The Story of Brideshead Revisited

IX

In May 1926, a year and a half after he last saw Sebastian, Charles hears about the outbreak of the General Strike in Britain. His French friends assure him that revolution is about to break out in London, and he returns to help deal with the revolutionaries.

Nothing seems to be very alarming when he arrives in London. He goes to a party given for the black American troupe the Black Birds and there meets both Anthony Blanche and Boy Mulcaster. Blanche has news of Sebastian who stayed with him in Marseilles for some months. Sebastian did not impress Blanche with his continual drinking. They moved to Tangier where Sebastian made a new friend, a German who had got out of the Foreign Legion by shooting off his big toe. Blanche thinks that the two of them had cleared out of Tangier and gone to French Morocco together.

Mulcaster enrols Charles in his company of the Defence Corps for the duration of the General Strike. Charles becomes a member of Bratt’s Club, which has been adopted as an operational centre and where they have to wait for orders. They have only one serious engagement, an affray between striking dockers and a couple of policemen which is soon settled when police reinforcements arrive. The General Strike is called off after a few days.

Julia telephones him to say that her mother is now seriously ill and wants to see him. He goes to Marchmain House but finds that Lady Marchmain is too ill to speak to him. Julia knows that she wanted to say sorry for her treatment of him on the last occasion they met, and that she now understood she was wrong in her judgment of him. Julia also asks him to go abroad and fetch Sebastian back as his mother wants to see him before she dies. Charles agrees to go.

Charles then travels to Fez in Morocco. He goes first to the house of the British Consul. The Consul knows Sebastian quite well and is surprised that he stays on in uncomfortable circumstances when there are nicer places nearby. An unpleasant German who stays with him seems to be the stumbling-block, he says.

A consular porter leads Charles to Sebastian’s house. There he finds only the German, Kurt, who is resting his bandaged foot on a box, drinking beer and listening to a jazz record. Kurt hopes that Charles is Sebastian’s brother or at least someone who can arrange for money. He also tells him that Sebastian is in hospital.

The doctor tells Charles that Sebastian is in no danger, but suffering a little from a lung infection. He is certainly unfit to travel at present. Because he is an alcoholic he has little resistance to disease. The lay-brother who looks after Sebastian is a kindly, charitable man who finds his patient to be the same. He is impressed by Sebastian’s Samaritan deed in taking in the German boy with syphilis. Charles telegraphs to Julia that Sebastian is too ill to move, and within a week he hears that Lady Marchmain is dead.

By this time Sebastian is getting well and bribing Arab boys to fetch bottles of brandy. The doctor tells Charles that Sebastian has to leave as the hospital does not take alcoholic cases. He predicts that each bout of drinking will leave Sebastian more vulnerable until one day some little illness will kill him.

Sebastian returns to the house where, despite his weakness, he again tends to Kurt’s needs. Charles arranges for a local bank to issue a weekly sum for Sebastian to live on. He leaves for home, knowing that Sebastian will not return to England. Bridey approves the financial arrangements, satisfied by Charles’s assurance that there is no vice in the relationship between Kurt and Sebastian. He also asks Charles to paint four pictures of the interior of Marchmain House, as Lord Marchmain is planning to sell it to make some much-needed money. The House will be demolished and a block of flats erected in its place. Charles hears this with great sadness as he thinks the House is an architectural gem.

These paintings are among the best he does, and help to make his reputation. Cordelia, in mourning for her mother, comes in and watches him paint one of them. He takes her to dine at the Ritz Grill, and she chatters on about her interests. She hopes she has the vocation to become a nun. She is confident that God will not let Sebastian, Julia and her father remain faithless for long - there is an invisible thread, she says (echoing G.K.Chesterton’s Father Brown), attaching them to Him which He can twitch at any time to bring them back to the faith. She was saddened when, as Bridey had predicted, the chapel at Brideshead was closed after her mother’s funeral. She makes a profound observation about her mother : because she was saintly, people hated her when they wanted to hate God.