Brideshead Revisited(82)

‘Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally,’ she said. ‘It’s just that he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there. He couldn’t imagine why it hurt me to find two months after we came back to London from our honeymoon, that he was still keeping up with Brenda Champion.’

‘I was glad when I found Celia was unfaithful,’ I said. ‘I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.’

‘Is she? Do you? I’m glad. I don’t like her either. Why did you marry her?’

‘Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she’s the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.’

‘You loved him, didn’t you?’

‘Oh yes. He was the forerunner.’

Julia understood.

The ship creaked and shuddered, rose and fell. My wife called to me from the next room: ‘Charles, are you there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve been asleep such a long while. What time is it?’

‘Half past three.’

‘It’s no better, is it?’

‘Worse.’

‘I feel a little better, though. D’you think they’d bring me some tea or something if I rang the bell?’

I got her some tea and biscuits from the night steward.

‘Did you have an amusing evening?’

‘Everyone’s seasick.’

‘Poor Charles. It was going to have been such a lovely trip, too. It may be better tomorrow.’

I turned out the light and shut the door between us.

Waking and dreaming, through the strain and creak and heave of the long night, firm on my back with my arms and legs spread wide to check the roll, and my eyes open to the darkness, I lay thinking of Julia.

‘…We thought papa might come back to England after mummy died, or that he might marry again, but he lives just as he did. Rex and I often go to see him now. I’ve grown fond-of him… Sebastian’s disappeared completely…Cordelia’s in Spain with an ambulance…Bridey leads his own extraordinary life. He wanted to shut Brideshead after mummy died, but papa wouldn’t have it for some reason, so Rex and I live there now, and Bridey has two rooms up in the dome, next to Nanny Hawkins, part of the old nurseries. He’s like a character from Chekhov. One meets him sometimes coming out of the library or on the stairs — I never know when he’s at home — and now and then he suddenly comes in to dinner like a ghost quite unexpectedly.

‘…Rex’s parties! Politics and money. They can’t do anything except for money; if they walk round the lake they have to make bets about how many swans they see…sitting up till two, amusing Rex’s girls, hearing them gossip, rattling away endlessly on the backgammon board while the men play cards and smoke cigars. The cigar smoke. I can smell it in my hair when I wake up in the morning; it’s in my clothes when I dress at night. Do I smell of it now? D’you think that woman who rubbed me, felt it in my skin?

‘…At first I used to stay away with Rex in his friends’ houses. He doesn’t make me any more. He was ashamed of me when he found I didn’t cut the kind of figure he wanted, ashamed of himself for having been taken in. I wasn’t at all the article he’d bargained for. He can’t see the point of me, but whenever he’s made up his mind there isn’t a point and he’s begun to feel comfortable, he gets a surprise — some man, or even woman, he respects, takes a fancy to me and he suddenly sees that there is a whole world of things we understand and he doesn’t … he was upset when I went away. He’ll be delighted to have me back. I was faithful to’ him until this last thing came along. There’s nothing like a good upbringing. Do you know last year, when I thought I was going to have a child, I’d decided to have it brought up a Catholic? I hadn’t thought about religion before; I haven’t since; but just at that time, when I was waiting for the birth, I thought, “That’s one thing I can give her. It doesn’t seem to have done me much good, but my child shall have it.” It was odd, wanting to give something one had — lost oneself. Then, in the end, I couldn’t even give that: I couldn’t even give her life. I never saw her; I was too ill to know what was going on, and afterwards, for a long time, until now, I didn’t want to speak about her — she was a daughter, so Rex didn’t so much mind her being dead.

‘I’ve been punished a little for marrying Rex. You see, I can’t get all that sort of thing out of my mind, quite — Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell, Nanny Hawkins, and the catechism. It becomes part of oneself, if they give it one early enough. And yet I wanted my child to have it…now I suppose I shall be punished for what I’ve just done. Perhaps that is why you and I are here together like this…part of a plan.’

That was almost the last thing she said to me — ‘part of a plan’ — before we went below and I left her at the cabin door.



Next day the wind had again dropped, and again we were wallowing in the swell. The talk was less of seasickness now than of broken bones; people had been thrown about in the night, and there had been many nasty accidents on bathroom floors.

That day, because we had talked so much the day before and because what we had to say needed few words, we spoke little. We had books; Julia found a game she liked. When after long silences we spoke, our thoughts, we found, had kept pace together side by side.