The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [114]
This sense of homelessness was new to me. Before I had moved constantly from one place to another; every few weeks I would descend upon St. John’s Wood with a trunk, leave some books, collect others, put away summer clothes for the winter; seldom as I slept there, the house in St. John’s Wood had been my headquarters and my home; that earth had now been stopped and I thought, not far away, I could hear the hounds.
My worries at this period became symbolized in a single problem; what to do with my hats. I owned what now seemed a multitude of them, of one sort and another; two of them of silk—the tall hat I took to weddings and a second I had bought some years earlier when I thought for a time that I was going to take to fox-hunting; there were a bowler, a panama, a black, a brown and a grey soft hat, a green hat from Salzburg, a sombrero, some tweed caps for use on board ship and in trains—all these had accumulated from time to time and all, with the possible exception of the sombrero, were more or less indispensable. Was I doomed for the rest of my life to travel everywhere with this preposterous collection? At the moment they were, most of them, in St. John’s Wood, but, any day now, the negotiations for the sale might be finished and the furniture removed, sold or sent to store.
Somewhere to hang up my hat, that was what I needed.
I consulted Roger Simmonds who was lunching with me. I felt as though I had known Roger all my life; actually I had first met him in our second year at Oxford; we edited an undergraduate weekly together and had been close associates ever since. He was one of the very few people I corresponded with when I was away; we met constantly when I was in London. Sometimes I even stayed with him, for he and half a dozen others constituted a kind of set. We had all known each other intimately over a number of years, had from time to time passed on girls from one to the other, borrowed and lent freely. When we were together we drank more and talked more boastfully than we normally did. We had grown rather to dislike one another; certainly when any two or three of us were alone, we blackguarded the rest, and if asked about them on neutral ground I denied their friendship. “Blades?” I would say. “Yes, I used to see a lot of him, but we never seem to meet now he’s in Parliament” or “Jimmie Rendall? Yes, I knew him well. Then he got taken up by Lord Monomark and that is the end of all friendship.” About Roger I used to say, “I don’t think he’s interested in anything except politics now.”
This was more or less true. In the late twenties he set up as a writer and published some genuinely funny novels on the strength of which he filled a succession of rather dazzling jobs with newspapers and film companies, but lately he had married an unknown heiress, joined the Communist Party and become generally respectable.
“I never wear a hat now I am married,” said Roger virtuously. “Lucy says they’re kulak. Besides I was beginning to lose my hair.”
“My dear Roger, you’ve been bald as a coot for ten years. But it isn’t only a question of hats. There are overcoats.”
“Only in front. It’s as thick as anything at the back. How many overcoats have you got?”
“Four, I think.”
“Too many.”
We discussed it at length and decided it was possible to manage with three.
“Workers pawn their overcoats in June and take them out again in October,” Roger said. He wanted to talk about his play, Internal Combustion. “The usual trouble with ideological drama,” he said, “is that they’re too mechanical. I mean the characters are economic