Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [117]
' 'Lo, Toni, back again?' said the youth behind the bar.
'We will take our drinks and sit in a comer. You must remember, my dear, that here you are just as conspicuous and, may I say, abnormal, my dear, as I should be in B-bbratt's.'
The place was painted cobalt; there was cobalt lineoleum on the floor. Fishes of silver and gold paper had been pasted haphazard on ceiling and walls. Half a dozen youths were drinking and playing with the slot-machines; an older, natty, crapulous-looking man seemed to be in control; there was some sniggering round the fruit-gum machine; then one of the youths came up to us and said, 'Would your friend care to rhumba?'
'No, Tom, he would not, and I'm not going to give you a drink; not yet, anyway. That's a very impudent boy, a regular little gold-digger, my dear.'
'Well,' I said, affecting an ease I was far from feeling in that den, what have you been up to all these years?'
'My dear, it is what you have been up to that we are here to talk about. I've been watching you, my dear. I'm a faithful old body and I've kept my eye on you.' As he spoke the bar and the bar-tender, the blue wicker furniture, the gambling-machines, the gramophone, the couple of youths dancing on the oilcloth, the youths sniggenng round the slots,. the purple-veined, stiffly-, dressed elderly man drinking in the corner opposite us, the whole drab and furtive joint seemed to fade, and I was back in Oxford looking out over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin-Gothic. 'I went to your first exhibition,' said Anthony; 'I found it—charming. There was an interior of Marchmain House, very English, very correct, but quite delicious. "Charles has done something," I said; "not all he will do, not all he can do, but something."
'Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I am not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said, "Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?"
'The next thing I saw was your very handsome volume "Village and Provincial Architecture", was it called? Quite a tome, my dear, and what did I find? Charm again. "Not quite my cup of tea," I thought; "this is too English." I have the fancy for rather spicy things, you know, not for the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis—not that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford. Then, to be frank, dear Charles, I despaired of you. "I am a degenerate old d-d-dago," I said "and Charles—I speak of your art, my dear—is a dean's daughter in flowered muslin."
'Imagine then my excitement at luncheon today. Everyone was talking about you. My hostess was a friend of my mother's, a Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander; a friend of yours, too, my dear. Such a frump! Not at all the society I imagined you to keep. However, they, had all been to your exhibition, but it was you they talked of, how you had broke away, my dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how my old heart leaped.
' "Poor Celia," they said, "after all she's done for him." "He owes everything to her. It's too bad." "And with Julia," they said, "after the way she behaved in America." "Just as she was going back to Rex."
' "But the pictures," I said; "Tell me about them."
'Oh, the pictures," they said; "they're most peculiar." "Not at all what he usually does." "Very forceful." "Quite barbaric." "I call them downright unhealthy," said Mrs Stuyvesant Oglander.
'My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, "Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures." Well, I went, but the gallery after luncheon was so full of absurd women in the sort of hats they should be made to eat, that I rested a little