The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [121]
He was overworking the Marxist vocabulary. That was always Roger’s way, to become obsessed with a new set of words and to extend them, deliberately, beyond the limits of sense; it corresponded to some sombre, interior need of his to parody whatever, for the moment, he found venerable; when he indulged it I was reminded of the ecclesiastical jokes of those on the verge of religious melancholy. Roger had been in that phase himself when I first met him.
One evening, at his house, the talk was all about the kind of house I should buy. It was clear that my friends had very much more elaborate plans for me than I had for myself. After dinner Roger produced a copper-engraving of 1767 of A Composed Hermitage in the Chinese Taste. It was a preposterous design. “He actually built it,” Roger said, “and it’s still standing a mile or two out of Bath. We went to see it the other day. It only wants putting into repair. Just the house for you.”
Everyone seemed to agree.
I knew exactly what he meant. It was just the house one would want someone else to have. I was graduating from the exploiting to the exploited class.
But Lucy said: “I can’t think why John should want to have a house like that.”
When she said that I had a sudden sense of keen pleasure. She and I were on the same side.
Roger and Lucy had become my main interest during the months while I was waiting to settle up in St. John’s Wood. They lived in Victoria Square where they had taken three years’ lease of a furnished house. “Bourgeois furniture,” Roger complained, rather more accurately than usual. They shut away the model ships and fire-bucket wastepaper baskets in a store cupboard and introduced a prodigious radio-gramophone; they hung their own pictures in place of the Bartolozzi prints, but the house retained its character, and Roger and Lucy, each in a different way, looked out of place there. It was here that Roger had written his ideological play.
They had been married in November. I had spent all the previous autumn abroad on a leisurely, aimless trip before settling at Fez for the winter’s work. My mail at Malta, in September, told me that Roger had taken up with a rich girl and was having difficulty with her family; at Tetuan I learned that he was married. Apparently he had been in pursuit of her all the summer, unknown to us. It was not until I reached London that I heard the full story. Basil Seal told me, rather resentfully, because for many years now he had himself been in search of an heiress and had evolved theories on the subject of how and where they might be taken. “You must go to the provinces,” he used to say. “The competition in London is far too hot for chaps like us. Americans and Colonials want value for money. The trouble is that the very rich have a natural affinity for one another. You can see it happening all the time—stinking rich people getting fixed up. And what happens? They simply double their super tax and no one is the better off. But they respect brains in the provinces. They like a man to be ambitious there, with his way to make in the world, and there are plenty of solid, mercantile families who can settle a hundred thousand on a daughter without turning a hair, who don’t care a hoot about polo, but think a Member of Parliament very fine. That’s the way to get in with them. Stand for Parliament.”
In accordance with this plan Basil had stood three times—or rather had three times been adopted as candidate; on two occasions he fell out with his committee