Free The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

lost his money in religion?”
    “Yes, the Four Square Gospel. That’s why I’m called Aimée, after Aimée Macpherson. Dad wanted to change the name after he lost his money. I wanted to change it too but it kinda stuck. Mother always kept forgetting what we’d changed it to and then she’d find a new one. Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better. Besides you see poor Mother was an alcoholic. But we always came back to Aimée between fancy names and in the end it was Aimée won through.”
    “And what else did you take at College?”
    “Just Psychology and Chinese. I didn’t get on so well with Chinese. But, of course, they were secondary subjects, too; for Cultural background.”
    “Yes. And what was your main subject?”
    “Beauticraft.”
    “Oh.”
    “You know—permanents, facials, wax—everything you get in a beauty parlor. Only, of course, we went in for history and theory too. I wrote my thesis on ‘Hairstyling in the Orient.’ That was why I took Chinese. I thought it would help, but it didn’t. But I got my diploma with special mention for Psychology and Art.”
    “And all this time between psychology and art and Chinese, you had the mortuary in view?”
    “Not at all. Do you really want to hear? I’ll tell you because it’s really rather a poetic story. You see I graduated in ’43 and lots of the girls of my class went to war work but I was never at all interested in that. It’s not that I’m unpatriotic. Wars simply don’t interest me. Everyone’s like that now. Well, I was like that in ’43. So I went to the Beverly-Waldorf and worked in the beauty parlor, but you couldn’t really get away from the war even there. The ladies didn’t seem to have a mind for anything higher than pattern-bombing. There was one lady who was worse than any of them, called Mrs. Komstock. She came every Saturday morning for a blue rinse and set and I seemed to take her fancy; she always asked for me; no one else would do, but she never tipped me more than a quarter. Mrs. Komstock had one son in Washington and one in Delhi, a grand-daughter in Italy and a nephew who was high in indoctrination and I had to hear everything about them all until it got so I dreaded Saturday mornings more than any day in the week. Then after a time Mrs. Komstock took sick but that wasn’t the end of her. She used to send for me to come up to her apartment every week and she still only gave me a quarter and she still talked about the war just as much only not so sensibly. Then imagine my surprise when one day Mr. Jebb, who was the manager, called me over and said: ‘Miss Thanatogenos, there’s a thing I hardly like to ask you. I don’t know exactlyhow you’ll feel about it, but it’s Mrs. Komstock who’s dead and her son from Washington is here and he’s very anxious to have you fix Mrs. Komstock’s hair just as it used to be. It seems there aren’t any recent photographs and no one at Whispering Glades knows the style and Colonel Komstock can’t exactly describe it. So, Miss Thanatogenos, I was wondering, would you mind very much to oblige Colonel Komstock going over to Whispering Glades and fix Mrs. Komstock like Colonel Komstock remembers?’
    “Well, I didn’t know quite what to think. I’d never seen a dead person before because Dad left Mother before he died, if he is dead, and Mother went East to look for him when I left college, and died there. And I had never been inside Whispering Glades as after we lost our money Mother took to New Thought and wouldn’t have it that there was such a thing as death. So I felt quite nervous coming here the first time. And then everything was so different from what I expected. Well, you’ve seen it and you know. Colonel Komstock shook hands and said: ‘Young lady, you are doing a truly fine and beautiful action’ and gave me fifty bucks.
    “Then they took me to the embalming-rooms and there was Mrs.