The meal progressed to some form of apple pudding which the Major, gorged on bacon and cabbage, declined politely. Edward and Ripon maintained their sullen feud. (What the devil was it all about?) Old Mrs Rappaport ate noisily and voraciously. As for Angela, his erstwhile “fiancée,” she seemed to have exhausted herself completely with her afternoon’s evocation of the splendours of her youth. Pale and listless, oblivious of her Major’s return from the war or of her ritual “every day I miss you more and more,” she toyed with her napkin ring and kept her eyes, unfocused and unseeing, on the sparkling silver crown of the cut-glass salt-cellar in front of her.
When at last it was over (no question of the women retiring while the men drank port; at the Majestic everyone retired together, “like a platoon under fire,” thought the Major sourly), and in the pitch-black corridor of the third floor he felt his hand close over the handle of the door to his room the Major was assailed by an immense sensation of relief and surrender. With a sigh he opened the door.
Inside, however, he received a truly terrible shock. Either he was in the wrong room or his bed had not been made up! But he was in the right room: his suitcase was there, his bottles of cologne and macassar were standing on the dressing-table.
He had no sheets to sleep in.
Now this was really too much! He picked up a china pitcher and dashed it savagely against the wall. It made a terrible crash as it splintered. But then silence descended, the all-absorbing silence of the mild Irish night. A squadron of fat brown moths zoomed clumsily in through the open window, attracted by the light. He closed it and sat disconsolately on the bed. The house was dark and silent now. He could hardly rouse the Spencers and demand sheets. He would simply have to sleep here as best he could, wrapped in dusty blankets. (It was true, of course, that he had slept in worse circumstances, but all the same...!)
Then he noticed again, more strongly than before, the sweetish, nauseating odour he had decided to forget about earlier. It was an awful smell. He could not stand it. But the thought of opening the window to more moths made his skin crawl. He took a slipper from his suitcase and stalked the fluttering moths. But after he had splattered one or two against the wall he stopped, his nerves jangled by remorse, and wished he had left them alive. So while the others continued to whiz and circle around the electric light he started to search for the source of the smell, looking in cupboards, sniffing the washbasin, peering under the bed (none of these things, as it happened, smelled very savoury).
A small cupboard stood beside the bed. He wrenched open the door. On the top shelf there was nothing. On the bottom shelf was a chamber-pot and in the chamber-pot was a decaying object crawling with white maggots. From the middle of this object a large eye, bluish and corrupt, gazed up at the Major, who scarcely had time to reach the bathroom before he began to vomit brown soup and steamed bacon and cabbage. Little by little the smell of the object stole into the bathroom and enveloped him.
“Let us pray. Let us thank the Lord for all His mercies, let us thank Him for His Justice enshrined in the peace treaty signed in Versailles last week in which the Prussian tyranny is accorded punishment...For the righteous shall triumph, saith the Lord; and in this world we are all subject, great and small, to God’s Justice and to His Order. For there is an order in the universe...there is an order. Everything is ordained for a purpose in this life, from the lowest to the highest, for God’s universe is like a pyramid reaching from the most lowly amongst us up to Heaven. Without this purpose our life here below would be nothing more than a random collection of desperate acts...I repeat, a random collection of desperate acts. Ripon, would you have the common decency to put that cigarette out and wait until I’ve finished?”
“What?” said Ripon, looking surprised. “Oh, sorry.”
Edward waited impressively while his son dropped his cigarette into the murky water of a vase containing a few pale-yellow roses.
“Now,” Edward went on with a frown, his concentration disturbed, “let us...let us never forget our position, the part each one of us must play in the Divine Purpose. We must not shirk. For there is an order. Without it our lives would be meaningless. So let us thank Him for the duties that accompany our privileges and pray that we may always discharge them as His faithful servants...Now let us thank the Lord for all His other mercies to us, for the reunion of families, for the produce of the land which comes to our table...”
Edward, inspiration gone, eye flitting round the room in search of reasons for giving thanks, was obliged to pause every now and then to collect and review fresh evidence of the divine magnanimity. In this way, among the more commonly acknowledged gifts of heaven he came to give thanks for some curious things: “the chairs on which we rest our tired bodies,” for example, “the faithful dogs” of Kilnalough, or, most curious of all, “the splendid century made by Hobbs against Lancashire yesterday.” It seemed to the Major that there might possibly be no end to this list: after all, if one was going to give thanks for chairs, dogs, and cricketers, why should one ever stop?
As it happened, however, Edward did stop, after a particularly long and distressing pause, by giving thanks for all those present who had come safely through “the dark watches of the night.” “Amen to that, anyway,” thought the Major peevishly.
But Edward had not quite finished. He still had to commemorate the Fallen. The Major, who was hungry again (either because the country air was giving him an appetite or because he had vomited up the only solid meal he had consumed in the last twenty-four hours) and who had been entertaining disabused thoughts about Edward’s prayers, now felt displeased with himself. With his eye distractedly on a giant silver dish bearing a domed lid surmounted by an ornamental spike (strangely reminiscent of a Boche helmet) beneath which he believed eggs, bacon and kidneys to be cooling, he did his best to reverse his thoughts into a more pious direction.
The breakfast room, though small by comparison with the dining-room, was spacious, airy, and on sunny days presumably sunny since it faced south and was lit by immense windows, the upper part of which (beyond where a man with his feet planted on the low sill might be able to reach) was opaque with grime. The Spencer family and a number of the hotel guests were grouped round the largest table, hands on the backs of chairs and chins on chests (with the exception of Ripon who with his head on one side was staring up at a generous cobweb billowing near the ceiling). Behind them, grouped at random in an attitude of devotion or subjection (rather as if they had been left chairless in a frantic game of Musical Chairs) stood Murphy, three or four maids in uniform, a hugely fat lady in an apron and Evans, the tutor, his face pitted and pale as death. The servants, the Major assumed, were not taking part in this alien act of worship but merely waiting for it to be over so that they could serve breakfast. But Edward was still going through his ritual.
To the wall behind the table was attached a carved wooden memorial in the shape of a gigantic book with open pages; from behind them rose the head of a unicorn. Book and unicorn together made up the Spencer family crest; all Angela’s letters had been embossed with it. In this case the varnished, elaborately curling pages had recently had two long lists of names chiselled into them, startling in their newness, the white wood beneath the varnish exposed like wounds.
Who were these poor chaps? the Major wondered distantly, without pity. On what basis had selection been made? Young men from Kilnalough? But recruiting had been poor in Ireland. Connolly, the Sinn Feiners, Nationalists of every hue had declared that Irishmen should not fight in the British Army. But if not from Kilnalough from Trinity, perhaps, or from some heroic cricket club or old school. There were so many ways in which the vast army of the dead could be drilled, classified, inspected, and made to present their ghostly arms. No end to the institutions, civilian and military, busy drawing up their sombre balance-sheet and recording it in wood, stone or metal. But if there was no end to the institutions there was no end to the dead men either. In truth, there were more than enough to go round
several times over. “Greater love hath no man than this,” the Major thought mechanically. Bacon and eggs...the saliva rinsed shamefully around his teeth.
Long ranks of tiny eyes were now staring at the Major as if accusing him of being both alive and about to eat breakfast. With a dignified gesture Edward had grasped each page of the book and folded it outward and back on concealed hinges, revealing row after row of photographs of young men, most of them in uniform. The photographs were not very good, some of them. Fuzzy or beginning to fade, ill-assorted; one or two of the young men were laughing unsuitably or, dazzled by the sun, looked to be already in agony. For the most part, though, they were meticulously uniformed and the Major could imagine them sitting there, grim and composed, as if for a portrait in oils. As often as not this long exposure to the unblinking eye had so completely steamed the life out of them that now one was difficult to tell from another.
Edward said in somewhat sepulchral tones: “They gave their lives for their King, their country and for us. Let us remain silent for a moment in their name.” Silence descended. The only sounds to be heard were Murphy’s regular, whistling breath and a faint gurgle of gastric juices.
Meanwhile the Major was trying once again to delve into the past with the paralysed fingers of his memory, hoping to grasp some warmth or emotion, the name perhaps of a dead friend that might mean the beginning of grief, the beginning of an end to grief. But now, as he stood at the breakfast table, even the dead faces that nightly appeared in his dreams remained absent. There was only the cold and constant surprise that would come, say, from dreaming of home and waking among strangers. He ground his teeth at the accusing, many-eyed memorial and thought: “Hypocrisy.”
As Edward said grace his eye met the Major’s for an instant and perhaps he noticed the Major’s bitterness, for a shadow of concern crossed his face. Turning, he closed the memorial and took his seat.
Now that the domed lid was being lifted from the silver dish the Major’s spirits improved and he thought that today, after breakfast, he must have a talk with Angela and clear up her misconceptions. Then he would leave. After all, if he did not leave promptly his presence might well foster more misconceptions. If she could nominate herself his “fiancée” on the strength of a few meetings in Brighton she might well be capable of arranging the wedding without consulting him. All the same, it was difficult to bring the matter up while Angela continued to treat him as a casual acquaintance. It seemed indelicate to recall that time they had kissed with the cactus in Brighton.
“Did you sleep well, Brendan?” Angela wanted to know... and looking at her pale and frigid face he wondered whether the kiss might have taken place only in his imagination.
“Yes,” the Major replied curtly, hoping to indicate the contrary.
“That’s good,” Edward said with satisfaction, spearing the fat rump of a kidney and a few leaves of bacon (all stone-cold by now and remarkably greasy). “Don’t pay any heed to what those bally guide-books say. It may not be quite what it was in the old days but it’s still a comfortable old place. Anyway, they’re all written by Liberals and Socialists and so forth... They envy us, if you want my opinion, it’s as simple as that.”
This was too much for the Major. “There was a sheep’s head in the cupboard by my bed.”
“Good heavens,” exclaimed Angela, though without surprise.
“That’s what we give the dogs. Boil ’em down. Very nourishing and they cost nothing at all. The butcher would probably throw them away if it wasn’t for us, though I’ve heard the country people sometimes eat them too. You should see the healthy coats they have on them. Come along with me afterwards and see for yourself.”
The Major, who hoped never in his life to see another sheep’s head, could only nod mutely and trust to luck that Edward would forget.
He didn’t, however. Just as the Major was preparing to slope off after breakfast (and perhaps corner Angela to drop a few hints about not wanting to marry her) Edward abruptly materialized at his elbow and steered him firmly down unfamiliar corridors, through a yard festooned with damp sheets bulging in the wind and into a smaller yard walled by outhouses. Here a dozen or so dogs of varying ages, shapes and sizes (whose names the Major already knew by heart) were dozing on piles of straw or empty sacks.
“My dogs,” Edward said with simplicity. “Aren’t they beauties? Mind where you walk.”
“They certainly are,” the Major replied insincerely.
The dogs brightened up at the sight of Edward and crowded round him excitedly, snapping at his fingers and trying to land their paws on his chest, barging, quarrelling and getting in the way to such an extent that the two men had trouble wading through them to reach a gate on the far side. This led into yet another yard, empty this time except for a three-sided fireplace sprouting black smoke and orange flames. Over the fire hung the round black belly of an iron cauldron, steaming and bubbling. The dogs sprang towards it in a frenzy of excitement.
Evans, the tutor, was standing beside the cauldron stirring it, his pale, unhealthy face completely expressionless. “What a strange fellow!” thought the Major. Stirring the cauldron with the flames leaping about his ears made him look positively sinister.
“Thank you, Tutor. A good brew today, is it?” Edward turned to the Major. “Evans does the cooking, I do the feeding. Dogs know who feeds them, believe you me. It’s not the same thing if you tell your servants to do it...they don’t know who’s master (I mean, the dogs don’t). Now take a look at that. Rich and juicy!”
The Major peered with distaste at the simmering liquid. Fortunately the surface was covered with an oily grey froth which masked the pot’s macabre contents.
“Very nourishing, I shouldn’t be surprised,” observed the Major drily. But Edward was not yet satisfied. Picking up a couple of charred sticks, he fished with them until he had located something beneath the surface. A moment later the Major was face to face with a long, narrow skull, eyeless and tipped with grinning teeth.
“Well, thanks a lot for showing me. I think I’ll take a stroll round while the weather holds.” The Major stared up at the overcast sky and then, backing away a couple of paces, almost fell over a massive sheepdog that had moved up behind him. Edward grasped him firmly by the upper arm—whether to help him keep his balance or to prevent him from leaving was not immediately clear.
“Look here, Major,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “We don’t want to be too hard on the boy, do we?”
The Major stared at him and Edward, taking his silence for disagreement, continued: “A lot of it’s my own fault, I realize that. He was sacked from school, d’you see, and I had him sent to a crammer. Shouldn’t have done that...turned him agin the government. I was angry, you know, and thought I wouldn’t let him get away with it...not scot free, anyway.”
“You mean Ripon?”
“Yes, yes, Ripon. I know you’ve been wondering why he didn’t volunteer and so forth. It’s only natural after what you’ve been through.”
“Really, Mr Spencer, I can assure you...” But Edward was patting his arm soothingly and saying: “Only natural. Anyone would feel the same in your position. Those who go and those who stay at home...white feathers and all that rot. He’s not a coward, though, and neither am I. Take a look at this!” Dropping the charred sticks, he unbuttoned his waistcoat and began pulling his shirt out until he had uncovered a patch of pale skin at his waist. In the middle of the patch was a round white scar as big as a halfpenny.
“In the service of the King-Emperor. Didn’t think I’d get back from that little affair. Somehow or other it missed the intestines or I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. Get down, sir!” A spaniel was attempting to lick the exposed patch of skin.
While Edward adjusted his clothing the Major repeated his innocence of any critical thoughts about Ripon. “Lot of fuss about nothing, was it?” Edward hastened to agree. “Well, that’s all right then. Still, I wouldn’t have wanted you to think we were a family of milksops.
Ripon told Angela that the first thing you asked him was whether he’d been abroad. He was angry with Angela, d’you see, because he thought she’d been telling tales.”
There was silence for a moment. Edward had retrieved one of the sticks and was stirring the pot, with the dogs milling and woofing round him. His rugged face with its clipped moustache and flattened ears was still scowling with anxiety in spite of the Major’s reassurance.
“He’s not a bad boy at heart, you know. It’s true he was sacked from school (though not for anything unhealthy, mind)...and I suppose that rather set him agin the government. I lose my temper with him at times and that doesn’t help...Get down! I’ll tell you when it’s ready,” he added to a large Alsatian puppy that from behind had forced its head under his arm. “All the same, he should have volunteered when he was needed, coward or no coward. He may never have another chance as good as the one he missed.”
The Empire Trilogy Page 5