Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [82]
'And then?'
'And then the talks went on and on. Poor mummy. And priests came into it and aunts came into it. There were all kinds of suggestions—that Rex should go to Canada, that Father Mowbray should go to Rome and see if there were any possible grounds for an annulment; that I should go abroad for a year. In the middle of it Rex just telegraphed to papa: "Julia and I prefer wedding ceremony take place by Protestant rites. Have you any objection?" He answered, "Delighted", and that settled the matter as far as mummy stopping us legally went. There was a lot of personal appeal after that. I was sent to talk to priests and nuns and aunts. Rex just went on quietly—or fairly quietly—with the plans.
'Oh, Charles, what a squalid wedding! The Savoy Chapel was the place where divorced couples got married in those days—a poky little place not at all what Rex had intended. I wanted just to slip into a registry office one morning and get the thing over with a couple of charwomen as witnesses, but nothing else would do but Rex had to have bridesmaids and orange blossom and the Wedding March. It was gruesome.
'Poor mummy behaved like a martyr and insisted on my having her lace in spite of everything. Well, she more or less had to—the dress had been planned round it. My own friends came, of course, and the curious accomplices Rex called his friends; the rest of the party were very oddly assorted. None of mummy's family came, of course, one or two of papa's. All the stuffy people stayed away—you know, the Anchorages and Chasms and Vanbrughs—and I thought, "Thank God for that, they always look down their noses at me, anyhow," but Rex was furious, because it was just them he wanted apparently.
'I hoped at one moment there'd be no party at all. Mummy said we couldn't use Marchers, and Rex wanted to telegraph papa and invade the place with an army of caterers headed by the family solicitor. In the end it was decided to have a party the evening before at home to see the presents—apparently that was all right according to Father Mowbray. Well, no one can ever resist going to see her own present, so that was quite a success, but the reception Rex gave next day at the Savoy for the wedding guests was very squalid.
'There was great awkwardness about the tenants. In the end Bridey went down and gave them a dinner and bonfire there which wasn't at all what they expected in return for their silver soup tureen.
'Poor Cordelia took it hardest. She had looked forward so much to being my bridesmaid—it was a thing we used to talk about long before I came out—and of course she was a very pious child, too. At first she wouldn't speak to me. Then on the morning of the wedding—I'd moved to Aunt Fanny Rosscommon's the evening before; it was thought more suitable—she, came bursting in before I was up, straight from Farm Street, in floods of tears, begged me not to marry, then hugged me, gave me a dear little brooch she'd bought, and said she prayed I'd always be happy. Always happy, Charles!
'It was an awfully unpopular wedding, you know. Everyone took mummy's side, as everyone always did—not that she got any benefit from it. All through her life mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she loved. They all said I'd behaved abominably to her. In fact, poor Rex found he'd married an outcast, which was exactly the opposite of all he'd wanted.
'So you see things never looked like going right. There was a hoodoo on us from the start. But I was still nuts about Rex.
'Funny to think of, isn't it?
'You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn't all there. He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modem and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.
'Well, it's all over now.'
It was ten years later that she said this to me in a storm in the Atlantic.