‘I’ll go and look for her,’ said Mulcaster.
While he was away two girls stopped near our table and looked at us curiously. ‘Come on,’ said one to the other, we’re wasting our time. They’re only fairies.’
Presently Mulcaster returned in triumph with Effie to whom, without its being ordered, the waiter immediately brought a plate of eggs and bacon.
‘First bite I’ve had all the evening,’ she said. ‘Only thing that’s any good here is the breakfast; makes you fair peckish hanging about.’
‘That’s another six bob,’ said the waiter.
When her hunger was appeased, Effie dabbed her mouth and looked at us.
‘I’ve seen you here before, often, haven’t I?’ she said to me.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘But I’ve seen you?’ to Mulcaster.
‘Well, I should rather hope so. You haven’t forgotten our little evening in September?’
‘No, darling, of course not. You were the boy in the Guards who cut your toe, weren’t you?’
‘Now, Effie, don’t be a tease.’
‘No, that was another night, wasn’t it? I know — you were with Bunty the time the police were in and we all hid in the place they keep the dust-bins.’
‘Effie loves pulling my leg, don’t you, Effie? She’s annoyed with me for staying away so long, aren’t you?’
‘Whatever you say, I know I have seen you before somewhere.’
‘Stop teasing.’
‘I wasn’t meaning to tease. Honest. Want to dance?’
‘Not at the minute.’
‘Thank the Lord. My shoes pinch something terrible tonight.’ Soon she and Mulcaster were deep in conversation. Sebastian leaned back and said to me: ‘I’m going to ask that pair to join us.’
The two unattached women who had considered us earlier, were again circling towards us. Sebastian smiled and rose to greet them: soon they, too, were eating heartily. One had the face of a skull, the other of a sickly child. The Death’s Head seemed destined for me. ‘How about a little party,’ she said, ‘just the six of us over at my place?’
‘Certainly,’ said Sebastian.
‘We thought you were fairies when you came in.’
‘That was our extreme youth.’
Death’s Head giggled. ‘You’re a good sport,’ she said. ‘You’re very sweet really,’ said the Sickly Child. ‘I must just tell Mrs Mayfield we’re going out.’
It was still early, not long after midnight, when we regained the street. The commissionaire tried to persuade us to take a taxi. ‘I’ll look after your car, sir, I wouldn’t drive yourself, sir, really I wouldn’t.’
But Sebastian took the wheel and the two women sat one on the other beside him, to show him the way. Effie and Mulcaster and I sat in the back. I think we cheered a little as we drove off.
We did not drive far. We turned into Shaftesbury Avenue and were making for Piccadilly when we narrowly escaped a head-on collision with a taxi-cab.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Effie, ‘look where you’re going. D’you want to murder us all?’
‘Careless fellow that,’ said Sebastian.
‘It isn’t safe the way you’re driving,’ said Death’s Head. ‘Besides, we ought to be on the other side of the road.’
‘So we should,’ said Sebastian, swinging abruptly across.
‘Here, stop. I’d sooner walk.’
‘Stop? Certainly.’
He put on the brakes and we came abruptly to a halt broadside across the road. Two policemen quickened their stride and approached us.
‘Let me out of this,’ said Effie, and made her escape with a leap and a scamper.
The rest of us were caught.
‘I’m sorry if I am impeding the traffic, officer,’ said Sebastian with care, ‘but the lady insisted on my stopping for her to get out. She would take no denial. As you will have observed, she was pressed for time. A matter of nerves you know.’
‘Let me talk to him,’ said Death’s Head. ‘Be a sport, handsome; no one’s seen anything but you. The boys don’t mean any harm. I’ll get them into a taxi and see them home quiet.’
The policemen looked us over, deliberately, forming their own judgement. Even then everything might have been well had not Mulcaster joined in. ‘Look here, my good man,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for you to notice anything. We’ve just come from Ma Mayfield’s. I reckon she pays you a nice retainer to keep your eyes shut. Well, you can keep ‘em shut on us too, and you won’t be the losers by it.’
That resolved any doubts which the policemen may have felt. In a short time we were in the cells.
I remember little of the journey there or the process of admission. Mulcaster, I think, protested vigorously and, when we were made to empty our pockets, accused his gaolers of theft. Then we were locked in, and my first clear memory is of tiled walls with a lamp set high up under thick glass, a bunk, and a door which had no handle on my side. Somewhere to the left of me Sebastian and Mulcaster were raising Cain. Sebastian had been steady on his legs and fairly composed on the way to the station; now, shut in, he seemed in a frenzy and was pounding the door, and. shouting: ‘Damn you, I’m not drunk. Open this door. I insist on seeing the doctor. I tell you I’m not drunk,’ while Mulcaster, beyond, cried: ‘My God, you’ll pay for this! You’re making a great mistake, I can ‘tell you. Telephone the Home Secretary. Send for my solicitors. I will have habeas corpus.’ Groans of protest rose from the other cells where various tramps and pickpockets were trying to get some sleep: ‘Aw, pipe down!’ ‘Give a man some peace, can’t yer?’…’Is this a blinking lock-up or a looney-house?’ — and the sergeant, going his rounds, admonished them through the grille. ‘You’ll be here all night if you don’t sober up.’
I sat on the bunk in low spirits and dozed a little. Presently the racket subsided and Sebastian called: ‘I say, Charles, are you there?’
‘Here I am.’
‘This is the hell of a business.’
‘Can’t we get bail or something?’
Mulcaster seemed to have fallen asleep.
‘I tell you the man — Rex Mottram. He’d be in his element here.’
We had some difficulty in getting in touch with him; it was half an hour before the policeman in charge answered my bell. At last he consented, rather sceptically, to send a telephone message to the hotel where the ball was being held. There was another long delay and then our prison doors were opened.
Seeping through the squalid air of the police station, the sour smell of dirt and disinfectant, came the sweet, rich smoke of a Havana cigar — of two Havana cigars, for the sergeant in charge was smoking also.
Rex stood in the charge-room looking the embodiment indeed, the burlesque — of power and prosperity; he wore a fur-lined overcoat with broad astrakhan lapels and a silk hat. The police were deferential and eager to help.
‘We had to do our duty,’ they said. ‘Took the young gentlemen into custody for their own protection.’
Mulcaster looked crapulous and began a confused complaint that he had been denied legal representation and civil rights. Rex said: ‘Better leave all the talking to me.’
I was clear-headed now and watched and listened with fascination while Rex settled our business. He examined the charge sheets, spoke affably to the men who had made the arrest; with the slightest perceptible nuance he opened the way for bribery and quickly covered it when he saw that things had now lasted too long and the knowledge had been too widely shared; he undertook to deliver us at the magistrate’s court at ten next morning, and then led us away. His car was outside.
‘It’s no use discussing things tonight. Where are you sleeping.?’
‘Marchers,’ said Sebastian.
‘You’d better come to me. I can fix you up for tonight. Leave everything to me.’
It was plain that he rejoiced in his efficiency.
Next morning the display was even more impressive. I awoke with the startled and puzzl
ed sense of being in a strange room, and in the first seconds of consciousness the memory of the evening before returned, first as though of a nightmare, then of reality. Rex’s valet was unpacking a suitcase. On seeing me move he went to the wash-hand stand and poured something from a bottle. ‘I think I have everything from Marchmain House,’ he said. ‘Mr Mottram sent round to Heppell’s for this.’
I took the draught and felt better.
A man was there from Trumper’s to shave us.
Rex joined us at breakfast. ‘It’s important to make a good appearance at the court,’ he said. ‘Luckily none of you look much the worse for wear.’
After breakfast the barrister arrived and Rex delivered a summary of the case.
‘Sebastian’s in a jam,’ he said. ‘He’s liable to anything up to six months’ imprisonment for being drunk in charge of a car. You’ll come up before Grigg unfortunately. He takes rather a grim view of cases of this sort. All that will happen this morning is that we shall ask to have Sebastian held over for a week to prepare the defence. You two will plead guilty, say you’re sorry, and pay your five bob fine. I’ll see what can be done about squaring the evening papers. The Star may be difficult.
‘Remember, the important thing is to keep out all mention of the Old Hundredth. Luckily the tarts were sober and aren’t being charged, but their names have been taken as witnesses. If we try and break down the police evidence, they’ll be called. We’ve got to avoid that at all costs, so we shall have to swallow the police story whole and appeal to the magistrate’s good nature not to wreck a young man’s career for a single boyish indiscretion. It’ll work all right. We shall need a don to give evidence of good character. Julia tells me you have a tame one called Samgrass. He’ll do. Meanwhile your story is simply that you came up from Oxford for a perfectly respectable dance, weren’t used to wine, had too much, and lost the way driving home.
‘After that we shall have to see about fixing things with your authorities at Oxford.’
‘I told them to call my solicitors,’ said Mulcaster, ‘and they refused. They’ve put themselves hopelessly in the wrong, and I don’t see why they should get away with it.’
‘For heaven’s sake don’t start any kind of argument. Just plead guilty and pay up. Understand?’
Mulcaster grumbled but submitted.
Everything happened at court as Rex had predicted. At half past ten we stood in Bow Street, Mulcaster and I free men, Sebastian bound over to appear in a week’s time. Mulcaster had kept silent about his grievance; he and I were admonished and fined five shillings each and fifteen shillings costs. Mulcaster was becoming rather irksome to us, and it was with relief that we heard his plea of other business in London. The barrister bustled off and Sebastian and I were left alone and disconsolate.
‘I suppose mummy’s got to hear about it,’ he said. ‘Damn, damn, damn! It’s cold. I won’t go home. I’ve nowhere to go. Let’s just slip back to Oxford and wait for them to bother us.’
The raffish habitués of the police court came and went, up and down the steps; still we stood on the windy corner, undecided.
‘Why not get hold of Julia?’
‘I might go abroad.’
‘My dear Sebastian, you’ll only be given a talking-to and fined a few pounds.’
‘Yes, but it’s all the bother — mummy and Bridey and all the family and the dons. I’d sooner go to prison. If I just slip away abroad they can’t get me back, can they? That’s what people do when the police are after them. I know mummy will make it seem she has to bear the whole brunt of the business.’
‘Let’s telephone Julia and get her to meet us somewhere and talk it over.’
We met at Gunter’s in Berkeley Square. Julia, like most women then, wore a green hat pulled down to her eyes with a diamond arrow in it; she had a small dog under her arm, three-quarters buried in the fur of her coat. She greeted us with an unusual show of interest.
‘Well, you are a pair of pickles; I must say you look remarkably well on it. The only time I got tight I was paralysed all the next day. I do think you might have taken me with you. The ball was positively lethal, and I’ve always longed to go to the Old Hundredth. No one will ever take me. Is it heaven?’
‘So you know all about that, too?’
‘Rex telephoned me this morning and told me everything. What were your girl friends like?’
‘Don’t be prurient,’ said Sebastian.
‘Mine was like a skull.’
‘Mine was like a consumptive.’
‘Goodness.’ It had clearly raised us in Julia’s estimation that we had been out with women; to her they were the point of interest.
‘Does mummy know?’
‘Not about your skulls and consumptives. She knows you were in the clink. I told her. She was divine about it, of course. You know anything Uncle Ned did was always perfect, and he got locked up once for taking a bear into one of Lloyd George’s meetings, so she really feels quite human about the whole thing. She wants you both to lunch with her.’
‘Oh God!’
‘The only trouble is the papers and the family. Have you got an awful family, Charles?’
‘Only a father. He’ll never hear about it.’
‘Ours are awful. Poor mummy is in for a ghastly time with them. They’ll be writing letters and paying visits of sympathy, and all the time at the back of their minds one half will be saying, “That’s what comes of bringing the boy up a Catholic,” and the other half will say, “That’s what comes of sending him to Eton instead of Stonyhurst.” Poor mummy can’t get it right.
We lunched with Lady Marchmain. She accepted the whole thing with humorous resignation. Her only reproach was: ‘I can’t think why you went off and stayed with Mr Mottram. You might have come and told me about it first.’
‘How am I going to explain it to all the family?’ she asked. ‘They will be so shocked to find that they’re more upset about it than I am. Do you know my sister-in-law, Fanny Rosscommon? She has always thought I brought the children up badly. Now I am beginning to think she must be right.’
When we left I said: ‘She couldn’t have been more charming. What were you so worried about?’
‘I can’t explain,’ said Sebastian miserably.
A week later when Sebastian came up for trial he was fined ten pounds. The newspapers reported it with painful prominence, one of them under the ironic headline: ‘Marquis’s son unused to wine’. The magistrate said that it was only through the prompt action of the police that he was not up on a grave charge. ‘It is purely by good fortune that you do not bear the responsibility of a serious accident…’ Mr Samgrass gave evidence that Sebastian bore an irreproachable character and that a brilliant future at the University was in jeopardy. The papers took hold of this too — ‘Model Student’s Career at Stake.’ But for Mr Samgrass’s evidence, said the magistrate, he would have been disposed to give an exemplary sentence; the law was the same for an Oxford undergraduate as for any young hooligan; indeed the better the home the more shameful the offence…
It was not only at Bow Street that Mr Samgrass was of value. At Oxford he showed all the zeal and acumen which were Rex Mottram’s in London. He interviewed the college authorities, the proctors, the Vice-Chancellor; he induced Mgr Bell to call on the Dean of Christ Church; he arranged for Lady Marchmain to talk to the Chancellor himself; and, as a result of all this, the three of us were gated for the rest of the term. Hardcastle, for no clear reason, was again deprived of the use of his car, and the affair blew over. The most lasting penalty we suffered was our intimacy with Rex Mottram and Mr Samgrass, but since Rex’s life was in London in a world of politics and high finance and Mr Samgrass’s nearer to our own at Oxford, it was from him we suffered the more.
For the rest of that term he haunted us. Now that we were ‘gated’ we could not spend our evenings together, and from nine o’clock onwards were alone and at Mr Samgrass’s mercy. Hardly an evening seemed to paw but he called on one o r the othe
r of us. He spoke of ‘our little escapade’ as though he, too, had been in the cells, and had that bond with us…Once I climbed out of college and Mr Samgrass found me in Sebastian’s rooms after the gate was shut and that, too, he made into a bond. It did not surprise me, therefore, when I arrived at Brideshead, after Christmas, to find Mr Samgrass, as though in wait for me, sitting alone before the fire in the room they called the ‘Tapestry Hall’.
‘You find me in solitary possession,’ he said, and indeed he seemed to possess the hall and the sombre scenes of venery that hung round it, to possess the caryatids on either side of the fireplace, to possess me, as he rose to take my hand and greet me like a host: ‘This morning,’ he continued, ‘we had a lawn meet of the Marchmain Hounds — a deliciously archaic spectacle and all our young friends are fox-hunting, even Sebastian who, you will not be surprised to hear, looked remarkably elegant in his pink coat. Brideshead was impressive rather than elegant; he is joint-master with a local figure of fun named Sir Walter Strickland-Venables. I wish the two of them could be included in these rather humdrum tapestries — they would give a note of fantasy.
‘Our hostess remained at home; also a convalescent Dominican who has read too much Maritain and too little Hegel; Sir Adrian Porson, of course, and two rather forbidding Magyar cousins — I have tried them in German and in French, but in neither tongue are they diverting. All these have now driven off to visit a neighbour. I have been spending a cosy afternoon before the fire with the incomparable Charlus. Your arrival emboldens me to ring for some tea. How can I prepare you for the party? Alas, it breaks up tomorrow. Lady Julia departs to celebrate the New Year elsewhere, and takes the beau-monde with her. I shall miss the pretty creatures about the house — particularly one Celia; she is the sister of our old companion in adversity, Boy Mulcaster, and wonderfully unlike, him. She has a bird-like style of conversation, pecking away at the subject in a way I find most engaging, and a school-monitor style of dress which I can only call “saucy”. I shall miss her, for I do not go tomorrow. Tomorrow I start work in earnest on our hostess’s book — which, believe me, is a treasure-house of period gems; pure authentic 1914.’