‘I feel middle-aged. That is infinitely worse. I believe we have had all the fun we can expect here.’
We sat silent in the firelight as darkness fell.
‘Anthony Blanche has gone down.’
‘Why?’
‘He wrote to me. Apparently he’s taken a flat in Munich — he has formed an attachment to a policeman there.’
‘I shall miss him.’
‘I suppose I shall, too, in a way.’
We fell silent again and sat so still in the firelight that a man who came in to see me, stood for a moment in the door and then went away thinking the room empty.
‘This is no way to start a new year,’ said Sebastian; but this sombre October evening seemed to breathe its chill, moist air over the succeeding-weeks. All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows and, like a fetish, hidden first from the missionary and at length forgotten, the toy bear, Aloysius, sat unregarded on the chest-of-drawers in Sebastian’s bedroom.
There was a change in both of us. We had lost the sense of discovery which had infused the anarchy of our first year. I began to settle down.
Unexpectedly, I missed my cousin Jasper, who had got his first in Greats and was now cumbrously setting about a life of public mischief in London; I needed him to shock; without that massive presence the college seemed to lack solidity; it no longer provoked and gave point to outrage as it had done in the summer. Moreover, I had come back glutted and a little chastened; with the resolve to go slow. Never again would I expose myself to my father’s humour; his whimsical persecution had convinced me, as no rebuke could have done, of the folly of living beyond my means. I had had no talking-to this term; my success in History Previous and a beta minus in one of my Collections papers had put me on easy terms with my tutor which I managed to maintain without undue effort.
I kept a tenuous connection with the History School, wrote my two essays a week, and attended an occasional lecture. Besides this I started my second year by joining the Ruskin School of Art; two or three mornings a week we melt, about a dozen of us — half, at least, the daughters of north Oxford among the casts from the antique at the Ashmolean Museum; twice a week we drew from the nude in a small room over a teashop; some pains were taken by the authorities to exclude any hint of lubricity on these evenings, and the young woman who sat to us was brought from London for the day and not allowed to reside in the University city; one flank, that nearer the oil stove, I remember, was always rosy and the other mottled and puckered as though it had been plucked. There, in the smell of the oil lamp, we sat astride the donkey stools and evoked a barely visible wraith of Trilby. My drawings were worthless; in my own rooms I designed elaborate little pastiches, some of which, preserved by friends of the period, come to light occasionally to embarrass me.
We were instructed by a man of about my age, who treated us with defensive hostility; he wore very dark blue shirts, a lemon-yellow tie, and horn-rimmed glasses, and it was largely by reason of this warning that I modified my own style of dress until it approximated to what my cousin jasper would have thought suitable for country-house visiting. Thus soberly dressed and happily employed I became a fairly respectable member of my college.
With Sebastian it was different. His year of anarchy had filled a deep, interior need of his, the escape from reality, and as he found himself increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times listless and morose, even with me.
We kept very much to our own company that term, each so much bound up in the other that we did not look elsewhere for friends. My cousin Jasper had told me that it was normal to spend one’s second year shaking off the friends of one’s first, and it happened as he said. Most of my friends were those I had made through Sebastian; together we shed them and made no others. There was no renunciation. At first we seemed to see them as often as ever; we went to parties but gave few of our own. I was not concerned to impress the new freshmen who, like their London sisters were here being launched in Society; there were strange faces now at every party and I, who a few months back had been voracious of new acquaintances, now felt surfeited; even our small circle of intimates, so lively in the summer sunshine, seemed dimmed and muted now in the pervading fog, the river-borne twilight that softened and obscured all that year for me. Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had always been a stranger, needed him now.
The Charity matinée was over, I felt; the impresario had buttoned his astrakhan coat and taken his fee and the disconsolate ladies of the company were without a leader. Without him they forgot their cues and garbled their lines; they needed him to ring the curtain up at the right moment; they needed him to direct the lime-lights they needed his whisper in the wings, and his imperious eye on the leader of the band; without him there were no photographers from the weekly press, no prearranged goodwill and expectation of pleasure. No stronger bond held them together than common service; now the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead. For a few happy hours of rehearsal, for a few ecstatic minutes of performance, they had played splendid parts, their own great ancestors, the famous paintings they were thought to resemble; now it was over and in the bleak light of day they must go back to their homes; to the husband who came to London too often, to the lover who lost at cards, and to the child who grew too fast.
Anthony Blanche’s set broke up and became a bare dozen lethargic, adolescent Englishmen. Sometimes in later life they would say: ‘Do you remember that extraordinary fellow we used all to know at Oxford — Anthony Blanche? I wonder what became of him.’ They lumbered back into the herd from which they had been so capriciously chosen and grew less and less individually recognizable. The change was not so apparent to them as to us, and they still congregated on occasions in our rooms; but we gave up seeking them. Instead we formed the taste for lower company and spent our evenings, as often as not, in Hogarthian little inns in St Ebb’s and St Clement’s and the streets between the old market and the canal, where we managed to be gay and were, I believe, well liked by the company. The Gardener’s Arms and the Nag’s Head, the Druid’s Head near the theatre, and the Turf in Hell Passage knew us well; but in the last of these we were liable to meet other undergraduates pub-crawling hearties from BNC — and Sebastian became possessed by a kind of phobia, like that which sometimes comes over men in uniform against their own service, so that many an evening was spoilt by their intrusion, and he would leave his glass half empty and turn sulkily back to college.
It was thus that Lady Marchmain found us when, early in that Michaelmas term, she came for a week to Oxford. She found Sebastian subdued, with all his host of friends reduced to one, myself. She accepted me as Sebastian’s friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.
Her business in Oxford was with Mr Samgrass of All Souls, who now began to play an increasingly large part in our lives. Lady Marchmain was engaged in making a memorial book for circulation among her friends, about her brother, Ned, the eldest of three legendary heroes all killed between Mons and Passchendaele; he had left a, quantity of papers — poems, letters, speeches, articles; to edit them, even for a restricted circle, needed tact and countless decisions in which the judgement of an adoring sister was liable to err. Acknowledging this, she had sought outside advice, and Mr Samgrass had been found to help her.
He was a young history don, a short, plump man, dapper in dress, with sparse hair brushed flat on an over-large head, neat hands, small feet, and the general appearance of being too often bathed. His manner was genial and his speech idiosyncratic. We came to know him well.
It was Mr Samgrass’s particular aptitude to help others with their work, but he was himself the author of several stylish little
books. He was a great delver in muniment-rooms and had a sharp nose for the picturesque. Sebastian spoke less than the truth when he described him as ‘someone of mummy’s’; he was someone of almost everyone’s who possessed anything to attract him.
Mr Samgrass was a genealogist and a legitimist; he loved dispossessed royalty and knew the exact validity of the rival claims of the pretenders to many thrones; he was not a man of religious habit, but he knew more than most Catholics about their Church; he had friends in the Vatican and could talk at length of policy and appointments, saying which contemporary ecclesiastics were in good favour, which in bad, what recent theological hypothesis was suspect, and how this or that Jesuit or Dominican had skated on thin ice or sailed near the wind in his Lenten discourses; he had everything except the Faith, and later liked to attend benediction in the chapel of Brideshead and see the ladies of the family with their necks arched in devotion under their black lace mantillas; he loved forgotten scandals in high life and was an expert in putative parentage; he claimed to love the past, but I always felt that he thought all the splendid company, living or dead, with whom he associated slightly absurd; it was Mr Samgrass who was real, the rest were an insubstantial pageant. He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded. And there was something a little too brisk about his literary manners; I suspected the existence of a dictaphone somewhere in his panelled rooms.
He was with Lady Marchmain when I first met them, and I thought then that she could not have found a greater contrast to herself than this intellectual-on-the-make, nor a better foil to her own charm. It was not her way to make a conspicuous entry into anyone’s life, but towards the end of that week Sebastian said rather sourly: ‘You and mummy seem very thick,’ and I realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it. By the time that she left I had promised to spend all next vacation, except Christmas itself, at Brideshead.
One Monday morning a week or two later I was in Sebastian’s room waiting for him to return from a tutorial, when Julia walked in, followed by a large man whom she introduced as ‘Mr Mottram’ and addressed as ‘Rex’. They were motoring up from a house where they had spent the week-end, they explained. Rex Mottram was warm and confident in a check ulster; Julia cold and rather shy in furs; she made straight for the fire and crouched over it shivering.
‘We hoped Sebastian might give us luncheon,’ she said. ‘Failing him we can always try Boy Mulcaster, but I somehow thought we should eat better with Sebastian, and we’re very hungry. We’ve been literally starved all the week-end at the Chasms.’
‘He and Sebastian are both lunching with me. Come too.’
So, without demur, they joined the party in my rooms, one of the last of the old kind that I gave. Rex Mottram exerted himself to make an impression. He was a handsome fellow with dark hair growing low on his forehead and heavy black eyebrows. He spoke with an engaging Canadian accent. One quickly learned all that he wished one to know about him, that he was a lucky man with money, a member of parliament, a gambler, a good fellow; that he played golf regularly with the Prince of Wales and was on easy terms with ‘Max’ and ‘F.E.’ and ‘Gertie’ Lawrence and Augustus John and Carpentier — with anyone, it seemed, who happened to be mentioned. Of the University he said: ‘No, I was never here. It just means you start life three years behind the other fellow.’
His life, so far as he made it known, began in the war, where he had got a good M.C. serving with the Canadians and had ended as A.D.C. to a popular general.
He cannot have been more than thirty at the time we met him, but he seemed very old to us in Oxford. Julia treated him, as she seemed to treat all the world, with mild disdain, but with an air of possession. During luncheon she sent him to the car for her cigarettes, and once or twice when he was talking very big, she apologized for him, saying: ‘Remember he’s a colonial,’ to which he replied with boisterous laughter.
When he had gone I asked who he was.
‘Oh, just someone of Julia’s,’ said Sebastian.
We were slightly surprised a week later to get a telegram from him asking us and Boy Mulcaster to dinner in London on the following night for ‘a party of Julia’s’.
‘I don’t think he knows anyone young,’ said Sebastian; ‘all his friends are leathery old sharks in the City and the House of Commons. Shall we go?’
We discussed it, and because our life at Oxford was now so much in the shadows, we decided that we would.
‘Why does he want Boy?’
‘Julia and I have known him all our lives. I suppose, finding him at lunch with you, he thought he was a chum.’
We had no great liking for Mulcaster, but the three of us were in high spirits when, having got leave for the night from our colleges, we drove off on the London road in Hardcastle’s car.
We were to spend the night at Marchmain House. We went there to dress and, while we dressed, drank a bottle of champagne, going in and out of one another’s rooms which were together three floors up and rather shabby compared with the splendours below. As we came downstairs Julia passed us going up to her room still in her day clothes.
‘I’m going to be late,’ she said; ‘you boys had better go on to Rex’s. It’s heavenly of you to come.’
‘What is this party?’
‘A ghastly charity ball I’m involved with. Rex insisted on giving a dinner party for it. See you there.’
Rex Mottram lived within walking distance of Marchmain House.
‘Julia’s going to be late,’ we said, ‘she’s only just gone up to dress.’
‘That means an hour. We’d better have some wine.’ A woman who was introduced as ‘Mrs Champion’ said: ‘I’m sure she’d sooner we started, Rex.’
‘Well, let’s have some wine first anyway.’
‘Why a Jeroboam, Rex?’ she said peevishly. ‘You always want to have everything too big.’
‘Won’t be too big for us,’ he said, taking the bottle in his own hands and easing the cork.
There were two girls there, contemporaries of Julia’s; they all seemed involved in the management of the ball. Mulcaster knew them of old and they, without much relish I thought, knew him. Mrs Champion talked to Rex. Sebastian and I found ourselves drinking alone together as we always did.
At length Julia arrived, unhurried, exquisite, unrepentant. ‘You shouldn’t have let him wait,’ she said. ‘It’s his Canadian courtesy.’
Rex Mottram was a liberal host, and by the end of dinner the three of us who had come from Oxford were rather drunk. While we were standing in the hall waiting for the girls to come down and Rex and Mrs Champion had drawn away from us, talking, acrimoniously, in low voices, Mulcaster said, ‘I say, let’s slip away from this ghastly dance and go to Ma Mayfield’s.’
‘Who is Ma Mayfield?’
‘You know Ma Mayfield. Everyone knows Ma Mayfield of the Old Hundredth. I’ve got a regular there — a sweet little thing called Effie. There’d be the devil to pay if Effie heard I’d been to London and hadn’t been in to see her. Come and meet Effie at Ma Mayfield’s.’
‘All right,’ said Sebastian, ‘let’s meet Effie at Ma Mayfield’s.’ ‘We’ll take another bottle of pop off the good Mottram and then leave the bloody dance and go to the Old Hundredth. How about that?’
It was not a difficult matter to leave the ball; the girls whom Rex Mottram had collected had many friends there and, after we had danced together once or twice, our table began to fill up; Rex Mottram ordered more and more wine; presently the three of us were together on the pavement.
‘D’you know where this place is?’
‘Of course I do. A hundred Sink Street.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Just off Leicester Square. Better take the car.’
‘Why?’
‘Always better to have one’s own car on an occasion like this.’ We did not que
stion this reasoning, and there lay our mistake. The car was in the forecourt of Marchmain House within a hundred yards of the hotel where we had been dancing. Mulcaster drove and, after some wandering, brought us safely to Sink Street. A commissionaire at one side of a dark doorway and a middle-aged man in evening dress on the other side of it, standing with his face to the wall cooling his forehead on the bricks, indicated our destination.
‘Keep out, you’ll be poisoned,’ said the middle-aged man.
‘Members?’ said the commissionaire.
‘The name is Mulcaster,’ said Mulcaster. ‘Viscount Mulcaster.’
‘Well, try inside,’ said the commissionaire.
‘You’ll be robbed, poisoned and infected and robbed,’ said the middle-aged man.
Inside the dark doorway was a bright hatch.
‘Members?’ asked a stout woman, in evening dress.
‘I like that,’ said Mulcaster. ‘You ought to know me by now.’
‘Yes, dearie,’ said the woman without interest. ‘Ten bob each.’
‘Oh, look here, I’ve never paid before.’
‘Daresay not, dearie. We’re full up tonight so it’s ten bob. Anyone who comes after you will have to pay a quid. You’re lucky.’
‘Let me speak to Mrs Mayfield.’
‘I’m Mrs Mayfield. Ten bob each.’
‘Why, Ma, I didn’t recognize you in your finery. You know Me, don’t you? Boy Mulcaster.’
‘Yes, duckie. Ten bob each.’
We paid, and the man who had been standing between us and the inner door now made way for us. Inside it was hot and crowded, for the Old Hundredth was then at the height of its success. We found a table and ordered a bottle; the waiter took payment before he opened it.
‘Where’s Effie tonight?’ asked Mulcaster.
‘Effie ‘oo?’
‘Effie, one of the girls who’s always here. The pretty dark one.’
‘There’s lots of girls works here. Some of them’s dark and some of them’s fair. You might call some of them pretty. I haven’t the time to know them by name.’