The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  A few days later she had met a young Englishman, an officer from the Curragh camp staying with his uncle for a few days, and she had told him about this idea of people speaking Irish to each other. “How bizarre!” he had exclaimed. “How delightful! How original!” and he had told her about a club he had joined at Oxford which specialized in trying to make contact with poltergeists in haunted houses.

  Ah, but the Major wouldn’t be interested in all this dull tattle from the provinces since he was in London at the very centre of things, at the very centre of the Empire, of “Life” even! She had abused his good nature by rambling on so long about herself and her own petty problems. He must think of her as she herself thought of the bovine aspirant for her affections, Mulcahy. And besides, besides, her fingers were now frozen to the point where they were practically “dropping off,” the hot-water bottles were lumps of ice on every side of her, her ink-well too was freezing over and her room was so cold that with every breath the paper she was writing on would disappear in a cloud of steam. The weather was quite appalling, cold and damp beyond belief, and the days so dark that even at midday one had to turn up the gas mantle in order to read a book or do some sewing. What misery, the Major must be thinking, to be an Irishwoman, to be living in Ireland, to live all of one’s life in Ireland beneath the steady rain and the despair of winter and the boredom, the boredom! But no, she was glad she was Irish and he could think what he liked! She thought of him, however, with affection and remained truly his.

  Having read this, the Major stood up and then sat down again. He turned over the thick, crinkly sheaf of writing-paper. The coffee pot had grown cold on the breakfast table. Well, he thought, what a remarkable letter...I must answer it immediately.

  And so he sat down, ignoring his aunt’s faint cries from upstairs, and wrote a long and slightly delirious reply as if he too were in a fever, gripped in the claws of boredom, passionate and intense, surrounded by icy hot-water bottles. He said in substance that even with spots (and he couldn’t believe that they were as bad as she claimed) nobody but herself could ever for a moment consider her ugly. That it was, alas, only too natural that the moth should be attracted by the flame, that the “rural swain” (not to mention other young men) should become besotted with her charms; nevertheless, he agreed with Dr Ryan (the “senile old codger,” as Ripon called him) that, splendid fellow though Mulcahy no doubt was, it would be a shame to waste her on someone so little able to appreciate her culture, refinement and intelligence. Had she no relation in London whom she could stay with for a while with a view to stimulating “une heureuse rencontre,” as the Frenchies put it, with a young man worthy of her? If not then she must certainly come and stay with him, duly chaperoned, of course. He would be only too glad to do everything in his power to rescue this “cultured” pearl from the Irish swine.

  In the meantime she must write and tell him everything that was going on at the Majestic. And she must write immediately. He was on tenterhooks. The thin, starving rats of curiosity were nibbling at his bones. As for London, though it was indeed the centre of the Empire it was no more the centre of “Life” than, say, Chicago, Amritsar, or Timbuctoo—“Life” being everywhere equal and coeval, though during the winter in Kilnalough one might be excused for thinking that “Life’s” fires were banked up if not actually burning low—certainly, if one happened to be in bed with an unmentionable illness.

  With that, he hastily sealed the letter with dry lips and posted it. Then he sat down with impatience to await the reply. But the days passed and no reply came.

  * * *

  Dispatches from Fiume this morning state that Gabriele D’Annunzio’s expedition has succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations of those who took part in it. All along his march the poet was joined by military contingents which broke away from their camps. He summoned the Allied Commanders and troops to withdraw...The Italian commander, General Pittaluga, immediately tried to stop the advance, but in vain. He sent out troops to meet those of D’Annunzio and to order them to stop outside the town, but his own men immediately fraternized with those of D’Annunzio, and embraced one another. The general twice sent out nineteen armoured cars with machine-guns, but they also immediately went over to D’Annunzio. A dramatic scene then followed. General Pittaluga, with his last detachment, went to D’Annunzio at the point where he was entering the town. He halted a few paces from the advancing column, and his own soldiers remained a few paces behind. D’Annunzio ordered his car to stop and jumped out. The troops on both sides stood at the halt, impassive and silent.

  An Animated Conversation

  There were a few minutes of animated conversation between the general and the poet. General Pittaluga saluted D’Annunzio and then said to him: “This is the way to ruin Italy.” The poet replied instantly: “You will ruin Italy if you oppose destiny by an infamous policy.”

  The general asked what were the poet’s intentions. The reply was: “Not one shot shall be fired by my men if their passage is free.”

  The general retorted: “I have strict orders and must prevent an act which may have incalculable consequences for my country.”

  The poet replied: “I understand your words, General. You will order your men to fire on my soldiers, their brothers. But before you do so, order them to fire on me. Here I am. Let them first fire on me.”

  Saying this he moved towards the soldiers, exposing his breast adorned with the medal of military honour. There was a movement among the troops, who approached the poet and cheered him. The general saw that his opposition was useless. He walked up to the poet and complimented him. The soldiers on both sides immediately cheered the poet and the general, and without further orders they crossed the road which divides Fiume from the suburbs and entered the town. General Pittaluga withdrew alone and the soldiers opened a way for him.

  * * *

  Mr Noonan, though a miller by profession, was an admirer of the military life and liked to wear clothes that gave him a soldierly air. He arrived at the Majestic wearing his most severe garb, a suit of khaki material garnished with black epaulettes. He unwisely parted company with his chauffeur at the gates of the Majestic (he had never visited the place before) and started to walk up the drive. He had been delayed on some business matter and Edward, who had long since ceased to expect him, had changed into his gardening clothes and was digging a flower-bed, thinking that some exercise might benefit his liver. Since he had never met Mr Noonan, he assumed that this was merely a somewhat elderly and irascible telegraph boy and told him to go on up to the house. Mr Noonan, believing he had just had an encounter with a particularly insolent gardener, did so but with bad grace. Pausing for a moment to acknowledge the statue of Queen Victoria, he then proceeded to climb the steps and be swallowed up by the front door of the Majestic, in whose various tracts and organs he wandered, increasingly furious, while Edward dug peacefully in the garden and wondered whether he would lose face (and establish Ripon’s guilt) by going to pay a visit on Mr Noonan at his home.

  Edward and Mr Noonan probably had more in common than they ever had a chance to realize. Neither, at this stage, was the least enthusiastic about a union of their respective children. Mr Noonan, looking round the mouldering caverns of the Majestic, no doubt saw immediately that only a massive transfusion of money could keep the place habitable for a few years longer; in a material sense it was a poor match for the daughter of Noonan’s Flour. As for the quality which Mr Noonan had once found faintly appetizing when he considered the prospect of having Ripon Spencer for a son-in-law, the quality of “breeding” (and with it automatic entry into the ruling class in Ireland from which Mr Noonan, in spite of his wealth and influence in business matters, was virtu-ally excluded), he had now become extremely dubious as to whether Ripon possessed it in adequate quantities. Besides, by the autumn of 1919 it had become clear to everyone in Ireland with the possible exception of the Unionists themselves that the Unionist cause had fallen into a decline. Add to that Ripon’s taint o
f Protestantism (which in Mr Noonan’s view no amount of “instruction” could scrub off) and the lad was a truly unsavoury prospect.

  Edward’s feelings were virtually a mirror-image of Mr Noonan’s. He had a profound lack of interest in money, never having been sufficiently short of it, and was positively chilled by the idea that his daughter-in-law (buxom and rosy-cheeked) should be represented on packets of flour available to the grubby fingers of the populace for a penny or two. He was by no means anxious to dissolve the “breeding” of the Spencers in a solution of Irish “bog Catholicism” (a daughter of Cardinal Newman might have been another matter). In these troubled times one clearly had to close the ranks, not open them...or so he thought as he set off to wander around the corridors of the Majestic in search of the “dratted” elderly telegraph boy (he supposed it was a telegraph boy). The two men failed to meet immediately, however, since Mr Noonan, tired of waiting, had struck off towards the west wing, Edward towards the east.

  Little by little, as they moved back towards each other, Edward’s thoughts turned to the main and unbridgeable chasm, the Roman Catholicism of the Noonans: the unhealthy smell of incense, the stupefying and bizarre dogmatic precepts, the enormous families generated by ignorance and a doctrine of “the more souls the better” (no matter whether their corporeal envelopes went barefoot or not), the absurd squadron of saints buzzing overhead like chaps in the Flying Corps supposedly ever ready to lend a hand to the blokes on the ground (and each with his own speciality), the Pope with all his unhealthy finery, the services in a gibberish of Latin that no one understood, least of all the ignorant, narrow-minded and hypocritical priests. Well, such thoughts do not actually have to occur by a process of thinking; they run in the blood of the Protestant Irish.

  At this point he found himself at the foot of the staircase leading to the servants’ quarters and remembered that the maids had been complaining about a supposed colony of rats. There was no shortage of them in the cellars, of course, but who ever heard of rats in the upper storeys? The whole thing was plainly nonsense; all the same, since he was there on the spot he might as well have a look round.

  The inspection did not take long and it came as no surprise to him that no rodent crossed his path. He peered with distaste into the cramped little rooms with their sloping ceilings. They had a curious and alien smell which he could not quite identify; perhaps it came from a lingering of cheap perfume on Sunday clothes (seeing the maids out of uniform in Kilnalough, he very often failed to recognize them and stared in surprise if they acknowledged him). Wherever it came from, he associated it with the distressingly vulgar holy pictures on the wall, with the chocolate-coloured rosary beads on the table, with the crucifix above the bed.

  “Education is what these people need. And they think they’re fit to govern a country!”

  Satisfied that the rats were imaginary, Edward resumed his languid search for the telegraph boy.

  Mr Noonan had just had a curious experience. He had met a maidservant hurrying down a corridor carrying a tray of teacups and toasted scones together with a large and (it must be admitted) desirable seed-cake. He had beckoned her, summoned her to his side. “Come here to me now,” he had said to her. But, to his surprise, hardly had the girl seen him when she turned and fled back the way she had come. Not knowing what a business it was to get afternoon tea at the Majestic, the bribes and cajolery that had to be administered, the deadly feuds that could be sponsored by one guest spotting another settling down to a clandestine sup of tea and bite of toast in a remote corner, Mr Noonan was astonished at this behaviour.

  “Where is the master?” he called after her. But she had scurried away and he was left listening to the fading clatter of her shoes on the tiles. A little later, however, he realized that there was a person following him, though very slowly, along the corridor. It turned out to be an old lady, a gentlewoman to judge by her clothing, moving forward with two sticks which she planted firmly in front of her one after the other in the manner of an Alpine guide. He halted and allowed her to catch up, her eyes on the ground, her breathing stertorous.

  “Where is Mr Spencer?” he demanded.

  The lady lifted her watery eyes and surveyed him; then she raised one of her sticks in a trembling, arthritic hand. The brass ferrule that tipped it performed a wavering figure-eight a little above his head. He took her to be indicating that his way led upwards.

  He was not a young man himself. His chest had been giving him trouble. His blood-pressure was too high. He’d started with nothing, d’ye see, and done it all himself. Self-raising, like his own flour, was what they said in Kilnalough.

  “Now what I’d better be doing is...”

  He was alone once more and, one way or another, had climbed to the floor above. The only reason he knew this for certain was that he happened to be standing at a surprisingly clean window looking down on the drive and, incidentally, on Edward’s Daimler. It was raining very hard—so hard that a mist of spray was rising off the roof and bonnet of the car. Where was he? When had it started raining? He shouldn’t let himself get in a rage because these days there was always a thick mist, bloody and opaque, waiting to roll in and blot out the landmarks. Now wait, the motor car had been left in front of the building, he remembered seeing it. Well, the great staircase with the chandelier was in the front of the building too...so that meant that he was on or beside the staircase.

  He was squeezed by a really breathtaking grip of anger when, on looking round, he found that this was not so. There was no staircase in sight. It was unfair and spiteful—a real British trick, the kind of murthering, hypocritical...Mother of God! he would like to have smashed a window, he had even raised the heavy ash handle of his furled umbrella to shatter the glass. He was restrained, though, by the sudden thought that the Englishman might consider it bad form. Besides, the window was already broken...that is, had obviously been broken on some other occasion, since it lacked its pane entirely. He could not have done it himself. There were no jagged edges. That was why it looked so clean. The rain, moreover, was pattering on the window sill and had darkened the faded crimson carpet (strewn with tiny three-pronged crowns) in the shape of a half-moon.

  Having regrouped his forces, Mr Noonan set out along a carpeted corridor (while Edward continued to search disconsolately for him on the floor below), peering through the open doors of the many rooms he passed—nobody made any attempt to close doors here, it appeared—at double beds, enormous and sinful, without a trace of religion, at wash-basins and towels starched like paper and grey with dust. And this was what his only daughter was supposed to be marrying into!

  In one room he came upon a vast pile of stone hot-water bottles, maybe two or three hundred of them. In another a makeshift washing-line had been stretched and forgotten, the clothing on it dry and riddled with moth-holes. In yet another he heard voices. He stopped and listened...but no, he had been mistaken (Edward at this moment was peering into the room directly below). At the next door, however, he definitely heard voices, so he entered with some confidence. He found himself, not in a bedroom but on a gallery that ran round beneath the ceiling of a large book-lined room. The voices were coming from below. He peered over the railing (as Edward, moving away from him once more, started towards the west wing).

  Below, two identical girls were sitting on a studded sofa with books in their hands. Opposite them, in an armchair but sitting very straight, was a small elderly lady wearing a lace cap. Her milky eyes were directed towards the girls, while her hands, constantly moving and apparently disconnected from the rest of her body, knitted away tirelessly in her lap.

  “Are you sitting up straight, Charity?”

  “Yes, Granny.”

  “Faith?”

  “Yes, Granny.”

  The two golden heads turned towards each other with their tongues out.

  “A lady never slouches in her chair as if she had no backbone.”

  “No, Granny.”

  Faith let herself sink back
with her mouth open, miming inertia, while Charity shook with silent laughter.

  “Sit still!”

  “We are bally well sitting still.”

  “Don’t answer back! You’ll be kept here all afternoon unless you behave. Charity, are your knees together?”

  “Yes, Granny.”

  Charity pulled her skirt up over her knees and threw one leg over the arm of the sofa, exposing pink thighs.

  “I’m sitting up straight, Granny,” she said, and snatching a pencil from Faith’s hand began to puff on it as if it were a cigarette-holder. While flicking the ash she happened to lift her eyes and saw Mr Noonan.

  “Good girl,” said the old lady.

  The twins stared up at Mr Noonan and he stared down at the twins. At length Charity said: “There’s an old man with an umbrella in the room, Granny.”

  “An old man? What does he want?”

  “What d’you want?” demanded Faith firmly.

  “Where is Mr Spencer? I won’t stand for it,” stuttered Mr Noonan furiously. “I’m looking for...I shall speak to my solicitor!”

  “What is he doing up near the ceiling?” the old lady wanted to know.

  “We’re in the library, Granny. There’s a sort of balcony...”

  “Well, whoever you are, I’m sure you won’t find your solicitor up there. Show him to the door, Faith. You stay here, Charity, it doesn’t take both of you.”

  Faith was already half-way up the spiral iron staircase to the gallery. Without a word she grasped Mr Noonan by the sleeve and towed him back the way he had come, down a dark flight of stairs, along a corridor, through a deserted cocktail bar, into the lobby and up to the front door which, with an immense effort, she dragged open.