Brideshead Revisited(81)

‘No. As a matter of fact, I’ve never been at sea before except coming to New York and, of course, crossing the Channel. I don’t feel sick, thank God, but I feel tired. I thought at first it was only the massage, but I’m coming to the conclusion it’s the ship.’

‘My wife’s in a terrible way. She’s an experienced sailor. Only shows, doesn’t it?’

He joined us at luncheon, and I did not mind his being there; he had clearly taken a fancy to Julia, and he thought we were man and wife; this misconception and his gallantry seemed in some way to bring her and me closer together. ‘Saw you two last night at the Captain’s table,’ he said, ‘with all the nobs.’

‘Very dull nobs.’

‘If you ask me, nobs always are. When you get a storm like this you find out what people are really made of’

‘You have a predilection for good sailors?’

‘Well, put like that I don’t know that I do — what I mean is, it makes for getting together.’

‘Yes.’

‘Take us for example. But for this we might never have met. I’ve had some very romantic encounters at sea in my time. If the lady will excuse me, I’d like to tell you about a little adventure I had in the Gulf of Lions when I was younger than I am now.’

We were both weary; lack of sleep, the incessant din, and the strain every movement required, wore us down. We spent that afternoon apart in our cabins. I slept and when I awoke the sea was as high as ever, inky clouds swept over us, and the glass streamed still with water, but I had grown used to the storm In my sleep, had made its rhythm mine, had become part of it, so that I arose strongly and confidently and found Julia already up and in the same temper.

‘What d’you think?’ she said. ‘That man’s giving a little “get together party” tonight in the smoking-room for all the good sailors. He asked me to bring my husband.’

‘Are we going?’

‘Of course…I wonder if I ought to feel like the lady our friend met on the way to Barcelona. I don’t, Charles not a bit.’

There were eighteen people at the ‘get-together party’; we had nothing in common except immunity from seasickness. We drank champagne, and presently our host said: ‘Tell you what, I’ve got a roulette wheel. Trouble is we can’t go to my cabin on account of the wife, and we aren’t allowed to play in public.’

So the party adjourned to my sitting-room and we played for low stakes until late into the night, when Julia left and our host had drunk too much wine to be surprised that she and I were not in the same quarters. When all but he had gone, he fell asleep in his chair, and I left him there. It was the last I saw of him, for later — so the steward told me when he came from returning the roulette things to the man’s cabin — he broke his thigh, falling in the corridor, and was taken to the ship’s hospital.

All next day Julia and I spent together without interruption; talking, scarcely moving, held in our chairs by the swell of the sea. After luncheon the last hardy passengers went to rest and we were alone as though the place had been cleared for us, as though tact on a titanic scale had sent everyone tip-toeing out to leave us to one another.

The bronze doors of the lounge had been fixed, but not before two seamen had been badly injured. They had tried various devices, lashing with ropes and, later, when these failed, with steel hawsers, but there was nothing to which they could be made fast; finally, they drove wooden wedges under them, catching them in the brief moment of repose when they were full open, and these held firm.

When, before dinner, she went to her cabin to get ready (no one dressed that night) and I came with her, uninvited, unopposed, expected, and behind closed doors took her in my arms and first kissed her, there was no alteration from the mood of the afternoon. Later, turning it over in my mind, as I turned in my bed with the rise and fall of the ship, through the long, lonely, drowsy night, I recalled the courtships of the past, dead, ten years; how, knotting my tie before setting out, putting the gardenia in my buttonhole, I would plan my evening and think at such and such a time, at such and such an opportunity, I shall cross the start-line and open my attack for better or worse; ‘this phase of the battle has gone on long enough’, I would think; ‘a decision must be reached.’ With Julia there were no phases, no start-line, no tactics at all.

But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her door, she stopped me.

‘No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want love.’

Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years — for one cannot die, even for a little, without some loss made me say, ‘Love? I’m not asking for love.’

‘Oh yes, Charles, you are,’ she said, and putting up her hand gently stroked my cheek; then shut her door.

And I reeled back, first on one wall, then on the other, of the long, softly lighted, empty corridor; for the storm, it appeared, had the form of a ring; all day we had been sailing through its still centre; now we were once more in the full fury of the wind and that night was to be rougher than the one before.



Ten hours of talking: what had we to say? Plain fact mostly, the record of our two lives, so long widely separate, now being knit to one. Through all that storm-tossed night I rehearsed what she had told me; she was no longer the alternate succubus and starry, vision of the night before; she had given all that was transferable of her past into my keeping. She told me, as I have already retold, of her courtship and marriage; she told me, as though fondly turning the pages of an old nursery-book, of her childhood, and I lived long, sunny days with her in the meadows, with Nanny Hawkins on her camp stool and Cordelia asleep in the pram, slept quiet nights under the dome with the religious pictures fading round the cot as the nightlight burned low and the embers settled in the grate. She told me of her life with Rex and of the secret, vicious, disastrous escapade that had taken her to New York. She, too, had had her dead years. She told me of her long struggle with Rex as to whether she should have a child; at first she wanted one, but learned after a year that an operation was needed to make it possible; by that time Rex and she were out of love, but he still wanted his child, and when at last she consented, it was born dead.