Free Black Mischief by Evelyn Waugh Page A

Angela Lyne was paying his
expenses. But they had trouble over something. You know how careful Angela is.
I never thought Basil was really her tea. They never quite made sense, I mean,
did they? So that’s all over.’
    ‘It’s
nice his being so dirty.’
    Other
people discussed him.
    ‘No,
the truth about Basil is just that he’s a bore. No one minds him being
rude, but he’s so teaching. I had him next to me at dinner once and he
would talk all the time about Indian dialects. Well, what was one to
say? And I asked afterwards and apparently he doesn’t know anything about them
either.’
    ‘He’s
done all kinds of odd things.’
    ‘Well,
yes, and I think that’s so boring too. Always in revolutions and murders and
things, I mean, what is one to say? Poor Angela is literally off her
head with him. I was there yesterday and she could talk of nothing else but the
row he’s had with his committee in his constituency. He does seem to have
behaved rather oddly at the Conservative ball and then he and Alastair
Trumpington and Peter Pastmaster and some others had a five-day party up there
and left a lot of bad cheques behind and had a motor accident and one of them
got run in — you know what Basil’s parties are. I mean, that sort of thing is
all right in London, but you know what provincial towns are. So what with one
thing and another they’ve asked him to stand down. The trouble is that poor
Angela still fancies him rather.’
    ‘What’s
going to happen to him?’
    ‘I know. That’s the point. Barbara says she won’t do another thing for him.’
    Someone
else was saying, ‘I’ve given up trying to be nice to Basil. He either cuts me
or corners me with an interminable lecture about Asiatic politics. It’s odd
Margot having him here — particularly after the way he’s always getting Peter
involved.’
    Presently
Basil came back from telephoning. He stood in the doorway, a glass of whisky in
one hand, looking insolently round the room, his head back, chin forward,
shoulders rounded, dark hair over his forehead, contemptuous grey eyes over
grey pouches, a proud, rather childish mouth, a scar on one cheek.
    ‘My
word, he is a corker,’ remarked one of the girls.
    His
glance travelled round the room. ‘I’ll tell you who I want to see, Margot. Is
Rex Monomark here?’
    ‘He’s
over there somewhere, but, Basil, I absolutely forbid you to tease him.’
    ‘I
won’t tease him.’
    Lord
Monomark, owner of many newspapers, stood at the far end of the drawing-room
discussing diet. Round him in a haze of cigar smoke were ranged his ladies and
gentlemen in attendance: three almost freakish beauties, austerely smart, their
exquisite, irregular features eloquent of respect; two gross men of the world,
wheezing appreciation; a dapper elderly secretary, with pink, bald pate and in
his eyes that glazed, gin-fogged look that is common to sailors and the
secretaries of the great, and comes from too short sleep.
    ‘Two
raw onions and a plate of oatmeal porridge,’ said Lord Monomark. ‘That’s all
I’ve taken for luncheon in the last eight months. And I feel two hundred per
cent better —physically, intellectually and ethically.’
    The
group was slightly isolated from the rest of the party. It was very rarely that
Lord Monomark consented to leave his own house and appear as a guest. The few
close friends whom he honoured in this way observed certain strict conventions
in the matter: new people were not to be introduced to him except at his own
command; politicians were to be kept at a distance; his cronies of the moment
were to be invited with him; provision had to be made for whatever health
system he happened to be following. In these conditions he liked now and then
to appear in society — an undisguised Haroun al-Rashid among his townspeople —
to survey the shadow-play of fashion, and occasionally to indulge the caprice
of singling out one of these bodiless phantoms and translating her or him into
the