Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [123]
'Does she boss him?'
'Not yet, much. He's in an amorous stupor, poor beast, and doesn't quite know where he is. She's just a good-hearted woman who wants a good home for her children and isn't going to let anything get in her way. She's playing up the religious stuff at the moment for all it's worth. I daresay she'll go easier when she's settled.'
The divorces were much talked of among our friends; even in that summer of general alarm there were still corners where private affairs commanded first attention. My wife was able to make it understood that the business was at the same time a matter of congratulation for her and reproach for me; that she had behaved wonderfully, had stood it longer than anyone but she would have done. Robin was seven years younger and a little immature for his age, they whispered in their private corners, but he was absolutely devoted to poor Celia, and really she deserved it after all she had been through. As for Julia and me, that was an old story. 'To put it crudely,' said my cousin Jasper, as though he had ever in his life put anything otherwise: 'I don't see why you bother to marry.'
Summer passed; delirious crowds cheered Neville Chamberlain's return from Munich; Rex made a rabid speech in the House of Commons which sealed his fate one way or the other; sealed it, as is sometimes done with naval orders, to be opened later at sea. Julia's family lawyers, whose black, tin boxes, painted 'Marquis of Marchmain', seemed to fill a room, began the slow process of her divorce; my own, brisker firm, two doors down, were weeks ahead with my affairs. It was necessary for Rex and Julia to separate formally, and since, for the time being, Brideshead was still her home, she remained there and Rex removed his trunks and valet to their house in London. Evidence was taken against Julia and me in my flat. A date was fixed for Brideshead's wedding, early in the Christmas holidays, so that his future step-children might take part.
One afternoon in November Julia and I stood at a window in the drawing-room watching the wind at work stripping the lime trees, sweeping down the yellow leaves, sweeping them up and round and along the terrace and lawns, trailing them through puddles and over the wet grass, pasting them on walls and window-panes, leaving them at length in sodden piles against the stonework.
'We shan't see them in spring,' said Julia; 'perhaps never again.'
'Once before,' I said, 'I went away, thinking I should never return.'
'Perhaps years later, to what's left of it, with what's left of us...'
A door opened and shut in the darkling room behind us. Wilcox approached through the firelight into the dusk about the long windows.
'A telephone message, my Lady, from Lady Cordelia.'
'Lady Cordelia! -Where was she?'
'In London, my Lady.'
'Wilcox, how lovely! Is she coming home?'
'She was just starting for the station. She will be here after dinner.'
'I haven't seen her for twelve years,' I said—not since the evening when we dined together and she spoke of being a nun; the evening when I painted the drawing-room at Marchmain House. 'She was an enchanting child.'
'She's had an odd life. First, the convent; then, when that was no good, the war in Spain. I've not seen her since then. The other girls, who went with the ambulance came back when the war was over; she stayed on, getting people back to their homes, helping in the prison-camps. An odd girl. She's grown up quite plain, you know.'
'Does she know about us?'
'Yes, she wrote me a sweet letter.'
It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up 'quite plain'; to think of all that burning love spending itself on serum-injections and delousing powder. When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman. It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed, could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia, and her. She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia's or Sebastian's grace, without Brideshead's gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the atmosphere of camp and dressing-station, so accustomed to gross suffering as to lose the finer shades of pleasure. She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when she said, 'It's wonderful to be home,' it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.