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 could 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 button-holes; 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 comer, 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 Sebasian’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 winetasting, 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?’

‘Never,’ I said, and he looked at me with the expression I have seen since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose themselves to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied solace.

Sebastian always heard his mass, which was ill-attended. Brideshead was not an old-established centre of Catholicism. Lady Marchmain had introduced a few Catholic servants, but the majority of them, and all the cottages, prayed, if anywhere, among the Flyte tombs in the little grey church at the gates.

Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve. I had no religion. I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was excused church in the holidays. The masters who taught me Divinity told me that biblical texts were highly untrustworthy. They never suggested I should try to pray. My father did not go to church except on family occasions and then with derision. My mother, I think, was devout. It once seemed odd to me that she should have thought it her duty to leave my father and me and go off with an ambulance, to Serbia, to die of exhaustion in the snow in Bosnia. But later I recognized some such spirit in myself. Later, too, I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real. I was aware of no such needs that summer at Brideshead.  Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible, like his teddy-bear. We never discussed the matter until on the second Sunday at Brideshead, when Father Phipps had left us and we sat in the colonnade with the papers, he surprised me by saying: ‘Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic.’ ‘Does it make much difference to you?’

‘Of course. All the time.’

‘Well, I can’t say I’ve noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don’t seem much more virtuous than me.’

‘I’m very, very much wickeder,’ said Sebastian indignantly.

‘Well then?’

‘Who was it used to pray, “O God, make me good, but not yet”?’

‘I don’t know. You, I should think.’

‘Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn’t that.’ He turned back to the pages of the News of the World and said, ‘Another naughty scout-master.’ ‘I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?’

‘Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.’

‘But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.’

‘Can’t I?’

‘I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.’

‘Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.’

‘But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.’

‘But I do. That’s how I believe.’

‘And in prayers? Do you think you can kneel down in front of a statue and say a few words, not even out loud, just in your mind, and change the weather; or that some saints are more influential than others, and you must get hold of the right one to help you on the right problem?’

‘Oh yes. Don’t you remember last term when I took Aloysius and left him behind I didn’t know where. I prayed like mad to St Anthony of Padua that morning, and immediately after lunch there was Mr Nichols at Canterbury Gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I’d left him in his cab.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you can believe all that and you don’t want to be good, where’s the difficulty about your religion?’

‘If you can’t see, you can’t.’

‘Well, where?’

‘Oh, don’t be a bore, Charles. I want to read about a woman in Hull who’s been using an instrument.’

‘You started the subject. I was just getting interested.’ ‘I’ll never mention it again...thirty-eight other cases were taken into consideration in sentencing her to six months - golly!’ But he did mention it again, some ten days later, as we were lying on the roof of the house, sunbathing and watching through a telescope the Agricultural Show which was in progress in the park below us. It was a modest two-day show serving the neighbouring parishes, and surviving more as a fair and social gathering than as a centre of serious competition. A ring was marked out in flags, and round it had been pitched half a dozen tents of varying size; there was a judges’ box and some pens for livestock; the largest marquee was for refreshments, and there the farmers congregated in numbers. Preparations had been going on for a week. ‘We shall have to hide,’ said Sebastian as the day approached. ‘My brother will be here. He’s a big part of the Agricultural Show.’ So we lay on the roof under the balustrade.  Brideshead came down by train in the morning and lunched with Colonel Fender, the agent. I met him for five minutes on his arrival. Anthony Blanche’s description was peculiarly apt; he had the Flyte face, carved by an Aztec. We could see him now, through the telescope, moving awkwardly among the tenants, stopping to greet the judges in their box, leaning over a pen gazing seriously at the cattle.  ‘Queer fellow, my brother,’ said Sebastian.

‘He looks normal enough.’

‘Oh, but he’s not. If you only knew, he’s much the craziest of us, only it doesn’t come out at all. He’s all twisted inside. He wanted to be a priest, you know.’ ‘I didn’t.’

‘I think he still does. He nearly became a Jesuit, straight from Stonyhurst. It was awful for mummy. She couldn’t exactly try and stop him, but of course it was the last thing she wanted. Think what people would have said - the eldest son; it’s not as if it had been me. And poor papa. The Church has been enough trouble to him without that happening. There was a frightful to do - monks and monsignori running round the house like mice, and Brideshead just sitting glum and talking about the will of God. He was the most upset, you see, when papa went abroad - much more than mummy really.  Finally they persuaded him to go to Oxford and think it over for three years. Now he’s trying to make up his mind. He talks of going into the Guards and into the House of Commons and of marrying. He doesn’t know what he wants. I wonder if I should have been like that, if I’d gone to Stonyhurst. I should have gone, only papa went abroad before I was old enough, and the first thing he insisted on was my going to Eton.  ‘Has your father given up religion?’

‘Well, he’s had to in a way; he only took to it when he married mummy. When he went off, he left that behind with the rest of us. You must meet him. He’s a very nice man.’

Sebastian had never spoken seriously of his father before.

I said: ‘It must have upset you all when your father went a way.’ ‘All but Cordelia. She was too young. It upset me at the time. Mummy tried to explain it to the three eldest of us so that we wouldn’t hate papa. I was the only one who didn’t. I believe she wishes I did. I was always his favourite. I should be staying with him now, if it wasn’t for this foot. I’m the only one who goes. Why don’t you come too? You’d like him.’

A man with a megaphone was shouting the results of the last event in the field below; his voice came faintly to us.

‘So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent, Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and papa is excommunicated - and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want I wish I liked Catholics more.’

‘They seem just like other people.’

‘My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not particularly in this country, where they’re so few. It’s not just that they’re a clique - as a matter of fact, they’re at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time - but they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It’s quite natural, really, that they should. But you see it’s dffficult for semi-heathens like Julia and me.’ We were interrupted in this unusually grave conversation by loud, childish cries from beyond the chimneystacks, ‘Sebastian, Sebastian.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Sebastian, reaching for a blanket. ‘That sounds like my sister Cordelia. Cover yourself up.’

‘Where are you?’

There came into view a robust child of ten or eleven; she had the unmistakable family characteristics, but had them ill-arranged in a frank and chubby plainness; two thick old fashioned pigtails hung down her back.

‘Go away, Cordelia. We’ve got no clothes on.’

‘Why? You’re quite decent. I guessed you were here. You didn’t know I was about, did you? I came down with Bridey and stopped to see Francis Xavier.’ (To me) ‘He’s my pig. Then we had lunch with Colonel Fender and then the show. Francis Xavier got a special mention. That beast Randal got first with a mangy animal. Darling Sebastian, I am pleased to see you again. How’s your poor foot?’

‘Say how-d’you-do to Mr Ryder.

‘0h, sorry. How d’you do?’ All the family charm was in her smile. ‘They’re all getting pretty boozy down there, so I came away. I say, who’s been painting the office? I went in to look for a shooting-sick and saw it.’

‘Be careful what you say. It’s Mr Ryder.’

‘But it’s lovely. I say, did you really? You are clever. Why don’t you both dress and come down? There’s no one, about.’

‘Bridey’s sure to bring the judges in.

‘But he won’t. I heard making plans not to. He’s very sour today. He didn’t want me to have dinner with you, but I fixed that. Come on. I’ll be in the nursery when you’re fit to be seen.’

We were a sombre little party that evening. Only Cordelia was perfectly at ease, rejoicing in the food, the lateness of the hour, and her brothers’ company. Brideshead was three years older than Sebastian and I, but he seemed of another generation. He had the physical tricks of his family, and his smile, when it rarely came, was as lovely as theirs; he spoke, in their voice, with a gravity and restraint which in my cousin jasper would have sounded pompous and false, but in him was plainly unassumed and unconscious.

‘I am so sorry to miss so much of your visit,’ he said to me. ‘You are being looked after properly? I hope Sebastian is seeing to the wine. Wilcox is apt to be rather grudging when he is on his own.’

‘He’s treated us very liberally.’

‘I am delighted to hear it. You are fond of wine?’

 

‘Very.’

‘I wish I were. It is such a bond with other men. At Magdalen I tried to get drunk more than once, but I did not enjoy it. Beer and whisky I find even less appetizing.  Events like this afternoon’s are a torment to me in consequence.’

‘I like wine,’ said Cordelia.

‘My sister Cordelia’s last report said that she was not only the worst girl in the school, but the worst there had ever been in the memory of the oldest nun.’ ‘That’s because I refused to be an Enfant de Marie. Reverend Mother said that if I didn’t keep my room tidier I couldn’t be one one, so I said, well, I won’t be one, and I don’t believe our Blessed Lasy cares two hoots whether I put my gym shoes on the left or the right of my dancing shoes. Reverend Mother was livid.  ‘Our Lady cares about obedience.’

‘Bridey, you mustn’t be pious,’ said Sebastian. ‘We’ve got an atheist with us.’

‘Agnostic,’ I said.

‘Really? Is there much of that at your college? There was a certain amount at Magdalen.’

‘I really don’t know. I was one long before I went to Oxford.’

‘It’s everywhere,’ said Brideshead.

Religion seemed an inevitable topic that day. For some time we talked about the Agricultural Show. Then Brideshead said, ‘I saw the Bishop in London last week. You know, he wants to close our chapel.’

‘Oh, he couldn’t,’ said Cordelia.

‘I don’t think mummy will let him, ‘ said Sebastian.

‘It’s too far away,’ said Brideshead. ‘There are a dozen families round Melstead who can’t get here. He wants to open a mass centre there.’

‘But what about us?’ said Sebastian. ‘Do we have to drive out on winter mornings?’ ‘We must have the Blessed Sacrament here,’ said Cordelia. ‘I like popping in at odd times; so does mummy.’

‘So do I, “ said Brideshead, ‘but there are so few of us. It’s not as though we were old Catholics with everyone on the estate coming to mass. It’ll have to go sooner or later, perhaps after mummy’s time. The point is whether it wouldn’t be better to let it go now.  You are an artist, Ryder, what do you think of it aesthetically?’

‘I think it’s beautiful,’ said Cordelia with tears in her eyes.

‘Is it Good Art?’

‘Well, I don’t quite know what you mean,’ I said warily. ‘I think it’s a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired.’ ‘But surely it can’t be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years, and not good now?’

‘Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don’t happen to like it much.’

‘But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good?’ ‘Bridey, don’t be so Jesuitical,’ said Sebastian, but I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could.  ‘Isn’t that just the distinction you made about wine?’

‘No. I like and think good the end to which wine is sometimes the means - the promotion of sympathy between man and man. But in my own case it does not achieve that end, so I neither like it nor think it good for me.’

‘Bridey, do stop.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I thought it rather an interesting point.’

‘Thank God I went to Eton,’ said Sebastian.

 

After dinner Brideshead said: ‘I’m afraid I must take Sebastian away for half an hour.  I shall be busy all day tomorrow, and I’m off immediately after the show. I’ve a lot of papers for father to sign. Sebastian must take them out and explain them to him. It’s time you were in bed, Cordelia.’

‘Must digest first,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to gorging like this at night. I’ll talk to Charles.’

‘”Charles”?’ said Sebastian. ‘”Charles”?’ “Mr Ryder” to you, child.’

‘Come on Charles.’

When we were alone: she said: ‘Are you really an agnostic?’

‘Does your family always talk about religion all the time?’

‘Not all the time. It’s a subject that just comes up naturally, doesn’t-it?’

‘Does it? It never has with me before.’

‘Then perhaps you are an agnostic. I’ll pray for you.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘I can’t spare you a whole rosary you know. Just a decade. I’ve got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week.’ ‘I’m sure it’s more than I deserve.’

‘Oh, I’ve got some harder cases than you. Lloyd George and the Kaiser and Olive Banks.’

‘Who is she?’

‘She was bunked from the convent last term. I don’t quite know what for. Reverend Mother found something she’d been writing. D’you know, if you weren’t an agnostic, I should ask you for five shillings to buy a black god-daughter.’ ‘Nothing will surprise me about your religion.’

‘It’s a new thing a missionary priest started last term. You send five bob to some nuns in Africa and they christen a baby and name her after you. I’ve got six black Cordelias already. Isn’t it lovely?’

When Brideshead and Sebastian returned, Cordelia was sent to bed. Brideshead began again on our discussion.

‘Of course, you are right really,’ he said. ‘You take art as a means not as an end. That is strict theology, but it’s unusual to find an agnostic believing it.’ ‘Cordelia has promised to pray for me,’ I said.

‘She made a novena I for her pig’ said Sebastian.

‘You know all this is very puzzling to me,’ I said.

‘I think we’re causing scandal, said Brideshead.

That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Sebastian, and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of his life. He was like a friend made on board ship, on the high seas; now we had come to his home port.

Brideshead and Cordelia went away; the tents were struck on the show ground, the flags uprooted; the trampled grass began to regain its colour; the month that had started in leisurely fashion came swiftly to its end. Sebastian walked without a stick now and had forgotten his injury.

‘I think you’d better come with me to Venice,’ he said.

‘No money.’

‘I thought of that. We live on papa when we get there. The lawyers pay my fare - first class and sleeper. We can both travel third for that.’

And so we went; first by the long, cheap sea-crossing to Dunkirk, sitting all night on deck under a clear sky, watching the grey dawn break over the sand dunes; then to Paris, on wooden seats, where we drove to the Lotti, had baths and shaved, lunched at Foyot’s, which was hot and half-empty, loitered sleepily among the shops, and sat long in a café waiting till the time of our train; then in the warm, dusty evening to the Gare de Lyon, to the slow train south, again the wooden seats, a carriage full of the poor, visiting their families - travelling, as the poor do in Northern countries, with a multitude of small bundles and an air of patient submission to authority - and sailors returning from leave.  We slept fitfully, jolting and stopping, changed once in the night, slept again and awoke in an empty carriage, with pine woods passing the windows and the distant view of mountain peaks. New uniforms at the frontier, coffee and bread at the station buffet, people round us of Southern grace and gaiety; on again into the plains, conifers changing to vine and olive, a change of trains at Milan; garlic sausage, bread, and a flask of Orvieto bought from a trolley (we had spent all our money save for a few francs, in Paris); the sun mounted high and the country glowed with heat; the carriage filled with peasants, ebbing and flowing at each station, the smell of garlic was overwhelming in the hot carriage. At last in the evening we arrived at Venice.  A sombre figure was there to meet us. ‘Papa’s valet, Plender.’ ‘I met the express,’ said Plender. ‘His Lordship thought you must have looked up the train wrong. This seemed only to come from Milan.’

‘We travelled third.’

Plender tittered politely. ‘I have the gondola here’. I shall follow with the luggage in the vaporetto. His Lordship had gone to the Lido. He was not sure he would be home before you - that was when we expected you on the Express. He should be there by now.’

He led us to the waiting boat. The gondoliers wore green and white livery and silver plaques on their chests; they smiled and bowed.

‘Palazzo. Pronto.’

‘Si, signore Plender.’

And we floated away.

‘You’ve been here before?’

‘No.’

‘I came once before - from the sea. This is the way to arrive.’

‘Ecco ci siamo, signori.’

The palace was a little less than it sounded, a narrow Palladian facade, mossy steps, a dark archway of rusticated stone. One boatman leapt ashore, made fast to the post, rang the bell; the other stood on the prow keeping the craft in to the steps. The doors opened; a man in rather raffish summer livery of striped linen led us up the stairs from shadow into light; the piano nobile was in full sunshine, ablaze with frescoes of the school of Tintoretto.

Our rooms were on the floor above, reached by a precipitous marble staircase; they were shuttered against the afternoon sun; the butler threw them open and we looked out on the grand canal; the beds had mosquito nets.

‘Mostica not now.’

There was a little bulbous press in each room, a misty, gilt-framed mirror, and no other furniture. The floor was of bare marble slabs.

‘A bit bleak?’ asked Sebastian.

‘Bleak? Look at that.’ I led him again to the window and the incomparable pageant below and about us.

‘No’, you couldn’t call it bleak.’

A tremendous explosion drew us next door. We found a bathroom which seemed to have been built in a chimney. There was no ceiling; instead the walls ran straight through the floor above to the open sky. The butler was almost invisible in the steam of an antiquated geyser. There was an overpowering smell of gas and a tiny trickle of cold water.

‘No good.’

‘Si, Si, subito signori.’

The butler ran to the top of the staircase and began to shout down it; a female voice, more strident than his answered. Sebastian and I returned to the spectacle below our windows. Presently the argument came to an, end and a woman and child appeared, who smiled at us, scowled at the butler, and put on Sebastian’s press I a silver basin and ewer of boiling water. The butler meanwhile unpacked and folded our clothes and, lapsing into Italian, told us of the unrecognized merits of the geyser, until suddenly cocking his head sideways he became alert, said ‘II marchese,’ and darted downstairs.  ‘We’d better look respectable before meeting papa,’ said Sebastian. ‘We needn’t dress.

I gather he’s alone at the moment.’

I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress. He was standing on the balcony of the saloon and, as he turned to greet us, his face was in deep shadow. I was aware only of a tall and upright figure.  ‘Darling papa,’ said Sebastian, ‘how young you are looking!’ He kissed Lord Marchmain on the cheek and I, who had not kissed my father since I left the nursery, stood shyly behind him.

‘This is Charles. Don’t you think my father very handsome, Charles?’

Lord Marchmain shook my hand.

‘Whoever looked up your train, ‘ he said - and his voice also was Sebastian’s - ‘made a bêtise. There’s no such one.’

‘We came on it.’

‘You can’t have. There was only a slow train from Milan at that time. I was at the Lido. I have taken to playing tennis there with the professional in the early evening. It is the only time of day when it is not too hot. I hope you boys will be fairly comfortable upstairs. This house seems to have been designed for the comfort of only one person, and I am that one. I have a room the size of this and a very decent dressing-room. Cara has taken possession of the other sizeable room.’

I was fascinated to hear him speak of his mistress so simply and casually; later I suspected that it was done for effect, for me.

‘How is she?’

‘Cara? Well, I hope. She will be back with us tomorrow. She is visiting some American friends at a villa on the Brenta canal. Where shall we dine? We might go to the Luna, but it is filling up with English now. Would you be too dull at home? Cara is sure to want to go out tomorrow, and the cook here is really quite excellent.’ He had moved away from the window and now stood in the full evening sunlight, with the red damask of the walls behind him. It was a noble face, a controlled one, just, it seemed, as he planned it to be; slightly weary, slightly sardonic, slightly voluptuous.  He seemed in the prime of life- it was odd to think that he was only a few years younger than my father.

We dined at a marble table in the windows; everything was either of marble, or velvet, or dull, gilt gesso, in this house. Lord Marchmain said, ‘And how do you plan your time here? Bathing or sight-seeing?’

‘Some sight-seeing, anyway,’ I said.

‘Cara will like that - she, as Sebastian will have told you, is your hostess here. You can’t do both, you know. Once you go to the Lido there is no escaping - you play backgammon, you get caught at the bar, you get stupefied by the sun. Stick to the churches.’

‘Charles is very keen on painting,.’ said Sebastian.

‘Yes?’ I noticed the hint of deep boredom which I knew so well in my own father.

‘Yes? Any particular Venetian painter?’

‘Bellini,’ I answered rather wildly.

‘Yes? Which?’

‘I’m afraid that I didn’t know there were two of them.’ ‘Three to be precise. You will find that in the great ages painting was very much a family business. How did you leave England?’

‘It has been lovely,’ said Sebastian.

‘Was it? Was it? It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling-block to my own party. Well, my elder son will change all that, I’ve no doubt, if they leave him anything to inherit...Why, I wonder, are Italian sweets always thought to be so good? There was always an Italian pastry-cook at Brideshead until my father’s day.  He had an Austrian, so much better. And now I suppose there is some British matron with beefy forearms.’

After dinner we left the palace by the street door and walked through a maze of.bridges and squares and alleys, to Florian’s for coffee, and watched the grave crowds crossing and recrossing under the campanile. ‘There is nothing quite like a Venetian crowd,’ said Lord Marchmain. ‘The city is crawling with Anarchists, - but an American woman tried to sit here the other night with bare shoulders and they drove her away by coming to stare at her, quite silently; they were like circling gulls coming back and back to her, until she left. Our countrymen are much less dignified when they attempt to express moral disapproval.’

An English party had just then come from the waterfront, made for a table near us, and then suddenly moved to the other side, where they looked askance at us and talked with their heads close together. ‘That is a man and his wife I used to know when I was in politics. A prominent member of your church, Sebastian.’ As we went up to bed that night Sebastian said: ‘He’s rather a poppet, isn’t he?’

Lord Marchmain’s mistress arrived next day. I was nineteen years old and completely ignorant of women. I could not with any certainty recognize a prostitute in the streets. I was therefore not indifferent to the fact of living under the roof of an adulterous couple, but I was old enough to hide my interest. Lord Marchmain’s mistress, therefore, found me with a multitude of conflicting expectations about her all of which were, for the moment, disappointed by her appearance. She was not a voluptuous, Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a ‘little bit of fluff’; she was a middle-aged, well-preserved, well-dressed, well-mannered woman such as I had seen in countless public places and occasionally met. Nor did she seem marked by any social stigma. On the day of her arrival we lunched at the Lido, where she was greeted at almost every table.  ‘Vittoria Corombona has asked us all to her ball on Saturday.’

‘It is very kind of her. You know I do not dance,’ said Lord Marchmain.

‘But for the boys? It is a thing to be seen - the Corombona palace lit up for the ball.

One does not know how many such balls there will be in the future.’

‘The boys can do as they like. We must refuse.’

‘And I have asked Mrs Hacking Brunner to luncheon. She has a charming daughter.

Sebastian and his friend will like her.’

 

‘Sebastian and his friend are more interested in Bellini than heiresses.’ ‘But that is what I have always wished,’ said Cara, changing her point of attack adroitly. ‘I have been here more times than I can count and Alex has not once let me inside San Marco, even. We will become tourists, yes?’ We became tourists; Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman to whom all doors were open and with him at her side and a guide book in her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat, prosaic figure amid the immense splendours of the place.

The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly - perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless. On some days life kept pace with the gondola, as we nosed through the sidecanals and the boatman uttered his plaintive musical bird-cry of warning; on other days with the speed-boat bouncing over the lagoon in a stream of sun-lit foam; it left a confused memory of fierce sunlight on the sands and cool, marble interiors; of water everywhere, lapping on smooth stone, reflected in a dapple of light on painted ceilings; of a night at the Corombona palace such as Byron might have known, and another Byronic night fishing for scampi in the shallows of Chioggia, the phosphorescent wake of the little ship, the lantern swinging in the prow, and the net coming up full of weed and sand and floundering fishes; of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at Harry’s bar.

I remember Sebastian looking up at the Colleoni statue and saying, ‘It’s rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war.’ I remember most particularly one conversation towards the end of my visit.

Sebastian had gone to play tennis with his father and Cara at last admitted to fatigue.  We sat in the late afternoon at the windows overlooking the Grand Canal, she on the sofa with a piece of needlework, I in an armchair, idle. It was the first time we had been alone together.

‘I think you are very -fond of Sebastian,’ she said.

‘Why, certainly.’

‘I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.’ She was so composed and matter-of-fact that I could not take her amiss, but I failed to find an answer. She seemed not to expect one but continued stitching, pausing sometimes to match the silk from a work-bag at her side.  ‘It is a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men; I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl. Alex you see had it for a girl, for his wife. Do you think he loves me?’

‘Really, Cara, you ask the most embarrassing questions. How should I know? I assume...’

‘He does not. But not the littlest piece. Then why does he stay with me? I will tell you; because I protect him from Lady Marchmain. He hates her; but you can have no conception how he hates her. You would think him so calm and English - the milord, rather blasé, all passion dead, wishing to be comfortable and not to be worried, following the sun, with me to look after that one thing that no man can do for himself.  My friend, he is a volcano of hate. He cannot breathe the same air as she. He will not set foot in England because it is her home; he can scarcely be happy with Sebastian because he is her son. But Sebastian hates her too.’

‘I’m sure you’re wrong there.’

‘He may not admit it to you. He may not admit it to himself; they are full of hate - hate of themselves. Alex and his family...Why do you think he will never go into Society?’

‘I always thought people had turned against him.’

‘My dear boy, you are very young. People turn against a handsome, clever, wealthy man like Alex? Never in your life. It is he who has driven them away. Even now they come back again and again to be snubbed and laughed at. And all for Lady Marchmain.  He will not touch a hand which may have touched hers. When we have guests I see him thinking, “Have they perhaps just come from Brideshead? Are they on their way to Marchmain House? Will they speak of me to my wife? Are they a link between me and her whom I hate?” But, seriously, with my heart, that is how he thinks. He is mad. And how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up. I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved.  I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.

‘When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating.  Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood - innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. A woman has not all these ways of loving.  ‘Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence. We are comfortable.

‘Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny and he is nineteen years old... ‘

She stirred on her sofa, shifting her weight so that she could look down at the passing boats, and said in fond, mocking tones: ‘How good it is to sit in the shade and talk of love,’ and then added with a sudden swoop to earth, ‘Sebastian drinks too much.’ ‘I suppose we both do.’

‘With you it does not matter. I have watched you together. With Sebastian it is different. He will be a drunkard if someone does not come to stop him. I have known so many. Alex was nearly a drunkard when he met me; it is in the blood. I see it in the way Sebastian drinks. It is not your way.’

We arrived in London on the day before term began. On the way from Charing Cross I dropped Sebastian in the forecourt of his mother’s house; ‘Here is “Marchers”,’ he said with a sigh which meant the end of a holiday. ‘I won’t ask you in, the place is probably full of my family. We’ll meet at Oxford’; I drove across the park to my home.  My father greeted me with, his usual air of mild regret.  ‘Here today,’ he said; ‘gone tomorrow. I seem to see very little of you. Perhaps it is dull for you here. How could it be otherwise? You have enjoyed yourself.’ ‘Very much. I went to Venice.’

‘Yes. Yes. I suppose so. The weather was fine?’ When he went to bed after an evening of silent study, he paused to ask: ‘The friend you were so much concerned about, did he die?’

‘No.’

‘I am very thankful. You should have written to tell me. I worried about him so much.’