Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [34]
'Why is this house called a "Castle"?'
'It used to be one until they moved it.'
'What can you mean?'
'Just that. We had a castle a mile away, down by the village. Then we took a fancy to the valley and. pulled the castle down, carted the stones up here, and built a new house. I'm glad they did, aren't you?'
'If it was mine I'd never live anywhere else.'
'But you sec. Charles, it isn't mine. Just at the moment it is, but usually it's full of ravening beasts. If it could only be like this always—always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe, and Aloysius in a good temper...'
It is thus I like to remember Sebastian, as he was that summer, when we wandered alone together through that enchanted palace; Sebastian in his wheel chair spinning down the box-edged walks of the kitchen gardens in search of alpine strawberries and warm figs, propelling himself through the succession of hothouses, from scent to scent and climate to climate, to cut the muscat grapes and choose orchids for our buttonholes; Sebastian hobbling with a pantomime of difficulty to the old nurseries, sitting beside me on the threadbare, flowered carpet with the toy-cupboard empty about us and Nanny Hawkins stitching complacently in the comer, saying, 'You're one as bad as the other; a pair of children the two of you. Is that what they teach you at College?' Sebastian supine on the sunny seat in the colonnade, as he was now, and I in a hard chair beside him, trying to draw the fountain.
'Is the dome by Inigo Jones, too? It looks later.'
'Oh, Charles, don't be such a tourist. What does it matter when it was built if it's pretty?'
'It's the sort of thing I like to know.'
'Oh dear, I thought I'd cured you of all that—the terrible Mr Collins.'
It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room, from the Soanesque library to the Chinese drawing, adazzle with gilt pagodas and nodding mandarins, painted paper and Chippendale fretwork, from the Pompeian parlour to the great tapestry-hung hall which stood unchanged, as it had been designed two hundred and fifty years before; to sit, hour after hour, in the shade looking out on the terrace.
This terrace was the final consummation of the house's plan; it stood on massive stone ramparts above the lakes, so that from the hall steps it seemed to overhang them, as though, standing by the balustrade, one could have dropped a pebble into the first of them immediately below one's feet. It was embraced by the two arms of the colonnade; beyond the pavilions groves of lime led to the wooded hillsides. Part of the terrace was paved, part planted with flower-beds and arabesques of dwarf box; taller box grew in a dense hedge, making a wide oval, cut into niches and interspersed with statuary, and, in the centre, dominating the, whole splendid space rose the fountain; such a fountain as one might expect to find in a piazza of southern Italy; such a fountain as was, indeed, found there a century ago by one of Sebasian's ancestors; found, purchased, imported, and re-erected in an alien but welcoming climate.
Sebastian set me to draw it. It was an ambitious subject for an amateur—an oval basin with an island of sculptured rocks at its centre; on the rocks grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation, and wild English fem in its natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs, and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards and an ebullient lion, all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone—but, by some odd chance, for the thing was far beyond me, I brought it off and, by judicious omissions and some stylish tricks, produced a very passable echo of Piranesi. 'Shall I give it to your mother?' I asked.
'Why? You don't know her.'
'It seems polite. I'm staying in her house.'
'Give it to nanny,'