Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

  At the end of the day my wife said: ‘Darling, I must go. It’s been a terrific success, hasn’t it? I’ll think of something to tell them at home, but I wish it hadn’t got to happen quite this way.’

  ‘So she knows,’ I thought. ‘She’s a sharp one. She’s had her nose down since luncheon and picked up the scent.’

  I let her get clear of the place and was about to follow — the rooms were nearly empty — when I heard a voice at the turnstile I had not heard for many years, an unforgettable self-taught stammer, a sharp cadence of remonstration.

  ‘No. I have not brought a card of invitation. I do not even know whether I received one. I have not come to a social function — I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler; I have not come to exhibit myself. I have come to see the pictures. Perhaps you are unaware that there are any pictures here. I happen to have a personal interest in the artist — if that word has any meaning for you.’

  ‘Antoine’ I said, ‘come in.’

  ‘My dear, there is a g-g-gorgon here who thinks I am g-g-gate-crashing. I only arrived in London yesterday, and heard quite by chance at luncheon that you were having an exhibition, so, of course I dashed impetuously to the shrine to pay homage. Have I changed? Would you recognize me? Where are, the pictures? Let me explain them to you.’

  Anthony Blanche had not changed from when I last saw him; not, indeed, from when I first saw him. He swept lightly across the room to the most prominent canvas — a jungle landscape paused a moment, his head cocked like a knowing terrier, and asked: ‘Where, my dear Charles, did you find this sumptuous greenery? The corner of a hothouse at T-t-rent or T-t-tring? What gorgeous usurer nurtured these fronds for your pleasure?’ Then he made a tour of the two rooms; once or twice he sighed deeply, otherwise he kept silence. When he came to the end he sighed once more, more deeply than ever, and said: ‘But they tell me, My dear, you are happy in love. That is everything, is it not, or nearly everything?’

  ‘Are they as bad as that?’

  Anthony dropped his voice to a piercing whisper: ‘My dear, let us not expose your little imposture before these good, plain people’ — he gave a conspiratorial glance to the last remnants of the crowd — ‘let us not spoil their innocent pleasure. We know, you and I, that this is all t-t-terrible t-t-tripe. Let us go, before we offend the connoisseurs. I know of a louche little bar quite near here. Let us go there and talk of your other c-cconquests.’

  It needed this voice from the past to recall me; the indiscriminate chatter of praise all that crowded day had worked on me like a succession of advertisement hoardings on a long road, kilometre after kilometre between the poplars, commanding one to stay at some new hotel, so that when at the end of the drive, stiff and dusty, one arrives at the destination, it seems inevitable to turn into the yard under the name that had first bored, then angered one, and finally become an inseparable part of one’s fatigue.

  Anthony led me from the gallery and down a side street to a door between a disreputable newsagent and a disreputable chemist, painted with the words ‘Blue Grotto Club. Members only.’

  ‘Not quite your milieu, my dear, but mine, I assure you. After all, you have been in your milieu all day.’

  He led me downstairs, from a smell of cats to a smell of gin and cigarette-ends and the sound of a wireless.

  ‘I was given the address by a dirty old man in the Boeuf sur le Toit. I am most grateful to him. I have been out of England so long, and really sympathetic little joints like this change so fast. I presented myself here for the first time yesterday evening, and already I feel quite at home. Good evening, Cyril.’

  ‘‘Lo, Toni, back again?’ said the youth behind the bar.

  ‘We will take our drinks and sit in a corner. You must remember, my dear, that here you are just as conspicuous and, may I say, abnormal, my dear, as I should be in B-bbratt’s.’

  The place was painted cobalt; there was cobalt lineoleum on the floor. Fishes of silver and gold paper had been pasted haphazard on ceiling and walls. Half a dozen youths were drinking and playing with the slot-machines; an older, natty, crapulous-looking man seemed to be in control; there was some sniggering round the fruit-gum machine; then one of the youths came up to us and said, ‘Would your friend care to rhumba?’

  ‘No, Tom, he would not, and I’m not going to give you a drink; not yet, anyway. That’s a very impudent boy, a regular little gold-digger, my dear.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, affecting an ease I was far from feeling in that den, what have you been up to all these years?’

  ‘My dear, it is what you have been up to that we are here to talk about. I’ve been watching you, my dear. I’m a faithful old body and I’ve kept my eye on you.’ As he spoke the bar and the bar-tender, the blue wicker furniture, the gambling-machines, the gramophone, the couple of youths dancing on the oilcloth, the youths sniggering round the slots,. the purple-veined, stiffly-, dressed elderly man drinking in the corner opposite us, the whole drab and furtive joint seemed to fade, and I was back in Oxford looking out over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin-Gothic. ‘I went to your first exhibition,’ said Anthony; ‘I found it — charming. There was an interior of Marchmain House, very English, very correct, but quite delicious. “Charles has done something,” I said; “not all he will do, not all he can do, but something.”

  ‘Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I am not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said, “Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?”

  ‘The next thing I saw was your very handsome volume “Village and Provincial Architecture”, was it called? Quite a tome, my dear, and what did I find? Charm again. “Not quite my cup of tea,” I thought; “this is too English.” I have the fancy for rather spicy things, you know, not for the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis — not that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford. Then, to be frank, dear Charles, I despaired of you. “I am a degenerate old d-d-dago,” I said “and Charles — I speak of your art, my dear — is a dean’s daughter in flowered muslin.”

  ‘Imagine then my excitement at luncheon today. Everyone was talking about you. My hostess was a friend of my mother’s, a Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander; a friend of yours, too, my dear. Such a frump! Not at all the society I imagined you to keep. However, they, had all been to your exhibition, but it was you they talked of, how you had broke away, my dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how my old heart leaped.

  ‘“Poor Celia,” they said, “after all she’s done for him.” “He owes everything to her. It’s too bad.” “And with Julia,” they said, “after the way she behaved in America.” “Just as she was going back to Rex.”

  ‘“But the pictures,” I said; “Tell me about them.”

  ‘Oh, the pictures,” they said; “they’re most peculiar.” “Not at all what he usually does.” “Very forceful.” “Quite barbaric.” “I call them downright unhealthy,” said Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander.

  ‘My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, “Take me to Charles’s unhealthy pictures.” Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little — I rested here with Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys. Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o’clock, all agog, my dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.’

  ‘You’re-quite right,’ I said.

  ‘My dear, of course I
’m right. I was right years ago — more years, I am happy to say, than either of us shows — when I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.’

  The youth called Tom approached us again. ‘Don’t be a tease, Toni; buy me a drink.’ I remembered my train and left Anthony with him.

  As I stood on the platform by the restaurant-car I saw my luggage and Julia’s go past with Julia’s sour-faced maid strutting beside the porter. They had begun shutting the carriage doors when Julia arrived, unhurried, and took her place in front of me. I had a table for two. This was a very convenient train; there was half an hour before, dinner and half and hour after it; then, instead of changing to the branch line, as had been the rule in Lady Marchmain’s day, we were met at the junction. It was night as we drew out of Paddington, and the glow of the town gave place first to the scattered lights of the suburbs, then to the darkness of the fields.

  ‘It seems days since I saw you,’ I said.

  ‘Six hours; and we were together all yesterday. You look worn out.’

  ‘It’s been a day of nightmare — crowds, critics, the Clarences, a luncheon party at Margot’s, ending up with half an hour’s well-reasoned abuse of my pictures in a pansy bar…I think Celia knows about us.’

  ‘Well, she had to know some time.’

  ‘Everyone seems to know. My pansy friend had not been in London twenty-four hours before he’d heard.’

  ‘Damn everybody.’

  ‘What about Rex?’

  ‘Rex isn’t anybody at all,’ said Julia; ‘he just doesn’t exist.’

  The knives and forks jingled on the table as we sped through the darkness; the little circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses lengthened to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip, lapped back again, never spilt; I was leaving the day behind me. Julia pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rack above her, and shook her night-dark hair with a little sigh of ease — a sigh fit for the pillow, the sinking firelight, and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of bare trees.

  ‘It’s great to have you back, Charles; like the old days.’

  ‘Like the old days?’ I thought.

  Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there was no time to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time to reply; time for a laugh — a throaty mirthless laugh, the base currency of goodwill.

  There were half a dozen of these friends in the Tapestry Hall: politicians; ‘young Conservatives’ in the early forties, with sparse hair and high blood-pressure; a Socialist from the coal-mines who had already caught their clear accents, whose cigars came to pieces on his lips, whose hand shook when he poured himself out a drink; a financier older than the rest, and, one might guess from the way they treated him, richer; a lovesick columnist, who alone was silent, gloating sombrely on the only woman of the party; a woman they called ‘Grizel’, a knowing rake whom, in their hearts, they all feared a little.

  They all feared Julia, too, Grizel included. She greeted them and apologized for not being there to welcome them, with a formality which hushed there for a minute; then she came and sat with me near the fire, and the storm of talk arose once more and whirled about our ears.

  ‘Of course, he can marry her and make her queen tomorrow.’

  ‘We had our chance in October. Why didn’t we send the Italian fleet to the bottom of Mare Nostrum? Why didn’t we blow Spezia to blazes? Why didn’t we land on Pantelleria?’

  ‘Franco’s simply a German agent. They tried to put him in to prepare air bases to bomb France. That bluff has been called, anyway.’

  ‘It would make the monarchy stronger than it’s been since Tudor times. The people are with him.’

  ‘The Press are with him.’

  ‘I’m with him.’

  ‘Who cares about divorce now except a few old maids who aren’t married, anyway?’

  ‘If he has a show-down with the old gang, they’ll just disappear like, like…’

  ‘Why didn’t we close the canal? Why didn’t we bomb Rome?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been necessary. One firm note…’

  ‘One firm speech.’

  ‘One show-down.’

  ‘Anyway, Franco will soon be skipping back to Morocco. Chap I saw today just come from Barcelona…’

  ‘…Chap just come from Fort Belvedere…’

  ‘…Chap just come from the Palazzo Venezia…’

  ‘All we want is a show-down.’

  ‘A show-down with Baldwin.’

  ‘A show-down with Hitler.’

  ‘A show-down with the Old Gang.’

  ‘…That I should live to see my country, the land of Clive and Nelson…’

  ‘…My country of Hawkins and Drake.’

  ‘…My country of Palmerston…’

  ‘Would you very much mind not doing that?’ said Grizel to the columnist, who had been attempting in a maudlin manner to twist her wrist; ‘I don’t happen to enjoy it.’

  ‘I wonder which is the more horrible,’ I said, ‘Celia’s Art and Fashion or Rex’s Politics and Money.’

  ‘Why worry about them?’

  ‘Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It’s supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.’

  ‘They are, they are.’

  ‘But we’ve got our happiness in spite of them; here and now, we’ve taken possession of it. They can’t hurt us, can they?’

  ‘Not tonight; not now.’

  ‘Not for how many nights?’

  CHAPTER 3

  The fountain

  ‘Do you remember, said Julia, in the tranquil, lime-scented evening, ‘do you remember the storm?’

  ‘The bronze doors banging.’

  ‘The roses in cellophane.’

  ‘The man who gave the “get-together” party and was never seen again.’

  ‘Do you remember how the sun came out on our last evening just as it has done today?’

  It had been an afternoon of low cloud and summer squalls, so overcast that at times I had stopped work and roused Julia from the light trance in which she sat — she had sat so often; I never tired of painting her, forever finding in her new wealth and delicacy — until at length we had gone early to our baths and, on coming down, dressed for dinner, in the last half-hour of the day, we found the world transformed; the sun had emerged; the wind had fallen to a soft breeze which gently stirred the blossom in the limes and carried its fragrance, fresh from the late rains, to merge with the sweet breath of box and the drying stone. The shadow of the obelisk spanned the terrace.

  I had carried two garden cushions from the shelter of the colonnade and put them on the rim of the fountain. There Julia sat, in a tight little gold tunic and a white gown, one hand in the water idly turning an emerald ring to catch the fire of the sunset; the carved animals mounted over her dark head in a cumulus of green moss and glowing stone and dense shadow, and the waters round them flashed and bubbled and broke into scattered flames.

  ‘…So much to remember,’ she said. ‘How many days have there been since then, when we haven’t seen each other; a hundred, do you think?’

  ‘Not so many.’

  ‘Two Christmases’ — those bleak, annual excursions into propriety. Boughton, home of my family, home of my cousin Jasper, with what glum memories of childhood I revisited its pitch-pine corridors and dripping walls! How querulously my father and I, seated side by side in my uncle’s Humber, approached the av
enue of Wellingtonias knowing that at the end of the drive we should find my uncle, my aunt, my aunt Philippa, my cousin Jasper, and, of recent years, Jasper’s wife and children; and besides them, perhaps already arrived, perhaps every moment expected, my wife and my children. This annual sacrifice united us; here among the holly and mistletoe and the cut spruce, the parlour game’s ritually performed, the brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums, the village choir in the pitch-pine minstrels’ gallery, gold twine and sprigged wrapping-paper, she and I were accepted, whatever ugly rumours had been afloat in tile past year, as man and wife. ‘We must keep it up, whatever it costs us, for the sake of the children my wife said.

  ‘Yes, two Christmases…And the three days, of good taste before I followed you to Capri.’

  ‘Our first summer.’

  ‘Do you remember how I hung about Naples, then followed, how we met by arrangement on the hill path and how flat it fell?’

  ‘I went back to the villa and said, “Papa, who do you think has arrived at the hotel?” and he said, “Charles Ryder, I suppose.” I said, “Why did you think of him?” and papa replied, “Cara came back from Paris with the news that you and he were inseparable. He seems to have a penchant for my children. However, bring him here; I think we have the room.”

  ‘There was the time you had jaundice and wouldn’t let me see you.’

  ‘And when I had flu and you were afraid to come.’

  ‘Countless visits to Rex’s constituency.’

  ‘And Coronation Week, when you ran away from London. Your goodwill mission to your father-in-law. The time you went to Oxford to paint the picture they didn’t like. Oh, yes, quite a hundred days.’