Word: ryder
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...Slowly, Ryder, now a successful artist, forgot the family at Brideshead. When the Depression blanketed England, Ryder became the last consolation of Britain's dying aristocracy. "I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom...
Just how odd they were Ryder was finding out for himself. Sebastian's father, Lord Marchmain, lived in Italy with an Italian mistress. His wife lived in Venice with a gentleman poet. ". . . Always drifting about the canals in a gondola with [him]," exclaimed Anthony Blanche, who was as "ageless as a lizard" and knew the family well "-such attitudes, my dear, like Madame Recamier; once, I passed them, and [the] gondolier . . . gave me such a wink. . . . She sucks [men's] blood. You can see the toothmarks all over Adrian's . . . shoulders when he is bathing...
...Young Ryder was not surprised when beautiful Lady Julia made noises like "a thin bat's squeak of sexuality" and became engaged to a rich Canadian, who gave her a tortoise with her initials set in diamonds on its shell. He was not surprised when his good friend Sebastian took to drinking on the sly. "My dear, such a sot," said Anthony Blanche. "Sip sip, sip like a dowager, all day." But when Ryder visited Brideshead, the magnificent family mansion, he was astonished to find that "religion predominated in the house," that the family diversified its sins with daily...
...must make a Catholic of Charles," said Lady Marchmain in a matter-of-fact way. Ryder thought it was all the most shocking hypocrisy-especially when his drunken friend Sebastian fled desperately to North Africa and took up with the most squalid society he could find...
Playing Tigers. As Englishmen entered into "the last decade of their grandeur," Artist Ryder, with no faith to cling to, desperately sought to recapture his artistic vitality by painting in the Latin American jungles. Result: he became a bigger social success. "Mr. Ryder," the best critics agreed (in one of Waugh's inimitable parodies of claptrap), "rises like a young trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture . . . focussing the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism. . . . Mr. Ryder has. found himself." But Anthony Blanche could not be fooled...