Brideshead Revisited(26)

‘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 know 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 Ampleforth. 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 see 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 cottages, 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 masters who taught me Divinity told me that biblical texts were highly untrustworthy. They never suggested I should try to pray. My father did not go to church except on family occasions and then with derision. My mother, I think, was devout. It once seemed odd to me that she should have thought it her duty to leave my father and me and go off with an ambulance, to Serbia, to die of exhaustion in the snow in Bosnia. But later I recognized some such spirit in myself. Later, too, I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real. I was aware of no such needs that summer at Brideshead.

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 teddybear. 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, “O 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? Do 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.’