Brideshead Revisited(47)
‘Then you agree to my leaving Oxford?’
‘Agree? Agree? My dear boy, you’re twenty-two.’
‘Twenty,’ I said, ‘twenty-one in October.’
‘Is that all? It seems much longer.’
A letter from Lady Marchmain completes this episode.
‘My dear Charles,’ she wrote, ‘Sebastian left me this morning to join his father abroad. Before he went I asked him if he had written to you. He said no, so I must write, tho’ I can hardly hope to say in a letter what I could not say on our last walk. But you must not be left in silence.
‘The college has sent Sebastian down for a term only, and will take him back after Christmas on condition he goes to live with Mgr Bell. It is for him to decide. Meanwhile Mr Samgrass has very kindly consented to take charge of him. As soon as his visit to his father is over Mr Samgrass will pick him up and the will go together to the Levant, where Mr Samgrass has long been anxious to investigate a number of orthodox monasteries. He hopes this may be a new interest for Sebastian.
‘Sebastian’s stay here has not been happy.
‘When they come home at Christmas I know Sebastian will want to see you, and so shall we all. I hope your arrangements for next term have not been too much upset and that everything will go well with you.
Yours sincerely,
Teresa Marchmain.
‘I went to the garden-room this morning and was so very sorry.’
BOOK TWO
BRIDESHEAD DESERTED
CHAPTER 1
Samgrass revealed — I take leave of Brideshead — Rex revealed
‘AND when we reached the top of the pass,’ said Mr Samgrass, we heard the galloping horses behind, and two soldiers rode up to the head of the caravan and turned us back. The General had sent them, and they reached us only just in time. There was a Band, not a mile ahead.’
He paused, and his small audience sat silent, conscious that he had sought, to impress them but in doubt as to how they could politely show their interest.
‘A Band?’ said Julia. ‘Goodness!’
Still he seemed to expect more. At last Lady Marchmain said, ‘I suppose the sort of folk-music you get in those parts is very monotonous.’
‘Dear Lady Marchmain, a Band of Brigands. Cordelia, beside me on the sofa, began to giggle noiselessly. ‘The mountains are full of them. Stragglers from Kemal’s army; Greeks who got cut off in, the retreat. Very desperate fellows, I assure you.’
‘Do pinch me’,’ whispered Cordelia.
I pinched her and the agitation of the sofa-springs ceased. ‘Thanks,’ she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘So you never got to wherever-it-was,’ said Julia. ‘Weren’t you terribly disappointed, Sebastian?’
‘Me?’ said Sebastian from the shadows beyond the lamplight, beyond the warmth of the burning logs, beyond the family circle, and the photographs spread out on the card-table. ‘Me? Oh, I don’t think I was there that day, was I, Sammy?’
‘That was the day you were ill.’
‘I was ill,’ he repeated like an echo, ‘so I never should have got to wherever-it-was, should I, Sammy?’
‘Now this, Lady Marchmain, is the caravan at Aleppo in the courtyard of the inn. That’s our Armenian cook, Begedbian; that’s me on the pony; that’s the tent folded up; that’s a rather tiresome Kurd who would follow us about at the time…Here I am in Pontus, Ephesus, Trebizond, Krak-des-chevaliers, Samothrace, Batum — of course, I haven’t got them in chronological order yet.’
‘All guides and ruins and mules,’ said Cordelia. ‘Where’s Sebastian?’
‘He,’ said Mr Samgrass, with a hint of triumph in his voice, as though he had expected the question and prepared the answer, ‘he held the camera. He became quite an expert as soon as he learned not to put his hand over the lens, didn’t you, Sebastian?’ There was no answer from the shadows. Mr Samgrass delved again into his pigskin satchel.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘is a group taken by a street photographer on the terrace of the St George Hotel at Beirut. There’s Sebastian.’
‘Why,’ I said, ‘there’s Anthony Blanche surely?’
‘Yes, we saw quite a lot of him; met him by chance at Constantinople.’ A delightful companion. I can’t think how I missed knowing him. He came with us all the way to Beirut.’
Tea had been cleared away and the curtains drawn. It was two days after Christmas, the first evening of my visit; the first, too, of Sebastian’s and Mr Samgrass’s, whom to my surprise I had found on the platform when I arrived.
Lady Marchmain had written three weeks before: ‘I have just heard from Mr Samgrass that he and Sebastian will be home for Christmas as we hoped. I had not heard from them for so long that I was afraid they were lost and did not want to make any arrangements until I knew. Sebastian will be longing to see you. Do come to us for Christmas if you can manage it, or as soon after as you can.’
Christmas with my uncle was an engagement I could not break, so I travelled across country and joined the local train midway, expecting to find Sebastian already established; there he was, however, in the next carriage to mine, and when I asked him what he was doing, Mr Samgrass replied with such glibness and at such length, telling me of mislaid luggage and of Cook’s being shut over the holidays, that I was at once aware of some other explanation which was being withheld.