Brideshead Revisited(76)

‘Celia wanted me to unpack some and stick them round the cabin for her cocktail party. I couldn’t do that.’

‘No…is Celia as pretty as ever? I always thought she had the most delicious looks of any girl of my year.’

‘She hasn’t changed.’

‘You have, Charles. So lean and grim; not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him. Harder, too.’

‘And you’re softer.’

‘Yes, I think so…and very patient now.’

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head that I used to think quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine; not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.

Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of la Gioconda; the years had been more than ‘the sound of lyres and flutes’, and had saddened her. She seemed to say: ‘Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?’

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.

‘Sadder, too,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, much sadder.’



My wife was in exuberant spirits when, two hours later, I returned to the cabin.

‘I’ve had to do everything. How does it look?’

We had been given, without paying more for it, a large suite of rooms, one so large, in fact, that it was seldom booked except by directors of the line, and on most voyages, the chief purser admitted, was given to those he wished to honour. (My wife was adept in achieving such small advantages, first impressing the impressionable with her chic and my celebrity and, superiority once firmly established, changing quickly to a pose of almost flirtatious affability.) In token of her appreciation the chief purser had, been asked to our party and he, in token of his appreciation, had sent before him the life-size effigy of a swan, moulded in ice and filled with caviar. This chilly piece of magnificence now dominated the room, standing on a table in the centre, thawing gently, dripping at the beak into its silver dish. The flowers of the morning delivery hid as much as possible of the panelling (for this room was a miniature of the monstrous hall above).

‘You must get dressed at once. Where have you been all this time?’

‘Talking to Julia Mottram.’

‘D’you know her? Oh, of course, you were a friend of the dipso brother. Goodness, her glamour!’

‘She greatly admires your looks, too.’

‘She used to be a girl friend of Boy’s.’

‘Surely not?’

‘He always said so.’

‘Have you considered,’ I asked, ‘how your guests are going to eat this caviar?’

‘I have. It’s insoluble. But there’s all this’ — she revealed some trays of glassy titbits — ‘and anyway, people always find ways of eating things at parties. D’you remember we once ate potted shrimps with a paper knife?’

‘Did we?’

‘Darling’ it was the night you popped the question.’

‘As I remember, you popped.’

‘Well, the night we got engaged. But you haven’t said how you like the, arrangements.’

The arrangements, apart from the swan and the flowers, consisted of a steward already inextricably trapped in the corner behind an improvised bar, and another steward, tray in hand, in comparative freedom.

‘A cinema actor’s dream,’ I said.

‘Cinema actors,’ said my wife; ‘that’s what I want to talk about.’

She came with me to my dressing-room and talked while I changed. It had occurred to her that, with my interest in architecture, my true métier was designing scenery for the films, and she had asked two Hollywood magnates to the party with whom she wished to ingratiate me.

We returned to the sitting-room.

‘Darling, I believe you’ve taken against my bird. Don’t be beastly about it in front of the purser. It was sweet of him to think of it. Besides, you know, if you had read about it in the description of a sixteenth-century banquet in Venice, you would have said those were the days to live.’

‘In sixteenth-century Venice it would have been a somewhat different shape.’

‘Here is Father Christmas. We were just in raptures over your swan.’

The chief purser came into the room and shook hands, powerfully.

‘Dear Lady Celia,’ he said, ‘if you’ll put on your warmest clothes and come on an expedition into the cold storage with me tomorrow, I can show you a whole Noah’s Ark of such objects. The toast will be along in a minute. They’re keeping it hot.’

‘Toast!’ said my wife, as though this was something beyond the dreams of gluttony. ‘Do you hear that Charles? Toast.’

Soon the guests began to arrive; there was nothing to delay them. ‘Celia,’ they said, ‘what a grand cabin and what a beautiful swan!’ and, for all that it was one of the largest in the ship, our room was soon painfully crowded; they began to put out their cigarettes in the little pool of ice-water which now surrounded the swan.