Brideshead Revisited(10)

After luncheon he stood on, the balcony with a megaphone which had appeared surprisingly among the bric-a-brac of Sebastian’s room, and in languishing tones recited passages from The Waste Land to the sweatered and muffled throng that was on its way to the river.

‘I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all,’ he sobbed to them from the Venetian arches;

‘Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed,

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked among the l-l-lowest of the dead…’

And then, stepping lightly into the room, ‘How I have surprised them! All b-boatmen are Grace Darlings to me.’

We sat on sipping Cointreau while the mildest and most detached of the Etonians sang: ‘Home they brought her warrior dead’ to his own accompaniment on the harmonium.

It was four o’clock before we broke up.

Anthony Blanche was the first to go. He took formal and complimentary leave of each of us in turn. To Sebastian he said: ‘My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pincushion,’ and to me: ‘I think it’s perfectly brilliant of Sebastian to have discovered you. Where do you lurk? I shall come down your burrow and ch-chivvy you out like an old st-t-toat.’

The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian said: ‘Have some more Cointreau,’ so I stayed and later he said, ‘I must go to the Botanical Gardens.’

‘Why?’

‘To see the ivy.’

It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.

‘I’ve never been to the Botanical Gardens,’ I said.

‘Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There’s a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don’t know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens.’

When at length I returned to my rooms and found them exactly as I had left them that morning, I detected a jejune air that had not irked me before. What was wrong? Nothing except the golden daffodils seemed to be real. Was it the screen? I turned it face to the wall. That was better.

It was the end of the screen. Lunt never liked it, and after a few days he took it away, to an obscure refuge he had under the stairs, full of mops and buckets.

That day was the beginning of my friendship with Sebastian, and thus it came about, that morning in June, that I was lying beside him in the shade of the high elms watching the smoke from his lips drift up into the branches.



Presently we drove on and in another hour were hungry. We stopped at an inn, which was half farm also, and ate eggs and bacon, pickled walnuts and cheese, and drank our beer in a sunless parlour where an old clock ticked. in the shadows and a cat slept by the empty grate.

We drove on and in the early afternoon came to our destination: wrought-iron gates and Twin, classical lodges on a village green, an avenue, more gates, open parkland, a turn in the drive and suddenly a new and secret landscape opened before us. We were at the head of a valley and below us, half a mile distant, grey and gold amid a screen of boskage, shone the dome and columns of an old house.

‘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.