‘Oh, a day’s hunting will put that all right.’

It was touching to see the faith which everybody put in the value of a day’s hunting. Lady Marchmain, who looked in on me during the morning, mocked herself for it with that delicate irony for which she was famous.

‘I’ve always detested hunting,’ she said, ‘because it seems to produce a particularly gross kind of caddishness in the nicest people. I don’t know what it is, but the moment they dress up and get on a horse they become like a lot of Prussians. And so boastful after it. The evenings I’ve sat at dinner appalled at seeing the men and women I know, transformed into half-awake, self-opinionated, monomaniac louts!…and yet, you know – it must be something derived from centuries ago – my heart is quite light today to think of Sebastian out with them. “There’s nothing wrong with him really,” I say, “he’s gone hunting” – as though it were an answer to prayer.’

She asked me about my life in Paris. I told her of my rooms with their view of the river and the towers of Notre Dame. ‘I’m hoping Sebastian will come and stay with me when I go back.’

‘It would have been lovely,’ said Lady Marchmain, sighing as though for the unattainable.

‘I hope he’s coming to stay with me in London.’

‘Charles, you know it isn’t possible. London’s the worst place. Even Mr Samgrass couldn’t hold him there. We have no secrets in this house. He was lost, you know, all through Christmas. Mr Samgrass only found him because he couldn’t pay his bill in the place where he was, so they telephoned our house. It’s too horrible. No, London is impossible; if he can’t behave himself here, with us…We must keep him happy and healthy here for a bit, hunting, and then send him abroad again with Mr Samgrass….You see, I’ve been through all this 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.’

A horn and the huntsman’s cry sounded in the valley below us.

‘There they go now, drawing the home woods. I hope he’s having a good day.’

Thus with Julia and Lady Marchmain I reached deadlock, not because we failed to understand one another, but because we understood too well. With Brideshead, who came home to luncheon and talked to me on the subject – for the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to light in acrid wisps of smoke that oozed under hatches and billowed suddenly from the scuttles and air pipes – with Brideshead, I was in a strange world, a dead world to me, in a moon-landscape of barren lava, a high place of toiling lungs.

He said: ‘I hope it is dipsomania. That is simply a great misfortune that we must all help him bear. What I used to fear was that he just got drunk deliberately when he liked and because he liked.’