The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [126]
“Can you come?”
“Yes, I suppose so. But what’s it all about?”
“It’s not ‘about’ anything. I just want you to lunch with me.”
“Why?”
“It’s quite usual, you know, when one’s friends marry. Just politeness.”
“You haven’t got some ghastly foreigners you stayed with abroad?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Well, it all seems very odd to me. Writing a letter, I mean, and everything . . .”
I rang off.
Lucy answered with a formal acceptance. I studied her writing. I had expected, I do not know why, a round girlish hand of the post-copper-plate era. Instead she wrote like a man. She used a fountain pen, I noticed; that was unusual in a girl.
Dear John,
Roger and I shall be delighted to lunch with you at the Ritz on Thursday week at 1.30.
Yours sincerely,
Lucy Simmonds.
Should it not have been “Yours ever” after the “Dear John”? I wondered whether she had wondered what to put. Another girl might have written “Yours” with a noncommittal squiggle, but her writing did not lend itself to that kind of evasion. I had ended my note, “Love to Roger.”
Was she not a little over-formal in repeating the place and time? Had she written straight off, without thinking, or had she sucked the top of her pen a little?
The paper was presumably the choice of their landlord, in unobtrusive good taste. I smelled it and thought I detected a whiff of soap.
At this point I lost patience with myself; it was ludicrous to sit brooding over a note of this kind. I began, instead, to wonder whom I should ask to meet her—certainly none of the gang she had learned to look on as “Roger’s friends.” On the other hand it must be clear that the party was for her. Roger would be the first to impute that they were being made use of. In the end, after due thought and one or two failures, I secured a middle-aged, highly reputable woman-novelist and Andrew Desert and his wife—an eminently sociable couple. When Roger saw his fellow guests he was more puzzled than ever. I could see him all through luncheon trying to work it out, why I should have spent five pounds in this peculiar fashion.
I enjoyed my party. Lucy began by talking about my father’s painting.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s very fashionable at the moment.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” she said in frank surprise, and went on to tell me how she had stopped before a shop window in Duke Street where a battle picture of my father’s was on view; there had been two private soldiers construing it together, point by point. “I think that’s worth a dozen columns of praise in the weekly papers,” she said.
“Just like Kipling’s Light that Failed,” said the woman-novelist.
“Is it? I didn’t know.” She told us she had never read any Kipling.
“That shows the ten years between us,” I said, and so the conversation became a little more personal as we discussed the differences between those who were born before the Great War and those born after it; in fact, so far as it could be worked, the differences between Lucy and myself.
Roger always showed signs of persecution-mania in the Ritz. He did not like it when we knew people at other tables whom he didn’t know and, when the waiter brought him the wrong dish by mistake, he began on a set-piece which I had heard him use before in this same place. “Fashionable restaurants are the same all over the world,” he said. “There are always exactly twenty per cent more tables than the waiters can manage. It’s a very good thing for the workers’ cause that no one except the rich know the deficiencies of the luxury world. Think of the idea Hollywood gives of a place like this,” he said, warming to his subject. “A maître d’hôtel like an ambassador, bowing famous beauties across acres of unencumbered carpet—and look at poor Lorenzo there, sweating under his collar, jostling a way through for dowdy Middle West Americans . . .” But it was not a success. Lucy, I could see, thought it odd of him to complain when he was a guest. I pointed out that the couple whom Roger