From ‘The Loved One’

It was still night; the sky was starless and below it the empty streets flamed with light. Aimee rose and dressed and went out under the arc lamps. She met no one during the brief walk from her apartment to Whispering Glades. The Golden Gates were locked from midnight until morning, but there was a side door always open for the use of the night staff. Aimee entered and followed the familiar road upwards to the terrace of the Kirk o’ Auld Lang Syne. Here she sat and waited for dawn.

Her mind was quite free from anxiety. Somehow, somewhere in the blank black hours she had found counsel; she had communed perhaps with the spirits of her ancestors, the impious and haunted race who had deserted the altars of the old Gods, had taken ship and wandered, driven by what pursuing furies through what mean streets and among what barbarous tongues! Her father had frequented the Four Square Gospel Temple: her mother drank. Attic voices prompted Aimee to a higher destiny; voices which far away and in another age had sung of the Minotaur, stamping far underground at the end of the passage; which spoke to her more sweetly of the still Boeotian waterfront, the armed men all silent in the windless morning, the fleet motionless at anchor, and Agamemnon turning away his eyes; spoke of Alcestis and proud Antigone.

The East lightened. In all the diurnal revolution these first fresh hours alone are untainted by man. They lie late abed in that region. In exaltation Aimee watched the countless statues glimmer, whiten and take shape while the lawns changed from silver and grey to green. She was touched by warmth. Then suddenly all round her and as far as eye could see the slopes became a dancing surface of light, of millions of minute rainbows and spots of fire; in the control house the man on duty had turned the irrigation cock and water was flooding through the network of pierced and buried pipes. At the same time parties of gardeners with barrows and tools emerged and tramped to their various duties. It was full day.

From “The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy” by Evelyn Waugh

(Back Bay Books: 164 pp., $13.95 paper)