The Loved One

“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 […].”

Throughout the novel, Waugh uses the setting to evoke images and symbols of death and decline. Here, in the opening passage, the setting sun combines with the “unseen, unheard” ocean and the dying palm leaves to foreshadow Sir Francis’s impending death.

“They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.”

Sir Francis’s condescending compliment of Americans reveals his British upper-class snobbery. He's basically saying that his American hosts are talkative but say nothing worthy of his listening. It’s obvious here—and elsewhere in the early chapters—that Sir Francis views his own opinions as superior.

“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.”

Waugh uses the image of a swimming pool, which usually connotes luxury and prosperity, to instead symbolize Sir Francis’s decline. The sentence leading up to the pool description reveals that Sir Francis “had descended to the Publicity Department” (6) at the movie studio. Waugh uses the weed image earlier in the chapter, too, when he refers to “the plot of weeds between the verandah and the dry water-hole” (3). Weeds typically symbolize neglect or disorder.