The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [136]
The last occasion of her leaving London before her confinement, was to look at a house with me, below the Berkshire downs. It was too far to travel comfortably in a day, and we spent the night with relatives of hers near Abingdon. We had by now grown so accustomed to one another’s company that there seemed nothing odd to us in Lucy proposing me as a guest. Our host and hostess, however, thought it most irregular, and their manifest surprise was a further bond between us. Lucy was by now seven months with child and at the back of her relatives’ concern was the fear that she might be delivered prematurely in their house. They treated her with a solicitude that all too clearly was a rebuke to my own easygoing acceptance of the situation. Try how I might to realize the dangers she ran, I could never feel protective towards Lucy. She looked, we agreed, like Tweedledum armed for battle, and I saw her at this time as preternaturally solid, with an armour of new life defending her from the world. Biologically, no doubt, this was a fallacy, but it was the attitude we jointly accepted, so that we made an immediate bad impression by being struck with fourire in the first five minutes of our visit, when our hostess whispered that she had fitted up a bedroom for Lucy on the ground floor so that she should not be troubled by stairs.
The house we had come to see proved, like so many others, to be quite uninhabitable. Its owner, in fact, was living in his lodge. “Too big for me these days,” he said of the house which, when he opened it to us, gave the impression of having been designed as a small villa and wantonly extended, as though no one had remembered to tell the workmen when to stop and they had gone on adding room to room like cells in a wasp-nest. “I never had the money to spend on it,” the owner said gloomily, “you could make something of it with a little money.”
We went upstairs and along a lightless passage. He had been showing people over this house since 1920, he said, and with the years he had adopted a regular patter. “Nice little room this, very warm in the winter. . . . You get a good view of the downs here, if you stand in the corner. . . . It’s a dry house. You can see that. I’ve never had any trouble with damp. . . . These used to be the nurseries. They’d make a nice suite of spare bedroom, dressing room and bath if you didn’t . . .” and at that point, remembering Lucy, he stopped abruptly and in such embarrassment that he scarcely spoke until we left him.
“I’ll write to you,” I said.
“Yes,” he said with great gloom, knowing what I meant, “I sometimes think the place might do as a school. It’s very healthy.”
So we drove back to Lucy’s relatives. They wanted her to dine in bed or, anyway, to go to her room and lie down until dinner. Instead she came out with me into the evening sunlight and we sat in what Lucy’s relatives called their “blue garden,” reconstructing a life history of the sad little man who had shown us his house. Lucy’s relatives thought us and our presence there and our whole expedition extremely odd. There was something going on, they felt, which they did not understand, and Lucy and I, infected by the atmosphere, became, as it were, confederates in this house which she had known all her life, in the garden where, as a little girl, she had once, she told me, buried a dead starling, with tears.
After this expedition Lucy remained in London, spending more and more of her time indoors. When I finally found a house to suit me, I was alone.
“You might have waited,” said Lucy. It seemed quite natural that she should reproach me. She had a share in my house. “Damn this baby,” she added.
III
In the last week before the birth of her child, Lucy began for the first time to betray impatience; she was never, at any time, at all apprehensive—merely bored and weary and