‘AND when we reached the top of the pass,’ said Mr Samgrass, we heard the galloping horses behind, and two soldiers rode up to the head of the caravan and turned us back.  The General had sent them, and they reached us only just in time. There was a Band, not a mile ahead.’

He paused, and his small audience sat silent, conscious that he had sought, to impress them but in doubt as to how they could politely show their interest.  ‘A Band?’ said Julia.’Goodness!’

Still he seemed to expect more. At last Lady Marchmain said, ‘I suppose the sort of folk-music you get in those parts is very monotonous.’ ‘Dear Lady Marchmain, a Band of Brigands. Cordelia, beside me on the sofa, began to giggle noiselessly. ‘The mountains are full of them. Stragglers from Kemal’s army;

Greeks who got cut off in, the retreat. Very desperate fellows, I assure you.’

‘Do pinch me’,’ whispered Cordelia.

I pinched her and the agitation of the sofa-springs ceased. ‘Thanks,’ she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘So you never got to wherever-it-was,’ said Julia. ‘Weren’t you terribly disappointed, Sebastian?’

‘Me?’ said Sebastian from the shadows beyond the lamplight, beyond the warmth of the burning logs, beyond the family circle, and the photographs spread out on the card-table. ‘Me? Oh, I don’t think I was there that day, was I, Sammy?’ ‘That was the day you were ill.’

‘I was ill,’ he repeated like an echo, ‘so I never should have got to wherever-it-was, should I, Sammy?’

 

‘Now this, Lady Marchmain, is the caravan at Aleppo in the courtyard of the inn.  That’s our Armenian cook, Begedbian; that’s me on the pony; that’s the tent folded up; that’s a rather tiresome Kurd who would follow us about at the time...Here I am in Pontus, Ephesus, Trebizond, Krak-des-chevaliers, Samothrace, Batum - of course, I haven’t got them in chronological order yet.’

‘All guides and ruins and mules, ‘ said Cordelia. ‘Where’s Sebastian?’ ‘He,’ said Mr Samgrass, with a hint of triumph in his voice, as though he had expected the question and prepared the answer, ‘he held the camera. He became quite an expert as soon as he learned not to put his hand over the lens, didn’t you, Sebastian?’ There was no answer from the shadows. Mr Samgrass delved again into his pigskin satchel.  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘is a group taken by a street photographer on the terrace of the St George Hotel at Beirut. There’s Sebastian.’

‘Why, ‘ I said, ‘there’s Anthony Blanche surely?’

‘Yes, we saw quite a lot of him; met him by chance at Constantinople.’ A delightful companion. I can’t think how I missed knowing him. He came with us all the way to Beirut.’

Tea had been cleared away and the curtains drawn. It was two days after Christmas, the first evening of my visit; the first, too, of Sebastian’s and Mr Samgrass’s, whom to my surprise I had found on the platform when I arrived.

Lady Marchmain had written three weeks before: ‘I have just heard from Mr Samgrass that he and Sebastian will be home for Christmas as we hoped. I had not heard from them for so long that I was afraid they were lost and did not want to make any arrangements until I knew. Sebastian will be longing to see you. Do come to us for Christmas if you can manage it, or as soon after as you can.’ Christmas with my uncle was an engagement I could not break, so I travelled across country and joined the local train midway, expecting to find Sebastian already established; there he was, however, in the next carriage to mine, and when I asked him what he was doing, Mr Samgrass replied with such glibness and at such length, telling me of mislaid luggage and of Cook’s being shut over the holidays, that I was at once aware of some other explanation which was being withheld.

Mr Samgrass was not at ease; he maintained all the physical habits of self-confidence, but guilt hung about him like stale cigar smoke, and in Lady Marchmain’s greeting of him I caught a note of anticipation. He kept up a lively account of his tour during tea, and then Lady Marchmain drew him away with her, upstairs, for a ‘little talk’. I watched him go with something near compassion; it was plain to anyone with a poker sense that Mr Samgrass held a very imperfect hand and, as I watched him at tea, I began to suspect that he was not only bluffing but cheating. There was something he must say, did not want to say, and did not quite know how to say to Lady Marchmain about his doings over Christmas, but, more than that, I quessed, there was a great deal he ought to say and had no intention at all of saying, about the whole Levantine tour.

‘Come and see nanny,’ said Sebastian.

‘Please, can I come, too?’ said Cordelia.

‘Come on.’

We climbed to the nursery in the dome. On the way Cordelia said: ‘Aren’t you at all pleased to be home?’

‘Of course I’m pleased,’ said Sebastian.

‘Well, you might show it a bit. I’ve been looking forward to it so much.’

Nanny did not particularly wish to be talked to; she liked visitors best when they paid

no attention to her and let her knit away, and watch their faces and think of them as she

had known them as small children; their present goings-on did not, signify much beside those early illnesses and crimes.

‘Well, ‘ she said, ‘you are looking peaky. I expect it’s all that foreign food doesn’t agree with you. You must fatten up now you’re back. Looks as though you’d been having some late nights, too, by the look of your eyes - dancing, I suppose.’ (It was ever Nanny Hawkins’s belief that the upper classes spent most of their leisure evenings in the ballroom.) ‘And that shirt wants darning. Bring it to me before it goes to the wash.’ Sebastian certainly did look ill; five months had wrought the change of years in him.  He was paler, thinner, pouchy under the eyes, drooping in, the corners of his mouth, and he showed the scars of a boil on the side of his chin; his voice seemed flatter and his movements alternately listless and jumpy; he looked down-at-heel, too, with clothes and hair, which formerly had been happily negligent now unkempt; worst of all there was a wariness in his eye which I had surprised there at Easter, and which now seemed habitual to him.

Restrained by this wariness I asked him nothing of himself, but told him, instead about my autumn and winter. I told him about my rooms in the Ile Saint-Louis and the art school, and how good the old teachers were and how bad the students.  ‘They never go near the Louvre,’ I said, ‘or, if they do, it’s only because one of their absurd reviews has suddenly “discovered” a master who fits in with that month’s aesthetic theory. Half of them are out to make a popular splash like Picabia; the other half quite simply want to earn their living doing advertisements for Vogue and decorating night clubs. And the teachers still go on trying to make them paint like Delacroix.’

‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modem Art is all bosh, isn’t it?’

‘Great bosh.’

‘Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns- and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.’

Presently it was time for Cordelia to go to her supper, and for Sebastian and me to go down to the drawing-room for our cocktails. Brideshead was there alone, but Wilcox followed on our heels to say to him: ‘Her Ladyship would like to speak to you upstairs, my Lord.’

‘That’s unlike mummy, sending for anyone. She usually lures them up herself.’ There was no sign of the cocktail tray. After a few minutes Sebastian rang the bell. A footman answered. ‘Mr Wilcox is upstairs with her Ladyship.’ ‘Well, never mind, bring in the cocktail things.’

‘Mr Wilcox has the keys, my Lord.’

‘Oh...well, send him in with them when he comes down.’ We talked a little abou t Anthony Blanche - ‘He had a beard in Istanbul, but I made him take it off’ - and after ten minutes Sebastian said: ‘Well, I don’t want a cocktail anyway; I’m off to my bath,’ and left the room.

It was half past seven; I supposed the others had gone to dress, but, as I was going to follow them, I met Brideshead coming down.

‘Just a moment, Charles, there’s something I’ve got to explain. My mother has given orders that no drinks are to be left in any of the rooms. You’ll understand why. If you want anything, ring and ask Wilcox - only better wait until you’re alone. I’m sorry, but there it is.’

‘Is that necessary?’

 

‘I gather very necessary. You may or may not have heard, Sebastian had another outbreak as soon as he got back to England. He was lost over Christmas. Mr Samgrass only found him yesterday evening.’

‘I guessed something of the kind had happened. Are you sure this is the best way of dealing with it?’

‘It’s my mother’s way. Will you have a cocktail, now that he’s gone upstairs?’

‘It would choke me.’

I was always given the room I had on my first visit; it was next to Sebastian’s, and we shared what had once been a dressing-room and had been changed to a bathroom twenty years back by the substitution for the bed, of a deep, copper, mahogany-framed bath, that was filled by pulling a brass lever heavy as a piece of marine engineering; the rest of the room remained unchanged; a coal fire always burned there in winter. I often think of that bathroom - the water colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair - and contrast it with the uniform, clinical, little chambers, glittering with chromium-plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.

I lay in the bath and then dried slowly by the fire, thinking all the time of my friend’s black home-coming. Then I put on my dressing gown and went to Sebastian’s room, entering, as I always did, without knocking. He was sitting by his fire half-dressed, and he started angrily when he heard me and put down a tooth glass.

‘Oh, it’s you. You gave me a fright.’

‘So you got a drink,’ I said.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to pretend with me! ‘You might offer me some.’

‘It’s just something I had in my flask. I’ve finished it now.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing. A lot. I’ll tell you some time.’

I dressed and called in for Sebastian, but found him still sitting as I had left him, half-dressed over his fire.

Julia was alone in the drawing-room.

‘Well,’ I asked, ‘what’s going on?’

‘Oh, just another boring family potin. Sebastian got tight again, so we’ve all got to keep an eye on him. It’s too tedious.’

‘It’s pretty boring for him, too.’

‘Well, it’s his fault. Why can t he behave like anyone else? Talking of keeping an eye on people) what about Mr Samgrass? Charles, do you notice anything at all fishy about that man?’

‘Very fishy. Do you think your mother saw it?’

‘Mummy only sees what suits her. She can’t have the whole household under surveillance. I’m causing anxiety, too, you know.’

‘I didn’t know’ I said, adding humbly, ‘I’ve only just come from Paris.’ so as to avoid giving the impression that any trouble she might be in was not widely notorious.

It was an evening of peculiar gloom. We dined in the Painted Parlour. Sebastian was late, and so painfully excited were we that I think it was in all our minds that he would make some sort of low-comedy entrance, reeling and hiccuping. When he came it was, of course, with perfect propriety; he apologized, sat in the empty place, and allowed Mr Samgrass to resume his monologue, uninterrupted and, it seemed, unheard. Druses, patriarchs, icons, bed-bugs, Romanesque remains, curious dishes of goat and sheeps’

eyes, French and Turkish officials all the catalogue of Near Eastern travel was provided for our amusement.

I watched the champagne go round the table. When it came to Sebastian he said: ‘I’ll have whisky, please,’ and I saw Wilcox glance over his head to Lady Marchmain and saw her give a tiny, hardly perceptible nod. At Brideshead they used small individual spirit decanters which held about a quarter of a bottle, and were always placed, full, before anyone who asked for it; the decanter which Wilcox put before Sebastian was half-empty. Sebastian raised it very deliberately, tilted it, looked at it, and then in silence poured the liquor into his glass, where it covered two fingers. We all began talking at once, all except Sebastian, so that for a moment Mr Samgrass found himself talking to no one, telling the candlesticks about the Maronites; but soon we fell silent again, and he had the table until Lady Marchmain and Julia left the room.  ‘Don’t be long, Bridey,’ she said, at the door, as she always said, and that evening we had no inclination to delay. Our glasses were filled with port and the decanter was at once taken from the room. We drank quickly and went to the drawing-room, where Brideshead asked his mother to read, and she read The Diary of a Nobody with great spirit until ten o’clock, when she closed the book and said she was unaccountably tired, so tired that she would not visit the chapel that night.

‘Who’s hunting tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘Cordelia,’ said Brideshead. ‘I’m taking that young horse of Julia’s, just to show him the hounds; I shan’t keep him out more than a couple of hours.’ ‘Rex is arriving some time,’ said Julia. ‘I’d better stay in to greet him.’

‘Where’s the meet?’ said Sebastian suddenly.

‘Just here at Flyte St Mary.’

‘Then I’d like to hunt, please, if there’s anything for me.’ ‘Of course. That’s delightful. I’d have asked you, only you always used to complain so of being made to go out. You can have Tinkerbell. She’s been going very nicely this season.’

Everyone was suddenly pleased that Sebastian wanted to hunt; it seemed to undo some of the mischief of the evening. Brideshead rang the bell for whisky.  ‘Anyone else want any?’

‘Bring me some, too,’ said Sebastian, and, though it was a footman this time and not Wilcox, I saw the same exchange of glance and nod between the servant and Lady Marchmain. Everyone had been warned. The two drinks were brought in, poured out already in the glasses, like ‘doubles’ at a bar, and all our eyes followed the tray, as though we were dogs in a dining-room smelling game.  The good humour engendered by Sebastian’s wish to hunt persisted, however;

Brideshead wrote out a note for the stables, and we all went to bed quite cheerfully.  Sebastian got straight to bed; I sat by his fire and smoked a pipe. I said: ‘I rather wish I was coming out with you tomorrow.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t see much sport. I can tell you exactly what I’m going to do. I shall leave Bridey at the first covert, hack over to the nearest good pub, and spend the entire day quietly soaking in the bar parlour. If they treat me like a dipsomaniac, they can bloody well have a dipsomaniac. I hate hunting, anyway.’ ‘Well, I can’t stop you.’

‘You can, as a matter of fact - by not giving me any money. They stopped my banking account, you know, in the summer. It’s been one of my chief difficulties. I pawned my watch and cigarette case to ensure a happy Christmas, so I shall have to come to you tomorrow for my day’s expenses.’

‘I won’t. You know perfectly well I can’t.’

 

‘Won’t you, Charles? Well, I daresay I shall manage on my own somehow. I’ve got rather clever at that lately - managing on my own. I’ve had to.’ ‘Sebastian, what have you and Mr Samgrass been up to?’

‘He told you at dinner - ruins and guides and mules, that’s what Sammy’s been up to.  We decided to go our own ways, that’s all. Poor Sammy’s really behaved rather well so far. I hoped he would keep it up, but he seems to have been very indiscreet about my happy Christmas. I suppose he thought if he gave too good an account of me, he might lose his job as keeper.

‘He makes quite a good thing out of it, you know. I don’t mean that he steals. I should think he’s fairly honest about money. He certainly keeps an embarrassing little note-book in which he puts down the travellers’ cheques he cashes and what he spends it on, for mummy and the lawyer to see. But he wanted to go to all these places, and it’s very convenient for him to have me to take him in comfort, instead of going as dons usually do. The only disadvantage was having to put up with my company, and we soon solved that for him.

‘We began very much on a Grand Tour, you know, with letters to all the chief people everywhere, and stayed with the Military Governor at Rhodes and the Ambassador at Constantinople. That was what Sammy had signed on for in the first place. Of course, he had his work cut out keeping his eye on me, but he warned all our hosts beforehand that I was not responsible.’

‘Sebastian.’

‘Not quite responsible - and as I had no money to spend I couldn’t get away very much. He even did the tipping for me, put the note into the man’s hand and jotted the amount down then and there in his note-book. My lucky time was at Constantinople. I managed to make some money at cards one evening when Sammy wasn’t looking. Next day I gave him the slip and was having a very happy hour in the bar at the Tokatlian when who should come in but Anthony Blanche with a beard and a Jew boy. Anthony lent me a tenner just before Sammy came panting in and recaptured me. After that I didn’t get a minute out of sight; the Embassy staff put us in the boat to Piraeus and watched us sail away. But in Athens it was easy. I simply walked out of the Legation one day after lunch, changed my money at Cook’s, and asked about sailings to Alexandria just to fox Sammy, then went down to the port in a bus, found a sailor who spoke American, lay up with him till his ship sailed, and popped back to Constantinople, and that was that.

‘Anthony and the Jew boy shared a very nice, tumbledown house near the bazaars. I stayed there till it got too cold, then Anthony and I drifted south till we met Sammy by appointment in Syria three weeks ago.’

‘Didn’t Sammy mind?’

‘Oh, I think he quite enjoyed himself in his own ghastly way only of course there was no more high life for him. I think he was a bit anxious at first. I didn’t want him to get the whole Mediterranean Fleet out, so I cabled him from Constantinople that I was quite well and would he send money to the Ottoman Bank. He came hopping over as soon as he got my cable. Of course he was in a difficult position, because I’m of age and not certified yet, so he couldn’t have me arrested. He couldn’t leave me to starve while he was living on my money, and he couldn’t tell mummy without looking pretty silly. I had him all ways, poor Sammy. My original idea had been to leave him flat, but Anthony was very helpful about that, and said it was far better to arrange things amicably; and he did arrange things very amicably. So here I am.’

‘After Christmas.’

‘Yes, I was determined to have a happy Christmas.’

 

‘Did you?’

‘I think so. I don’t remember it much, and that’s always a good sign, isn’t it?’

Next morning at breakfast Brideshead wore scarlet; Cordelia, very smart herself, with her chin held high over her white stock, wailed when Sebastian appeared in a tweed coat: ‘Oh, Sebastian, you can’t come out like that. Do go and change. You look so lovely in hunting clothes.’

‘Locked away somewhere. Gibbs couldn’t find them.’

‘That’s a fib. I helped get them out myself before you were called.’

‘Half the things are missing.’

‘It just encourages the Strickland-Venableses. They’re behaving rottenly. They’ve even taken their grooms out of top hats.’

It was a quarter to eleven before the horses were brought round, but no one else appeared downstairs; it was as though they were in hiding, listening for Sebastian’s retreating hooves before showing themselves.

Just as he was about to start, when the others were already mounted, Sebastian beckoned me into the hall. On the table beside his hat, gloves, whip, and sandwiches, lay the flask he had put out to be filled. He picked it up and shook it; it was empty.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘I can’t even be trusted that far. It’s they who are mad, not me. Now you can’t refuse me money.’ I gave him a pound.

‘More,’ he said.

I gave him another and watched him mount and trot after his brother and sister.  Then, as though it were his cue on the stage, Mr Samgrass came to my elbow, put an arm in mine, and led me back to the fire. He warmed his neat little hands and then turned to warm his seat.

‘So Sebastian is in pursuit of the fox,’ he said, ‘and our little problem is shelved for an hour or two?’

I was not going to stand this from Mr Samgrass.

‘I heard all about your Grand Tour, last night,’ I said.

‘Ah, I rather supposed you might have.’ Mr Samgrass was undismayed, relieved, it seemed, to have someone else in the know. ‘I did not harrow our hostess with all that.  After all, it turned out far better than one had any right to expect. I did feel, however, that some explanation was due to her of Sebastian’s Christmas festivities. You may have observed last night that there were certain precautions.’ ‘I did.’

‘You thought them excessive? I am with you, particularly as they tend to compromise the comfort of our own little visit. I have seen Lady Marchmain this morning. You must not suppose I am just out of bed. I have had a little talk upstairs with our hostess. I think we may hope for some relaxation tonight. Yesterday was not an evening that any of us would wish to have repeated. I earned less gratitude than I deserved, I think, for my efforts to distract you.’

It was repugnant to me to talk about Sebastian to Mr Samgrass, but I was compelled to say: ‘I’m not sure that tonight would be the best time to start the relaxation.’ ‘But surely? Why not tonight, after a day in the field under Brideshead’s inquisitorial eye? Could one choose better?’

‘Oh, I suppose it’s none of my business really.’

‘Nor mine strictly, now that he is safely home. Lady Marchmain did me the honour of consulting me. But it is less Sebastian’s welfare than our own I have at heart at the moment. I need my third glass of port; I need that hospitable tray in the library. And yet you specifically advise against it tonight. I wonder why. Sebastian can come to no mischief today. For one thing, he has no money. I happen to know. I saw to it. I even have his watch and cigarette case upstairs. He will be quite harmless...as long as no one is so wicked as to give him any...Ah, Lady Julia, good morning to you, good morning. And how is the peke this hunting morning?’

‘Oh, the peke’s all right. Listen. I’ve got Rex Mottram coming here today. We simply can’t have another evening like last night. Someone must speak to mummy.’ ‘Someone has. I spoke. I think it will be all right.’

‘Thank God for that. Are you painting today, Charles?’ It had been the custom that on every visit to Brideshead I painted a medallion on the walls of the garden-room. The custom suited me well, for it gave me a good reason to detach myself from the rest of the party; when the house was full, the garden-room became a rival to the nursery, where from time to time people took refuge to complain about the others; thus without effort I kept in touch with the gossip of the place. There were three finished medallions now, each rather pretty in its way, but unhappily each in a different way, for my tastes had changed and I had become more dexterous in the eighteen months since the series was begun. As a decorative scheme, they were a failure. That morning was typical of the many mornings when I had found the garden-room a sanctuary. There I went and was soon at work. Julia came with me to see me started and we talked, inevitably, of Sebastian.

‘Don’t you, get bored with the subject?’ she asked. ‘Why must everyone make such a Thing about it?’

‘Just because we’re fond of him.’

‘Well. I’m fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he’d behave like anybody else. I’ve grown up with one family skeleton, you know - papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before us when we were children. If mummy is going to start making a skeleton out of Sebastian, it’s too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn’t he go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn’t matter?’ ‘Why does it matter less being unhappy in Kenya than anywhere else?’

‘Don’t pretend to be stupid, Charles. You understand perfectly.’ ‘You mean there won’t be so many embarrassing situations for you? Well, all I was trying to say was that I’m afraid there may be an embarrassing situation tonight if Sebastian gets the chance. He’s in a bad mood.’

‘Oh, a day’s hunting will put that all right.’

It was touching to see the faith which everybody put in the value of a day’s hunting.  Lady Marchmain, who looked in on me during the morning, mocked herself for it with that delicate irony for which she was famous.

‘I’ve always detested hunting,’ she said, ‘because it seems to produce a particularly gross kind of caddishness in the nicest people. I don’t know what it is, but the moment they dress up and get on a horse they become like a lot of Prussians. And so boastful after it. The evenings I’ve sat at dinner appalled at seeing the men and women I know, transformed into half-awake, self-opinionated, monomaniac louts!...and yet, you know - it must be something derived from centuries ago - my heart is quite light today to think of Sebastian out with them. “There’s nothing wrong with him really,” I say, “he’s gone hunting” - as though it were an answer to prayer.’

She asked me about my life in Paris. I told her of my rooms with their view of the river and the towers of Notre Dame. ‘I’m hoping Sebastian will come and stay with me when I go back.’

‘It would have been lovely,’ said Lady Marchmain, sighing as though for the unattainable.

 

‘I hope he’s coming to stay with me in London.’

‘Charles, you know it isn’t possible. London’s the worst place. Even Mr Samgrass couldn’t hold him there. We have no secrets in this house. He was lost, you know, all through Christmas. Mr Samgrass only found him because he couldn’t pay his bill in the place where he was, so they telephoned our house. It’s too horrible. No, London is impossible; if he can’t behave himself here, with us...We must keep him happy and healthy here for a bit, hunting, and then send him abroad again with Mr Samgrass...You see, I’ve been through all this before.’

The retort was there, unspoken, well-understood by both of us - ‘You couldn’t keep him; he ran away. So will Sebastian. Because they both hate you.’ A horn and the huntsman’s cry sounded in the valley below.

‘There they go now, drawing the home woods. I hope he’s having a good day.’ Thus with Julia and Lady Marchmain I reached deadlock, not because we failed to understand one another, but because we understood too well. With Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject - for the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to in acrid wisps of smoke that oozed under hatches and billowed suddenly from the scuttles and air pipes - with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, a high place of toiling lungs.

He said: ‘I hope it is dipsomania. That is simply a great misfortune that we must all help him bear. What I used to fear was that he just got drunk deliberately when he liked and because he liked.’

‘That’s exactly what he did - what we both did. It’s what he does with me now. I can keep him to that, if only your mother would trust me. If you worry him with keepers and cures he’ll be a physical wreck in a few years.’

‘There’s nothing wrong in being a physical wreck, you know. There’s no moral obligation to be Postmaster-General or Master of Foxhounds or to live to walk ten miles at eighty.’

‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘Moral obligation - now you’re back on religion again.

‘I never left it, said Brideshead.

‘D’you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense.’

‘It’s odd you should say that. I’ve heard it before from other people. It’s one of the many reasons why I don’t think I should make a good priest. It’s something in the way my mind works, I suppose.’

At luncheon Julia had no thoughts except for her guest who was coming that day. She drove to the station to meet him and brought him home to tea.  ‘Mummy, do look at Rex’s Christmas present.’

It was a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.

‘Dear me,’ said Lady Marchmain. ‘I wonder if it eats the same sort of things as an ordinary tortoise.’

‘What will you do when it’s dead?’ asked Mr Samgrass. ‘Can you have another tortoise fitted into the shell?’

 

Rex had been told about the problem of Sebastian - he could scarcely have endured in that atmosphere without - and had a solution pat. He propounded it cheerfully and openly at tea, and after a day of whispering it was a relief to hear the thing discussed.  ‘Send him to Borethus at Zurich. Borethus is the man. He works miracles every day at that sanatorium of his. You know how Charlie Kilcartney used to drink.’ ‘No,’ said Lady Marchmain, with that sweet irony of hers. ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t know how Charlie Kilcartney drank.’

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 returnd 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 Diaiy 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 the 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 itseif, 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 ma?tre d’h?tel 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 Rex 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 shakeup 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.’ 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.