Author’s Note:
I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.
The text below is taken from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, with only a few slight modifications.
–A.M.
Jack Donaghy – Captain Charles Ryder
Avery Jessup – Lady Julia Flyte
Devon Banks – Lord Sebastian Flyte
Liz Lemon – Lady Cordelia Flyte
Prologue
Here love had died between me and General Electric.
Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news.
*
Parcell, a sallow youth with hair combed back, without parting, from his forehead, and a flat, Midland accent.
Parcell became a symbol to me of Young America, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting “Parcell” and seeing if they still seemed as plausible: “Parcell Rallies,” “Parcell Hostels,” “International Parcell Co-operation” and “the Religion of Parcell.” He was the acid test of all these alloys.
Kenneth: “But you know how it is. He had his own stuff to do. If you get on the wrong side of these fellows they take it out of you in other ways.”
Part I
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
Devon: “You’re to come away at once, out of danger. I’ve got a motor-car and a round of Camembert and a bottle of Château Peyraguey—which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with night cheese.”
….
On a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms we ate the Camembert and drank the wine—as Devon promised, they were delicious together—and we lit fat, Turkish cigarettes and lay on our backs, Devon’s eyes on the leaves above him, mine on his profile, while the blue-grey smoke rose, untroubled by any wind, to the blue-green shadows of foliage, and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf and hold us suspended.
Devon: “Just the place to bury a crock of gold. I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”
And even then, rapt in the vision, I felt, momentarily, like a wind stirring the tapestry, an ominous chill at the words he used—not “That is my home,” but “It’s where my family live.”
The telegram, which read simply: gravely injured. come at once. Devon.
Fear worked like a yeast in my thoughts, and the fermentation brought to the surface, in great gobs of scum, the images of disaster: a loaded gun held carelessly at a stile, a horse rearing and rolling over, a shaded pool with a submerged stake, a sudden attack by hill people.
*
I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at 30 Rock.
*
That night I began to realize how little I really knew of Devon, and to understand why he had always sought to keep me apart from the rest of his life.
Toofer: “The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.”
Liz: “You didn’t like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy.”
Jack: “What do you mean by that, Lemon?”
….
I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had had my finger in the great succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s Renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed, hair-splitting speech.
Jack: “You’ll fall in love.”
Liz: “Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?”
Part II
A TWITCH UPON THE THREAD
That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.
*
Jack: “I was glad when I found Bianca was unfaithful. I felt it was all right for me to dislike her.”
Avery: “Is she? Do you? I’m glad. I don’t like her either. Why did you marry her?”
Jack: “Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she’s the ideal wife for a GE executive. Loneliness, missing Devon.”
Avery: “You loved him, didn’t you?”
Jack: “Oh yes. He was the forerunner.”
But later that night when she went to bed and I followed her to her door she stopped me.
Avery: “No, Jack, not yet. Perhaps never. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want love.”
Jack: “Love? I’m not asking for love.”
Avery: “Oh yes, Jack, you are.”
*
Avery: “Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.”
*
Avery: “You knew?”
Jack: “Since this morning; since before this morning; all this year.”
Avery: “I didn’t know till to-day. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand. Then I could bear to part, or bear it better. I should say my heart was breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can’t marry you, Jack; I can’t be with you ever again.
I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But I saw to-day there was one thing unforgiveable—the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I’m not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God’s.
It may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won’t quite despair of me in the end.”
Jack: “I don’t want to make it easier for you. I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.”
