‘You’re Mr Ryder? Jump in.’ Her voice was Sebastian’s and his her, way of speaking.
‘How is he?’
‘Sebastian? Oh, he’s fine. Have you had dinner? Well, I expect it was beastly. There’s some more at home. Sebastian and I are alone, so we thought we’d wait for you.’
‘What’s happened to him?’
‘Didn’t he say? I expect he thought you wouldn’t come if you knew. He’s cracked a bone in his ankle so small that it hasn’t a name. But they X-rayed it yesterday, and told him to keep it up for a month. It’s a great bore to him, putting out all his plans; he’s been making the most enormous fuss…Everyone else has gone. He tried to make me stay back with him. Well, I expect you know how maddeningly pathetic he can be. I almost gave in, and then I said: “Surely there must be someone you can get hold of,” and he said everybody was away or busy and, anyway, no one else would do. But at last he agreed to try you, and I promised I’d stay if you failed him, so you can imagine how popular you are with me. I must say it’s noble of you to come all this way at a moment’s notice.’ But as she said it, I heard, or thought I heard, a tiny note of contempt in her voice that I should be so readily available.
‘How did he do it?’
‘Believe it or not, playing croquet. He lost his temper and tripped over a hoop. Not a very honourable scar.’
She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and strangeness. Thus, looking through strong lenses, one may watch a man approaching from afar, study every detail of his face and clothes, believe one has only to put out a hand to touch him marvel that he does not hear one and look up as one moves, and then, seeing him with the naked eye, suddenly remember that one is to him a distant speck, doubtfully human. I knew her and she did not know me. Her dark hair was scarcely longer than Sebastian’s, and it blew back from her forehead as his did; her eyes on the darkling road were his, but larger; her painted mouth was less friendly to the world. She wore a bangle of charms on her wrist and in her ears little gold rings. Her light coat revealed an inch or two of flowered silk; skirts were short in those days, and her legs, stretched forward to the controls of the car, were spindly, as was also the fashion. Because her sex was the palpable difference between the familiar and the strange it seemed to fill the space between us, so that I felt her to be especially female, as I had felt of no woman before.
‘I’m terrified of driving at this time of the evening,’ she said. ‘There doesn’t seem anyone left at home who can drive a car. Sebastian and I are practically camping out here. I hope you haven’t come expecting a pompous party.’ She leaned forward to the locker for a box of cigarettes.
‘No thanks.’
‘Light one for me, will you?’
It was, the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.
‘Thanks. You’ve been here before. Nanny reported it. We both thought it very odd of you not to stay to tea with me.’
‘That was Sebastian.’
‘You seem to let him boss you about a good deal. You shouldn’t. It’s very bad for him.’
We had turned the corner of the drive now; the colour had died in the woods and sky, and the house seemed painted in grisaille, save for the central golden square at the open doors. A man was waiting to take my luggage.
‘Here we are.’
She led me up the steps and into the hall, flung her coat on a marble table, and stooped to fondle a dog which came to greet her. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Sebastian to have started dinner.’
At that moment he appeared between the pillars at the further end, propelling himself in a wheel-chair. He was in pyjamas and dressing-gown, with one foot heavily bandaged.
‘Well, darling, I have collected your chum,’ she said, again with a barely perceptible note of contempt.
‘I thought you were dying,’ I said, conscious then, as I had been ever since I arrived, of the predominating emotion of vexation, rather than of relief, that I had been bilked of my expectations of a grand tragedy.
‘I thought I was, too. The pain was excruciating. Julia, do you think, if you asked him, Wilcox would give us champagne tonight?’
‘I hate champagne and Mr Ryder has had dinner.’
‘Mister Ryder? Mister Ryder? Charles drinks champagne at all hours. Do you know, seeing this great swaddled foot of mine, I can’t get it out of my mind that I have gout, and that gives me a craving for champagne.’
We dined in a room they called ‘the Painted Parlour’. It was a spacious octagon, later in design than the rest of the house its walls, were adorned with wreathed medallions and across its dome prim Pompeian figures stood pastoral groups. They and the satinwood and ormolu furniture, the carpet, the hanging bronze candelabrum, the mirrors and sconces, were all a single composition, the design of one illustrious hand. ‘We usually eat here when we’re alone,’ said Sebastian, ‘it’s so cosy.’
While they dined I ate a peach and told them of the war with my father.
‘He sounds a perfect poppet,’ said Julia. ‘And now I’m going to leave you boys.’
‘Where are you off to?’
‘The nursery. I promised nanny a last game of halma.’ She kissed the top of Sebastian’s head. I opened the door for her. ‘Good Night, Mr Ryder, and good-bye. I don’t suppose we’ll meet tomorrow. I’m leaving early. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for relieving me at the sick-bed.’
‘My sister is very pompous tonight,’ said Sebastian, when she was gone.
‘I don’t think she cares for me,’ I said.
‘I don’t think she cares for anyone much. I love her. She’s so like me.’
‘Do you? Is she?’
‘In looks I mean and the way she talks. I wouldn’t love anyone with a character like mine.’
When we had drunk our port, I walked beside Sebastian’s chair through the pillared hall to the library, where we sat that night and nearly every night of the ensuing month. It lay on the side of the house that overlooked the lakes; the windows were open to the stars and the scented air, to the indigo and silver, moonlit landscape of the valley and the sound of water falling in the fountain.
‘We’ll have a heavenly time alone,’ said Sebastian and when next morning, while I was shaving, I saw from my bathroom window Julia, with luggage at her back, drive from the forecourt and disappear at the hill’s crest, without a backward glance, I felt a sense of liberation and peace such as I was, to know years later when, after a night of unrest, the sirens sounded the ‘All Clear’.
CHAPTER 4
Sebastian at home — Lord Marchmain abroad
THE languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life. These things are a part of life itself; but languor — the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.
‘Why is this house called a “Castle”?’
‘It used to be one until they moved it.’
‘What can you mean?’
‘Just that. We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and. pulled the castle down, carted the stones up here, and built a new house. I’m glad they did, aren’t you?’
‘If it was mine I’d never live anywhere else.’
‘But you sec. Charles, it isn’t mine. Just at the moment it is, but usually it’s full of ravening beasts. If it cou
ld only be like this always — always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe, and Aloysius in a good temper…’
It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace; Sebastian in his wheel chair spinning down the box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the succession of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our buttonholes; Sebastian hobbling with a pantomime of difficulty to the old nurseries, sitting beside me on the threadbare, flowered carpet with the toy-cupboard empty about us and Nanny Hawkins stitching complacently in the corner, saying, ‘You’re one as bad as the other; a pair of children the two of you. Is that what they teach you at College?’ Sebastian supine on the sunny seat in the colonnade, as he was now, and I in a hard chair beside him, trying to draw the fountain.
‘Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later.’
‘Oh, Charles, don’t be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built if it’s pretty?’
‘It’s the sort of thing I like to know.’
‘Oh dear, I thought I’d cured you of all that — the terrible Mr Collins.’
It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing, adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and Chippendale fretwork, from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung hall which stood unchanged, as it had been designed two hundred and fifty years before; to sit, hour after hour, in the shade looking out on the terrace.
This terrace was the final consummation of the house’s plan; it stood on massive stone ramparts above the lakes, so that from the hall steps it seemed to overhang them, as though, standing by the balustrade, one could have dropped a pebble into the first of them immediately below one’s feet. It was embraced by the two arms of the colonnade; beyond the pavilions groves of lime led to the wooded hillsides. Part of the terrace was paved, part planted with flower-beds and arabesques of dwarf box; taller box grew in a dense hedge, making a wide oval, cut into niches and interspersed with statuary, and, in the centre, dominating the, whole splendid space rose the fountain; such a fountain as one might expect to find in a piazza of southern Italy; such a fountain as was, indeed, found there a century ago by one of Sebastian’s ancestors; found, purchased, imported, and re-erected in an alien but welcoming climate.
Sebastian set me to draw it. It was an ambitious subject for an amateur — an oval basin with an island of sculptured rocks at its centre; on the rocks grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation, and wild English fem in its natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs, and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards and an ebullient lion, all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone — but, by some odd chance, for the thing was far beyond me, I brought it off and, by judicious omissions and some stylish tricks, produced a very passable echo of Piranesi. ‘Shall I give it to your mother?’ I asked.
‘Why? You don’t know her.’
‘It seems polite. I’m staying in her house.’
‘Give it to nanny,’ said Sebastian.
I did so, and she put it among the collection on the top of her chest of drawers, remarking that it had quite a look of the thing, which she had often heard admired but could never see the beauty of, herself.
For me the beauty was new-found.
Since the days when, as a schoolboy, I used to bicycle round the neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I had nursed a love of architecture, but, though in opinion I had made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and medieval.
This was my conversion to the Baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those coffered ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones, was indeed a life-giving spring.
One day in a cupboard we found a large japanned-tin box of oil-paints still in workable condition.
‘Mummy bought them a year or two ago. Someone told her that you could only appreciate the beauty of the world by trying to paint it. We laughed at her a great deal about it. She couldn’t draw at all, and however bright, the colour were in the tubes, by the time mummy had mixed them up, they came out a kind of khaki. Various dry, muddy smears on the palette confirmed this statement. ‘Cordelia was always made to wash the brushes. In the end we all protested and made mummy stop.’
The paints gave us the idea of decorating the office; this was a small room opening on the colonnade; it had once been used for estate business, but was now derelict, holding only some garden games and a tub of dead aloes; it had plainly been designed for a softer use, perhaps as a tea-room or study, for the plaster walls were decorated with delicate Rococo panels and the roof was prettily groined. Here, in one of the smaller oval frames, I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out in colour, and, by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of it. The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it. It was a landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances, with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and a waterfall affording a rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind. I knew little of oil-painting and learned its ways as I worked. When, in a week, it was finished, Sebastian was eager for me to start on one of the larger panels. I made some sketches. He called for a fête champêtre with a ribboned swing and a Negro page and a shepherd playing the pipes, but the thing languished. I knew it was good chance that had made my landscape, and that this elaborate pastiche was too much for me.
One day we went down to the cellars with Wilcox and saw the empty bays which had once held a vast store of wine; one transept only was used now; there the bins were well stocked, some of with vintages fifty years old.
‘There’s been nothing added since his Lordship went abroad,’ said Wilcox. ‘A lot of the old wine wants drinking up. We ought to have laid down the eighteens and twenties. I’ve had several letters about it from the wine merchants, but her Ladyship says to ask Lord Brideshead, and he says to ask his Lordship, and his Lordship says to ask the lawyers. That’s how we get low. There’s enough here for ten years at the rate it’s going, but how shall we be then?’
Wilcox welcomed our interest; we had bottles brought up from every bin, and it was during those tranquil evenings with Sebastian that I first made a serious acquaintance with wine and sowed the seed of that rich harvest which was to be my stay in many barren years. We would sit, he and I, in the Painted Parlour with three bottles open on the table and three glasses before each of us; Sebastian had found a book on wine tasting, and we followed its instructions in detail. We warmed the glass slightly at a candle, filled it a third high, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it, and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat. Then we talked of it and nibbled Bath Oliver biscuits, and passed on to another wine; then back to the first, then on to another, until all three were in circulation and the order of glasses got confused, and we fell out over which was which, and we passed the glasses to and fro between us until there were six glasses, some of them with mixed wines in them which we had filled from the wrong bottle, till we were obliged to start again with three clean glasses each, and the bottles were empty and our praise of them wilder and more exotic.
‘…It is a little shy wine like
a gazelle.’
‘Like a leprechaun.’
‘Dappled, in a tapestry meadow.’
‘Like flute by still water.’
‘…And this is a wise old wine.’
‘A prophet in a cave.’
‘…And this is a necklace of pearls on a white neck.’
‘Like a swan.’
‘Like the last unicorn.’
And we would leave the golden candlelight of the dining-room for the starlight outside and sit on the edge of the fountain, cooling our hands in the water and listening drunkenly to its splash and gurgle over the rocks.
‘Ought we to be drunk every night?, Sebastian asked one morning.
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘I think so too.’
We saw few strangers. There was the agent, a lean and pouchy colonel, who crossed our path occasionally and once came to tea. Usually we managed to hide from him. On Sundays a monk was fetched from a neighbouring monastery to say mass and breakfast with us. He was the first priest I ever met; I noticed how unlike he was to a parson, but Brideshead was a place of such enchantment to me that I expected everything and everyone to be unique; Father Phipps was in fact a bland, bun-faced man with, an interest in county cricket which he obstinately believed us to share.
‘You, know, father, Charles and I simply don’t know about cricket.’
‘I wish I’d seen Tennyson make that fifty-eight last Thursday. That must have been an innings. The account in The Times was excellent. Did you see him against the South Africans?’
‘I’ve never seen him.’
‘Neither have I. I haven’t seen a first-class match for years not since Father Graves took me when we were passing through Leeds, after we’d been to the induction of the Abbot at Ampleforth. Father Graves managed to look up a train which gave us three hours to wait on the afternoon of the match against Lancashire. That was an afternoon. I remember every ball of it. Since then I’ve had to go by the papers. You seldom go to see cricket?’