The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [216]
Life in the country palled when food rationing ceased. Angela made over the house they had called “Cedric’s Folly” and its grottoes to her son Nigel on his twenty-first birthday, and took a large, unobtrusive house in Hill Street. She had other places to live, a panelled seventeenth-century apartment in Paris, a villa on Cap Ferrat, a beach and bungalow quite lately acquired in Bermuda, a little palace in Venice which she had once bought for Cedric Lyne but never visited in his lifetime—and among them they moved with their daughter Barbara. Basil settled into the orderly round of the rich. He became a creature of habit and of set opinions. In London finding Bratt’s and Bellamy’s disturbingly raffish, he joined that sombre club in Pall Mall that had been the scene of so many painful interviews with his self-appointed guardian, Sir Joseph Mannering, and there often sat in the chair which had belonged prescriptively to Sir Joseph and, as Sir Joseph had done, pronounced his verdict on the day’s news to any who would listen.
Basil turned, crossed to the looking glasses and straightened his tie. He brushed up the copious grey hair. He looked at himself with the blue eyes which had seen so much and now saw only the round, rosy face in which they were set, the fine clothes of English make which had replaced the American improvisations, the starched shirt which he was almost alone in wearing, the black pearl studs, the buttonhole.
A week or two ago he had had a disconcerting experience in this very hotel. It was a place he had frequented all his life, particularly in the latter years, and he was on cordial terms with the man who took the men’s hats in a den by the Piccadilly entrance. Basil was never given a numbered ticket and assumed he was known by name. Then a day came when he sat longer than usual over luncheon and found the man off duty. Lifting the counter he had penetrated to the rows of pegs and retrieved his bowler and umbrella. In the ribbon of the hat he found a label, put there for identification. It bore the single pencilled word “Florid.” He had told his daughter, Barbara, who said: “I wouldn’t have you any different. Don’t for heaven’s sake go taking one of those cures. You’d go mad.”
Basil was not a vain man; neither in rags nor in riches had he cared much about the impression he made. But the epithet recurred to him now as he surveyed himself in the glass.
Peter?”
“Would you say Ambrose was ‘florid,’
“Not a word I use.”
“It simply means flowery.”
“Well, I suppose he is.”
“Not fat and red?”
“Not Ambrose.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve been called ‘florid.’”
“You’re fat and red.”
“So are you.”
“Yes, why not? Almost everyone is.”
“Except Ambrose.”
“Well, he’s a pansy. I expect he takes trouble.”
“We don’t.”
“Why the hell should we?”
“We don’t.”
“Exactly.”
The two old friends had exhausted the subject.
Basil said: “About those shirts. How did your girl ever meet a fellow like that?”
“At Oxford. She insisted on going up to read History. She picked up some awfully rum friends.”
“I suppose there were girls there in my time. We never met them.”
“Nor in mine.”
“Stands to reason the sort of fellow who takes up with undergraduettes has something wrong with him.”
“Albright certainly has.”
“What does he look like?”
“I’ve never set an eye. My daughter asked him to King’s Thursday when I was abroad. She found he had no shirts and she gave him mine.”
“Was he hard up?”
“So she said.”
“Clarence Albright never had any money. Sally can’t have brought him much.”
“There may be no connection.”
“Must be. Two fellows without money both called Albright. Stands to reason they’re the same fellow.”
Peter looked at his watch.
“Half