“Och, it’s just a bit of nonsense. In a day or two they’ll have forgotten about it. But look who’s just come in, Ted. You’d have thought he’d be spending the day on his knees in front of the miracle.”
The Major turned. Mr Devlin had just come in and was standing uncomfortably at the door, smiling ingratiatingly in the direction of a group at the bar who, by accident or design, had turned their backs on him. Sarah was standing beside her father. For a moment her eyes met the Major’s but her face remained expressionless. Mr Devlin, in turn, caught the Major’s eye and began to make frantic signals of respectful greeting: would he be permitted to join the Major and his companions and perhaps have the honour of purchasing them a refreshment? The Major nodded curtly.
O’Neill said: “I do believe the awful fellow is coming over here.”
“I invited him,” the Major said coldly.
“Well, well, you don’t say...”
Sarah, sullen and with downcast eyes, hesitated for a moment before accompanying her father. She barely moved her lips in response to the Major’s greeting. Captain Bolton had come in silently behind the Devlins and followed them over to where Edward, O’Neill and the Major were standing. Boy O’Neill, meanwhile, was maliciously asking Mr Devlin what he thought of the miracle. Did he agree that it was mumbo-jumbo? Mr Devlin said cautiously that he really didn’t know what to think, it was such a strange business.
“But you’d better believe what they tell you to believe, Devlin, isn’t that right? Or else the priest will send you to hellfire, eh?” O’Neill, barking with aggressive laughter, was somewhat drunk, the Major realized. “So you don’t think it’s mumbo-jumbo then?”
Well, of course, in such matters one would want to be careful, because there was perhaps more to it than met the eye, at least, to his way of thinking...
“To your way of thinking but not to mine. If you ask me it’s a plain case of hysteria.”
“Well now,” began Devlin helplessly, “I’m not sure about that...”
“If there’s hysteria it’s because innocent people are having their houses burned down,” burst out the Major suddenly.
Bolton said: “There are no innocent people in Ireland these days, Major. If you put on a uniform like this you’ll find that everyone’s your enemy.”
There was silence for a moment. Then Bolton added: “If any of you are brave enough to be seen with a man in the uniform of the Crown perhaps you’d care to come out to the seminary with me. I’m afraid that the Shinners are using your miracle to do some rabble-rousing with. It’s a strange feeling to be in the middle of a crowd of innocent people, Major, any of whom may instantly become a hero by pulling a gun from his pocket and shooting you in the back without fear of being caught...How about you, Mr O’Neill? Would you like to come with me?”
“I’d be delighted any other time, but I’ve arranged to meet my wife.”
“Too bad.” Bolton smiled faintly.
There was silence for a moment. Sarah had at last lifted her eyes and was looking with amusement from one face to another. Bolton’s eyelids drooped sleepily.
“Of course I’m probably exaggerating the danger,” he added indifferently. “There may not be a single person with a gun in the whole crowd.” He paused again and his eyes flicked towards Edward. “How about it, Mr Spencer?”
“I really can’t see the point in taking foolhardy risks,” Edward said harshly. “That’s the first thing they teach you in the army.”
“Of course. You’re perfectly right. All the same, the Major here is an army man and I’m sure he’ll want to come with me.” Bolton was smiling contemptuously once more. Without turning towards her the Major was aware of Sarah’s eyes on his face.
“Certainly,” he said. “I’m ready to go whenever you like.”
The wind that had been blowing since early morning continued without slackening throughout the afternoon, a solid rushing of air that kept the branches of the trees pinned back and combed the grass flat on the hill-slope where the Major was standing. The wind sifted through Captain Bolton’s short fair hair and ballooned the jacket of his tunic as he sat on a shooting-stick, peering through binoculars. His wind-swollen shoulders gave him the appearance of a hunchback. After a moment he dropped the binoculars, removed the leather thong from round his neck and, without a word, handed them to the Major. The Major raised them to his eyes and looked down the slope towards the sea.
“Funny thing,” Bolton mused. “I never cared much for the Irish even before all this. An uncouth lot. More like animals than human beings...used to make me sick sometimes, just watching them eat.”
The Major had by now focused the binoculars on the seminary, which stood beside a rocky promontory. The crowd had assembled in a meadow in front of the grey stone campanile, whose bell, moved by the wind, struck an irregular, querulous chime, scarcely audible at this distance.
“I hope they all get rheumatism from kneeling in the wet grass.”
“They’re standing up again now. A young man is making a speech by the look of it.”
“Let’s have a look.” Bolton took the glasses, looked through them briefly and handed them back.
Even though earlier in the afternoon he had seen the roads packed with people and carriages, the Major was astonished by the size of the crowd. With the foreshortening of perspective the heads seemed to be piled one on top of another. A number of women stood on the fringes of the crowd and three or four carts in which invalids lay propped on mattresses had been dragged over the rough ground to the front of the seminary so that they could hear the speaker. At the upper windows of the seminary building white-faced boys craned to hear, grasping the heavy iron bars for support, while on the steps a group of black-skirted priests stood and stared and cupped their ears into the rushing gale of air. The young man now stood way out by himself on a jetty of rock that ran some distance into the sea.
He had a strong jaw above a thick, muscled neck in which the Major imagined he could see veins starting out, bulging furiously as the mouth opened and closed to articulate his soundless words of rage. He stood on a level a little below that of the listening crowd and the wind from the sea blew his matted hair forward over his face.
“Are we going down there?”
“You can go if you like, but I prefer not to get a bullet in the spine if I can help it.” Bolton stared mockingly at the Major and then went on: “I get fed up, you understand, with all the heroes in the Golf Club. You must excuse me for not being able to resist calling their bluff from time to time.”
“I see.”
“Sarah Devlin was telling me the other day what a fine man Edward Spencer is. A man of courage and principles who would never be capable of a cowardly or unworthy act—a real gentleman, in fact. She compared him favourably with me, a ruthless and unprincipled fellow whose men harass innocent people, burn their houses and destroy their property as the whim takes them.”
“What she says is true, isn’t it?”
Bolton smiled and picked up a dry twig, snapping it thoughtfully into small pieces between his fingers. “I do whatever the situation requires, Major. What I tried to explain to Sarah was that people like you and Edward can only afford to have fine feelings because you have someone like me to do your dirty work for you. I become a little upset when people who rely on me to stop them being murdered in their beds start giving themselves superior moral airs.”
“As a matter of fact I think you’re wrong about Edward. If anything he supports reprisals.”
“Perhaps, but without dirtying his own hands with them. That makes all the difference.”
The Major raised the binoculars and gazed once more at the young man on the rock jetty, wondering what he was saying to the crowd. Behind him as he spoke great towering breakers would build up; a solid wall of water as big as a house would mount over his gesticulating arms, would hang there above him for an instant as if about to engulf him, then crash around him in a torrent of foam.
“He look
s a wild young fellow,” the Major said as he handed the binoculars back. Before turning away he watched another huge wave tower over the young Irishman, hang for a moment, and at last topple to boil impotently around his feet. It was, after all, only the lack of perspective that made it seem as if he would be swept away.
By the following morning the wind had dropped and mild autumnal sunshine bathed the old brick and woodwork of the Majestic.
With the milder weather the Major’s nest of pillows in the linen room became hotter than ever, almost equatorial in fact. It was impossible to open the window, which had swollen with the rain and been painted shut many years ago. The heat mounted. After a couple of hours of tortured reflection on his relationship with Sarah, his naked body glistening like a savage’s, he would be obliged to gulp down several pints of cold water. It was true that later, when the meal had been cooked and the stoves banked down for the night, the heat would drop to a more pleasant temperature—but by that time he had worn out his emotions, written two or three feverish letters with sweaty hiatuses on the paper where the ink refused to stay. In some of these letters, forgetting that he could not permit himself to be weak, he capitulated completely (“Sarah, I love you, you must come back to me, ah, the heat is intolerable”). But fortunately he mastered himself sufficiently never to post them, thinking: “She’d only think me a bit of an ass.”
“I shall never see you again,” he groaned aloud one afternoon, sitting high up on one of the blanket racks with a glass of whiskey and swinging his damp hairy legs in the air. But at that moment there was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?”
“Me. Can I come in?” came Charity’s voice.
“Certainly not.” The Major hastily jumped down and began to pull on his clothes. “What d’you want?”
“That girl wants to see you.”
“Which girl?”
“The one you all make such a fuss of. The one with the spots and the limp.”
“You mean Sarah? Tell her I’ll be down immediately.”
But Charity was still mooning outside the door when he opened it, and gave him a surly, reproachful look.
“How did you know where I was?”
“I saw you go in one day. What d’you do in there anyway?”
Although some days had passed since they had seen each other, Sarah seemed to be treating her visit as entirely normal. She greeted him as if unaware of the heartache that this separation had caused him. She was cheerful. She was delighted to see him. By herself she had been miserable. Why had he not come to see her?
“Eh?”
“I’ve been most horribly sick (ugh! It’s disgusting to mention such things). You might at least have come and cheered me up.”
“Was it an unmentionable disease?” asked the Major gaily, infected by her good spirits.
“All diseases are unmentionable, Brendan, but I shall tell you anyway. I spent a whole night vomiting. Isn’t that re-volting?”
The Major laughed, although secretly somewhat taken aback by this frankness. Of course Sarah was a law unto herself.
But she was irresistible. She chattered away gaily to him as they strolled arm-in-arm back and forth over the dusty floor of the ballroom. Yes, she had talked to Captain Bolton... What a strange, cold man he was! Those blue eyes of his! They said in Kilnalough that once he had glanced for a moment at a glass of water on Father O’Byrne’s table and ice had formed on it an inch thick...Oh, the Major was impossible! Of course it wasn’t true literally, it was true in some other way, how should she know in what way it was true? And, and... the miracle, had he seen the miracle after that absurd little scene at the Golf Club? Well, she’d taken a peek at the statue and there didn’t seem to be much blood flowing anywhere but there were a couple of brown spots...but they might have been anything, they might have been, say, oxtail soup. Oh well, if it was blasphemy to say so then so much the better, she’d have a sin to confess for once, which would make a nice change, her life was so dull...she could never think of any sins to commit, let alone confess, particularly when she felt sick and vomited all the time, it left her feeling much too weak to do any sinning...and anyway, since he, the Major, was a “beastly Prod,” she didn’t see why he should mind her saying something blasphemous, in fact he should positively encourage her, but never mind about that, what was it she wanted to say, yes, she wanted to know everything, absolutely everything that had been going on while she had been sick...
“You mean, going on here?”
“Of course I mean here. Where d’you think I mean?”
But the Major could think of nothing but the fact that he had spent three whole days hollow-eyed with love for her.
By now they were strolling in the residents’ lounge, shielded from the curiosity of the whist players by a bank of potted shrubs which had been evacuated from the Palm Court by Edward.
“Take a look at this.” Grasping a heavy plush sofa that stood in the middle of the room beside a table of warped walnut, he dragged it aside. Beneath, the wooden blocks of parquet flooring bulged ominously upward like a giant abscess. Something was trying to force its way up through the floor.
“Good heavens! What is it?”
The Major knelt and removed three or four of the blocks to reveal a white, hairy wrist.
“It’s a root. God only knows where it comes from: probably from the Palm Court—one of those wretched tropical things. There’s a two-foot gap between this floor and the brick ceiling in the cellars, packed with earth and gravel and wringing wet from some burst drain or waste-pipe.”
“Why d’you think it wants to come up into the lounge?”
“Looking for nourishment, I suppose. There may be lots more of them for all I know. One shudders to think what it may be doing to the foundations.”
“Poor Edward! Come on. Let’s see if we can find any more suspicious bulges.”
They set off immediately, walking from one room to the next, along corridors, upstairs and downstairs. In no time this looking for bulges became a marvellous game. They spotted bulges on the walls and floor and even on the ceiling. “Bulge!” Sarah would cry gaily and point at some offending surface. And then the Major would have to get down on his hands and knees or place his cheek against a cold wall and squint along it in order to adjudicate. Although a number of these bulges proved imaginary, once one started looking for them at the Majestic there was no shortage of genuine ones. Did some of these bulges conceal thrusting roots sent out by one or other of the ambitious plants in the Palm Court? Probably not. However, without digging up tiles and making holes in plaster it was impossible to be sure. Even so it was great fun. Sarah was in the most delightful, effervescent mood and in between bulges she chattered away with all sorts of charming nonsense. What would she do without her gallant Major? How brave he must be to have won all those medals in the war (what medals? he wondered, perplexed)! And had he ever in his life seen a more delicately shaped ankle than hers (leaning a hand on his shoulder and lifting the hem of her skirt to show him not only her ankle but her knee as well)? It came from having been a miserable cripple in a wheelchair all her life, which had stopped her getting ugly muscles like a dairy-maid. And she was lost, she said, in admiration of the Major’s moustache, which made her think of a privet hedge she had seen in Phoenix Park. What a fine couple they made! she exclaimed as their twin reflections floated over a grimy mirror. What a fine couple! The Major laughed and laughed, as happy as a schoolboy. The afternoon passed delightfully.
Tired out at last, they sank down on one of the red plush sofas in the foyer and chuckled about the grey veil of dust that rose as usual, and about the clock over the reception desk which only told the right time, by accident, once every twelve hours. It was tranquil here, and oddly private, as public rooms often seem when deserted. By the foot of the stairs the statue of Venus glimmered in the subdued light.
Still chuckling, Sarah leaned over and kissed the Major, partly on his moustache then, more seriously and from a better
position, on the lips. The Major melted, but cautiously, remembering the remark she had once made about his moustache tasting of garlic. They continued to kiss for a minute or two. Then Sarah sat up abruptly, disengaging herself. The Major straightened up also, to see what was the matter. She was looking over his shoulder with an expression of shock. He turned to see what it was.
Edward was standing a few feet away watching them. He had evidently come down one of the corridors, his footfall muffled by the carpet—but no, the floor was surely tiled, there was no carpet, they should have heard him coming; perhaps, even, Sarah had chosen this very place because one could hear people coming. Edward continued to stand there for the briefest of moments, his face expressionless. Then he turned and vanished, his shoes ringing clearly on the tiles.
Sarah hurriedly got to her feet. As the Major made to do the same she pushed him back and said sharply: “No, wait here for me. I’ll be back in a moment.” With that she hurried after Edward. The Major was left alone.
The foyer had become very silent. The Major got up and went over to peer down the corridor. It was deserted. He listened, holding his breath. Very faintly he heard, or imagined he could hear, the sound of Sarah’s voice. Then a door closed. He stood there for a moment or two, then went to sit down again. The minutes passed. Sarah did not come back. “Really, that’s a bit thick.”
He had been there for half an hour by now. The foyer was silent and peaceful. Nothing stirred. Nobody came or went. For a while he played hopefully with the thought that Sarah might have forgotten that she had said she would come back, that she was waiting anxiously for him in some other part of the building. But no, he had to abandon it. It did not hold water. So that was that.
He chose the corridor that led away from Edward’s study and as he mechanically followed it he experienced a sharp craving for something sweet. There was a bar of chocolate in his pocket. He gobbled it rapidly. But the acid continued to eat into his soul.
The Empire Trilogy Page 28