The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [135]
“He’ll do it very well,” I said, “Roger can write anything.”
“Yes.”
But while she was telling me this and I was answering, I thought only of Lucy’s new beauty. I knew that beauty of that kind did not come from a suitable light or a lucky way with the hair or a sound eight hours’ sleep, but from an inner secret; and I knew this morning that the secret was the fact of Roger’s jealousy. So another stage was reached in my falling in love with Lucy, while each week she grew heavier and slower and less apt for love, so that I accepted the joy of her companionship without reasoning. Later, on looking back on those unusual weeks, I saw myself and Lucy as characters in the stock intrigue of renaissance comedy, where the heroine follows the hero in male attire and is wooed by him, unknowing, in the terms of rough friendship.
In these weeks Lucy and I grew adept in construing the jargon of the estate agents. We knew that “substantially built” meant “hideous,” “ripe for modernization” “ruinous,” that “matured grounds” were a jungle of unkempt laurel; all that belonged to the underworld of Punch humour. We learned, what was far more valuable, to detect omissions; nothing could be taken for granted, and if the agent did not specify a staircase, it had in all probability disappeared. Basil explained to me how much more practical it was to purchase a mansion; really large houses, he said, were sold for the sake of the timber in the park; he had a scheme, rather hazily worked out, by which I should make myself a private company for the development of a thousand acres, a mile of fishing, a castle and two secondary residences which he knew of in Cumberland, and by a system of mortgages, subtenancies, directors’ fees and declared trading losses, inhabit the castle, as he expressed it, “free”; somewhere, in the legal manoeuvres, Basil was to have acquired and divested himself, at a profit, of a controlling interest in the estate. Roger produced a series of derelict “follies” which he thought it my duty to save for the nation. Other friends asked why I did not settle in Portugal where, they said, Jesuit Convents in the Manuelo style could be picked up for a song. But I had a clear idea of what I required. In the first place it must not cost, all told, when the decorators and plumbers had moved out and the lawyers been paid for the conveyance, more than £3,000; it must be in agricultural country, preferably within five miles of an antiquated market town, it must be at least a hundred years old, and it must be a house, no matter how dingy, rather than a cottage, however luxurious; there must be a cellar, two staircases, high ceilings, a marble chimneypiece in the drawing room, room to turn a car at the front door, a coach-house and stable yard, a walled kitchen garden, a paddock and one or two substantial trees—these seemed to me the minimum requisites of the standard of gentility at which I aimed, something between the squire’s and the retired admiral’s. Lucy had a womanly love of sunlight and a Marxist faith in the superior beauties of concrete and steel. She had, moreover, a horror, born of long association, of the rural bourgeoisie with whom I was determined to enrol myself. I was able to excuse my predilection to others by describing it as Gallic; French writers, I explained, owed their great strength, as had the writers of nineteenth-century England, to their middle-class status; the best of them all owned square white houses, saved their money, dined with the mayor and had their eyes closed for them at death by faithful, repellent housekeepers; English and American writers squandered their energy in being fashionable or bohemian or, worst of all, in an unhappy alternation between the two. This theme went down well with Mr. Benwell who, in the week or two after I expounded it to him, gave deathless offence to several