The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh

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.”

“So you did. I was there. Well, someone like that. One of those girls who were going round at the time—John Flintshire’s sister, Sally perhaps. I expect your Albright is her son.”

“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 that. 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.”

“You and your mother have been into Nudge’s bedroom?”

“Me and Charles. He’s the chap I’m scouring with. He’s downstairs now trying to pick the lock. I think Nudge must be sedated, he just rolled over snoring when we shook him.”

At the foot of the staircase a door led to the servants’ quarters. It opened and someone very strange appeared with an armful of bottles. Basil saw below him a slender youth, perhaps a man of twenty-one, who had a mop of dishevelled black hair and a meagre black fringe of beard and whiskers; formidable, contemptuous blue eyes above grey pouches; a proud, rather childish mouth. He wore a pleated white silk shirt, open at the neck, flannel trousers, a green cummerbund and sandals. The appearance, though grotesque, was not specifically plebeian and when he spoke his tone was pure and true without a taint of accent.

“The lock was easy,” he said, “but I can’t find anything except wine. Where d’you keep the whisky?”

“Heavens, I don’t know,” said Barbara.

“Good evening,” said Basil.

“Oh, good evening. Where do you keep the whisky?”

“It is a fancy dress party?” Basil asked.

“Not particularly,” said the young man.

“What have you got there?”

“Champagne of some kind. I didn’t notice the label.”

“He’s got the Cliquot rosé,” said Basil.

“How clever of him,” said Barbara.

“It will probably do,” said the young man. “Though most people prefer whisky.”

Basil attempted to speak but found no words.

Barbara quoted:

“‘His Aunt Jobiska made him drink

Lavender water tinged with pink,

For the world in general knows

There’s nothing so good for a Pobble’s toes.’

“Come along, Charles, I think we’ve got all we’re going to get here. I sense a grudging hospitality.”

She skipped downstairs, waved from the hall and was out of the front door, while Basil still stood dumbfounded.

At length, even more laboriously than he was wont, he continued upward. Angela was in bed reading.

“You’re home early.”

“Peter was there. No one else I knew except old Ambrose. Some booby made a speech. So I came away.”

“Very wise.”

Basil stood before Angela’s long looking glass. He could see her behind him. She put on her spectacles and picked up her book.

“Angela, I don’t drink much nowadays, do I?”

“Not as much as you used.”

“Or eat?”

“More.”

“But you’d say I led a temperate life?”

“Yes, on the whole.”

“It’s just age,” said Basil. “And dammit, I’m not sixty yet.”

“What’s worrying you, darling?”

“It’s when I meet young men. A choking feeling—as if I was going to have an apoplectic seizure. I once saw a fellow in a seizure, must have been about the age I am now—the Lieutenant Colonel of the Bombardiers. It was a most unpleasant spectacle. I’ve been feeling lately something like that might strike me any day. I believe I ought to take a cure.”

“I’ll come too.”

“Will you really, Angela? You are a saint.”

“Might as well be there as anywhere. They’re supposed to be good for insomnia too. The servants would like a holiday. They’ve been wearing awfully overworked expressions lately.”

“No sense taking Babs. We could send her to Malfrey.”

“Yes.”

“Angela, I saw the most awful-looking fellow tonight with a sort of beard—here, in the house, a friend of Babs. She called him ‘Charles.’”

“Yes, he’s someone new.”

“What’s his name?”

“I did hear. It sounded like a pack of fox hounds I once went out with. I know—Albrighton.”

“Albright,” cried Basil, the invisible noose tightening. “Albright, by God.”

Angela looked at him with real concern. “You know,” she said, “you really do look rather rum. I think we’d better go to one of those starving places at once.”

And then what had seemed a death-rattle turned into a laugh.

“It was one of Peter’s shirts,” he said, unintelligibly to Angela.

II

It may one day occur to a pioneer of therapeutics that most of those who are willing to pay fifty pounds a week to be deprived of food and wine, seek only suffering and that they could be cheaply accommodated in rat-ridden dungeons. At present the profits of the many thriving institutions which cater for the ascetic are depleted by the maintenance of neat lawns and shrubberies and, inside, of the furniture of a private house and apparatus resembling that of a hospital.

Basil and Angela could not immediately secure rooms at the sanatorium recommended by Molly Pastmaster. There was a waiting list of people suffering from every variety of infirmity. Finally they frankly outbid rival sufferers. A man whose obesity threatened the collapse of his ankles, and a woman raging with hallucinations were informed that their bookings were defective, and on a warm afternoon Basil and Angela drove down to take possession of their rooms.

There was a resident physician at this most accommodating house. He interviewed each patient on arrival and ostensibly considered individual needs.

He saw Angela first. Basil sat stolidly in an outer room, his hands on the head of his cane, gazing blankly before him.

When at length he was admitted, he stated his needs. The doctor did not attempt any physical investigation. It was a plain case.

“To refrain from technical language you complain of speechlessness, a sense of heat and strangulation, dizziness and subsequent trembling?” said this man of science.

“I feel I’m going to burst,” said Basil.

“Exactly. And these symptoms only occur when you meet young men?”

“Hairy young men especially.”

“Ah.”

“Young puppies.”

“And with puppies too? That is very significant. How do you react to kittens?”

“I mean the young men are puppies.”

“Ah. And are you fond of puppies, Mr. Seal?”

“Reasonably.”

“Ah.” The man of science studied the paper on his desk. “Have you always been conscious of this preference for your own sex?”

“I’m not conscious of it now.”

“You are fifty-eight years and ten months. That is often a crucial age, one of change, when repressed and unsuspected inclinations emerge and take control. I should strongly recommend your putting yourself under a psychoanalyst. We do not give treatment of that kind here.”

“I just want to be cured of feeling I’m going to burst.”

“I’ve no doubt our régime will relieve the symptoms. You will not find many young men here to disturb you. Our patients are mostly mature women. There is a markedly virile young physical training instructor. His hair is quite short but you had better keep away from the gym. Ah, I see from your paper that you are handicapped by war-wounds. I will take out all physical exercise from your timetable and substitute extra periods of manipulation by one of the female staff. Here is your diet sheet. You will notice that for the first forty-eight hours you are restricted to turnip juice. At the end of that period you embark on the carrots. At the end of the fortnight, if all goes well, we will have you on raw eggs and barley. Don’t hesitate to come and see me again if you have any problem to discuss.”

The sleeping quarters of male and female inmates were separated by the length of the house. Basil found Angela in the drawing room. They compared their diet sheets.

“Rum that it should be exactly the same treatment for insomnia and apoplexy.”

“That booby thought I was a pansy.”

“It takes a medical man to find out a thing like that. All these years and I never knew. They’re always right, you know. So that’s why you’re always going to that odd club.”

“This is no time for humour. This is going to be a very grim fortnight.”

“Not for me,” said Angela. “I came well provisioned. I’m only here to keep you company. And there’s a Mrs. Somebody next door to me who I used to know. She’s got a private cache of all the sleeping pills in the world. I’ve made great friends with her already. I shall be all right.”

On the third day of his ordeal, the worst according to habitués of the establishment, there came a telephone call from Barbara.

“Pobble, I want to go back to London. I’m bored.”

“Bored with Aunt Barbara?”

“Not with her, with here.”

“You stay where you’re put, chattel.”

“No. Please, I want to go home.”

“Your home is where I am. You can’t come here.”

“No. I want to go to London.”

“You can’t. I sent the servants away for a fortnight.”

“Most of my friends live without servants.”

“You’ve sunk into a very low world, Babs.”

“Don’t be such an ass. Sonia Trumpington hasn’t any servants.”

“Well, she won’t want you.”

“Pobble, you sound awfully feeble.”

“Who wouldn’t who’s only had one carrot in the last three days.”

“Oh, you are brave.”

“Yes.”

“How’s mummy?”

“Your mother is not keeping the régime as strictly as I am.”

“I bet she isn’t. Anyway, please, can I go back to London?”

“No.”

“You mean ‘No’?”

“Yes.”

“Fiend.”

Basil had gone hungry before. From time to time in his varied youth, in desert, tundra, glacier and jungle, in garrets and cellars, he had briefly endured extremities of privation. Now in the periods of repose and solitude, after the steam bath and the smarting deluge of the showers, after the long thumping and twisting by the huge masseuse, when the chintz curtains were drawn in his bedroom and he lay towel-wrapped and supine gazing at the pattern of the ceiling paper, familiar, forgotten pangs spoke to him of his past achievements.

He defined his condition to Angela after the first week of the régime. “I’m not rejuvenated or invigorated. I’m etherealized.”

“You look like a ghost.”

“Exactly. I’ve lost sixteen pounds three ounces.”

“You’re overdoing it. No one else keeps these absurd rules. We aren’t expected to. It’s like the ‘rien ne va plus’ at roulette. Mrs. What’s-her-name has found a black market in the gym kept by the sergeant-instructor. We ate a grouse pie this morning.”

They were in the well-kept grounds. A chime of bells announced that the brief recreation was over. Basil tottered back to his masseuse.

Later, light-headed and limp, he lay down and stared once more at the ceiling paper.

As a convicted felon might in long vigils search his history for the first trespass that had brought him to his present state, Basil examined his conscience. Fasting, he knew, was in all religious systems the introduction to self-knowledge. Where had he first played false to his destiny? After the conception of Barbara; after her birth. She, in some way, was at the root of it. Though he had not begun to dote on her until she was eight years old, he had from the first been aware of his own paternity. In 1947, when she was a year old, he and Angela had gone to New York and California. That enterprise, in those days, was nefarious. Elaborate laws restricted the use of foreign currencies and these they had defied, drawing freely on undisclosed assets. But on his return he had made a full declaration to the customs. It was no immediate business of theirs to inquire into the sources of his laden trunks. In a mood of arrogance he had displayed everything and paid without demur. There lay the fount and origin of the deviation into rectitude that had disfigured him in recent years. As though waking after a night’s drunkenness—an experience common enough in his youth—and confusedly articulating the disjointed memories of outrage and absurdity, he ruefully contemplated the change he had wrought in himself. His voice was not the same instrument as of old. He had first assumed it as a conscious imposture; it had become habitual to him; the antiquated, wordly-wise moralities which, using that voice, he had found himself obliged to utter, had become his settled opinions. It had begun as nursery clowning for the diversion of Barbara; a parody of Sir Joseph Mannering; darling, crusty old Pobble performing the part expected of him; and now the parody had become the persona.

His meditation was interrupted by the telephone. “Will you take a call from Mrs. Sothill?”

“Babs.”

“Basil. I just wondered how you were getting on.”

“They’re very pleased with me.”

“Thin?”

“Skinny. And concerned with my soul.”

“Chump. Listen. I’m concerned with Barbara’s soul.”

“What’s she been up to?”

“I think she’s in love.”

“Rot.”

“Well, she’s moping.”

“I expect she misses me.”

“When she isn’t moping she’s telephoning or writing letters.”

“Not to me.”

“Exactly. There’s someone in London.”

“Robin Trumpington?”

“She doesn’t confide.”

“Can’t you listen in on the telephone?”

“I’ve tried that, of course. It’s certainly a man she’s talking to. I can’t really understand their language but it sounds very affectionate. You won’t like it awfully if she runs off, will you?”

“She’d never think of such a thing. Don’t put ideas into the child’s head, for God’s sake. Give her a dose of castor oil.”

“I don’t mind, if you don’t. I just thought I should warn.”

“Tell her I’ll soon be back.”

“She knows that.”

“Well, keep her under lock and key until I get out.”

Basil reported the conversation to Angela. “Barbara says Barbara’s in love.”

“Which Barbara?”

“Mine. Ours.”

“Well, it’s quite normal at her age. Who with?”

“Robin Trumpington, I suppose.”

“He’d be quite suitable.”

“For heaven’s sake, Angie, she’s only a child.”

“I fell in love at her age.”

“And a nice mess that turned out. It’s someone after my money.”

“My money.”

“I’ve always regarded it as mine. I shan’t let her have a penny. Not till I’m dead anyway.”

“You look half dead now.”

“I’ve never felt better. You simply haven’t got used to my new appearance.”

“You’re very shaky.”

“‘Disembodied’ is the word. Perhaps I need a drink. In fact I know I do. This whole business of Babs has come as a shock—at a most unsuitable time. I might go and see the booby doctor.”

And, later, he set off along the corridor which led to the administrative office. He set off but had hardly hobbled six short paces when his newly sharpened conscience stabbed him. Was this the etherealized, the reborn Basil slinking off like a schoolboy to seek the permission of a booby doctor for a simple adult indulgence? He turned aside and made for the gym.

There he found two large ladies in bathing-dresses sitting astride a low horse. They swallowed hastily and brushed crumbs from their lips. A rubbery young man in vest and shorts addressed him sternly: “One moment, sir. You can’t come in here without an appointment.”

“My visit is unprofessional,” said Basil. “I want a word with you.”

The young man looked doubtful. Basil drew his note case from his pocket and tapped it on the knob of his cane.

“Well, ladies, I think that finishes the workout for this morning. We’re getting along very nicely. We mustn’t expect immediate results you know. Same routine tomorrow.” He replaced the lid on a small enamelled bin. The ladies looked hungrily at it but went in peace.

“Whisky,” said Basil.

“Whisky? Why, I couldn’t give you such a thing even if I had it. It would be as much as my job’s worth.”

“I should think it is precisely what your job is worth.”

“I don’t quite follow, sir.”

“My wife had grouse pie this morning.”

He was a cheeky young man much admired in his own milieu for his bounce. He was not abashed. A horrible smirk of complicity passed over his face. “It wasn’t really grouse,” he said. “Just a stale liver pâté the grocer had. They get so famished here they don’t care what they’re eating, the poor creatures.”

“Don’t talk about my wife in those terms,” said Basil, adding: “I shall know what I’m drinking, at a pound a snort.”

“I haven’t any whisky, honest. There may be a drop of brandy in the first-aid cupboard.”

“Let’s look at it.”

It was of a reputable brand. Basil took two snorts. He gasped. Tears came to his eyes. He felt for support on the wall-bars beside him. For a moment he feared nausea. Then a great warmth and elation were kindled inside him. This was youth indeed; childhood no less. Thus he had been exalted in his first furtive swigging in his father’s pantry. He had drunk as much brandy as this twice a day, most days of his adult life, after a variety of preliminary potations, and had felt merely a slight heaviness. Now in his etherealized condition he was, as it were, raised from the earth, held aloft and then lightly deposited; a mystical experience as though on Ganges bank or a spur of the Himalayas.

There was a mat near his feet, thick, padded, bed-like. Here he subsided and lay in ecstasy; quite outside his body, high and happy, his spirit soared; he shut his eyes.

“You can’t stay here, sir. I’ve got to lock up.”

“Don’t worry,” said Basil. “I’m not here.”

The gymnast was very strong; it was a light task to hoist Basil on one of the trollies which in various sizes were part of the equipment of the sanatorium, and thus recumbent, dazed but not totally insensible, smoothly propelled up the main corridor, he was met by the presiding doctor.

“What have you there, sergeant?”

“Couldn’t say at all. Never saw the gentleman before.”

“It looks like Mr. Seal. Where did you find him?”

“He just walked into the gym, sir, looking rather queer and suddenly he passed out.”

“Gave you a queer look? Yes.”

“He rolls through the air with the greatest of ease, that darling young man on the flying trapeze,” Basil chanted with some faint semblance of tune in his voice.

“Been overdoing it a bit, sir, I wouldn’t wonder.”

“You might be right, sergeant. You had better leave him now. The female staff can take over. Ah, Sister Gamage, Mr. Seal needs help in getting to his room. I think the régime has proved too strenuous for him. You may administer an ounce of brandy. I will come and examine him later.”

But when he repaired to Basil’s room he found his patient deeply sleeping.

He stood by the bed, gazing at his patient. There was an expression of peculiar innocence on the shrunken face. But the physician knew better.

“I will see him in the morning,” he said and then went to instruct his secretary to inform the previous applicants that two vacancies had unexpectedly occurred.

III

“The sack, the push, the boot. I’ve got to be out of the place in an hour.”

“Oh Basil, that is like old times, isn’t it?”

“Only deep psychoanalysis can help me, he says, and in my present condition I am a danger to his institution.”

“Where shall we go? Hill Street’s locked up. There won’t be anyone there until Monday.”

“The odd thing is I have no hangover.”

“Still ethereal?”

“Precisely. I suppose it means an hotel.”

“You might telephone to Barbara and tell her to join us. She said she was keen to leave.”

But when Angela telephoned to her sister-in-law, she heard: “But isn’t Barbara with you in London? She told me yesterday you’d sent for her. She went up by the afternoon train.”

“D’you think she can have gone to that young man?”

“I bet she has.”

“Ought I to tell Basil?”

“Keep it quiet.”

“I consider it very selfish of her. Basil isn’t at all in good shape. He’ll have a fit if he finds out. He had a sort of fit yesterday.”

“Poor Basil. He may never know.”

Basil and Angela settled their enormous bill. Their car was brought round to the front. The chauffeur drove. Angela sat beside Basil who huddled beside her occasionally crooning ill-remembered snatches of “the daring young man on the flying trapeze.” As they approached London they met all the outgoing Friday traffic. Their own way was clear. At the hotel Basil went straight to bed—“I don’t feel I shall ever want another bath as long as I live,” he said—and Angela ordered a light meal for him of oysters and stout. By dusk he had rallied enough to smoke a cigar.

Next morning he was up early and spoke of going to his club.

“That dingy one?”

“Heavens no, Bellamy’s. But I don’t suppose there’ll be many chaps there on a Saturday morning.”

There was no one. The barman shook him up an egg with port and brandy. Then, with the intention of collecting some books, he took a taxi to Hill Street. It was not yet eleven o’clock. He let himself into what should have been the empty and silent house. Music came from the room on the ground floor where small parties congregated before luncheon and dinner. It was a dark room, hung with tapestry and furnished with Bühl. There he found his daughter, dressed in pajamas and one of her mother’s fur coats, seated on the floor with her face caressing a transistor radio. Behind her in the fireplace large lumps of coal lay on the ashes of the sticks and paper which had failed to kindle them.

“Darling Pobble, never more welcome. I didn’t expect you till Monday and I should have been dead by then. I can’t make out how the central heating works. I thought the whole point of it was it just turned on and didn’t need a man. Can’t get the fire to burn. And don’t start: ‘Babs, what are you doing here?’ I’m freezing, that’s what.”

“Turn that damn thing off.”

In the silence Barbara regarded her father more intently. “Darling, what have they been doing to you? You aren’t yourself at all. You’re tottering. Not my fine stout Pobble at all. Sit down at once. Poor Pobble, all shrunk like a mummy. Beasts!”

Basil sat and Barbara wriggled round until her chin rested on his knees. “Famine baby,” she said. Star-sapphire eyes in the child-like face under black tousled hair gazed deep into star-sapphire eyes sunk in empty pouches. “Belsen atrocity,” she added fondly. “Wraith. Skeleton-man. Dear dug-up corpse.”

“Enough of this flattery. Explain yourself.”

“I told you I was bored. You know what Malfrey’s like as well as I do. Oh the hell of the National Trust. It’s not so bad in the summer with the charabancs. Now it’s only French art experts—half a dozen a week, and all the rooms still full of oilcloth promenades and rope barriers and Aunt Barbara in the flat over the stables and those ridiculous Sothills in the bachelors’ wing and the height of excitement a pheasant shoot with lunch in the hut and then nothing to eat except pheasant and… Well, I registered a formal complaint, didn’t I? but you were too busy starving to pay any attention, and if your only, adored daughter’s happiness doesn’t count for more than senile vanity…..” She paused, exhausted.

“There’s more to it than that.”

“There is something else.”

“What?”

“Now, Pobble, you have to take this calmly. For your own good, not for mine. I’m used to violence, God knows. If you had been poor the police would have been after you for the way you’ve knocked me about all these years. I can take it; but you, Pobble, you are at an age when it might be dangerous. So keep quite calm and I’ll tell you. I’m engaged to be married.”

It was not a shock; it was not a surprise. It was what Basil had expected. “Rot,” he said.

“I happen to be in love. You must know what that means. You must have been in love once—with mummy or someone.”

“Rot. And dammit, Babs, don’t blub. If you think you’re old enough to be in love, you’re old enough not to blub.”

“That’s a silly thing to say. It’s being in love makes me blub. You don’t realize. Apart from being perfect and frightfully funny he’s an artistic genius and everyone’s after him and I’m jolly lucky to have got him and you’ll love him too once you know him if only you won’t be stuck-up and we got engaged on the telephone so I came up and he was out for all I know someone else has got him and I almost died of cold and now you come in looking more like a vampire than a papa and start saying ‘rot.’”

She pressed her face on his thigh and wept.

After a time Basil said: “What makes you think Robin paints?”

“Robin? Robin Trumpington? You don’t imagine I’m engaged to Robin, do you? He’s got a girl of his own he’s mad about. You don’t know much about what goes on, do you, Pobble? If it’s only Robin you object to, everything’s all right.”

“Well, who the hell do you think you are engaged to?”

“Charles of course.”

“Charles à Court. Never heard of him.”

“Don’t pretend to be deaf. You know perfectly well who I mean. You met him here the other evening only I don’t think you really took him in.”

“Albright,” said Basil. It was evidence of the beneficial effect of the sanatorium that he did not turn purple in the face, did not gobble. He merely asked quietly: “Have you been to bed with this man?”

“Not to bed.”

“Have you slept with him?”

“Oh, no sleep.”

“You know what I mean. Have you had sexual intercourse with him?”

“Well, perhaps; not in bed; on the floor and wide awake you might call it intercourse, I suppose.”

“Come clean, Babs. Are you a virgin?”

“It’s not a thing any girl likes having said about her, but I think I am.”

“Think?”

“Well, I suppose so. Yes, really. But we can soon change all that. Charles is set on marriage, bless him. He says it’s easier to get married to girls if they’re virgins. I can’t think why. I don’t mean a big wedding. Charles is very unsocial and he’s an orphan, no father, no mother, and his relations don’t like him, so we’ll just be married quietly in a day or two and then I thought if you and mummy don’t want it we might go to the house in Bermuda. We shan’t be any trouble to you at all, really. If you want to go to Bermuda, we’ll settle for Venice, but Charles says that’s a bit square and getting cold in November, so Bermuda will really be better.”

“Has it occurred to either of you that you need my permission to marry?”

“Now don’t get legal, Pobble. You know I love you far too much ever to do anything you wouldn’t like.”

“You’d better get dressed and go round to your mother at Claridges.”

“Can’t get dressed. No hot water.”

“Have a bath there. I had better see this young man.”

“He’s coming here at twelve.”

“I’ll wait for him.”

“You’ll freeze.”

“Get up and get out.”

There followed one of those scuffles that persisted between father and daughter even in her eighteenth year which ended in her propulsion, yelping.

Basil sat and waited. The bell could not be heard in the anteroom. He sat in the window and watched the doorstep, saw a taxi draw up and Barbara enter it, still in pajamas and fur coat, carrying a small case. Later he saw his enemy strolling confidently from Berkeley Square. Basil opened the door.

“You did not expect to see me?”

“No, but I’m very glad to. We’ve a lot to discuss.”

They went together to the ante-room. The young man was less bizarre in costume than on their previous meeting but his hair was as copious and his beard proclaimed his chosen, deleterious status. They surveyed one another in silence. Then Basil said: “Lord Pastmaster’s shirts are too big for you.”

It was a weak opening.

“It’s not a thing I should have brought up if you hadn’t,” said Albright, “but all your clothes look too big for you.”

Basil covered his defeat by lighting a cigar.

“Barbara tells me you’ve been to that sanatorium in Kent,” continued the young man easily; “there’s a new place, you know, much better, in Sussex.”

Basil was conscious of quickening recognition. Some faint, odious inkling of kinship; had he not once, in years far gone by, known someone who had spoken in this way to his elders? He drew deeply on his cigar and studied Albright. The eyes, the whole face seemed remotely familiar; the reflection of a reflection seen long ago in shaving mirrors.

“Barbara tells me you have proposed marriage to her.”

“Well, she actually popped the question. I was glad to accept.”

“You are Clarence Albright’s son?”

“Yes, did you know him? I barely did. I hear he was rather awful. If you want to be genealogical, I have an uncle who is a duke. But I barely know him either.”

“And you are a painter?”

“Did Barbara tell you that?”

“She said you were an artistic genius.”

“She’s a loyal little thing. She must mean my music.”

“You compose?”

“I improvise sometimes. I play the guitar.”

“Professionally?”

“Sometimes—in coffee bars, you know.”

“I do not know, I’m afraid. And you make a living by it?”

“Not what you would call a living.”

“May I ask, then, how you propose to support my daughter?”

“Oh that doesn’t come into it. It’s the other way round. I’m doing what you did, marrying money. Now I know what’s in your mind. ‘Buy him off,’ you think. I assure you that won’t work. Barbara is infatuated with me and, if it’s not egotistical to mention it, I am with her. I’m sure you won’t want one of those ‘Gretna Green Romances’ and press photographers following you about. Besides, Barbara doesn’t want to be a nuisance to you. She’s a loyal girl, as we’ve already remarked. The whole thing can be settled calmly. Think of the taxes your wife will save by a good solid marriage settlement. It will make no appreciable difference to your own allowance.”

And still Basil sat steady, unmoved by any tremor of that volcanic senility which a fortnight ago would have exploded in scalding, blinding showers. He was doing badly in this first encounter which he had too lightly provoked. He must take thought and plan. He was not at the height of his powers. He had been prostrate yesterday. Today he was finding his strength. Tomorrow experience would conquer. This was a worthy antagonist and he felt something of the exultation which a brave of the sixteenth century might have felt when in a brawl he suddenly recognized in the clash of blades a worthy swordsman.

“Barbara’s mother has the best financial advice,” he said.

“By the way, where is Barbara? She arranged to meet me here.”

“She’s having a bath in Claridges.”

“I ought to go over and see her. I’m taking her out to lunch. You couldn’t lend me a fiver, could you?”

“Yes,” said Basil. “Certainly.”

If Albright had known him better he would have taken alarm at this urbanity. All he thought was: “Old crusty’s a much softer job than anyone told me.” And Basil thought: “I hope he spends it all on luncheon. That banknote is all he will ever get. He deserved better.”

IV

Sonia Trumpington had never remarried. She shared a flat with her son Robin but saw little of him. Mostly she spent her day alone with her needlework and in correspondence connected with one or two charitable organizations with which, in age, she had become involved. She was sewing when Basil sought her out after luncheon (oysters again, two dozen this time with a pint of champagne—his strength waxed hourly) and she continued to stitch at the framed grospoint while he confided his problem to her.

“Yes, I’ve met Charles Albright. He’s rather a friend of Robin’s.”

“Then perhaps you can tell me what Barbara sees in him.”

“Why, you, of course,” said Sonia. “Haven’t you noticed? He’s the dead spit—looks, character, manner, everything.”

“Looks? Character? Manner? Sonia, you’re raving.”

“Oh, not as you are now, not even after your cure. Don’t you remember at all what you were like at his age?”

“But he’s a monster.”

“So were you, darling. Have you quite forgotten? It’s all as clear as clear to me. You Seals are so incestuous. Why do you suppose you got keen on Barbara? Because she’s just like Barbara Sothill. Why is Barbara keen on Charles? Because he’s you.”

Basil considered this proposition with his newly resharpened wits.

“That beard.”

“I’ve seen you with a beard.”

“That was after I came back from the Arctic and I never played the guitar in my life,” he said.

“Does Charles play the guitar? First I’ve heard of it. He does all sorts of things—just as you did.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing me into it.”

“Have you quite forgotten what you were like? Have a look at some of my old albums.”

Like most of her generation Sonia had in youth filled large volumes with press-cuttings and photographs of herself and her friends. They lay now in a shabby heap in a corner of the room.

“That’s Peter’s twenty-firster at King’s Thursday. First time I met you, I think. Certainly the first time I met Alastair. He was Margot’s boyfriend then, remember? She was jolly glad to be rid of him….. That’s my marriage. I bet you were there.” She turned the pages from the posed groups of bride, bridegroom and bridesmaids to the snapshots taken at the gates of St. Margaret’s. “Yes, here you are.”

“No beard. Perfectly properly dressed.”

“Yes, there are more incriminating ones later. Look at that… and that.”

They opened successive volumes. Basil appeared often.

“I don’t think any of them very good likenesses,” said Basil stiffly. “I’d just come back from the Spanish front there—of course I look a bit untidy.”

“It’s not clothes we’re talking about. Look at your expression.”

“Light in my eyes,” said Basil.

“1937. That’s another party at King’s Thursday.”

“What a ghastly thing facetious photographs are. What on earth am I doing with that girl?”

“Throwing her in the lake. I remember the incident now. I took the photograph.”

“Who?”

“I’ve no idea. Perhaps it says on the back. Just ‘Basil and Betty.’ She must have been much younger than us, not our kind at all. I’ve got an idea she was the daughter of some duke or other. The Stayles—that’s who she was.”

Basil studied the picture and shuddered. “What can have induced me to behave like that?”

“Youthful high spirits.”

“I was thirty-four, God help me. She’s very plain.”

“I’ll tell you who she is—was. Charles Albright’s mother. That’s an odd coincidence if you like. Let’s look her up and make sure.”

She found a Peerage and read: “Here we are. Fifth daughter of the late duke. Elizabeth Ermyntrude Alexandra, for whom H.R.H. The Duke of Connaught stood sponsor. Born 1920. Married 194 °Clarence Albright, killed in action 1943. Leaving issue. Died 1956. I remember hearing about it—cancer, very young. That’s Charles, that issue.”

Basil gazed long at the photograph. The girl was plump and, it seemed, wriggling; annoyed rather than amused by the horseplay. “How one forgets. I suppose she was quite a friend of mine once.”

“No, no. She was just someone Margot produced for Peter.”

Basil’s imagination, once so fertile of mischief, lately so dormant, began now, in his hour of need, to quicken and stir.

“That photograph has given me an idea.”

“Basil, you’ve got that old villainous look. What are you up to?”

“Just an idea.”

“You’re not going to throw Barbara into the Serpentine.”

“Something not unlike it,” he said.

“Let us go and sit by the Serpentine,” said Basil to his daughter that afternoon.

“Won’t it be rather cold?”

“It will be quiet. Wrap up well. I have to talk to you seriously.”

“Good temper?”

“Never better.”

“Why not talk here?”

“Your mother may come in. What I have to say doesn’t concern her.”

“It’s about me and Charles, I bet.”

“Certainly.”

“Not a scolding?”

“Far from it. Warm fatherly sympathy.”

“It’s worth being frozen for that.”

They did not speak in the car. Basil sent it away, saying they would find their own way back. At that chilly tea time, with the leaves dry and falling, there was no difficulty in finding an empty seat. The light was soft; it was one of the days when London seems like Dublin.

“Charles said he’d talked to you. He wasn’t sure you loved him.”

“I love him.”

“Oh, Pobble.”

“He did not play the guitar but I recognized his genius.”

“Oh, Pobble, what are you up to?”

“Just what Sonia asked.” Basil leaned his chin on the knob of his cane. “You know, Babs, that all I want is your happiness.”

“This doesn’t sound at all like you. You’ve got some sly scheme.”

“Far from it. You must never tell him or your mother what I am about to say. Charles’s parents are dead so they are not affected. I knew his mother very well; perhaps he doesn’t know how well. People often wondered why she married Albright. It was a blitz marriage, you know, while he was on leave and there were air raids every night. It was when I was first out of hospital, before I married your mother.”

“Darling Pobble, it’s very cold here and I don’t quite see what all this past history has to do with me and Charles.”

“It began,” said Basil inexorably, “when—what was her name? — Betty was younger than you are now. I threw her into the lake at King’s Thursday.”

“What began?”

“Betty’s passion for me. Funny what excites a young girl—with you a guitar, with Betty a ducking.”

“Well, I think that’s rather romantic. It sort of brings you and Charles closer.”

“Very close indeed. It was more than romantic. She was too young at the beginning—just a girlish crush. I thought she would get over it. Then, when I was wounded, she took to visiting me every day in hospital and the first day I came out—you won’t be able to understand the sort of exhilaration a man feels at a time like that, or the appeal lameness has for some women, or the sense of general irresponsibility we all had during the blitz—I’m not trying to excuse myself. I was not the first man. She had grown up since the splash in the lake. It only lasted a week. Strictly perhaps I should have married her, but I was less strict in those days. I married your mother instead. You can’t complain about that. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t exist. Betty had to look elsewhere and fortunately that ass Albright turned up in the nick. Yes, Charles is your brother, so how could I help loving him?”

Soundlessly Barbara rose from the seat and sped through the twilight, stumbled on her stiletto heels across the sand of the Row, disappeared behind the statuary through Edinburgh Gate. Basil at his own pace followed. He stopped a taxi, kept it waiting at the kerb while he searched Bellamy’s vainly for a friendly face, drank another eggnog at the bar, went on towards Claridges.

“What on earth’s happened to Barbara?” Angela asked. “She came in with a face of tragedy, didn’t speak and now she’s locked herself in your bedroom.”

“I think she’s had a row with that fellow she was keen on. What was his name? Albright. A good thing really, a likeable fellow but not at all suitable. I daresay Babs needs a change of scene. Angie, if it suits you, I think we might all three of us go to Bermuda tomorrow.”

“Can we get tickets?”

“I have them already. I stopped at the travel office on my way from Sonia’s. I don’t imagine Babs will want much dinner tonight. She’s best left alone at the moment. I feel I could manage a square meal. We might have it downstairs.”