The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  Edward ordered fresh tea and, anxiously looking up at the other letters clinging insecurely to the building, suggested that she might like to move her chair along the veranda a little to where there was a better view.

  As a result of this incident Edward seemed to abandon whatever ambition he might still have nourished of running the place as a hotel. It marked, at any rate, the end of that period during which guests might consider themselves encouraged to come to the Majestic. He did not lock the gates, however, and a trickle of Christmas guests continued to arrive, unencouraged, to claim hospitality.

  The Major, unfortunately, was unable to match Edward’s indifference. He worried about everything, about the cats proliferating in the upper storeys, about the lamentable state of the roof (on rainy days the carpets of the top floor squelched underfoot), about the state of the foundations, about the septic tank, about the ivy advancing like a green epidemic over the outside walls (someone told him that far from holding the place together, as he had hoped, it would pull it to pieces with all the more speed). It is true that the Major’s nerves were in a poor condition; he sometimes wondered himself if he wasn’t being unduly alarmist—the Majestic had held up splendidly in all weathers for many years. Presently, however, a piece of stucco ornamentation the size of a man fell from the coping of the roof into the dogs’ yard. A foot or two to the left and it would have squashed Foch, a long-haired dachshund.

  Anxious to report this, he went in search of Edward. The laboratory had been evacuated from the bridal suite; Edward had set up his table in the very middle of the ballroom. One needed space to allow one’s thoughts to expand, he explained. In the bathroom he had felt compressed, his ideas had been restricted, had refused to flow freely.

  While the Major told him about the near-disaster to the dog Foch, Edward picked up the dead mouse and absent-mindedly began to squeeze its thorax between finger and thumb like a piece of india-rubber.

  “Missed him, did it?” he remarked brightly. “Well, that was a stroke of luck.”

  “Hadn’t we better get a mason in to look the place over?”

  “That’s a capital idea. I expect there’s some johnny in Kilnalough who does that sort of thing. I’ll get in touch with him.”

  That night the Major dreamed that he was in a dirigible. The captain and crew had fallen overboard, leaving only Mrs Rice and himself. Later Mrs Rappaport appeared in the uniform of one of the Bavarian line regiments, together with her marmalade cat, now as big as a sheep. Fortunately she took command and, after bombing Dublin, brought them down safely.

  There was no sign of the mason. Instead, a plump and pretty girl wearing a straw boater over her stiff pigtails came wobbling up the drive on a bicycle. It was Viola O’Neill, come to play with the twins. The twins gave her a desultory kiss on the cheek and led her away upstairs. As she went her eyes lingered disconcertingly on the Major, who was standing in the foyer listening sympathetically to an old gentleman in stockinged feet. The Major watched her slender white hand trail up spiral after spiral of the staircase and heaved a melancholy sigh. “Why couldn’t Sarah want me like that?”

  “Do you have any idea where they would be?” the old gentleman asked crossly, not for the first time.

  “Where what would be?” The Major’s mind had wandered again. “Oh yes, of course, you’ve lost your shoes. I’ll make inquiries.”

  The old gentleman, a new arrival at the Majestic, had left his shoes outside his bedroom door. Not only had they not been cleaned, they had disappeared altogether! And all his other shoes were in a cabin trunk that had yet to be delivered from the railway station. The Major left him in the foyer and went to ask Murphy to ask the maids.

  Later in the day, while hunting languidly for the shoes along one of the upper landings, he opened a door and was greeted by cries of surprise and dismay: through a blue mist of cigarette-smoke he perceived three figures in petticoats. He closed the door again discreetly. He was shocked, however, and thought: “I must tell Edward. If those girls go on the way they’re going....” But he was annoyed with Edward and did not see why he should have to bring up his daughters for him; let him see to it himself! Besides, young women these days...

  The matter of the shoes was cleared up in the course of the afternoon. It seemed that the cook, on her way down to prepare breakfast, had noticed them outside the gentleman’s door and had naturally supposed that he was throwing them away—a perfectly good pair of shoes! She had picked them up and given them to Seán Murphy, who had been digging energetically in them all morning.

  At the end of the first week of December Padraig was also sent up to the Majestic to visit the twins, not by old Dr Ryan but by his father who, it turned out, was not only a staunch Unionist but something of a snob into the bargain. The Major intercepted Padraig (who was looking pale and anxious—it was clear he had little appetite for visiting the twins) to ask him about his grandfather.

  “Oh, he’s well enough. I don’t see him so much now. He has a cook and a maid but he’ll hardly let anyone into the house.”

  “Is he still not speaking to your parents?”

  Padraig nodded. “He’s very stubborn and bad-tempered.

  “He’s told my father he’s a traitor to Ireland for approving the British the way he does.”

  “I didn’t know he was a Sinn Feiner.”

  “Ah, you wouldn’t mind him,” Padraig said, his eyes flickering uneasily to the landing above, where three pretty faces had appeared over the banister. “He’s very old.”

  “Well, here’s your guest,” the Major called up sternly. “I hope you’ll look after him properly and behave yourselves.”

  Padraig mounted the stairs as if under sentence of death, was seized by the girls and whisked away. The Major went about his business.

  Curiously enough, Padraig seemed to enjoy himself. He reappeared on the following day looking cheerful and confident, then again on the day after. Soon he became a frequent visitor. “It was probably just a question of breaking the ice,” reflected the Major.

  The Major’s nerves were once more in a deplorable state. He could hardly bear to open the newspaper, for it seemed that the war, which he thought he had escaped, had pursued and caught him after all. Martial law was proclaimed in Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Limerick. On the night of December 11th Cork was sacked by Auxiliaries and Black and Tans after a patrol had been ambushed. Reading about it, the Major was reminded of how Edward had once said to him that he would welcome a holocaust, that he would like to see everything smashed and in ruins so that the Irish would really taste the meaning of destruction. He read about the scarlet flames that lit up the night sky as the shopping district of Cork was set on fire: firemen’s hoses cut by axes; uniformed police and military staggering through the flaming streets with looted goods; Auxiliaries drunk on looted whiskey singing and dancing with local girls in the smoke. It was said that the clock on the tower of the City Hall, rising out of an ocean of flame and smoke, went on striking the hour until dawn, when it finally toppled into the inferno below.

  The Major’s sleep was as short and disturbed as it had been during his convalescence in hospital, punctuated by nightmares which continually returned him to the trenches. Any sharp noise, a book clapped down flat on a table or a dropped plate, would have him ducking involuntarily like a new recruit. During the hours of daylight, unless he was in the open air or in the safety and warmth of the linen room, he felt himself compelled to keep moving from room to room, corridor to corridor, upstairs and down. Only now did he consider that this compulsion might stem from the irrational fear that a trench-mortar shell was about to land in the spot where he had been standing a moment before, invisible explosions that tracked him from the lounge to the dining-room to the library to the billiard room, on and on, perpetually allow-ing him to escape by a fraction of a second. “I must pull myself together or Edward will notice that I’m showing the white feather.”

  He needed some distraction—a visit to the theatre. He con
sulted the Irish Times. Charley’s Aunt was being performed at the Gaiety and the advertisement said that it was “Enough to make a cat laugh.” But the Major dolefully suspected that it would fail to work on him. Besides, there was a special notice which said that the performance ended nightly at 9.15 p.m. sharp, and the idea of snatching a few quick chuckles before hastening home through the lawless streets did not appeal to him. All the same, he must take himself in hand. For an entire morning he forced himself to remain sitting in one place. The ladies, rebuffed in peevish tones, watched him from a distance and supposed in offended whispers that he had “got out of bed the wrong side.” After lunch, when he had satisfied his most urgent craving for movement, he did his best to restore himself to their good graces.

  Shortly before tea-time he was strolling, hands in pockets, along a corridor on the third floor (since putting his foot through the floor-boards he seldom ventured higher) when a door opened round the corner, releasing a gale of laughter followed by footsteps and a rustling of skirts. A moment later and he had collided with a slim, dark girl who came running round the corner, laughing over her shoulder. In the dim light the Major failed to see her until the last moment. He just had time to catch her in his arms to prevent her falling.

  “I beg your pardon!”

  The girl’s laughter changed to surprise and dismay. She disengaged herself and stood back awkwardly. The Major peered at her in the twilight. She was wearing a charming dress of black velvet with a white ruff and white lace cuffs; from the ruff her neck rose, slender and flushed, to a delicate pouting face. A fragrant perfume hung in the air. Abruptly, she turned and fled back into the room that the laughter was coming from. There was some urgent whispering (it was the twins and Viola, of course) and then the hilarity became greater than ever. The Major, also laughing, put his head round the door. By this time he had realized that the “girl” was Padraig.

  “Brendan, what d’you think? Doesn’t he make a gorgeous girl?”

  “We’re all frightfully jealous of him.”

  Smiling (though still a tiny bit dismayed by the pleasure he had derived from touching “her” soft body a moment earlier), the Major agreed that black velvet suited Padraig to perfection. It was some time before the mortified Padraig could be enticed out of the adjoining dressing-room. Indeed, it took a great deal of cajolery from the girls and a hearty appeal from the Major before he would agree to show himself again. And then what laughter there was when Charity lifted the hem of his skirt to show the Major what slender, well-turned ankles he had! And his hair was so fine and curled so naturally that if he grew it a bit longer he wouldn’t have to wear a wig at all! Besides, according to some magazine they’d been reading there were girls in London who had cut off all their hair and wore it short like men.

  “So with his lovely soft hair...”

  “And his skin and colouring...”

  “And his dark eyes with their long lashes...”

  “And my ankles, don’t forget them,” added Padraig.

  “And his ankles, of course, we mustn’t forget them, and his hands, just look how slender and white they are!”

  “With all those things there’s hardly any difference between him and a girl at all!” cried Viola enthusiastically.

  There was a moment of silence after this remark, perhaps for reflection that there were, after all, one or two small but essential differences (although a well-brought-up girl like Viola might not be expected to know much about them). However, the general good humour was such that in no time at all everyone was bubbling over with laughter and compliments once more and Faith was showing the blushing but gratified Padraig how a girl should walk: this walking was more like gliding, the twins explained (and they ought to know, they’d been to enough different schools with enough deportment classes). They made him walk to and fro with a book balanced on the top of his head until he could move without it falling off. Padraig took to this with a splendid natural aptitude and soon they could safely balance a glass of water on top of the book without him spilling a drop.

  Presently someone decided that Padraig should be taken on a tour of the hotel to see if any of the ladies recognized him. He should go on the Major’s arm! What a brain-wave! But the Major turned out to be a spoil-sport and refused point-blank.

  “Oh, oh, why?” pleaded the girls.

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “Just because.”

  And there was no shifting him. Usually the twins could get round him without difficulty, just by telling him that they thought him handsome and interesting, that he looked like Alcock, say, or Brown. But this time, for some reason, he remained adamant. Well, never mind. They would take him on a tour themselves!

  The Major, like the spoil-sport he was, tried to dissuade them, but he did not make his case very eloquently. He kept pointing out that although a joke was a joke, enough was enough, and that sort of thing. Padraig, he suggested hopefully, should put his clothes back on and then everyone should think of another, different, game.

  “But he’s got his clothes on!” screamed the girls indignantly. The Major was too boring!

  “Yes, I’ve got them on,” agreed Padraig.

  Were there any actual reasons, the girls wanted to know, enunciating carefully, as if to an idiot, why Padraig shouldn’t be taken on a tour of the hotel? Well, yes, there were reasons, but they were so nebulous that the Major found it difficult to specify them. They were certainly not tangible enough to satisfy the girls.

  So the tour got under way, Viola leading the way with long button-booted strides, displaying her pearly teeth like the principal boy in a pantomime. Padraig followed with a twin on each arm, chuckling or whispering into one ear or the other while he himself looked as radiant as Joan of Arc and prepared to respond to anything the situation might present.

  And as it turned out, Padraig had an enormous suc-cess with the old ladies, which caused the Major to reflect that the twins were probably right: he was a stick-in-the-mud, a spoil-sport and a kill-joy. What a fuss they made of him! They patted his shoulder and kissed his brow and made minute adjustments to his wig, which was the only part of him that “rather spoiled the effect,” they thought (it was a cheap theatrical wig stolen by Faith from some school dramatic society). They delved into their handbags and gave him chocolates to nibble that had that rather peculiar musty taste of perfume and moth-balls that old ladies’ chocolates always have. It was wonderful, they thought, how he seemed to know what to do just by instinct, keeping his knees together and sitting up straight and so forth. They were so delighted with him, in fact, that they were loath to let him continue his tour and made him promise to come back. He agreed, of course, and came back quite soon.

  The rest of his tour had turned out to be something of an anticlimax. With his retinue he had marched into the ballroom and wheeled several times round Edward’s makeshift laboratory. But Edward was engrossed in assembling some extraordinary piece of machinery with pipes and tubes and an old clockwork barometer with graph-drum and inking-needle and pieces of rubber, evidently for some experiment he wanted to make. Consequently he paid no attention whatsoever. The maidservants, of course, smiled at him and showed their dimples, but they were too shy to speak to him, so that was no good. Curiously enough, Mr Norton showed no interest at all; he merely glanced up from his newspaper and raised his wicked old eyebrows. One had to assume that after his life of debauchery he must know the difference between Padraig and the real thing, so this poor reaction dampened their enthusiasm a trifle. Back to the old ladies, then, to have their confidence restored. All in all, and taking, as one must, the rough with the smooth, they had reason to be satisfied.

  By now, unfortunately, it was time for Padraig to go home for his supper and so he had to get changed back into his other clothes. But he would come again on the following day; there were still lots of different dresses for him to try on—all Angela’s clothes, in fact, which the twins still stoutly declined to wear. Viola had
to go home too and said she’d escort Padraig back to his house. With all the excitement and amusement they had been having, with all the good cheer, one tended to forget that these days the roads could be dangerous.

  Soon it was time for dinner at the Majestic and the hotel guests began to assemble in the dining-room. It was cold there. A stiff east wind was blowing off the sea and, filtering in through the cracks between the French windows, caused the heavy curtains to move back and forth like impatient spectators in the shadows. In the branched silver candlesticks the flames constantly sputtered from yellow to blue under the compulsion of draughts; the light they provided was supplemented by an oil lamp on each table. One could see one’s breath against the surrounding darkness; the tureen of soup on the table belched steam like a locomotive.

  The ladies waited, pinched and shivering in layers of shawls and stoles, fingers buried in muffs, crowding all together around the moaning fireplace in which huge, unevenly cut sods of turf blazed without warmth. Now and again a back-draught of pungent whitish smoke would drive the ladies back with averted faces, but somehow this puff of smoke ascending into the darkness, and the smell of turf-ash, made the room seem fractionally warmer. The fireplace groaned mournfully and everyone waited for Edward to come.