A sombre figure was there to meet us. ‘Papa’s valet, Plender.’
‘I met the express,’ said Plender. ‘His Lordship thought you must have looked up the train wrong. This seemed only to come from Milan.’
‘We travelled third.’
Plender tittered politely. ‘I have the gondola here’. I shall follow with the luggage in the vaporetto. His Lordship had gone to the Lido. He was not sure he would be home before you — that was when we expected you on the Express. He should be there by now.’
He led us to the waiting boat. The gondoliers wore green and white livery and silver plaques on their chests; they smiled and bowed.
‘Palazzo. Pronto.’
‘Si, signore Plender.’
And we floated away.
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘No.’
‘I came once before — from the sea. This is the way to arrive.’
‘Ecco ci siamo, signori.’
The palace was a little less than it sounded, a narrow Palladian facade, mossy steps, a dark archway of rusticated stone. One boatman leapt ashore, made fast to the post, rang the bell; the other stood on the prow keeping the craft in to the steps. The doors opened; a man in rather raffish summer livery of striped linen led us up the stairs from shadow into light; the piano nobile was in full sunshine, ablaze with frescoes of the school of Tintoretto.
Our rooms were on the floor above, reached by a precipitous marble staircase; they were shuttered against the afternoon sun; the butler threw them open and we looked out on the grand canal; the beds had mosquito nets.
‘Mostica not now.’
There was a little bulbous press in each room, a misty, gilt-framed mirror, and no other furniture. The floor was of bare marble slabs.
‘A bit bleak?’ asked Sebastian.
‘Bleak? Look at that.’ I led him again to the window and the incomparable pageant below and about us.
‘No’, you couldn’t call it bleak.’
A tremendous explosion drew us next door. We found a bathroom which seemed to have been built in a chimney. There was no ceiling; instead the walls ran straight through the floor above to the open sky. The butler was almost invisible in the steam of an antiquated geyser. There was an overpowering smell of gas and a tiny trickle of cold water.
‘No good.’
‘Si, Si, subito signori.’
The butler ran to the top of the staircase and began to shout down it; a female voice, more strident than his answered. Sebastian and I returned to the spectacle below our windows. Presently the argument came to an, end and a woman and child appeared, who smiled at us, scowled at the butler, and put on Sebastian’s press I a silver basin and ewer of boiling water. The butler meanwhile unpacked and folded our clothes and, lapsing into Italian, told us of the unrecognized merits of the geyser, until suddenly cocking his head sideways he became alert, said ‘Il marchese,’ and darted downstairs.
‘We’d better look respectable before meeting papa,’ said Sebastian. ‘We needn’t dress. I gather he’s alone at the moment.’
I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress. He was standing on the balcony of the saloon and, as he turned to greet us, his face was in deep shadow. I was aware only of a tall and upright figure.
‘Darling papa,’ said Sebastian, ‘how young you are looking!’
He kissed Lord Marchmain on the cheek and I, who had not kissed my father since I left the nursery, stood shyly behind him.
‘This is Charles. Don’t you think my father very handsome, Charles?’
Lord Marchmain shook my hand.
‘Whoever looked up your train,’ he said — and his voice also was Sebastian’s — ‘made a bêtise. There’s no such one.’
‘We came on it.’
‘You can’t have. There was only a slow train from Milan at that time. I was at the Lido. I have taken to playing tennis there with the professional in the early evening. It is the only time of day when it is not too hot. I hope you boys will be fairly comfortable upstairs. This house seems to have been designed for the comfort of only one person, and I am that one. I have a room the size of this and a very decent dressing-room. Cara has taken possession of the other sizeable room.’
I was fascinated to hear him speak of his mistress so simply and casually; later I suspected that it was done for effect, for me.
‘How is she?’
‘Cara? Well, I hope. She will be back with us tomorrow. She is visiting some American friends at a villa on the Brenta canal. Where shall we dine? We might go to the Luna, but it is filling up with English now. Would you be too dull at home? Cara is sure to want to go out tomorrow, and the cook here is really quite excellent.’
He had moved away from the window and now stood in the full evening sunlight, with the red damask of the walls behind him. It was a noble face, a controlled one, just, it seemed, as he planned it to be; slightly weary, slightly sardonic, slightly voluptuous. He seemed in the prime of life — it was odd to think that he was only a few years younger than my father.
We dined at a marble table in the windows; everything was either of marble, or velvet, or dull, gilt gesso, in this house. Lord Marchmain said, ‘And how do you plan your time here? Bathing or sight-seeing?’
‘Some sight-seeing, anyway,’ I said.
‘Cara will like that — she, as Sebastian will have told you, is your hostess here. You can’t do both, you know. Once you go to the Lido there is no escaping — you play backgammon, you get caught at the bar, you get stupefied by the sun. Stick to the churches.’
‘Charles is very keen on painting,.’ said Sebastian.
‘Yes?’ I noticed the hint of deep boredom which I knew so well in my own father. ‘Yes? Any particular Venetian painter?’
‘Bellini,’ I answered rather wildly.
‘Yes? Which?’
‘I’m afraid that I didn’t know there were two of them.’
‘Three to be precise. You will find that in the great ages painting was very much a family business. How did you leave England?’
‘It has been lovely,’ said Sebastian.
‘Was it? Was it? It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling-block to my own party. Well, my elder son will change all that, I’ve no doubt, if they leave him anything to inherit…Why, I wonder, are Italian sweets always thought to be so good? There was always an Italian pastry-cook at Brideshead until my father’s day. He had an Austrian, so much better. And now I suppose there is some British matron with beefy forearms.’
After dinner we left the palace by the street door and walked through a maze of bridges and squares and alleys, to Florian’s for coffee, and watched the grave crowds crossing and recrossing under the campanile. ‘There is nothing quite like a Venetian crowd,’ said Lord Marchmain. ‘The city is crawling with Anarchists, — but an American woman tried to sit here the other night with bare shoulders and they drove her away by coming to stare at her, quite silently; they were like circling gulls coming back and back to her, until she left. Our countrymen are much less dignified when they attempt to express moral disapproval.’
An English party had just then come from the waterfront, made for a table near us, and then suddenly moved to the other side, where they looked askance at us and talked with their heads close together. ‘That is a man and his wife I used to know when I was in politics. A prominent member of your church, Sebastian.’
As we went up to bed that night Sebastian said: ‘He’s rather a poppet, isn’t he?’
Lord Marchmain’s mistress arrived next day. I was nineteen years old and completely ignorant of women. I could not with an
y certainty recognize a prostitute in the streets. I was therefore not indifferent to the fact of living under the roof of an adulterous couple, but I was old enough to hide my interest. Lord Marchmain’s mistress, therefore, found me with a multitude of conflicting expectations about her all of which were, for the moment, disappointed by her appearance. She was not a voluptuous, Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a ‘little bit of fluff’; she was a middle-aged, well-preserved, well-dressed, well-mannered woman such as I had seen in countless public places and occasionally met. Nor did she seem marked by any social stigma. On the day of her arrival we lunched at the Lido, where she was greeted at almost every table.
‘Vittoria Corombona has asked us all to her ball on Saturday.’
‘It is very kind of her. You know I do not dance,’ said Lord Marchmain.
‘But for the boys? It is a thing to be seen — the Corombona palace lit up for the ball. One does not know how many such balls there will be in the future.’
‘The boys can do as they like. We must refuse.’
‘And I have asked Mrs Hacking Brunner to luncheon. She has a charming daughter. Sebastian and his friend will like her.’
‘Sebastian and his friend are more interested in Bellini than heiresses.’
‘But that is what I have always wished,’ said Cara, changing her point of attack adroitly. ‘I have been here more times than I can count and Alex has not once let me inside San Marco, even. We will become tourists, yes?’
We became tourists; Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman to whom all doors were open and with him at her side and a guide book in her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat, prosaic figure amid the immense splendours of the place.
The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly — perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the sidecanals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sunlit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging in the prow, and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at Harry’s bar.
I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying, ‘It’s rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war.’
I remember most particularly one conversation towards the end of my visit.
Sebastian had gone to play tennis with his father and Cara at last admitted to fatigue. We sat in the late afternoon at the windows overlooking the Grand Canal, she on the sofa with a piece of needlework, I in an armchair, idle. It was the first time we had been alone together.
‘I think you are very fond of Sebastian,’ she said.
‘Why, certainly.’
‘I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.’
She was so composed and matter-of-fact that I could not take her amiss, but I failed to find an answer. She seemed not to expect one but continued stitching, pausing sometimes to match the silk from a work-bag at her side.
‘It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl. Alex you see had it for a girl, for his wife. Do you think he loves me?’
‘Really, Cara, you ask the most embarrassing questions. How should I know? I assume…’
‘He does not. But not the littlest piece. Then why does he stay with me? I will tell you; because I protect him from Lady Marchmain. He hates her; but you can have no conception how he hates her. You would think him so calm and English — the milord, rather blasé, all passion dead, wishing to be comfortable and not to be worried, following the sun, with me to look after that one thing that no man can do for himself. My friend, he is a volcano of hate. He cannot breathe the same air as she. He will not set foot in England because it is her home; he can scarcely be happy with Sebastian because he is her son. But Sebastian hates her too.’
‘I’m sure you’re wrong there.’
‘He may not admit it to you. He may not admit it to himself; they are full of hate — hate of themselves. Alex and his family…Why do you think he will never go into Society?’
‘I always thought people had turned against him.’
‘My dear boy, you are very young. People turn against a handsome, clever, wealthy man like Alex? Never in your life. It is he who has driven them away. Even now they come back again and again to be snubbed and laughed at. And all for Lady Marchmain. He will not touch a hand which may have touched hers. When we have guests I see him thinking, “Have they perhaps just come from Brideshead? Are they on their way to Marchmain House? Will they speak of me to my wife? Are they a link between me and her whom I hate?” But, seriously, with my heart, that is how he thinks. He is mad. And how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up. I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.
‘When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood — innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. A woman has not all these ways of loving.
‘Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. We are comfortable.
‘Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny and he is nineteen years old…’
She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so that she could look down at the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones: ‘How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love,’ and then added with a sudden swoop to earth, ‘Sebastian drinks too much.’
‘I suppose we both do.’
‘With you it does not matter. I have watched you together. With Sebastian it is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him. I have known so many. Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me; it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your way.’
We arrived in London on the day before term began. On the way from Charing Cross I dropped Sebastian in the forecourt of his mother’s house; ‘Here is “Marchers”,’ he said with a sigh which meant the end of a holiday. ‘I won’t ask you in, the place is probably full of my family. We’ll meet at Oxford’; I drove across the park to my home.
My father greeted me with, his usual air of mild regret.
‘Here today,’ he said; ‘gone tomorrow. I seem to see very little of you. Perhaps it is dull for you here. How could it be otherwise? You have enjoyed yourself.’
‘Very much. I went to Venice.’
‘Yes. Yes. I suppose so. The weather was fine?’ When he went to bed after an evening of silent study, he paused to ask: ‘The friend you were so much concerned about, did he die?’
‘No.’
‘I am very thankful. You should have written to tell me. I worried about him so much.’
CHAPTER 5
Autumn in Oxford — dinner with Rex Mottram and supper with Boy Mulcaster — Mr Samgrass — Lady Marchmain at home — Sebastian contra mundum
‘IT is typical of Oxford,’ I said, ‘to start the new year in autumn.’
Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves we
re falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.
The autumnal mood possessed us both as though the riotous exuberance of June had died with the gillyflowers whose scent at my windows now yielded to the damp leaves, smouldering in a corner of the quad.
It was the first Sunday evening of term.
‘I feel precisely one hundred years old,’ said Sebastian.
He had come up the night before, a day earlier than I, and this was our first meeting since we parted in the taxi.
‘I’ve had a talking to from Mgr Bell this afternoon. That makes the fourth since I came up — my tutor, the junior dean, Mr Samgrass of All Souls, and now Mgr Bell.’
‘Who is Mr Samgrass of All Souls?’
‘Just someone of mummy’s. They all say that I made a very bad start last year, that I have been noticed, and that if I don’t mend my ways I shall get sent down. How does one mend one’s ways? I suppose one joins the League of Nations Union, and reads the Isis every week, and drinks coffee in the morning at the Cadena café, and smokes a great pipe and plays hockey and goes out to tea on Boar’s Hill and to lectures at Keble, and rides a bicycle with a little tray full of notebooks and drinks cocoa in the evening and discusses sex seriously. Oh, Charles, what has happened since last term? I feel so old.’