‘The Chinese drawing-room, my lord, the “Queen’s bed”?’

‘Yes, yes. I may be spending some time there in the next few weeks.’

The Chinese drawing-room was one I had never seen used; in fact one could not normally go further into it than a small roped area round the door, where sight-seers were corralled on the days the house was open to the public; it was a splendid, uninhabitable museum of Chippendale carving and porcelain and lacquer and painted hangings; the Queen’s bed, too, was an exhibition piece, a vast velvet tent like the baldachino at St Peter’s. Had Lord Marchmain planned this lying-in-state for himself, I wondered, before he left the sunshine of Italy? Had he thought of it during the scudding rain of his long, fretful journey? Had it come to him at that moment, an awakened memory of childhood, a dream in the nursery – ‘When I’m grown up I’ll sleep in the Queen’s bed in the Chinese drawing-room’ – the apotheosis of adult grandeur?

Few things, certainly, could have caused more stir in the house. What had been foreseen as a day of formality became one of fierce exertion; housemaids began making a fire, removing covers, unfolding linen; men in aprons, never normally seen, shifted furniture; the estate carpenters were collected to dismantle the bed. It came down the main staircase in pieces, at intervals during the afternoon; huge sections of Rococo, velvet-covered cornice; the twisted, gilt and velvet columns which formed its posts; beams of unpolished wood, made not to be seen, which performed invisible, structural functions below the draperies; plumes of dyed feathers, which sprang from gold-mounted ostrich eggs and crowned the canopy; finally, the mattresses with four toiling men to each. Lord Marchmain seemed to derive comfort from the consequences of his whim; he sat by the fire watching the bustle, while we stood in a half circle – Cara, Cordelia, Julia, and I – and talked to him.

Colour came back to his cheeks and light to his eyes. ‘Brideshead and his wife dined with me in Rome,’ he said. ‘Since we are all members of the family’ – and his eye moved ironically from Cara to me – ‘I can speak without reserve. I found her deplorable. Her former consort, I understand, was a seafaring man and, presumably, the less exacting, but how my son, at the ripe age of thirty-eight, with, unless things have changed very much, a very free choice among the women of England, can have settled on – I suppose I must call her so – Beryl.…’ He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.

Lord Marchmain showed no inclination to move, so presently we drew up chairs – the little, heraldic chairs, for everything else in the hall was ponderous – and sat round him.

‘I daresay I shall not be really fit again until summer comes,’ he said. ‘I look to you four to amuse me.’

There seemed little we could do at the moment to lighten the rather sombre mood; he, indeed, was the most cheerful of us. ‘Tell me’, he said, ‘the circumstances of Brideshead’s courtship.’