We had by no means reached the cognac, but here we were on the subject of himself. In twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to tell. I closed my mind to him as best I could and gave myself to the food before me, but sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited. He wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her at his own price; that was what it amounted to.
‘…Ma Marchmain doesn’t like me. Well, I’m not asking her to. It’s not her I want to marry. She hasn’t the guts to say openly: “You’re not a gentleman. You’re an adventurer from the Colonies.” She says we live in different atmospheres. That’s all right, but Julia happens to fancy my atmosphere…Then she brings up religion. I’ve nothing against her Church; we don’t take much account of Catholics in Canada, but that’s different; in Europe you’ve got some very posh Catholics. All right, Julia can go to church whenever she wants to. I shan’t try and stop her. It doesn’t mean two pins to her, as a matter of fact, but I like a girl to have religion. What’s more, she can bring the children up Catholic. I’ll make all the “promises” they want…Then there’s my past. “We know so little about you.” She knows a sight too much. You may know I’ve been tied up with someone else for a year or two.’
I knew; everyone who had ever met Rex knew of his affair with Brenda Champion; knew also that it was from this affair that he derived everything which distinguished him from every other stock-jobber; his golf with the Prince of Wales, his membership of Bratt’s, even his smoking-room comradeship at the House of Commons, for, when he first appeared there, his party chiefs did not say of him, ‘Look, there is the promising young member for north Gridley who spoke so well on Rent Restrictions.’ They said: ‘There’s Brenda Champion’s latest’; it had done him a great deal of good with men; women he could usually charm.
‘Well, that’s all washed up. Ma Marchmain was too delicate to mention the subject; all she said was that I had “notoriety”. Well, what does she expect as a son-in-law — a sort of half-baked monk like Brideshead? Julia knows all about the other thing; if she doesn’t care, I don’t see it’s anyone else’s business.’
After the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives. I tried to think only of the salad. I succeeded for a time in thinking only of the soufflé. Then came the cognac and the proper hour for these confidences. ‘…Julia’s just rising twenty. I don’t want to wait till she’s of age. Anyway, I don’t want to marry without doing the thing properly…nothing hole-in-corner…I have to see she isn’t jockeyed out of her proper settlement. So as the Marchioness won’t play ball I’m off to see the old man and square him. I gather he’s likely to agree to anything he knows will upset her. He’s at Monte Carlo at the moment. I’d planned to go there after dropping Sebastian off at Zurich. That’s why it’s such a bloody bore having lost him.’
The cognac was not to Rex’s taste. It was clear and pale and it came to us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.
‘Brandy’s one of the things I do know a bit about,’ said Rex. ‘This is a bad colour. What’s more, I can’t taste it in this thimble.’
They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it over the spirit lamp. Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes, and pronounced it the sort, of stuff he put soda in at home.
So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex’s sort.
‘That’s the stuff,’ he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings round the sides of his glass. ‘They’ve always got some tucked away, but they won’t bring it out unless you make a fuss. Have some.’
‘I’m quite happy with this.’
‘Well, it’s a crime to drink it, if you don’t really appreciate it.
He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We were both happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog’s barking miles away on a still night.
At the beginning of May the engagement was announced. I saw the notice in the Continental Daily Mail and assumed that Rex had ‘squared the old man’. But things did not go as were expected. The next news I had of them was in the middle of June, when I read that they had been married very quietly at the Savoy Chapel. No royalty was present; nor was the Prime Minister; nor were any of Julia’s family. It sounded like a ‘hole-in-the-corner’ affair, but it was not for several years that I heard the full story.
CHAPTER 2
Julia and Rex
IT is time to speak of Julia, who till now has played an intermittent and somewhat enigmatic part in Sebastian’s drama. It was thus she appeared to me at the time, and I to her. We pursued separate aims which brought us near to one another, but we remained strangers. She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one’s attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and, saying ‘I must read that, too, when I’ve the time,’ replace it, and continue the search. On my side the interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand out clear and firm.
She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not reduce her to type.
When I first met her, when she met me in the station yard and drove me home through the twilight, that high summer of 1923, she was just eighteen and fresh from her first London season.
Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things were getting into their stride again. Julia was at the centre of it. There were then remaining perhaps half a dozen London houses which could be called ‘historic’; Marchmain House in St James’s was one of them, and the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a splendid series.
How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that summer; London could wait, I thought.
The other great houses belonged to kinsmen or to childhood friends of Julia’s, and besides them there were countless substantial houses in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia, alight and thronged, one or other of them, night after night. Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed lost forever, among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the tress, part of the candle-light in the mirror’s spectrum, so that elderly men and women sitting aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird. ‘“Bridey” Marchmain’s eldest girl,’ they said. ‘Pity he can’t see her tonight.’
That night and the night after, wherever she went always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought a moment of Joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning ov
er in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked., but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
She had no interest in me that evening; the jinn rumbled below us uncalled; she lived apart in a little world, within a little world, the innermost of a system of concentric spheres, like the ivory balls laboriously carved in China; a little problem troubling her mind — little, as she saw it, in abstract terms and symbols. She was wondering dispassionately and leagues distant from reality, whom she should marry. Thus strategists hesitate over the map, the few pins and lines of coloured chalk, contemplating a change in the pins and lines, a matter of inches, which outside the room, out of sight of the studious officers, may engulf past, present, and future in ruin or life. She was a symbol to herself then, lacking the life of both child and women; victory and defeat were changes of pin and line; she knew nothing of war.
‘If only one lived abroad,’ she thought, ‘where these things are arranged between parents and lawyers.’
To be married, soon and splendidly, was the aim of all her friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one’s spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life.
She outshone by far all the girls of her age, but she knew that, in that little world within a world which she inhabited, there were certain grave disabilities from which she suffered. On the sofas against the wall where the old people counted up the points, there were things against her. There was the scandal of her father; that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness that seemed deepened by something in her own way of life — waywardness and wilfulness, a less disciplined habit than most of her contemporaries; but for that, who knows?…
One subject eclipsed all others in importance for the ladies along the wall; who would the young princes marry? They could not hope for purer lineage or a more gracious presence than Julia’s; but there was this faint shadow on her that unfitted her for the highest honours; there was also her religion.
Nothing could have been further from Julia’s ambitions than a royal marriage. She knew, or thought she knew, what she wanted and it was not that. But wherever she turned, it seemed, her religion stood as a barrier between her and her natural goal.
As it seemed to her, the thing was a dead loss. If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her. There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. Younger sons had none of the privileges of obscurity; it was their plain duty to remain hidden until some disaster perchance promoted them to their brother’s places, and, since this was their function, it was desirable that they should keep themselves wholly suitable for succession. Perhaps in a family of three or four boys, a Catholic might get the youngest without opposition. There were of course the Catholics themselves, but these came seldom into the little world Julia had made for herself; those who did were her mother’s kinsmen, who, to her, seemed grim and eccentric. Of the dozen or so rich and noble Catholic families, none at that time had an heir of the right age. Foreigners — there were many among her mother’s family — were tricky about money, odd in their ways, and a sure mark of failure in the English girl who wed them. What was there left?
This was Julia’s problem after her weeks of triumph in London. She knew it was not insurmountable. There must, she thought, be a number of people outside her own world who were well qualified to be drawn into it; the shame was that she must seek them.
Not for her the cruel, delicate luxury of choice, the indolent, cat-and-mouse pastimes of the hearth-rug. No Penelope she; she must hunt in the forest.
She had made a preposterous little picture of the kind of man who would do: he was an English diplomat of great but not very virile beauty, now abroad, with a house smaller than Brideshead, nearer to London; he was old, thirty-two or -three, and had been recently and tragically widowed; Julia thought she would prefer a man a little subdued by earlier grief. He had a great career before him but had grown listless in his loneliness; she was not sure he was not in danger of falling into the hands of an unscrupulous foreign adventuress; he needed a new infusion of young life to carry him to the Embassy at Paris. While professing a mild agnosticism himself he had a liking for the shows of religion and was perfectly agreeable to having his children brought up Catholic; he believed, however in the prudent restriction of his family to two boys and a girl, comfortably, spaced over twelve years, and did not demand, as a Catholic husband might, yearly pregnancies. He had twelve thousand a year above his pay, and no near relations. Someone like that would do, Julia thought, and she was in search of him when she met me at the railway station. I was not her man. She told me as much, without a word, when she took the cigarette from my lips.
All this I learned about Julia, bit by bit, as one does learn the former — as it seems at the time, the preparatory — life of a woman one loves, so that one thinks of oneself as having been part of it, directing it by devious ways, towards oneself.
Julia left Sebastian and me at Brideshead and went to stay with an aunt, Lady Rosscommon, in her villa at Cap Ferrat. All the way she pondered her problem. She had given a name to her widower-diplomat; she called him “Eustace”, and from that moment he became a figure of fun to her, a little interior, incommunicable joke, so that when at last such a man did cross her path — though he was not a diplomat but a wistful major in the Life Guards — and fall in love with her and offer her just those gifts she had chosen, she sent him away moodier and more wistful than ever; for by that time she had met Rex Mottram.
Rex’s age was greatly in his favour, for among Julia’s friends there was a kind of gerontophilic snobbery; young men were held to be gauche and pimply; it was thought very much more chic to be seen lunching alone at the Ritz — a thing, in any case, allowed to few girls of that day, to the tiny circle of Julia’s intimates; a thing looked at askance by the elders who kept the score, chatting pleasantly against the walls of the ballrooms — at the table on the left as you came in, with a starched and wrinkled old roué whom your mother had be warned of as a girl, than in the centre of the room with a party of exuberant young bloods. Rex, indeed, was neither starched nor wrinkled; his seniors thought him a pushful young cad, but Julia recognized the unmistakable chic — the flavour of ‘Max’ and ‘F. E.’ and the Prince of Wales, of the big table in the Sporting Club, the second magnum, and the fourth cigar, of the chauffeur kept waiting hour after hour without compunction — which her friends would envy. His social position was unique; it had an air of mystery, even of crime, about it; people said Rex went about armed. Julia and her friends had a fascinated abhorrence of what they called ‘Pont Street’; they collected phrases that damned their user, and among themselves — and often, disconcertingly, in public — talked a language made up of them. It was ‘Pont Street’ to wear a signet ring and to give chocolates at the theatre; it was ‘Pont Street’ at a dance to say, ‘Can I forage for you?’ Whatever Rex might be, he was definitely not ‘Pont Street’. He had stepped straight from the underworld into the world of Brenda Champion who was herself the innermost of a number of concentric ivory spheres. Perhaps Julia recognized in Brenda Champion an intimation of what she and her friends might be in twelve years’ time; there was an antagonism between the girl and the woman that was hard to explain otherwise. Certainly the fact of his being Brenda Champion’s property sharpened Julia’s appetite for Rex.
Rex and Brenda Champion were staying at the next villa on Cap Ferrat, taken that year by a newspaper magnate, and frequented by politicians. They would not normally have come within Lady Rosscommon’s ambit, but, living so close, the parties
mingled and at once, Rex began warily to pay his court.
All that summer he had been feeling restless. Mrs Champion had proved a dead end; it had all been intensely exciting at first, but now the bonds had begun to chafe. Mrs Champion lived as, he found, the English seemed apt to do, in a little world within a little world; Rex demanded a wider horizon. He wanted to consolidate his gains; to strike the black ensign, go ashore, hang the cutlass up over the chimney, and think about the crops. It was time he married; he, too, was in search of a ‘Eustace’, but, living as he did, he met few girls. He knew of Julia; she was by all accounts top debutante, a suitable prize.
With Mrs Champion’s cold eyes watching behind her sunglasses, there was little Rex could do at Cap Ferrat except establish a friendliness which could be widened later. He was never entirely alone with Julia, but he saw to it that she was included in most things they did; he taught her chemin-de-fer, he arranged that it was always in his car that they drove to Monte Carlo or Nice; he did enough to make Lady Rosscommon. write to Lady Marchmain, and Mrs Champion move him, sooner than they had planned, to Antibes.
Julia went to Salzburg to join her mother.
‘Aunt Fanny tells me you made great friends with Mr Mottram. I’m sure he can’t be very nice.’
‘I don’t think he is,’ said Julia. ‘I don’t know that I like nice people.’
There is proverbially a mystery among most men of new wealth, how they made their first ten thousand; it is the qualities they showed then, before they became bullies, when every man was someone to be placated, when only hope sustained them and they could count on nothing from the world but what could be charmed from it, that make them, if they survive their triumph, successful with women. Rex, in the comparative freedom of London, became abject to Julia; he planned his life about hers where he would meet her, ingratiating himself with those who could report well of him to her; he sat on a number of charitable committees in order to be near Lady Marchmain; he offered his services to Brideshead in getting him a seat in Parliament (but was there rebuffed); he expressed a keen interest in the Catholic Church until he found that this was no way to Julia’s heart. He was always ready to drive her in his Hispano wherever she wanted to go; he took her and parties of her friends to ring-side seats at prize-fights and introduced them afterwards to the pugilists; and all the time he never once made love to her. From being agreeable, he became indispensable to her; from having been proud of him in public she became a little ashamed, but by that time, between Christmas and Easter, he had become indispensable. And then, without in the least expecting it, she suddenly found herself in love.