Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [110]
Presently there was the slight hush and edging away which follows the entry of a royal party. I saw my wife curtsey and heard her say: 'Oh, sir, you are sweet'; then I was led into the clearing and the Duke of Clarence said: 'Pretty hot out there I should think.'
'It was, sir.'
'Awfully clever the way you've hit off the impression of heat. Makes me feel quite uncomfortable in my greatcoat.'
'Ha, ha.'
When they had gone my wife said: 'Goodness, we're late for lunch. Margot's giving a party in your honour, and in the taxi she said: 'I've just thought of something. Why don't you write and ask the Duchess of Clarence's permission to dedicate Latin America to her?'
'Why should I?'
'She'd love it so.'
'I wasn't thinking of dedicating it to anyone.'
'There you are; that's typical of you, Charles. Why miss an opportunity to give pleasure?'
There were a dozen at luncheon, and though it pleased my hostess and my wife to say that they were there in my honour, it was plain to me that half of them did not know of my exhibition and had come because they had been invited and had no other engagement. Throughout luncheon they talked, without stopping, of Mrs Simpson, but they all, or nearly all, came back with us to the gallery.
The hour after luncheon was the busiest time. There were representatives of the Tate Gallery and the National Art Collections Fund, who all promised to return shortly with colleagues and, in the meantime, reserved certain pictures for further consideration. The most influential critic, who in the past had dismissed me with a few wounding commendations, peered out at me from between his slouch hat and woollen muffler, gripped my arm, and said: 'I knew you had it. I saw it there. I've been waiting for it.'
From fashionable and unfashionable lips alike I heard fragments of praise. 'If you'd asked me to guess,' I overheard, 'Ryder's is the last name would have occurred to me. They're so virile, so passionate.'
They all thought they had found something new. It had not been thus at my last exhibition in these same rooms, shortly before my going abroad. Then there had been an unmistakable note of weariness. Then the talk had been less of me than of the houses, anecdotes of their owners. That same woman, it came back to me, who now applauded my virility and passion, had stood quite near me, before a painfully laboured canvas, and said, 'So facile.'
I remembered the exhibition, too, for another reason; it was the week I detected my wife in adultery. Then, as now, she was, a tireless hostess, and I heard her say: 'Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays—a building or a piece of scenery—I think to myself, "that's by Charles". I see everything through his eyes. He is England to me.'
I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels shrivel within me at the things she said. But that day, in this gallery, I heard her unmoved, and suddenly realized that she was powerless to hurt me any more; I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.
At the end of the day my wife said: 'Darling, I must go. It's been a terrific success, hasn't it? I'll think of something to tell them at home, but I wish it hadn't got to happen quite this way.'
'So she knows,' I thought. 'She's a sharp one. She's had her nose down since luncheon and picked up the scent.'
I let her get clear of the place and was about to follow—the rooms were nearly empty—when I heard a voice at the turnstile I had not heard for many years, an unforgettable self-taught stammer, a sharp cadence of remonstration.