The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  Edward’s gaze wandered absently around the room while he waited for everyone to assemble. Presently he stifled a yawn; he did not in the least look like someone about to make an important announcement. When at last a hush fell on the room he cleared his throat. He just wanted to say, he said, that he was on the point of—he paused a moment to let his words sink in—on the point of beginning an economy drive.

  An “economy drive”? The old ladies flashed inquiring glances at each other, as if to say that they had been under the impression that this economy drive had already begun, indeed that it had already been going on for rather a long time. Some of the servants too betrayed signs of alarm: was this the end of their employment? So many people were out of work these days that it seemed more than likely that one day their turn would come. The cook, who had a houseful of drunken relations to support in one of the Dublin slums, gasped inaudibly; the massive façade of her bosom began to rise and fall rapidly. Evans turned pale and the boils on his neck glowed like cherries above the worn fringe of his stiff collar. Only one or two of the youngest maids who had barely arrived “from the country” blushed shyly and smiled their acceptance, as they would have even if Edward had decreed that they were to be whipped. As for Murphy, hitherto frozen into a cast-iron lethargy, his eyes were now racing to and fro across the carpet like terrified mice.

  Edward cleared his throat. They expected him to continue, to amplify and explain...but no, he said nothing. The heavy ticking of the grandfather clock became audible. At length he sighed and asked: were there any questions?

  Well, no, there were not. The air of dissatisfaction in the room deepened, however, and Miss Bagley looked quite cross. One really did not know where to begin with one’s ques-tions when such an outlandish idea as an “economy drive” was proposed. In the old days...Silence had fallen again. It was interrupted by old Mrs Rappaport, who was sitting straight-backed as ever in a rocking-chair by the empty fire-place, a lace cap pinned on her thin grey hair. She began to rock herself peevishly back and forth, faster and faster, until at last she cried: “It’s scandalous!” and everyone brightened a little.

  But with Granny Rappaport one could never be quite sure whether she had altogether pinned down the subject under discussion or was talking about something totally different. Edward chose to ignore her and said that, all right then, that was all he had wanted to say and, by the way, thanked them for their co-operation. So they were dismissed...and still did not know at whose hard-won comforts the thin rats of economy were about to begin gnawing.

  Edward, of course, was the sort of person for whom words and deeds are the same. Perhaps, the Major reflected, he would consider it sufficient to announce the economy drive without actually putting it into practice. That afternoon, however, while Edward and the Major were taking an after-lunch stroll on the terrace outside the ballroom, the twins were noticed fishing in the swimming-pool with an old tennis racket. They were brusquely summoned.

  “Stand here and let’s see how tall you are. Oh, stand up straight, girl! D’you need clothes?”

  “Yes, Daddy. Ours are all in flitters, mine especially.”

  “Mine are worse.”

  “Mine are ten times, twenty times, a hundred times—” Charity held up the darned elbow of her cardigan—“a million million times worse.”

  “How long have you had the clothes you’ve got?”

  “Absolutely ages.”

  “A billion years.”

  “All right then, follow me. You come too, Major, and see fair play.”

  Edward turned in through the grimy desert of the ball-room and they followed him across it and up an unfamiliar staircase, seldom used, to judge by the spiders’ webs which garnished the banister. As they climbed the twins pestered Edward with questions: what were these clothes? Had he been to Dublin to the shops? Was it Switzer’s, or Pim’s, or Brown Thomas’s, or what was it? How did he know their size and did he realize that Faith was a bit bigger in her bosom? Edward made no reply; he was short of breath and flushed. As they struck off down a corridor he murmured to the Major: “Getting old. Must take it easy these days.”

  The twins had run ahead; every step they took raised a puff of dust from the carpet, so that their footprints appeared like smoke, glittering in the stripes of afternoon sunlight that filtered through half-open doors. Underfoot loose floorboards creaked and shifted ominously.

  “If I get dry rot I’m done for,” Edward continued as if still discussing his health.

  “Oh?”

  “Bally place’ll fall about m’ears.”

  One hundred and twenty-one, one hundred and twenty-two, one hundred and twenty-three...The next room had no brass number screwed to the door but once there had been one; its darker shadow remained on the varnished wood. It was at this door that Edward halted. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked it.

  “In there?” exclaimed Charity, mystified. It was dark inside. Edward crossed to the window and threw open the closed shutters. Abruptly everything took on shape, colour and meaning. Although he had never been here before, everything he saw was perfectly familiar to the Major. He knew whose room this had been. His heart sank.

  The twins had not been in here before. The room seemed to be occupied. They peered around curiously but already their excitement was melting into suspicion. They looked at the unmade bed, sheets and eiderdown roughly pulled up as if the chambermaid had not had time to make it properly. They wrinkled their noses at the pitcher and bowl, the sponge dried as hard as the pumice-stone beside it. They eyed their lovely reflections in the mirror and looked at the dressing-table with its silver hairbrushes and the silver frame containing a photograph of, well...the truth had dawned on them now but for a moment they were speechless with disbelief.

  “Now let’s see...where...?” Edward said quietly. As he spoke the Major glimpsed a shadow of pain, as if he had been hurt behind the eyes (but why did he have to bring me? he wondered bitterly). Edward stepped over to the wardrobe and opened it experimentally. It was empty. A large white moth flew wearily out for a little way until it vanished from the air under a vicious downward smash of Faith’s tennis racket. A puff of powder from its wings hung in the room.

  “Daddy, how could you?” cried Charity. “You surely don’t mean us to wear Angela’s things!” Edward said nothing, but his face darkened as he turned away and looked round the room. His eye came to rest on a chest of dark polished oak which, to the Major’s excited imagination, looked remarkably like a coffin. In fact it was an old dower chest which had probably belonged to the Spencers for generations. Edward had dug up the old metal clasp and lifted the lid; inside it was lined with another kind of wood, lighter and fragrant, cedar-wood perhaps. Another lid was lifted. In a moment Edward was scooping piles of neatly folded clothing on to the carpet.

  “We can’t, Daddy, it’s too creepy,” insisted Faith, wiping the strings of the tennis racket on the bedclothes to clean off the minced remains of the moth.

  “Not a corpse’s clothes,” pleaded Charity. “It’s awful. Just the thought of it makes me feel funny.”

  “We must save money, my dear. Now be a good girl and take your dress off so we can try them on. If they don’t fit we’ll have to get the cook to work with her needle and thread—they tell me she’s very handy at that sort of thing. Besides, you’d do well to take a few lessons from her while you have the chance since you don’t seem to have learned much at school...One of these days you’ll have homes of your own and maybe, I don’t know, the way things are going you’ll not always have servants to look after you...in any case,” he added weakly, “a bit of sewing never did anyone any harm.”

  “I think I’m going to faint,” Faith said grimly and sat down heavily on the bed, making its springs creak.

  “Ugh! That’s the corpse’s death-bed you’re sitting on, Faithy.”

  “You’ll speak of Angela with respect,” snapped Edward, “or you’ll both get a hiding and be sent to your rooms.”

  �
��Why me? It was Catty that said it,” Faith said grumpily. “And what’s more I am feeling sick and will probably start spewing any moment.”

  “Faith, don’t be disgusting,” Charity said, grinning in spite of herself. “You’ve started me feeling peculiar too.”

  “Shut up, both of you, and pick one of these dresses before I lose my patience. They’re as good as new and some of them were never worn.”

  “Which ones?” asked Faith dubiously, poking at the heap of clothing with her tennis racket.

  The Major had lit his pipe and was watching the twins as they rummaged in the pile of clothing, holding dresses up to see what they looked like. It was clear (one of the countless things the Major had never known about her) that Angela had dressed extravagantly. Almost all her dresses had tucks in descending horizontal tiers; there was a heavy afternoon dress of velvet embossed with chrysanthemums which reached to the ground and trailed in a swallow-tail behind; there were heavy woollen dresses with overdresses, all with a great deal of frogging and embroidery; there was a blue satin evening dress with a band of black velvet that trailed as a sash behind; there was a dress of black taffeta or chiné silk with a vast amount of braid; and there was a moleskin cape and muff.

  “It’s all so horribly old-lady!”

  “Come on, we haven’t got all day,” Edward told them. “Make up your minds. If you don’t pick one of these dresses each within thirty seconds I’ll pick them for you.”

  Under this threat the twins reluctantly made their selections: Charity a simple blue linen morning dress with a white organdie collar, Faith a silk jersey afternoon dress with a belt of gold cord and tassels to the ankles.

  “I feel a bit sick, Daddy...”

  But Edward’s patience was now clearly at an end and the twins retired sullenly to change.

  Slumped in an armchair, the Major was wondering whether he might ask Edward for the photograph of himself which stood on the dressing-table (a picture taken in Brighton in 1916 showing a relatively carefree youth who bore little resemblance to the stoically grim head which these days accompanied him to the mirror). He wanted this picture merely to remove it from the room, from the neighbouring hairbrushes and other relics, to destroy it...he did not know why he wanted to do this. In any case, he was afraid that Edward might look askance at such a request.

  Edward was kneeling among the bundles of clothing and rummaging through them abstractedly.

  “Poor Angie! There’s lots more somewhere: petticoats and knickers and corsets and so forth...she liked clothes, used to buy things nobody’d ever wear out here in the country.”

  He held up a dress of black velvet that billowed emptily in his hands, empty of Angela.

  “Wore this the day she was presented at the Viceregal Lodge. For a joke we went out to Phoenix Park on the tram instead of hiring a carriage, both of us dressed up like dog’s dinners. How people stared at us! Bit of fun we had, you know, pretending to be Socialists. Angie said she was ashamed to be seen arriving on the tram, but she laughed about it afterwards like a good sport.” He stood up and went to stare at himself moodily in the mirror, picking up one of the silver brushes (tarnished blue-grey by months of neglect) and rubbing his thumb over the bristles.

  “They’re only kids and it doesn’t really matter what they wear so long as it keeps them warm,” he added defensively. “Got to get hold of a bit of spare cash one way or another if I’m to give that blighter Ripon a helping hand.”

  “Is that the reason?”

  “Well, you said yourself that with a wife to support he’d be needing some cash to set himself up.”

  The Major could remember saying no such thing but could see no point in denying it.

  “But don’t you think his wife will have something?”

  “I doubt it. Anyway, Ripon’s not the sort to accept charity, whatever his faults. In some ways, you know, he’s a chip off the old block. I suppose I should sell off these brushes and things as well. They’re not much good to poor Angie now. These trinkets might fetch something. Hate to do it, though.”

  They lapsed into a lugubrious silence. Presently, with a sigh, Edward began: “You know, the one time in my life when I was really happy...” But at this moment the twins entered.

  “My! Don’t they look smart?” cried Edward in genuine admiration. “Well, what d’you think of that, Brendan? Aren’t they lovely?”

  The Major had to agree with him. The twins looked more lovely than ever standing there, identical, outraged, each holding up her skirts in small clenched fists. They uttered a simultaneous gasp.

  “But we look like freaks, Daddy!”

  “We can’t wear things like this. People will laugh themselves sick at us.”

  “Nonsense, you look absolutely charming, you can take it from me. Young ladies knew how to dress themselves before the war.”

  “Daddy, you surely don’t want us to look like freaks,” pleaded Faith, close to tears.

  “That’s going too far! I refuse, I simply refuse!”

  “Faith, I warned you! Charity! You’ll go to your rooms this instant,” shouted Edward, losing his temper. His anger impressed the twins sufficiently to quell them. They glared at him tearfully for a moment and then stamped out.

  The soft-hearted Major hurried out after them and handed each a bar of chocolate (he had recently taken to carrying chocolate in his pockets to give to the ragged, famished children he encountered on his walks). They looked at the chocolate, sniffed, but finally accepted it.

  The following day the Major came upon the twins in a deserted sitting-room sifting through a mountain of hats, muffs, boas and shoes. The hats were hopelessly lush and exotic, they told him peevishly. Who could possibly wear such things?

  “Look at this!” Faith showed him a broad-brimmed felt hat swathed in yards of orange satin with a bird clinging to the back.

  “Or this, it looks like a whole farmyard,” she said, throwing him another hat of black leghorn trimmed with a jungle of osprey feathers and real oats. They appeared to be mollified, however, by the boas; indeed, the Major found himself having to adjudicate a squabble that developed over a magnificent boa of magenta cock feathers. It went to Charity on the understanding that Faith should have first claim over a matching hat, tippet and muff of peacock feathers (the muff even had a beak and brown glass eyes on the alert), together with first choice of the silk parasols. Finally, the twins made another discovery: Angela’s shoes fitted them to perfection! Unfortunately, however, old Mrs Rappaport happened to hear about the shoes and caused a dreadful scene. They must wear their button boots up to their calves for the sake of their ankles! Otherwise they would look like milkmaids when they grew up. The old lady achieved the support of Edward in this matter (although, to tell the truth, he was losing interest in the twins’ clothing) and shoes were forbidden. The twins became spiteful and for days refused to go near their grandmother. But presently all was forgotten and nobody (except the Major) seemed to notice that they had gone back to wearing Angela’s shoes. Certainly no one thought of mentioning the fact to old Mrs Rappaport.

  This incident marked the beginning and also, really, the end of Edward’s economy drive. The simple truth was that the old ladies were right: it was as if an economy drive had already been in operation. There was nothing much left to economize on. True, one could sack a few servants, but they were paid so little anyway it hardly seemed worth while. Besides, the place was already in a scarcely habitable state. If, into the bargain, the servants were sacked what would it be like? Well, probably, not much different, as a matter of fact, because the problem of keeping the place clean had long since gone beyond the point where Murphy and the blushing young girls “up from the country” could make a significant impact on it, even if they had wanted to (which they did not, particularly).

  Murphy had been behaving oddly of late. At Edward’s meeting he had shown signs of abject terror lest his meagre income be stifled by the proposed economies. But now there came to the Major’s ears o
ne or two extraordinary rumours about the aged manservant’s truculent behaviour; rumours, of course, which anyone who had set eyes on the chap could scarcely credit.

  According to a story circulated by Miss Staveley, one of the oldest and deafest but not least talkative ladies in the hotel, Murphy had been asked to assist her up the stairs to her room on the first floor where she had the feeling she might find her pince-nez. The impudent old rascal was reported to have told her bluntly that she would do better to stay where she was...before padding away down some lonely corridor with a wheezing chuckle. Unable to believe her ears (she was distinctly hard of hearing, it was true) she had waited for him to come back. But there had been no sign of him. He had disappeared into the dim recesses of the interior and it was hopeless to look for him (nobody, not even the twins, not even Edward himself, knew the geography of that immense rambling building better than Murphy who had spent his life in it). She had not set eyes on him again for two days, by which time she had found her pince-nez in her sewing basket and lost them again (this time the Major was conscripted to help in the search and found them on the nose of the statue of Venus in the foyer). This rumour reached Edward who rebuked Murphy. But Murphy denied all knowledge of the affair and clearly did not know what pince-nez were; he seemed to have a vague idea that they were a reprehensible form of underwear worn by foreign ladies. One just had to give the fellow the benefit of the doubt and, besides, Miss Staveley... Edward tapped his forehead and rolled his eyes.