Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [69]
Next morning I said to Sebastian: 'Tell me honestly, do you want me to stay on here?'
'No, Charles, I don't believe I do.'
'I'm no help?'
'No help.'
So I went to make my excuses to his mother.
'There's something I must ask you, Charles. Did you give Sebastian money yesterday?'
'Yes.'
'Knowing how he was likely to spend it?'
'Yes.'
'I don't understand it,' she said. 'I simply don't understand how anyone can be so callously wicked.'
She paused, but I do not think she expected any answer; there was nothing I could say unless I were to start all over again on that familiar, endless argument.
'I'm not going to reproach you,' she said. 'God knows it's not for me to reproach anyone. Any failure in my children is my failure. But I don't understand it. I don't understand how you can have been so nice in so many ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don't understand how we all liked you so much. Did you hate us all the time? I don't understand how we deserved it.'
I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I almost expected to hear her say: 'I have already written to inform your unhappy father.' But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.
'I shall never go back,' I said to myself.
A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.
I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.
I had left behind me—what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, 'the Young Magician's Compendium', that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.
'I have left behind illusion,' I said to myself. 'Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.'
I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.
Thus I returned to Paris, and to the friends I had found there and the habits I had formed. I thought I should hear no more of Brideshead, but life has few separations as sharp as that. It was not three weeks before I received a letter in Cordelia's Frenchified convent hand:
'Darling Charles,' she said. 'I was so very miserable when you went. You might have come and said good-bye!
'I heard all about your disgrace, and I am writing to say that I am in disgrace, too. I sneaked Wilcox's keys and got whisky for Sebastian and got caught. He did seem to want it so. And there was (and is) an awful row.
'Mr Samgrass has gone (good!), and I think he is a bit in disgrace, too, but I don't know why.
'Mr Mottram is very popular with Julia (bad!) and is taking Sebastian away (bad! bad!) to a German doctor.
'Julia's tortoise disappeared. We think it buried itseif, as they do, so there goes a packet (expression of Mr Mottram's).
'I am very well.
'With love from
Cordelia.'
It must have been about a week after receiving this letter that I returned to my rooms one afternoon to find Rex waiting for me.
It was about four, for the light began to fail early in the studio at that time of year. I could see by the expression on the concierge's face, when she told me I had a visitor waiting, that there was something impressive upstairs; she had a vivid gift of expressing differences of age or attraction; this was the expression which meant someone of the first consequence, and Rex indeed seemed to justify it, as I found him in his big travelling coat, filling the window that looked over the river.