The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [178]
“But I can’t afford to go on living here indefinitely. I was only allowed to bring seventy-five pounds and the prices are terrible.”
“Yes, we had a case like that the other day. A man called Whitemaid. He’d run out of money and wanted to cash a cheque, but of course that is specifically contrary to the currency regulations. The consul took charge of him.”
“Did he get home?”
“I doubt it. They used to ship them by sea, you know, as Distressed British Subjects and hand them over to the police on arrival, but all that has been discontinued since the war. He was connected with your Bellorius celebration I think. It has caused a good deal of work to us one way and another. But it’s worse for the Swiss. They’ve had a professor murdered and that always involves a special report on counsellor-level. I’m sorry I can’t do more for you. I only deal with air priorities. You are the business of the consulate really. You had better let them know in a week or two how things turn out.”
The heat was scarcely endurable. In the ten days Scott-King had been in the country, the summer seemed to change temper and set its face angrily against him. The grass had turned brown in the square. Men still hosed the streets but the burning stone was dry again in an instant. The season was over; half the shops were shut and the little brown noblemen had left their chairs in the Ritz.
It was no great distance from the Embassy to the hotel, but Scott-King was stumbling with exhaustion before he reached the revolving doors. He went on foot for he was obsessed now by parsimony; he could no longer eat with pleasure, counting the price of each mouthful, calculating the charge for service, the stamp duty, the luxury taxes; groaning in that scorching summer under the weight of the Winter Relief Fund. He should leave the Ritz without delay, he resolved, and yet he hesitated; once ensconced in some modest pension, in some remote side street where no telephone ever rang and no one in passage from the outer world ever set foot, might he not be lost irretrievably, submerged, unrecognizable in his dimness, unremembered? Would he perhaps, years hence, exhibit a little discoloured card advertising lessons in English conversation, grow shabbier and greyer and plumper with the limp accretions of despair and destitution and die there at last nameless? He was an adult, an intellectual, a classical scholar, almost a poet, but he could not face that future without terror. So he clung to the Ritz, empty as it was, contemptuously as he felt himself regarded there, as the one place in Neutralia where salvation might still be found. If he left, he knew it would be forever. He lacked the assurance of the native nobility who could sit there day by day, as though by right. Scott-King’s only right lay in his travellers’ cheques. He worked out his bill from hour to hour. At the moment he had nearly forty pounds in hand. When he was down to twenty, he decided, he would move. Meanwhile he looked anxiously round the dining room before starting the daily calculation of how cheaply he could lunch.
And that day he was rewarded. His number turned up. Sitting not two tables away, alone, was Miss Bombaum. He rose to greet her. All the hard epithets with which they had parted were forgotten.
“May I sit here?”
She looked up, first without recognition, then with pleasure. Perhaps there was something in his forlorn appearance, in the diffidence of his appeal, which cleared him in Miss Bombaum’s mind. This was no fascist beast that stood before her, no reactionary cannibal.
“Surely,” she said. “The guy who invited me hasn’t shown up.”
A ghastly fear, cold in that torrid room, struck Scott-King, that he would have to pay for Miss Bombaum’s luncheon. She was eating a lobster, he noted, and drinking hock.
“When you’ve finished,” he said. “Afterwards, with coffee perhaps in the lounge.”
“I’ve a date in twenty minutes,” she said. “Sit down.”
He sat and at once, in answer to her casual enquiry, poured out the details of his predicament. He laid particular stress on his financial problems