The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [184]
John Verney was discharged from the Army early in 1945 with an M.C. and one leg, for the future, two inches shorter than the other. He found Elizabeth living in Hampstead with her parents, his uncle and aunt. She had kept him informed by letter of the changes in her condition but, preoccupied, he had not clearly imagined them. Their flat had been requisitioned by a government office; their furniture and books sent to a repository and totally lost, partly burned by a bomb, partly pillaged by firemen. Elizabeth, who was a linguist, had gone to work in a clandestine branch of the Foreign Office.
Her parents’ house had once been a substantial Georgian villa overlooking the Heath. John Verney arrived there early in the morning after a crowded night’s journey from Liverpool. The wrought-iron railings and gates had been rudely torn away by the salvage collectors, and in the front garden, once so neat, weeds and shrubs grew in a rank jungle trampled at night by courting soldiers. The back garden was a single, small bomb-crater; heaped clay, statuary and the bricks and glass of ruined greenhouses; dry stalks of willow-herb stood breast high over the mounds. All the windows were gone from the back of the house, replaced by shutters of card and board, which put the main rooms in perpetual darkness. “Welcome to Chaos and Old Night,” said his uncle genially.
There were no servants; the old had fled, the young had been conscribed for service. Elizabeth made him some tea before leaving for her office.
Here he lived, lucky, Elizabeth told him, to have a home. Furniture was unprocurable, furnished flats commanded a price beyond their income, which was now taxed to a bare wage. They might have found something in the country, but Elizabeth, being childless, could not get release from her work. Moreover, he had his constituency.
This, too, was transformed. A factory, wired round like a prisoner-of-war camp, stood in the public gardens. The streets surrounding it, once the trim houses of potential Liberals, had been bombed, patched, confiscated, and filled with an immigrant proletarian population. Every day he received a heap of complaining letters from constituents exiled in provincial boardinghouses. He had hoped that his decoration and his limp might earn him sympathy, but he found the new inhabitants indifferent to the fortunes of war. Instead they showed a sceptical curiosity about Social Security. “They’re nothing but a lot of reds,” said the Liberal agent.
“You mean I shan’t get in?”
“Well, we’ll give them a good fight. The Tories are putting up a Battle-of-Britain pilot. I’m afraid he’ll get most of what’s left of the middle-class vote.”
In the event John Verney came bottom of the poll, badly. A rancorous Jewish schoolteacher was elected. The Central Office paid his deposit, but the election had cost him dear. And when it was over there was absolutely nothing for John Verney to do.
He remained in Hampstead, helped his aunt make the beds after Elizabeth had gone to her office, limped to the greengrocer and fishmonger and stood, full of hate, in the queues; helped Elizabeth wash up at night. They ate in the kitchen, where his aunt cooked deliciously the scanty rations. His uncle went three days a week to help pack parcels for Java.
Elizabeth, the deep one, never spoke of her work, which, in fact, was concerned with setting up hostile and oppressive governments in Eastern Europe. One evening at a restaurant, a man came and spoke to her, a tall young man whose sallow, aquiline face was full of intellect and humour. “That’s the head of my department,” she said. “He’s so amusing.”
“Looks like a Jew.”
“I believe he is. He’s a strong Conservative and hates the work,” she added hastily, for since his defeat in the election John had become fiercely anti-Semitic.
“There is absolutely no need to work for the State now,” he said. “The war’s over.”
“Our work is just beginning. They won’t let any of us go. You must understand what conditions are in this country.”
It often fell to Elizabeth to explain “conditions