It is remarkable how some people are able to put their opinions in lapidary form; your aunt had that gift.
'It is odd to think that she and I once dined together nightly just as you and I do, my boy. Now she made unremitting efforts to take me out of myself. She used to tell me about her reading. It was in her mind to make a home with me, you know. She thought I should get into funny ways if I was left on my own. Perhaps I have got into funny ways. Have I? But it didn't do. I got her out in the end.'
There was an unmistakable note of menace in his voice as he said this.
It was largely by reason of my Aunt Philippa that I now found myself so much a stranger in my father's house. After my mother's death she came to live with my father and me, no doubt, as he said, with the idea of making her home with us. I knew nothing, then, of the nightly agonies at the dinner table. My aunt made herself my companion, and I accepted her without question. That was for a year. The first change was that she reopened her house in Surrey which she had meant to sell, and lived there during my school terms, coming to London only for a few days' shopping and entertainment. In the summer we went to lodgings together at the seaside. Then in my last year at school she left England. 'I got her out in the end,' he said with derision and triumph of that kindly lady, and he knew that I heard in the words a challenge to myself.
As we left the dining-room my father said, 'Hayter, have you yet said anything to Mrs Abel about the lobsters I ordered for tomorrow?'
'No, sir.'
'Do not do so.'
'Very good, sir.'
And when we reached our chairs in the garden-room he said: 'I wonder whether Hayter had any intention of mentioning, lobsters, I rather think not. Do you know, I believe he thought I was joking? '
Next day by chance, a weapon came to hand. I met an old acquaintance of school-days, a contemporary of mine named Jorkins. I never had much liking for Jorkins. Once, in my Aunt Philippa's day, he had come to tea, and she had condemned him as being probably charming at heart, but unattractive at first sight. Now I greeted him with enthusiasm and asked him to dinner. He came and showed little alteration. My father must have been warned by Hayter that there was a guest, for instead of his velvet suit he wore a tail coat; this, with a black waistcoat, very high collar, and very narrow white tie, was his evening dress; he wore it with an air of melancholy as though it were court mourning, which he had assumed in early youth and, finding the style sympathetic, had retained. He never possessed a dinner jacket.
'Good evening, good evening. So nice of you to come all this way.'
'Oh, it wasn't far, said Jorkins, who lived in Sussex Square.
'Science annihilates distance,' said my father disconcertingly. 'You are over here on business?'
'Well, I'm in business, if that's what you mean.'
'I had a cousin who was in business - you wouldn't know him; it was before your time. I was telling Charles about him only the other night. He has been much in my mind. He came,' my father paused to give full weight to the bizarre word - 'a cropper.'
Jorkins giggled nervously. My father fixed him with a look of reproach.
'You find his misfortune the subject of mirth? Or perhaps the word I used was unfamiliar; you no doubt would say that he "folded up".'
My father was master of the situation. He had made a little fantasy for himself, that Jorkins should I be an American and throughout the evening he played a delicate one-sided parlour-game with him, explaining any peculiarly English terms that occurred in the conversation, translating pounds into dollars and courteously deferring to him with such phrases as 'Of course, by your standards...'; 'All this must seem very parochial to Mr Jorkins'; 'In the vast spaces to which you are accustomed...' so that my guest was left with the vague sense that there was a misconception somewhere as to his identity, which he never got the chance of explaining. Again and again during dinner he sought my father's eye, thinking to read there the simple statement that this form of address was an elaborate joke, but met instead a look of such mild benignity that he was left baffled.
Once I thought my father had gone too far, when he said: 'I am afraid that, living in London, you must sadly miss your national game.'
'My national game?' asked Jorkins, slow in the uptake, but scenting that here, at last, was the opportunity for clearing the matter up.
My father glanced from him to me and his expression changed from kindness to malice then back to kindness again as he turned once more to Jorkins. It was the look of a gambler who lays down fours against a full house. 'Your national game,' he said gently, 'cricket,' and he snuffled uncontrollably, shaking all over and wiping his eyes with his napkin. 'Surely, working in the City, you find your time on the cricket-field, greatly curtailed?'
At the door of the dining-room he left us. 'Good night, Mr Jorkins,' he said. 'I hope you will pay us another visit when you next "cross the herring pond".'
'I say, what did.your governor mean by that?' He seemed almost to think I was, American.'
'He's rather odd at times.'
'I mean all that about advising me to visit Westminster Abbey. It seemed rum.'
'Yes. I can't quite explain.'
'I almost thought he was pulling my leg,' said Jorkins in puzzled tones.
My father's counter-attack was delivered a few days later. He sought me out and said, 'Mr Jorkins is still here?'
'No, father, of course not. He only came to dinner.'
'Oh, I hoped he was staying with us. Such a versatile young man. But you will be dining in?'
'Yes.'
'I am giving a little dinner party to diversify the rather monotonous series of your evenings at home. You think Mrs Abel is up to it? No. But our guests are not exacting. Sir Cuthbert and Lady Orme-Herrick are what might be called the nucleus. I hope for a little music afterwards. I have included in the invitations some young people for you.'
My presentiments of my father's plan were surpassed by the actuality. As the guests assembled in the room which my father, without self-consciousness, called 'the Gallery', it was plain to me that they had been carefully chosen for my discomfort. The 'young people' were Miss Gloria Orme-Herrick a student of the cello; her fianc? a bald young man .from the British Museum; and a monoglot Munich publisher. I saw my father snuffling at me from behind a case of ceramics as he stood with them. That evening he wore, like a chivalric badge of battle, a small red rose in his button-hole.
Dinner was long and chosen, like the guests, in a spirit of careful mockery. It was not of Aunt Philippa's choosing, but had been reconstructed from a much earlier period, long before he was of an age to dine downstairs. The dishes were ornamental in appearance and regularly alternated in colour between red and white. They and the wine were equally tasteless. After dinner my father led the German publisher to the piano and then, while he played, left the drawing-room to show Sir Cuthbert Orme-Herrick the Etruscan bull in the gallery.
It was a gruesome evening, and I was astonished to find, when at last the party broke up, that it was only a few minutes after eleven. My father helped himself to a glass of barley-water and said: 'What very dull friends I have! You know, without the spur of your presence I should never have roused myself to invite them. I have been very negligent about entertaining lately. Now that you are paying me such a long visit, I will have many such evenings. You liked Miss Gloria Orme-Herrick?'
'No.'
'No? Was it her little moustache you objected to or her very large feet? Do you think she enjoyed herself.'
'No.'
'That was my impression also. I doubt if any of our guests will count this as one of their happiest evenings. That young foreigner played atrociously, I thought. Where can I have met him? And Miss Constantia Smethwick - where can I have met her? But the obligations of hospitality must be observed. As long as you are here, you shall not be dull.'
Strife was internecine during the next fortnight, but I suffered the more, for my father had greater reserves to draw on and a wider territory for manoeuvre, while I was pinned to my bridgehead between. the uplands and the sea. He never declared his war aims, and I do not to this day know whether they, were purely punitive - whether he had really at the back of his mind some geopolitical idea of getting me out of the country, as my Aunt Philippa had been driven to Bordighera and cousin Melchior to Darwin, or whether, as seems most likely, he fought for the sheer love of a battle in which indeed he shone.
I received one letter from Sebastian, a conspicuous object which was brought to me in my father's presence one day when he was lunching at home; I saw him look curiously at it and bore it away to read in solitude. It was written on, and enveloped in, heavy late-Victorian mourning paper, black-coroneted and black-bordered. I read it eagerly:
Brideshead Castle,
Wiltshire
I wonder what the date is
Dearest Charles,
I found a box of this paper at the back of a bureau so I must write to you as I am mourning for my lost innocence. It never looked like living. The doctors despaired of it from the start.
Soon I am off to Venice to stay with my papa in his palace of sin. I wish you were coming. I wish you were here.
I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again but the white raspberries are ripe.
I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.
Love or what you will.
S.
I knew his letters of old; I had had them at Ravenna; I should not have been disappointed; but that day as I tore the stiff sheet across and let it fall into the basket, and gazed resentfully across the grimy gardens and irregular backs of Bayswater, at the jumble of soil-pipes and fire-escapes and protuberant little conservatories, I saw, in my mind's eye, the pale face of Anthony Blanche, peering through the straggling leaves as it had peered through the candle flames at Thame, and heard, above the murmur of traffic, his clear tones...'You mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little insipid...When I hear him talk I am reminded of that in some ways nauseating picture of "Bubbles".'
For days after that I thought I hated Sebastian; then one Sunday afternoon a telegram came from him, which dispelled that shadow, adding a new and darker one of its own.
My father was out and returned to find me in a condition of feverish anxiety. He stood in the hall with his panama hat still on his head and beamed at me.
'You'll never guess how I have spent the day; I have been to the Zoo. It was most agreeable; the animals seem to enjoy the sunshine so much.'
'Father, I've got to leave at once.'
'Yes?'
'A, great friend of mine - he's had a terrible accident. I must go to him at once. Hayter's packing for me, now. There's a train in half an hour.'
I showed him the telegram, which read simply: 'Gravely injured come at once Sebastian.'
'Well,' said my father. 'I'm sorry you are upset. Reading this message I should not say that the accident was as serious as you seem to think - otherwise it would hardly be signed by the victim himself. Still, of course, he may well be fully conscious but blind or paralysed with a broken back. Why exactly is your presence so necessary? You have no medical knowledge. You are not in holy orders. Do you hope for a legacy?'
'I told you, he is a great friend.'
'Well, Orme-Herrick is a great friend of mine, but I should not go tearing off to his deathbed on a warm Sunday afternoon. I should doubt whether Lady Orme-Herrick would welcome me. However, I see you have no such doubts. I shall miss you, my dear boy, but do not hurry back on my account.'
Paddington Station on that August Sunday evening, with the sun streaming through the obscure panes of its roof, the bookstalls shut, and the few passengers strolling unhurried beside their porters, would have soothed a mind less agitated than mine. The train was nearly empty. I had my suitcase put in the corner of a third-class carriage and took a seat in the dining-car. 'First dinner after Reading, sir; about seven o'clock. Can I get you anything now?' I ordered gin and vermouth; it was brought to me as we pulled out of the station. The knives and forks set up their regular jingle; the bright landscape rolled past the windows. But I had no mind for these smooth things; instead, fear worked like yeast in my thoughts, and the fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster; a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged, stake, an elm bough falling suddenly on a still morning, a car at a blind corner; all the catalogue of threats to civilized life rose and haunted me; I even pictured a homicidal maniac mouthing in the shadows, swinging a length of lead pipe. The cornfields and heavy woodland sped past, deep in the golden evening, and the throb of the wheels repeated monotonously in my ears. 'You've come too late. You've come too late. He's dead. He's dead. He's dead.'
I dined and changed trains to the local line, and in twilight came to Melstead Carbury, which was my destination.
'Brideshead, sir? Yes, Lady Julia's in the yard.'
She was sitting at the wheel of an open car. I recognized her at once; I could not have failed to do so.
'You're Mr Ryder? Jump in.' Her voice was Sebastian's and his her, way of speaking.
'How is he?'
'Sebastian? Oh, he's fine. Have you had dinner? Well, I expect it was beastly. There's some more at home. Sebastian and I are alone, so we thought we'd wait for you.'
'What's happened to him?'
'Didn't he say? I expect he thought you wouldn't come if you knew. He's cracked a bone in his ankle so small that it hasn't a name. But they X-rayed it yesterday, and told him to keep it up for a month. It's a great bore to him, putting out all his plans; he's been making the most enormous fuss...Everyone else has gone. He tried to make me stay back with him. Well, I expect you know how maddeningly pathetic he can be. I almost gave in, and then I said: "Surely there must be someone you can get hold of," and he said everybody was away or busy and, anyway, no one else would do. But at last he agreed to try you, and I promised I'd stay if you failed him, so you can imagine how popular you are with me. I must say it's noble of you to come all this way at a moment's notice.' But as she said it, I heard, or thought I heard, a tiny note of contempt in her voice that I should be so readily available.
