The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh

PERIOD PIECE

Lady Amelia had been educated in the belief that it was the height of impropriety to read a novel in the morning. Now, in the twilight of her days, when she had singularly little to occupy the two hours between her appearance downstairs at quarter past eleven, hatted and fragrant with lavender water, and the announcement of luncheon, she adhered rigidly to this principle. As soon as luncheon was over, however, and coffee had been served in the drawing room; before the hot milk in his saucer had sufficiently cooled for Manchu to drink it; while the sunlight, in summer, streamed through the Venetian blinds of the round-fronted Regency windows; while, in winter, the carefully stacked coal-fire glowed in its round-fronted grate; while Manchu sniffed and sipped at his saucer, and Lady Amelia spread out on her knees the various shades of coarse wool with which her failing eyesight now compelled her to work; while the elegant Regency clock ticked off the two and a half hours to tea time—it was Miss Myers’s duty to read a novel aloud to her employer.

With the passing years Lady Amelia had grown increasingly fond of novels, and of novels of a particular type. They were what the assistant in the circulating library termed “strong meat” and kept in a hidden place under her desk. It was Miss Myers’s duty to fetch and return them. “Have you anything of the kind Lady Amelia likes?” she would ask sombrely.

“Well, there’s this just come in,” the assistant would answer, fishing up a volume from somewhere near her feet.

At one time Lady Amelia had enjoyed love stories about the irresponsible rich; then she had had a psychological phase; at the moment her interests were American, in the school of brutal realism and gross slang. “Something else like Sanctuary or Bessie Cotter,” Miss Myers was reluctantly obliged to demand. And as the still afternoon was disturbed by her delicately modulated tones enunciating page by page, in scarcely comprehensible idiom, the narratives of rape and betrayal, Lady Amelia would occasionally chuckle a little over her woolwork.

“Women of my age always devote themselves either to religion or novels,” she said. “I have remarked among my few surviving friends that those who read novels enjoy far better health.”

The story they were reading came to an end at half past four.

“Thank you,” said Lady Amelia. “That was most entertaining. Make a note of the author’s name, please, Miss Myers. You will be able to go to the library after tea and see whether they have another. I hope you enjoyed it.”

“Well, it was very sad, wasn’t it?”

“Sad?”

“I mean the poor young man who wrote it must come from a terrible home.”

“Why do you say that, Miss Myers?”

“Well, it was so far fetched.”

“It is odd you should think so. I invariably find modern novels painfully reticent. Of course until lately I never read novels at all. I cannot say what they were like formerly. I was far too busy in the old days living my own life and sharing the lives of my friends—all people who came from anything but terrible homes,” she added with a glance at her companion; a glance sharp and smart as a rap on the knuckles with an ivory ruler.

There was half an hour before tea; Manchu was asleep on the hearth rug, before the fireless grate; the sun streamed in through the blinds, casting long strips of light on the Aubusson carpet. Lady Amelia fixed her eyes on the embroidered, heraldic firescreen; and proceeded dreamily. “I suppose it would not do. You couldn’t write about the things which actually happen. People are so used to novels that they would not believe them. The poor writers are constantly at pains to make the truth seem probable. Dear me, I often think, as you sit, so kindly, reading to me, ‘If one was just to write down quite simply the events of a few years in any household one knows… No one would believe it.’ I can hear you yourself, dear Miss Myers, saying, ‘Perhaps these things do happen, very occasionally, once in a century, in terrible homes’; instead of which they are constantly happening, every day, all round us—or at least, they were in my young days.

“Take for example the extremely ironic circumstances of the succession of the present Lord Cornphillip:

“I used to know the Cornphillips very well in the old days,” said Lady Amelia—“Etty was a cousin of my mother’s—and when we were first married my husband and I used to stay there every autumn for the pheasant shooting. Billy Cornphillip was a very dull man—very dull indeed. He was in my husband’s regiment. I used to know a great many dull people at the time when I was first married, but Billy Cornphillip was notorious for dullness even among my husband’s friends. Their place is in Wiltshire. I see the boy is trying to sell it now. I am not surprised. It was very ugly and very unhealthy. I used to dread our visits there.

“Etty was entirely different, a lively little thing with very nice eyes. People thought her fast. Of course it was a very good match for her; she was one of seven sisters and her father was a younger son, poor dear. Billy was twelve years older. She had been after him for years. I remember crying with pleasure when I received her letter telling me of the engagement… It was at the breakfast table… she used a very artistic kind of writing paper with pale blue edges and bows of blue ribbon at the corner…

“Poor Etty was always being artistic; she tried to do something with the house—put up peacocks’ feathers and painted tambourines and some very modern stencil work—but the result was always depressing. She made a little garden for herself at some distance from the house, with a high wall and a padlocked door, where she used to retire to think—or so she said—for hours at a time. She called it the Garden of Her Thoughts. I went in with her once, as a great privilege, after one of her quarrels with Billy. Nothing grew very well there—because of the high walls, I suppose, and her doing it all herself. There was a mossy seat in the middle. I suppose she used to sit on it while she thought. The whole place had a nasty dank smell…

“Well we were all delighted at Etty’s luck and I think she quite liked Billy at first and was prepared to behave well to him, in spite of his dullness. You see it came just when we had all despaired. Billy had been the friend of Lady Instow for a long time and we were all afraid she would never let him marry but they had a quarrel at Cowes that year and Billy went up to Scotland in a bad temper and little Etty was staying in the house; so everything was arranged and I was one of her bridesmaids.

“The only person who was not pleased was Ralph Bland. You see he was Billy’s nearest relative and would inherit if Billy died without children and he had got very hopeful as time went on.

“He came to a very sad end—in fact I don’t know what became of him—but at the time of which I am speaking he was extremely popular, especially with women… Poor Viola Chasm was terribly in love with him. Wanted to run away. She and Lady Anchorage were very jealous of each other about him. It became quite disagreeable, particularly when Viola found that Lady Anchorage was paying her maid five pounds a week to send on all Ralph’s letters to her—before Viola had read them, that was what she minded. He really had a most agreeable manner and said such ridiculous things… The marriage was a great disappointment to Ralph; he was married himself and had two children. She had a little money at one time, but Ralph ran through it. Billy did not get on with Ralph—they had very little in common, of course—but he treated him quite well and was always getting him out of difficulties. In fact he made him a regular allowance at one time, and what with that and what he got from Viola and Lady Anchorage he was really quite comfortable. But, as he said, he had his children’s future to consider, so that Billy’s marriage was a great disappointment to him. He even talked of emigrating and Billy advanced him a large sum of money to purchase a sheep farm in New Zealand, but nothing came of that because Ralph had a Jewish friend in the city who made away with the entire amount. It all happened in a very unfortunate manner because Billy had given him this lump sum on the understanding that he should not expect an allowance. And then Viola and Lady Anchorage were greatly upset at his talk of leaving and made other arrangements so that in one way and another Ralph found himself in very low water, poor thing.

“However he began to recover his spirits when, after two years, there was no sign of an heir. People had babies very much more regularly when I was young. Everybody expected that Etty would have a baby—she was a nice healthy little thing—and when she did not, there was a great deal of ill-natured gossip. Ralph himself behaved very wrongly in the matter. He used to make jokes about it, my husband told me, quite openly at his club in the worst possible taste.

“I well remember the last time that Ralph stayed with the Cornphillips; it was a Christmas party and he came with his wife and his two children. The eldest boy was about six at the time and there was a very painful scene. I was not there myself, but we were staying nearby with the Lockejaws and of course we heard all about it. Billy seems to have been in his most pompous mood and was showing off the house when Ralph’s little boy said solemnly and very loudly, ‘Daddy says that when I step into your shoes I can pull the whole place down. The only thing worth worrying about is the money.’

“It was towards the end of a large and rather old-fashioned Christmas party, so no one was feeling in a forgiving mood. There was a final breach between the two cousins. Until then, in spite of the New Zealand venture, Billy had been reluctantly supporting Ralph. Now the allowance ceased once for all and Ralph took it in very bad part.

“You know what it is—or perhaps, dear Miss Myers, you are so fortunate as not to know what it is—when near relatives begin to quarrel. There is no limit to the savagery to which they will resort. I should be ashamed to indicate the behaviour of these two men towards each other during the next two or three years. No one had any sympathy with either.

“For example, Billy, of course, was a Conservative. Ralph came down and stood as a Radical in the General Election in his own county and got in.

“This, you must understand, was in the days before the lower classes began going into politics. It was customary for the candidates on both sides to be men of means and, in the circumstances, there was considerable expenditure involved. Much more in fact than Ralph could well afford, but in those days Members of Parliament had many opportunities for improving their position, so we all thought it a very wise course of Ralph’s—the first really sensible thing we had known him to do. What followed was very shocking.

“Billy of course had refused to lend his interest—that was only to be expected—but when the election was over, and everybody perfectly satisfied with the result, he did what I always consider a Very Wrong Thing. He made an accusation against Ralph of corrupt practices. It was a matter of three pounds which Ralph had given to a gardener whom Billy had discharged for drunkenness. I daresay that all that kind of thing has ceased nowadays, but at the time to which I refer, it was universally customary. No one had any sympathy with Billy but he pressed the charge and poor Ralph was unseated.

“Well, after this time, I really think that poor Ralph became a little unsettled in his mind. It is a very sad thing, Miss Myers, when a middle-aged man becomes obsessed by a grievance. You remember how difficult it was when the Vicar thought that Major Etheridge was persecuting him. He actually informed me that Major Etheridge put water in the petrol tank of his motor-cycle and gave sixpences to the choir boys to sing out of tune—well it was like that with poor Ralph. He made up his mind that Billy had deliberately ruined him. He took a cottage in the village and used to embarrass Billy terribly by coming to all the village fêtes and staring at Billy fixedly. Poor Billy was always embarrassed when he had to make a speech. Ralph used to laugh ironically at the wrong places but never so loudly that Billy could have him turned out. And he used to go to public houses and drink far too much. They found him asleep on the terrace twice. And of course no one on the place liked to offend him, because at any moment he might become Lord Cornphillip.

“It must have been a very trying time for Billy. He and Etty were not getting on at all well together, poor things, and she spent more and more time in the Garden of Her Thoughts and brought out a very silly little book of sonnets, mostly about Venice and Florence, though she could never induce Billy to take her abroad. He used to think that foreign cooking upset him.

“Billy forbade her to speak to Ralph, which was very awkward as they were always meeting one another in the village and had been great friends in the old days. In fact Ralph used often to speak very contemptuously of his cousin’s manliness and say it was time someone took Etty off his hands. But that was only one of Ralph’s jokes, because Etty had been getting terribly thin and dressing in the most artistic way, and Ralph always liked people who were chic and plump—like poor Viola Chasm. Whatever her faults —” said Lady Amelia, “Viola was always chic and plump.

“It was at the time of the Diamond Jubilee that the crisis took place. There was a bonfire and a great deal of merry making of a rather foolish kind and Ralph got terribly drunk. He began threatening Billy in a very silly way and Billy had him up before the magistrates and they made an order against him to keep the peace and not to reside within ten miles of Cornphillip. ‘All right,’ Ralph said, in front of the whole Court, ‘I’ll go away, but I won’t go alone.’ And will you believe it, Miss Myers, he and Etty went off to Venice together that very afternoon.

“Poor Etty, she had always wanted to go to Venice and had written so many poems about it, but it was a great surprise to us all. Apparently she had been meeting Ralph for some time in the Garden of Her Thoughts.

“I don’t think Ralph ever cared about her, because, as I say, she was not at all his type, but it seemed to him a very good revenge on Billy.

“Well, the elopement was far from successful. They took rooms in a very insanitary palace, and had a gondola and ran up a great many bills. Then Etty got a septic throat as a result of the sanitation and while she was laid up Ralph met an American woman who was much more his type. So in less than six weeks poor Etty was back in England. Of course she did not go back to Billy at once. She wanted to stay with us, but, naturally, that wasn’t possible. It was very awkward for everyone. There was never, I think, any talk of a divorce. It was long before that became fashionable. But we all felt it would be very inconsiderate to Billy if we had her to stay. And then, this is what will surprise you, Miss Myers, the next thing we heard was that Etty was back at Cornphillip and about to have a baby. It was a son. Billy was very pleased about it and I don’t believe that the boy ever knew, until quite lately, at luncheon with Lady Metroland, when my nephew Simon told him, in a rather ill-natured way.

“As for poor Ralph’s boy, I am afraid he has come to very little good. He must be middle-aged by now. No one ever seems to hear anything of him. Perhaps he was killed in war. I cannot remember.

“And here comes Ross with the tray; and I see that Mrs. Samson has made more of those little scones which you always seem to enjoy so much. I am sure, dear Miss Myers, you would suffer much less from your migraine if you avoided them. But you take so little care of yourself, dear Miss Myers… Give one to Manchu.”