Brideshead Revisited(69)

‘He’s so patient. Not like a young man at all. He ties there and never complains — and there is much to complain of. We have no facilities. The Government give us what they can spare from kind. There is a poor German boy with the soldiers. And he is so kind. There is a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal and secondary syphilis, who comes here for treatment. Lord Flyte found him starving in Tangier and took him in and gave him a home. A real Samaritan.’

‘Poor simple monk,’ I thought, ‘poor booby.’ God forgive me!

Sebastian was in the wing kept for Europeans, where the beds were divided by low partitions into cubicles with some air of privacy. He was lying with his hands on the quilt staring at the wall, where the only ornament was a religious oleograph.

‘Your friend,’ said the brother.

He looked round slowly.

‘Oh, I thought he meant Kurt. What are you doing here, Charles?’

He was more than ever emaciated; drink, which made others fat and red, seemed to wither Sebastian. The brother left us, and I sat by his bed and talked about his illness.

‘I was out of my mind for a day or two,’ he said. ‘I kept thinking I was back in Oxford. You went to my house? Did you like it? Is Kurt still there? I won’t ask you if you liked Kurt; no one does. It’s funny — I couldn’t get on without him, you know.’

Then I told him about his mother. He said nothing for some time, but lay gazing at the oleograph of the Seven Dolours. Then:

‘Poor mummy. She really was a femme fatale, wasn’t she? She killed at a touch.’

I telegraphed to Julia that Sebastian was unable to travel and stayed a week at Fez, visiting the hospital daily until he was well enough to move. His first sign of returning strength, on the second day of my visit, was to ask for brandy. By next day he had got some, some how, and kept it under the bedclothes.

The doctor said: ‘Your friend is drinking again. It is forbidden here. What can I do? This is not a reformatory school. I cannot police the wards. I am here to cure people, not to protect them from vicious habits, or teach them self-control. Cognac will not hurt him now. It will make him weaker for the next time he is ill, and then one day some little trouble will carry him off, pouff. This is not a home for inebriates. He must go at the end of the week.’

The lay-brother said: ‘Your friend is so much happier today, it is like one transfigured.’

‘Poor simple monk,’ I thought, ‘poor booby’; but he added, ‘You know why? He has a bottle of cognac in bed with him. It is the second I have found. No sooner do I take one away than he gets another. He is so naughty. It is the Arab boys who fetch it for him. But it is good to see him happy again when he has been so sad.’

On my last afternoon I said, ‘Sebastian, now your mother’s dead’ — for the news had reached us that morning — ‘do you think of going back to England?’

‘It would be lovely, in some ways,’ he said, ‘but do you think Kurt would like it?’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘you don’t mean to spend your life with Kurt, do you?’

‘I don’t know. He seems to mean to spend it with me. “It’th all right for him, I reckon, maybe,”‘ he said, mimicking Kurt’s accent, and then he added what, if I had paid more attention, should have given me the key I lacked; at the time I heard and remembered it, without taking notice. ‘You know, Charles,’ he said, ‘it’s rather a pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.’

I was able to straighten his money affairs before I left. He had lived till then by getting into difficulties and then telegraphing for odd sums to his lawyers. I saw the branch manager of the bank and arranged for him, if funds were forthcoming from London, to receive Sebastian’s quarterly allowance and pay him a weekly sum of pocket money with a reserve to be drawn in emergencies. This sum was only to be given to Sebastian personally, and only when the manager was satisfied that he had a proper use for it. Sebastian agreed readily to all this.

‘Otherwise,’ he said, ‘Kurt will get me to sign a cheque for the whole lot when I’m tight and then he’ll go off and get into all kinds of trouble.’

I saw Sebastian home from the hospital. He seemed weaker in his basket chair than he had been in bed. The two sick men, he and Kurt, sat opposite one another with the gramophone between them.

‘It was time you came back,’ said Kurt. ‘I need you.’

‘Do you, Kurt?’

‘I reckon so. It’s not so good being alone when you’re sick. That boy’s a lazy fellow — always slipping off when I want him. Once he stayed out all night and there was no one to make my coffee when I woke up. It’s no good having a foot full of pus. Times I can’t sleep good. Maybe another time I shall slip off, too, and go where I can be looked after.’ He clapped his hands but no servant came. ‘You see?’ he said.

‘What d’you want?’

‘Cigarettes. I got some in the bag under my bed.’

Sebastian began painfully to rise from his chair.

‘I’ll get them,’ I said. ‘Where’s his bed?’

‘No, that’s my job,’ said Sebastian.