by Evelyn Waugh
“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 t
o 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 t
heir 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.
