Brideshead Revisited(62)

‘It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, and he accepted everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn’t happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him. One has to take a chance sometimes with semi-imbeciles, for instance. You never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there’s someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance.’

‘How I wish Rex could hear this!’ said Cordelia.

‘But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed. Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He learned large bits of the catechism by heart, and the Lord’s Prayer, and the Hail Mary. Then I asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked at me in a crafty way and said, “Look, Father, I don’t think you’re being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I’m going to join your Church, but you’re holding too much back.” I asked what he meant, and he said: “I’ve had a long talk with a Catholic — a very pious well-educated one and I’ve learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that’s the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I’ll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d’you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a Cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone’s name on it, they get sent to hell. I don’t say there mayn’t be a good reason for all this,” he said, “but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself.”‘

‘What can the poor man have meant?’ said Lady Marchmain.

‘You see he’s a long way from the Church yet,’ said Father Mowbray.

‘But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia, what’s the matter?’

‘What a chump! Oh, mummy, what a glorious chump!’

‘Cordelia, it was you.’

‘Oh, mummy, who could have dreamed he’d swallow it? I told him such a lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican — all kinds of things.’

‘Well, you’ve very considerably increased my work,’ said Father Mowbray.

‘Poor Rex,’ said Lady Marchmain. ‘You know, I think it makes him rather lovable. You must treat him like an idiot child, Father Mowbray.’

So the instruction was continued, and Father Mowbray at length consented to receive Rex a week before his wedding.

‘You’d think they’d be all over themselves to have me in,’ Rex complained. ‘I can be a lot of help to them one way and another; instead they’re like the chaps who issue, cards for a casino. What’s more,’ he added, ‘Cordelia’s got me so muddled I don’t know what’s in the catechism and what she’s invented.’ Thus things stood three weeks before the wedding; the cards had gone out, presents were coming in fast, the bridesmaids were delighted with their dresses. Then came what Julia called ‘Bridey’s bombshell’.

With characteristic ruthlessness he tossed his load of explosive without warning into what, till then, had been a happy family party. The library at Marchmain House was being devoted to wedding presents; Lady Marchmain, Julia, Cordelia, and Rex were busy unpacking and listing them. Brideshead came in and watched them for a moment.

‘Chinky vases from Aunt Betty,’ said Cordelia. ‘Old stuff. I remember them on the stairs at Buckborne.’

‘What’s all this?’ asked Brideshead.

‘Mr, Mrs, and Miss Pendle-Garthwaite, one early morning tea set. Goode’s, thirty shillings, jolly mean.’

‘You’d better pack all that stuff up again.’

‘Bridey, what do you mean?’

‘Only that the wedding’s off.’

‘Bridey’

‘I thought I’d better make some inquiries about my prospective brother-in-law, as no one else seemed interested,’ said Brideshead. ‘I got the final answer tonight. He was married in Montreal in 1915 to a Miss Sarah Evangeline Cutler, who is still living there.’

‘Rex, is this true?’

Rex stood with a jade dragon in his hand looking at it critically; then he set it carefully on its ebony stand and smiled openly and innocently at them all.

‘Sure it’s true,’ he said. ‘What about it? What are you all looking so het up about? She isn’t a thing to me. She never meant any good. I was only a kid, anyhow. The sort of mistake anyone might make. I got my divorce back in 1919. I didn’t even know where she was living till Bridey here told me. What’s all the rumpus?’

‘You might have told me,’ said Julia.

‘You never asked. Honest, I’ve not given her a thought in years.

His sincerity was so plain that they had to sit down and talk about it calmly.

‘Don’t you realize, you poor sweet oaf,’ said Julia, ‘that you can’t get married as a Catholic when you’ve another wife alive?’