Brideshead Revisited(91)

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘thank you. I think I am very fortunate.’

‘But when are we going to meet her? I do think you might have brought her down with you.’

He said nothing, sipped and gazed.

‘Bridey,’ said Julia. ‘You sly, smug old brute, why haven’t you brought her here?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, you know.’

‘Why couldn’t you? I’m dying to meet her. Let’s ring her up now and invite her. She’ll think us most peculiar leaving her alone at a time like this.’

‘She has the children,’ said Brideshead. ‘Besides, you are peculiar, aren’t you?’

‘What can you mean?’

Brideshead raised his head and looked solemnly at his sister, and continued in the same simple way, as though he were saying nothing particularly different from what had gone before, ‘I couldn’t ask her here, as things are. It wouldn’t be suitable. After all, I am a lodger here. This is Rex’s house at the moment, so far as it’s anybody’s. What goes on here is his business. But I couldn’t bring Beryl here.’

‘I simply don’t understand,’ said Julia rather sharply. I looked at her. All the gentle mockery had gone; she was alert, almost scared, it seemed. ‘Of course, Rex and I want her to come.’

‘Oh, yes, I don’t doubt that. The difficulty is quite otherwise.’

He finished his port, refilled his glass, and pushed the decanter towards me. ‘You must understand that Beryl is a woman of strict Catholic principle fortified by the prejudices of the middle class. I couldn’t possibly bring her here. It is a matter of indifference whether you choose to live in sin with Rex or Charles or both — I have always avoided inquiry into the details of your ménage — but in no case would Beryl consent to be your guest.’

Julia rose. ‘Why, you pompous ass…’ she said, stopped, and turned towards the door.

At first I thought she was overcome by laughter; then, as I opened the door to her, I saw with consternation that she was in tears. I hesitated. She slipped past me without a glance.

‘I may have given the impression that this was a marriage of convenience’ Brideshead continued placidly. I cannot speak for Beryl; no doubt the security of my position has some influence on her. Indeed, she has said as much. But for myself, let me emphasize, I am ardently attracted.’

‘Bridey, what a bloody offensive thing to say to Julia!’

‘There was nothing she should object to. I was merely stating a fact well known to her.’



She was not in the library; I mounted to her room, but she was not there. I paused by her laden dressing table wondering if she would come. Then through the open window, as the light streamed out across the terrace into the dusk, to the fountain which in that house seemed always to draw us to itself for comfort and refreshment I caught the glimpse of a white skirt against the stones. It was nearly night. I found her in the darkest refuge, on a wooden seat, in a bay of the clipped box which encircled the basin. I took her in my arms and she pressed her face to my heart.

‘Aren’t you cold out here?’

She did not answer, only clung closer to me, and shook with sobs.

‘My darling, what is it? Why do you mind? What does it matter what that old booby says?’

‘I don’t; it doesn’t. It’s just the shock. Don’t laugh at me.’ In the two years of our love, which seemed a lifetime, I had not seen her so moved or felt so powerless to help.

‘How dare he speak to you like that?’ I said. ‘The cold-blooded old humbug…’ But I was failing her in sympathy.

‘No,’ she said ‘it’s not that. He’s quite right. They know all about it, Bridey and his widow; they’ve got it in black and white; they bought it for a penny at the church door. You can get anything there for a penny, in black and white, and nobody to see that you pay; only an old woman with a broom at the other end, rattling round the confessionals, and a young woman lighting a candle at the Seven Dolours. Put a penny in the box, or not, just as you like; take your tract. There you’ve got it, in black and white.

‘All in one word, too, one little, flat, deadly word that covers a lifetime.

‘“Living in sin”; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting. That’s not what they mean. That’s not Bridey’s pennyworth. He means just what it says in black and white.

‘Living in sin, with sin, always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. “Poor Julia,” they say, “she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her sin. A pity it ever lived,” they say, “but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.”‘

‘An hour ago,’ I thought, ‘under the sunset, she sat turning her ring in the water and counting the days of happiness; now under the first stars and the last grey whisper of day, all this mysterious tumult of sorrow! What had happened to us in the Painted Parlour? What shadow had fallen in the candlelight? Two rough sentences and a trite phrase.’ She was beside herself; her voice, now muffled in my breast, now clear and anguished, came to me in single words and broken sentences.

‘Past and future; the years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the cigar smoke, while the counters clicked on the backgammon board, and the man who was “dummy” at the men’s table filled the glasses; when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead; putting him away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war coming, world ending — sin.