Kurt
would like it?"
"For God's sake," I said, "you don't mean to spend your life with Kurt,
do you?"
"I don't know. He seems to mean to spend it with me. 'It'th all right
for him, I reckon, maybe,'" he said, mimicking Kurt's accent, and then he
added what, if I had paid more attention, should have given me the key I
lacked; at the time I heard and remembered it, without taking notice.
"You know, Charles," he said, "it's rather a pleasant change when all
your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after
yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need
looking after by me."
I was able to straighten his money affairs before I left. He had lived
till then by getting into difficulties and then telegraphing for odd sums to
his lawyers. I saw the branch manager of the Bank of Indo-China and arranged
for him, if funds were forthcoming from London, to receive Sebastian's
quarterly allowance and pay him a weekly sum of pocket money with a reserve
to be drawn in emergencies. This sum was only to be given to Sebastian
personally, and only when the manager was satisfied that he had a proper use
for it. Sebastian agreed readily to all this.
"Otherwise," he said, "Kurt will get me to sign a cheque for the whole
lot when I'm tight and then he'll go off and get into all kinds of trouble."
I saw Sebastian home from the hospital. He seemed weaker in his basket
chair than he had been in bed. The two sick men, he and Kurt, sat opposite
one another with the gramophone between them.
"It was time you came back," said Kurt. "I need you."
"Do you, Kurt?"
"I reckon so. It's not so good being alone when you're sick. That boy's
a lazy fellow -- always slipping off when I want him. Once he stayed out all
night and there was no one to make my coffee when I woke up. It's no good
having a foot full of pus. Times I can't sleep good. Maybe another time I
shall slip off, too, and go where I can be looked after." He clapped his
hands but no servant came. "You see?" he said.
"What d'you want?"
"Cigarettes. I got some in the bag under my bed."
Sebastian began painfully to rise from his chair.
"I'll get them," I said. "Where's his bed?"
"No, that's my job," said Sebastian.
"Yeth," said Kurt, "I reckon that's Sebastian's job."
So I left him with his friend in the little enclosed house at the end
of the alley. There was nothing more I could do for Sebastian.
I had meant to return direct to Paris, but this business of Sebastian's
allowance meant that I must go to London and see Brideshead. I travelled by
sea, taking the P. & O. from Tangier, and was home in early June.
"Do you consider," asked Brideshead, ''that there is anything vicious
in my brother's connection with this German?"
"No. I'm sure not. It's simply a case of two waifs coming together."
"You say he'is a criminal?"
"I said 'a criminal type.' He's been in the military prison and was
dishonourably discharged."
"And the doctor says Sebastian is killing himself with drink?"
"Weakening himself. He hasn't D.T.'s or cirrhosis."
"He's not insane?"
"Certainly hot. He's found a companion he happens to like and a place
where he happens to like living."
"Then he must have his allowance as you suggest. The thing is quite
clear."
In some ways Brideshead was an easy man to deal with. He had a kind of
mad certainty about everything which made his decisions swift and easy.
"Would you like to paint this house?" he asked suddenly. "A picture of
the front, another of the back on the park, another of the staircase,
another of the big drawing-room? Four small oils; that is what my father
wants done for a record, to keep at Brideshead. I don't know any painters.
Julia said you specialized in architecture."
"Yes," I said. "I should like to very much."
"You know it's being pulled down? My father's selling it. They are
going to put up a block of flats here. They're keeping the name -- we can't
stop them apparently."
"What a very sad thing."
"Well, I'm sorry of course. But you think it good architecturally?"
"One of the most beautiful houses I know."
"Can't see it. I've always thought it rather ugly. Perhaps your
pictures will make me see it differently."
This was my first commission; I had to work against time, for the
contractors were only waiting for the final signature to start their work of
destruction. In spite, or perhaps because, of that -- for it is my vice to
spend too long on a canvas, never content to leave well alone -- those four
paintings are particular favourites of mine, and it was their success, both
with myself and others, that confirmed me in what has since been my career.
I began in the long drawing-room, for they were anxious to shift the
furniture, which had stood there since it was built. It was a long,
elaborate, symmetrical Adam room, with two bays, of windows opening into
Green Park. The light, streaming in from the west on the afternoon when I
began to paint there, was fresh green from the young trees outside.
I had the perspective set out in pencil and the detail carefully
placed. I held back from painting, like a diver on the water's edge; once in
I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberate
painter; that afternoon and all next day, and the day after, I worked fast.
I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid
to start , the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the
pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There
were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became
a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the palette; each brush
stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.
Presently on the last afternoon I heard a voice behind me say; "May I
stay here and watch?"
I turned and found Cordelia.
"Yes," I said, "if you don't talk," and I worked on, oblivious of her,
until the failing sun made me. put up my brushes.
"It must be lovely to be able to do that."
I had forgotten she was there.
"It is."
I could not even now leave my picture, although the sun was down and
the room fading to monochrome. I took it from the easel and held it up to
the windows, put it back and lightened a shadow. Then, suddenly weary in
head and eyes and back and arm, I gave it up for the evening and turned to
Cordelia.
She was now fifteen and had grown tall, nearly to her full height, in
the last eighteen months. She had not the promise of Julia's full
Quattrocento loveliness; there was a touch of Brideshead already in her
length of nose and high cheekbone; she was in black, mourning for her
mother.
"I'm tired," I said.
"I bet you are. Is it finished?"
"Practically. I must go over it again to-morrow."
"D'you know it's long past dinner-time? There's no one here to cook
anything now. I only came up to-day, and didn't realize how far the decay
had gone. You wouldn't like to take me out to dinner, would you?"
We left by the garden door, into the park, and walked in the twilight
to the Ritz Grill.
"You've seen Sebastian? He won't come home, even now?"
I did not realize till then that she had understood so much. I said so.
"Well, I love him more than anyone," she said. "It's sad about
Marchers, isn't it? Do you know they're going tp build a block of flats, and
that Rex wanted to take what he called a 'penthouse' at the top. Isn't it
like him? Poor Julia. That was too much for her. He couldn't understand at
all; he thought she would like to keep up with her old home. Things have all
come to an end very quickly, haven't they? Apparently Papa has been terribly
in debt for a long time. Selling Marchers has put him straight again and
saved I don't know how much a year in rates. But it seems a shame to pull it
down. Julia says she'd sooner that than to have someone else live there."
"What's going to happen to you?"
"What, indeed? There are all kinds of suggestions. Aunt Fanny
Rosscommon wants me to live with her. Then Rex and Julia talk o taking over
half Brideshe'ad and living there. Papa won't come back. We thought he
might, but no.
"They've closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop;
Mummy's requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the
priest came in -- I was there alone. I don't think he saw me--and took out
the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with
the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water
stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open
and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose
none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there
till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any
more, just an oddly decorated room. I can't tell you what it felt like.
You've never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?"
"Never."
"Well, if you had you'd know what the Jews felt about their temple.
Quomodo sedet sola civitas . . . it's a beautiful chant. You ought to go
once, just to hear it."
"Still trying to convert me, Cordelia?"
"Oh, no. That's all over, too. D'you know what Papa said when he became
a Catholic? Mummy told me once. He said to her: 'You have brought back my
family to the faith of their ancestors.' Pompous, you know. It takes people
different ways. Anyhow, the family haven't been very constant, have they?
There's him gone and Sebastian gone and Julia gone. But God won't let them
go for long, you know. I wondtx if you remember the story Mummy read us the
evening Sebastian first got drunk -- I mean the bad evening. Father Brown
said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an
invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the
world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'"
We scarcely mentioned her mother. All the time we talked, she ate
voraciously. Once she said: --
"Did you see Sir Adrian Person's poem in The Times? It's funny, he knew
her best of anyone--he loved her all his life, you know -- and yet it
doesn't seem to have anything to do with her at all.
"I got on best with her of any of us, but I don't believe I ever really
loved her. Not as she wanted or deserved. It's odd I didn't, because I'm
full of natural affections."
"I never really knew your mother," I said.
"You didn't like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God
they hated Mummy."
"What do you mean by that, Cordelia?"
"Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could
really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When
they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like
themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's
all bosh."
"I heard almost the same thing once before--from someone very
different."
"Oh, I'm quite serious. I've thought about it a lot. It seems to
explain poor Mummy."
Then this odd child tucked into her dinner with renewed relish.
"First time I've ever been taken our. to dinner alone at a restaurant,"
she said.
Later: "When Julia heard they were selling Marchers she said: 'Poor
Cordelia. She won't have her coming-out ball there after all.' It's a thing
we used to talk about--like my being her bridesmaid. That didn't come off
either. When Julia had her ball I was allowed down for an hour, to sit in
the corner with Aunt Fanny, and she said, 'In six years' time you'll have
all this.' ... I hope I've got a vocation."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good
however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away
from it, however much you hate it. Bridey thinks he has a vocation and
hasn't. I used to think Sebastian had and hated it--but I don't know now.
Everything has changed so much suddenly."
But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush
take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great,
succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening--of
Browning's Renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa
velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars
with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed
hair-splitting speech.
"You'll fall in love," I said.
"Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those
scrumptious meringues?"
BOOK II A TWITCH UPON THE THREAD
Chapter One
my theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey
morning of war-time.
These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly
except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they
were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced
congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of
their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking
a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed
and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare
and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that
morning.
These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a
lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art,
are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for
centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging,
eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and
nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all
manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end
in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards
won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of
survival starts again.
The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from
them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a
hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves -- the
sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and
the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image,
indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out
of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind
unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, j| breathe freely and take
our bearings, or to push ahead, out-' distance our shadows, lead them a
dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one
another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share.
For nearly ten years I was thus borne along a road outwardly full of
change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my
painting -- and that at longer and longer intervals-- did I come alive as I
had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be
youth, not life, that I was losing. My work upheld me, for I had chosen to
do what I could do well, did better daily, and liked doing; incidentally it
was something which no one else at that time was attempting to do. I became
an architectural painter. I have always loved building, holding it to be not
only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of
consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected,
without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much
less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and
short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the-long, fruitful life of
their homes.
More even than the work of the great architects, 1 loved buildings that
grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each
generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's
vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such
buildings England abounded, and in the last decade of their grandeur,
Englishmen seemed for the first time to become conscious of what before was
taken for granted, and to salute their achievements at the moment of
extinction. Hence my prosperity, far beyond my merits; my work had nothing
to recommend it except my growing technical skill, enthusiasm for my subject
and independence of popular notions. The financial slump of the period,
which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success,
which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes
were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I
was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were
soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a
few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom.
I published three splendid folios--Ryder's Country Seats, Ryder's
English Homes, and Ryder's Village and Provincial Architecture, which each
sold its thousand copies at five guineas apiece. I seldom failed to please,
for there was no conflict between myself and my patrons; we both wanted the
same thing. But as the years passed I began to mourn the loss of something I
had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since,
the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by
hand--in a word, the inspiration.
In quest of this fading light I went abroad, in the Augustan manner,
laden with the apparatus of my trade, for two years' refreshment among alien
styles. I did not go to Europe; her treasures were safe, too safe, swaddled
in expert care, obscured by reverence. Europe could wait. There would be a
time for Europe, I thought; all too soon the days would come when I should
need a man at my side to put up my easel and carry my paints; when I could
not venture more than an hour's journey from a good hotel; when I should
need soft breezes and mellow sunshine all day long; then I would take my old
eyes to Germany and Italy. Now while I had the strength I would go to the
wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back
to its old strongholds.
Accordingly, by slow but not easy stages, I travelled through Mexico
and Central America in a world which had all I needed, and the change from
parkland and hall should have quickened me and set me right with myself. I
sought inspiration among gutted palaces and cloisters embowered in weed,
derelict churches where the vampire-bats hung in the dome like dry seed-pods
and only the ants were ceaselessly astir tunnelling in the rich stalls;
cities where no road led, and mausoleums where a single, agued family of
Indians sheltered from the rains. There in great labour, sickness and
occasionally in some danger, I made the first drawings for Ryder's Latin
America. Every few weeks I came to rest, finding myself once more in the
zone of trade or tourism, recuperated, set up my studio, transcribed my
sketches, anxiously packed the completed canvasses, despatched them to my
New York agent, and then set out again, with my small retinue, into the
wastes.
I was at no great pains to keep touch with England. I followed local
advice for my itinerary and had no settled route, so that much of my mail
never reached me, and the rest accumulated until there was more than could
be read at a sitting. I used to stuff a bundle of letters into my bag and
read them when I felt inclined, which was in circumstances so incongruous --
swinging in my hammock under the net by the light of a storm lantern;
drifting down-river, sprawled amidships in the canoe, with the boys astern
of me lazily keeping our nose out of the bank, with the dark water keeping
pace with us, in the green shade, with the great trees towering above us and
the monkeys screeching in the sunlight, high overhead among the flowers on
the roof of the forest; on the verandah of a hospitable ranch, where the ice
and the dice clicked, and a tiger cat played with its chain on the mown
grass -- that they seemed voices so distant as to be meaningless; their
matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like the
facts about themselves which fellow travellers distribute so freely in
American railway trains.
But despite this isolation and this long sojourn in a strange world, I
remained unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending to be whole. I
discarded the experiences of those two years with my tropical kit and
returned to New York as I had set out. I had a fine haul -- eleven paintings
and fifty odd drawings-- and when eventually I exhibited them in London, the
art critics, many of whom hitherto had been patronizing in tone as my
success invited, acclaimed a new and richer note in my work.
Mr. Ryder [the most respected of them wrote] rises like a fresh young
trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture and discloses a powerful
facet in the vista of his potentialities ... By focusing the frankly
traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of
barbarism, Mr. Ryder has at last found himself.
Grateful words, but, alas, not true by a long chalk. My wife, who
crossed to New York to meet me, and saw the fruits of our separation
displayed in my agent's office, summed the thing up better by saying: "Of
course, I can see they're perfectly brilliant and really rather beautiful in
a sinister way, but somehow I don't feel they are quite you"
In Europe my wife was sometimes taken for an American because of her
dapper and jaunty way of dressing, and the curiously hygienic quality of her
prettiness; in America she assumed an English softness and reticence. She
arrived a day or two before me, and was on the pier when my ship docked.
"It has been a long time," she said fondly when we met.
She had not joined the expedition; she explained to our friends that
the country was unsuitable and she had her son at home. There was also a
daughter now, she remarked, and it came back to me that there had been talk
of this before I started, as an additional reason for her staying behind.
There had been some mention of it, too, in her letters.
"I don't believe you read my letters," she said that night at last,
late, after a dinner party and some hours at a cabaret, we found ourselves
alone in our hotel bedroom.
"Some went astray. I remember distinctly your telling me that the
daffodils in the orchard were a dream, that the nurserymaid was a jewel,
that the Regency four-poster was a find, but frankly I do not remember
hearing that your new baby was called Caroline. Why did you call it that?"
"After Charles, of course."
"Ah!"
"I made Bertha Van Halt godmother. I thought she was safe for a good
present. What do you think she gave?"
"Bertha Van Halt is a well-known trap. What?"
"A fifteen-shilling book token. Now that Johnjohn has a companion -- "
"Who?"
"Your son, darling. You haven't forgotten him, too?"
"For Christ's sake," I said, "why do you call him that?"
"It's the name he invented for himself. Don't you think it sweet? Now
that Johnjohn has a companion I think we'd better not have any more for some
time, don't you?"
"Just as you please."
"Johnjohn talks of you such a lot. He prays every night for your safe
return."
She talked in this way while she undressed, with an effort to appear at
ease; then she sat at the dressing table, ran a comb through her hair, and
with her bare back towards me, looking at herself in the glass, said, "I
hope you admire my self-restraint."
"Restraint?"
"I'm not asking awkward questions. I may say I've been tormented with
visions of voluptuous half-castes ever since you went away. But I determined
not to ask and I haven't."
"That suits me," I said.
She left the dressing-table and crossed the room.
"Lights out?"
"As you like. I'm not sleepy."
We lay in our twin beds, a yard or two distant, smoking. I looked at my
watch; it was four o'clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in
that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for
energy.
"I don't believe you've changed at all, Charles."
"No, I'm afraid not."
"D'you want to change?"
"It's the only evidence of life."
"But you might change so that you didn't love me any more."
"There is that risk."
"Charles, you haven't stopped loving me?"
"You said yourself I hadn't changed."
"Well, I'm beginning to think you have. I haven't."
"No," I said, "no; I can see that."
"Were you at all frightened at meeting me to-day?"
"Not the least."
"You didn't wonder if I should have fallen in love with someone else in
the meantime?"
"No. Have you?"
"You know I haven't. Have you?"
"No. I'm not in love."
My wife seemed content with this answer. She had married me six years
ago at the time of my first exhibition, and had done much since then to push
our interests. People said she had "made" me, but she herself took credit
only for supplying me with a congenial background; she had firm faith in my
genius and in the "artistic temperament," and in the principle that things
done on the sly are not really done at all. .
Presently she said: "Looking forward to getting home?" (My father gave
me as a wedding present the price of a house, and I bought an old rectory in
my wife's part of the country.) "I've got a surprise for you."
"Yes?"
"I've turned the old tithe barn into a studio for you, so that you
needn't be disturbed by the children or when we have people to stay. I got
Emden to do it. Everyone thinks it a great success. There was an article on
it in Country Life; I brought it for you to see."
She showed me the article:. . . happy example of architectural good
manners. . . . Sir Joseph Emden's tactful adaptation of traditional material
to modern needs . . . ; there were some photographs; wide oak boards now
covered the earthen floor; a high, stone-mullioned bay-window had been built
in the north wall, and the great timbered roof, which before had been lost
in shadow, now stood out stark, well lit, with clean white plaster between
the beams; it looked like a village hall. I remembered the smell of the
place, which would now be lost.
"I rather liked that barn," I said.
"But you'll be able to work there, won't you?"
"After squatting in a cloud of sting-fly," I said, "under a sun which
scorched the paper off the block as I drew, I could work on the top of an
omnibus. I expect the vicar would like to borrow the place for whist
drives."
"There's a lot of work waiting for you. I promised Lady Anchorage you
would do Anchorage House as soon as you got back. That's coming down, too,
you know--shops underneath and two-roomed flats above. You don't think, do
you, Charles, that all this exotic work you've been doing is going to spoil
you for that sort of thing?"
"Why should it?"
"Well, it's so different. Don't be cross."
"It's just another jungle closing in."
"I know just how you feel, darling. The Georgian Society made such a
fuss, but we couldn't do anything. . . . Did you ever get my letter about
Boy?"
"Did I? What did it say?"
(Boy Mulcaster was her brother.)
"About his engagement. It doesn't matter now because it's all off, but
Father and Mother were terribly upset. She was an awful girl. They had to
give her money in the end."
"No, I heard nothing of Boy."
"He and Johnjohn are tremendous friends, now. It's so sweet to see them
together. Whenever he comes home the first thing he does is to drive
straight to the Old Rectory. He just walks into the house, pays no attention
to anyone else, and hollers out: 'Where's my chum Johnjohn?' and Johnjohn
comes tumbling downstairs and off they go into the spinney together and play
for hours. You'd think, to hear them talk to each other, they were the same
age. It was really Johnjohn who made him see reason about that girl;
seriously, you know, he's frightfully sharp. He must have heard Mother and
me talking, because next time Boy came he said: 'Uncle Boy shan't marry
horrid girl and leave Johnjohn,' and that was the very day -he settled for
two thousand pounds out of court. Johnjohn admires Boy so tremendously and
imitates him in everything. It's so good for them both."
I crossed the room and tried once more, ineffectively, to moderate the
heat of the radiators; I drank some iced water and opened the window, but,
besides the sharp night air, music was borne in from the next room where
they were playing the wireless. I shut it and turned,back towards my wife.
At length she began talking again, more drowsily. . . . "The garden's
come on a lot. . . . The box hedges you planted grew five inches last year.
... I had some men down from London to put the tennis court right . . .
first-class cook at the moment . . .' As the city below us began to wake we
both fell asleep, but not for long; the telephone rang and a voice of
hermaphroditic gaiety said: "Savoy-Carlton-Hotelgoodmorning. It is now a
quarter of eight."
"I didn't ask to be called, you know."
"Pardon me?"
"Oh, it doesn't matter."
"You're welcome."
As I was shaving, my wife from the bath said: "Just like old times. I'm
not worrying any more, Charles."
"Good."
"I was so terribly afraid that two years might have made a difference.
Now I know we can start again exactly where we left off."
I paused in my shaving.
"When?" I asked. "What? When we left off what?"
"When you went away, of course."
"You are npt thinking of something else, a little time before?"
"Oh, Charles, that's old history. That was nothing. It was never
anything. It's all over and forgotten."
"I just wanted to know," I said. "We're back as we were the day I went
abroad, is that it?"
So we started that day exactly where we left off two years before, with
my wife in tears.
My wife's softness and English reticence, her-very white, small,
regular teeth, her neat rosy finger-nails, her schoolgirl air of innocent
mischief and her schoolgirl dress, her modern jewellery, which was made at
great expense to give the impression, at a distance, of having been
mass-produced, her ready, rewarding smile, her deference to me and her zeal
in my interests, her motherly heart which made her cable daily to the nanny
at home -- in short, her peculiar charm -- made her popular among the
Americans, and our cabin on the day of departure was full of cellophane
packages -- flowers, fruit, sweets, books, toys for the children--from
friends she had known for a week. Stewards, like sisters in a nursing home,
used to judge their passengers' importance by the number and value of these
trophies; we therefore started the voyage in high esteem.
My wife's first thought on coming aboard was of the passenger list.
"Such a lot of friends," she said. "It's going to be a lovely trip.
Let's have a cocktail party this evening."
The companion-ways were no sooner cast off than she was busy with the
telephone.
"Julia. This is Celia -- Celia Ryder. It's lovely to find you on board.
What have you been up to? Come and have a cocktail this evening and tell me
all about it."
"Julia who?"
"Mottram. I haven't seen her for years."
Nor had I; not, in fact, since my wedding day, not to speak to for any
time, since the private view of my exhibition where the four canvasses of
Marchmain House, lent by Brideshead, had hung together attracting much
attention. Those pictures were my last contact with the Flytes; our lives,
so close for a year or two, had drawn apart. Sebastian, I knew, was still
abroad; Rex and Julia, I sometimes heard said, were unhappy together. Rex
was not prospering quite as well as had been predicted; he remained on the
fringe of the Government, prominent but vaguely suspect. He lived among the
very rich, and in his speeches seemed to incline to revolutionary policies,
flirting with Communists and fascists. I heard the Mottrams' names in
conversation; I saw their faces now and again peeping from the Tatler, as I
turned the pages impatiently waiting for someone to come, but they and I had
fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds,
little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a
perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in
which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves
in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can
speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that
England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as
in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in
London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could
have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other's
fortunes, a regret, even, that we 1 should be separated, and the knowledge
that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other's
pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the
morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the
centripetal force of our own worlds, and the coldj interstellar space
between them.
My wife, perched on the back of the sofa in a litter of cellophane and
silk ribbons, continued telephoning, working brightly through the passenger
list ... "Yes, do of course bring him, I'm told he's sweet. . . . Yes, I've
got Charles back from the wilds atyj last; isn't it lovely. . . . What a
treat seeing your name in the list! It's made my trip . . . darling, we were
at the Savoy-Car Iton, too; how can we have missed you? . . ." Sometimes she
turned to me and said: "I have to make sure you're still really there. I
haven't got used to it yet."
I went up and out as we steamed slowly down the river to one of the
great glass cases where the passengers stood to watch the land slip by.
"Such a lot of friends," my wife had said. They looked a strange crowd to
me; the emotions of leave-taking were just beginning to subside; some of
them, who had been drinking till the last moment with those who were seeing
them off, were still boisterous; others were planning where they would have
their deck chairs; the band played unnoticed -- all were as restless as
ants.
I turned into some of the halls of the ship, which were huge without
any splendour, as though they had been designed for a railway coach and
preposterously magnified. I passed through vast bronze gates whose ornament
was like the trade mark of a cake of soap which had been used once or twice;
I trod carpets the colour of blotting paper; the painted panels of the walls
were like blotting paper, too: kindergarten work in flat, drab colours; and
between the walls were yards and yards of biscuit-coloured wood which no
carpenter's tool had ever touched, wood that had been bent round corners,
invisibly joined strip to strip, steamed and squeezed and polished; all over
the blotting-paper carpet were strewn tables designed perhaps by a sanitary
engineer, square blocks of stuffing, with square holes for sitting in, and,
upholstered, it seemed, in blotting paper also; the light of the hall was
suffused from scores of hollows, giving an even glow, casting no shadows --
the whole place hummed from its hundred ventilators and vibrated with the
turn of the great engines below.
Here I am, I thought, back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here,
where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity. Quomodo sedet
sola civitas (for I had heard that great lament, which Cordelia once quoted
to me in the drawing-room of Marchmain House, sung by a half-caste choif in
Guatemala, nearly a year ago).
A steward came up to me.
"Can I get you anything, sir?"
"A whiskey-and-soda, not iced."
"I'm sorry, sir, all the soda is iced."
"Is the water iced, too?"
"Oh yes, sir."
"Well, it doesn't matter."
He trotted off, puzzled, soundless in the pervading hum.
"Charles."
I looked behind me. Julia was sitting in a cube of blotting-paper, her
hands folded in her lap, so still that I had passed by without noticing her.
"I heard you were here. Celia telephoned to me. It's delightful."
"What are you doing?"
She opened the empty hands in her lap with a little eloquent gesture.
"Waiting. My maid's unpacking; she's been so disagreeable ever since we left
England. She's complaining now about my cabin. I can't think why. It seems a
lap to me."
The steward returned with whiskey and two jugs, one of iced water, the
other of boiling water; I mixed them to the right temperature. He watched
and said: "I'll remember that's how you take it, sir."
Most passengers had fads; he was paid to fortify their self-esteem.
Julia asked for a cup of hot chocolate. I sat by her in the next cube.
"I never see you now," she said. "I never seem to see anyone I like. I
don't know why."
But she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years;
as though, too, before our parting we had been firm friends. It was dead
contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to
have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid
a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more
often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the
tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms
of long and unbroken intimacy.
"What have you been doing in America?"
She looked up slowly from her chocolate and, her splendid, serious eyes
in mine, said: "Don't you know? I'll tell you about it sometime. I've been a
mug. I thought I was in love with someone, but it didn't turn out that way."
And my mind went back ten years to the evening at Brideshead, when that
lovely, spidery child of nineteen, as though brought in for an hour from the
nursery and nettled by lack of attention from the grown-ups, had said: "I'm
causing anxiety, too, you know," and I had thought at the time, though
scarcely, it now seemed to me, in long trousers myself: "How important these
girls make themselves with their love affairs."
Now it was different; there was nothing but humility and friendly
candour in the way she spoke.
I wished I could respond to her confidence, give some token of
acceptance, but there was nothing in my last, flat, eventful years that I
could share with her. I began instead to talk of my time in the jungle, of
the comic characters I had met and the lost places I had visited, but in
this mood of old friendship the tale faltered and came to an end abruptly.
"I long to see the paintings," she said.
"Celia wanted me to unpack some and stick them round the cabin for her
cocktail party. I couldn't do that."
"No. ... Is Celia as pretty as ever? I always thought she had the most
delicious looks of any g