Brideshead Revisited(71)
‘What’s going to happen to you?’
‘What, indeed? There are all kinds of suggestions. Aunt Fanny Rosscommon wants me to live with her. Then Rex and Julia talk of taking over half Brideshead and living there. Papa won’t come back. We thought he might, but no.
‘They’ve closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop; mummy’s Requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the priest came in — I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me — and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy-water stoop and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary, and left the tabernacle open, and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like. You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas…it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it.’
‘Still trying to convert me, Cordelia?’
‘Oh, no. That’s all over, too. D’you know what papa said when he became a Catholic? Mummy told me once. He said to her: “You have brought back my family to the faith of their ancestors.” Pompous, you know. It takes people different ways. Anyhow, the family haven’t been very constant, have they? There’s him gone and Sebastian gone and Julia gone. But God won’t let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk I mean the bad evening. “Father Brown” said something like “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”‘
We scarcely mentioned her mother. All the time we talked, she ate voraciously. Once she said:
‘Did you see Sir Adrian Porson’s poem in The Times? It’s funny: he knew her best of anyone — he loved her all his life, you know — and yet it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with her at all.
‘I got on best with her of any of us, but I don’t believe I ever really loved her. Not as she wanted or deserved. It’s odd I didn’t, because I’m full of natural affections.’
‘I never really knew your Mother,’ I said.
‘You didn’t like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated mummy.’
‘What do you mean by that, Cordelia?’
‘Well, you see, she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate him and his saints, they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that. I suppose you think that’s all bosh.’
‘I heard almost the same thing once before — from someone very different.’
‘Oh, I’m quite serious. I’ve thought about it a lot. It seems to explain poor mummy.’
Then this odd child tucked into her dinner with renewed relish. ‘First time I’ve ever been taken out to dinner alone at a restaurant,’ she said.
Later: ‘When Julia heard they were selling Marchers she said: “Poor Cordelia. She won’t have her coming-out ball there after all.” It’s a thing we used to talk about — like my being her bridesmaid. That didn’t come off either. When Julia had her ball I was allowed down for an hour, to sit in the corner with Aunt Fanny, and she said, “In six years’ time you’ll have all this.”…I hope I’ve got a vocation.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It means you can be a nun. If you haven’t a vocation it’s no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can’t get away from it, however much you hate it. Bridey thinks he has a vocation and hasn’t. I used to think Sebastian had and hated it — but I don’t know now. Everything has changed so much suddenly.’
But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening — of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hairsplitting speech.
‘You’ll fall in love,’ I said.
‘Oh, pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?’
BOOK THREE
A TWITCH UPON THE THREAD
CHAPTER 1
Orphans of the Storm
MY theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of wartime.
These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning of wartime.