Brideshead Revisited(44)
The family history was typical of the Catholic squires of England; from Elizabeth’s reign till Victoria’s they lived sequestered lives, among their tenantry and kinsmen, sending their sons to school abroad, often marrying there, inter-marrying, if not, with a score of families like themselves, debarred from all preferment, and learning, in those lost generations, lessons which could still be read in the lives of the last three men of the house.
Mr Samgrass’s deft editorship had assembled and arranged a curiously homogeneous little body of writing — poetry, letters, scraps of a journal, an unpublished essay or two, which all exhaled the same high-spirited, serious, chivalrous, otherworldly air and the letters from their contemporaries, written after their deaths, all in varying degrees of articulateness, told the same tale of men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice. These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures. I wondered, as the train carried me farther and farther from Lady Marchmain, whether perhaps there was not on her, too, the same blaze, marking her and hers for destruction by other ways than war. Did she see a sign in the red centre of her cosy grate and hear it in the rattle of creeper on the window-pane, this whisper of doom?
Then I reached Paddington and, returning home, found Sebastian there, and the sense of tragedy vanished, for he was gay and free as when I first met him.
‘Cordelia sent you her special love.’
‘Did you have a “little talk” with mummy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you gone over to her side?
The day before I would have said: ‘There aren’t two sides’; that day I said, ‘No, I’m with you, “Sebastian contra mundum”.’
And that was all the conversation we had on the subject, then or ever.
But the shadows were closing round Sebastian. We returned to Oxford and once again the gillyflowers bloomed under my windows and the chestnut lit the streets and the warm stones strewed their flakes upon the cobble; but it was not as it had been; there was mid-winter in Sebastian’s heart.
The weeks went by; we looked for lodgings for the coming term and found them in Merton Street, a secluded, expensive little house near the tennis court.
Meeting Mr Samgrass, whom we had seen less often of late, I told him of our choice. He was standing at the table in Blackwell’s where recent German books were displayed, setting aside a little heap of purchases.
‘You’re sharing digs with Sebastian?’ he said. ‘So he is coming up next term?’
‘I suppose so. Why shouldn’t he be?’
‘I don’t know why; I somehow thought perhaps he wasn’t. I’m always wrong about things like that. I like Merton Street.’
He showed me the books he was buying, which, since I knew no German, were not of interest to me. As I left him he said: ‘Don’t think me interfering, you know, but I shouldn’t make any definite arrangement in Merton Street until you’re sure.’
I told Sebastian of this conversation and he said: ‘Yes, there’s a plot on. Mummy wants me to go and live with Mgr Bell.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’
‘Because I’m not going to live with Mgr Bell.’
‘I still think you might have told me. When did it start?’
‘Oh, it’s been going on. Mummy’s very clever, you know. She saw she’d failed with you. I expect it was the letter you wrote after reading Uncle Ned’s book.’
‘I hardly said anything.’
‘That was it. If you were going to be any help to her, you would have said a lot. Uncle Ned is the test, you know.’
But it seemed she had not quite despaired, for a few days later I got a note from her which said: ‘I shall be passing through Oxford on Tuesday and hope to see you and Sebastian. I would like to see you alone for five minutes before I see him. Is that too much to ask? I will come to your rooms at about twelve.’
She came; she admired my rooms… ‘My brothers Simon and Ned were here, you know. Ned had rooms on the garden front. I wanted Sebastian to come here, too, but my husband was at Christ Church and, as you know, he took charge of Sebastian’s education’; she admired my drawings… ‘everyone loves your paintings in the garden-room. We shall never forgive you if you don’t finish them.’ Finally, she came to her point.
‘I expect you’ve guessed already what I have come to ask. Quite simply, is Sebastian drinking too much this term?’
I had guessed; I answered: ‘If he were, I shouldn’t answer. As it is I can say, “No”.’
She said: ‘I believe you. Thank God!’ and we went together to luncheon at Christ Church.
That night Sebastian had his third disaster and was found by the junior dean at one o’clock, wandering round Tom Quad hopelessly drunk.
I had left him morose but completely sober at a few minutes before twelve. In the succeeding hour he had drunk half a bottle of whisky alone. He did not remember much about it when he came to tell me next morning.