Read Online Unconditional surrender by Evelyn Waugh - Free Book Online Page B

monsignore.
    ‘His lordship the Bishop was unable to come. He sent me to represent him and convey his condolences.’
    There was also a layman whom Guy recognized as his father’s solicitor from Taunton.
    Father Geoghegan was fasting, but he dispensed hospitality in the form of whisky and cake. Uncle Peregrine edged Guy into a corner. His fatuous old face expressed a kind of bland decorum.
    ‘The hatchment,’ he said. There was some difficulty about the hatchment. One can’t get anything done nowadays. No heraldic painters available anywhere. There are quite a collection of old hatchments in the sacristy, none in very good condition. There was your grandfather’s, but of course that was impaling Wrothman so it would hardly have done. Then I had a bit of luck and turned up what must have been made for Ivo. Rather rough work, local I should think. I was abroad at the time of his death, poor boy. Anyway, it is the simple blazon without quarterings. It is the best we can do in the circumstances. You don’t think I did wrong to put it up?’
    ‘No, Uncle Peregrine, I am sure you did quite right.’
    ‘I think I’d better be going across. People are beginning to arrive. Someone will have to show them where to sit.’
    The priest from Matchet said: ‘I don’t think your father has got long for purgatory.’
    The solicitor said: ‘We ought to have a word together afterwards.’
    ‘No reading of the will?’
    ‘No, that only happens in Victorian novels. But there are things we shall have to discuss some time and it’s difficult to meet these days.’
    Arthur Box-Bender was seeking to make himself agreeable to the domestic prelate ‘… not a member of your persuasion myself but I’m bound to say your Cardinal Hinsley did a wonderful job of work on the wireless. You could see he was an Englishman first and a Christian second; that is more than you can say of one or two of
our
bishops.’
    Angela said: ‘I’ve been dealing with letters as best I can. I’ve had hundreds.’
    ‘So have I.’
    ‘Extraordinary the number of people one’s never heard of who were close friends of papa. I slept at the convent last night and shall go home tonight. The nuns are being awfully decent. Reverend Mother wants anyone to come back and have coffee afterwards. There’s so many people we’ll have to talk to. I had no idea so many people would get here.’
    They were arriving on foot, by motor car and in pony traps. From the presbytery window Guy and Angela watched them. Angela said: ‘I’m taking Felix home with me. They’re keeping him at the inn at the moment.’ Then the clergy withdrew to vest and Uncle Peregrine came to fetch the chief mourners.
    ‘Prie-dieus,’ he said, ‘on the right in front.’
    They crossed the narrow strip of garden and entered under the diamond-shaped panel cut by the house carpenter for poor mad Ivo. The sable and argent cross of Crouchback had not greatly taxed his powers of draughtsmanship. It was no ornament designed by the heralds to embellish a carriage door but something rare in English armoury – a device that had been carried into battle. They walked up the aisle with their eyes on the catafalque and the tall unbleached candles which burned beside it. The smell of beeswax and chrysanthemums, later to be permeated by incense, was heavy on the brumous air.
    The church had been planned on a large scale when the Crouchback family were at the height of prosperity and the conversion of England seemed something more than a remote, pious aspiration. Gervase and Hermione had built it; they who acquired the property of Santa Dulcina. It was as crowded for Mr Crouchback’s funeral as for midnight Mass at Christmas. When the estate was bit by bit dispersed in the lean agricultural years, the farms had been sold on easy terms to the tenants. Some had changed hands since, but there were three pews full of farmers in black broadcloth. The village were there in force; many neighbours; the Lord