The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [127]
I thought it typical of the way Lucy had been brought up that she returned my invitation in a day or two.
Roger got in first on the telephone. “I say, are you free on Wednesday evening?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“I wondered if you’d dine with us.”
“Not at half past six for the Finsbury Theatre?”
“No. I work late these days at the Red China Supply Committee.”
“What time then?”
“Oh, any time after eight. Dress or not, just as you feel like it.”
“What will you and Lucy be doing?”
“Well, I suppose we shall dress. In case anyone wants to go on anywhere.”
“In fact, it’s a dinner party?”
“Well, yes, in a kind of way.”
It was plain that poor Roger was dismayed at this social mushroom which had sprung up under his nose. As a face-saver the telephone call was misconceived, for a little note from Lucy was already in the post for me. It was not for me to mock these little notes; I had begun it. But an end had to be made to them, so I decided to answer this by telephone, choosing the early afternoon when I assumed Roger would be out. He was in, and answered me. “I wanted to speak to Lucy.”
“Yes?”
“Just to accept her invitation to dinner.”
“But you’ve already accepted.”
“Yes, but I thought I’d better just tell her.”
“I told her. What d’you think?”
“Ah, good, I was afraid you might have forgotten.”
I had come badly out of that.
From first to last the whole episode of the dinner was calamitous. It was a party of ten, and one glance round the room showed me that this was an occasion of what Lucy had been brought up to call “duty.” That is to say, we were all people whom for one reason or another she had felt obliged to ask. She was offering us all up together in a single propitiatory holocaust to the gods of the schoolroom. Even Mr. Benwell was there. He did not realize that Lucy had taken the house furnished and was congratulating her upon the decorations; “I like a London house to look like a London house,” he was saying.
Roger was carrying things off rather splendidly with a kind of sardonic gusto which he could often assume in times of stress. I knew him in that mood and respected it. I knew, too, that my presence added a particular zest to his performance. Throughout the evening I caught him in constant enquiry of me; was I attending to this parody of himself? I was his audience, not Lucy.
The fate in store for myself was manifest as soon as I came into the room. It was Lucy’s cousin Julia, the younger of the two girls Basil had told me of, the one whose début had been so disturbed by Lucy’s marriage. It would not, I felt, be a grave setback. Julia had that particular kind of succulent charm—bright, dotty, soft, eager, acquiescent, flattering, impudent—that is specially, it seems, produced for the delight of Anglo-Saxon manhood. She had no need of a London season to find a happy future. “Julia is staying with us. She is a great fan of yours,” said Lucy in her Pont Street manner; a manner which, like Roger’s, but much more subtly, had an element of dumb crambo in it. What she said turned out to be true.
“My word, this is exciting,” said Julia, and settled down to enjoy me as though I were a box of chocolates open on her knees.
“What a lot of people Lucy’s got here tonight.”
“Yes, it’s her first real dinner party, and she says it will be her last. She says she doesn’t like parties any more.”
“Did she ever?” I was ready to talk about Lucy at length, but this was not Julia’s plan.
“Everyone does at first,” she said briefly, and then began the conversation as she had rehearsed it, I am sure, in her bath. “I knew you the moment you came into the room. Guess how.”
“You heard my name announced.”
“Oh, no. Guess again.”
An American hero