A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh [12]
by step through alternations of dusk and rainbow. Both hands were occupied, holding to her breast a bag, a small hat, a half finished panel of petit-point embroidery and a vast disordered sheaf of Sunday newspapers, above which only her eyes and forehead appeared as though over a yashmak. Beaver emerged from the shadows below and stood at the foot of the stairs looking up at her. "I say can't I carry something?" "No, thanks, I've got everything safe. How did you sleep?" "Beautifully." "I bet you didn't." "Well I'm not a very good sleeper." "Next time you come you shall have a different room. But I daresay you won't ever come again. People so seldom do. It is very sad because it's such fun for us having them and we never make any new friends living down here." "Tony's gone to church." "Yes, he likes that. He'll be back soon. Let's go out for a minute or two, it looks lovely." When Tony came back they mere sitting in the library. Beaver was telling Brenda's fortune with cards. "... Now cut to me again," he was saying, "and I'll see if it's any clearer.... Oh yes... there is going to be a sudden death which. will cause you great pleasure and profit. In fact you are going to kill someone. I can't tell if it's a man or a woman... yes, a woman... then you are going to go on a long journey across the sea, marry six dark men and have eleven children, grow a beard and die." "Beast. And all this time I've been thinking it was serious. Hullo, Tony, jolly church?" "Most enjoyable; how about some sherry?" When they were alone together, just before luncheon, he said. "Darling, you're being heroic with Beaver." "Oh, I quite enjoy coping-in fact I'm bitching him rather." "So I saw. Well I'll look after him this afternoon and he's going this evening." "Is he, I'll be quite sorry. You know that's a difference between us, that when someone's awful you just run away and hide, while I actually enjoy it-making up to them and showing off to myself how well I can do it. Besides Beaver isn't so bad. He's quite like us in some ways." "He's not like me," said Tony. After luncheon Tony said, "Well if it would really amuse you, we might go over the house. I know it isn't fashionable to like this sort of architecture now-my Aunt Frances says it is an authentic Pecksniff-but I think it's good of its kind." It took them two hours. Beaver was well practised in the art of being shown over houses; he had been brought up to it in fact, ever since he had begun to accompany his mother, whose hobby it had always been, and later, with changing circumstances, the profession. He made apt and appreciative comments and greatly enhanced the pleasure Tony always took in exposing his treasures. It was a huge building conceived in the late generation of the Gothic revival, when the movement had lost its fantasy and become structurally logical and stodgy. They saw it all: the shuttered drawing room, like a school speech-hall, the cloistral passages, the dark inner courtyard, the chapel where, until Tony's succession, family prayers had been daily read to the assembled household, the plate room and estate office, the bedrooms and attics, the watertank concealed among the battlements; they climbed the spiral staircase into the works of the clock and waited to see it strike half past three. Thence they descended with ringing ears to the collections-enamel, ivories, seals, snuff boxes, china, ormolu, cloisonn�they paused before each picture in the oak gallery and discussed its associations; they took out the more remarkable folios in the library and examined prints of the original buildings, manuscript account books of the old abbey, travel journals of Tony's ancestors. At intervals Beaver would say, "The So-and-sos have got one rather like that at Such-and-such a place," and Tony would say, "Yes, I've seen it but I think mine is the earlier." Eventually they came back to the smoking room and Tony left Beaver to Brenda. She was stitching away at the petit-point, hunched in an armchair. "Well," she asked, without looking up from her needlework, "what did you think of it?" "Magnificent."