Brideshead Revisited(32)

‘I’m sure you’re wrong there.’

‘He may not admit it to you. He may not admit it to himself; they are full of hate — hate of themselves. Alex and his family…Why do you think he will never go into Society?’

‘I always thought people had turned against him.’

‘My dear boy, you are very young. People turn against a handsome, clever, wealthy man like Alex? Never in your life. It is he who has driven them away. Even now they come back again and again to be snubbed and laughed at. And all for Lady Marchmain. He will not touch a hand which may have touched hers. When we have guests I see him thinking, “Have they perhaps just come from Brideshead? Are they on their way to Marchmain House? Will they speak of me to my wife? Are they a link between me and her whom I hate?” But, seriously, with my heart, that is how he thinks. He is mad. And how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up. I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.

‘When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood — innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. A woman has not all these ways of loving.

‘Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. We are comfortable.

‘Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddybear, his nanny and he is nineteen years old…’

She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so that she could look down at the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones: ‘How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love,’ and then added with a sudden swoop to earth, ‘Sebastian drinks too much.’

‘I suppose we both do.’

‘With you it does not matter. I have watched you together. With Sebastian it is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him. I have known so many. Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me; it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your way.’



We arrived in London on the day before term began. On the way from Charing Cross I dropped Sebastian in the forecourt of his mother’s house; ‘Here is “Marchers”,’ he said with a sigh which meant the end of a holiday. ‘I won’t ask you in, the place is probably full of my family. We’ll meet at Oxford’; I drove across the park to my home.

My father greeted me with, his usual air of mild regret.

‘Here today,’ he said; ‘gone tomorrow. I seem to see very little of you. Perhaps it is dull for you here. How could it be otherwise? You have enjoyed yourself.’

‘Very much. I went to Venice.’

‘Yes. Yes. I suppose so. The weather was fine?’ When he went to bed after an evening of silent study, he paused to ask: ‘The friend you were so much concerned about, did he die?’

‘No.’

‘I am very thankful. You should have written to tell me. I worried about him so much.’





CHAPTER 5




Autumn in Oxford — dinner with Rex Mottram and supper with Boy Mulcaster — Mr Samgrass — Lady Marchmain at home — Sebastian contra mundum



‘IT is typical of Oxford,’ I said, ‘to start the new year in autumn.’

Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.

The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.

It was the first Sunday evening of term.

‘I feel precisely one hundred years old,’ said Sebastian.

He had come up the night before, a day earlier than I, and this was our first meeting since we parted in the taxi.

‘I’ve had a talking to from Mgr Bell this afternoon. That makes the fourth since I came up — my tutor, the junior dean, Mr Samgrass of All Souls, and now Mgr Bell.’

‘Who is Mr Samgrass of All Souls?’

‘Just someone of mummy’s. They all say that I made a very bad start last year, that I have been noticed, and that if I don’t mend my ways I shall get sent down. How does one mend one’s ways? I suppose one joins the League of Nations Union, and reads the Isis every week, and drinks coffee in the morning at the Cadena café, and smokes a great pipe and plays hockey and goes out to tea on Boar’s Hill and to lectures at Keble, and rides a bicycle with a little tray full of notebooks and drinks cocoa in the evening and discusses sex seriously. Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I feel so old.’

‘I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse. I believe we have had all the fun we can expect here.’

We sat silent in the firelight as darkness fell.

‘Anthony Blanche has gone down.’