Brideshead Revisited
Page 4
‘Well?’ said Sebastian, stopping the car. Beyond the dome lay receding steps of water and round it, guarding and hiding it, stood the soft hills.
‘Well?’
‘What a place to live in!’ I said.
‘You must see the garden front and the fountain.’ He leaned forward and put the car into gear. ‘It’s where my family live’; and even then, rapt in the vision, I felt, momentarily, an ominous chill at the words he used — not, ‘that is my house’, but ‘it’s where my family live’.
‘Don’t worry,’ he continued, ‘they’re all away. You won’t have to meet them.’
‘But I should like to.’
‘Well, you can’t. They’re in London.’
We drove round the front into a side court — ‘Everything’s shut up. We’d better go in this way’ — and entered through the fortress-like, stone-flagged, stone-vaulted passages of the servants’ quarters — ‘I want you to meet Nanny Hawkins. That’s what we’ve come for’ — and climbed uncarpeted, scrubbed elm stairs, followed more passages of wide boards covered in the centre by a thin strip of drugget, through passages covered by linoleum, passing the wells of many minor staircases and many rows of crimson and gold fire buckets, up a final staircase, gated at the head. The dome was false, designed to be seen from below like the cupolas of Chambord. Its drum was merely an additional storey full of segmental rooms. Here were the nurseries.
Sebastian’s nanny was seated at the open window; the fountain lay before her, the lakes, the temple, and, far away on the last spur, a glittering obelisk; her hands lay open in her lap and loosely between them, a rosary; she was fast asleep. Long hours of work in her youth, authority in middle life, repose and security in her age, had set their stamp on her lined and serene face’.
‘Well,’ she said, waking; ‘this is a surprise.’
Sebastian kissed her.
‘Who’s this?’ she said, looking at me. ‘I don’t think I know him.’
Sebastian introduced us.
‘You’ve come just the right time. Julia’s here for the day. Such a time they’re all having. It’s dull without them. Just Mrs Chandler and two of the girls and old Bert. And then they’re all going on holidays and the boiler’s being done out in August and you going to see his Lordship in Italy, and the rest on visits, it’ll be October before we’re settled down again. Still, I suppose Julia must have her enjoyment the same as other young ladies, though what they always want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the gardens all out, I never have understood. Father Phipps was here on Thursday and I said exactly the same to him,’ she added as though she had thus acquired sacerdotal authority for her opinion.
‘D’you say Julia’s here?’
‘Yes, dear, you must have just missed her. It’s the Conservative Women. Her Ladyship was to have done them, but she’s poorly. Julia won’t be long; she’s leaving immediately after her speech, before the tea.’
‘I’m afraid we may miss her again.’
‘Don’t do that, dear, it’ll be such a surprise to her seeing you, though she ought to wait for the tea, I told her, it’s what the Conservative Women come for. Now what’s the news? Are you studying hard at your books?’
‘Not very, I’m afraid, nanny,’
‘Ah, cricketing all day long, I expect, like your brother. He found time to study, too, though. He’s not been here since Christmas, but he’ll be here for the Agricultural, I expect. Did you see this piece about Julia in the paper? She brought it down for me. Not that it’s nearly good enough of her, but what it says is very nice. “The lovely daughter whom Lady Marchmain is bringing out this season…witty as well as ornamental…the most popular débutante”, well that’s no more than the truth, though it was a shame to cut her hair; such a lovely head of hair she had, just like her Ladyship’s. I said to Father Phipps it’s not natural. He said: “Nuns do it,” and I said, “Well, surely, father, you aren’t going to make a nun out of Lady Julia? The very idea!”‘
Sebastian and the old woman talked on. It was a charming room, oddly shaped to conform with the curve of the dome. The walls were papered in a pattern of ribbon and roses. There was a rocking horse in the corner and an oleograph of the Sacred Heart over the mantelpiece; the empty grate was hidden by a bunch of pampas grass and bulrushes; laid out on the top of the chest of drawers and carefully dusted, were the collection of small presents which had been brought home to her at various times by her children, carved shell and lava, stamped leather, painted wood, china, bog-oak, damascened silver, blue-john, alabaster, coral, the souvenirs of many holidays.
Presently nanny said: ‘Ring the bell, dear, and we’ll have some tea. I usually go down to Mrs Chandler, but we’ll have it up here today. My usual girl has gone to London with the others. The new one is just up from the village. She didn’t know anything at first, but she’s coming along nicely. Ring the bell.’
But Sebastian said we had to go.
‘And miss Julia? She will be upset when she hears. It would have been such a surprise for her.’
‘Poor nanny,’ said Sebastian when we left the nursery. ‘She does have such a dull life. I’ve a good mind to bring her to Oxford to live with me, only she’d always be trying to send me to church. We must go quickly before my sister gets back.’
‘Which are you ashamed of, her or me?’
‘I’m ashamed of myself,’ said Sebastian gravely. ‘I’m not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They’re so madly charming. All my life they’ve been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m perfectly content. But am I not going to be allowed to see any more of the house?’
‘It’s all shut up. We came to see nanny. On Queen Alexandra’s day it’s all open for a shilling. Well, come and look if you want to…’
He led me through a baize door into a dark corridor; I could dimly see a gilt-cornice and vaulted plaster above; then, opening a heavy, smooth-swinging, mahogany door, he led me into a darkened hall. Light streamed through the cracks in the shutters. Sebastian unbarred one, and folded it back; the mellow afternoon sun flooded in, over the bare floor, the vast, twin fireplaces of sculptured marble, the coved ceiling frescoed with classic deities and heroes, the gilt mirrors and scagliola pilasters, the islands of sheeted furniture. It was a glimpse only, such as might be had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom; then Sebastian quickly shut out the sun. ‘You see,’ he said; ‘it’s like this.’
His mood had changed since we had drunk our wine under the elm trees, since we had turned the corner of the drive and he had said: ‘Well?’
‘You see, there’s nothing to see. A few pretty things I’d like to show, you one day — not now. But there’s the chapel. You must see that. It’s a monument of art nouveau.’
The last architect to work at Brideshead had added a colonnade and flanking pavilions. One of these was the chapel. We entered it by the public porch (another door led direct to the house); Sebastian dipped his fingers in the water stoup, crossed himself, and genuflected; I copied him. ‘Why do you do that?’ he asked crossly.
‘Just good manners.’
‘Well, you needn’t on my account. You wanted to do sight-seeing; how about this?’
The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.
‘Golly,’ I said.
On the drive we passed a closed Rolls-Royce driven by a chauffeur; in the back was a vague, girlish figure who looked round at us through the window.
‘Julia,’ said Sebastian. ‘We only just got away in time.’
We stopped to speak to a man with a bicycle — ‘That was old Bat,’ said Sebastian — and then were away, past the wrought-iron gates, past the lodges, and out on the road heading back to Oxford.
‘I’m sorry said Sebastian after a time. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice this afternoon. Brideshead often has that effect on me. But I had to take you to see nanny.’
Why? I wondered; but said nothing — Sebastian’s life was governed by a code of such imperatives. ‘I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,’ ‘I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows,’ ‘I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!’ — except, ‘It had quite the reverse effect on me.’
After a long pause he said petulantly, ‘I don’t keep asking you questions about your family.’
‘Neither do I about yours.’
‘But you look inquisitive.’
‘Well, you’re so mysterious about them.’
‘I hoped I was mysterious about ‘everything.’
‘Perhaps I am rather curious about people’s families — you see, it’s not a thing I know about. There is only my father and myself. An aunt kept an eye on me for a time but my father drove her abroad. My mother was killed in the war.’
‘Oh…how very unusual.’
‘She went to Serbia with the Red Cross. My father has been rather odd in the head ever since. He just lives alone in London with no friends and footles about collecting things.’
Sebastian said, ‘You don’t know what you’ve been saved. There are lots of us. Look them up in Debrett.’
His mood was lightening, now. The further we drove from Brideshead, the more he seemed to cast off his uneasiness — the almost furtive restlessness and irritability that had possessed him. The sun was behind us as we drove, so that we seemed to be in pursuit of our own shadows.
‘It’s half past five. We’ll get to Godstow in time for dinner, drink at the Trout, leave Hardcastle’s motor-car, and walk back by the river. Wouldn’t that be best?’
That is the full account of my first brief visit to Brideshead; could I have known then that it, would one day be remembered with tears by a middle-aged captain of infantry?
CHAPTER II
My cousin Jasper’s Grand Remonstrance — a warning against — Sunday morning in Oxford
TOWARDS the end of that summer term I received the last visit and Grand Remonstrance of my cousin Jasper. I was just free of the schools, having taken the last paper of History Previous on the afternoon before; Jasper’s subfusc suit and white tie proclaimed him still in the thick of it; he had, too, the exhausted but resentful air of one who fears he has failed to do himself full justice on the subject of Pindar’s Orphism. Duty alone had brought him to my rooms, that afternoon at great inconvenience to himself and, as it happened, to me, who, when he caught me in the door, was on my way to make final arrangements about a dinner I was giving that evening. It was one of several parties designed to comfort Hardcastle — one of the tasks that had lately fallen to Sebastian and me since, by leaving his car out, we had got him into grave trouble with the proctors.
Jasper would not sit down; this was to be no cosy chat; he stood with his back to the fireplace and, in his own phrase, talked to me ‘like an uncle’. ‘…I’ve tried to get in touch with you several times in the last week or two. In fact, I have the impression you are avoiding me. If that is so, Charles, I can’t say I’m surprised.
‘You may think it none of my business, but I feel a sense of responsibility. You know as well as I do that since your — well, since the war, your father has not been really in touch with things lives in his own world. I don’t want to sit back and see you making mistakes which a word in season might save you from.
‘I expected you to make mistakes your first year. We all do. I got in with some thoroughly objectionable O.S.C.U. men who ran a mission to hop-pickers during the long vac. But you, my dear Charles, whether you realize it or not, have gone straight, hook line and sinker, into the very worst set in the University. You may think that, living in digs, I don’t know what goes on in college; but I hear things. In fact, I hear all too much. I find that I’ve become a figure of mockery on your account at the Dining Club. There’s that chap Sebastian Flyte you seem inseparable from. He may be all right, I don’t know. His brother Brideshead was a very sound fellow. But this friend of yours looks odd to me and he gets himself talked about. Of course, they’re an odd family. The Marchmains have lived apart since the war, you know. An extraordinary thing; everyone thought they were a devoted couple. Then he went off to France with his Yeomanry and just never came, back. It was as if he’d been killed. She’s a Roman Catholic, so she can’t get a divorce — or won’t, I expect. You can do anything at Rome with money, and they’re enormously rich. Flyte, may be all right, but Anthony Blanche — now there’s a man there’s absolutely no excuse for.’
‘I don’t, particularly like him myself,’ I said.
‘Well, he’s always hanging round here, and the stiffer element in college don’t like it. They can’t stand him at the House. He was in Mercury again last night. None of these people you go about with pull any weight in their own colleges, and that’s the real test. They think because they’ve got a lot of money to throw about, they can do anything.
‘And that’s another thing. I don’t know what allowance my uncle makes you, but I don’t mind betting you’re spending double. All this,’ he said, including in a wide sweep of his hand the evidence of profligacy about him. It was true; my room had cast its austere winter garments, and, by not very slow stages, assumed a richer wardrobe. ‘Is that paid for?’ (the box of a hundred cabinet Partagas on the sideboard) ‘or those?’ (a dozen frivolous, new books on the table) ‘or those?’ (a Lalique decanter and glasses) ‘or that peculiarly noisome object?’ (a human skull lately purchased from the School of Medicine, which, resting in a bowl of roses, formed, at the moment, the chief decoration of my table. It bore the motto ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ inscribed on its forehead.)
‘Yes,’ I said, glad to be clear of one charge. ‘I had to pay cash for the skull.’
‘You can’t be doing any work. Not that that matters, particularly if you’re making something of your career elsewhere — but are you? Have you spoken at the Union or at any of the clubs? Are you connected with any of the magazines? Are you even making a position in the O.U.D.S.? And your clothes!’ continued my cousin. ‘When you came up I remember advising you to dress as you would in a country house. Your present get-up seems an unhappy compromise between the correct wear for a theatrical party at Maidenhead and a glee-singing competition in a garden suburb.
‘And drink — no one minds a man getting tight once or twice a term. In fact, he ought to, on certain occasions. But I hear you’re constantly seen drunk in the middle of the afternoon.’
He paused, his duty discharged. Already the perplexities of the examination school were beginning to reassert themselves in his mind.
‘I’m sorry, Jasper,’ I said. ‘I know it must be embarrassing for you, but I happen to like this bad set. I like getting drunk at luncheon, and though I haven’t yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall before the end of term. I usually have a glass of champagne about this time. Will you join me?’
So my cousin Jasper despaired and, I learned later, wrote to his father on the subject of my excesses who, in his turn, wrote to my father, who took no action or particular thought in the matter, partly because he had disliked my uncle for nearly sixty years and partly because, as Jasper had said, he lived in his own world now, since my mother’s death.
Thus, in broad outline, Jasper sketched the more prominent features of my first year
; some detail may be added on the same scale.
I had committed myself earlier to spend the Easter vacation with Collins and, though I would have broken my word without compunction and left my former friend friendless, had Sebastian made a sign, no sign was made; accordingly Collins and I spent several economical and instructive weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those mighty tombs. In an hotel bedroom designed for a warmer season, I wrote long letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post: office for his answers. There were two, each from a different address, neither giving any plain news of himself, for he wrote in a style of remote fantasy — … ‘Mummy and two attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people here, but one, praise heaven! Has an ear trumpet, and that keeps me in good humour. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you so I will keep the backbone…’ — which left me fretful. Collins made notes for a little thesis pointing out the inferiority of the original mosaics to their photographs. Here was planted the seed of what became his life’s harvest. When, many years later, there appeared the first massive volume of his still unfinished work on Byzantine Art, I was touched to find among two pages of polite, preliminary acknowledgements of debt, my own name: ‘…to Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing yes I first saw the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and San Vitale…’
I sometimes wonder whether, had it not been for Sebastian, I might have trodden the same path as Collins round the cultural water-wheel. My father in his youth sat for All Souls and, in a year of hot competition, failed; other successes and honours came his way later, but that early failure impressed itself on him, and through him on me, so that I came up with an ill-considered sense that there lay the proper and natural goal of the life of reason. I, too, should doubtless have failed, but, having failed, I might perhaps have slipped into a less august academic life elsewhere. It is conceivable, but not, I believe, likely, for the hot spring of anarchy rose from the depths where was no solid earth, and burst into the sunlight — a rainbow in its cooling vapours — with a power the rocks could not repress.