ired by my sister Philippa. She gave Mrs. Abel ten menus,
and they have never been varied. When I am alone I do not notice what I eat,
but now that you are here, we must have a change. What would you like? What
is in season? Are you fond of lobsters? Hayter, tell Mrs. Abel to give us
lobsters to-morrow night."
Dinner that evening consisted of a white, tasteless soup, over-fried
fillets of sole with a pink sauce, lamb cutlets propped against a cone of
mashed potato, stewed pears in jelly standing on a kind of sponge cake.
"It is purely out of respect for your Aunt Philippa that I dine at this
length. She laid it down that a three-course dinner was middle-class. 'If
you once let the servants get their way,' she said, 'you will find yourself
dining nightly off a single chop.' There is nothing I should like more. In
fact, that is exactly what I do when I go to my club on Mrs. Abel's evening
out. But your aunt ordained that at home I must have soup and three courses;
some nights it is fish, meat and savoury, on others it is meat, sweet,
savoury -- there are a number of possible permutations.
"It is remarkable how some people are able to put their opinions in
lapidary form; your aunt had that gift.
"It is odd to think that she and I once dined together nightly -- just
as you and I do, my boy. Now she made unremitting efforts to take me out of
myself. She used to tell me about her reading. It was in her mind to make a
home with me, you know. She thought I should get into funny ways if I was
left on my own. Perhaps I have got into funny ways. Have I? But it didn't
do. I got her out in the end."
There was an unmistakable note of menace in his voice as he said this.
It was largely by reason of my Aunt Philippa that I now found myself so
much a stranger in my father's house. After my mother's death she came to
live with my father and me, no doubt, as he said, with the idea of making
her home with us. I knew nothing, then, of the nightly agonies at the dinner
table. My aunt made herself my companion, and I accepted her without
question. That was for a year. The first change was that she re-opened her
house in Surrey which she had meant to sell, and lived there during my
school terms, coming to London only for a few days' shopping and
entertainment. In the summer we went to lodgings together at the sea-side.
Then in my last year at school she left England. "/ got her out in the end"
he said with derision and triumph of that kindly lady, and he knew that I
heard in the words a challenge to myself.
As we left the dining-room my father said, "Hayter, have you said
anything yet to Mrs. Abel about the lobsters I ordered for to-morrow?"
"No, sir."
"Do not do so."
"Very good, sir."
And when we reached our chairs in the garden-room he said: "I wonder
whedier Hayter had any intention of mentioning lobsters. I rather think not.
Do you know, I believe he thought I was joking?"
Next day, by chance, a weapon came to hand. I met an old acquaintance
of school days, a x contemporary of mine named Jorkins. I never had much
liking for Jorkins. Once, in my Aunt Philippa's day, he had come to tea, and
she had condemned him as being probably charming at heart, but unattractive
at first sight. Now I greeted him with enthusiasm and asked him to dinner.
He came and showed little alteration. My father must have been warned by
Hayter that there was a guest, for instead of his velvet suit he wore a tail
coat; this, with a black waistcoat, very high collar, and very narrow white
tie, was his evening dress; he wore it with an air of melancholy as though
it were court mourning, which he had assumed in early youth and, finding the
style sympathetic, had retained. He never possessed a dinner jacket.
"Good evening, good evening. So nice of you to come all this way."
"Oh, it wasn't far," said Jorkins, who lived in Sussex Square.
"Science annihilates distance," said my father disconcertingly. "You
are over here on business?"
"Well, I'm in business, if that's what you mean."
"I had a cousin who was in business--you wouldn't know him; it was
before your time. I was telling Charles about him only the other night. He
has been much in my mind. He came," my father paused to give full weight to
the bizarre word -- "a cropper."
Jorkins giggled nervously. My father fixed him with a look of reproach.
"You find his misfortune the subject of mirth? Or perhaps the word I
used was unfamiliar; you no doubt would say that he 'folded up.'"
My father was master of the situation. He had made a little fantasy for
himself, tha Jorkins should be an American, and throughout the evening he
played a delicate, one-sided parlour-game with him, explaining any
peculiarly English terms that occurred in the conversation, translating
pounds into dollars, and courteously deferring to him with such phrases as
"Of course, by your standards . . ."; "All this must seem very parochial to
Mr. Jorkins"; "In the vast spaces to which you are accustomed . . ." so that
my guest was left with the vague sense that there was a misconception
somewhere as to his identity, which he never got the chance of explaining.
Again and again during dinner he sought my father's eye, thinking to read
there the simple statement that this form of address was an elaborate joke,
but met instead a look of such mild benignity that he was left baffled.
Once I thought my father had gone too far, when he said: "I am afraid
that, living in London, you must sadly miss your national game."
"My national game?" asked Jorkins, slow in the uptake, but scenting
that here, at last, was the opportunity for clearing the matter up.
My father glanced from him to me and his expression changed from
kindness to malice; then back to kindness again as he turned once more to
Jorkins. It was the look of a gambler who lays down fours against a full
house. "Your national game," he said gently, "cricket" and he snuffled
uncontrollably, shaking all over and wiping his eyes with his napkin.
"Surely, working in the City, you find your time on the cricket-field
greatly curtailed?"
At the door of the dining-room he left us. "Good night, Mr. Jorkins,"
he said. "I hope you will pay us another visit when you next 'cross the
herring pond.'"
"I say, what did your governor mean by that? He seemed almost to think
I was American."
"He's rather odd at times."
"I mean all that about advising me to visit Westminster Abbey. It
seemed rum."
"Yes. I can't quite explain."
"I almost thought he was pulling my leg," said Jorkins in puzzled
tones.
My father's counter-attack was delivered a few days later.
He sought me out and said, "Mr. Jorkins is still here?"
"No, Father, of course not. He only came to dinner."
"Oh, I hoped he was staying with us. Such a versatile young man. But
you will be dining in?"
"Yes."
"I am giving a little dinner party to diversify the'rather monotonous
series of your evenings at home. You think Mrs. Abel is up to it? No. But
our guests are not exacting. Sir Cuthbert and Lady Orme-Herrick are what
might be called the nucleus. I hope for a little music afterwards. I have
included in the invitations some young people for you."
My presentiments of my father's plan were surpassed by the actuality.
As the guests assembled in the room which my father, without
self-consciousness, called "the Gallery," it was plain to me that they had
been carefully chosen for my discomfort. The "young people" were Miss Gloria
Orme-Herrick, a student of the cello; her fiance, a bald young man from the
British Museum; and a monoglot Munich publisher. I saw my father snuffling
at me from behind a case of ceramics as he stood with them. That evening he
wore, like a chivalric badge of battle, a small red rose in his button-hole.
Dinner was long and chosen, like the guests, in a spirit of careful
mockery. It was not of Aunt Philippa's choosing, but had been reconstructed
from a much earlier period, long before he was of an age to dine downstairs.
The dishes were ornamental in appearance and regularly alternated in colour
between red and white. They and the wine were equally tasteless. After
dinner my father led the German publisher to the piano and then, while he
played, left the dining-room to show Sir Cuthbert Orme-Herrick the Etruscan
bull in the gallery.
It was a gruesome evening, and I was astonished to find, when at last
the party broke up, that it was only a few minutes after eleven. My father
helped himself to a glass of barley-water and said: "What very dull friends
I have! You know, without the spur of your presence I should never have
roused myself to invite them. I have been very negligent about entertaining
lately. Now that you are paying me such a long visit, I will have many such
evenings. You liked Miss Gloria Orme-Herrick?"
"No."
"No? Was it her little moustache you objected to or her very large
feet? Do you think she enjoyed herself?"
"No."
"That was my impression also. I doubt if any of our guests will count
this as one of their happiest evenings. That young foreigner played
atrociously, I thought. Where can I have met him? And Miss.Constantia
Smethwick -- where can I have met her? But the obligations of hospitality
must be observed. As long as you are here, you shall not be dull."
Strife was internecine during the next fortnight, but I suffered the
more, for my father had greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory
for manoeuvre, while I was pinned to my bridgehead between the uplands and
the sea. He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know
whether they were purely punitive -- whether he had really at the back of
his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as Aunt
Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and my cousin Melchior to Darwin, or
whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle, in
which indeed he shone.
I received one letter from Sebastian, a conspicuous object which was
brought to me in my father's presence one day when he was lunching at home;
I saw him look curiously at it and bore it away to read in solitude. It was
written on, and enveloped in, heavy late-Victorian mourning paper,
black-coroneted and black-bordered. I read it eagerly: --
brideshead castle
wiltshire
Dearest Charles,-
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to
you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The
doctors despaired of it from the start.
Soon I am off to Venice to stay with my papa in his palace of sin. I
wish you were coming. I wish you were here.
I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and
collecting luggage and going away again, but the white raspberries are ripe.
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to
meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
Love or what you will.
S.
I knew his letters of old; I had had them at Ravenna; I should not have
been disappointed; but that day as I tore the stiff sheet across and let it
fall into the basket, and gazed resentfully across the grimy gardens and
irregular backs of Bayswater, at the jumble of soil pipes and fire-escapes
and protuberant little conservatories, I saw, in my mind's eye, the pale
face of Anthony Blanche, peering through the straggling leaves as it had
peered through the candle flames at Thame, and heard, above the murmur of
traffic, his clear tones . . . "You mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he
seems a little insipid. . . . When I hear him talk I am reminded of that in
some ways nauseating picture of 'Bubbles.' . . . Boredom . . . like a cancer
in the breast. . . ."
For days after that I thought I hated Sebastian; then one Sunday
afternoon a telegram came from him, which dispelled that shadow, adding a
new and darker one of its own.
My father was out and returned to find me in a condition of feverish
anxiety. He stood in the hall with his Panama hat still on his head and
beamed at me.
"You'll never guess how I have spent the day; I have been to the Zoo.
It was most agreeable; the animals seem to enjoy the sunshine so much."
"Father, I've got to leave at once."
"Yes?"
"A great friend of mine -- he's had a terrible accident. I must go to
him at once. Hayter's packing for me, now. There's a train in half an hour."
I showed him the telegram, which read simply: GRAVELY INJURED. COME AT
ONCE. SEBASTIAN.
"Well," said my father. "I'm sorry you are upset. Reading this message
I should not say that the accident was as serious as you seem to think --
otherwise it would hardly be signed by the victim himself. Still, of course,
he may well be fully conscious but blind or paralysed with a broken back.
Why exactly is your presence so necessary? You have no medical knowledge.
You are not in holy orders. Do you hope for a legacy?"
"I told you, he is a great friend."
"Well, Orme-Herrick is a great friend of mine, but I should not go
tearing off to his deathbed on a warm Sunday afternoon. I should doubt
whether Lady Orme-Herrick would welcome me. However, I see you have no such
doubts. I shall miss you, my dear boy, but do not hurry back on my account."
Paddington Station on that August Sunday evening, with the sun
streaming through the obscure panes of its roof, the bookstalls shut, and
the few passengers strolling unhurried beside their porters, would have
soothed a mind less agitated than mine. The train was nearly empty. I had my
suitcase put in the corner of a third-class carriage and took a seat in the
dining-car. "First dinner after Reading, sir; about seven o'clock. Can I get
you anything now?" I ordered gin and vermouth; it was brought to me as we
pulled out of the station. The knives and forks set up their regular jingle;
the bright landscape rolled past the windows. But I had no mind for these
smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the
fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of
disaster: a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and
rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged stake, an elm bough falling
suddenly on a still morning, a car at a blind corner; all the catalogue of
threats to civilized life rose and haunted me; I even pictured a homicidal
maniac mouthing in the shadows swinging a length of lead pipe. The
cornfields and heavy woodland sped past, deep in the golden evening, and the
throb of the wheels repeated monotonously in my ears, "You've come too late.
You've come too late. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead."
I dined and changed trains to the local line, and in twilight came to
Melstead Carbury, which was my destination. "Brideshead, sir? Yes, Lady
Julia's in the yard." I recognized her at once; I could not have failed to.
She was sitting at the wheel of an open car.
"You're Mr. Ryder? Jump in." Her voice was Sebastian's and his her
w&y of speaking. "How is he?"
"Sebastian? Oh, he's fine. Have you had dinner? Well, I expect it was
beastly. There's some more at home. Sebastian and I are alone, so we thought
we'd wait for you." "What's happened to him?"
"Didn't he say? I expect he thought you wouldn't come if you knew. He's
cracked a bone in his ankle so small that it hasn't a name. But they X-rayed
it yesterday and told him to keep it up for'a month. It's a great bore to
him, putting out all his plans; he's been making the most enormous fuss. . .
. Everyone else has gone. He tried" to make me stay back with him. Well, I
expect you know how maddeningly pathetic he can be. I almost gave in, and
then I said: 'Surely there must be someone you can get hold of,' and he said
everybody was away or busy and, anyway, no one else would do. But at last he
agreed to try you, and I promised I'd stay if you failed him, so you can
imagine how popular you are with me. I must say it's noble of you to come
all this way at a moment's notice." But as she said it I heard, or thought I
heard, a tiny note of contempt in her voice that I should be so readily
available.
"How did he do it?"
"Believe it or not, playing croquet. He lost his temper and tripped
over a hoop. Not a very honourable scar."
She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the
gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and
strangeness. Thus, looking through strong lenses one may watch a man
approaching from afar, study every detail of his face and clothes, believe
one has only to put out a hand to touch him, marvel that he does not hear
one, and look up as one moves, and then seeing him with the naked eye
suddenly remember that one is to him a distant speck, doubtfully human. I
knew her and she did not know me. Her dark hair .was scarcely longer than
Sebastian's, and it blew back from her forehead as his did; her eyes on the
darkling road were his, but larger, her painted mouth was less friendly to
the world. She wore a bangle of charms on her wrist and in her ears little
gold rings. Her light coat revealed an inch or two of flowered silk; skirts
were short in those days, and her legs, stretched forward to the controls of
the car, were spindly, as was also the fashion. Because her sex was the
palpable difference between the familiar and the strange, it seemed to fill
the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female as I had
felt of no woman before.
"I'm terrified of driving at this time of the eve'ning," she said.
"There doesn't seem anyone left at home who can drive a car. Sebastian and I
are practically camping out here. I hope you haven't come expecting a
pompous party." She leaned forward to the locker for a box of cigarettes.
"No thanks."
"Light one for me, will you?"
It was the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and
as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin
bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.
"Thanks. You've been here before. Nanny reported it. We both thought it
very odd of you not to stay to tea with me."
"That was Sebastian."
"You seem to let him boss you about a good deal. You shouldn't. It's
very bad for him."
We had turned the corner of the drive now; the colour had died in the
woods and sky and the house seemed painted in grisaille, save for the
central golden square at the open, doors. A man was waiting to take my
luggage.
"Here we are."
She led me up the steps and into the hall, flung her coat on a marble
table, and stooped to fondle a dog which came to greet her. "I wouldn't put
it past Sebastian to have started dinner."
At that moment he appeared between the pillars at the further end,
propelling himself in a wheel-chair. He was in pyjamas and dressing-gown
with one foot heavily bandaged.
"Well, darling, I've collected your chum," she said, again with a
barely perceptible note of contempt.
"I thought you were dying," I said, conscious then, as I had been ever
since I arrived, of the predominating emotion of vexation, rather than of
relief, that I had been bilked of my expectations of a grand tragedy.
"I thought I was, too. The pain was excruciating. Julia, do you think
if you asked him, Wilcox would give us champagne to-night?"
"I hate champagne and Mr. Ryder has had dinner."
"Mister Ryder? Mister Ryder? Charles drinks champagne at all hours. Do
you know, seeing this great swaddled foot of mine, I can't get it out of my
mind that I have gout, and that gives me a craving for champagne?"
We dined in a room they called "the Painted Parlour." It was a spacious
octagon, later in design than the rest of the house; its walls were adorned
with wreathed medallions, and across its dome prim Pompeian figures stood in
pastoral groups. They and the satin-wood and ormolu furniture, the carpet,
the hanging bronze candelabrum, the mirrors and sconces, were all a single
composition, the design of one illustrious hand. "We usually eat here when
we're alone," said Sebastian, "it's so cosy."
While they dined I ate a peach and told them of the war with my father.
"He sounds a perfect poppet," said Julia. "And now I'm going to leave
you boys."
"Where are you off to?"
"The nursery. I promised Nanny a last game of halma." She kissed the
top of Sebastian's head. I opened the door for her. "Good night, Mr. Ryder,
and good-bye. I don't suppose we'll meet to-morrow. I'm leaving early. I
can't tell you how grateful I am to you for relieving me at the sick-bed."
"My sister's very pompous to-night," said Sebastian, when she was gone.
"I don't think she cares for me," I said.
"I don't think she cares for anyone much. I love her. She's so like
me."
"Do you? Is she?"
"In looks I mean and the way she talks. I wouldn't love anyone with a
character like mine."
When we had drunk our port I walked beside Sebastian's chair through
the pillared hall to the library, where we sat that night and nearly every
night of the ensuing month. It lay on the side of the house that overlooked
the lakes; the windows were open to the stars and the scented air, to the
indigo and silver, moonlit landscape of the valley and the sound of water
falling in the fountain.
"We'll have a heavenly time alone," said Sebastian, and when next
morning, while I was shaving, I saw from my bathroom window Julia, with
luggage at her back, drive from the forecourt and disappear at the hill's
crest, without a backward glance, I felt a sense of liberation and peace
such as I was to know years-later when, after a night of unrest, the sirens
sounded the All Clear.
Chapter Four
the languor of Youth -- how unique and quintessential it is! How
quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the
illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth -- all save
this -- come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we
experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left
behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its
concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us
in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. These things
are a part of life itself; but languor -- the relaxation of yet unwearie^l
sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in
the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse -- that belongs to
Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes
enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps
the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly
experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those
languid days at Brideshead.
"Why is this house called a 'Castle'?"
"It used to be one until they moved it."
"What can you mean?"
"Just that. We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then in
Inigo Jones's time we took a fancy to the valley and pulled the castle down,
carted the stones up here and built a new house. I'm glad they did, aren't
you?"
"If it was mine I'd never live anywhere else."
"But you see, Charles, it isn't mine. Just at the moment it is, but
usually it's full of ravening beasts. If it could only be like this always
-- always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good
temper. . . ."
It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we
wandered alone together through that enchanted j palace; Sebastian in his
wheel-chair spinning down die box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in
search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the
succession; of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut
the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our buttonholes; Sebas- | tian
hobbling, with a pantomime of difficulty, to the old nurseries, sitting
beside me on the thread-bare, flowered carpet with the toy-cupboard empty
about us and Nanny Hawkins stitching com- I placehtly in the corner, saying,
"You're one as bad as the other; a pair of children the two of you. Is that
what they teach you at college?" Sebastian prone on the sunny seat in the
colonnade, 1 as he was now, and I in a hard chair beside him, trying to draw
the fountain.
"Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later."
"Oh, Charles, don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was
built, if it's pretty?"
"It's the sort of thing I like to know."
"Oh dear, I thought I'd cured you of all that--the terrible Mr.
Collins."
It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander
from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing-room,
adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and
Chippendale fret-work, from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung
hall which stood unchanged, as it had been designed two hundred and fifty
years before; to sit, hour after hour, in the pillared shade looking out on
the terrace.
This terrace was the final consummation of the house's plan; it stood
on massive stone ramparts above the lakes, so that from the hall steps it
seemed to overhang them, as though, standing by the balustrade, one could
have dropped a pebble into the first of them immediately below one's feet.
It was embraced by the two arms of the colonnade; beyond the pavilions
groves of lime led to the wooded hillsides. Part of the terrace was paved,
part planted with flower-beds and arabesques of dwarf box; taller box grew
in a dense hedge, making a wide oval, cut into niches and interspersed with
statuary, and, in the centre, dominating the whole spendid space, rose the
fountain; such a fountain as one might expect to find in a piazza of
Southern Italy, such a fountain as was, indeed, found there a century ago by
one of Sebastian's ancestors; found, purchased, imported and re-erected in
an alien but welcoming climate.
Sebastian set me to draw it. It was an ambitious subject for an amateur
-- an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks
grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation and wild English fern in its
natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs,
and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards
and an ebullient lion all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the
pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone -- but, by some odd
chance, for the thing was far beyond me, I brought it off and by judicious
omissions and some stylish tricks, produced a very passable echo of
Piranesi. "Shall I give it to your mother?" I asked.
"Why ? You don't know her."
"It seems polite. I'm staying in her house."
"Give it to Nanny," said Sebastian.
I did so, and she put it among the collection on the top of her chest
of drawers, remarking that it had quite a look of the thing, which she had
often heard admired but could never see
the beauty of, herself.
I was myself in almost the same position as Nanny Hawkins.
Since the days when, as a school-boy, I used to bicycle round the
neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I have
nursed a love of architecture, but though in opinion I had made that easy
leap, characteristic of my generation; from the puritanism of Ruskin to the
puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and mediaeval.
This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and
insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed j through
those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour
by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering
echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt
a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that
spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.
One day in a cupboard we found a large japanned-tin box of oil paints
still in workable condition.
"Mummy bought them a year or two ago. Someone told her that you could
only appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it. We laughed at
her a great deal about it. She couldn't draw at all, and however .bright the
colours were in the tubes, by the time Mummy had mixed them up, they came
out a kind of khaki." Various dry, muddy smears on the palette confirmed
this statement. "Cordelia was always made to wash the brushes. In the end we
all protested and made Mummy stop."
The paints gave us the idea of decorating the office; this was a small
room opening on the colonnade; it had once been used for estate business,
but was now derelict, holding only some garden games and a tub of dead
aloes; it had plainly been designed for a softer use; perhaps as a tea-room
or study, for the plaster walls were decorated with delicate rococo panels
and the roof was prettily groined. Here, in one of the smaller oval frames,
I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out
in colour, and by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of
it. The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it. It .was a
landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances,
with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and a waterfall affording a
rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind. I knew little of oil
painting and learned its ways as I worked. When, in a week, it was finished,
Sebastian was eager for me to start on one of the larger panels. I made some
sketches. He called for a f te champ tre with a ribboned swing and a Negro
page and a shepherd playing the pipes, but the thing languished. I knew it
was good chance that had made my landscape, and that this elaborate pastiche
was too much for me.
One day we went down to the cellars with Wilcox and saw the empty bays
which had once held a vast store of wine; one transept only was used now;
there the bins were well stocked, some of them with vintages fifty years
old.
"There's been nothing added since his Lordship went abroad," said
Wilcox. "A lot of the old wine wants drinking up. We ought to have laid down
the eightcens and twenties. I've had several letters about it from the wine
merchants, but her Ladyship says to ask Lord Brideshead, and he says to ask
his Lordship, and his Lordship says to ask the lawyers. That's how we get
low. There's enough here for ten years at the rate it's going, but how shall
we be then?"
Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin,
and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a
serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which
was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the
Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses
before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine-tasting, and we
followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a
candle, filled a third of it, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our
hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with
it and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a
counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we
talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another
wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in
circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over
which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there
were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled
from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean
glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and
more exotic.
"... It is a little, shy wine like a gazelle."
"Like a leprechaun."
"Dappled, in a tapestry meadow."
"Like a flute by still water."
"... And this is a wise old wine."
"A prophet in a cave."
"... And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck."
"Like a swan."
"Like the last unicorn."
And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the
starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in
the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.
"Ought we to be drunk every night?" Sebastian asked one morning.
"Yes, I think so."
"I think so too."
We saw few strangers. There was the agent, a lean and pouchy colonel,
who crossed our path occasionally and once came to tea. Usually we managed
to hide from him. On Sundays a monk was fetched from a neighbouring
monastery to say mass and breakfast with us. He was the first priest I ever
met; I noticed how unlike he was to a parson, but Brideshead was a place of
such enchantment to me that I expected everything and everyone to be unique;
Father Phipps was in fact a bland, bun-faced man with an interest in county
cricket which he obstinately believed us to share.
"You know, Father, Charles and I simply don't tyiow about cricket."
"I wish I'd seen Tennyson make that fifty-eight last Thursday. That
must have been an innings. The account in The Times was excellent. Did you
see him against the South Africans?"
"I've never seen him."
"Neither have I. I haven't seen a first-class match for years -- not
since Father Graves took me when we were passing through Leeds, after we'd
been to the induction of the Abbot at Ample-forth. Father Graves managed to
look up a train which gave us three hours to wait on the afternoon of the
match against Lancashire. That was an afternoon. I remember every ball of
it. Since then I've had to go by the papers. You seldom go to sec'cricket?"
"Never," I said, and he looked at me with the expression I have seen
since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose themselves
to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied
solace.
Sebastian always heard his mass, which was ill-attended. Brideshead was
not an old-established centre of Catholicism. Lady Marchmain had introduced
a few Catholic servants, but the majority of them, and all the cottagers,
prayed, if anywhere, among the Flyte tombs in the little grey church at the
gates.
Sebastian's faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I
felt particularly concerned to solve. I had no religion. I was taken to
church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as
though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was
excused church in the holidays. The view implicit in my education was that
the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and
that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of
present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion
was a hobby which some people professed and others; did not; at the best it
was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of "complexes" and
"inhibitions" -- catchwords I of the decade -- and of the intolerance,
hypocrisy, and sheer j| stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one had
ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent
philosophic system and intransigeant historical claims; nor, had they done
so, would I have been much interested.
Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance ' word in
his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, ' but I took it as
a foible, like his Teddy-bear. We never discussed the matter until on the
second Sunday at Brideshead, when Father Phipps had left us and we sat in
the colonnade with the papers, he surprised me by saying: "Oh dear, it's
very difficult being a Catholic."
"Does it make much difference to you?"
"Of course. All the time."
"Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against
temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me."
"I'm very, very much wickeder," said Sebastian indignantly.
"Well then?"
"Who was it used to pray, 'Oh God, make me good, but not yet'?"'
"I don't know. You, I should think."
"Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn't that." He turned back to the
pages of the News of -the World and said, "Another naughty scout-master."
"I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?"
"Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible
to me."
"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."
"Can't I?"
"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and
the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."
"And in prayers? You think you can kneel down in front of a statue and
say a few words, not even out loud, just in your mind, and change the
weather; or that some saints are more influential than others, and you must
get hold of the right one to help you on the right problem?"
"Oh yes. Don't you remember last term when I took Aloysius and left him
behind I didn't know where? I prayed like mad to St. Anthony of Padua that
morning, and immediately after lunch there was Mr. Nichols at Canterbury
Gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I'd left him in his cab."
"Well," I said, "if you can believe all that and you don't want to be
good, where's the difficulty about your religion?"
"If you can't see, you can't."
"Well, where?"
"Oh, don't be a bore, Charles. I want to read about a woman in Hull
who's been using an instrument."
"You started the subject. I was just getting interested."
"I'll never mention it again . . . Thirty-eight other cases were taken
into consideration in sentencing her to six months -- golly!"
But he did mention it again, some ten days later, as we were lying on
the roof of the house, sunbathing and watching through a telescope the
Agricultural Show which was in progress in the park below us. It was a
modest two-day show serving the neighbouring parishes, and surviving more as
a fair and social gathering than as a centre of serious competition. A ring
was marked out in flags, and round it had been pitched half a dozen tents o
varying size; there was a judges' box, and some pens for livestock; the
largest marquee was for refreshments, and there the
farmers congregated in numbers. Preparations had been going on for a
week. "We shall have to hide," said Sebastian as the day approached. "My
brother will be here. He's in his element 4 at the Agricultural
Show." So we lay on the roof under the balustrade.
Brideshead came down by train in the morning and lunched with Colonel
Fender, the agent. I met him for five minutes on his arrival. Anthony
Blanche's description was peculiarly apt; he had the Flyte face, carved by
an Aztec. We could see him now, through the telescope,