Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [98]
Now it was different; there was nothing but humility and friendly candour in the way she spoke.
I wished I could respond to her confidence, give some token of acceptance, but there was nothing in my last, flat, eventful years that I could share with her. I began instead to talk of my time in the jungle, of the comic characters I had met and the lost places I had visited, but in this mood of old friendship the tale faltered and came to an end abruptly.
'I long to see the paintings,' she said.
'Celia wanted me to unpack some and stick them round the cabin for her cocktail party. I couldn't do that.'
'No...is Celia as pretty as ever? I always thought she had the most delicious looks of any girl of my year.'
'She hasn't changed.'
'You have, Charles. So lean and grim; not at all the pretty boy Sebastian brought home with him. Harder, too.'
'And you're softer.'
'Yes, I think so...and very patient now.'
She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spidery look; the head that I used to think quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine; not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, so that it would be idle to itemize and dissect her beauty, which was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.
Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of la Gioconda; the years had been more than 'the sound of lyres and flutes', and had saddened her. She seemed to say: 'Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?'
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
'Sadder, too,' I said.
'Oh yes, much sadder.'
My wife was in exuberant spirits when, two hours later, I returned to the cabin.
'I've had to do everything. How does it look?'
We had been given, without paying more for it, a large suite of rooms, one so large, in fact, that it was seldom booked except by directors of the line, and on most voyages, the chief purser admitted, was given to those he wished to honour. (My wife was adept in achieving such small advantages, first impressing the impressionable with her chic and my celebrity and, superiority once firmly established, changing quickly to a pose of almost flirtatious affability.) In token of her appreciation the chief purser had, been asked to our party and he, in token of his appreciation, had sent before him the life-size effigy of a swan, moulded in ice and filled with caviar. This chilly piece of magnificence now dominated the room, standing on a table in the centre, thawing gently, dripping at the beak into its silver dish. The flowers of the morning delivery hid as much as possible of the panelling (for this room was a miniature of the monstrous hall above).
'You must get dressed at once. Where have you been all this time?'
'Talking to Julia Mottram.'
'D'you know her? Oh, of course, you were a friend of the dipso brother. Goodness, her glamour!'
'She greatly admires your looks, too.'
'She used to be a girl friend of Boy's.'
'Surely not?'
'He always said so.'
'Have you considered,' I asked, 'how your guests are going to eat this caviar?'
'I have. It's insoluble. But there's all this'—she revealed some trays of glassy titbits—'and anyway, people always find ways of eating things at parties. D'you remember we once ate potted shrimps with a paper knife?'
'Did we?'
'Darling' it was the night you popped the question.'
'As I remember, you popped.'
'Well, the night we got engaged. But you haven't said how you like the arrangements.'
The arrangements, apart from the swan and the flowers, consisted of a steward already inextricably trapped in the corner behind an improvised bar, and another steward, tray in hand, in comparative freedom.