Brideshead Revisited(57)
At the beginning of May the engagement was announced. I saw the notice in the Continental Daily Mail and assumed that Rex had ‘squared the old man’. But things did not go as were expected. The next news I had of them was in the middle of June, when I read that they had been married very quietly at the Savoy Chapel. No royalty was present; nor was the Prime Minister; nor were any of Julia’s family. It sounded like a ‘hole-in-the-corner’ affair, but it was not for several years that I heard the full story.
CHAPTER 2
Julia and Rex
IT is time to speak of Julia, who till now has played an intermittent and somewhat enigmatic part in Sebastian’s drama. It was thus she appeared to me at the time, and I to her. We pursued separate aims which brought us near to one another, but we remained strangers. She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one’s attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and, saying ‘I must read that, too, when I’ve the time,’ replace it, and continue the search. On my side the interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand out clear and firm.
She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not reduce her to type.
When I first met her, when she met me in the station yard and drove me home through the twilight, that high summer of 1923, she was just eighteen and fresh from her first London season.
Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things were getting into their stride again. Julia was at the centre of it. There were then remaining perhaps half a dozen London houses which could be called ‘historic’; Marchmain House in St James’s was one of them, and the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a splendid series.
How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that summer; London could wait, I thought.
The other great houses belonged to kinsmen or to childhood friends of Julia’s, and besides them there were countless substantial houses in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia, alight and thronged, one or other of them, night after night. Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed lost forever, among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the tress, part of the candlelight in the mirror’s spectrum, so that elderly men and women sitting aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird. ‘“Bridey” Marchmain’s eldest girl,’ they said. ‘Pity he can’t see her tonight.’
That night and the night after, wherever she went always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought a moment of Joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked., but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
She had no interest in me that evening; the jinn rumbled below us uncalled; she lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls laboriously carved in China; a little problem troubling her mind — little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry. Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf past, present, and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and women; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.
‘If only one lived abroad,’ she thought, ‘where these things are arranged between parents and lawyers.’
To be married, soon and splendidly, was the aim of all her friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one’s spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.
She outshone by far all the girls of her age, but she knew that, in that little world within a world which she inhabited, there were certain grave disabilities from which she suffered. On the sofas against the wall where the old people counted up the points, there were things against her. There was the scandal of her father; that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness that seemed deepened by something in her own way of life — waywardness and wilfulness, a less disciplined habit than most of her contemporaries; but for that, who knows?…