The Empire Trilogy

by J. G. Farrell

  While they talked Dr Ryan scraped feebly at a potato he was trying to peel. A man of his class peeling his own potatoes! This was too much for the Major. Elbowing the old doctor aside, he seized the potato from him and began to peel it in his place, and then another and another (by this time he had taken off his jacket). Dr Ryan, unable to leave well alone, tottered back and forth from the pantry collecting things.

  “Will ye not stop and eat with me, Major?” But the Major had eaten already; his only interest was to see that the doctor ate. Still, he might stay to sample a little, see what it tasted like. And he became absorbed in the preparation of the meal —which luckily presented no great difficulties since the servants had left the chicken stuffed and it had only to be put in the oven. Ah, but there was no bread, except for the remains of a pan loaf, hard as steel, that was serving as a paperweight in the doctor’s study. They would have to make do with the potatoes and Brussels sprouts. And so he set to work again. But all that peeling and chopping took him an age, and Dr Ryan kept wanting to help, getting in the way and giving advice, as if the Major didn’t know what he was doing, which was more than the perspiring and exasperated Major could stand.

  “Look, why don’t you go and sit down and leave it to me?” he exploded at last.

  But the old man had become bad-tempered too. He was probably hungry, although he said he wasn’t. His mind had begun to wander as well...Fanny would soon be here, he said, with her mother and father, they were expected for Christmas. The Major did not know who Fanny was. He supposed she must be the doctor’s wife, dead, though, forty years or more. And no one did come, which in the circumstances was perhaps just as well.

  But then the doctor seemed to realize that he was being disagreeable and wandered away, returning almost immediately with two wine glasses and a bottle of sherry. So they had a drink and wished each other Merry Christmas...However, while the chicken was in the oven and they were waiting in vague desperation (the Major, too, had become horribly hungry, as if he hadn’t eaten for days) for the wretched thing to cook, the old doctor, although he was plainly trying to be nice to the Major, kept bursting out “British blackguard!”, which distressed the Major considerably.

  Soon a tantalizing smell pervaded the kitchen, the smell of roasting chicken—but if anything this made them more hungry and bad-tempered than ever and, besides, there was still a great deal of work to be done. It was time, the Major judged, to put the vegetables on to boil. Should one put salt in the water with them?

  “British blackguard!” muttered the doctor irritably. But then his mood changed and he murmured almost tenderly that the Major shouldn’t worry, that life was a fugitive affair at best, he should know, he’d been a doctor for sixty years... Then he shuffled away to the lavatory, for the cold weather and the port he had been drinking made him incontinent, and when he came back he was saying that, really, people are insubstantial, they never last. He himself wouldn’t last much longer, but that was a law of Nature, the body wears out... the Major wouldn’t last very long either, but one had to accept it and make way for one’s children and grandchildren... he himself had accepted it long ago because he had had to, long ago, when he was still a young fellow of the Major’s age. But here he was interrupted by the need to go to the lavatory once more, though he had only just been there, and the Major poked desperately with a fork at the bubbling potatoes and Brussels sprouts which were still as hard as stones. Strange, said the doctor coming back, to think that a beautiful woman who seemed like a solid thing, solid as granite, was really no more solid than a flaring match, a burst of flame, darkness before and darkness after...People are insubstantial, they never last...And so he rambled on while the Major ground his teeth and prodded the vegetables with a fork.

  At long last everything was ready and they sat down to eat at the kitchen table. Once more they toasted each other and really, thought the Major as they began to eat, it wasn’t half bad considering everything, though the potatoes were still not completely cooked. The doctor was tired, however, and could eat very little—the wine had no doubt made him sleepy. The Major helped him back to his armchair in the other room and made up the fire, banking it down with wet slack so that it would last through the evening. Then he carved some breast of chicken and left it on a plate by the old man’s side with a glass of port, in case he should feel hungry later on. Dr Ryan was dozing already, his head lolling against one of the wings of his armchair. The Major said goodbye, that he would call in tomorrow and perhaps bring Padraig. Without open-ing his eyes the old man made a faint, murmured reply that might have been: “British blackguard!”

  Edward had fired his shotgun at Murphy! He had gone berserk and tried to slay the elderly manservant. The strain had been too much for him.

  All afternoon the downpour had continued, so that by now the roads were flanked with bubbling pools; the wheels of the Standard sent out great bow-waves that saturated the hedges and stone walls. But the Major’s eyes were on the winding road ahead, alert for signs of an ambush. No civilized person, of course, would wait behind a hedge in a downpour on the off chance that an ex-British-Army-officer might come driving by. But were the Irish civilized? The Major was not prepared to risk his life on the assumption that they were.

  Nevertheless he reached the Majestic without incident. It was as he strode cheerfully into the lounge and found himself surrounded by pale excited faces that he realized that something was amiss. Everyone was talking at once, so that it was a few moments before he was able to understand what it was all about. Edward had summoned Murphy about an hour ago. After a brief, heated discussion a terrible boom had reverberated throughout the building. A few minutes later Murphy had staggered out of the ballroom more dead than alive (though physically unscathed) and was now lying down somewhere.

  “Where’s Edward?”

  “Still in the ballroom. But you’d better not go in.”

  “Don’t worry. It was probably just an accident. I’ll go and have a talk with him.”

  In the ballroom it was still light enough, thanks to the glass dome of the roof, for the Major to see Edward sitting at his table in the middle of the floor. He was scribbling rapidly on the top sheet of a thick stack of paper; a number of curl-ing pages lay beside him, already written on. As the Major watched, he came to the end of a page, threw it aside without waiting for the ink to dry and immediately started on another, the nib of his pen making a faint rasping sound, barely audible against the dull, steady roar of the rain drumming on the glass roof.

  The Major took a few steps forward. Scattered on the parquet floor around Edward’s table were a number of pinging jam-jars, two or three of which were already brimming. But more jam-jars were needed. Here and there shining puddles had already formed.

  “Edward.” The Major advanced with caution. “What’s all this I hear about you firing a shotgun at Murphy?”

  “Eh? Oh, it’s you, Brendan. Watch out where you’re walking. There’s a drop of rain coming in. Wait, I’ll get some light.” He crossed to the grand piano and came back with some candlesticks which he arranged in a battery around his writing-table. He struck a match, touching off one candle after another until his desk shone like a lighthouse in the gathering gloom.

  “It was just an experiment. Are they making a fuss?”

  “They are a bit. You can’t really blame them, you know.”

  “They’ll get over it. As far as Murphy’s concerned it had to be a shock, mind you. There was no other way of doing it. But I gave him a couple of quid, so I don’t suppose he has any complaints. He’ll be as right as rain in an hour or two.”

  Edward seemed calm and pleased with himself. The candlelight, however, throwing the lines and wrinkles of his face into sharp relief, gave him a haggard, insane look.

  “It’s never been done before. Never actually measured, that is...so, of course, as far as science is concerned it hasn’t strictly speaking existed until now. Plenty of subjective reports, but they won’t wash for your scientist. I
f you want my opinion, Brendan, nobody has ever dared to do it before. In Cannon’s book The Wisdom of the Body he mentions a person who was captured by Chinese bandits and thought he was going to be shot. His mouth went dry, of course, but he didn’t bother to find out how dry...He was a scientist too, I gather. Still, I suppose it’s understandable.”

  “You mean you threatened to shoot Murphy.”

  “He believed me too. Went as white as a sheet. For a moment I was afraid he was going to pass out, which would have ruined the whole thing. I had to keep him talking for a while so that he could get a grip on himself...but not too much of a grip. Told him the first thing that came into m’head... that his service had been unsatisfactory and so forth, and that he had to be dealt with. Then I pulled both triggers. It made one hell of a noise...even scared me. I’d taken the shot out, of course, so it was only the caps going off. Even so, it brought down a cloud of plaster from the ceiling...” He gestured to a corner of the room where the Major perceived what looked like a snowdrift glimmering in the shadows. “The place needs doing up a bit.” He cleared his throat and got to his feet as a drop of rain from a new leak in the roof hurtled into the area of light and drummed on the white stomach of the frog lying beside the ink-well. Picking up one of the jam-jars from the floor, he edged the frog aside with it, then sat down again.

  “Anyway, I dropped the gun and got him to spit out what saliva he could manage into the measuring-glass. D’you realize that he could only produce four c.c.? It’s incredible! Here, have a look. It may seem a bit more than that because I’m afraid a few drips of rain got into it before I realized what was happening.”

  The Major looked dubiously at the white froth in the measuring-jar.

  “I’m drafting a paper to send to the Royal Society. Maybe you’d like to see it before I send it off.”

  “Yes, I would,” the Major said.

  Above them, against the streaming, echoing bubble of blackness, the rain increased in intensity. Presently Edward said: “I always wanted to make a contribution, however small.”

  The Major said nothing. Together they listened to the steady, musical drips in the jam-jars around them.

  Nineteen-twenty-one. The rain continued to fall virtually without interruption into the New Year. By now most of the seasonal guests had disappeared, manifestly dissatisfied with their stay. But oh, if they had only known (reflected the Major) how much worse it might easily have been! He himself was so hardened that he no longer found it easy to sympathize about such matters as cold rooms and cold food, dirty towels and damp sheets. Besides, the near-escape of the dog Foch was still at the back of his mind. Compared with death itself these things pale into insignificance.

  In spite of the continuing bad weather Edward refused to remove himself from the ballroom. The Major looked in on him once or twice and saw him sitting there, calmly dissecting a toad under an umbrella. The jam-jars had proliferated around him, so that now, if one listened carefully, one could hear a symphony of drips against the percussion of rain from above. As for the toad, it reminded the Major only too horribly of things he still saw in his nightmares—indeed, for all its resemblance to a toad it might have been strawberry jam scooped out of one of the jars and thinly spread on Edward’s marble slab. As for the old ladies, they now had no other resource than to grit their teeth and survive as best they could the awful weeks between Christmas and Easter, keep their noses above the surface somehow or other until the green leaves were back on the trees. As for Padraig, he had not been seen for a few days. Although Dermot had by now gone back to school with his boxing-gloves, the two young Auxiliaries, Matthews and Mortimer, claimed to have found another prospective sparring-partner for him, the son of a farmer of the region—a lad who, although only twelve years old, was reputed to have to shave twice a day. As for the Major himself, the start of the new year could not help but fill him with a young man’s irrational optimism. Perhaps nineteen-twenty-one was the year he would get married (to Sarah, naturally, since matrimony involving any other girl was quite unthinkable)—but even if he did not (and he could not escape the unpleasant fact that for the moment he did not even know where she was), even if he did not, it was still a new year. Something new was sure to happen.

  Moreover, any new year was a gift that the Major somehow felt that he did not deserve. Although the Weekly Irish Times no longer published those inky photographs of dead men on the front page, the last stragglers having by now made up their minds whether to live or die (and those that were going having gone), he still had the same grateful but uneasy sensation. “You must do the living for all the others as well as yourself,” a kindly Scottish doctor had once said to him in hospital, trying to coax him back out of the cold areas of chagrin and indifference where his mind had chosen to stray. But of course that was easier said than done, particularly at the Majestic.

  The weather continued bitterly cold for the next few days. Getting out of bed in the morning, taking a bath with an icy draught sighing underneath the bathroom door, became an agony. The Major’s teeth chattered and he thought with physical distress of sunshine and Italy. People spoke little during this cold weather; the ladies curled themselves up in tight little bundles and compressed their lips to preserve every particle of warmth in their bodies. Twelfth Night came and went, but nobody thought of taking down the decorations. One had to keep one’s arms tightly hugging one’s sides these days; lift them for a moment and the chilly sword of pneumonia would run you through.

  Not only for the ladies was this a bad time. Padraig too was in despair. His father was now talking of having him apprenticed as a clerk in a solicitor’s office in Dublin, a prospect which no person of sensitivity could tolerate. Faith told the Major that Padraig was going about telling the ladies that he would prefer to dress himself in a scarlet cloak and leap from the battlements of the Majestic. The Major told her to tell him on no account to go near the battlements, they weren’t safe. The ornamental façade might give way at any moment.

  Wearing mittens and a Balaclava helmet, the Major sat in the residents’ lounge on a bright February morning reading of the day’s disasters in the Irish Times. Looking up, he noticed that Edward had come into the room. He gave a violent start. With Edward was Sarah! Her face was pale and tense; she looked unhappy. Edward stared sightlessly past her, but his lips were moving rapidly as he spoke to her in an undertone. Only for an instant, as he came to the end of what he was saying, did he allow his eyes to focus on her face before retiring to scan the empty reaches of the room once more. Sarah was protesting bitterly about something. The Major dropped his eyes and pretended to be engrossed in the newspaper. Sarah stood talking with Edward near the fire for a few moments. The Major was aware that her glance rested on him once or twice, as if waiting for the moment when he would look up and their glances would meet. However, he continued to scrutinize the Irish Times, frowning with concentration. Presently he was aware that she and Edward were moving away again through the chairs and tables towards the door. When he at last permitted himself to look up they were no longer there. “What a fool I am! It would have been much better if I’d gone up to her and made some cheerful remark and then wandered away again, so that she’d have realized how little she means to me since she told Edward about the letters I wrote her.”

  Edward’s experiments were languishing once again. His toad, spread out invitingly on the marble slab, had been devoured during the night by the omnipresent cats—they had evidently been undeterred by the fact that the toad had been marinated in formalin, which had turned it a blue-black colour, more like damson jam than strawberry. Edward still sat among his books and implements, lost in thought, his face extinct. But now sometimes his seriousness gave way abruptly to disconcerting bouts of hilarity; he became once more a player of mild practical jokes. To the Major, who had no sense of humour, practical jokes were disagreeable in the normal course of affairs; in cold weather they became intolerable—one simply had no energy left to cope with them. But neverthele
ss he was obliged to keep a constant watch on Edward, jokes or no jokes; he was obliged to haunt him, in fact, flitting along chilly corridors, taking walks in the grounds whenever Edward went to commune with his piglets, or repeatedly passing the ballroom windows to ascertain that he was still at his desk. The reason, of course, was that sooner or later Sarah would come again to visit Edward. Honour required the Major to seize the opportunity of making some casual remark to her which would indicate his indifference.

  The three of them met head-on in one of the high-hedged privet alleys of the Chinese Garden.

  “Hello, Brendan,” she said with a smile.

  “Oh, hello...you’re back, are you?” replied the Major casually, turning pale. Even though he had been prepared for this inevitable meeting, it had still come as a dreadful shock. She looked very pretty in her winter coat of heavy grey wool trimmed with dark musquash, fingers buried in a fur muff, ears hidden by a fur cape. Her eyes remained steadily on the Major’s, disconcerting him. In order to avoid this gaze he turned about and strolled in the direction they were going.

  Edward himself seemed disconcerted for a moment; he had been talking with animation but had stopped suddenly on seeing the Major. Edward continued to look distressed until his eye fell on a bird-bath in the shape of a giant sea-shell proffered by a cement nymph. Her body was naked, clothed only in patches of yellow green lichen on her stomach and beneath her arms; one foot had been broken off, a rusty wire projected from the stump of her ankle. The Major studied her with feigned interest.

  A great deal of snow had collected in the sea-shell and Edward was busy patting it together to make a snowball which he drolly pretended to throw at Sarah.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” she muttered testily.