Charles quickly addresses the happenings of the following 10 years. He enjoys a successful career painting the grand houses of England, which are in decline, and publishes several books of his illustrations. Despite this success, he too feels the loss of the aristocratic world he visited at Brideshead and travels through Central America, seeking inspiration. He feels distant from England but unchanged by the journey.

His wife meets him in New York. In the frame narrative, Charles doesn’t name her and speaks distantly about her and his children (her name is later revealed to be Celia). In New York, they have dispassionate sex, and she frets that Charles has stopped loving her. They discuss her brother, Boy Mulcaster, who has had a failed engagement in Charles’s absence. Mulcaster is devoted to Charles’s son, Johnjohn. They make vague references to picking up where they left off. Charles is uncertain whether she is referring to an affair she had. Celia clarifies that she wants to pick up at Charles’s departure, two years prior.

Celia and Charles board the ship back to England; Celia quickly arranges to have cocktails with Julia, whom neither of the Ryders have seen for years despite living near her in London.