The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  “A cold, is it?” grunted the old man querulously. “Sure, we all get ’em...a cold is nothing at all.”

  And he went on to say something confused about things not being the way they used to be...or perhaps people weren’t the way they used to be, one or the other, or perhaps both, it was hard to make out precisely.

  “But I just want to know what medicine to take,” the Major interrupted him plaintively. He had been going hot and cold by turns and felt that at any moment he would be suffocated by fever or roasted alive, if he was not actually poignarded to death by the painful “absence-of-Sarah” that had suddenly started to afflict him—indeed, the pangs of self-pity and Sarahlessness became appallingly acute as he listened to the old man grumbling on. A wave of fever clutched him. His shirt and underwear clung damply to his skin.

  “Thought you’d come sooner or later,” the doctor was saying contemptuously. “This is no place for the likes of you...You must leave Ireland, leave Kilnalough, it’s no place at all now for a British gentleman like you. Clear yourself out of here, bag and baggage, before it’s too late!”

  “But I only asked about my cold,” protested the Major petulantly. “I suppose I shall have to go to bed before it gets any worse.”

  “Yes, go to bed, go to bed, that’s it,” sneered the doctor. “You’re as right as rain, just sorry for yourself.”

  The doctor, splendid old chap though he no doubt was, thought the Major indignantly, was really becoming a tiny bit tiresome.

  The great gong boomed for dinner. The Major dolefully wandered along a corridor. Padraig was still talking volubly to the alarmed Miss Bagley as they passed on their way to the dining-room. Did she know...did she know...did she know then what had happened to Héloise and Abélard? he was asking slyly, well, to Abélard anyway, since nothing much in that line could happen to Héloise? Well, he’d better not be telling her because it might spoil her appetite...

  The Major decided not to go in to dinner. Instead he sat down dizzily in an armchair in the residents’ lounge, not his favourite room at the Majestic but he felt too weak to go any farther. His mouth open like a dying fish, he fell asleep. His last conscious image was of Dr Ryan pottering past, grumbling to himself, his stick held in a knobbly, freckled hand.

  “Go on out of it, the whole bally lot o’ ye,” he might have been muttering as his boots scraped by on the other side of the Major’s drooping eyelids—but before it had time to consider this, his waking mind had slipped away into a quieter and darker area beyond.

  * * *

  MESOPOTAMIA

  Serious Agitation on the Lower Euphrates

  The situation in Mesopotamia shows some improvement in the disturbed areas, but is becoming more tense in the districts not yet in open rebellion. The Lower Euphrates and Hammar Lake neighbourhood are being seriously affected by the agitation now breaking out among the Muntafik Arabs. The besieging forces are said to be increasing in numbers.

  * * *

  TERRIBLE OUTBREAK IN BALBRIGGAN

  Town Partially Destroyed by Fire

  During Monday night and Tuesday morning there was a violent outbreak in Balbriggan, following the murder of Head Constable Burke in that town. Head Constable Burke, with other police in plain clothes, had motored from Dublin on their way to Gormanstown. At Balbriggan they stopped for refreshments, which were refused by the publican. In the disturbance which appears to have ensued, revolver shots were discharged, and the Head Constable was shot dead, and his brother, Sergeant Burke, was wounded. Subsequently, it is stated, a number of auxiliary police stationed at Gormanstown came into Balbriggan. Many houses were burned and shots fired in the streets. Two civilians were killed during the night. In the morning large numbers of the panic-stricken population left the town by road and railway and apparently only those who were unable to get away remained.

  * * *

  EYE-WITNESS STORY

  An old gentleman resident, describing what followed the shooting, said: “Myself and my wife went to bed, and some time later we were awakened by a tremendous knocking at the door which greatly alarmed my wife. We thought it was some persons intruding. On going down to the door, I found there two ‘black and tan’ policemen, with two children of the barber, James Lawless. One of the children was suffering from pneumonia and the other was an infant of not more than two years old. I took the two children upstairs and put them into my own bed as they were. I was told that the house of Lawless, the barber, had been wrecked, and this morning I learnt that Lawless was dead—that he had been taken from his house and shot, and also that a young man named Joe Gibbons, a dairy farmer, had been killed.”

  * * *

  GOVERNMENT TO PREVENT REPRISALS

  The Pall Mall Gazette last evening published the following telegram from Sir Hamar Greenwood, Chief Secretary for Ireland.

  Monday

  Dublin

  There is no truth in the allegations that the Government connive in or support reprisals. The Government condemn reprisals, have issued orders condemning them, and have taken steps to prevent them. Nearly one hundred policemen have been brutally murdered, five recently in Clare on one day, by expanding bullets, resulting in horrible mutilation. In spite of intolerable provocation the police forces maintain their discipline, are increasing in number and efficiency, and command the support of every law-abiding citizen. The number of alleged reprisals is few and the damage done exaggerated.

  (Signed) HAMAR GREENWOOD

  * * *

  If the ladies at the Majestic had needed something to improve their morale before, now, with the country “put to the fire and the sword,” as Miss Johnston expressed it not without satisfaction, with “the troubles” yesterday at Balbriggan, tomorrow perhaps in Kilnalough itself, how much more they needed this something! Once again whist proved to be the answer. A couple of tables were started in the residents’ lounge, although without the circumstance and the finery of the occasion in the writing-room. These tables rapidly became the centre of social life in the hotel; each player found a retinue of advisers and confidantes at her elbow providing a constant stream of conflicting advice and encouragement and when she became weary her place would promptly be filled by someone else. Within a day or two this epidemic of whist had taken such a grip that play began immediately after break-fast on the green baize tables (opportunely salvaged from the writing-room but dispensing, nevertheless, a faint odour of cats) and continued almost without interruption throughout the day and on into the night. There was an excellent spirit at these games: an air of gaiety and abandon, almost of recklessness, reigned over the chattering groups. By the end of the chilly autumn evening, with dampness and dark beyond the window panes, the hooting of an owl in the park or the lonely cry of a peacock, when one of the ladies irrevocably dozed off with the cards in her ancient arthritic fingers and there was no one at hand to replace her (which meant the end of the game, of course), one pair of players might add up the score and find that they were winning or losing by some prodigious number of tricks accumulated during the day, several hundred perhaps...And everyone would climb the stairs chuckling to their rooms and dream of aces and knaves and a supply of trumps that would last for ever and ever, one trump after another, an invincible superiority subject to neither change nor decay nor old age, for a trump will always be a trump, come what may.

  Around these tables rumours continued to circulate and prosper. One day it was thought that a brigade of Cossacks, émigrés from Russia whose fiendish Bolshevists they no longer found it worth their while to quell, had been hired en bloc by Dublin Castle to subdue the Irish. Someone else announced confidently that a hungry mob in County Mayo had seized and eaten a plump Resident Magistrate; because this story, absurd though it was, happened to coincide with the actual disappearance of an R.M. (though not from County Mayo) it gave all the ladies a dreadful frisson and a kaleidoscope of bad dreams. But then the R.M. was discovered, in a coffin left on a railway line, and all was well. It said in the Irish Times that he
had been buried and dug up again (reprisals had been threatened if his whereabouts were not made known), but there was no mention of cannibalism.

  But while the ladies gossiped cheerfully and playing-cards continued to snow down on the green baize tables the Major was at his most despondent. Above all, he took a gloomy view of the reprisals at Balbriggan and elsewhere. The result of this degeneration of British justice could only be chaotic. Once an impartial and objective justice was abandoned every faction in Ireland, every person in Ireland, was free to invent his own version of it. A man one met in the street in Kilnalough might with equal justification (provided it fitted into his own private view of things) offer you a piece of apple pie or slit your throat. But given the way things were going (the Major could not help feeling) he would be more likely to slit your throat.

  If no throats were actually slit in Kilnalough in the first days after the disturbances, there were, nevertheless, some ugly incidents. Miss Archer was rudely barged into the gutter by two mountainous Irishwomen clad in black and wearing men’s boots. She then dropped her muff, which was trampled on and kicked around like a football by a group of urchins. Wisely she left it to them and fled before anything worse happened. Not long afterwards a young hooligan in Kilnalough put his stick through the spokes of Charity’s bicycle, causing her to fall and graze her knees and palms. Stones were thrown at the people from the Majestic but without causing any great harm. Viola O’Neill, while buying buttons in the haberdashery (Boy O’Neill informed the Major), had had some obscene words spoken into her innocent ears which, naturally, she had failed to comprehend.

  But presently the Major’s sense of shock and dismay over the degeneration of British justice evaporated, leaving only a sediment of contempt and indifference. After all, if one lot was as bad as the other why should anyone care? “Let them sort it out for themselves.”

  He was bored, he was lonely, and one day he realized that Edward was getting on his nerves. The more the Major thought about this, the stronger his aversion grew. Strange that he had never noticed before how he disliked the fellow. These days the mere sight of Edward was enough to set him grinding his teeth. Everything about him was capable of awakening the Major’s irritation: his overbearing manner; the way he always insisted on being right, flatly stating his opinions in a loud and abusive tone without paying any attention to what the other fellow was saying; and the unjust way in which he dealt with the twins, locking them up for telling lies when he himself was in the process of telling them, tyrannizing them unmercifully whenever the whim crossed his mind. But no less offensive were Edward’s demonstrations of tenderness towards these same twins, the mildness and self-mockery that cohabited uneasily with his ferocity and conviction of always being in the right. “He’s weak and sentimental,” the Major would think on these occasions. “How can I have ever liked the chap?” Even Edward’s clothes, the impeccable cut of his suits and the creases in his trousers, became an affront. “Don’t you think that Edward looks like a tailor’s dummy?” he remarked one day to Miss Archer as Edward sauntered past. Indeed, the only satisfactory thing about Edward was his evident liking for the Major. “He can’t help but admire me because I did what his wash-out of a son should have done. What a joke!”

  Perhaps it was inevitable that sooner or later the Major and Edward should have a row.

  “The Black and Tans who sacked Balbriggan should be punished,” the Major said one day after he had glimpsed Edward and Sarah walking together on the terrace outside the dining-room. Edward looked at him, irritated and surprised—it had obviously never occurred to him that the Major might not approve of reprisals.

  “Or perhaps you think that there should be one law for them and one law for other people?” went on the Major aggressively.

  “But, Brendan, a man was killed in cold blood.”

  “That’s still no reason for going on the rampage.”

  “A man was murdered. These people have to be taught a lesson.”

  “By all means let the culprits be taught a lesson. And leave law-abiding people alone.”

  “Ach, they’re all the same. They laugh behind their hands when one of our chaps is killed.”

  “That’s not against the law. Burning people’s houses is.”

  “But how can the police possibly be expected to find who’s guilty and who isn’t when they’re all in it together?” shouted Edward, losing his temper. “Dammit, man! Be reasonable.”

  “If they don’t know who’s guilty they should find out before going berserk and punishing people at random the way they did at Balbriggan.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this. If you don’t care about the poor fellow who was killed doing his duty, I do!” And with that Edward strode away, clenching and unclenching his fists furiously. After a few strides he paused and shouted back: “Are you disloyal, Major, or what?” Then he departed without waiting for a reply.

  Edward muttered an apology later in the day for this last abusive question and the Major, who was ashamed of himself, murmured sadly that that was quite all right, he hadn’t taken it to heart. Later the Major wondered why he should feel ashamed of himself. After all, he genuinely believed in what he had said to Edward.

  “If the R.I.C. take to behaving as badly as the Shinners,” he remarked to Miss Archer, “pretty soon the whole country will be in chaos and it’ll be every man for himself.”

  Later again the painful image of Edward and Sarah walking together on the terrace came to his mind.

  “She’s a Catholic and he’s old enough to be her father,” he told himself sourly.

  “This is no place for a young man to spend his time, surrounded by a lot of old women,” Miss Archer said to the Major with a smile.

  “Yes, perhaps I shall still go to Italy...Florence maybe, or Naples. But I hear that travelling abroad is becoming impossible. All the papers one needs...not like before the war when all you needed was a ticket. But you’re quite right, Sybil. I must make up my mind.”

  And yes, the Major was seriously thinking of leaving Kilnalough. Now that relations were strained between himself and Edward there was even less reason to stay. He could go anywhere in the world. He no longer had any ties, either in London or elsewhere. Yet this was precisely the trouble. In all the aching void of the world where should he go? Why should he choose one place rather than another? For wherever he went, Sarah would not be. Sarah would remain behind in Kilnalough.

  The Major still had hopes, although now somewhat insubstantial, of establishing once more the intimacy which had existed between them during Sarah’s brief visit to London the previous winter. He still sometimes, at his writing-desk or in bed with a book open on his chest, fell into a reverie for minutes on end, day-dreaming delightfully about Sarah in the Strand with her arm through his, asking him questions, Sarah in a restaurant not knowing which knife and fork to use, sad and sweet, page after page of an old photograph-album...with himself at her side, amused, paternal, indulgent, and a tiny bit world-weary. He still had hopes.

  She often came to the Majestic in the afternoon. He did not know what to make of her relationship with Edward: it was not as if she took any trouble to be alone with him. She seemed to enjoy the Major’s company just as much. Of course, the wide-eyed Sarah whose excitement at finding herself in a strange city he had found so touching was a very different person from Sarah in Kilnalough where she was so sure of herself. She was sometimes impatient with him. Sometimes, it was true, she laughed at him as if she found him ridiculous (he was still nettled by the thought of the bunch of roses and the chocolates). She enjoyed teasing him but she enjoyed flirting with him too, sometimes.

  “You may kiss my hand, Brendan, if you want to very badly, as I can see you do,” she would say, laughing.

  “Nothing could interest me less,” the Major would reply gruffly, laughing also but in a rather strained manner (he dimly divined that if he was to get anywhere he must refuse these tempting little offers, although the effort of doing so w
ore him out).

  In front of the fire in the gun room stood an old leather sofa, a first cousin of the one in Edward’s study, buttoned and bulging like a sergeant major. Sitting on this one evening while Edward was away at the Golf Club, idly playing with a large family of new-born kittens that lived in the turf-basket, the Major suddenly found himself being kissed by Sarah. When they paused for breath elated thoughts sped through the Major’s mind like scared antelope. He was unable to speak. Sarah, however, merely remarked: “Your moustache has a taste of garlic,” and went on with what she had been saying a moment before about the races at Leopardstown. This comment staggered the Major but he said nothing. It was clear that he was a traveller through unmapped country.

  On the other hand she was also quite capable of falling into a cold rage for no reason that he could perceive. At such times she could be very cruel. One day when he had been speaking, though impersonally, about marriage and its place in the modern world, she interrupted him brutally by saying: “It’s not a wife you’re looking for, Brendan. It’s a mother!” The Major was upset because he had not, in fact, been saying he was looking for either.