The Loved One

Waugh often places images that connote death in the novel’s setting to foreshadow a character’s declining state or imminent demise. In the opening chapter, the setting sun, a silent ocean, and dying palm leaves welcome the reader to the abode of Sir Francis, a has-been script writer in the sunset of his life:

All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the west, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fingers of palm-leaf […] (3).

Later in the opening chapter, Waugh refers to an empty swimming pool to symbolize Sir Francis’s descent from the ranks of Hollywood’s elite: “His swimming-pool which had once flashed like an aquarium with the limbs of long-departed beauties was empty now and cracked and over-grown with weed” (6). The emptiness motif recurs in several places in the story as a symbol of death. For example, when Aimée is walking from her home to Whispering Glades, where she dies by suicide, Waugh describes the environment as follows:

It was still night; the sky was starless and below it the empty streets flamed with light. Aimée rose and dressed and went out under the arc-lamps. She met no one during the brief walk from her apartment to Whispering Glades (131).

In addition, Waugh uses silence and stillness to evoke death. The words “silent” and “silently” appear many times throughout the novel, including several times during Aimée’s final walk to Whispering Glades: “They glanced at her incuriously as she passed silently through them, for urgent work was done at all hours. She took the lift to the top story where everything was silent and empty save for the sheeted dead” (133). At the end of the novel, when Dennis goes to Whispering Glades to pick up Aimée’s body, Waugh evokes the stillness of the moment: “On a swift and silent trolley they set Dennis’s largest collecting box, first empty, later full” (144).