Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh

Author:Evelyn Waugh [Waugh, Evelyn]
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Unread
ISBN: 9780140274103
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1962-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

- 91 -

she wants to. I shan't try and stop her. It doesn't mean two pins to her, as a matter of fact, but I like a girl to have religion. What's more, she can bring the children up Catholic. I'll make all the "promises" they want...Then there's my past. "We know so little about you." She knows a sight too much. You may know I've been tied up with someone else for a year or two.'

I knew; everyone who had ever met Rex knew of his affair with Brenda Champion; knew also that it was from this affair that he derived everything which distinguished him from every other stock-jobber; his golf with the Prince of Wales, his membership of Bratt's, even his smoking-room comradeship at the House of Commons, for, when he first appeared there, his party chiefs did not say of him, 'Look, there is the promising young member for north Gridley who spoke so well on Rent Restrictions.' They said:

'There's Brenda Champion's latest'; it had done him a great deal of good with men; women he could usually charm.

'Well, that's all washed up. Ma Marchmain was too delicate to mention the subject; all she said was that I had "notoriety". Well, what does she expect as a son-in-law - a sort of half-baked monk like Brideshead? Julia knows all about the other thing; if she doesn't care, I don't see it's anyone else's business.'

After the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives. I tried to think only of the salad. I succeeded for a time in thinking only of the soufflé. Then came the cognac and the proper hour for these confidences. '...Julia's just rising twenty. I don't want to wait till she's of age. Anyway, I don't want to marry without doing the thing properly...nothing hole-in-corner...I have to see she isn't jockeyed out of her proper settlement. So as the Marchioness won't play ball I'm off to see the old man and square him. I gather he's likely to agree to anything he knows will upset her. He's at Monte Carlo at the moment. I'd planned to go there after dropping Sebastian off at Zurich. That's why it's such a bloody bore having lost him.'

The cognac was not to Rex's taste. It was clear and pale and it came to us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.

'Brandy's one of the things I do know a bit about,' said Rex. 'This is a bad colour. What's more, I can't taste it in this thimble.'

They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it over the spirit lamp. Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes, and pronounced it the sort, of stuff he put soda in at home.

So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort.

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