Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news.

She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.

Here, discordantly, in Eights Week, came a rabble of womankind, some hundreds strong, twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sight-seeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches; pushed in punts about the river, herded in droves to the college barges; greeted in the Isis and in the Union by a sudden display of peculiar, facetious, wholly distressing Gilbert-and-Sullivan badinage, and by peculiar choral effects in the college chapels.

I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey—which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend.

should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”

“I must go to the Botanical Gardens.” “Why?” “To see the ivy.” It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him.

“It’s where my family live”; and even then, rapt in the vision, I felt, momentarily, an ominous chill at the words he used—not, “that is my house,” but “it’s where my family live.”

“I’m not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They’re so madly charming. All my life they’ve been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them.”

I like getting drunk at luncheon, and though I haven’t yet spent quite double my allowance, I undoubtedly shall before the end of term. I usually have a glass of champagne about this time. Will you join me?”

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

At the George bar he ordered “Four Alexandra cocktails, please,” ranged them before him with a loud “Yum-yum” which drew every eye, outraged, upon him.

Well, as you know, Venice is the one town in Italy where no one ever has gone to church.

For the rest of dinner he was silent save for an occasional snuffle of merriment which could not, I thought, be provoked by the work he read.

“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.” “But I do. That’s how I believe.”

“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?”

Bruh

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.

“No, not to me. It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.”

I was not her man. She told me as much, without a word, when she took the cigarette from my lips.

I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?”

“No, Charles, not yet. Perhaps never. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want love.” Then something, some surviving ghost from those dead ten years—for one cannot die, even for a little, without some loss—made me say, “Love? I’m not asking for love.” “Oh yes, Charles, you are,” she said, and putting up her hand gently stroked my cheek; then shut her door.

“You are standing guard over your sadness.”

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

“Sometimes,” said Julia, “I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”