Orphans of the storm

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm, Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842). Photo: Photo12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Probably a thousand articles have been written in praise of Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited—about the expertly-limned characters, about the spot-on dialogue, about the resolution of each character’s story arc. I’m going to heap on the thousandth-and-first accolade by showing the precise way that Waugh handles the rolling of the ocean liner crossing the Atlantic during a storm while Charles pursues and consummates his adulterous relationship with Lady Julia Flyte.

Charles, the narrator, lays it on thick as he gives us his excuses for committing adultery in the chapter, “Orphans of the Storm.” We find out that he’d married; that his wife, with whom he is traveling, had previously committed adultery; that his marriage is loveless; and, by coincidence, that Julia is on board. Soon, he runs into Julia, he looks into her eyes, she’s at the peak of her beauty, and he’s hooked like a trout. Cut to the beginning of the storm.

Waugh gives us a masterclass. First, Charles sets up the coming storm with dialog at a party in his cabin. An unknown man (who is arrested at the end of the voyage for criminal fraud) speaks with Charles.

“Well, well, well,” he paused. I waited. “The purser here says we’re headed for dirty weather. What d’you know about that?”

“Far less than the purser.”

In the next scene, the major players gather at the Captain’s table: Charles, Charles’s wife, and, of course, Julia, along with several extras. At the conclusion of the dinner, the storm begins.

For some time now, though whether it was a mere trick of the nerves I did not then know, I had felt a recurrent and persistently growing motion—a heave and shudder of the large dining-room as of the breast of a man in deep sleep. Now my wife turned to me and said: “Either I am a little drunk or it’s getting rough,” and, even as she spoke we found ourselves leaning sideways in our chairs; there was a crash and tinkle of falling cutlery by the wall, and on our table the wine glasses all together toppled and rolled over, while each of us steadied the plates and forks and looked at the other with expressions that varied between frank horror in the diplomat’s wife and relief in Julia.

The dinner breaks up which leaves Charles with his wife and Julia. “Another climb, another vast drop,” Charles notes about the swells. On the way to the lounge, “we had all three to cling to a pillar.”

The wife and Julia exeunt, while Charles walks around the deck, “where the wind howled and the spray leaped up from the darkness and smashed white and brown against the glass screen[.]” Back in the cabin, his wife says to him, “I didn’t know a ship of this size could pitch like this[.]” The storm swells make his wife seasick and keep her bedridden, almost as if the storm had a mind of its own.

Charles tries to sleep the first night, “but through the night I turned with each swing and twist of the ship—she was rolling now as well as pitching—and my head rang with the creak and thud.” Charles has obscene dreams of Julia.

In the morning, the ship’s steward says to Charles, “there’s nothing worse than a heavy swell […] for the enjoyment of the passengers.” Charles sends flower’s to Julia, then talks to her by phone. Afterwards, Charles gets a shave.

The barber did his work with extraordinary dexterity—indeed, with agility, for he stood like a swordsman in a ballet sometimes on the point of one foot, sometimes on the other, lightly flicking the lather off his blade, and swooping back to my chin as the ship righted herself[.]

He leaves his sick wife and meets with Julia where they walk the promenade. “I held the rail; she took my other arm. It was hard going[.]” The swells seem to push Julia and Charles together.

When the ship rolled heavily I swung [Julia] round so that she could hold the rail with her other hand; the howl of the wind was subdued, but the whole ship creaked with strain.”

Then begins the story arc of the dangerous, great bronze doors that Charles and Julia pass through to get to the lounge. The doors “had torn away from their hoods and were swinging free with the roll of the ship.” Charles continues, “There was no real risk in passing them, except of slipping and being caught by that swift, final blow[.]” Yet, they successfully walk through together, “Julia’s hand perfectly steady on my arm[.]” They enter the lounge and encounter the few who had not become seasick. One man greets them,

…with a movement which began as a bow and ended as a lurch forward to his knees, as the blotting-paper floor dipped steeply between us. The roll carried us away from him, clinging together but still on our feet…

They sit, order a drink, and in the next skillful paragraph, the prose itself suggests, with short clauses, the rise and fall of the swells of the storm as Charles admits to himself that he loves Julia.

…then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths [my emphasis], I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant.

Charles and Julia spend the next day together, “held in our chairs by the swell of the sea.” The dangerous swinging bronze doors make their second appearance. Wooden wedges held them firm after they had hurt two seamen. Charles follows Julia into her cabin and kisses her for the first time. That night, he thinks about the kiss as he turns in his bed “with the rise and fall of the ship[.]”

Another day passes, and the ship arrives at the still center of the storm. That night, Charles again follows her to her cabin, this time to consummate his desires but Julia rebuffs him. She says, “I don’t know if I want love.” Charles answers, “Love? I’m not asking for love.” Julia responds, “Oh, yes, Charles, you are[.]” As Charles leaves her, he notes:

…for the storm, it appeared, had the form of a ring; all day we had been sailing through its still center; now we were once more in the full fury of the wind—and that night was to be rougher than the one before.

Since Charles is narrating this, it’s Charles himself that has to be accused of skillfully using this storm as a metaphor, so that no one can blame Waugh directly for using such an old-fashioned trope for such a modern theme. Moreover, this probably says mountains about Charles’s character as well, how he sees nature, which seems to be a theme in his paintings. But I’m not concerned about theme or character or metaphor, only about how skillfully Waugh writes this chapter and never for a moment lets us forget that we’re on a ship in a storm.

The voyage continues. Charles mulls over everything Julia had told him about her failed marriage to Rex, as the ship “creaked and shuddered, rose and fell.” The storm continues to keep Charles’s wife sick and in bed. Later that night, Charles notes, “Waking and dreaming, through the strain and creak and heave of the long night, firmly on my back with my arms and legs spread wide to check the roll, and my eyes open to the darkness, I lay thinking of Julia.”

The next day they were again, “wallowing in the swell,” talking of broken bones and those who “had been thrown about in the night” and suffered “nasty accidents on bathroom floors.” Later, the rain stops, the sun breaks through, and Julia leads Charles “through the roll and pitch of the ship” to the boat-deck to see the sunset. The swells continue to bring Charles and Julia physically together:

As we made our halting, laborious way forward, away from the flying smuts of the smoke stack, we were alternatively jostled together, then strained, nearly sundered, arms and fingers interlocked as I held the rail and Julia clung to me, thrust together again, drawn apart; then, in a plunge deeper than the rest, I found myself flung across her, pressing her against the rail, warding myself off her with the arms that held her prisoner on either side, and as the ship paused at the end of its drop, as though gathering strength for the ascent, we stood thus embraced, in the open, cheek against cheek, her hair blowing across my eyes; the dark horizon of tumbling water, flashing now with gold, stood still above us, then came sweeping down till I was staring through Julia’s dark hair into a wide and golden sky, and she was thrown forward on my heart, held up by my hands on the rail, her face still pressed to mine.

Guess what happens next?

Later, because the steward mentions that the storm is almost passed and that the band would play again the next evening, Julia says, “[W]here can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?” Charles stays with Julia that night. The next morning, Charles says, “I made my way back along the corridor, I found I could walk without difficulty; the ship rode easily on a smooth sea, and I knew that our solitude was broken.”

The storm has ended, the voyage concludes, but the dangerous swinging bronze doors make one last appearance, years later at the fountain at Brideshead, when Julia asks Charles, “[D]o you remember the storm?” Charles responds, “The bronze doors banging?” This foreshadows another kind of storm, the beginning of the end of their relationship.