The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [137]
Miss Meikeljohn said: “Lucy’s being so wonderful. She doesn’t realize.”
The nurse occupied herself with extravagant shopping lists; “Does everyone have to have all these things?” Lucy asked, aghast at the multitude of medical and nursery supplies which began to pour into the house. “Everyone who can afford them,” said Sister Kemp briskly, unconscious of irony. Roger found some comfort in generalizing. “It’s anthropologically very interesting,” he said, “all this purely ceremonial accumulation of rubbish—like turtle doves brought to the gates of a temple. Everyone according to his means sacrificing to the racial god of hygiene.”
He showed remarkable forbearance to Sister Kemp, who brought with her an atmosphere of impending doom and accepted a cocktail every evening, saying, “I’m not really on duty yet,” or “No time for this after the day.”
She watched confidently for The Day, her apotheosis, when Lucy would have no need for Roger or me or Miss Meikeljohn, only for herself.
“I shall call you Mrs. Simmonds until The Day,” she said. “After that you will be my Lucy.” She sat about with us in the drawing room, and in Lucy’s bedroom where we spent most of the day, now; like an alien, sitting at a café; an alien anarchist, with a bomb beside him, watching the passing life of a foreign city, waiting for his signal from the higher powers, the password which might come at once or in a very few days, whispered in his ear, perhaps, by the waiter, or scrawled on the corner of his evening newspaper—the signal that the hour of liberation had come when he would take possession of all he beheld. “The fathers need nearly as much care as the mothers,” said Sister Kemp. “No, not another thank you, Mr. Simmonds. I’ve got to keep in readiness, you know. It would never do if baby came knocking at the door and found Sister unable to lift the latch.”
“No,” said Roger. “No, I suppose it wouldn’t.”
Sister Kemp belonged to a particularly select and highly paid corps of nurses. A baby wheeled out by her, as it would be daily for the first month, would have access to certain paths in the Park where inferior nurses trespassed at the risk of cold looks. Lucy’s perambulator would thus be socially established and the regular nurse, when she took over, would find her charge already well known and respected. Sister Kemp explained this, adding as a concession to Lucy’s political opinions, “The snobbery among nurses is terrible. I’ve seen many a girl go home from Stanhope Gate in tears.” And then, esprit de corps asserting itself, “Of course, they ought to have known. There’s always Kensington Gardens for them.”
Once Sister Kemp had attended a house in Seamore Place, in nodding distance of Royalty, but the gardens there, though supremely grand, had been, she said, “dull,” by which we understood that even for her there were close circles. Roger was delighted with this. “It’s like something out of Thackeray,” he said and pressed for further details, but Lucy was past taking relish in social survivals; she was concerned only with the single, physical fact of her own exhaustion. “I hate this baby already,” she said. “I’m going to hate it all my life.”
Roger worked hard at this time, in the morning at his detective story, in the afternoons at his committee for Chinese aid. Miss Meikeljohn and I tried to keep Lucy amused with increasingly little success. Miss Meikeljohn took her to concerts and cinemas where, now, she allowed Lucy to buy the seats as extreme comfort was clearly necessary for her. I took her to the Zoo, every morning at twelve o’clock. There was a sooty, devilish creature in the monkey house named Humboldt’s