Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [115]
'Never that.'
We fell silent; only the birds spoke in a multitude of small, clear voices in the lime trees; only the waters spoke among their carved stones.
Julia took the handkerchief from my breast pocket and dried her hand; then lit a cigarette. I feared to break the spell of memories, but for once our thoughts had not kept pace together, for when at length Julia spoke, she said sadly: 'How many more? Another hundred?'
'A lifetime.'
'I want to marry you, Charles.'
'One day; why now?'
'War,' she said, 'this year, next year, sometime soon. I want a day or two with you of real peace.'
'Isn't this peace?'
The sun had sunk now to the line of woodland beyond the valley; all the opposing slope was already in twilight, but the lakes below us were aflame; the light grew in strength and splendour as it neared death, drawing long shadows across the pasture, falling full on the rich stone spaces of the house, firing the panes in the windows, glowing on cornices and colonnade and dome, spreading out all the stacked merchandise of colour and scent from earth and stone and leaf, glorifying the head and golden shoulders of the woman beside me.
'What do you mean by "peace", if not this?'
'So much more'; and then in a chill, matter-of-fact tone she continued: 'Marriage isn't a thing we can take when the impulse moves us. There must be a divorce—two divorces. We must make plans.'
'Plans, divorce, war—on an evening like this.'
'Sometimes said Julia, 'I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.' Then Wilcox came down the steps into the sunset to tell us that dinner was ready.
Shutters were up, curtains drawn, candles lit, in the Painted Parlour.
'Hullo, it's laid for three,'
'Lord Brideshead arrived half an hour ago, my lady. He sent a message would you please not wait dinner for him as he may be a little late.'
'It seems months since he was here last,' said Julia. 'What does he do in London?'
It was often a matter for speculation between us—giving birth to many fantasies, for Bridey was a mystery; a creature from underground; a hard-snouted, burrowing, hibernating animal who shunned the light. He had been completely without action in all his years of adult life; the talk of his going into the army and into parliament and into a monastery, had all come to nothing. All that he was known with certainty to have done and this because in a season of scant news it had formed the subject of a newspaper article entitled 'Peer's Unusual Hobby'—was to form a collection of match-boxes; he kept them mounted on boards, card-indexed, yearly occupying a larger and larger space in his small house in Westminster. At first he was bashful about the notoriety which the newspaper caused, but later greatly pleased, for he found it the means of his getting into touch with other collectors in all parts of the world with whom he now corresponded and swapped duplicates. Other than this he was not known to have any interests. He remained joint Master of the Marchmain and hunted with them dutifully on their two days a week when he was at home; he never hunted with the neighbouring pack, who had the better country. He had no real zest for sport, and had not been out a dozen times that season; he had few friends; he visited his aunts; he went to public dinners held in the Catholic interest. At Brideshead he performed all unavoidable local duties, bringing with him to platform and fête and committee room his own thin mist of clumsiness and—aloofness.
'There was a girl found strangled with a piece of barbed wire at Wandsworth last week,' I said, reviving an old fantasy.
'That must be Bridey. He is naughty.'
When we had been a quarter of an hour at the table, he joined us, coming ponderously into the room in the bottle-green velvet smoking suit which he kept at Brideshead and always wore when he was there. At thirty-eight he had grown heavy and bald, and might have been taken for forty-five.
'Well,' he said, 'well, only you two; I hoped to find Rex here.'