The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [138]
Because of my confidence in her, and my resentment of the proprietary qualms of Roger and Miss Meikeljohn, I accepted her attitude; and was correspondingly shocked when the actual day came.
Roger telephoned to me at breakfast time. “The baby’s begun.”
“Good,” I said.
“What d’you mean, good?”
“Well, it is good, isn’t it? When did it start?”
“Last night, about an hour after you left.”
“It ought to be over soon.”
“I suppose so. Shall I come round?”
He came, yawning a great deal from having been up all night. “I was with her for an hour or two. I always imagined people in bed when they were having babies. Lucy’s up, going about the house. It was horrible. Now she doesn’t want me.”
“What happened exactly?”
He began to tell me and then I was sorry I had asked. “That nurse seems very good,” he said at the end. “The doctor didn’t come until half an hour ago. He went away again right away. They haven’t given her any chloroform yet. They say they are keeping that until the pains get worse. I don’t see how they could be. You’ve no conception what it was like.” He stayed with me for half an hour and read my newspapers. Then he went home. “I’ll telephone you when there’s any news,” he said.
Two hours later I rang up. “No,” he said, “there’s no news. I said I’d telephone you if there was.”
“But what’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of lull.”
“But she’s all right, isn’t she? I mean they’re not anxious.”
“I don’t know. The doctor’s coming again. I went in to see her, but she didn’t say anything. She was just crying quietly.”
“Nothing I can do, is there?”
“No, how could there be?”
“I mean about lunch or anything. You don’t feel like coming out?”
“No, I ought to stay around here.”
The thought of the lull, of Lucy not speaking, but lying there, in tears, waiting for her labour to start again, pierced me as no tale could have done of cumulative pain; but beyond my sense of compassion I was now scared. I had been smoking a pipe; my mouth had gone dry, and when I knocked out the smouldering tobacco the smell of it sickened me. I went out into Ebury Street as though to the deck of a ship, breathing hard against nausea, and from habit more than sentiment, took a cab to the Zoo.
The man at the turnstile knew me as a familiar figure. “Your lady not with you today, sir?”
“No, not today.”
“I’ve got five myself,” he said.
I did not understand him and repeated foolishly, “Five?”
“Being a married man,” he added.
Humboldt’s Gibbon seemed disinclined for company. He sat hunched up at the back of his cage, fixing on me a steady, and rather bilious stare. He was never, at the best of times, an animal who courted popularity. In the cage on his left lived a sycophantish, shrivelled, grey monkey from India who salaamed for tidbits of food; on his right were a troup of patchy buffoons who swung and tumbled about their cage to attract attention. Not so Humboldt’s Gibbon; visitors passed him by—often with almost superstitious aversion and some such comment as “Nasty thing”; he had no tricks, or, if he had, he performed them alone, for his own satisfaction, after dark, ritualistically, when, in that exotic enclave among the stucco terraces, the prisoners awake and commemorate the jungles where they had their birth, as exiled darkies, when their work is done, will tread out the music of Africa in a vacant lot behind the drug store.
Lucy used always to bring fruit to the ape; I had nothing, but, to deceive him, I rattled the wire and held out my empty fingers as though