Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [40]
'Cara will like that—she, as Sebastian will have told you, is your hostess here. You can't do both, you know. Once you go to the Lido there is no escaping—you play backgammon, you get caught at the bar, you get stupefied by the sun. Stick to the churches.'
'Charles is very keen on painting,.' said Sebastian.
'Yes?' I noticed the hint of deep boredom which I knew so well in my own father.
'Yes? Any particular Venetian painter?'
'Bellini,' I answered rather wildly.
'Yes? Which?'
'I'm afraid that I didn't know there were two of them.'
'Three to be precise. You will find that in the great ages painting was very much a family business. How did you leave England?'
'It has been lovely,' said Sebastian.
'Was it? Was it? It has been my tragedy that I abominate the English countryside. I suppose it is a disgraceful thing to inherit great responsibilities and to be entirely indifferent to them. I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumblingblock to my own party. Well, my elder son will change all that, I've no doubt, if they leave him anything to inherit...Why, I wonder, are Italian sweets always thought to be so good? There was always an Italian pastry-cook at Brideshead until my father's day. He had an Austrian, so much better. And now I suppose there is some British matron with beefy forearms.'
After dinner we left the palace by the street door and walked through a maze of.bridges and squares and alleys, to Florian's for coffee, and watched the grave crowds crossing and recrossing under the campanile. 'There is nothing quite like a Venetian crowd,' said Lord Marchmain. 'The city is crawling with Anarchists,—but an American woman tried to sit here the other night with bare shoulders and they drove her away by coming to stare at her, quite silently; they were like circling gulls coming back and back to her, until she left. Our countrymen are much less dignified when they attempt to express moral disapproval.'
An English party had just then come from the waterfront, made for a table near us, and then suddenly moved to the other side, where they looked askance at us and talked with their heads close together. 'That is a man and his wife I used to know when I was in politics. A prominent member of your church, Sebastian.'
As we went up to bed that night Sebastian said: 'He's rather a poppet, isn't he?'
Lord Marchmain's mistress arrived next day. I was nineteen years old and completely ignorant of women. I could not with any certainty recognize a prostitute in the streets. I was therefore not indifferent to the fact of living under the roof of an adulterous couple, but I was old enough to hide my interest. Lord Marchmain's mistress, therefore, found me with a multitude of conflicting expectations about her all of which were, for the moment, disappointed by her appearance. She was not a voluptuous, Toulouse-Lautrec odalisque; she was not a 'little bit of fluff'; she was a middle-aged, well-preserved, welldressed, well-mannered woman such as I had seen in countless public places and occasionally met. Nor did she seem marked by any social stigma. On the day of her arrival we lunched at the Lido, where she was greeted at almost every table.
'Vittoria Corombona has asked us all to her ball on Saturday.'
'It is very kind of her. You know I do not dance,' said Lord Marchmain.
'But for the boys? It is a thing to be seen—the Corombona palace lit up for the ball. One does not know how many such balls there will be in the future.'
'The boys can do as they like. We must refuse.'
'And I have asked Mrs Hacking Brunner to luncheon. She has a charming daughter. Sebastian and his friend will like her.'
'Sebastian and his friend are more interested in Bellini than heiresses.'
'But that is what I have always wished,' said Cara, changing her point of attack adroitly. 'I have been here more times than I can count and Alex has not once let me inside San Marco, even. We will become tourists, yes?'
We became tourists; Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman to whom all doors were open and with him at her side and a guide book in her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat, prosaic figure amid the immense splendours of the place.