第 21 页

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.'