Brideshead Revisited1981

[Bridey has just deeply offended Julia by referring to her affair with Charles as "living in sin"]

Charles Ryder:
Darling, what is it? Why do you mind? What doe it matter what the old booby says?

Julia Mottram:
[sobbing] I don't. It doesn't! It's just the shock. Don't laugh at me.

Charles Ryder:
How *dare* he speak to you like that? Cold-blooded old humbug.

Julia Mottram:
No it's not that. He's quite right. They know all about it, Bridey and his widow - they bought it for a penny at the church door. All in one word - one little flat word that covers a lifetime. "Living in sin". Not just "doing wrong", as I did when I went to America, doing wrong, knowing it's wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting it. That's not what they mean, that's not Bridey's pennyworth. [distraught] He means just what it says. *Living* in sin - every hour, every day, year in, year out. It's always the same. It's like an idiot child, carefully nursed, guarded from the world. "Poor Julia," they say, "She can't go out. She's got to take care of her little sin. It's a pity it ever lived, but it's so strong. Children like that always are. Julia's so good to her little mad sin." All those years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the cigar smoke, when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead. Putting him away, forgetting him. Finding you - the past two years with you, all the future with you or without you. It's a word from so long ago - Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Me and Cordelia with the Catechism in Mummy's room before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my sin with her to church, bowed under it. Mummy dying with my sin, eating her more cruelly than her own deadly illness. Mummy dying with it. Christ dying wit,h it nailed hand and foot, high among the crowds and soldiers. No comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief. Hanging forever, over the bed in the night-nursery. There's no way back - the gate's barred. All the saints and angels posted along the wall. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down. Nameless and dead. Like the baby they wrapped up and took away, before I had chance see him.

[she dries her tears on Charles's handkerchief and walks away]