Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [86]
I was shown into the library and in less than a minute Julia joined me. She shook hands with a gentleness and gravity of a ghost.
'It's sweet of you to come. Mummy has kept asking for you, but I don't know if she'll be able to see you now, after all. She's just said "good-bye" to Adrian Porson and it's tired her.'
'Good-bye?'
'Yes. She's dying. She may live a week or two or she may go at any minute. She's so weak. I'll go and ask nurse.'
The stillness of death seemed in the house already. No one ever sat in the library at Marchmain House. It was the one ugly room in either of their houses. The bookcases of Victorian oak held volumes of Hansard and obsolete encyclopedias that were never opened; the bare mahogany table seemed set for the meeting of a committee; the place had the air of being both public and unfrequented; outside lay the forecourt, the railings, the quiet cul-de-sac.
Presently Julia returned.
'No, I'm afraid you can't see her. She's asleep. She may lie like that for hours; I can tell you what she wanted. Let's go somewhere else. I hate this room.'
We went across the hall to the small drawing-room where luncheon parties used to assemble, and sat on either side of the fireplace. Julia seemed to reflect the crimson and gold of the walls and lose some of her warmness.
'First, I know, mummy wanted to say how sorry she is she was so beastly to you last time you met. She's spoken of it often. She knows now she was wrong about you. I'm quite sure you understood and put it out of your mind immediately, but it's the kind of thing mummy can never forgive herself—it's the kind of thing she so seldom did.'
'Do tell her I understood completely.'
'The other thing, of course, you have guessed—Sebastian. She wants him. I don't know if that's possible. Is it?'
'I hear he's in a very bad way.'
'We heard that, too. We cabled to the last address we had, but there was no answer.
There still may be time for him to see her. I thought of you as the only hope, as soon, as I heard you were in England. Will you try and get him? It's an awful lot to ask, but I think Sebastian would want it, too, if he realized.'
'I'll try.'
'There's no one else we can ask. Rex is so busy.'
'Yes. I heard reports of all he's been doing organizing the gas works.'
'Oh yes,' Julia said with a touch of her old dryness. 'He's made a lot of kudos out of the strike.'
Then we talked for a few minutes about the Bratt's squad. She told me Brideshead had refused to take any public service because he was not satisfied with the justice of the cause; Cordelia was in London, in bed now, as she had been watching by her mother all night. I told her I had taken up architectural painting and that I enjoyed it. All this talk was nothing; we had said all we had to say in the first two minutes; I stayed for tea and then left her.
Air France ran a service of a kind to Casablanca; there I took the bus to Fez, starting at dawn and arriving in the new town at evening. I telephoned from the hotel to the British Consul and dined with him that evening, in his charming house by the walls of the old town. He was a kind, serious man.
'I'm delighted someone has come to took after young Flyte at last,' he said. 'He's been something of a thorn in our sides here. This is no place for a remittance man. The French don't understand him at all. They think everyone who's not engaged in trade is a spy. It's not as though he lived like a Milord. Things aren't easy here. There's war going on not thirty miles from this house, though you might not think it. We had some young fools on bicycles only last week who'd come to volunteer for Abdul Krim's army.
'Then the Moors are a tricky lot; they don't hold with drink and our young friend, as you may know, spends most of his day drinking. What does he want to come here for? There's plenty of room for him at Rabat or Tangier, where they cater for tourists. He's taken a house in the native town, you know. I tried to stop him, but he got it from a Frenchman in the Department of Arts. I don't say there's any harm in him, but he's an anxiety. There's an awful fellow sponging on him