Julia, hearing her lover mocked, frowned at the tortoise, but Rex Mottram was impervious to such delicate mischief.
‘Two wives despaired of him,’ he said. ‘When he got engaged to Sylvia, she made it a condition that he should take the cure at Zurich. And it worked. He came back in three months a different man. And he hasn’t touched a drop since, even though Sylvia walked out on him.’
‘Why did she do that?’
‘Well, poor Charlie got rather a bore when he stopped drinking. But that’s not really the point of the story.’
‘No, I suppose not. In fact, I suppose, really, it’s meant to be an encouraging story.’
Julia scowled at her jewelled tortoise.
‘He takes sex cases, too, you know.’
‘Oh dear, what very peculiar friends poor Sebastian will make in Zurich.’
‘He’s booked up for months ahead, but I think he’d find room if I asked him. I could telephone him from here tonight.’
(In his kindest moments Rex displayed a kind of hectoring zeal as if he were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife.)
‘We’ll think about it.’
And we were thinking about it when Cordelia returned from hunting.
‘Oh, Julia, what’s that? How beastly.’
‘It’s Rex’s Christmas present.’
‘Oh, sorry. I’m always putting my foot in it. But how cruel! It must have hurt frightfully.’
‘They can’t feel.’
‘How d’you know? Bet they can.’
She kissed her mother, whom she had not seen that day, shook hands with Rex, and rang for eggs.
‘I had one tea at Mrs Bamey’s, where I telephoned for the car, but I’m still hungry. It was a spiffing day. Jean Strickland-Venables fell in the mud. We ran from Bengers to Upper Eastrey without a check. I reckon that’s five miles, don’t you, Bridey?’
‘Three.’
‘Not as he ran…’ Between mouthfuls of scrambled egg she told us about the hunt. ‘…You should have seen Jean when she came out of the mud.’
‘Where’s Sebastian?’
‘He’s in disgrace.’ The words, in that clear, child’s voice had the ring of a bell tolling, but she went on: ‘Coming out in that beastly rat-catcher coat and mean little tie like something from Captain Morvin’s Riding Academy. I just didn’t recognize him at the meet, and I hope nobody else did. Isn’t he back? I expect he got lost.’
When Wilcox came to clear the tea, Lady Marchmain asked: ‘No sign of Lord Sebastian?’
‘No, my Lady.’
‘He must have stopped for tea with someone. How very unlike him.’
Half an hour later, when Wilcox brought in the cocktail tray, he said: ‘Lord Sebastian has just rung up to be fetched from South Twining.’
‘South Twining? Who lives there?’
‘He was speaking from the hotel, my Lady.’
‘South Twining.?’ said Cordelia. ‘Goodness, he did get lost!’
When he arrived he was flushed and his eyes were feverishly bright; I saw that he was two-thirds drunk.
‘Dear boy,’ said Lady Marchmain. ‘How nice to see you looking so well again. Your day in the open has done you good. The drinks are on the table; do help yourself’
There was nothing unusual in her speech but the fact of her saying it. Six months ago it would not have been said.
‘Thanks,’ said Sebastian. ‘I will.’
A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne — that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night, seeing his clouded eye and groping movements, hearing his thickened voice breaking in, ineptly, after long brutish silences. When at length Lady Marchmain and Julia and the servants left us, Brideshead said: ‘You’d best go to bed, Sebastian.’
‘Have some port first.’
‘Yes, have some port if you want it. But don’t come into the drawing-room.’
‘Too bloody drunk,’ said Sebastian nodding heavily. ‘Like olden times. Gentlemen always too drunk join ladies in olden times.’
(‘And, yet, you know, it wasn’t,’ said Mr Samgrass, trying to be chatty with me about it afterwards, ‘it wasn’t at all like olden times. I wonder where the difference lies. The lack of good humour? The lack of companionship? You know I think he must have been drinking by himself today. Where did he get the money?’)
Sebastian’s gone up,’ said Brideshead when we reached the drawing-room.
‘Yes? Shall I read?’
Julia and Rex played bezique; the tortoise, teased by the pekinese, withdrew into his shell; Lady Marchmain read The Diary of a Nobody aloud until, quite early, she said it was time for bed.
‘Can’t I stay up and play a little longer, mummy ? Just three games?’
‘Very well, darling. Come in and see me before you go to bed. I shan’t be asleep.’
It was plain to Mr Samgrass and me that Julia and Rex wanted to be left alone, so we went, too; it was not plain to, Brideshead, who settled down to read The Times, which he had not yet seen that day. Then, going to our side of the house, Mr Samgrass said: ‘It wasn’t at all like olden times.’
Next morning I said to Sebastian: ‘Tell me honestly, do you want me to stay on here?’
‘No, Charles, I don’t believe I do.’
‘I’m no help?’
‘No help.’
So I went to make my excuses to his mother.
‘There’s something I must ask you, Charles. Did you give Sebastian money yesterday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Knowing how he was likely to spend it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘I simply don’t understand how anyone can be so callously wicked.’
She paused, but I do not think she expected any answer; there was nothing I could say unless I were to start all over again on that familiar, endless argument.
‘I’m not going to reproach you,’ she said. ‘God knows it’s not for me to reproach anyone. Any failure in my children is my failure. But I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you can have been so nice in so many ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don’t understand how we all liked you so much. Did you hate us all the time? I don’t understand how we deserved it.’
I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I almost expected to hear her say: ‘I have already written to inform your unhappy father.’ But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
‘I shall never go back,’ I said to myself.
A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.
I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.
I had left behind me — what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, ‘the Young Magician’s Compendium’, that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.
‘I have left behind illusion,’ I said to myself. ‘Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses.’
I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.
Thus I returned to Paris, and to the friends I had found there and th
e habits I had formed. I thought I should hear no more of Brideshead, but life has few separations as sharp as that. It was not three weeks before I received a letter in Cordelia’s Frenchified convent hand:
‘Darling Charles,’ she said. ‘I was so very miserable when you went. You might have come and said good-bye!
‘I heard all about your disgrace, and I am writing to say that I am in disgrace, too. I sneaked Wilcox’s keys and got whisky for Sebastian and got caught. He did seem to want it so. And there was (and is) an awful row.
‘Mr Samgrass has gone (good!), and I think he is a bit in disgrace, too, but I don’t know why.
‘Mr Mottram is very popular with Julia (bad!) and is taking Sebastian away (bad! bad!) to a German doctor.
‘Julia’s tortoise disappeared. We think it buried itself, as they do, so there goes a packet (expression of Mr Mottram’s).
‘I am very well.
‘With love from
Cordelia.’
It must have been about a week after receiving this letter that I returned to my rooms one afternoon to find Rex waiting for me.
It was about four, for the light began to fail early in the studio at that time of year. I could see by the expression on the concierge’s face, when she told me I had a visitor waiting, that there was something impressive upstairs; she had a vivid gift of expressing differences of age or attraction; this was the expression which meant someone of the first consequence, and Rex indeed seemed to justify it, as I found him in his big travelling coat, filling the window that looked over the river.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Well.’
‘I came this morning. They told me where you usually lunched but I couldn’t see you there. Have you got him?’
I did not need to ask whom. ‘So he’s given you the slip, too?’ ‘We got here last night and were going on to Zurich today. I left him at the Lotti after dinner, as he said he was tired, and went round to the Travellers’ for a game.’
I noticed how, even with me, he was making excuses, as though rehearsing his story for retelling elsewhere. ‘As he said he was tired’ was good. I could not well imagine Rex letting a half-tipsy boy interfere with his cards.
‘So you came back and found him gone?’
‘Not at all. I wish I had. I found him sitting up for me. I had a run of luck at the Travellers’ and cleaned up a packet. Sebastian pinched the lot while I was asleep. All he left me was two first-class tickets to Zurich stuck in the edge of the looking-glass. I had nearly three hundred quid, blast him!’
‘And now he may be almost anywhere.’
‘Anywhere. You’re not hiding him by any chance?’
‘No. My dealings with that family are over.’
‘I think mine are just beginning,’ said Rex. ‘I say, I’ve got a lot to talk about, and I promised a chap at the Travellers’ I’d give him his revenge this afternoon. Won’t you dine with me?’
‘Yes. Where?’
‘I usually go to Ciro’s.’
‘Why not Paillard’s?’
‘Never heard of it. I’m paying you know.’
‘I know you are. Let me order dinner.’
‘Well, all right. What’s the place again?’ I wrote it down for him. ‘Is it the sort of place you see native life?’
‘Yes, you might call it that.’
‘Well, it’ll be an experience. Order something good.’
‘That’s my intention.’
I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner well — soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white-wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé. At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviar aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bèze of 1904.
Living was easy in France then; with the exchange as it was, my allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. It was very seldom, however, that I had a dinner like this, and I felt well disposed to Rex, when at last he arrived and gave up his hat and coat with the air of not expecting to see them again. He looked round the sombre little place with suspicion as though hoping to see apaches or a drinking party of students. All he saw was four senators with napkins tucked under their beards eating in absolute silence. I could imagine him telling his commercial friends later: ‘…interesting fellow I know; an art student living in Paris. Took me to a funny little restaurant — sort of place you’d pass without looking at — where there was some of the best food I ever ate. There were half a dozen senators there, too, which shows you it was the right place. Wasn’t at all cheap either.’
‘Any sign of Sebastian?’ he asked.
‘There won’t be,’ I said, ‘until he needs money.’
‘It’s a bit thick, going off like that. I was rather hoping that if I made a good job of him, it might do me a bit of good in another direction.’
He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I thought, for the hour of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could wait until the attention was blunted and one could listen with half the mind only; now in the keen moment when the maître d’hôtel was turning the blinis over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the press, we would talk of myself.
‘Did you stay long at Brideshead? Was my name mentioned after I left?’
‘Was it mentioned? I got sick of the sound of it, old boy. The Marchioness got what she called a “bad conscience” about you. She piled it on pretty thick, I gather, at your last meeting.’
“‘Callously wicked”, “wantonly cruel”.’
‘Hard words.’
‘“It’ doesn’t matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.”‘
‘Eh?’
‘A saying.’
‘Ah.’ The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed, separating each glaucous bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.
‘I like a bit of chopped onion with mine,’ said Rex. ‘Chap who-knew told me it brought out the flavour.’
‘Try it without first I said. ‘And tell me more news of myself.’
‘Well, of course, Greenacre, or whatever he was called — the snooty don — he came a cropper. That was well received by all.
He was the blue-eyed boy for a day or two after you left. Shouldn’t wonder if he hadn’t put the old girl up to pitching you out. He was always being pushed down our throats, so in the end Julia couldn’t bear it any more and gave him away.’
‘Julia did?’
‘Well, he’d begun to stick his nose into our affairs, you see. Julia spotted he was a fake, and one afternoon when Sebastian was tight — he was tight most of the time — she got the whole story of the Grand Tour out of him. And that was the end of Mr Samgrass. After that the Marchioness began to think she might have been a bit rough with you.’
‘And what about the row with Cordelia?’
‘That eclipsed everything. That kid’s a walking marvel — she’d been feeding Sebastian whisky right under our noses for a week. We couldn’t think where he was getting it. That’s when the Marchioness finally crumbled.’
The soup was delicious after the rich blinis — hot, thin, bitter, frothy.
‘I’ll tell you a thing, Charles, that Ma Marchmain hasn’t let on to anyone. She’s a very sick woman. Might peg out any minute. George Anstruther saw her in the autumn and put it at two years.’
‘How on earth do you know?’
‘It’s the kind of thing I hear. With the way her family are going on at the moment, I wouldn’t give her a year. I know just the man for her in Vienna. He put Sonia Bamfshire on her feet when everyone including Anstruther had despaired of her. But Ma Marchmain won’t do anything about it. I suppose it’s something to do with her crackbrain religion, not to take care of the body.’
The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Re
x failed to notice it. We ate to the music of the press — the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast. There was a pause here of a quarter of an hour, while I drank the first glass of the Clos de Bèze and Rex smoked his first cigarette. He leaned back, blew a cloud of smoke across the table, and remarked, ‘You know, the food here isn’t half bad; someone ought to take this place up and make something of it.’
Presently he began again on the Marchmains:
‘I’ll tell you another thing, too — they’ll get a jolt financially soon if they don’t look out.’
‘I thought they were enormously rich.’
‘Well, they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914, and the Flytes don’t seem to realize it. I reckon those lawyers who manage their affairs find it convenient to give them all the cash they want and no questions asked. Look at the way they live — Brideshead and Marchmain House both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked, dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants, and then besides all that there’s the old boy setting up a separate establishment — and setting it up on no humble scale either. D’you know how much they’re overdrawn?’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘Jolly near a hundred thousand in London. I don’t know what they owe elsewhere. Well, that’s quite a packet, you know, for people who aren’t using their money. Ninety-eight thousand last November. It’s the kind of thing I hear.’
Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I thought.
I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a, reminder that the world was an older, and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime, the same words of hope.
‘I don’t mean that they’ll be paupers; the old boy will always be good for an odd thirty thousand a year, but there’ll be a shake-up coming soon, and when the upper-classes get the wind up, their first idea is usually to cut down on the girls. I’d like to get the little matter of a marriage settlement through, before it comes.’