Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
‘You’d better pack all that stuff up again.’
‘Bridey, what do you mean?’
‘Only that the wedding’s off.’
‘Bridey’
‘I thought I’d better make some inquiries about my prospective brother-in-law, as no one else seemed interested,’ said Brideshead. ‘I got the final answer tonight. He was married in Montreal in 1915 to a Miss Sarah Evangeline Cutler, who is still living there.’
‘Rex, is this true?’
Rex stood with a jade dragon in his hand looking at it critically; then he set it carefully on its ebony stand and smiled openly and innocently at them all.
‘Sure it’s true,’ he said. ‘What about it? What are you all looking so het up about? She isn’t a thing to me. She never meant any good. I was only a kid, anyhow. The sort of mistake anyone might make. I got my divorce back in 1919. I didn’t even know where she was living till Bridey here told me. What’s all the rumpus?’
‘You might have told me,’ said Julia.
‘You never asked. Honest, I’ve not given her a thought in years.
His sincerity was so plain that they had to sit down and talk about it calmly.
‘Don’t you realize, you poor sweet oaf,’ said Julia, ‘that you can’t get married as a Catholic when you’ve another wife alive?’
‘But I haven’t. Didn’t I just tell you we were divorced six years ago.’
‘But you can’t be divorced as a Catholic.’
‘I wasn’t a Catholic and I was divorced. I’ve got the papers somewhere.’
‘But didn’t Father Mowbray explain to you about marriage?’
‘He said I wasn’t to be divorced from you. Well, I don’t want to be. I can’t remember all he told me — sacred monkeys, plenary indulgences, four last things — if I remembered all he told me I shouldn’t have time for anything else. Anyhow, what about your Italian cousin, Francesca? — she married twice.’
‘She had an ‘annulment.’
‘All right then, I’ll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get it from? Has Father Mowbray got one? I only want to do what’s right. Nobody told me.’
It was a long time before Rex could be convinced of the existence of a serious impediment to his marriage. The discussion took them to dinner, lay dormant in the presence of the servants, started again as soon as they were alone, and lasted long after midnight. Up, down, and round the argument circled and swooped like a gull, now out to sea, out of sight, cloud-bound, among irrelevances and repetitions, now right on the patch where the offal floated.
‘What d’you want me to do? Who should I see?’ Rex kept asking. ‘Don’t tell me there isn’t someone who can fix this.’
‘There’s nothing to do, Rex,’ said Brideshead. ‘It simply means your marriage can’t take place. I’m sorry from everyone’s point of view that it’s come so suddenly. You ought to have told us yourself’
‘Look said Rex. ‘Maybe what you say is right; maybe strictly by law I shouldn’t get married in your cathedral. But the cathedral is booked; no one there is asking any questions; the Cardinal knows nothing about it; Father Mowbray knows nothing about it. Nobody except us knows a thing. So why make a lot of trouble? Just stay mum and let the thing go through, as if nothing had happened. Who loses anything by that? Maybe I risk going to hell. Well, I’ll risk it. What’s it got to do with anyone else?’
‘Why not?’ said Julia. ‘I don’t believe these priests know everything. I don’t believe in hell for things like that. I don’t know that I believe in it for anything. Anyway, that’s our look out. We’re not asking you to risk your souls. Just keep away.’
‘Julia, I hate you,’ said Cordelia, and left the room.
‘We’re all tired,’ said Lady Marchmain. ‘If there was anything to say, I’d suggest our discussing it in the morning.’
‘But there’s nothing to discuss,’ said Brideshead, ‘except what’ is the least offensive way we can close the whole incident. Mother and I will decide that. We must put a notice in The Times and the Morning Post; the presents will have to go back. I don’t know what is usual about the bridesmaids’ dresses.’
‘Just a moment,’ said Rex. ‘Just a moment. Maybe you can stop us marrying in your cathedral. All right, to hell, we’ll be married in a Protestant church.’
‘I can stop that, too,’ said Lady Marchmain.
‘But I don’t think you will, mummy,’ said Julia. ‘You see, I’ve been Rex’s mistress for some time now, and I shall go on being, married or not.’
‘Rex, is this true?’
‘No damn it, it’s not,’ said Rex. ‘I wish it were.’
‘I see we shall have to discuss it all again in the morning,’ said Lady Marchmain faintly. ‘I can’t go on any more now.’
And she needed her son’s help up the stairs.
‘What on earth made you tell your mother that?’ I asked, when, years later, Julia described the scene to me.
‘That’s exactly what Rex wanted to know. I suppose because I thought it was true. Not literally — though you must remember I was only twenty, and no one really knows the “facts of life” by being told them — but, of course, I didn’t mean it was true literally. I didn’t know how else to express it. I meant I was much too deep with Rex just to be able to say “the marriage arranged will not now take place”, and leave it at that. I wanted to be made an honest woman. I’ve been wanting it ever since come to think of it.’
‘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
‘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 modern 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.
CHAPTER 3
Mulcaster and I in defence of our country — Sebastian abroad — I take leave of Marchmain House
I RETURNED to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike.
It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil war. Every evening the kiosks displayed texts of doom, and, in the cafés, acquaintances greeted one half-derisively with: ‘Ha, my friend, you are better off here than at home, are you not?’ until I and several friends in circumstances like my own came seriously to believe that our country was in danger and that our duty lay there. We were joined by a Belgian Futurist, who lived under the, I think, assumed name of Jean de Brissac la Motte, and claimed the right to bear arms in any battle anywhere against the lower classes.
We crossed together, in a high-spirited, male party, expecting to find unfolding before us at Dover the history so often repeated of late, with so few variations, from all parts of Europe, that I, at any rate, had formed in my mind a clear, composite picture of ‘Revolution’ — the red flag on the post office, the overturned tram, the drunken N.C.O.s, the gaol open and gangs of released criminals prowling the streets, the train from the capital that did not arrive. One had read it in the papers, seen it in the films, heard it at café tables again and again for six or seven years now, till it had become part of one’s experience, at second hand, like the mud of Flanders and the flies of Mesopotamia.
Then we landed and met the old routine of the customs-shed, the punctual boat-train, the porters lining the platform at Victoria and converging on the first-class carriages; the long line of waiting taxis.
‘We’ll separate,’ we said, and see what’s happening. We’ll meet and compare notes at dinner,’ but we knew already in our hearts that nothing was happening; nothing, at any rate, which needed our presence.
‘Oh dear,’ said my father, meeting me by chance on the stairs, ‘how delightful to see you again so soon.’ (I had been abroad fifteen months.) ‘You’ve come at a very awkward time, you know. They’re having another of those strikes in two days — such a lot of nonsense — and I don’t know when you’ll be able to get away.’
I thought of the evening I was forgoing, with the lights coming out along the banks of the Seine, and the company I should have had there — for I was at the time concerned with two emancipated American girls who shared a garçonnière in Auteuil — and wished I had not come.
We dined that night at the Café Royal. There things were a little more warlike, for the Café was full of undergraduates who had come down for ‘National Service’. One group, from Cambridge, had that afternoon signed on to run messages for Trans-port House, and their table backed on another group’s, who were enrolled as special constables. Now and then one or other party would shout provocatively over the shoulder, but it is hard to come into serious conflict back to back, and the affair ended with their giving each other tall glasses of lager beer.
‘You should have been in Budapest when Horthy marched in’ said Jean. ‘That was politics.’
A party was being given that night in Regent’s Park for the ‘Black Birds’ who had newly arrived in England. One of us had been asked and thither we all went.
To us, who frequented Bricktop’s and the Bal Nègre in the Rue Blomet, there was nothing particularly remarkable in the spectacle; I was scarcely inside the door when I heard an unmistakable voice, an echo from what now seemed a distant past.
‘No,’ it said, ‘they are not animals in a zoo, Mulcaster, to be goggled at. They are artists, my dear, very great artists, to be revered.’
Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster were at the table where the wine stood.
‘Thank God here’s someone I know,’ said Mulcaster, as I joined them. ‘Girl brought me. Can’t see her anywhere.’
‘She’s given you the slip, my dear, and do you know why? Because you look ridiculously out of place, Mulcaster. It isn’t your kind of party at all; you ought not to be here; you ought to go away, you know, to the Old Hundredth or some lugubrious dance in Belgrave Square.’
‘Just come from one,’ said Mulcaster. ‘Too early for the Old Hundredth. I’ll stay on a bit. Things may cheer up.’
‘I spit on you,’ said Anthony. ‘Let me talk to you, Charles.’
We took a bottle and our glasses and found a corner in another room. At our feet five members of the ‘Black Birds’ orchestra squatted on their heels and threw dice.
‘That one,’ said Anthony, ‘the rather pale one, my dear, conked Mrs Arnold Frickheimer the other morning on the nut, my dear, with a bottle of milk.’
Almost immediately, inevitably, we began to talk of Sebastian.
‘My dear, he’s such a sot. He came to live with me in Marseille last year when you threw him over, and really it was as much as I could stand. Sip, sip, sip like a dowager all day long. And so sly. I was always missing little things, my dear, things I rather liked; once I lost two suits that had arrived from Lesley and Roberts that morning. Of course, I didn’t know it was Sebastian — there were some rather queer fish, my dear, in and out of my little apartment. Who knows better than you my taste for queer fish? Well, eventually, my dear, we found the pawnshop where Sebastian was p-p-popping them and then he hadn’t got the tickets; there was a market for them, too, at the bistro.
‘I can see that puritanical, disapproving look in your eye, dear Charles, as though you thought I had led the boy on. It’s one of Sebastian’s less lovable qualities that he always gives the impression of being l-l-led on — like a little horse at a circus. But I assure you I did everything. I said to him again and again, “Why drink? If you want to be intoxicated there are so many much more delicious things.” I took him to quite the best man; well, you know him as well as I do, Nada Alopov and Jean Luxmore and everyone we know has been to him for years — he’s always in the Regina Bar — and then we had trouble over that because Sebastian gave him a bad cheque — a s-s-stumer, my dear — and a whole lot of very menacing men came round to the flat — thugs, my dear — and Sebastian was making no sense at the time and it was all most unpleasant.’
Boy Mulcaster wandered towards us and sat down, without encouragement, by my side.
‘Drink running short in there,’ he said, helping himself from our bottle and emptying it. ‘Not a soul in the place I ever set eyes on before — all black fellows.’
Anthony ignored him and continued: ‘So then we left Marseille and went t
‘Never seen you before,’ she said. ‘Never asked you. Who are all this white trash, anyway? Seems to me I must be in the wrong house.’
‘A time of national emergency,’ said Mulcaster. ‘Anything may happen.’
‘Is the party going well?’ she asked anxiously. ‘D’you think Florence Mills would sing? We’ve met before,’ she added to Anthony.
‘Often, my dear, but you never asked me tonight.’
‘Oh dear, perhaps I don’t like you. I thought I liked everyone.’
‘Do you think,’ asked Mulcaster, when our hostess had left us, ‘that it might be witty to give the fire alarm?’
‘Yes, Boy, run away and ring it.’
‘Might cheer things up, I mean.’
‘Exactly.’
So Mulcaster left us in search of the telephone.
‘I think Sebastian and his lame chum went to French Morocco,’ continued Anthony. ‘They were in trouble with the Tangier police when I left them. The Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to make me get into touch with them. What a time that poor woman’s having! It only shows there’s some justice in life.’
Presently Miss Mills began to sing and everyone, except the crap players, crowded to the next room.
‘That’s my girl,’ said Mulcaster. ‘Over there, with that black fellow. That’s the girl who brought me.’