SECOND READING: 18LIFE AT Hetton Abbey is sufficiently content for most of the London set to envy the Lasts; Tony Last is devoted to the family seat, a large country estate which is very grand - and expensive to run. He is considered "madly feudal" by his wife, Brenda, a lovely, obviously shallow socialite. The couple sweet-talk each other, while their only child, little John Andrew, is taught to ride - and swear - by the colourful Ben, a former farm worker.
Brenda, married seven years, is bored and pokes fun at Tony's pomposity and belief in the old social order. The arrival of an unexpected weekend guest changes their lives. The guest is John Beaver, hopelessly idle son of a mother who runs a frenetic decor business. Mrs Beaver is the universal provider of everything from cushion covers to entire flats. She indulges her boy, while he takes whatever he can get through random invitations secured due to his usefulness as a single man on the dinner-party circuit. Beaver's arrival at Hetton causes Tony to leave Brenda to play hostess. She is heroic. Not only does she entertain the boring, self-absorbed and, as she says herself, "pathetic" Beaver, she decides to fall in love with him.
With the publication of his first novel, Decline and Fall, in 1928, Waugh had emerged as a gifted comic writer with a flair for brilliant caricature and zany, nuanced dialogue, capable of replicating the pace and witty crackle of Wilde's comedies. Society and human behaviour intrigued him, and with A Handful of Dust, possibly his finest book, he revealed a powerfully astute moral sense.
Brenda's infatuation with Beaver feeds the gossips, yet Waugh is more than playing for laughs, shrewdly conveying the lowliness of Brenda's deceit, which quickly requires a London flat. Soon she announces to Tony that she should enrol in an economics course, in order to help him. All the while Brenda is aware that Beaver has no interest in her.
At the time of Beaver's visit to Hetton, Brenda remarks to Tony: "He's quite like us in some ways." To which Tony immediately retorts: "He's not like me." And he is not. Tony is an old-school product of the upper classes. Waugh is not unsympathetic to Tony and chronicles his increasing bewilderment as Brenda withdraws further away, even refusing to speak to him when he travels to London to visit her.
The death of their son, John Andrew, in a hunting accident is the climax of the book. On being told of John's death, Brenda at first thinks her lover has been killed, and appears relieved that her son is the victim.
It is a chilling moment. For all the comedy, particularly when Tony sets out in the company of a woman and her child to provide evidence of infidelity to a pair of detectives working for divorce lawyers, more is to follow in a satire which becomes a black morality play. Tony asserts himself, rejecting Brenda's selfish divorce demands.
Aware that "the dappled unicorns had fled", he travels to Brazil on an expedition. Delirious and experiencing bizarre hallucinations, he is rescued by an insane recluse who insists Tony read the works of Dickens aloud to him. In exposing the cynical hypocrisy of the post-first World War generation, Waugh may be suggesting that reading Dickens in the Brazilian jungle is not the worst of fates.
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits the literary canon
