Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [86]
'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