had a disconcerting experience in this very hotel. It was a place he had frequented all his life, particularly in the latter years, and he was on cordial terms with the man who took the men’s hats in a den by the Piccadilly entrance. Basil was never given a numbered ticket and assumed he was known by name. Then a day came when he sat longer than usual over luncheon and found the man off duty. Lifting the counter he had penetrated to the rows of pegs and retrieved his bowler and umbrella. In the ribbon of the hat he found a label, put there for identification. It bore the single pencilled word “Florid.” He had told his daughter, Barbara, who said: “I wouldn’t have you any different. Don’t for heaven’s sake go taking one of those cures. You’d go mad.”
Basil was not a vain man; neither in rags nor in riches had he cared much about the impression he made. But the epithet recurred to him now as he surveyed himself in the glass.
Peter?”
“Would you say Ambrose was ‘florid,’
“Not a word I use.”
“It simply means flowery.”
“Well, I suppose he is.”
“Not fat and red?”
“Not Ambrose.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve been called ‘florid.’”
“You’re fat and red.”
“So are you.”
“Yes, why not? Almost everyone is.”
“Except Ambrose.”
“Well, he’s a pansy. I expect he takes trouble.”
“We don’t.”
“Why the hell should we?”
“We don’t.”
“Exactly.”
The two old friends had exhausted the subject.
Basil said: “About those shirts. How did your girl ever meet a fellow like that?”
“At Oxford. She insisted on going up to read History. She picked up some awfully rum friends.”
“I suppose there were girls there in my time. We never met them.”
“Nor in mine.”
“Stands to reason the sort of fellow who takes up with undergraduettes has something wrong with him.”
“Albright certainly has.”
“What does he look like?”
“I’ve never set an eye. My daughter asked him to King’s Thursday when I was abroad. She found he had no shirts and she gave him mine.”
“Was he hard up?”
“So she said.”
“Clarence Albright never had any money. Sally can’t have brought him much.”
“There may be no connection.”
“Must be. Two fellows without money both called Albright. Stands to reason they’re the same fellow.”
Peter looked at his watch.
“Half past eleven. I don’t feel like going back to hear those speeches. We showed up. Ambrose must have been pleased.”
“He was. But he can’t expect us to listen to all that rot.”
“What did he mean about Ambrose’s ‘silence’? Never knew a fellow who talked so much.”
“All a lot of rot. Where to now?”
“Come to think of it, my mother lives upstairs. We might see if she’s at home.”
They rose to the floor where Margot Metroland had lived ever since the destruction of Pastmaster House. The door on the corridor was not locked. As they stood in the little vestibule loud, low-bred voices came to them.
“She seems to have a party.”
Peter opened the door of the sitting room. It was in darkness save for the ghastly light of a television set. Margot crouched over it, her old taut face livid in the reflection.
“Can we come in?”
“Who are you? What d’you want? I can’t see you.”
Peter turned on the light at the door.
“Don’t do tha
t. Oh, it’s you Peter. And Basil.”
“We’ve been dining downstairs.”
“Well, I’m sorry; I’m busy, as you can see. Turn the light out and come and sit down if you want to, but don’t disturb me.”
“We’d better go.”
“Yes. Come and see me when I’m not so busy.”
Outside Peter said: “She’s always looking at that thing nowadays. It’s a great pleasure to her.”
“Where to now?”
“I thought of dropping in at Bellamy’s.”
“I’ll go home. I left Angela on her own. Barbara’s at a party of Robin Trumpington’s.”
“Well, good-night.”
“I say, those places where they starve you,—you know what I mean—do they do any good?”
“Molly swears by one.”
“She’s not fat and red.”
“No. She goes to those starving places.”
“Well, good-night.”
Peter turned east, Basil north, into the mild, misty October night. The streets at this hour were empty. Basil stumped across Piccadilly and up through Mayfair, where Angela’s house was almost the sole survivor of the private houses of his youth. How many doors had been closed against him then that were now open to all comers as shops and offices!
The lights were on. He left his hat and coat on a marble table and began the ascent to the drawing-room floor, pausing on the half-landing to recuperate.
“Oh, Pobble, you toeless wonder. You always turn up just when you’re wanted.”
Florid he might be, but there were compensations. It was not thus that Basil had often been greeted in limber youth. Two arms embraced his neck and drew him down, an agile figure inclined over the protuberance of his starched shirt, a cheek was pressed to his and teeth tenderly nibbled the lobe of his ear.
“Babs, I thought you were at a party. Why on earth are you dressed like that?”
His daughter wore very tight, very short trousers, slippers and a thin jersey. He disengaged himself and slapped her loudly on the behind.
“Sadist. It’s that sort of party. It’s a ‘happening.’
“You speak in riddles, child.”
“It’s a new sort of party the Americans have invented. Nothing is arranged beforehand. Things just happen. Tonight they cut off a girl’s clothes with nail scissors and then painted her green. She had a mask on so I don’t know who it was. She might just be someone hired. Then what happened was Robin ran out of drink so we’ve all gone scouring for it. Mummy’s in bed and doesn’t know where Old Nudge keeps the key and we can’t wake him up.”
