The Complete Stories Of Evelyn Waugh by Evelyn Waugh

Author:Evelyn Waugh [Waugh, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_classic
ISBN: 0-316-92546-2
Published: 1998-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

II

Lucy was a girl of few friends; she had, in fact, at the time I was admitted to their number, only two; a man named Peter Baverstock, in the Malay States, whom I never saw, and a Miss Muriel Meikeljohn whom I saw all too often. Peter Baverstock had wanted to marry Lucy since she was seven and proposed to her whenever he came home on leave, every eighteen months, until she married Roger, when he sent her a very elaborate wedding present, an immense thing in carved wood, ivory and gilt which caused much speculation with regard to its purpose; later he wrote and explained; I forget the explanation. I think it was the gift which, by local usage, men of high birth gave to their granddaughters when they were delivered of male twins; it was, anyway, connected with twins and grandparents, of great rarity, and a token of high esteem in the parts he came from. Lucy wrote long letters to Baverstock every fortnight. I often watched her at work on those letters, sitting square to her table, head bowed, hand travelling evenly across the page, as, I remembered reading in some books of memoirs, Sir Walter Scott’s had been seen at a lighted window, writing the Waverley novels. It was a tradition of her upbringing that letters for the East must always be written on very thin, lined paper. “I’m just telling Peter about your house,” she would say.

“How can that possibly interest him?”

“Oh, he’s interested in everything. He’s so far away.”

It seemed an odd reason.

Miss Meikeljohn was a pale, possessive girl, who had been a fellow boarder with Lucy in the house of a distressed gentlewoman in Vienna where they had both been sent to learn singing. They had shared a passion for a leading tenor, and had once got into his dressing room at the Opera House by wearing mackintoshes and pretending to be reporters sent to interview him. Lucy still kept a photograph of this tenor, in costume, on her dressing table, but she had shed her musical aspirations with the rest of her Pont Street life. Miss Meikeljohn still sang, once a week to a tutor. It was after these lessons that she came to luncheon with Lucy, and the afternoon was hers by prescriptive right for shopping, or for a cinema, or for what she liked best, a “good talk.” These Tuesdays were “Muriel’s days,” and no one might interfere with them.

“They are the only times she comes into London. Her parents are separated and terribly poor,” Lucy said, as though in complete explanation.

When they went to the cinema or play together they went in the cheap seats because Miss Meikeljohn insisted on paying her share. Lucy thought this evidence of Miss Meikeljohn’s integrity of character; she often came back from their common entertainments with a headache from having had to sit so close to the screen.

The friendship was odd in many ways, notably because Miss Meikeljohn luxuriated in heart-to-heart confidences—in what

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