The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [186]
Sometimes they went out together. As the winter passed, John took to dining once or twice a week at his club. He assumed that on these occasions she stayed at home, but one morning it transpired that she too had dined out the evening before. He did not ask with whom, but his aunt did, and Elizabeth replied, “Just someone from the office.”
“The Jew?” John asked.
“As a matter of fact, it was.”
“I hope you enjoyed it.”
“Quite. A beastly dinner, of course, but he’s very amusing.”
One night when he returned from his club, after a dismal little dinner and two crowded Tube journeys, he found Elizabeth in bed and deeply asleep. She did not stir when he entered. Unlike her normal habit, she was snoring. He stood for a minute, fascinated by this new and unlovely aspect of her, her head thrown back, her mouth open and slightly dribbling at the corner. Then he shook her. She muttered something, turned over and slept heavily and soundlessly.
Half an hour later, as he was striving to compose himself for sleep, she began to snore again. He turned on the light, looked at her more closely and noticed with surprise, which suddenly changed to joyous hope, that there was a tube of unfamiliar pills, half empty, beside her on the bed table.
He examined it. “24Comprimés narcotiques, hypnotiques,” he read, and then in large, scarlet letters, “NE PAS DEPASSER DEUX.” He counted those which were left. Eleven.
With tremulous butterfly wings Hope began to flutter in his heart, became a certainty. He felt a fire kindle and spread inside him until he was deliciously suffused in every limb and organ. He lay, listening to the snores, with the pure excitement of a child on Christmas Eve. “I shall wake up tomorrow and find her dead,” he told himself, as once he had felt the flaccid stocking at the foot of his bed and told himself, “Tomorrow I shall wake up and find it full.” Like a child, he longed to sleep to hasten the morning and, like a child, he was wildly, ecstatically sleepless. Presently he swallowed two of the pills himself and almost at once was unconscious.
Elizabeth always rose first to make breakfast for the family. She was at the dressing table when sharply, without drowsiness, his memory stereoscopically clear about the incidents of the night before, John awoke. “You’ve been snoring,” she said.
Disappointment was so intense that at first he could not speak. Then he said, “You snored, too, last night.”
“It must be the sleeping tablet I took. I must say it gave me a good night.”
“Only one?”
“Yes, two’s the most that’s safe.”
“Where did you get them?”
“A friend at the office—the one you called the Jew. He has them prescribed by a doctor for when he’s working too hard. I told him I wasn’t sleeping, so he gave me half a bottle.”
“Could he get me some?”
“I expect so. He can do most things like that.”
So he and Elizabeth began to drug themselves regularly and passed long, vacuous nights. But often John delayed, letting the beatific pill lie beside his glass of water, while, knowing the vigil was terminable at will, he postponed the joy of unconsciousness, heard Elizabeth’s snores, and hated her sumptuously.
One evening while the plans for the holiday were still under discussion, John and Elizabeth went to the cinema. The film was a murder story of no great ingenuity but with showy scenery. A bride murdered her husband by throwing him out of a window, down a cliff. Things were made easy for her by his taking a lonely lighthouse for their honeymoon. He was very rich and she wanted his money. All she had to do was confide in the local doctor and a few neighbours that her husband frightened her by walking in his sleep; she doped his coffee, dragged him from the bed to the balcony—a feat of some strength—where she had already broken away a yard of balustrade, and rolled him over. Then she went back to bed, gave the alarm next morning, and wept over the mangled body which was presently discovered half awash on the rocks. Retribution overtook her later, but at the time the thing was a complete success.