The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [222]
But when he repaired to Basil’s room he found his patient deeply sleeping.
He stood by the bed, gazing at his patient. There was an expression of peculiar innocence on the shrunken face. But the physician knew better.
“I will see him in the morning,” he said and then went to instruct his secretary to inform the previous applicants that two vacancies had unexpectedly occurred.
III
“The sack, the push, the boot. I’ve got to be out of the place in an hour.”
“Oh Basil, that is like old times, isn’t it?”
“Only deep psychoanalysis can help me, he says, and in my present condition I am a danger to his institution.”
“Where shall we go? Hill Street’s locked up. There won’t be anyone there until Monday.”
“The odd thing is I have no hangover.”
“Still ethereal?”
“Precisely. I suppose it means an hotel.”
“You might telephone to Barbara and tell her to join us. She said she was keen to leave.”
But when Angela telephoned to her sister-in-law, she heard: “But isn’t Barbara with you in London? She told me yesterday you’d sent for her. She went up by the afternoon train.”
“D’you think she can have gone to that young man?”
“I bet she has.”
“Ought I to tell Basil?”
“Keep it quiet.”
“I consider it very selfish of her. Basil isn’t at all in good shape. He’ll have a fit if he finds out. He had a sort of fit yesterday.”
“Poor Basil. He may never know.”
Basil and Angela settled their enormous bill. Their car was brought round to the front. The chauffeur drove. Angela sat beside Basil who huddled beside her occasionally crooning ill-remembered snatches of “the daring young man on the flying trapeze.” As they approached London they met all the outgoing Friday traffic. Their own way was clear. At the hotel Basil went straight to bed—“I don’t feel I shall ever want another bath as long as I live,” he said—and Angela ordered a light meal for him of oysters and stout. By dusk he had rallied enough to smoke a cigar.
Next morning he was up early and spoke of going to his club.
“That dingy one?”
“Heavens no, Bellamy’s. But I don’t suppose there’ll be many chaps there on a Saturday morning.”
There was no one. The barman shook him up an egg with port and brandy. Then, with the intention of collecting some books, he took a taxi to Hill Street. It was not yet eleven o’clock. He let himself into what should have been the empty and silent house. Music came from the room on the ground floor where small parties congregated before luncheon and dinner. It was a dark room, hung with tapestry and furnished with Bühl. There he found his daughter, dressed in pajamas and one of her mother’s fur coats, seated on the floor with her face caressing a transistor radio. Behind her in the fireplace large lumps of coal lay on the ashes of the sticks and paper which had failed to kindle them.
“Darling Pobble, never more welcome. I didn’t expect you till Monday and I should have been dead by then. I can’t make out how the central heating works. I thought the whole point of it was it just turned on and didn’t need a man. Can’t get the fire to burn. And don’t start: ‘Babs, what are you doing here?’ I’m freezing, that’s what.”
“Turn that damn thing off.”
In the silence Barbara regarded her father more intently. “Darling, what have they been doing to you? You aren’t yourself at all. You’re tottering. Not my fine stout Pobble at all. Sit down at once. Poor Pobble, all shrunk like a mummy. Beasts!”
Basil sat and Barbara wriggled round until her chin rested on his knees. “Famine baby,” she said. Star-sapphire eyes in the child-like face under black tousled hair gazed deep into star-sapphire eyes sunk in empty pouches. “Belsen atrocity,” she added fondly. “Wraith. Skeleton-man. Dear dug-up corpse.”
“Enough of this flattery. Explain yourself.”
“I told you I was bored. You know what Malfrey’s like as well as I do. Oh the hell of the National