It had been damaged but not completely destroyed. Although a gaping hole had appeared in the horse’s flanks, the august cavalier had managed to remain in the saddle, leaning acutely sideways in the manner of a bareback rider in a circus ring. The blast had immodestly lifted her steel skirts a few inches, he noticed.
“Gelignite and a coffee tin,” explained Murdoch at his elbow. “A temperamental explosive which kills the Shinners and British with perfect impartiality. In Irish they call the stuff ‘Bas gan Sagart’—‘Death without the priest.’” And while one half of Murdoch’s face remained smooth and solemn, the other half lit up with wrinkled glee.
Later again the Major sat for a long time in the room of the priest, Father O’Byrne, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence. The room was very small, dark and cluttered with books. The Major was abominably tired. He frequently looked at his watch, but the hours of the morning refused to pass.
“Edward Spencer is a coward and a murderer, Major... You’re a poor sort of man that you’d take it on yourself to make excuses for him.”
The Major was abominably tired. Yet he was fascinated by the priest’s threadbare cassock and by the hatred in his eyes. At length he lifted his eyes from the Major’s face to the crucifix on the wall. To the Major the steadiness of this gaze on the crucifix seemed blind, inhuman, fanatical. The yellowish naked body, the straining ribs, the rolling eyes and parted lips, the languorously draped arms and long trailing fingers, the feet crossed to economize on nails, the cherry splash of blood from the side...
“That boy got what he deserved,” he said harshly. “I only hope it may serve as an example to some of the other young cut-throats who are laying Ireland to waste!”
And with that he turned and strode out of the house, slamming the door with a crash.
In the weeks which had elapsed since the night of the ball the health of Mr Norton had declined steadily. It was hard to say whether this was because the poor man had over-exerted himself on the dance-floor or whether it was merely a natural and inevitable decline of the faculties. In any event, he was now confined to bed, his mind wandering indiscriminately between mathematics and the boudoir, sometimes chuckling to himself, sometimes in tears, but constantly demanding company and attention.
Their sense of duty overcoming their distaste, the ladies would sometimes take their knitting and climb the stairs to the first floor to sit with him. And while they knitted he would gabble long, incomprehensible equations interlarded with scarcely more intelligible descriptions of his encounters with that sex to which, all his life, he had devotedly attempted to unite himself (only to finish his days, old and alone, between these chilly, rumpled sheets). The Major was sorry for him but glad, on the whole, that his reminiscences were so difficult to fathom...The snatches that one could understand were extraordinarily indecent, even to the Major’s hardened military ears.
One day, afraid lest Mr Norton’s ramblings should offend the ladies (particularly those whose honour had remained unimpaired by marriage), the Major brought him an arithmetic textbook belonging to the twins which he had happened to come across in a waste-paper basket unemptied since the previous winter. Mr Norton seized it with delight and in the few days that remained to him (before his rela-tions whisked him away to a more suitable institution) recited mathematical problems without pausing for breath, answering each one promptly before proceeding to the next. The Major sometimes paused to listen to this litany, and one of the problems, in particular, remained in his mind. It concerned a man who was unable to swim and found himself in a leaking rowing-boat so many hundreds of yards from land. He was faced with the alternative of baling rapidly with a tin cup (volume so many cubic inches; maximum rate of baling movement so many times per minute), the water entering at such-and-such a speed; or of ignoring the leak and rowing furiously (at so many miles per hour) for the nearest land... or, of course, a combination of now one, now the other. How should this man best proceed?
“Can he make it?”
“Afraid not quite, old chap,” replied Mr Norton with unexpected clarity.
“Ah,” said the Major absently and wandered off puffing his pipe.
The Major was working hard these days, helped by Mrs Roche, Miss Archer and some of the other ladies. Edward’s frame of mind had improved to some extent since he had killed a Sinn Feiner. An abscess had been lanced and a quantity of poison had been allowed to escape. Nevertheless the Major was aware that it would fill up again, given time.
Surprisingly docile at first, Edward had agreed to go to England and spend some time with the twins. He had even shown one or two faint traces of remorse. The Major had come upon him cleaning the congealed blood from the work bench in the potting-shed. On seeing the Major, however, he had stopped and walked out into the light drizzle, a hat-less and derelict figure. Latterly the Major had detected signs of renascent fear and bitterness. He was watching him more carefully now and it soon became clear that Edward was preparing plans for the defence of his estate. One evening when, in spite of the Major’s absolute refusal to accommodate them, a frighteningly determined and aggressive young schoolmistress had succeeded in installing a brood of girl guides at the Majestic for the night, Edward, incoher-ent with whiskey and raddled with anger over the loss of Ireland, had discoursed to his tittering young guests and the gloomy, silent Major on fields of fire, enfilading machine-guns, flanking attacks and suchlike. It all boded ill. One must work quickly.
The explosion and the shooting had had at least one good effect: it had caused three of the less important ladies to leave immediately and had decided the others that they too must find a place to go. There was considerable distress, of course, in the residents’ lounge, much weeping and sniffing of salts. But the Major was doing what he could to counter this despondency. He had written to the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association and was considering other possibilities. There must be girls’ boarding schools in Egypt, India and other places (remote, certainly, but where the natives were better behaved than the Irish) whose dusky little pupils would benefit from the dignity and moral rectitude of an elderly English lady, even an impoverished one. The trouble was that the ladies greeted this suggestion with further despondency and alarm, convinced that the Major was planning to send them off alone to some tropical knacker’s yard.
Amid all this distress Mrs Roche was a great help and comfort. She encouraged the ladies, made practical suggestions, helped them to compose appealing yet dignified letters to more fortunate relations. She even took Edward in hand, telling him briskly that he shouldn’t drink so much (which nobody else had dared do) and sewing a button on his jacket. The Major at this time entertained a faint hope that Mrs Roche might at last discover a romantic interest in Edward—after all, he was still, with his massive, handsome face and commanding presence, an imposing figure in his own way. But Mrs Roche had more sense and presently she left with her mother, Mrs Bates, for some happier destination. She left the Major wondering whether Edward could be relied on to look after Mrs Rappaport, since no institution was ever likely to accept both her and the hideous marmalade cat, not to mention her revolver.
Miss Staveley, who, having the money, could have left, surprised everyone by remaining stalwartly where she was. Indeed, once Mrs Roche had left she took on her role of comforter and adviser, becoming, in her rather muddled way, a tower of strength. In general, after the first despondency had worn off morale was excellent. The ladies, in adversity, were determined to show “the stuff they were made of,” which turned out to be a very tough weave indeed.
This was fortunate, because standards had yet again (and for the last time) begun to decline at the Majestic. By now most of the servants had vanished. From the day of the explosion they had gradually melted away, as native bearers on safaris are reputed to melt, one by one, into the jungle, taking with them anything of value that did not happen to be nailed down (not, however, that there was a great deal of value at the Majestic, nailed down or otherwise). Among the many obj
ects whose disappearance for the most part went unnoticed the following items were seen to be missing: two of Edward’s sporting rifles, his hunting pink, his velvet smoking-jacket, most of his fishing rods, a carved ivory chess-set from the residents’ lounge, approximately half of the pile of stone hot-water jars on the first floor, a hundred weight of embossed cutlery and china (very popular), a portrait in oils of a former manager of the hotel clad in Napoleonic uniform, sheets, pillow-cases and blankets (also very popular), the unfortunate dog Foch (who had always been a great favourite with the kitchen staff) and the stuffed pike from the gun room.
One morning, returning up the drive from an early walk through the grounds, the Major was astonished to meet the cook, clad in a fur coat several sizes too big for her, with unlaced men’s shoes on her feet, and pulling a hand-cart piled high with gilt chairs from the writing-room. At the sight of the Major she gave a shriek of fear and cried what sounded like: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” But the Major averted his eyes and walked past her without even noticing, thereby proving to the cook the efficacy of prayer.
The cook was the last of the servants to go. Presently only Murphy remained, muttering to himself and haunting the staircases as he had always done. These days, of course, he was never asked to do anything, for his reason was quite clearly unhinged. He was merely there, a cadaverous relic of a happier time. Occasionally someone might glance at him curiously and wonder why he did not leave too. But he didn’t. He remained to lurk in the company of the silent, prowling cats in the shadowy upper storeys. People were too busy to bother about him.
There was the cooking to be done, for instance. Miss Johnston had taken charge of the kitchens and established a hierarchy of helpers whose jobs diminished gradually in importance from her own to that of poor Mrs Rice who was considered only capable of washing the dishes. Strangely enough, the food was better in these last few days of the Majestic’s existence than it had been for many years—indeed, since the hotel had reached its zenith in the 1880s.
The ladies tied aprons round their waists and put their diamond rings in a saucer on the sideboard while they kneaded the dough for apple pies or disembowelled chickens with trembling fingers. How exciting it was! If only the future had seemed less uncertain how they would have enjoyed this challenge to abilities which since girlhood, throughout all their long, dull and genteel lives, had lain dormant! Moved, the Major watched them at work, Miss Bagley’s rheumy eyes blurred by incipient cataracts, Miss Devere’s head permanently bent to one side, Miss Johnston unable to stand up for long because her ankles would swell, Mrs Rice stooped over the sink with the steam clouding her pince-nez, and all of them, without exception, forgetting things (“Now what was it I was going to do?”) and losing things (“Now where on earth did I put...?”) which very often turned out to be in front of their noses.
But then with a start, the Major would remember that he had letters to write, that he must telephone Dublin, that he must put an advertisement in the Irish Times...and many other things. In short, that he must continue to row furiously for the nearest land, for the boat continued to settle lower and lower in the water.
Unsavoury characters were noticed lurking among the trees (the Major remembered with nostalgia the “unsavoury character” they had hunted chuckling through the park on the afternoon he had first arrived). Worse, the ceiling of the writing-room descended with an appalling crash, ridden to the floor by the grand piano from the sitting-room above. For hours afterwards a thick white fog of plaster hung in the corridors, through which the inhabitants of the Majestic flitted like ghosts, gasping feebly.
* * *
PREMIER’S BID FOR PEACE
Proposed Conference in London Following
The King’s Appeal for Reconciliation
De Valera Invited by Lloyd George to London
Reuter’s Paris Correspondent telegraphed yesterday: “Commenting this morning on the letter addressed to Mr De Valera inviting him to attend a conference in London with Sir James Craig to explore to the utmost the possibility of a settlement of the Irish question, Le Petit Parisien lays special stress on the conciliatory and even friendly tone of the letter, which, in its opinion, marks a great and praiseworthy effort on the part of the British Government.”
* * *
Every now and then, just for a moment, the Major would rest on his oars, lost in thought. It was early summer, a delightful season. The smell of grass and wood lingered delightfully under the mild sky. On his way to fix a FOR SALE notice to one of the gateposts he strolled through a grove of silver birches; it was hard to believe that there was any malice in Ireland. For a moment he felt almost at peace; but then it occurred to him that a few inches below where he was standing the rotting carcase of Rover sat up and begged, encased in earth.
A letter arrived from Faith with the news that Charity had fallen in love with Mimi’s butler, Brown. But this was swiftly followed by a letter from Charity saying that it wasn’t true. Besides, Brown was a Socialist and had ideas above his station and would the Major send her some money (it was hopeless asking Daddy) as she desperately needed some new clothes? She and Faithy were ashamed to be seen out of doors in their dreadful Irish rags and tweeds and all the men they met absolutely had fits when they saw what scarecrows they were. Also could the Major afford to buy them a motor car? In London a motor car was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY! Just a small one would do as they didn’t need anything big and it would only cost more. Mimi (Aunt Mildred) had crashed hers into a wall and the bally thing wouldn’t work any more. A frightful bore! But the clothes were the most important because they simply couldn’t wait and would he write back immediately sending a cheque.
The Major did write back immediately, sending a cheque for fifty pounds together with the news that Edward would be setting out for London in two days’ time. He himself would follow when he had made final arrangements with an estate agent in Dublin. By now it was the end of June and almost everything had been settled. The dogs had been sent to a kennel while preparations were made for their new home. The ladies’ trunks had been packed and delivered to the station, labelled for various destinations (those of Miss Bagley, Miss Porteous, Miss Archer, Mrs Rice and Miss Staveley all bore the address of a boarding-house on the Isle of Wight purchased expressly by Miss Staveley to give shelter to her friends, a most satisfactory conclusion). Old Mrs Rappaport had been dispatched to London, still armed to the teeth and the wonder of her fellow-passengers, carrying the marmalade cat in a wicker basket. She was accompanied on her journey by an indigent cousin of Edward’s, specially hired for the purpose.
In the course of Edward’s last afternoon at the Majestic he and the Major took sledge-hammers and rained blows on Queen Victoria and her horse in an attempt to restore her to a more vertical position. For half an hour they hammered away at her shoulders, her head, even her bosom, the sound of their blows ringing cheerfully over the countryside. As they worked, her delicate green metal became pocked with brown marks... but little else was achieved. She was still leaning drunkenly sideways. At most they had managed to correct her position a few inches by the time they retired, perspiring, to drink some tea (in plentiful supply now that the old ladies commanded the kitchen). After tea they returned to hammer down her ruffled skirts. That was all they could do for her.
“I shan’t be leaving tomorrow, Edward. There are still a number of things I have to do here.” The Major had delayed informing Edward of his decision to stay for fear that Edward too might change his mind. This fear had been illusory, he decided, seeing the stricken, anxious expression that appeared on Edward’s face.
“But you must leave! It’s dangerous here.” Calmly, but feeling that he hated Edward, the Major said: “I don’t intend just to walk off and leave the place to the bloody Shinners.”
“But Brendan, you must face reality. You’ve read the newspapers. You know as well as I do that it’s all over here. It’s finished. Any day now that blighter Lloyd George is going to throw in the sponge and then
there’ll be hell to pay for people like you and me who’ve been loyal.”
“I’m damned if I’m going to take to my heels, Edward, just because there’s a possibility of trouble. If I go at all I shall go in my own good time.”
“But good God, Brendan! Things are bad enough already. When they send the army home it’ll be the law of the jungle. Every Unionist in the South will have his throat cut. Go to Ulster if you want to stay in Ireland.”
“I’ve made up my mind that I’m staying, Edward. At least for a while.”
“But you can’t stay here. The old place is falling to pieces. It’s dangerous. You’ve been telling me for months how dangerous it is...Think of the writing-room ceiling! That could happen anywhere at all in the building, anywhere.”
“I’ll stay in the rooms that have the fewest cracks in them,” said the Major smiling.
“Without servants?”
“Oh well, there’s always Murphy.”
“Murphy! Besides, just look at the size of the place, it’s absurd. You can’t live here all by yourself. And you just told me the place is up for sale.”
“I’ll wait until it’s sold, then. But I refuse to be hounded out of the place by a handful of labourers with guns in their hands.”
“Well, I shall stay with you, of course,” Edward murmured unhappily. “But I must say I think it’s most unwise.”
“There’s absolutely no question of you staying, Edward. You have the twins to think of.”
Edward had dropped his sledge-hammer and was sitting on the stone steps facing the shattered statue, watching the jagged, freshly torn edges of metal glimmer in the sunshine. A faint breeze stirred the shaggy mass of grey hair above Edward’s grim, defeated face. “Absurd,” thought the Major, “that we should go on competing when the thing that we were competing for has long since vanished.”
The Empire Trilogy Page 44
