Brideshead Revisited: Key Quotations: Chapter 1 (Book 2)



Brideshead Revisited: Key Quotations: Chapter 1 (Book 2)

‘Me?’ said Sebastian from the shadows beyond the lamplight, beyond the warmth of the burning logs, beyond the family circle, and the photographs spread on the card table. (p. 139)

Sebastian certainly did look ill; five months had wrought the change of years in him. He was paler, thinner, pouchy under the eyes, drooping in the corners of the mouth, and he showed the scars of a boil on the side of his chin; his voice seemed flatter and his movements alternately listless and jumpy; he looked down-at-heel, too, with clothes and hair, which formerly had been happily negligent, now unkempt; worst of all, there was a wariness in his eye which I had surprised there at Easter, and which now seemed habitual to him. (p. 142)

I often think of that bathroom – the water colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair – and contrast it with the uniform, clinical, little chambers, glittering with chromium-plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world. (pp. 143-4)

‘I can tell you exactly what I’m going to do. I shall leave Bridey at the first covert, hack over to the nearest good pub, and spend the entire day quietly soaking in the bar parlour. If they treat me like a dipsomaniac, they can bloody well have a dipsomaniac. I hate hunting, anyway.’ (p. 146)

‘Anthony and the Jew boy shared a very nice, tumbledown house near the bazaars. I stayed there till it got too cold, then Anthony and I drifted south till we met Sammy by appointment in Syria three weeks ago.’ (p. 148)

‘Now you can’t refuse me money.’

I gave him a pound.

‘More,’ he said.

I gave him another and watched him mount and trot after his brother and sister.

It had been the custom that on every visit to Brideshead I painted a medallion on the wall of the garden-room. The custom suited me well, for it gave me a good reason to detach myself from the rest of the party; when the house was full, the garden-room became a rival to the nursery, where from time to time people took refuge to complain about the otters; thus without effort I kept in touch with the gossip of the place. (p. 150)

‘I’ve grown up with one family skeleton – you know – papa. Not to be talked of before the servants, not to start making a skeleton out of Sebastian, it’s too much. If he wants to be always tight, why doesn’t he go to Kenya or somewhere where it doesn’t matter?’ (p. 151)

‘…You see, I’ve been through this all before.’

The retort was there, unspoken, well-understood by both of us – ‘You couldn’t keep him; he ran away. So will Sebastian. Because they both hate you.’ (p. 152)

‘What I used to fear was that he just got drunk deliberately when he liked and because he liked.’

‘That’s exactly what he did – what we both did. It’s what he does with me now. I can keep him to that, if only your mother would trust me. If you worry him with keepers and cures he’ll be a physical wreck in a few years.’ (p. 153)

Discuss the tortoise.

‘A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne – that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night…’ (p. 156)

‘Too bloody drunk,’ said Sebastian nodding heavily. ‘Like olden times. Gentlemen always too drunk join ladies in olden times.’

(‘And yet, you know, it wasn’t,’ said Mr Samgrass, trying to be chatty with me about it afterwards, ‘it wasn’t at all like the olden times.’…) (p. 156)

‘But I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you can have been so nice in so many ways, and then do something so wantonly cruel. I don’t understand how we all liked you so much. Did you hate us all the time? I don’t understand how we deserved it.’

I was unmoved. (p. 157)

But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

‘I shall never go back,’ I said to myself.

A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.

I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed. (pp. 157-8)

I had left behind me – what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, ‘the Young Magician’s Compendium’, that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.

‘I have left behind illusion,’ I said to myself. ‘Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions – with the aid of my five senses.’

I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue. (pp. 157-8)

Living in France was easy then; with the exchange as it was, my allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. (p.160)

‘And what about the row with Cordelia?’

‘That eclipsed everything. That kid’s a walking marvel – she’d been feeding Sebastian whiskey right under our noses for a week…’ (p. 162)

Presently he began again on the Marchmains:

‘I’ll tell you another thing, too – they’ll get a jolt financially soon if they don’t look out.’

‘I thought they were enormously rich.’

‘Well, they are rich in the way people are who just let their money sit quiet. Everyone of that sort is poorer than they were in 1914, and the Flytes don’t seem to realize it. … Look at the way they live – Brideshead and Marchmain House both going full blast, pack of foxhounds, no rents raised, nobody sacked, dozens of old servants doing damn all, being waited on by other servants, and then besides all that there’s the old boy setting up a separate establishment – and setting it up on no humble scaled either. D’you know how much they’re overdrawn?’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘Jolly near a hundred thousand in London.’ (p. 163)

I knew; everyone who had ever met Rex knew of his affair with Brenda Champion… it had done him a great deal of good with men; women he could usually charm. (p. 164)

He lit his cigar and sat back a peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We were both happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog’s barking miles away on a still night. (p. 165)

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