The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [215]
“I’ve got to pee,” said Basil.
“I always want to nowadays.”
“Come on then.”
Slowly and stiffly they left the hotel dining room.
As they stood side by side in the lavatory Basil said: “I’m glad Ambrose has got a gong. D’you think the fellow making the speech was pulling his leg?”
“Must have been. Stands to reason.”
“You were going to tell me something about some shirts.”
“I did tell you.”
“What was the name of the chap who got them?”
“Albright.”
“Yes, I remember; a fellow called Clarence Albright. Rather an awful chap. Got himself killed in the war.”
“No one that I knew got killed in the war except Alastair Trumpington.”
“And Cedric Lyne.”
“Yes, there was Cedric.”
“And Freddy Sothill.”
“I never really considered I knew him,” said Basil.
“This Albright married someone—Molly Meadows, perhaps?”
“I married Molly Meadows.”
“So you did. I was there. Well, someone like that. One of those girls who were going round at the time—John Flintshire’s sister, Sally perhaps. I expect your Albright is her son.”
“He doesn’t look like anyone’s son.”
“People always are,” said Basil, “sons or daughters of people.”
This truism had a secondary, antiquated and, to Peter, an obvious meaning, which was significant of the extent by which Basil had changed from enfant terrible to “old Pobble,” the name by which he was known to his daughter’s friends.
The change had been rapid. In 1939 Basil’s mother, his sister, Barbara Sothill, and his mistress, Angela Lyne, had seen the war as the opportunity for his redemption. His embattled country, they supposed, would find honourable use for those deplorable energies which had so often brought him almost into the shadows of prison. At the worst he would fill a soldier’s grave; at the best he would emerge as a second Lawrence of Arabia. His fate was otherwise.
Early in his military career, he lamed himself, blowing away the toes of one foot while demonstrating to his commando section a method of his own device for demolishing railway bridges, and was discharged from the army. From this disaster was derived at a later date the sobriquet “Pobble.” Then, hobbling from his hospital bed to the registry office, he married the widowed Angela Lyne. Hers was one of those few, huge, astutely dispersed fortunes which neither international calamities nor local experiments with socialism could seriously diminish. Basil accepted wealth as he accepted the loss of his toes. He forgot he had ever walked without a stick and a limp, had ever been lean and active, had ever been put to desperate shifts for quite small sums. If he ever recalled that decade of adventure it was as something remote and unrelated to man’s estate, like an end-of-term shortness of pocket money at school.
For the rest of the war and for the first drab years of peace he had appeared on the national register as “farmer”; that is to say, he lived in the country in ease and plenty. Two dead men, Freddy Sothill and Cedric Lyne, had left ample cellars. Basil drained them. He had once expressed the wish to become one of the “hard-faced men who had done well out of the war.” Basil’s face, once very hard, softened and rounded. His scar became almost invisible in rosy suffusion. None of his few clothes, he found, now buttoned comfortably and when, in that time of European scarcity, he and Angela went to New York, where such things could then still be procured by the well-informed, he bought suits and shirts and shoes by the dozen and a whole treasury of watches, tie-pins, cuff-links and