eeling in that den,
"what have you been up to all these years?"
"My dear, it is what you have been up to that we are here to talk
about. I've been watching you, my dear. I'm a faithful old body and I've
kept my eye on you." As he spoke the bar and the bar-tender, the blue wicker
furniture, the gambling-machines, the wireless, the couple of youths dancing
on the oilcloth, the youths sniggering round the slots, the purple-veined,
stiffly dressed elderly man drinking in the corner opposite us, the whole
drab and furtive joint, seemed to fade, and I was back in Oxford looking out
over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin Gothic. "I went to your
first exhibition," said Anthony; "I found it -- charming. There was an
interior of Marchmain House, very English, very correct, but quite
delicious. 'Charles has done something,' I said; 'not all he will do, not
all he can do, but something.'
"Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there
was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I
arm not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English
snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said,
'Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?'
"The next thing I saw was your very handsome volume -- Village and
Provincial Architecture, was it called? Quite a tome, my dear, and what did
I find? Charm again. 'Not quite my cup of tea,' I thought; 'this is too
English.' I have the fancy I for rather spicy things, you know, not for the
shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the
English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis -- not
that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford. Then, to be frank, dear
Charles, I despaired of you. 'I am a degenerate old d-d-dago,' I said, 'and
Charles -- I speak of your art, my dear -- is a dean's daughter in flowered
muslin.'
"Imagine then my excitement at luncheon to-day. Everyone was talking
about you. My hostess was a friend of my mother's, a Mrs. Stuyvesant
Oglander; a friend of yours, too, my dear. Such a frump! Not at all the
society I imagined you to keep. 1 However, they had all been to your
exhibition, but it was you f they talked of, how you had broken away, my
dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how
my old heart leaped.
"' Poor Celia,' they said, 'after all she's done for him.' 'He owes
everything to her. It's too bad.' 'And with Julia,' they said, 'after the
way she behaved in America.' 'Just as she was going back 1 to Rex.'
" 'But the pictures,' I said; 'tell me about them'
'"Oh, the pictures,' they said: 'they're most peculiar.' 'Not at 1 all
what he usually does.' 'Very forceful.' 'Quite barbaric.' 'if call them
downright unhealthy,' said Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander.
"My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted tof dash out
of the house and leap in a taxi and say, 'Take me to Charles's unhealthy
pictures.' Well, I went, but the gallery after J luncheon was so full of
absurd women in the sort of hats they'i] should be made to eat, that I
rested a little --I rested here witfcl Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys.
Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my
dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very
successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so
much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple,
creamy English charm, playing tigers."
"You're quite right," I said.
"My dear, of course I'm right. I was right years ago--more years, I am
happy to say, than either of us shows -- when I warned you. I took you out
to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail
of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist
outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills
love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."
The youth called Tom approached us again. "Don't be a tease, Toni; buy
me a drink." I remembered my train and left Anthony with him.
As I stood on the platform by the restaurant-car I saw my luggage and
Julia's go past with Julia's sour-faced maid strutting beside the porter.
They had begun shutting the carriage-doors when Julia arrived, unhurried,
and took her place in front of me. I had a table for two. This was a very
convenient train; there was half an hour before dinner and half an hour
after it; then, instead of changing to the branch line, as had been the rule
in Lady Marchmain's day, we were met at the junction. It was night as we
drew out of Paddington, and the glow of the town gave place first to the
scattered lights of the suburbs, then to the darkness of the fields.
"It seems days since I saw you," I said.
"Six hours; and we were together all yesterday. You look worn out."
"It's been a day of nightmare -- crowds, critics, the Clarences, a
luncheon party at Margot's, ending up with half an hour's well-reasoned
abuse of my pictures in a pansy bar. ... I think Celia knows about us."
"Well, she had to know some time."
"Everyone seems to know. My pansy friend had not been in London
twenty-four hours before he'd heard."
"Damn everybody."
"What about Rex?"
"Rex isn't anybody at all," said Julia; "he just doesn't exist."
The knives and forks jingled on the tables as we sped through the
darkness; the little circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses i lengthened
to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip,
lapped back again, never spilt; I was leaving the day behind me. Julia
pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rack above her, and shook her
night-dark hair with a little sigh of ease -- a sigh fit for the pillow, the
sinking firelight and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of
bare trees.
"It's great to have you back, Charles; like the old days."
Like the old days? I thought.
Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his
Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common
to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make
themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there
was no timdi to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time
ten reply; time for a laugh -- a throaty mirthless laugh, the base| currency
of goodwill.
There were half a dozen of these friends in the Tapestry Hall ill
politicians, "young conservatives" in the early forties, with spar hair and
high blood-pressure; a socialist from the coal mines wh had already caught
their clear accents, whose cigars came lid pieces in his lips, whose hand
shook when he poured hir out a drink; a lovesick columnist, who alone was
silent, glc ing sombrely on the only woman of the party; a financier oldafl
than the rest, and, one might guess from the way they treated him, richer; a
woman they called "Grizel," a knowing rake whom, in their hearts, they all
feared a little.
They all feared Julia, too, Grizel included. She greeted them and
apologized for not being there to welcome them, with a formality which
hushed them for a minute; then she came and sat with me near the fire, and
the storm of talk arose once more and whirled about bur ears.
"Of course, he can marry her and make her queen to-morrow."
"We had our chance in October. Why didn't we send the Italian fleet to
the bottom of Mare Nostrum? Why didn't we blow Spezia to blazes. Why didn't
we land on Pantelleria?"
"Franco's simply a German agent. They tried to put him in to prepare
air'bases to bomb France. That bluff has been called, anyway."
"It would make the monarchy stronger than it's been since Tudor times.
The people are with him."
"The press arc with him."
"I'm with him."
"Who cares about divorce now except a few old maids who aren't married,
anyway?"
"If he has a showdown with the old gang, they'll just disappear like,
like . . ."
"Why didn't we close the Canal? Why didn't we bomb Rome?"
"It wouldn't have been necessary. One firm note . . ."
"One firm speech."
"One showdown."
"Anyway, Franco will soon be skipping back to Morocco. Chap I saw
to-day just come from Barcelona . . ."
". . . Chap just come from Fort Belvedere . . ."
". . . Chap just come from the Palazzo Venezia . . ."
"All we want is a showdown."
"A showdown with Baldwin."
"A showdown with Hitler."
"A showdown with the Old Gang."
". . . That I should live to see my country, the land of Clive and
Nelson ..."
". . . My country of Hawkins and Drake."
". . . My country of Palmerston . . ."
"Would you very much mind not doing that?"'said Grizel the columnist,
who had been attempting in a maudlin manner to twist her wrist. "I don't
happen to enjoy it."
"I wonder which is the more horrible," I said, "Celia's Art and Fashion
or Rex's Politics and Money."
"Why worry about them?"
"Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's
supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though' all mankind,
and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us."
"They are, they are."
"But we've got our happiness in spite of them; here and noW| we've
taken possession of it. They can't hurt us, can they?"
"Not to-night; not now."
"Not for how many nights?"
Chapter Three
"Do you remember," said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening,
"do you remember the storm?"
"The bronze doors banging."
"The roses in cellophane."
"The man who gave the 'get-together' party and was never seen again."
"Do you remember how the sun came out on our last evening just as it
has done to-day?"
It had been an afternoon of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast
that at times I had stopped work and roused Julia from the light trance in
which she sat -- she had sat so often; I never tired of painting her,
forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy -- until at length we had
gone early to our baths, and on coming down, dressed for dinner, in the last
half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the sun had emerged;
the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the blossom in the
limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to merge with
the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the obelisk
spanned the terrace.
I had carried two garden cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and
put them on the rim of the fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold
tunic and a white gown, one hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring
to catch the fire of the sunset; the carved animals mounted over her dark
head in a cumulus of green moss and glowing stone and dense shadow, and the
waters round them flashed and bubbled and broke into scattered beads of
flame.
". . . So much to remember," she said. "How many days have there been
'since then, when we haven't seen each other; a hundred, do you think?"
"Not so many."
"Two Christmases" -- those bleak, annual excursions into propriety.
Boughton, home of my family, home of my cousin Jasper, with what glum
memories of childhood I revisited its pitch-pine corridors and dripping
walls! How querulously my father and I, seated side by side in my uncle's
Humber, approached the avenue of Wellingtonias knowing that at the end of
the drive we should find my uncle, my aunt, my Aunt Philippa, my cousin
Jasper and, of recent years, Jasper's wife and children; and besides them,
perhaps already arrived, perhaps every moment expected, my wife and my
children. This annual sacrifice united us; here among the holly and
mistletoe and the cut spruce, the parlour games ritually performed, the
brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums, the village choir in the pitch-pine
minstrekl gallery, gold twine and sprigged wrapping-paper, she and I weril
accepted, whatever ugly rumours had been afloat in the past yeafJ as man and
wife. "We must keep it up, whatever it costs us, fc the sake of the
children," my wife said.
"Yes, two Christmases. . . . And the three days of good tas before I
followed you to Capri."
"Our first summer."
"Do you remember how I hung about Naples, then followe how we met by
arrangement on. the hill path and how flat fell?"
"I went back to the villa and said, 'Papa, who do you think arrived at
the hotel?' and he said, 'Charles Ryder, I suppose.' said, 'Why did you
think of him?' and Papa replied, 'Cara came back from Paris with the news
that you and he were inseparable He seems to have a penchant for my
children. However, brir him here. I think we have the room.'"
"There was the time you had jaundice and wouldn't let see you."
"And when I had flu and you were afraid to come."
"Countless visits to Rex's constituency."
"And Coronation Week, when you ran away from Londc Your goodwill
mission to your father-in-law. The time you went to Oxford to paint the
picture they didn't like. Oh, yes, quite' hundred days."
"A hundred days wasted out of two years and a bit ... a day when you
were not in my heart; not a day's coldness mistrust or disappointment."
"Never that."
We fell silent; only the birds spoke in a multitude of smalj clear
voices in the lime-trees; only the waters spoke among the carved stones.
Julia took the handkerchief from my breast pocket and her hand; then
lit a cigarette. I feared to break the spell of memories, but for once our
thoughts had not kept pace together, for when at length Julia spoke, she
said sadly: "How many more? Another hundred?"
"A lifetime."
"I want to marry you, Charles."
"One day; why now?"
"War," she said, "this year, next year, sometime soon. I want a day or
two with you of real peace."
"Isn't this peace?"
The sun had sunk now to the line of woodland beyond the valley; all the
opposing slope was already in twilight, but the lakes below us were aflame;
the light grew in strength and splendour as it neared death, spreading long
shadows across the pasture, falling full on the rich stone spaces of the
house, firing the panes in the windows, glowing on cornices and colonnade
and dome, drawing out all the hidden sweetness of colour and scent from
earth and stone and leaf, glorifying the head and golden shoulders of the
woman beside me.
"What do you mean by 'peace'; if not this?"
"So much more"; and then in a chill, matter-of-fact tone she continued:
"Marriage isn't a thing we can take when the impulse moves us. There must be
a divorce -- two divorces. We must make plans."
"Plans, divorce, war -- on an evening like this."
"Sometimes," said Julia, "I feel the past and the future pressing so
hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all."
Then Wilcox came down the steps into the sunset to tell us that dinner
was ready.
Shutters were up, curtains drawn, candles lit, in the Painted Parlour.
"Hullo, it's laid for three." "Lord Brideshead arrived half an hour
ago, my lady. He sent a message would you please not wait dinner for him as
he may be a little late."
"It seems months since he was here last," said Julia. "What does he do
in London?"
It was often a matter for speculation between us -- giving birth to
many fantasies, for Bridey was a mystery; a creature from under ground; a
hard-snouted, burrowing, hibernating animal who shunned the light. He had
been completely without action in all his years of adult life; the talk of
his going into the army, 1 and into Parliament, and into a monastery, had
all come to nothing. All that he was known with certainty to have done--andi
this because in a season of scant news it had formed the subject of a
newspaper article entitled peer's unusual hobby -- was to form a collection
of match-boxes; he kept them mounted on boards, card-indexed, yearly
occupying a larger and larger space in his small house in Westminster. At
first he was bashful about the notoriety which the newspaper caused, but
later greatly pleased, for he found it the means of his getting into touch
with other collectors in all parts of the world with whom he now
corresponded and swapped duplicates. Other than this he was not known to
have any interests. He remained Joint-Master of the Marchmain and hunted
with them dutifully on their two days a week when he was at home; he never
hunted with the neighbouring pack, who had the better country. He had no
real zest for sport, and had not been out a dozen times that season; he had
few friends; he visited his aunts; he went to public dinners held in the
Catholic interest. At Brideshead he performed all unavoidable local duties,
bringing with him to platform and fettfil and committee room his own thin
mist of clumsiness and aloofness.
"There was a girl found strangled with a piece of barbed wire at
Wandsworth last week," I said, reviving an old fantasy.
"That must be Bridey. He is naughty."
When we had been a quarter of an hour at the table he joined us, coming
ponderously into the room in the bottle-green velvet smoking suit which he
kept at Brideshead and always wore when he was there. At thirty-eight he had
grown heavy and bald, and might have been taken for forty-five.
"Well," he said, "well, only you two; I hoped to find Rex here."
I often wondered what he made of me and of my continual presence; he
seemed to accept me, without curiosity, as one of the household. Twice in
the past two years he had surprised me by what seemed to be acts of
friendship; last Christmas he sent me a photograph of himself in the robes
of a Knight of Malta, and shortly afterwards he asked me to go with him to a
dining club. Both acts had an explanation: he had had more copies of his
portrait printed than he knew what to do with; he was proud of his club. It
was a surprising association of men quite eminent in their professions who
met once a month for an cvp-ning of ceremonious buffoonery; each had his
sobriquet-- Bridey was called "Brother Grandee"--and a specially designed
jewel worn like an order of chivalry, symbolizing it; they had club buttons
for their waistcoats and an elaborate ritual for the introduction of guests;
after dinner a paper was read and facetious speeches made. There was plainly
some competition to bring guests of distinction, and since Bridey had few
friends, and since I was tolerably well-known, I was invited. Even on that
convivial evening I could feel my host emanating little magnetic waves of
social uneasiness, creating, rather, a pool of general embarrassment about
himself in which he floated with loglike calm.
He sat down opposite me and bowed his sparse, pink head over his plate.
"Well, Bridey. What's the news?"
"As a matter of fact," he said, "I have some news. But it can wait."
"Tell us now."
He made a grimace which I took to mean "not in front of the f
servants," and said, "How is the painting, Charles?"
"Which painting?"
"Whatever you have on the stocks."
"I began a sketch of Julia, but the light was tricky all to-day."
"Julia? I thought you'd done her before. I suppose it's a change from
architecture, and much more difficult."
His conversation abounded in long pauses during which his mind seemed
to remain motionless; he always brought one back with a start to the exact
point where he had stopped. Now after more than a minute he said: "The world
is full of different subjects."
"Very true, Bridey."
"If I were a painter," he said, "I should choose an entirely different
subject every time; subjects with plenty of action in them like . . ."
Another pause. What, I wondered, was coming? "The Flying Scotsman"'? "The
Charge of the Light Brigade"? "Henley' Regatta"? Then surprisingly he
said:". . . like 'Macbeth.'" There was something supremely preposterous in
the idea of Bridey as a painter of action pictures; he was usually
preposterous yet seldom quite absurd. He achieved dignity by his remoteness
and agelessness; he was still half-child, already half-veteran; there seemed
no spark of contemporary life in him; he had a kind of massive rectitude and
impermeability, an indifference to the world, which compelled respect.
Though we often laughed at: him, he was never wholly ridiculous;
at times he was even formidable.
We talked of the news from Central Europe until, suddenly ill cutting
across this barren topic, Bridey asked: "Where are Mummy's jewels?"
"This was hers," said Julia, "and this. Cordelia and I had all her own
things. The family jewels went to the bank."
"It's so long since I've seen them--I don't know that I ever saw them
all. What is there? Aren't there some rather famous rubies, someone was
telling me?"
"Yes, a necklace. Mummy used often to wear it, don't you remember ? And
there are the pearls -- she always had those out. But most of it stayed in
the bank year after year. There are some hideous diamond fenders, I
remember, and a Victorian diamond collar no one could wear now. There's a
mass of good stones. Why?"
"I'd like to have a look at them some day."
"I say, Papa isn't going to pop them, is he? He hasn't got into debt
again?"
"No, no, nothing like that."
Bridey was a slow and copious eater. Julia and I watched him between
the candles. Presently he said: "If I was Rex . . .".His mind seemed full of
such suppositions: "If I was Archbishop of Westminster," "If I was head of
the Great Western Railway," "If I was an actress"--as though it were a mere
trick of fate that he was none of these things, and he might awake any
morning to find the matter adjusted. "If I was Rex I should want to live in
my constituency."
"Rex says it saves four days' work a week not to."
"I'm sorry he's not here. I have a little announcement to make."
"Bridey, don't be so mysterious. Out with it."
He made the grimace, which seemed to mean "not before the servants."
Later, when port was on the table and we three were alone, Julia said:
"I'm not going till I hear the announcement."
"Well," said Bridey sitting back in his chair and gazing fixedly at his
glass. "You have only to wait until Monday to see it in black and white in
the newspapers. I am engaged to be married. I hope you are pleased."
"Bridey. How . . . how very exciting! Who to?."
"Oh, no one you know."
"Is she pretty?"
"I don't think you would exactly call her pretty; 'comely' is the word
I think of in her connection. She is a big woman."
"Fat?"
"No, big. She is called Mrs. Muspratt; her Christian name is Beryl. I
have known her for a long time, but until last year she had a husband; now
she is a widow. Why do you laugh?"
"I'm sorry. It isn't the least funny. It's just so unexpected. Is she .
. . is she about your own age?"
"Just about, I believe. She has three children, the eldest boy has just
gone to Ampleforth. She is not at all well off."
"But Bridey, where did you find her?"
"Her late husband, Admiral Muspratt, collected match-boxes," he said
with complete gravity.
Julia trembled on the verge of laughter, recovered her self-possession
and asked: "You're not marrying her for her matchboxes?"
"No, no; the whole collection was left to the Falmouth Town Library. I
have a great affection for her. In spite of all her difficulties she is a
very cheerful woman,, very fond of acting. She is connected with the
Catholic Players' Guild."
"Does Papa know?"
"I had a letter from him this morning giving me his approval. He has
been urging me to marry for some time."
It occurred to both Julia and myself simultaneously that we were
allowing curiosity and surprise to predominate; now we congratulated him in
gentler tones from which mockery was almost excluded.
"Thank you," he said, "thank you. I think I am very fortunate."
"But when are we going to meet her? I do think you might have brought
her down with you."
He said nothing, sipped and gazed.
"Bridey," said Julia. "You sly, smug old brute, why haven't you brought
her here?"
"Oh I couldn't do that, you know."
"Why couldn't you? I'm dying to meet her. Let's ring her up now and
invite her. She'll think us most peculiar leaving her alone at a time like
this."
"She has the children," said Brideshead. "Besides, you are peculiar,
aren't you?"
"What can you mean?"
Brideshead raised his head and looked solemnly at his sister, and
continued in the same simple way, as though he were saying nothing
particularly different from what had gone before, "I couldn't ask her here,
as things are. It wouldn't be suitable. After all, I am a lodger here. This
is Rex's house at the moment, as far as it's anybody's. What goes on here is
his business. But I couldn't bring Beryl here."
"I simply don't understand," said Julia rather sharply. I looked at
her. All the gentle mockery had gone; she was alert, almost scared, it
seemed. "Of course, Rex and I want her to come."
"Oh yes, I don't doubt that. The difficulty is quite otherwise." He
finished his port, refilled his glass, and pushed the decanter towards me.
"You must understand that Beryl is a woman of strict Catholic principle
fortified by the prejudices of the middle class. I couldn't possibly bring
her here. It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin
with Rex or Charles or both -- I have always avoided enquiry into the
details of your menage --but in no case would Beryl consent to be your
guest."
Julia rose. "Why, you pompous ass . . ." she said, stopped, and turned
towards the door.
At first I thought she was overcome by laughter; then, as I opened the
door to her, I saw with consternation that she was in tears. I hesitated.
She slipped past me without a glance.
"I may have given the impression that this was a marriage of
convenience," Brideshead continued placidly. "I cannot speak for Beryl; no
doubt the security of my position has some influence on her. Indeed, she has
said as much. But for myself, let me emphasize, I am ardently attracted."
"Bridey, what a bloody offensive thing to say to Julia!"
"There was nothing she should object to. I was merely stating! a fact
well known to her."
She was not in the library; I mounted to her room, but she J was not
there. I paused by her laden dressing-table wonderingT if she would come.
Then through the open window, as the light I streamed out across the
terrace, into the dusk, to the fountain which in that house seemed always to
draw us to itself for comfort and refreshment, I caught the glimpse of a
white skirt against I the stones. It was nearly night. I found her in the
darkest refuge, on a wooden seat, in a bay of the clipped box which
encircled the basin. I took her in my arms and she pressed her face to my
heart.
"Aren't you cold out here?"
She did not answer, only clung closer to me and shook with sobs.
"My darling, what is it? Why do you mind? What does it matter what that
old booby says?"
"I don't; it doesn't. It's just the shock. Don't laugh at me."
In the two years of our love, which seemed a lifetime, I had not seen
her so moved or felt so powerless to help.
"How dare he speak to you like that?" I said. "The cold-blooded old
humbug . . ." But I was failing her in sympathy.
"No," she said, "it's not that. He's quite right. They know all about
it, Bridey and his widow; they've got it in black and white; they bought it
for a penny at the church door. You cat get anything there for a penny, in
black and white, and nobody to see that you pay; only an old woman with a
broom at the other end, rattling round the confessionals, and a young woman
lighting a candle at the Seven Dolours. Put a penny in the box or not, just
as you like; take your tract. There you've got it in black and white.
"All in one word, too, one little, flat, deadly word that cover a
lifetime.
" 'Living in sin'; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to
America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting.
That's not what they mean. That's not Bridey's pennyworth. He means just
what it says in black and white.
"Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year
in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn
on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it,
showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a
tablet of Dial if it's fretful.
"Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from
the world. 'Poor Julia,' they say, 'she can't go out. She's got to take care
of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,' they say, 'but it's so strong.
Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little, mad sin.'"
An hour ago, I thought, under the sunset, she sat turning her ring in
the water fend counting the days of happiness; now under the first stars and
the last grey whisper of day, all this mysterious tumult of sorrow! What had
happened to us in the Painted Parlour? What shadow had fallen in the
candlelight? Two rough sentences and a trite phrase. She was beside herself;
her voice, now muffled in my breast, now clear and anguished, came to me in
single words and broken sentences, which may be strung together thus: --
"Past and future; the years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the
cigar smoke, while time crept on and the counters clicked on the backgammon
board, and the man who was 'dummy' at the men's table filled the glasses;
when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already
dead; putting him, away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years
with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war
coming, world ending -- sin.
"A word from so long ago, from Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth
and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Cordelia and me with the
catechism, in Mummy's room, before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my
sin with her to church, bowed under it and the black lace veil, in the
chapel; slipping out with it in London before the fires were lit; taking it
with her through the empty streets, where the milkman's ponies stood with
their forefeet on the pavement; Mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more
cruelly than her own deadly illness.
"Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot;
hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the
dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the
dark church where only the old char- woman raises the dust and one candle
burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort
except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging forever;
never the cool sepulchre and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab,
never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always I the midday sun and the
dice clicking for the seamless coat.
"Never the shelter of the cave or of the castle walls. Outcast il in
the desolate spaces where the hyenas roam at night and the 1 rubbish heaps
smoke in the daylight. No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and
angels posted along the walls. Nothing but bare stone and dust and the
smouldering dumps. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with
lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish,,
hoping for something to put in his sack, something marketable, turns away
with disgust.
"Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before
I had seen her."
Between her tears she talked herself into silence. I could do nothing;
I was adrift in a strange sea; my hands on the metal-spun threads of her
tunic were cold and stiff, my eyes dry; I was as far from her in spirit, as
she clung to me in the darkness, as when years ago I had lit her cigarette
on the way from the station; as far as when she was out of mind, in the dry,
empty years at the Old Rectory and in the jungle.
Tears spring from speech; presently in the silence her weeping stopped.
She sat up, away from me, took my handkerchief, shivered, rose to her feet.
"Well," she said, in a voice much like normal. "Bridey is one for
bombshells, isn't he?"
I followed her into the house and to her room; she sat at her
looking-glass. "Considering that I've just recovered from a fit of
hysteria," she said, "I don't call that at all bad." Her eyes seemed
unnaturally large and bright, her cheeks pale with two spots of high colour,
where, as a girl, she used to put a dab of rouge. "Most hysterical women
look as if they had a bad cold. You'd better change your shirt before going
down; it's all tears and lipstick."
"Are we going down?"
"Of course, we mustn't leave poor Bridey on his engagement night."
When I came back to her she said: "I'm sorry for that appalling '
scene, Charles. I can't explain."
Brideshead was in the library, smoking his pipe, placidly reading a
detective story.
"Was it nice out? If I'd known you were going I'd have come, too."
"Rather cold."
"I hope it's not going to be inconvenient for Rex moving out of here.
You see, Barton Street is much too small for us and the three children.
Besides, Beryl likes the country. In his letter Papa proposed making over
the whole estate right away."
I remembered how Rex had greeted me on my first arrival at Brideshead
as Julia's guest. "A very happy arrangement," he had said. "Suits me down to
the ground. The old boy keeps the place up; Bridey does all the feudal stuff
with the tenants; I have the run of the house rent-free. All it costs me is
the food and the wages of the indoor servants. Couldn't ask faker than that,
could you?"
"I should think he'll be sorry to go," I said.
"Oh, he'll find another bargain somewhere," said Julia; "trust him."
"Beryl's got some furniture of her own she's very attached to. I don't
know that it would go very well here. You know, oak dressers and coffin
stools and things. I thought she could put it in Mummy's old room."
"Yes, that would be the place."
So brother and sister sat and talked about the arrangement of the house
until bed-time. An hour ago, I thought, in the black refuge in the box
hedge, she wept her heart out for the death of her God; now she is
discussing whether Beryl's children shall take the old smoking-room or the
schoolroom for their own. I was all at sea.
"Julia," I said later, when Brideshead had gone upstairs, "have you
ever seen a picture of Holman Hunt's called 'The Awakened Conscience'?"
"No."
I had seen a copy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the library some days before;
I found it again and read her Ruskin's description. She laughed quite
happily.
"You're perfectly right. That's exactly what I did feel."
"But, darling, I can't believe that all that tempest of emotion came
just from a few words of Bridey's. You must have been thinking about it
before."
"Hardly at all; now and then; more, lately, with the Last Trump so
near."
"Of course it's a thing psychologists could explain; a preconditioning
from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the
nursery. You do know at heart that it's all bosh, don't you?"
"How I wish it was!"
"Sebastian once said almost the same thing to me."
"He's gone back to the Church, you know. Of course, he never left it as
definitely as I did. I've gone too far; there's no turning back now; I know
that, if that's wha you mean by thinking it all bosh. All I can hope to do
is to put my life in some sort of order in a human way, before all human
order comes to an end. That's why I want to marry you. I should like to have
a child. That's one thing I can do. . . . Let's go out again. The moon
should be up by now."
The moon was full and high. We walked round the house; under the limes
Julia paused and idly snapped off one of the long shoots, last year's
growth, that fringed their boles, and stripped it as she walked, making a
switch, as children do, but with petulant movements that were not a child's,
snatching nervously at the leaves and crumpling them between her fingers;
she began peeling the bark, scratching it with her nails.
Once more we stood by the fountain.
"It's like the setting of a comedy," I said. "Scene: a baroque fountain
in a nobleman's grounds. Act One, Sunset; Act Two, Dusk; Act Three,
Moonlight. The characters keep assembling at the fountain for no very clear
reason."
"Comedy?"
"Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation
scene."
"Was there a quarrel?"
"Estrangement and misunderstanding in Act Two."
"Oh, don't talk in that damned bounderish way. Why must you see
everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a
Pre-Raphaelite picture?"
"It's a way I have."
"I hate it."
Her anger was as unexpected as every change on this evening of swift
veering moods. Suddenly she cut me across the face with her switch, a
vicious, stinging little blow as hard as she could strike.
"Now do you see how I hate it?"
She hit me again.
"All right," I said, "go on."
Then, though her hand was raised, she stopped and threw | the
half-peeled wand into the water, where it floated white and black in the
moonlight.
"Did that hurt?"
"Yes."
"Did it? ... Did I?"
In the instant her rage was gone; her tears, newly flowing, were on my
cheek. I held her at arm's length and she put down her head, stroking my
hand on her shoulder with her face, catlike, but, unlike a cat, leaving a
tear there.
"Cat on the roof-top," I said.
"Beast!"
She bit at my hand, but when I did not move it and her teeth touched
me, she changed the bite to a kiss, the kiss to a lick of her tongue.
"Cat in the moonlight."
This was the mood I knew. We turned towards the house. When we came to
the lighted hall she said: "Your poor face," touching the weals with her
fingers. "Will there be a mark to-morrow?"
"I expect so."
"Charles, am I going crazy? What's happened to-night? I'm so tired."
She yawned; a fit of yawning took her. She sat at her dressing-table,
head bowed, hair over her face, yawning helplessly; when she looked up I saw
over her shoulder in the glass a face that was dazed with weariness like a
retreating soldier's, and beside it my own, streaked with two crimson lines.
"So tired," she repeated, taking off her gold tunic and letting, it
fall to the floor, "tired and crazy and good for nothing."
I saw her to bed; the blue lids fell over her eyes; her pale lips moved
on the pillow, but whether to wish me good-night or to murmur a prayer -- a
jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilit world between
sorrow and sleep; some ancient pious rhyme that had come down to Nanny
Hawkins from centuries of bedtime whispering, through all the changes of
language, from the days of pack-horses on the Pilgrim's Way -- I did not
know.
Next night Rex and his political associates were with us.
"They won't fight."
"They can't fight. They haven't the money; they haven't the oil."
"They haven't the wolfram; they haven't the men."
"They haven't the guts."
"They're afraid."
"Scared of the French; scared of the Czechs; scared of the Slovaks;
scared of us." '
"It's a bluff."
"Of course it's a bluff. Where's their tungsten? Where's their
manganese?"
"Where's their chrome?"
"I'll tell you a thing . . ."
"Listen to this; it'll be good; Rex will tell you a thing."
"... Friend of mine motoring in the Black Forest, only the other day,
just came back and told me about it while we played a round of golf. Well,
this friend driving along, turned down a lane into the high road. What
should he find but a military convoy? Couldn't stop, drove right into it,
smack into a tank, broadside-on. Gave himself up for dead. . . . Hold on,
this is the funny part."
"This is the funny part."
"Drove clean through it, didn't scratch his paint. What do you think?
It was made of canvas -- a bamboo frame and painted canvas."
"They haven't the steel."
"They haven't the tools. They haven't the labour. They're half
starving. They haven't the fats. The children have rickets."
"The women are barren."
"The men are impotent."
"They haven't the doctors."
"The doctors were Jewish."
"Now they've got consumption."
"Now they've got syphilis."
"Goering told a friend of mine . . ."
"Goebbels told a friend of mine . . ."
"Ribbentrop told me that the army just kept Hitler in power, so long as
he was able to get things for nothing. The moment anyone stands up to him,
he's finished. The army will shoot him."
"The liberals will hang him."
"The Communists will tear him limb from limb."
"He'll scupper himself."
"He'd do it now if it wasn't for Chamberlain."
"If it wasn't for Halifax."
"If it wasn't for Sir Samuel Hoare."
"And the 1920 Committee."
"Peace Pledge."
"Foreign Office."
"New York banks."
"All that's wanted is a good strong line."
"A line from Rex."
"And a line from me."
"We'll give Europe a good strong line. Europe is waiting for | a speech
from' Rex."
"And a speech from me."
"And a speech from me. Rally the freedom-loving peoples of 'the world.
Germany will rise; Austria will rise. The Czechs and the Slovaks are bound
to rise."
"To a speech from Rex and a speech from me."
"What about a rubber? How about a whiskey? Which of you chaps will have
a big cigar? Hullo, you two going out?"
"Yes, Rex," said Julia. "Charles and I are going into the moon-light."
We shut the windows behind us and the voices ceased; the moonlight lay
like hoar-frost on the terrace and the music of the fountain crept in our
ears; the stone balustrade of the terrace might have been the Trojan walls,
and in the silent park might have stood the Grecian tents where Cressid lay
that night.
"A few days, a few months."
"No time to be lost."
"A lifetime between the rising of the mooii and its setting. Then the
dark."
Chapter Four
"and of course Celia will have custody of the children."
"Of course."
"Then what about the Old Rectory? I don't imagine you'll want to settle
down with Julia bang at our gates. The children look on it as their home,
you know. Robin's got no place of his own till his uncle dies. After all,
you never used the studio, did you? Robin was saying only the other day what
a good playroom it would make--big enough for badminton."
"Robin can have the Old Rectory."
"Now with regard to money, Celia and Robin naturally don't want to
accept anything for themselves, but there's the question of the children's
education."
"That will be all right. I'll see the lawyers about it."
"Well, I think that's everything," said Mulcaster. "You know, I've seen
a few divorces in my time, and I've never known one work out so happily for
all concerned. Almost always, however matey people are at the start, bad
blood crops up when they get down to detail. Mind you, I don't miricl saying
there have been times in the last two years when I thought you were treating
Celia a bit rough. It's hard to tell with one's own sister, but I've always
thought her a jolly attractive girl, the sort of girl any chap would be glad
to have--artistic, too, just down your street. But I must admit you're a
good picker. I've always had a soft spot for Julia. Anyway, as things have
turned out everyone seems satisfied. Robin's been mad about Celia for a year
or more. D'you know him?"
"Vaguely. A half-baked, pimply youth as I remember him." "Oh, I
wouldn't quite say that. He's rather young, of course, but the great thing
is that Johnjohn and Caroline adore him. You've got two grand kids there,
Charles. Remember me to Julia; wish her all the best for old time's sake."
"So you're being divorced," said my father. "Isn't that rather
unnecessary, after you've been happy together all these years?"
"We weren't particularly happy, you know."
"Weren't you? Were you not? I distinctly remember last Christmas seeing
you together and thinking how happy you looked, and wondering why. You'll
find it very disturbing, you know, starting off again. How old are
you--thirty-four? That's no age to be starting. You ought to be settling
down. Have you made any plans?"
"Yes. I'm marrying again as soon as the divorce is through."
"Well, I do call that a lot of nonsense. I can understand a man wishing
he hadn't married and trying to get out of it -- though I never felt
anything of the kind myself -- but to get rid of one wife and take up with
another immediately is beyond all reason. Celia was always perfectly civil
to me. I had quite a liking for her, in a way. If you couldn't be happy with
her, why on earth should you expect to be happy with anyone else? Take my
advice, my dear boy, and give up the whole idea."
"Why bring Julia and me into this?" asked Rex. "If Celia wants to marry
again, well and good; let her. That's your business and hers. But I should
have thought Julia and I were quite happy as we are. You can't say I've been
difficult. Lots of chaps would have cut up nasty. I hope I'm a man of the
world. I've had my own fish to fry, too. But a divorce is a different thing
altogether; I've never known a divorce do anyone any good."
"That's your affair and Julia's."
"Oh, Julia's set on it. What I hoped was, you might be able to talk her
round. I've tried to keep out of the way as much as I could; if I've been
around too much, just tell me, I shan't mind. But there's too much going on
altogether at the moment, what with Bridey wanting me to clear out of the
house; it's disturbing, and I've got a lot on my mind."
Rex's public life was approaching a climacteric. Things had not gone as
smoothly with him as he had planned. I knew nothing of finance, but I heard
it said that his dealings were badly looked on by orthodox conservatives;
even his good qualities of geniality and impetuosity counted against him,
for his parties at Brideshead got talked about. There was always too much
about him in the papers; he was one with the press lords and their sad-eyed,
smiling hangers-on; in his speeches he said the sort of thing which "made a
story" in Fleet Street, and that did him no good with his party chiefs; only
war could put Rex's fortunes right and carry him into power. A divorce would
do Him no harm with these cronies; it was rather that with a big bank
running he could not look up from the table.
"If Julia insists on a divorce, I suppose she must have it," he said.
"But she couldn't have chosen a worse time. Tell her to hang on a bit,
Charles, there's a good fellow."
"Bridey's widow said: 'So you're divorcing one divorced man and
marrying another. It sounds rather complicated, but my dear' -- she called
me 'my dear' about twenty times -- 'I've usually found every Catholic family
has one lapsed member, and it's often the nicest.'"
Julia had just returned from a luncheon party given by Lady Rosscommon
in honour of Brideshead's engagement.
"What's she like?"
"Majestic and voluptuous; common, of course; might be Irish or Jewish
or both; husky voice, big mouth, small eyes, dyed hair -- I'll tell you one
thing, she's lied to Bridey about her age. She's a good forty-five. I don't
see her providing an heir. Bridey can't take his eyes off her. He was
gloating on her in the most revolting way all through luncheon."
"Friendly?"
"Goodness, yes, in a condescending way. You see, I imagine 1 she's been
used to bossing things rather in naval circles, with flag-lieutenants
trotting round and young officers-on-the-make sucking up to her. Well, she
clearly couldn't do a great deal of bossing at Aunt Fanny's, so it put her
rather at ease to have me there as the black sheep. She concentrated on me,
in fact; asked my advice about shops and things; said, rather pointedly, she
hoped to see me often in London. I think Bridey's scruples only extend to
her sleeping under the same roof with me. Apparently I can do her no serious
harm in a hat-shop or hairdresser's ' or lunching at the Ritz. The scruples
are all on Bridey's part, anyway; the widow is madly tough."
"Does she boss him?"
"Not yet, much. He's in an amorous stupor, poor beast, and doesn't
quite know where he is. She's just a good-hearted woman who wants a good
home for her children and isn't going to let anything get in her way. She's
playing up the religious stuff at j the moment for all it's worth. I daresay
she'll ease up a bit when she's settled."
The divorces were much talked of among our friends; even in that summer
of general alarm there were still corners where private affairs commanded
first attention. My wife was able to put it across that the business was a
matter of congratulation for her and reproach for me; that she had behaved
wonderfully, had stood it longer than anyone but she would have done; Robin
was seven years younger and a little immature for his age, they whispered in
their private corners, but he was absolutely devoted to poor Celia, and
really she deserved it after all she had been through. As for Julia and me,
that was an old story. "To put it crudely," said my cousin Jasper, as though
he had ever in his life put anything otherwise: "I don't see why you bother
to marry."
Summer passed; delirious crowds cheered Neville Chamberlain's return
from Munich; Rex made a rabid speech in the House of Commons which sealed
his fate one way or the other; sealed it, as is sometimes done with naval
orders, to be opened later at sea. Julia's family lawyers, whose black, tin
boxes, painted marquis of marchmain, seemed to fill a room, began the slow
process of her divorce; my own, brisker firm, two doors down, were weeks
ahead with my affairs. It was necessary for Rex and Julia to separate
formally, and since, for the time being, Brideshead was still her home, she
remained there and Rex removed his trunks and valet to their house in
London. Evidence was taken against Julia and me in my flat. A date was fixed
for Brideshead's wedding, early in the Christmas holidays, so that his
future stepchildren might take part.
One afternoon in November Julia and I stood at a window in the
drawing-room watching the wind at work stripping the lime-trees, sweeping
down the yellow leaves, sweeping them up and round and along the terrace and
lawns, trailing them through puddles and over the wet grass, pasting them on
walls and window-panes, leaving them at length in sodden piles against the
stonework.
"We shan't see them in spring," said Julia; "perhaps never again."
"Once before," I said, "I went away, thinking I should never return."
"Perhaps years later, to what's left of it, with what's left of us ..."
A door opened and shut in the darkling room behind us. Wilcox
approached through the firelight into the dusk about the long windows.
"A telephone message, my lady, from Lady Cordelia."
"Lady Cordelia! Where was she?"
"In London, my lady."
"Wilcox, how lovely! Is she coming home?"
"She was just starting for the station. She will be here after dinner."
"I haven't seen her for twelve years," I said -- not since the evening
when we dined together and she spoke of being a nun; the evening when I
painted the drawing-room at Marchmain House.
"She was an enchanting child."
"She's had an odd life. First, the convent; then, when that was no
good, the war in Spain. I've not seen her since then. The other girls who
went with the ambulance came back when the war was over; she stayed on,
getting people back to their homes, helping in the prison camps. An odd
girl. She's grown up quite plain, you know."
"Does she know about us?"
"Yes, she wrote me a sweet letter."
It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up quite plain; to think of all
that burning love spending itself on serum injections and delousing powder.
When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the
manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman.
It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed,
could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia and her. She was unmistakably
their sister, without any of Julia's or Sebastian's grace, without
Brideshead's gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the
atmosphere of camp and dressing station, so accustomed to gross suffering as
to lose the finer shades of pleasure. She looked more than her twenty-six
years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign
tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she
sat by the fire, and when she said, "It's wonderful to be home," it sounded
to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.
Those were the impressions of the first half-hour, sharpened by the
contrast with Julia's white skin and silk and jewelled hair and with my
memories of her as a child.
"My job's over in Spain," she said; "the authorities were very polite,
thanked me for all I'd done, gave me a medal and sent me packing. It looks
as though there'll be plenty of the same sort of work over here soon."
Then she said: "Is it too late to see Nanny?"
"No, she sits up to all hours with her wireless." We went up, all three
together, to the old nursery. Julia and I always spent part of our day
there. Nanny Hawkins and my father were two people who seemed impervious to
change; neither an hour older than when I first knew them. A wireless set
had now been added to Nanny Hawkins's small assembly of pleasures--the
rosary, the Peerage with its neat brown-paper wrapping protecting the red
and gold covers, the photographs and holiday souvenirs -- on her table. When
we broke it to her that Julia and I were to be married, she said, "Well,
dear, I hope it's all for the best," for it was not part of her religion to
question the propriety of Julia's actions.
Brideshead had never been a favourite with her; she greeted the news of
his engagement with "He's certainly taken long enough to make up his mind,"
and, when the search through Debrett afforded no information about Mrs.
Muspratt's connections: "She's caught him, I daresay."
We found her, as always in the evening, at the fireside with her
teapot, and the wool rug she was making.
"I knew you'd be up," she said. "Mr. Wilcox sent to tell me you were
coming."
"I brought you some lace."
"Well, dear, that is nice. Just like her poor Ladyship used to wear at
mass. Though why they made it black I never did understand, seeing lace is
white naturally. That is very welcome, I'm sure."
"May I turn off the wireless, Nanny?"
"Why, of course; I didn't notice it was still on, in the pleasure of
seeing you. What have you done to your hair?"
"I know it's terrible. I must get all that put right now I'm back.
Darling Nanny."
As we sat there talking, and I saw Cordelia's fond eyes on all of us, I
began to realize that she, too, had a beauty of her own.
"I saw Sebastian last month."
"What a time he's been gone! Was he quite well?"
"Not very. That's why I went. It's quite near you know from Spain to
Tunis. He's with the monks there."
"I hope they look after him properly. I expect they find him a regular
handful. He always sends to me at Christmas, but it's not the same as having
him home. Why you must all always be going abroad I never did understand.
Just like his Lordship. When there was that talk about going to war with
Munich, I said to myself, there's Cordelia and Sebastian and his Lordship
all abroad; that'll be very awkward for them."
"I wanted him to come home with me, but he wouldn't. He's got beard
now, you know, and he's very religions."
"That I won't believe, not even if I see it. He was always a little
heathen. Brideshead was one for church, not Sebastian. And a beard, only
fancy; such a nice fair skin as he had; always looked clean though he'd not
been near water all day, while Brideshead there was no doing anything with
scrub as you might."
"It's frightening," Julia once said, "to think how completely you have
forgotten Sebastian."
"He was the forerunner."
"That's what you said in the storm. I've thought since: perhaps I am
only a forerunner, too."
Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us
like a wisp of tobacco smoke -- a thought to fade and vanish like smoke
without a trace -- perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a
hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only
a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types
and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from
disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other,
snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always
a pace or two ahead of us.
I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather
it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant, Arcadian days.
"That's cold comfort for a girl," she said when I tried to explain.
"How do I know I shan't suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It's an easy
way to chuck."
I had not forgotten Sebastian; every stone of the house had a memory of
him, and when I heard him spoken of by Cordelia as someone she had seen a
month ago, my lost friend filled my thoughts. When we left the nursery, I
said, "I want to hear all about Sebastian."
"To-morrow. It's a long story."
And next day, walking through the wind-swept park, she told me: --
"I heard he was dying," she said. "A journalist in Burgos told me,
who'd just arrived from North Africa. A down-and-out called Flyte, who
people said was an English lord, whom the fathers had found starving and
taken in at a monastery near Carthage. That was how the story reached me. I
knew it couldn't be quite true--however little we did for Sebastian, he at
least got his money sent him--but I started off at once.
"It was all quite easy. I went to the consulate first and they knew all
about him; he was in the infirmary of the head house of some missionary
fathers. The consul's story was that Sebastian had turned up in Tunis one
day, some weeks before, in a motor bus from Algiers, and had applied to be
taken on as a missionary lay brother. The fathers took one look at him and
turned him down. Then he started drinking. He lived in a little.' hotel on
the edge of the Arab quarter. I went to see the place later; it was a bar
with a few rooms over it, kept by a Greek, smelling of hot oil and garlic
and stale wine and old clothes, a place where the small Greek traders came
and played draughts and listened to the wireless. He stayed there a month
drinking Greek absinthe, occasionally wandering out, they didn't know where,
coming back and drinking again. They were afraid he j would come to harm and
followed him sometimes, but he only went to the church or took a car to the
monastery outside the town. They loved him there. He's still loved, you see,
wherever he goes, whatever condition he's in. It's a thing about him he'll
never lose. You should have heard the proprietor and his family talk of him,
tears running down their cheeks; they'd clearly robbed him right and left,
but they'd looked after him and tried j to make him eat'his meals. That was
the thing that shocked them about him: that he wouldn't eat; there he was
with all that money, so thin. Some of the clients of the place came in while
we were talking in very peculiar French; they all had the same story: such a
good man, they said, it made them unhappy to sec him so low. They thought
very ill of his family for leaving him like that; it couldn't happen with
their people, they said, and I daresay they're right.
"Anyway, that was later; after the consulate I went straight to the
monastery and saw the Superior. He was a grim old Dutch man who had spent
fifty years in Central Africa. He told me his part of the story; how
Sebastian had turned up, just as the consul said, with his beard and a
suitcase, and asked to be admitted as a lay brother. 'He was very earnest,'
the Superior said -- Cordelia imitated his guttural tones; she had had an
aptitude for mimicry, I remembered, in the schoolroom -- " 'please do not
think there is any doubt of that -- he is quite sane and quite in earnest.
He wanted to go to the bush, as far away as he could get, among the simplest
people, to the cannibals. The Superior said: 'We have no cannibals in our
missions.' He said, well, pygmies would do, or just a primitive village
somewhere on a river; or lepers--lepers would do best of anything. The
Superior said: 'We have plenty of lepers, but they live in our settlements
with doctors and nuns. It is all very orderly.' He thought again, and said
perhaps lepers were not what he wanted, was there not some small church by a
river -- he always wanted a river you see --which he could look after when
the priest was away. The Superior said; 'Yes, there are such churches. Now
tell me about, yourself.' 'Oh, I'm nothing,' he said. 'We see some queer
fish'" -- Cordelia lapsed again into mimicry; " 'he was a queer fish, but he
was very earnest.' The Superior told him about the novitiate and the
training and said: 'You are not a young man. You do not seem strong to me.'
He said: 'No, I don't want to be trained. I don't want to do things that
need training.' The Superior said: 'My friend, you need a missionary for
yourself,' and he said: 'Yes, of course.' Then he sent him away.
"Next day he came back again. He had been drinking. He said he had
decided to become a novice and be trained. 'Well,' said the Superior, 'there
are certain things that are impossible for a man in the bush. One of them is
drinking. It is not the worst thing, but it is nevertheless quite fatal. I
sent him away.' Then he kept coming two or three times a week, always drunk,
until the Superior gave orders that the porter was to keep him out. I said,
'Oh dear, I'm afraid he was a terrible nuisance to you,' but of course
that's a thing they don't understand in a place like that. The Superior
simply said, 'I did not think there was anything I could do to help him
except pray.' He was a very holy old man and recognized it in others."
"Holiness?"
"Oh yes, Charles, that's what you've got to understand about Sebastian.
"Well, finally one day they found Sebastian lying outside the main gate
unconscious; he had walked out -- usually he took a car -- and fallen down
and lain there all night. At first they thought he was merely drunk again;
then they realized he was very ill, so they put him in the infirmary, where
he'd been ever since.
"I stayed a fortnight with him till he was over the worst of his
illness. He looked terrible, any age, rather bald with a straggling beard,
but he had his old sweet manner. They'd given him a room to himself; it was
barely more than a monk's cell with a bed and a crucifix and white walls. At
first he couldn't talk much and was not at all surprised to see me; then he
was surprised and wouldn't talk much, until just before I was going, when he
told me all that had been happening to him. It was' mostly about Kurt, his
German friend. Well, you met him, so you know all about that. He sounds
gruesome, but as long as Sebastian had him to look after, he was happy. He
told me he'd practically given up drinking at one time while he and Kurt
lived together. Kurt was ill and had a wound that wouldn't heal. Sebastian
saw him through that. Then they went to Greece when Kurt got well. You know
how Germans sometimes seem to discover a sense of decency when they get to a
classical country. It seems to have worked with Kurt. Sebastian says he
became quite human in Athens. Then he got sent to prison; I couldn't quite
make out why; apparently it wasn't particularly his fault-- some brawl with
an official. Once he was locked up the German authorities got at him. It was
the time when they were rounding up all their nationals from all parts of
the world to make them into Nazis. Kurt didn't at all want to leave Greece.
But the Greeks didn't want him, and he was marched straight from prison with
a lot of other toughs into a German boat and shipped home.
"Sebastian went after him, and for a year could find no trace. Then in
the end he ran him to earth dressed as a storm trooper in a provincial town.
At first he wouldn't have anything to do with Sebastian; spouted all the
official jargon about the rebirth of his country, and his belonging to his
country and finding t self-realization in the life of the race. But it was
only skin-deep with him. Six years of Sebastian had taught him more than a
year of Hitler; eventually he chucked it, admitted he hated Germany, and
wanted to get out. I don't know how much it was simply the call of the easy
life, sponging on Sebastian, bathing in the Mediterranean, sitting about in
caf&, having his shoes polished. Sebastian says it wasn't entirely that;
Kurt had just begun to grow up in Athens. It may be he's right. Anyway, he
decided to try and get out. But it didn't work. He always got into trouble
whatever he did, Sebastian said. They caught him and put him in a
concentration camp. Sebastian couldn't get near him or hear a word of him;
he couldn't even find what camp he was in; he hung about for nearly a year
in Germany, drinking again, until one day in his cups he took up with a man
who was just out of the camp where Kurt had been, and learned that he had
hanged himself in his hut the first week.
"So that was the end of Europe for Sebastian. He went back to Morocco,
where he had been happy, and gradually drifted down the coast, from place to
place, until one day when he had sobered up -- his drinking goes in pretty
regular bouts now--he conceived the idea of escaping to the savages. And
there he was.
"I didn't suggest his coming home. I knew he wouldn't, and he was too
weak still to argue it out. He seemed quite happy by the time I left. He'll
never be able to go into the bush, of course, or join the order, but the
Father Superior is going to take charge of him. They had the idea of making
him a sort of under-porter; there are usually a few odd hangers-on in a
religious house, you know; people who can't quite fit in either to the world
or the monastic rule. I suppose I'm something of the sort myself. But as I
don't happen to drink, I'm more employable."
We had reached the turn in our walk, the stone bridge at the foot of
the last and smallest lake, under which the swollen waters fell in a
cataract to the stream below; beyond the path doubled back towards the
house. We paused at the parapet looking down into the dark water.
"I once had a governess who jumped off this bridge and drowned
herself."
"Yes, I know."
"How could you know?"
"It was the first thing I ever heard about you---before I ever met
you."
"How very odd. . . ."
"Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?"
"The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you
know, as we do."
"Do" The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia's verb
"to love."
"Poor SebastianI" I said. "It's too pitiful. How will it end?"
"I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I've seen others like him,
and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He'll live on, half in,
half out of the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom
and his bunch of keys. He'll be a great favourite with the old fathers,
something of a joke I to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking;
he'll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they'll all nod
and smile and say in their various accents, 'Old Sebastian's on the spree
again,' and then he'll come back dishevelled and shamefaced and be more
devout for a day or two in the chapel. He'll probably have little hiding
places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and
then on the sly. They'll bring him forward to act as guide, whenever they
have an English-speaking visitor; and he will be completely charming, so
that before they go they'll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that
he has high connections at home. If he lives long enough, generations of
missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old
character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and
remember him in their masses. He'll develop little eccentricities of
devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he'll be found in the chapel at
odd times and missed when he's expected. Then one morning, after one of his
drinking bouts, he'll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere
flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last
sacraments. It's not such a bad way of getting through one's life."
I thought of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering
chestnuts. "It's not what one would have foretold," I said. "I suppose he
doesn't suffer?"
"Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering may
be, to be maimed as he is -- no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever
holy without suffering. It's taken that form with him. . . . I've seen so
much suffering in the last few years; there's so much coming for everybody
soon. It's the spring of love . . ." And then in condescension to my
paganism, she added: "He's in a very beautiful place, you know, by the sea
-- white cloisters, a bell tower, rows of green vegetables, and a monk
watering them when the sun is low."
I laughed. "You knew I wouldn't understand?"
"You and Julia . . ."she said. And then, as we moved on towards the
house, "When you met me last night did you think, 'Poor Cordelia, such an
engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works'?
Did you think 'thwarted'?"
It was no time for prevarication. "Yes," I said, "I did; I don't now,
so much."
"It's funny," she said, "that's exactly the word I thought of for you
and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with Nanny. Thwarted passion,' I
thought."
She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which
descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back
to me poignantly.
Julia wore the embroidered Chinese robe which she often used when we
were dining alone at Brideshead; it was a robe whose weight and stiff folds
stressed her repose; her neck rose exquisitely from the plain gold circle at
her throat; her hands lay still among the dragons in her lap. It was thus
that I had rejoiced to see her nights without number, and that night,
watching her as she sat between the firelight and the shaded lamp, unable to
look away for love of her beauty, I suddenly thought, When else have I seen
her like this? Why am I reminded of another moment of vision? And it came
back to me that this was how she had sat in the liner, before the storm;
this was how she had looked; and I realized that she had regained what I
thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to
her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some
other purpose than this?"
That night I woke in the darkness and lay awake turning over in my mind
the conversation with Cordelia. How I had said, "You knew I would not
understand?" How often, it seemed to me, I was brought up short, like a
horse in full stride suddenly refusing an obstacle, backing from the spurs,
too shy even to put his nose at it and look at the thing.
And another image came to me, of an arctic hut and a trapper alone with
his furs and oil lamp and log fire; the remains of supper on the table, a
few books, skis in the corner; everything dry and neat and warm inside, and
outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against
the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt
straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white
heap sealing the door, until quite soon, when the wind dropped and the sun
came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in, a block would move, slide
and tumble, high above, gather way, gadier weight, till the whole hillside
seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would crash open and
splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.
Chapter Five
my divorce case, or rather my wife's, was due to be heard at about the
same time as Brideshead was to be married. Julia's would not come up till
the following term; meanwhile the game of General Post--moving my property
from the Old Rectory to my flat, my wife's from my flat to the Old Rectory,
Julia's from Rex's house and from Brideshead to my flat, Rex's from Brides,
head to his house, and Mrs. Muspratt's from Falmouth to Brides, head -- was
in full swing and we were all, in varying degrees, homeless, when a halt was
called and Lord Marchmain, with a taste for the dramatically inopportune
which was plainly the prototype of his elder son's, declared his intention,
in view of the international situation, of returning to England and passing
his declining years in his old home.
The only member of the family to whom this change promised any benefit
was Cordelia, who had been sadly abandoned in the turmoil. Brideshead,
indeed, had made a formal request to her to consider his house her home for
as long as it suited her, but when she learned that her sister-in-law
proposed to install her children there for the holidays immediately after
the wedding, in the charge of a sister of hers and the sister's friend,
Cordelia had decided to move, too, and was talking of setting up alone in
London. She now found herself, Cinderella-like, promoted chatelaine, while
her brother and his wife, who had till that moment expected to find
themselves, within a matter of days, absolute owners of the entire property,
were without a roof; the deeds of conveyance, engrossed and ready for
signing, were rolled up, tied and put away in one of the black tin boxes in
Lincoln's Inn. It was bitter for Mrs. Muspratt; she was not an ambitious
woman; something very much less grand than Brideshead would have contented
her heartily; but she did aspire to finding some shelter for her children
over Christmas. The house at Falmouth was stripped and up for sale;
moreover, Mrs. Muspratt had taken leave of the place with some justifiably
rather large talk of her new establishment; they could not return there. She
was obliged in a hurry to move her furniture from Lady Marchmain's room to a
disused coachhouse and to take a furnished villa at Torquay. She was not, as
I have said, a woman of high ambition, but, having had her expectations so
much raised, it was disconcerting to be brought so low so suddenly. In the
village the working party who had been preparing the decorations for the
bridal entry began unpicking the B's on the bunting and substituting M's,
obliterating the Earl's points and stencilling balls and strawberry leaves
on the painted coronets, in preparation for Lord Marchmain's return.
News of his intentions came first to the solicitors, then to, Cordelia,
then to Julia and me, in a rapid succession of contradictory cables. Lord
Marchmain would arrive in time for the wedding; he would arrive after the
wedding, having seen Lord and Lady Brideshead on their way through Paris; he
would see them in Rome. He was not well enough to travel at all; he was just
starting; he had unhappy memories of winter at Brideshead and would not come
until spring was well advanced and the heating apparatus overhauled; he was
coming alone; he was bringing his Italian household; he wished his return to
be unannounced and to lead a life of complete seclusion; he would give a
ball. At last a date in January was chosen which proved to be the correct
one.
Plender preceded him by some days; there was a difficulty here. Plender
was not an original member of the Brideshead household; he had been Lord
Marchmain's servant in the yeomanry, and had only once met Wilcox, on the
painful occasion of the removal of his master's luggage when it was decided
not to return from the war; then Plender had been valet, as, officially, he
still was, but he had in the past years introduced a kind of curate, a Swiss
body-servant, to attend to the wardrobe and also, when occasion arose, lend
a hand with less dignified tasks about the house, and had in effect become
major-domo of that fluctuating and mobile household; sometimes he even
referred to himself on the telephone as the "secretary." There was an acre
of thin ice between him and Wilcox.
Fortunately the two men took a liking to one anodier, and the thing was
solved in a series of three-cornered discussions with Cordelia. Plender and
Wilcox became Joint Grooms of the Chambers, like Blues and Life Guards with
equal precedence, Plender having as his particular province his Lordship's
own apartments, and Wilcox a sphere of influence in the public rooms; the
senior footman was given a black coat and promoted butler, the nondescript
Swiss, on arrival, was to have full valet's status; there was a general
increase in wages to meet the new dignities, and all were content.
Julia and I, who had left Brideshead a month before, thinking we should
not return, moved back for the reception. When the day came, Cordelia went
to the station and we remained to greet him at home. It was a bleak and
gusty day. Cottages and lodges were decorated; plans for a bonfire that
night and for the village silver band to play on the terrace were put down,
but the house flag that had not flown for twenty-five years was hoisted over
the pediment, and flapped sharply against the leaden sky. Whatever harsh
voices might be bawling into the microphones of Central Europe, and whatever
lathes spinning in the armament factories, the return of Lord Marchmain was
a matter of first importance in his own neighbourhood.
He was due at three o'clock. Julia and I waited in the drawing-room
until Wilcox, who had arranged with the station-master to be kept informed,
announced "The train is signalled," and a minute later, "The train is in;
his Lordship is on the way." Then we went to the front portico and waited
there with the upper,' servants. Soon the Rolls appeared at the turn in the
drive, followed at some distance by the two vans. It drew up; first Cordelia
got out, then Cara; there was a pause, a rug was handed to theu chauffeur, a
stick to the footman; then a leg was cautiously thrust I forward. Plender
was by now at the car door; another servant -- the Swiss valet -- had
emerged from a van; together they lifted jj Lord Marchmain out and set him
on his feet; he felt for his stick grasped it, and stood for a minute
collecting his strength for the I few low steps which led to the front door.
Julia gave a little sigh of surprise and touched my hand. We had seen
him nine months ago at Monte Carlo, when he had j been an upright and
stately figure, little changed from when I first met him in Venice. Now he
was an old man. Plender had told us his master had been unwell lately; he
had not prepared us for j this.
Lord Marchmain stood bowed and shrunken, weighed down ... by his
great-coat, a white muffler fluttering untidily at his throat, a cloth cap
pulled low on his forehead, his face white and lined, his nose coloured by
the cold; the tears which gathered in his eyes came not from emotion but
from the east wind; he breathed heavily. Cara tucked in the end of his
muffler and whispered something to him. He raised a gloved hand -- a
schoolboy's glove of grey wool -- and made a small, weary gesture of
greeting to the group at the door; then, very slowly, with his eyes on thfl
ground before him, he made his way into the house.
They took off his coat and cap and muffler and the kind of leather
jerkin which he wore under them; thus stripped he seemed more than ever
wasted but more elegant; he had cast the shabbiness of extreme fatigue. Cara
straightened his tie; he wiped his eyes with a bandanna handkerchief and
shuffled with' his stick to the hall fire.
There was a little heraldic chair by the chimney-piece, one of a set
which stood against the walls, a little, inhospitable, flat-seated thing, a
mere excuse for the elaborate armorial painting on its back, on which,
perhaps, no one, not even a weary footman, had ever sat since it was made;
there Lord Marchmain sat and wiped his eyes.
"It's the cold," he said. "I'd forgotten how cold it is in England.
Quite bowled me over."
"Can I get you anything, my lord?"
"Nothing, thank you. Cara, where are those confounded pills?"
"Alex, the doctor said not more than three times a day."
"Damn the doctor. I feel quite bowled-over."
Cara produced a blue bottle from her bag and Lord Marchmain took a
pill. Whatever was in it seemed to revive him. He remained seated, his long
legs stuck out before him, his cane between them, his chin on its ivory
handle, but he began to take notice of us all, to greet us and to give
orders.
'Tm afraid I'm not at all the thing to-day; the journey's taken it out
of me. Ought to have waked a night at Dover. Wilcox, what rooms have you
prepared for me?"
"Your old ones, my lord."
"Won't do; not till I'm fit again. Too many stairs; must be on the
ground floor. Plender, get a bed made up for me downstairs."
Plender and Wilcox exchanged an anxious glance.
"Very good, my lord. Which room shall we put it in?"
Lord Marchmain thought' for a moment. "The Chinese drawing-room; and,
Wilcox, the 'Queen's bed.'"
"The Chinese drawing-room, my lord, the 'Queen's bed'?"
"Yes, yes. I may be spending some time there in the next few weeks."
The Chinese drawing-room was one I had never seen used; in fact one
could not normally go further into it than a small roped area round the
door, where sight-seers were corralled on the days the house was open to the
public; it was a splendid uninhabitable museum of Chippendale carving and
porcelain and lacquer and painted hangings; the "Queen's bed," too, was an
exhibition piece, a vast velvet tent like the Baldachino at St. Peter's. Had
Lord Marchmain planned this lying-in-state for himself, I wondered, before
he left the sunshine of Italy? Had he thought of it during the scudding rain
of his long, fretful journey? Had it come to him at that moment, an awakened
memory of childhood, a dream in the nursery -- "When I'm grown up I'll sleep
in the Queen's bed in the Chinese drawing-room" -- the apotheosis of adult
grandeur?
Few things, certainly, could have caused more stir in the house. What
had been foreseen as a day of formality became one of fierce exertion;
housemaids began making a fire, removing covers, unfolding linen; men in
aprons, never normally seen, shifted furniture; the estate carpenters were
collected to dismantle the bed. It came down the main staircase in pieces,
at intervals during the afternoon; huge sections of rococo, velvet-covered
cornice; the twisted gilt and velvet columns which formed its posts; beams
of unpolished wood, made not to be seen, which performed invisible,
structural functions below the draperies; plumes of dyed feathers, which
sprang from gold-mounted ostrich eggs and crowned the canopy; finally, the
mattresses with four toiling men to each. Lord Marchmain seemed to derive
comfort from the consequences of his whim; he sat by the fire watching the
bustle, while we stood in a half-circle--Cara, Cordelia," Julia and I -- and
talked to him.
Colour came back to his cheeks and light to his eyes. "Brides-head and
his wife dined with me in Rome," he said. "Since we are all members of the
family" -- and his eye moved ironically from Cara to me -- "I can speak
without reserve. I found her deplorable. Her former consort, I understand,
was a seafaring man and, presumably, the less exacting, but how my son, at
the ripe age of thirty-eight, with, unless things have changed very much, a
very free choice among the women of England, can have settled on--I suppose
I must call her so--Beryl . . ." He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.
Lord Marchmain showed no inclination to move, so presently we drew up
chairs -- the little heraldic chairs, for everything else in the hall was
ponderous--and sat round him.
"I daresay I shall not be really fit again until summer comes," he
said. "I look to you four to amuse me."
There seemed little we could do at the moment to lighten the rather
sombre mood; he, indeed, was the most cheerful of us. "Tell me," he said,
"the circumstances of Brideshead's courtship."
We told him what we knew.
"Match-boxes," he said. "Match-boxes. I think she's past
child-bearing."
Tea was brought us at the hall fireplace.
"In Italy," he said, "no one believes there will be a war. They think
it will all be 'arranged.' I suppose, Julia, you no longer have access to
political information? Cara, here, is fortunately a British subject by
marriage. It is not a thing she customarily mentions, but it may prove
valuable. She is legally Mrs. Hicks, are you not, my dear? We know little of
Hicks, but we shall be grateful to him, none the less, if it comes to war.
And you," he said, turning the attack to me, "you will no doubt become an
official artist?"
"No. As a matter of fact I am negotiating now for a commission in the
Special Reserve."
"Oh, but you should be an artist. I had one with my squadron during the
last war, for weeks -- until we went up to the line."
This waspishness was new. I had always been aware of a frame of
malevolence under his urbanity, now it protruded like his own sharp bones
through the sunken skin.
It was dark before the bed was finished; we went to see it, Lord
Marchmain stepping quite briskly now through the intervening rooms.
"I congratulate you. It really looks remarkably well. Wilcox, I seem to
remember a silver basin and ewer--they stood in a room we called 'the
Cardinal's dressing-room,' I think -- suppostt we had them here on the
console. Then if you will send Plender and Gaston to me, the luggage can
wait till to-morrow -- simply' the dressingose and what I need for the
night. Plender will know. If you will leave me with Plender and Gaston, I
will go td ' bed. We will meet later; you will dine here and keep me
amused."
We turned to go; as I was at the door he called me back.
"It looks very well, does it not?"
"Very well."
"You might paint it, eh --and call it "The Death Bed'?"
"Yes," said Cara, "he has come home to die."
"But when he first arrived he was talking so confidently of recovery."
"That was because he was so ill. When he is himself, he knows he is
dying and accepts it. His sickness is up and down; one day, sometimes for
several days on end, he is strong and lively and then he is ready for death,
then he is down and afraid. I do not | know how it will be when he is more
and more down. That must come in good time. The doctors in Rome gave him
less than a year. There is someone coining from London, I think to-morrow, j
who will tell us more."
"What is it?"
"His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word."
That evening Lord Marchmain was in good spirits; the room I had a
Hogarthian aspect, with the dinner-table set for the four of us by the
grotesque, chinoiserie chimney-piece, and the old j man propped among his
pillows, sipping champagne, tasting,' praising, and failing to eat the
succession of dishes which had been prepared for his homecoming. Wilcox had
brought out for the occasion the gold plate, which I had not before seen in
use; that and the gilt mirrors and the lacquer and the drapery of the great
bed and Julia's mandarin coat gave the scene an air of pantomime, of
Aladdin's cave.
Just at the end, when the time came for us to go, his spirits flagged.
"I shall not sleep," he said. "Who is going to sit with me? Cara,
carissima, you are fatigued. Cordelia, will you watch for an hour in this
Gethsemane?"
Next morning I asked her how the night had passed.
"He went to sleep almost at once. I came in to see him at two to make
up the fire; the lights were on, but he was asleep again. He must have woken
up and turned them on; he had to get out of bed to. do that. I think perhaps
he is afraid of the dark."
It was natural, with her hospital experience, that Cordelia should take
charge of her father. When the doctors came that day they gave their
instructions to her, instinctively.
"Until he gets worse," she said, "I and the valet can look after him.
We don't want nurses in the house before they are needed." At this stage the
doctors had nothing to recommend except to keep him comfortable and
administer certain drugs when his attacks came on. "How long will it be?"
"Lady Cordelia, there are men walking about in hearty old age whom
their doctors gave a week to live. I have learned one thing in medicine:
never prophesy."
These two men had made a long journey to tell her this; the local
doctor was there to accept the same advice in technical phrases.
That night Lord Marchmain reverted to the topic of his new
daughter-in-law; it had never been long out of his mind, finding expression
in various sly hints throughout the day; now he lay back in his pillows and
talked of her at length.
"I have never been much moved by family piety until now," he said, "but
I am frankly appalled at the prospect of-- of Beryl taking what was once my
mother's place in this house. Why
should that uncouth pair sit here childless while the place crumbles
about their ears? I will not disguise from you that I have take a dislike to
Beryl.
"Perhaps it was unfortunate that we met in Rome. Anywhere else might
have been more sympathetic. And yet, if one comes to consider it, where
could I have met her without repugnance? We dined at Ranieri's; it is a
quiet little restaurant I have fire quented for years -- no doubt you know
it. Beryl seemed to fill the place. I, of course, was host, though to hear
Beryl press my son with food, you might have thought otherwise. Brideshead
was always a greedy boy; a wife who has his best interests at heart should
seek to restrain him. However, that is a matter ol small importance.
"She had no doubt heard of me as a man of irregular life. I can only
describe her manner to me as roguish. A naughty old man, that's what she
thought I was. I suppose she had met naughty old admirals and knew how they
should be humoured; a stage-door chappie, a bit of a lad ... I could not
attempt to reproduce her conversation. I will give you one example.
"They had been to an audience at the Vatican that morning; a blessing
for their marriage -- I did not follow attentively ---something of the kind
had happened before I gathered, some previous husband, some previous Pope.
She described, rather vivaciously, how on this earlier occasion she had gone
with a whole body of newly married couples, mostly Italians of all ranks,
some of the simpler girls in their wedding dresses, and how each had
appraised the other, the bridegrooms looking the brides over, comparing
their own with one another's, and so fordi. Then she said, 'This time, of
course, we were in private, but do you know, Lord Marchmain, I felt as
though it was I who was leading in the bride.'
"It was said with great indelicacy. I have not yet quite fathomed her
meaning. Was she making a play on my son's name, or was she, do you think,
referring to his undoubted virginity? I fancy the latter. Anyway, it was
with pleasantries of that kind that we passed the evening.
"I don't think she would be quite in her proper element here, do you?
Who shall I leave k to? The entail ended with me, you know. Sebastian, alas,
is out of the question. Who wants it? Quis? Would you like it, Cara? No, of
course you would not. Cordelia? I think I shall leave it to Julia and
Charles."
"Of course not, Papa, it's Bridey's."
"And . . . Beryl's? I will have Gregson down one day soon and go over
the matter. It is time I brought my will up to date; it is full of anomalies
and anachronisms. ... I have rather a fancy for the idea of installing Julia
here; so beautiful this evening, my dear; so beautiful always; much, much
more suitable."
Shortly after this he sent to London for his solicitor, but, on the day
he came, Lord Marchmain was suffering from an attack and would not see him.
"Plenty of time," he said, between painful gasps for breath, "another day,
when I am stronger," but the choice of his heir was constantly in his mind,
and he referred often to the time when Julia and I should be married and in
possession.
"Do you think he really means to leave it to us?" I asked Julia.
"Yes, I think he does.'
"But it's monstrous for Bridey."
"Is it? I don't think he cares much for the place. I do, you know. He
and Beryl would be much more content in some little house somewhere."
"You mean to accept it?"
"Certainly. It's Papa's to leave as he likes. I think you and I would
be very happy here."
It opened a prospect; the prospect one gained at the turn of the
avenue, as I had first seen it with Sebastian, of the secluded valley, the
lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the
rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and
love and beauty; a soldier's dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect
perhaps as a hig pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in
desert and the jackal-haunted nights. Need I reproach myself if sometimes I
was rapt in the vision?
The weeks of illness wore on and the life of the house kept pace with
the faltering strength of the sick man. There days when Lord Marchmain was
dressed, when he stood at the window or moved on his valet's arm from fire
to fire through if the rooms of the ground floor, when visitors came and
went -- neighbours and people from the estate, men of business from London
-- parcels of new books were opened and discussed, a piano moved into the
Chinese drawing-room; once at the end of February, on a single, unexpected
day of brilliant sunshine, he called for a car and got as far as the hall,
had on his fur coat and reached the front door. Then suddenly he lost
interest in the drive, said, "Not now. Later. One day in the summer," took
his man's arm again and was led back to his chair. Once ho had the humour of
changing his room and gave detailed orders for a move to the Painted
Parlour; the chinoiserie, he said disturbed his rest -- he kept the lights
full on at night -- but again lost heart, countermanded everything, and kept
his room.
On other days the house was hushed as he sat high in bed,]' propped by
his pillows, with labouring breath; even then Wanted to have us round him;
night or day he could not bead to be alone; when he could not speak his eyes
followed us, and ii| anyone left the room he would look distressed, and
Cara, sitting I often for hours at a time by his side against the pillows
with atilj arm .in his, would say, "It's all right, Alex, she's coming
back."
Brideshead and his wife returned from their honeymoon and stayed a few
nights; it was one of the bad times, and Lord Marchmain refused to have them
near him. It was Beryl's first visit, and she would have been unnatural if
she had shown no" curiosity about what had nearly been, and now again
promised soon to be, her home. Beryl was natural enough, and surveyed the
place fairly thoroughly in the days she was there. In the strange disorder
caused by Lord Marchmain's illness, it must have seemed capable of much
improvement; she referred once or twice to the way in which establishments
of similar size had been managed at various Government Houses she had
visited. Brideshead took her visiting among the tenants by day, and in the
evenings she talked to me of painting, or to Cordelia of hospitals, or to
Julia of clothes, with cheerful assurance. The shadow of betrayal, the
knowledge of how precarious were their just expectations, was all one-sided.
I was not easy with them; but that was no new thing to Brideshead; in the
little circle of shyness in which he was used to move, my guilt passed
unseen.
Eventually it became clear that Lord Marchmain did not intend to see
more of them. Brideshead was admitted alone for a minute's leave-taking;
then they left.
"There's nothing we can do here," said Brideshead, "and it's very
distressing for Beryl. We'll come back if things get worse."
The bad spells became longer and more frequent; a nurse was engaged. "I
never saw such a room," she said, "nothing like it anywhere; no conveniences
of any sort." She tried to have her patient moved upstairs, where there was
running water, a dressing-room for herself, a "sensible" narrow bed she
could "get round" --what she was used to--but Lord Marchmain would not
budge. Soon, as days and nights became indistinguishable to him, a second
nurse was installed; the specialists came again from London; they
recommended a new and rather daring treatment, but his body seemed weary of
all drugs and did not respond. Presently there were no good spells, merely
brief fluctuations in the speed of his decline.
Brideshead was called. It was the Easter holidays and Beryl was busy
with her children. He came alone, and haying stood silently for some minutes
beside his father, who sat silently looking at him, he left the room and,
joining the rest of us who wertfj in the library, said, "Papa must see a
priest."
It was not the first time the topic had come up. In the early days,
when Lord Marchmain first arrived, the parish priest-since the chapel was
shut there was a new church and presbytery in Melstead -- had come to call
as a matter of politeness. Cor