The Story of Brideshead Revisited

XIII

Charles and Boy Mulcaster, who is representing his sister, come to an easy agreement about the divorce arrangements. Celia is to keep the children and the house, and Charles agrees to give her the money for the children’s education. She has found another lover, a younger man called Robin.

Charles’s father is characteristically dismissive of the whole process of getting rid of one wife in order immediately to marry another. Rex is hard-pressed politically and financially, and tries to delay the divorce; but Charles and Julia go ahead. Julia meets Mrs Muspratt in London and finds her a vulgar if majestic woman - and too old to bear a child for Bridey.

Cordelia arrives home after nursing in Spain during the Civil War. She had first tried the convent and failed to find a vocation there, and then had taken up nursing. She had gone to visit Sebastian when she had heard he was unwell. She found him in the infirmary of a monastery near Carthage. He had arrived at the monastery asking to be taken on as a lay-brother, but his drinking had put a stop to that. He had had hopes of becoming a missionary to the cannibals, pygmies or lepers! The Superior had gently had to point out his total unfitness though he was willing to make him a sort of porter.

Sebastian had told Cordelia all about Kurt and himself. They had moved to Athens after Fez, but after a minor crime Kurt had been repatriated to Nazi Germany against his will. Sebastian found him there a year later, a storm-trooper in the SA. Kurt had tried to escape but had been captured and put in a concentration camp. Sebastian took another year to find out that Kurt had hanged himself after a few days. Sebastian had gone back to North Africa and eventually ended up at the Carthage monastery.

Cordelia tells Charles how she thinks things will develop. Sebastian will potter around being a favourite with the novices and the monks, occasionally getting drunk, until one day he will be found dying and will be given the last rites. To Charles this seems a tragic end that could not have been foreseen at Oxford; but Cordelia sees it as the last days of a man close to holiness.