Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [73]
'That's the stuff,' he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings round the sides of his glass. 'They've always got some tucked away, but they won't bring it out unless you make a fuss. Have some.'
'I'm quite happy with this.'
'Well, it's a crime to drink it, if you don't really appreciate it.'
He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We were both happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.
At the beginning of May the engagement was announced. I saw the notice in the Continental Daily Mail and assumed that Rex had 'squared the old man'. But things did not go as were expected. The next news I had of them was in the middle of June, when I read that they had been married very quietly at the Savoy Chapel. No royalty was present; nor was the Prime Minister; nor were any of Julia's family. It sounded like a 'hole-in-the-corner' affair, but it was not for several years that I heard the full story.
2
IT is time to speak of Julia, who till now has played an intermittent and somewhat enigmatic part in Sebastian's drama. It was thus she appeared to me at the time, and I to her. We pursued separate aims which brought us near to one another, but we remained strangers. She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and, saying 'I must read that, too, when I've the time,' replace it, and continue the search. On my side the interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand out clear and firm.
She was thin in those days, flat-chested, leggy; she seemed all limbs and neck, bodiless, spidery; thus far she conformed to the fashion, but the hair-cut and the hats of the period, and the blank stare and gape of the period, and the clownish dabs of rouge high on the cheekbones, could not reduce her to type.
When I first met her, when she met me in the station yard and drove me home through the twilight, that high summer of 1923, she was just eighteen and fresh from her first London season.
Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things were getting into their stride again. Julia was at the centre of it. There were then remaining perhaps half a dozen London houses which could be called 'historic'; Marchmain House in St James's was one of them, and the ball given for Julia, in spite of the ignoble costume of the time, was by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a splendid series.
How could I have known? There seemed time for everything in those days; the world was open to be explored at leisure. I was so full of Oxford that summer; London could wait, I thought.
The other great houses belonged to kinsmen or to childhood friends of Julia's, and beside s them there were countless substantial houses in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia, alight and thronged, one or other of them, night after night. Foreigners returning on post from their own waste lands wrote home that here they seemed to catch a glimpse of the world they had believed lost forever, among the mud and wire, and through those halcyon weeks Julia darted and shone, part of the sunshine between the tress, part of the candle-light in the mirror's spectrum, so that elderly men and women sitting aside with their memories, saw her as herself the blue-bird. ' "Bridey"
Marchmain's eldest girl,' they said. 'Pity he can't see her tonight.'
That night and the night after, wherever she went always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought a moment of Joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river's bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.