Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [70]
'Oh, the peke's all right. Listen. I've got Rex Mottram coming here today. We simply can't have another evening like last night. Someone must speak to mummy.'
'Someone has. I spoke. I think it will be all right.'
'Thank God for that. Are you painting today, Charles?'
It had been the custom that on every visit to Brideshead I painted a medallion on the walls of the garden-room. The custom suited me well, for it gave me a good reason to detach myself from the rest of the party; when the house was full, the garden-room became a rival to the nursery, where from time to time people took refuge to complain about the others; thus without effort I kept in touch with the gossip of the place. There were three finished medallions now, each rather pretty in its way, but unhappily each in a different way, for my tastes had changed and I had become more dexterous in the eighteen months since the series was begun. As a decorative scheme, they were a failure. That morning was typical of the many mornings when I had found the gardenroom a sanctuary. There I went and was soon at work. Julia came with me to see me started and we talked, inevitably, of Sebastian.
'Don't you, get bored with the subject?' she asked. 'Why must everyone make such a Thing about it?'
'Just because we're fond of him.'
'Well. I'm fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he'd behave like anybody else. I've grown up with one family skeleton, you know—papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to be talked of before us when we were children. If mummy is going to start making a skeleton out of Sebastian, it's too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn't he go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn't matter?'
'Why does it matter less being unhappy in Kenya than anywhere else?'
'Don't pretend to be stupid, Charles. You understand perfectly.'
'You mean there won't be so many embarrassing situations for you? Well, all I was trying to say was that I'm afraid there may be an embarrassing situation tonight if Sebastian gets the chance. He's in a bad mood.'
'Oh, a day's hunting will put that all right.'
It was touching to see the faith which everybody put in the value of a day's hunting. Lady Marchmain, who looked in on me during the morning, mocked herself for it with that delicate irony for which she was famous.
'I've always detested hunting,' she said, 'because it seems to produce a particularly gross kind of caddishness in the nicest people. I don't know what it is, but the moment they dress up and get on a horse they become like a lot of Prussians. And so boastful after it. The evenings I've sat at dinner appalled at seeing the men and women I know, transformed into half-awake, self-opinionated, monomaniac louts!...and yet, you know—it must be something derived from centuries ago—my heart is quite light today to think of Sebastian out with them. "There's nothing wrong with him really," I say, "he's gone hunting"—as though it were an answer to prayer.'
She asked me about my life in Paris. I told her of my rooms with their view of the river and the towers of Notre Dame. 'I'm hoping Sebastian will come and stay with me when I go back.'
'It would have been lovely,' said Lady Marchmain, sighing as though for the unattainable.
'I hope he's coming to stay with me in London.'
'Charles, you know it isn't possible. London's the worst place. Even Mr Samgrass couldn't hold him there. We have no secrets in this house. He was lost, you know, all through Christmas. Mr Samgrass only found him because he couldn't pay