27
Jul
Before Ivo’s oddness gave cause for real anxiety Guy had married, not a Catholic but a bright, fashionable girl quite unlike anyone that his friends or family would have expected. He took his younger son’s share of the diminished family fortune, and settled in Kenya, living, it seemed to him afterwards, in unruffled good-humour beside a mountain lake where the air was always brilliant and keen and the flamingos rose at dawn first white, then pink, then a whirl of shadow passing across the glowing sky. he farmed assiduously and nearly made it pay. Then unaccountably his wife said that her health required a year in England. She wrote regularly and affectionately until one day, still affectionately, she informed him that she had fallen deeply in love with an acquaintance of theirs named Tommy Blackhouse; that Guy was not to be cross about it; that she wanted a divorce. ‘And, please,’ her letter ended, ‘there’s to be no chivalrous nonsense of your going to Brighton and playing “the guilty party”. That would mean six months separation from Tommy and I don’t trust him out of my sight for six minutes, the beast.’
Men at Arms | Evelyn Waugh
