Free The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh Page B

Glades—on the Lake Island itself. Was it something like that you were writing when I came along?”
    “Not exactly.”
    Across the water the carillon in the Belfry Beautiful musically announced the hour.
    “That’s six o’clock. I have to go early today.”
    “And I have a poem to finish.”
    “Will you stay and do it here?”
    “No. At home. I’ll come with you.”
    “I’d love to see the poem when it’s done.”
    “I’ll send it to you.”
    “Aimée Thanatogenos is my name. I live quite close but send it here, to Whispering Glades. This is my true home.”
    When they reached the ferry the waterman looked at Dennis with complicity. “So she turned up all right, bud,” he said.

Six
    M r. Joyboy was debonair in all his professional actions. He peeled off his rubber gloves like a hero of Ouida returning from stables, tossed them into a kidney bowl and assumed the clean pair which his assistant held ready for him. Next he took a visiting-card—one of a box of blanks supplied to the florist below—and a pair of surgical scissors. In one continuous movement he cut an ellipse, then snicked half an inch at either end along the greater axis. He bent over the corpse, tested the jaw and found it firm set; he drew back the lips and laid his card along the teeth and gums. Now was the moment; his assistant watched with never-failing admiration the deft flick of the thumbs with which he turned the upper corners of the card, the caress of the rubber fingertips with which he drew the dry and colorless lips into place. And, behold! where before had been a grim line ofendurance, there was now a smile. It was masterly. It needed no other touch. Mr. Joyboy stood back from his work, removed the gloves and said: “For Miss Thanatogenos.”
    Of recent weeks the expressions that greeted Aimée from the trolley had waxed from serenity to jubilance. Other girls had to work on faces that were stern or resigned or plumb vacant; there was always a nice bright smile for Aimée.
    These attentions were noted with sourness in the cosmetic rooms where love of Mr. Joyboy illumined the working hours of all the staff. In the evenings each had her consort or suitor; none seriously aspired to be Mr. Joyboy’s mate. As he passed among them, like an art-master among his students, with a word of correction here or commendation there, sometimes laying his gentle hand on a living shoulder or a dead haunch, he was a figure of romance, a cult shared by all in common, not a prize to be appropriated by any one of them.
    Nor was Aimée entirely at ease in her unique position. That morning in particular she met the corpse’s greeting with impaired frankness for she had taken a step which she knew Mr. Joyboy could not possibly approve.
    There was a spiritual director, an oracle, in these parts who daily filled a famous column in one of the local newspapers. Once, in days of family piety, it bore the title
Aunt Lydia’s Post Bag;
now it was
The Wisdom of the Guru Brahmin
, adorned with the photograph of a bearded and almost naked sage. To this exotic source resorted all who were in doubt or distress.
    It might be thought that at this extremity of the New World unceremonious manners and frank speech occasioned no doubt; the universal good humor no distress. But it was not so—etiquette, child-psychology, aesthetics and sex reared their questioning heads in this Eden too and to all readers the Guru Brahmin offered solace and solution.
    To him Aimée had applied some time ago when the smiles had first become unequivocal. Her problem was not about Mr. Joyboy’s intentions but about her own. The answer had not been quite satisfactory:
No, A.T., I do not consider that you are in love—yet. Esteem for a man’s character and admiration of his business ability may form the basis of an improving friendship but they are not Love. What you describe of your feelings in his presence does not incline us to believe that there is a physical affinity between