'An hour ago,' I thought, 'under the sunset, she sat turning her ring in the water and counting the days of happiness; now under the first stars and the last grey whisper of day, all this mysterious tumult of sorrow! What had happened to us in the Painted Parlour? What shadow had fallen in the candlelight? Two rough sentences and a trite phrase.' She was beside herself; her voice, now muffled in my breast, now clear and anguished, came to me in single words and broken sentences.
'Past and future; the years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the cigar smoke, while the counters clicked on the backgammon board, and the man who was "dummy" at the men's table filled the glasses; when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead; putting him away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war coming, world ending - sin.
'A word from so long ago, from Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Cordelia and me with the catechism, in mummy's room, before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my sin with her to church, bowed under it and the black lace veil, in the chapel; slipping out with it in London before the fires were lit; taking it with her through the empty streets, where the milkman's ponies stood with their forefeet on the pavement; mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more cruelly than her own deadly illness.
'Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth hanging in the dark church where only the old char-woman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever; never the cool sepulchre and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.
'No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish, hoping for something to put in his sack, something marketable, turns away with disgust.
'Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before I had seen her.'
Between her tears she talked herself into silence. I could do nothing; I was adrift in a strange sea; my hands on the metal-spun threads of her tunic were cold and stiff, my eyes dry; I was as far from her in spirit, as she clung to me in the darkness, as when years ago I had lit her cigarette on the way from the station; as far as when she was out of mind, in the dry, empty years at the Old Rectory, and in the jungle.
Tears spring from speech; presently in her silence her weeping stopped. She sat up, away from me, took my handkerchief, shivered, rose to her feet.
'Well,' she said, in a voice much like normal. 'Bridey is one for bombshells, isn't he?'
I followed her into the house and to her room; she sat at her looking-glass. 'Considering that I've just recovered from a fit of hysteria,' she said, 'I don't call that at all bad.' Her eyes seemed unnaturally large and bright, her cheeks pale with two spots of high colour, where, as a girl, she used to put a dab of rouge. 'Most hysterical women look as if they had a bad cold. You'd better change your shirt before going down; it's all tears and lipstick.'
'Are we going down?'
'Of course, we mustn't leave poor Bridey on his engagement night.'
When I went back to her she said: 'I'm sorry for that appalling scene, Charles. I can't explain.'
Brideshead was in the library, smoking his pipe, placidly reading a detective story.
'Was it nice out? If I'd known you were going I'd have come, too.'
'Rather cold.'
'I hope it's not going to be inconvenient for Rex moving out of here. You see, Barton Street is much too small for us and the three children. Besides, Beryl likes the country. In his letter papa proposed making over the whole estate right away.'
I remembered how Rex had greeted me on my first arrival at Brideshead as Julia's guest. 'A very happy arrangement,' he had said. 'Suits me down to the ground. The old boy keeps the place up; Bridey does all the feudal stuff with the tenants; I have the run of the house rent free. All it costs me is the food and the wages of the indoor servants. Couldn't ask fairer than that, could you?'
'I should think he'll be sorry to go,' I said.
'Oh, he'll find another bargain somewhere, ' said Julia; 'trust him.'
'Beryl's got some furniture of her own she's very attached to. I don't know if it would go very well here. You know, oak dressers and coffin stools and things. I thought she could put it in mummy's old room.
'Yes, that would be the place.'
So brother and sister sat and talked about the arrangement of the house until bed-time. 'An hour ago,' I thought, 'in the black refuge in the box hedge, she wept her heart out for the death of her God; now she is discussing whether Beryl's children shall take the old smoking-room or the school-room for their own.' I was all at sea.
'Julia,' I said later, when Brideshead had gone upstairs, 'have you ever seen a picture of Holman Hunt's called "The Awakened Conscience" '
'No.'
I had seen a copy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the library some days before; I found it again and read her Ruskin's description. She laughed quite happily.
'You're perfectly right. That's exactly what I did feel.'
'But, darling, I won't believe that great spout of tears came just from a few words.of Bridey's. You must have been thinking about it before.'
'Hardly at all; now and then; more, lately, with the Last Trump so near.'
'Of course it's a thing psychologists could explain; a preconditioning from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the nursery. You do know at heart that it's all bosh, don't you?'
'How I wish it was!'
'Sebastian once said almost the same thing to me.'
'He's gone back to the Church, you know. Of course, he never left it as definitely as I did. I've gone too far; there's no turning back now; I know that, if that's what you mean by thinking it all bosh. All I can hope to do is to put my life in some sort of order in a human way, before all human order comes to an end. That's why I want to marry you. I should like to have a child. That's one thing I can do...Let's go out again. The moon should be up by now.'
The moon was full and high. We walked round the house; under the limes Julia paused and idly snapped off one of the long shoots, last year's growth, that fringed their boles, and stripped it as she walked, making a switch, as children do, but with petulant movements that were not a child's, snatching nervously at the leaves and crumbling them between her fingers; she began peeling the bark, scratching it with her nails.
Once more we stood by the fountain.
'It's like the setting of a comedy,' I said. 'Scene: a Baroque fountain in a nobleman's grounds. Act one, sunset; act two, dusk; act three, moonlight. The characters keep assembling at the fountain for no very clear reason.'
'Comedy?'
'Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation scene.'
'Was there a quarrel?'
'Estrangement and misunderstanding in act two.'
'Oh, don't talk in that damned bounderish way. Why must you see everything second-hand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a Pre-Raphaelite picture?'
'It's a way I have.'
'I hate it.'
Her anger was as unexpected as every change on this evening of swift veering moods. Suddenly she cut me across the face with her switch, a vicious, stinging little blow as hard as she could strike.
'Now do you see how I hate it?'
She hit me again.
'All right,' I said 'go on.'
Then, though her hand was raised, she stopped and threw the half-peeled wand into the water, where it floated white and black in the moonlight.
'Did that hurt?'
'Yes.'
'Did it?...Did I?'
In the instant her rage was gone; her tears, newly flowing, were on my cheek. I held her at arm's length and she put down her head, stroking my hand on her shoulder with her face, catlike, but, unlike a cat, leaving a tear there.
'Cat on the roof-top,' I said.
'Beast!'
She bit at my hand, but when I did not move it and her teeth touched me, she changed the bite to a kiss, the kiss to a lick of her tongue.
'Cat in the moonlight.'
This was the mood I knew. We turned towards the house. When we came to the lighted hall she said: 'Your poor face,' touching the weals with her fingers. 'Will there be a mark tomorrow?'
'I expect so.'
'Charles, am I going crazy? What's happened tonight? I'm so tired.'
She yawned; a fit of yawning took her. She sat at her dressing table, head bowed, hair over her face, yawning helplessly; when she looked up I saw over her shoulder in the glass a face that was dazed with weariness like a retreating soldier's, and beside it my own, streaked with two crimson lines.
'So tired,' she repeated,, taking off her gold tunic and letting it fall to the floor, 'tired and crazy and good for nothing.'
I saw her to bed; the blue lids fell over her eyes; her pale lips moved on the pillow but whether to wish me good night or to murmur a prayer - a jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilight world between sorrow and sleep: some ancient pious rhyme that had come down to Nanny Hawkins from centuries of bedtime whispering, through all the changes of language, from the days of pack-horses on the Pilgrim's Way - I did not know.
Next night Rex and his political associates were with us.
'They won't fight.'
'They can't fight. They haven't the money; they haven't the oil.'
'They haven't the wolfram; they haven't the men.'
'They haven't the guts.'
'They're afraid.'
'Scared of the French; scared of the Czechs; scared of the Slovaks; scared of us.'
'It's a bluff.'
'Of course it's a bluff Where's their tungsten? Where's their manganese?'
'Where's their chrome?'
'I'll tell you a thing...'
'Listen to this; it'll be good; Rex will tell you a thing.'
Friend of mine motoring in the Black Forest only the other day, just came back and told me about it while we played a round of golf. Well, this friend driving along, turned down a lane into the high road. What should he find but a military convoy? Couldn't stop, drove right into it, smack into a tank, broadside on. Gave himself up for dead...Hold on this is the funny part.'
'This is the funny part.'
'Drove clean through it, didn't scratch his paint;. What do you think? It was made of canvas - a bamboo frame and painted canvas.'
'They haven't the steel.'
'They haven't the tools. They haven't the labour. They're half starving. They haven't the fats. The children have rickets.'
'The women are barren.'
'The men are impotent.'
'They haven't the doctors.'
'The doctors were Jewish.'
'Now they've got consumption.'
'Now they've got syphilis.'
'Goering told a friend of mine...'
'Goebbels told a friend of mine...'
'Ribbentrop told me that the army just kept Hitler in power so long as he was able to get things for nothing. The moment anyone stands up to him, he's finished. The army will shoot him.'
'The Liberals will hang him.'
'The Communists will tear him limb from limb.'
'He'll scupper himself.'
'He'd do it now if it wasn't for Chamberlain.'
'If it wasn't for Halifax.'
'If it wasn't for Sir Samuel Hoare.'
'And the 1922Committee.'
'Peace Pledge.'
'Foreign Office.'
'New York Banks.'
'All that's wanted is a good strong line.'
'A line from Rex.'
'We'll give Europe a good strong line. Europe is waiting for a speech from Rex.'
'And a speech from me.'
'And a speech from me. Rally the freedom-loving peoples of the world. Germany will rise; Austria will rise. The Czechs and the Slovaks are bound to rise.'
'To a speech from Rex and a speech from me.'
'What about a rubber? How about a whisky? Which of you chaps will have a big cigar? Hullo, you two going out?'
'Yes, Rex, ' said Julia. 'Charles and I are going into the moonlight.'
We shut the windows behind us and the voices ceased; the moonlight lay like hoar-frost on the terrace and the music of the fountain crept in our ears- the stone balustrade of the terrace might have been the Trojan walls, and in the silent park might have stood the Grecian tents where Cressid lay that night.
'A few days, a few months.'
'No time to be lost.'
'A lifetime between the rising of the moon and its setting. Then the dark.'
[4]
'AND of course Celia will have custody of the children.'
'Of course.'
'Then what about the Old Rectory? I don't imagine you'll want to settle down with Julia bang at our gates. The children look on it as their home, you know. Robin's got no place of his own till his uncle dies. After all, you never used the studio, did You? Robin was saying only the other day what a good playroom it would make - big enough for Badminton.'
