The Story of Brideshead Revisited

V

After Julia has left, Charles and Sebastian get down to enjoying themselves at Brideshead while Sebastian recovers from his injury. They taste the fine wines and excellent cuisine of the house, and Charles practises his art. He draws the great fountain and paints a mural in the Office which he thinks is surprisingly successful.

During his visit Charles realises that Sebastian is a Catholic to a degree which surprises him. He seems to have a simple faith bordering on childishness at one moment, and at others an approach which appears to be a flight from his religion.

Charles finds out more about the family. Sebastian’s father, Lord Marchmain, had married Lady Marchmain late in the nineteenth century and they had had four children. He had gone off at the age of nearly fifty to fight in France in 1914 and had never returned home. He had stayed in Europe and now lived with a mistress. His children had grown up without him, and their loss was made the greater by the death in the war of all three of their mother’s brothers.

The eldest son, Lord Brideshead, known as ‘Bridey’, had wanted to join the priesthood but had had no real vocation for it. Sebastian is the next child, and then Julia. The youngest, Cordelia, is about twelve and still at convent school. At the time Charles visits Brideshead, Lady Marchmain is in London bringing Julia out into society in her debutante year. This is why Julia was desperate to get back to London.

Charles meets both Bridey and Cordelia at the time of the Brideshead Agricultural Show. Cordelia is a delightful child, but he finds Bridey buttoned-up, very settled in his views and ways, and rather odd.

Sebastian decides to take Charles with him to Venice when he goes to visit his father in September. Since Charles has no money they travel third-class and thoroughly enjoy themselves. Charles finds Lord Marchmain a fine figure of a man, somewhat Byronic in his air. His mistress, Cara, is an elegant, cultured woman, and she happily joins in the sight-seeing that the boys want to do, enlisting the help of a Venetian nobleman she knows.

Late in the holiday, she and Charles have a conversation which reveals to him more of the strange situation of the Flyte family. Lord Marchmain is fleeing from a wife he had loved as a boy and could not as a man, she explains. Cara likes the way that northern European boys develop love for another boy before they mature into love for a woman. Alex (Lord Marchmain) had not done that and had suffered as a result; indeed, she says, he hates Lady Marchmain - and all she had ever done wrong was to love him.

She also points out that Sebastian is a compulsive drinker, and that this weakness will lead to great unhappiness. So will his reluctance to give childhood up : he clings to Nanny Hawkins, he carries his teddy-bear Aloysius around with him still. He does not want to mature.