Unconditional surrender by Evelyn Waugh Page A

Hark.’
    From high overhead at the top of the wide staircase came sounds which could only be the beat of a tom-tom. Virginia climbed towards it thinking of Trimmer who had endlessly, unendurably crooned ‘Night and Day’ to her. The beat of the drum seemed to be saying: ‘You, you, you.’ She reached the door behind which issued the jungle rhythm. It seemed otiose to add the feeble tap of her knuckles. She tried the handle and found herself locked out. There was a bell with the doctor’s name above it. She pressed. The drumming stopped. A key turned. Virginia was greeted by a small, smiling, nattily dressed Negro, not in his first youth; there was grey in his sparse little tangle of beard; he was wrinkled and simian and what should have been the whites of his eyes were the colour of Trimmer’s cigarette-stained fingers; from behind him there came a faint air blended of spices and putrefaction. His smile revealed many gold capped teeth.
    ‘Good morning. Come in. How are you? You have the scorpions?’
    ‘No,’ said Virginia, ‘no scorpions this morning.’
    ‘Pray come in.’
    She stepped into a room whose conventional furniture was augmented with a number of hand-drums, a bright statue of the Sacred Heart, a cock, decapitated but unplucked, secured with nails to the table top, its wings spread open like a butterfly’s, a variety of human bones including a skull, a brass cobra of Benares ware, bowls of ashes, flasks from a chemical laboratory stoppered and holding murky liquids. A magnified photograph of Mr Winston Churchill glowered down upon the profusion of Dr Akonanga’s war-stores, but Virginia did not observe them in detail. It was the fowl that caught her attention.
    ‘You are not from HOO HQ?’ asked Dr Akonanga.
    ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am. How did you guess?’
    ‘I have been expecting scorpions for three days. Major Allbright assured me they were being flown from Egypt. I explained they are an essential ingredient for one of my most valuable preparations.’
    ‘There’s always a delay nowadays in getting what one wants, isn’t there? I don’t know Major Allbright I’m afraid. Mrs Bristow sent me to you.’
    ‘Mrs Bristow? I am not sure I have the honour—’
    ‘I’ve come as a private patient,’ said Virginia. ‘You’ve treated lots of her friends. Women like myself,’ she explained with her high incorrigible candour, ‘who want to get rid of babies.’
    ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps a long time ago in what you would call the “piping days” of peace. All that is changed. I am now in the government service. General Whale would not like it if I resumed my private practice. Democracy is at stake.’
    Virginia shifted her gaze from the headless fowl to the unfamiliar assembly of equipment. She noticed a copy of
No Orchids for Miss Blandish.
    ‘Dr Akonanga,’ she asked, ‘what can you think you are doing that is more important than me?’
    ‘I am giving Herr von Ribbentrop the most terrible dreams,’ said Dr Akonanga with pride and gravity.
     
    What dreams troubled Ribbentrop that night, Virginia could not know. She dreamed she was extended on a table, pinioned, headless and covered with blood-streaked feathers, while a voice within her, from the womb itself, kept repeating: ‘You, you, you.’
     
5
    LUDOVIC’S command was stationed in a large, requisitioned villa in a still desolate area of Essex. The owners had been ready to move out when they saw and heard, a few flat fields away, the bulldozers move in to prepare the new aerodrome; a modest enough construction, a single cross of runway, a dozen huts, but enough to annihilate the silence they had sought there. They left behind them most of their furniture, and Ludovic’s quarters in what had been designed as the nurseries were equipped with all he required. He had never shared the taste of Sir Ralph and his friends for bric-à-brac. There was a certain likeness between his office and Mr Crouchback’s sitting-room at Matchet,