Brideshead Revisited(64)

‘Poor mummy behaved like a martyr and insisted on my having her lace in spite of everything. Well, she more or less had to — the dress had been planned round it. My own friends came, of course, and the curious accomplices Rex called his friends; the rest of the party were very oddly assorted. None of mummy’s family came, of course, one or two of papa’s. All the stuffy people stayed away — you know, the Anchorages and Chasms and Vanbrughs — and I thought, “Thank God for that, they always look down their noses at me, anyhow,” but Rex was furious, because it was just them he wanted apparently.

‘I hoped at one moment there’d be no party at all. Mummy said we couldn’t use Marchers, and Rex wanted to telegraph papa and invade the place with an army of caterers headed by the family solicitor. In the end it was decided to have a party the evening before at home to see the presents — apparently that was all right according to Father Mowbray. Well, no one can ever resist going to see her own present, so that was quite a success, but the reception Rex gave next day at the Savoy for the wedding guests was very squalid.

‘There was great awkwardness about the tenants. In the end Bridey went down and gave them a dinner and bonfire there which wasn’t at all what they expected in return for their silver soup tureen.

‘Poor Cordelia took it hardest. She had looked forward so much to being my bridesmaid — it was a thing we used to talk about long before I came out — and of course she was a very pious child, too. At first she wouldn’t speak to me. Then on the morning of the wedding — I’d moved to Aunt Fanny Rosscommon’s the evening before; it was thought more suitable — she, came bursting in before I was up, straight from Farm Street, in floods of tears, begged me not to marry, then hugged me, gave me a dear little brooch she’d bought, and said she prayed I’d always be happy. Always happy, Charles!

‘It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took mummy’s side, as everyone always did — not that she got any benefit from it. All through her life mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she loved. They all said I’d behaved abominably to her. In fact, poor Rex found he’d married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he’d wanted.

‘So you see things never looked like going right. There was a hoodoo on us from the start. But I was still nuts about Rex.

‘Funny to think of, isn’t it?

‘You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

‘Well, it’s all over now.’

It was ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the Atlantic.





CHAPTER 3




Mulcaster and I in defence of our country — Sebastian abroad — I take leave of Marchmain House



I RETURNED to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.

It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom, and, in the cafés, acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: ‘Ha, my friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?’ until I and several friends in circumstances like my own came seriously to believe that our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.

We crossed together, in a high-spirited, male party, expecting to find unfolding before us at Dover the history so often repeated of late, with so few variations, from all parts of Europe, that I, at any rate, had formed in my mind a clear, composite picture of ‘Revolution’ — the red flag on the post office, the overturned tram, the drunken N.C.O.s, the gaol open and gangs of released criminals prowling the streets, the train from the capital that did not arrive. One had read it in the papers, seen it in the films, heard it at café tables again and again for six or seven years now, till it had become part of one’s experience, at second hand, like the mud of Flanders and the flies of Mesopotamia.

Then we landed and met the old routine of the customs-shed, the punctual boat-train, the porters lining the platform at Victoria and converging on the first-class carriages; the long line of waiting taxis.

‘We’ll separate,’ we said, and see what’s happening. We’ll meet and compare notes at dinner,’ but we knew already in our hearts that nothing was happening; nothing, at any rate, which needed our presence.

‘Oh dear,’ said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, ‘how delightful to see you again so soon.’ (I had been abroad fifteen months.) ‘You’ve come at a very awkward time, you know. They’re having another of those strikes in two days — such a lot of nonsense — and I don’t know when you’ll be able to get away.’

I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there — for I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a gar?onnière in Auteuil — and wished I had not come.