I had not been long away from Oxford when I began to understand the difference between living and existing, between being and being alive. It came to me all at once, one silent evening dinner with my Father. He sat hunched over his book at the dinner table, letting his food grow cold. Our maid had thrown the windows open, and I could smell the summer-sweet scent of city rain that had become London to me. In those vague, edgeless days I felt that I was only drifting; I woke only to sleep again and slept only to wake again with a feeling that nothing had improved and nothing ever would. My hours blended seamlessly into days and so on, and they had done it so efficiently that not even I could remember how much time had passed since I bid farewell to Sebastian outside of the café on High Street. Yet, the thought of him put a wall between the London air and myself. There seemed to be a thick stained glass of amber or ruby red, through which I could see nothing there that pleased me, nothing worthwhile. He lingered in all the open spaces of my memory, collapsing history lessons and Christmases to make room for the hue of his eyes, the verdure of the country, the tint of his wine. My life that spring had been a haze of colours, and I gathered them together in my mind now to ward off the dullness of the coming night. I took my thoughts of him and set them ablaze, retreating to a set of melting photographs behind my eyes as the wind came in off of the river. For a moment, I could have sworn I caught the smell of incense.
Suddenly, there was a rapping on the door that echoed through the darkened house. I let my eyes slip open halfway, and saw that my Father had finally looked up from his book. The rapping continued.
"Oh for God's sake, why don't we pay that woman more money?" he asked me with a false lightness, floating out of the room like some great grey bird.
In another life, I might have been interested. The summer before, or any of twenty summers before that, I might have jumped and fallen over myself to answer the door. But something had changed in me then, and the same tinted glass that blocked the wind from me blocked the sound as well. I returned to the photographs melting behind my eyes, irked at the interruption, to bask in the glory of smoke rings under a spring tree; the taste of strawberries. The warmth of the memory faded as I heard my Father's footsteps returning.
"Charles, are you acquainted with a Lord Flyte?"
The fire behind my eyes fizzled as the contents of chest leapt into my throat.
"Yes. Why? Is that a telegram?" I demanded eagerly.
My Father resumed his seat in front of his cold food and pushed his glasses up from the tip of his nose.
"Naturally, naturally."
"Naturally what?"
"Naturally you'll want to go."
"Go where? Who is that from?"
"Didn't I tell you? It's from Lord Flyte. If he is to be believed, he is dying."
"What?" I hissed, nearly knocking over my empty plate as I snatched the telegram away from him.
GRAVELY INJURED. COME AT ONCE.
-SEBASTIAN
I never liked the night train, especially not after my Father had built it up with so much talk of robbers and German spies. (I sometimes wondered if he didn't spend all of his lethargic silences dreaming up misfortunes.) That night was different, though. The stained glass layer between myself and the rest of the world had finally been shattered once again. I could breathe; there was a lightness and a freedom in my chest. Yes-Sebastian's words had chilled my blood, and I remembered them from time to time. I saw them chisel out frown lines in my own reflection in the black windows as the night rushed by me in gulps of damp air. But there was no question in my mind now that I myself was alive again. There was a certain anticipation that had always attended catastrophe for me. I knew that, for better or worse, I was going back to Brideshead.
It was near midnight when I toppled onto the platform of the dimly lit station, half full of fear of a God I didn't believe in. I saw her in the half-light, shrouded in cigarette smoke, with her hand on her hip.
"You must be Charles." She said, clearly bored. She sized me up with a single sweep of her near-noir eyes and dismissed me with a twitch of her mouth. I nodded.
"Julia Flyte." She held out a prim, slender hand. It reminded me so much of Sebastian's that, after she had dropped me, I longed to latch on again.
"Is your brother alright? I assume he's still alive if you're here."
"Alive? Goodness, child. Of course he's alive. He's really got you wrapped around his finger, hasn't he?" she patted my cheek and gave me a pitying smile before leading me to the car.
We drove mostly in silence. I could tell she must be as tired as I was, and I wanted to thank her somehow for coming to fetch me at such a strange hour. But something about her intimidated me, the way she stared straight ahead into the blackness of the road. An iciness. The faded yellow of the headlights cast strange shadows against her features. I was struck by the lines of her face, but only because I had seen all of these things before in someone else. I felt that I knew her without knowing her, had touched her without touching her.
The house loomed ahead like a marble giant in the darkness, barely illuminated by the headlights of Julia's tiny car. When we pulled up in front of the pillared porch, a young man in uniform appeared to dislodge my case from the back. Julia killed the engine and the quiet of the night seeped in.
"Next to Sebastian's." she said to the man, and he set off ahead of us with a curt nod.
The house was nearly empty and barely lit as we made our way through the endless rooms in search of her brother. She called to him once, and I could tell that the sound of her own voice startled her. She did not feel at home enough here to shatter the silence that way. I remembered so much of my brief visit, but everything seemed so much stranger in the darkness. Where before I had seen high ceilinged parlours and sculpted facades, I now saw only caverns of nothingness. I caught here and there the swishing of a marble cloak as if the saintly figures had come alive in the night to dance to the ticking of hidden clocks. In that vast place, there were untouchable distances so shrouded that even Julia tensed in the crossing.
"I doubt he'll be sitting in the dark." I offered, mirroring her apprehension.
"Quite right. We'll try his bedroom."
Sebastian was in bed when Julia barged into his room and flipped on the light without warning. He slept with his blanket pulled over his head like a tent and one bandaged foot sticking out strangely at the bottom.
"SEBASTIAN!" she shouted, and he jumped up wildly.
"What! Jules? Is that you? Was that really necessary?"
"Yes, Sebastian, it was necessary. You've been sleeping all day! Charles is here and you'd best get up and tell him he's been had."
"Had?" I inquired.
"Charles!" Sebastian called gleefully, untangling himself from the sheets. I could not help the strange burst of joy that I felt at the sight of his face. He seemed to me to be a flower always in bloom: some arching, amber rarity that would never cease to be enchanting.
He stopped short when he caught sight of my expression.
"Whatever is the matter?" he asked me, suddenly concerned.
"I thought you were dying." I said flatly.
"He's broken a tiny bone in his foot playing croquet, Charles." Julia chimed in the same patronizing tone as before.
"I thought I might be dying! I thought to myself that it would be better to have you here just in case I was, that way-"
"What he means to say is that he thought it would be better to have you here because I'm leaving for London tomorrow and he doesn't know how to take care of himself."
I looked at Sebastian for some kind of confirmation of this, but all I received was a devilish grin from his handsome face. It took all of my will not to return it.
"You're an idiot." I finally said, accusingly. His face fell.
"I'll leave you two… to it." Julia said, backing out of the room.
I noticed then that she could not be nearly as beautiful as I had imagined before. The bones of her face were too sharp, her brows too high. Her eyes were a darker shade of brown; they did not glow golden in the light as Sebastian's did. There were no tiny flecks of pigment on her neck, no sweetly smirking birthmark just above her lip. She had none of his eccentricities. She had none of his warmth. She was nothing of him, and now that I had him there for myself in the flesh, I could not imagine how I had ever thought she might be.
"Are you very angry?" he asked me after she had pulled the door closed.
"You could have told me the truth." I shrugged.
"I thought you might not come."
Of all the ridiculous things I had heard that day, this to me was the worst. But I could not find the words to explain myself then, in the heavy air of my exhaustion. I could not explain to him about the coloured glass and the anticipation of catastrophe. So I only sat down on the edge of his bed. He took one of my hands between both of his and began to trace my shape with his fingertips. I studied his face as he worked.
"I would have come anyways." I said quietly.
His eyes flickered up to me, glowing gold in the dim light of the bedside lamp. He took my hand and placed it flat against his chest to let me feel his heart racing there. I returned his smile this time. I couldn't help myself.
"See? Quite alive." He whispered.
My room that summer overlooked the front drive and the massive fountain poised before the entrance to the house. There was a bench seat that lined the large bay window and, on the eighth morning of my stay at Brideshead, I woke to find it occupied by my host. Sebastian lay sprawled in the mid-morning sun like a great golden cat, the lines of his bare figure nearly lost in a haze of smoke and heat. I smelled him before I saw him, the sweetness of his cigarette. Incense and damp skin. Languorous.
I crawled out of my bed from the foot and joined him. He pulled his knees delicately up to his chest and made a place for me on the burning sill. I could feel the heat seeping through the fabric against my skin, and suddenly I wished to lose my clothes as he had done. But I was not that person. His charm afforded him a great deal of eccentricity; mine had only brought me him. It was enough.
"Aren't you burning up?" I began.
"I don't believe in wearing clothes."
"You believe in God, but not in pants?" I asked him, raising an eyebrow.
"There's a difference, Charles. God is a beautiful idea. Pants are just for hiding things."
He stretched his legs out again, over me this time, as if I might be nothing more than a part of the furniture. I was touching him before I could stop myself; it always seemed to work that way. The smallest motions, terribly innocent and terribly guilty. I slid a hand under his knee and brought it to my lips. I wondered if he understood what it meant to me, being so close to him.
"Can I ask you something important?" I heard him say.
An alarm went off in the back of my mind like a bell, but I knew of no good way to untangle myself. So I snapped my eyes closed and pressed my cheek against his thigh. He was radiating heat. I said nothing, but he continued.
"I wonder sometimes how your thoughts are sewn together. How do they melt into each other?"
"What do you mean?"
"I wish that I could watch them and hear them the way you do. I wish they floated in the air above your head. I'd love so terribly to see them sometimes."
I felt him touch my hair.
"I'm glad no one can." I said quietly to his skin.
"Tell me what you were thinking when you woke up and came to sit with me."
"I thought there's Sebastian, sitting in the window."
"Was it really that simple?"
"No." How could it ever be that simple?
"What was the first thing you thought?"
"I knew you were here because it smelled like you."
"Like what?"
I wrapped my arms around his leg.
"Sweet, very sweet."
"What else?" he whispered.
"I thought you looked like a statue I saw once in Paris at sunset. I thought you must have not been wearing anything at all. I thought your skin must be warm to touch and I wondered... I thought the light was beautiful."
"The light was?"
"You are." I said without thinking. "In the light. The smoke. The light, yes, the light. It was all beautiful."
Did the heat in my face come from the sun, or from my own stupidity? I used his body to hide from him. That could only work with someone like him, someone with a mind so full of hidden doors and secret passageways. There were parts of him that not even he knew about, facets of Sebastian that only showed themselves when the light fell just right, when I said just the right word in just the right way. I imagined that I was the only person capable of seeing all of him, of finding something new every time I looked at him, creating something new every time I touched him. He sat up and moved closer to me, putting his head on my shoulder to stare out the window. I tried to keep my hands limp.
"I want to see everything the way you see it." He said in a far away voice.
"How do I see things?" I spoke into his hair.
"Like an artist."
"It isn't difficult."
How did my fingers find their way to his ribs? I thought I heard him smiling.
"Will you teach me how? Will you draw for me? Paint? Anything you want, only I want to watch. I want to see."
I would have started a war for him, but I only nodded. It was something.
We spent three afternoons on the lawn while I drew Brideshead for him: the house with its grand old dome, the marble fountain shooting jets of boiling water into the pacific sky. I wondered how he never got bored of it, of me. He always sat behind me with his hand on my shoulder, stroking the starched fabric of my collar. Just watching. Every time I turned to look at him, he would be there to meet my gaze, interested as ever. I began to believe that he had meant what he said about learning how I saw things, learning to think like an artist. In many ways, Sebastian was not a man of his word. It must be said that he was prone to flights of fancy, to promises that could never possibly be fulfilled. But I began to understand the difference between his comedy and his sincerity, the look in his eyes. When he sat with me while I drew, he meant it. He cared, cared more than anyone I had ever met. About me, about art, about the way the water fell in ripples on the surface of the lake. He cared so much that he could hurt himself by doing so, and I felt it was my role in life to make sure he didn't.
On the third afternoon, I was running out of patience and landmarks. I had finally finished the fountain and handed the paper over to him when he said, "What's next?"
I laughed, exhausted. It seemed impossible that he could expect me to draw anything else, but he was still staring at me in all his wide-eyed glory.
"You're serious?" I asked. He looked dejected.
"You've forgotten to sign this." He said softly, handing it back to me.
He pulled a handful of grass out of the lawn and sprinkled it onto my leg as I scribbled my initials on the corner of the picture.
"Are you tired of spending time with me? If you want to be alone, Aloysius and I can go for a walk and-"
"No! It isn't that. Listen to me, it isn't that. I just can't imagine what's left to draw. I think we've done every bit of this place."
"What's your favourite part of Brideshead?" He asked, tracing my hands again.
I almost stopped myself from answering honestly. Almost.
It was nearly sunset when I finished drawing him for the first time. He was still beaming at me, reclining in the grass, propped up on an elbow. I wanted so badly to replicate him perfectly. An adoration of detail had always plagued me, but never more so than then. Never before had I worshiped something so exactly, to the eyelash. Never before had it meant so much to me to know that I had pleased someone. From time to time, he tried to peek at the image of himself, but I always managed to stop him. I think, more than anything, he wanted to remind me he was still a real person, no matter what I was creating with the blunt pencil in my hand. He wanted to make sure he still mattered.
"Charles, we've been here for sixty-three days. I'm getting hungry."
"It has to be perfect, Sebastian. I want to make it perfect."
"But I'm not perfect. And you know, I'll still love you if this isn't." he said, far away again.
I wish that I had told him that I loved him then, but I didn't. I was too taken aback, too uncertain of myself to respond. I knew what he was capable of evoking in me, and I had never been more frightened. I could only stare stupidly at him as he snatched the drawing out of my hands.
"Do I really look like this?"
"I think so. Don't you like it?"
"Of course I like it, you made it."
"You would say that." I rolled my eyes.
"I mean it, Charles. This person is so…"
"So what?"
He bit his lip.
"He's rather attractive, isn't he?"
"And?"
"Well I'm not like that at all."
I leaned back into the grass and stared at him. He looked every bit as troubled by this realization as he sounded.
"You're serious, aren't you?"
He tilted his head to the side. "Perfectly. Aloysius always tells me that I'm far too thin and that I always look like I haven't slept enough."
"That's why Aloysius will never be an artist."
"Because he doesn't think I'm beautiful?"
"Because he doesn't think you're beautiful."
"Is that what artists do? Find beauty where it doesn't exist?"
I could barely believe him, but I knew that he wasn't pretending. It was beyond him to pretend about things like that. The more whimsical the lie, the easier it was for him to play the part. A teddy bear could talk, but he could never look me in the eye and tell me he hated himself unless it was true.
"Sebastian. No. No. We take things that are already beautiful and adore them."
The customary sense of nervous humiliation filled me, and I glued my eyes to the fading sky. I felt him press his lips against my face.
"Do you want to get drunk tonight?" he whispered into my ear. His breath already smelled of wine.
I almost snorted. "When are we not drunk?"
"No, I mean especially drunk."
"What's the occasion?"
He shrugged.
"Being here, together. Alone. We have such an excellent time alone together."
To this day, I have no recollection of anything that happened after dinner, save a few slurred images of a chess- board flying across the room and Sebastian pretending to be a trumpet. I woke alone on the floor of my bedroom, mercifully still clothed, but inarguably still completely drunk as well.
"Sebastian?" I called.
There was no reply.
"SEBASTIAN!" I tried again.
"Charles, there's no need to shout!" came his wind-chime voice from my bed.
"Where are you?" I demanded.
"Bed. I've gone to bed." He said with perfect clarity, and I could tell that he was already far more coherent than I.
"Why?"
"I don't remember why."
"I feel sick." I told him. My voice sounded stupid, even to me.
"Try not to feel sick on that rug, it's from Ankara."
I groaned.
"I need you." I heard myself say.
"No one needs me, Charles. Especially not you."
I somehow managed to rise to my feet and stumble wildly towards my bed.
"Stop! You love, I love you. Didn't say it earlier. Should have said it. Should always say it. Love you, love you, love you. Sebastian?"
I collapsed onto the pillow beside him.
"Yes?"
"I love you."
"You really are terribly drunk, aren't you?"
I reached out to touch his face with my fingertips.
"No! Yes. Maybe. I love you anyways and I am going to draw you every single day until we're old and then people will come over and see how you change over the years and-"
"Charles, stop it."
"-and then they'll all know how much I love you because they'll see it and I'll tell them how long I spent on your eyelashes every time and-"
"CHARLES."
"What?"
"Don't say things you don't mean! Especially not that!"
"Why can't I mean them?"
"Because you've never said them before and you wouldn't say them again!"
Despite my best, sloppiest efforts to stop myself, I started to cry. Not a few tears, but a deluge. I wasn't particularly proud of myself; I'm still not. I hadn't cried since my mother died, and to break such a streak seemed like a terrible shame in hindsight. But my hysterics served to convince Sebastian, at long last, that I was completely serious. He laid me back down and wrapped me up in his arms. I felt him slide his knee between my legs.
"We'll talk about it tomorrow." He whispered.
"I don't want to talk about it." I sobbed petulantly.
"Aloysius has been saying we should."
"If you think I give a flying fuck what your-"
"Shhh."
"But it's a-"
"Charles, be quiet now. I want to take care of you." He cooed, and I finally drifted off to sleep with the vague notion that he might be stroking my hair.
We must not have moved a single inch that night for, when I finally opened my eyes again, we still clung to one another like twin locks. How quickly all of this had happened! I had imagined, half a year ago, that I would spend time without end in distant adoration of his near-mythological persona. And now… and now. I traced the ridges of his lithe spine with my half-numb fingers, shivering against the heat of his breath, his unclothed skin. He began to stir.
"I think I dreamed of Tchaikovsky." He said, as a greeting.
"The man?"
"I was an instrument in his orchestra."
"I remember."
"You remember my dream?"
"I was there."
He propped himself up and took on a thoughtful expression.
"Of course you were. I remember it now. You were a violin."
"You were a trumpet."
We fell into laughter again, and when we finished, he smiled down at me for a moment too long. I licked my lips and left them slightly parted. He took my head in his hands and I felt him shift his weight to fill the space between my legs. He bit me twice, nimble and twinging, softly. I adored him. I told him so. He followed the line of my jaw with the tip of his tongue; I let my hands venture farther and farther down his spine. He was burning, and I was filled with a terrible new urge to possess and be possessed by him, to let him consume me entirely.
"They all tell me this is very wrong." He whispered suddenly.
"What?...Who?"
"Mummy. The priests she sends. Julia. Cordelia. They all do. Except Father, Father doesn't much care. He's got a mistress himself, in Venice. That's also very wrong, they say."
"Sebastian, are you serious?"
I was filled with a sudden urge to hit him, or to all least throw him off of me. I sat up quickly and pushed his hands away.
"They say it's the most wrong I can go. That I should just try not to love anybody at all because then maybe, maybe I won't go to hell and-"
"You can't really believe that?"
"I don't know Charles, I don't know. I want to believe in the good bits without believing in the bad bits. But they say this is very bad…"
"How can you believe in a god who would burn you for loving someone?"
"Do you love me? Do you really? Because that's important."
"Would I still be here if I didn't?"
"That isn't an answer!"
"The answer is yes!"
"Are you always going to? Are you going to stop one day? Just wake up and think that I've grown tedious and then move on to someone better? Because there are so many people better than me, you know. You could have a family Charles. You could be normal. You're so good at being normal. You could have anyone you wanted! You should have seen the way Julia looked at you."
"I don't understand you!" I shouted.
"I only want to know how long I can have you," he explained, in what I assumed was a shaky attempt at being calm.
I rose from the bed, and my head spun with frustration at Sebastian and the wine from the night before. I paused in the doorway to the bathroom.
"You can have me for as long as you want me." I finally replied.
He looked confused for a moment.
"And if I always want you?"
I shrugged.
"Then always."
He smiled halfway.
"Do you promise?"
I laughed in spite of myself.
"I promise."
I have broken many promises in my life: vows of marriage, parenthood; loyalties of every kind all grow meaningless to me. But never my promise to Sebastian. Sometimes I start to think that perhaps it must have been the first promise that invalidated all the others, that Sebastian voided everything that came after him, made it all so irrelevant so effortlessly. What a way to end a life, I think sleeplessly to myself sometimes, ashamed now. But I always remind myself that I never betrayed him, and after that, I begin to find myself a model man indeed.
We were subdued that afternoon and well into the night. Sebastian seemed to be grappling with the idea that he had sold his soul to the devil in me, and I was still flustered at being worked up and talked down by the saint in him. But I was patient, because when you worship someone as I worshiped him, you can be nothing else. He spent the day being uncharacteristically awkward, suspiciously formal and strangely proper. He set to talking of Roman emperors and insisted that I dress in his fanciest clothes for dinner. I indulged him, all the while silently hoping it was only a temporary venture, heart leaping into my throat each time it suited him to take my hand.
"The mad ones are my favourite." He said definitively.
"Which one was the maddest?"
"You read history, don't you?"
"Well yes, but I want to know your favourite."
He gave me a lingering smile, but no answer.
"Do you like to dance, Charles?"
Sebastian did not tense to cross the shadowed rooms of his family's home as Julia had done. Then again, Julia did not trust me as he did, and could not have found my presence to be an equal comfort in the darkness. We wound our way arm-in-arm through a maze of stone-walled rooms and spiralling staircases until finally he seemed to recognise his destination. He pushed open a wood panelled door and slid inside ahead of me, lithely. I tried to push from my mind the memory of his spine beneath my fingertips. A light clicked on to reveal a room lined with books.
"My father's old study." He explained with a sad little smile.
He began to pull open drawers and knock their contents haphazardly onto the floor, one after the other, until finally I heard a triumphant "Aha!" With a dusty clatter, he slammed a gramophone onto the desk and grinned devilishly.
"What have you got?" I asked, moving to his side.
"There's something in… let's see."
I heard an amplified click, and suddenly the air was filled with the static of sparse piano notes and a sudden shock of soprano. The record spun dizzily. I felt him staring. Were the words Italian, or were they French? The meanings slipped into me and out again like drops of tepid rain. There was only Sebastian, amber eyes catching the light, biting his lips, edging nervously against the desk. There was only ever Sebastian.
"Do you like to lead?" he began softly.
"Or do you prefer being told what to do?" he finished, an edge to his voice.
I felt a sudden desire to seize him, to get my hands on him, inside of him, to rough him up, to taste a tint of blood on his lips and feel him lose his breath. I wanted to vulgarize him, just a little bit, because he was so very pure. Or was that only what he wanted me to think? He was so laced with contradiction: The illusion of innocence masking a contrived desire, the propagation of grandeur hiding a desperate insecurity. We danced; he led. I could not remember the steps, if I had ever known them. Hold me, my God, won't you just? He tasted sweet, very sweet. Delving for peppermint, unable to breathe. Pushy, very pushy, little bruises, falling, contact. I adore him. I tell him so. He is basking in the glory of the dim light, the scent of leather and dust, the frantic sound of his own repeated name. The music rages on, ignored.
Three weeks later, Sebastian received a telegram from his mother promising to be home by the end of the month. The summer thus far had played out in stages of idyllic shyness, each day a bit more beautiful and bit less rigid than the last. A little at a time, we had cast off our misgivings, our misconceptions and doubts, and submerged ourselves entirely in idea of one another. There are not adjectives glorious enough to describe the height of sensation he learned to evoke in me. But it is not fair to only speak of him that way when the bond between us transcended even the most passionate of exchanges. There was nothing hidden, no secret filter between my thoughts and my words, my desires and my actions. I kept nothing from Sebastian, not even the most trivial passing thought, and he appeared to keep nothing from me. It seemed that all my life I had been searching for something to pour myself into, something that would in turn fill me with a new sense of existence. To love him was to awaken, to be constantly ablaze with the knowledge that I was not alone in my ecstasies, my aspirations, my fears. The black, coughing terrors that had lived so long inside my ribs seemed paltry beneath his candlelight gaze. The aura of mystery that had so long surrounded him melted away at the touch of my hand. We were two people who had laboured long under the delusion that we were doomed to forever live only for ourselves. But somewhere in the heat-thick days where July became August, the line between us blurred. I lost track of which parts of him belonged to him and which to me. Was I wearing my own clothing, my own skin? Where did I begin and he end? I grew older as I slept beside him only in the sense that I grew wiser. For, as anyone who has ever held someone so dearly will tell you, to love one other person is the root of all wisdom.
I noticed a change in him at the announcement of his mother's arrival. His usually steady stream of dialogue dwindled to a few passing remarks, an appeasing smile for me. He began to drink even more than before, more than I could handle or enjoy. When, after an evening of steady wine, he crawled into bed and turned his back towards me without a word, I decided to act.
"Sebastian?"
"Yes, my love."
I faltered. Suddenly, I didn't seem to remember exactly what I was objecting to. Was it simply that he no longer cared as much for me as he had done before?
"Is everything okay with you? You've been rather… distant."
The word hung in the air. He turned to face me, looking thoughtful.
"I suppose you're right. I hardly realised. Distant how?"
I tried to be nonchalant. This was not about me.
"Ever since you told me your mother was coming back…."
He made a noise like a laugh. It was a derisive little thing, so unlike him.
"Charles, don't you understand that everything will change?"
"I don't see why."
"You don't know her."
I had never known his voice to be laced with so much hatred. Tinged with fear.
"Sebastian, what exactly is wrong with your mother?"
"Nothing. That's just it, darling. She's a saint. Positively and completely."
"I don't see the problem."
"The problem is that she thinks I ought to be a saint as well! That she'll do anything she can to make sure that I am, or at least that I'm dead miserable trying to be! She'll take you and twist you, Charles, make you believe things about me that you can't imagine! She could make you agree to anything! That's Mummy, she'll hurt you somehow. She always drives away everything I love."
It was one of those delicate, echoing times that he left me entirely speechless. But not in a pleasant way. The sheer terror in him lent terror also to me, and I suddenly found Lady Marchmain to be the most villainous woman in all of Britain.
"Darling. You can't possibly think anyone could turn me against you? After everything? All the saints in Christendom could not convince me to think any less of you."
"Charles, Mummy can make me think less of me. Is it not the same thing? Is it not worse?"
There was a gloss in his eyes that suggested he might be close to tears. I brushed my lips against his, breathed him in for a moment.
"We'll figure something out. You can come stay with me in London."
"My family is all over London. We have a house there too, you know. Julia would be there. It wouldn't surprise me if Mummy went back just to be a terror. We'd better stay here, at least for a while. Father still wants me to visit him in Venice, if things get too out of hand."
I was silent for a moment, imagining in due course what it must be like to have homes in so many places, to have parents in so many places. I thought of Venice in the abstract; I had never been before. To join Sebastian there would be the dream of unadulterated dreams, but he made no motion to invite me then. He made no plans for even himself to go, which I found odd given his blatant distaste for the rest of his family.
"Well, she isn't here yet." I offered, feeling overwhelmed by his bleakness.
"You're quite right." He agreed after a moment, slipping into a grin. "You'd best enjoy this while it lasts. Before you know it, we'll be sleeping in separate beds again!"
I felt as though I had been kicked in the stomach. The reaction was, of course, irrational, but to me it felt like the precursor to a hundred tiny changes. Changes that would, without our knowledge or permission, allow Lady Marchmain to separate us with her mere presence. It must have shown on my face.
"My God, Charles! Don't look like that! I was only kidding, love. Only a joke."
He began to kiss my face fervently, an apology as only Sebastian could give.
"We shall have a merry game of secret-keeping, you and I," he whispered.
A merry game of secret-keeping indeed.
It had been raining all day when the rest of the Flyte family arrived at Brideshead. Sebastian and I had devised a system of elaborate plans to greet them, for we anticipated putting a great deal of effort into keeping up appearances. But it was all for nothing. The rain had made me loathe to leave my bed all afternoon and Sebastian, unsurprisingly, had been equally unwilling to leave me. I flipped lazily through a book on architecture that I had borrowed from his father's old study. He lay curled up beside me with his face pressed into the curve of my neck, dozing. I could feel his eyelashes. Suddenly, he jumped slightly and looked up at me.
"Did you hear that?" he asked, face filled with a curious sort of dread.
"I didn't hear anything, Sebastian. You must have been dreaming."
"No, I'm certain I heard something. It sounded like a car door."
He slid quickly from his place at my side and crossed over to the window. Peering out over the lawn, he took a seat on the sill. His figure slumped; I could not see his face.
"They're here." He said simply.
I gathered my blanket and joined him, wrapping it around both of us. The action felt desperate, like some futile attempt to protect him. He turned to study me for a curious moment before he kissed me, hands in my hair, gripping so hard that I would have said it hurt me, if it had been someone else. But not him. When he finally pulled away, gritting his teeth, it felt like goodbye.
"I love you."
He gave me a small smile and pressed his lips against my forehead.
"Get dressed." He whispered.