Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.

Same Charles, same!

It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

‘I’m ashamed of myself,’ said Sebastian gravely. ‘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 this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon’; that was enough then. Is more needed now?

She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and strangeness.

It was, the first time in my life that anyone had asked this of me, and as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.

‘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.’

(In his kindest moments Rex displayed a kind of hectoring zeal as if he were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife.)

‘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.

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled.

‘You’re-quite right,’ I said. ‘My dear, of course I’m right. I was right years ago — more years, I am happy to say, than either of us shows — when I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. 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.’

‘Bridey’s widow said: “So you’re divorcing one divorced man and marrying another. It sounds rather complicated, but my dear” — she called me “my dear” about twenty times — “I’ve usually found every Catholic family has one lapsed member, and it’s often the nicest.”‘

‘We shan’t see them in spring,’ said Julia; ‘perhaps never again.’ ‘Once before,’ I said, ‘I went away, thinking I should never return.’ ‘Perhaps years later, to what’s left of it, with what’s left of us…’

I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him, in those distant Arcadian days.

‘Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?’ ‘The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you know, as we do.’ ‘Do’. The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia’s verb ‘to love’.