“What’s going on?”
But Sarah ignored him, intent on what was taking place in the ballroom. The Major brushed past her and went inside.
Edward was standing on the orchestra dais, his face dark and congested with blood, his massive body vibrating with fury. He was glaring down at the young men frozen like statues here and there on the empty floor. Behind him the musicians were swiftly and silently packing their instruments into cases and collecting their music. Three or four maids who had been dancing with the Auxiliaries melted away from the floor and vanished.
Edward had begun to stride back and forth along the narrow platform with short, violent steps...a wooden music-stand got in his way, he kicked it aside with a deafening crash, then silence returned except for the ominous creaking of the boards under his weight. As he prowled back and forth his furious eyes remained on the faces of the young men on the dance floor.
Then one of the young men laughed. And at the same time a cold gust of wind blew through the open windows, swirling the curtains and fluttering the tablecloths, making the regiments of candles splutter and grow dim, sending up a blizzard of white petals from a wilted flower that lay beside a lady’s forgotten handbag. And then they were all laughing, rocking, hooting with merriment as they strolled unconcernedly towards the French windows. Outside on the terrace they could still be heard laughing as they moved away into the darkness.
Edward stopped pacing. His shoulders sagged and he looked ill. A minute or two passed and then the Major strolled across the floor and looked out over the terrace to make sure they had gone. He only saw a brief glitter in the darkness as an empty wine-bottle flew up from the terrace below, hung for a moment and then plummeted towards the glass roof. It smashed through the roof in a diamond rain and exploded on the floor in a thousand fragments. Edward, Sarah and the Major waited motionless. Presently from the glass roof there came another deafening crash and shower of glass, but this time the bottle dropped unbroken into the empty cushions of a sofa. And that was the end. It was only now that the Major noticed there had been somebody else in the ballroom all the time: sitting on another sofa in the darkest and most obscure corner holding hands were the racing motorist and his lady. But nobody acknowledged their presence and in due course they disappeared without a word.
“Where have you been?” demanded the Major bitterly. “And thanks for leaving me to cope with everything.”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Edward said curtly. Turning to Sarah he added: “I must take you home.” They left the Major standing resentfully amid the broken glass in the middle of the floor.
Unknown to the Major there still remained two Auxiliaries at the Majestic. After Charity’s fall the two young men who had been escorting them, the somewhat dubious Matthews and the clean-limbed Mortimer, winked at each other and hastened to assist the girls up the stairs. Charity needed this assistance; she had become extraordinarily sleepy and lethargic all of a sudden; she could hardly keep her eyes open or put one foot in front of the other. Faith, on the other hand, raced up the stairs unaided and even tugged at Mortimer’s sleeve (which made Matthews wonder whether his great experience of women, which had led him to choose the more intoxicated of the twins, had guided him to such a wise choice after all) whenever Mortimer, who had become strangely talkative, hung back to chat with his friend Matthews. The truth was that Mortimer, though determined to put the best possible face on it in front of Matthews (to whom he had once, in a moment of weakness, confided the description of one or two fictitious conquests), was distinctly alarmed by the turn events had taken and was secretly wondering just what he was in for...that is to say, he already knew more or less what he was in for, having had (or almost had) a thoroughly nauseating experience in a brothel in France, one of those “reserved for officers” (one shuddered to think what those reserved for the other ranks had been like). Even now, chatting garrulously on the stairs about Jack Hobbs hitting long-hops over the pavilion, he had only to close his eyes to see glittering-ringed fingers parting thick white curtains of fat to invite him into some appalling darkness.
Gay as a skylark and with more energy than she could find a use for, Faith had now begun to climb using only one leg, her crinoline ballooning prettily with each hop—but even so she found she was ascending more quickly than the others. Back she came to tug at Mortimer’s sleeve again, telling him that he was a slowcoach and that he should forget his beastly cricket and come on up and...“My God! Just look at Catty! You’d think she was sleep-walking!”
Indeed, Charity was swaying helplessly, loose-limbed as a puppet, divinely relaxed. Her eyelids kept creeping down and it took all her strength to force them up a millimetre or two to see what was going on. Climbing unaided would have been out of the question but fortunately Matthews’s shoulder was under her left armpit, his powerful arm was wrapped round her back and a hand like a steel hook gripped the bottom of her rib-cage as if it were the handle of a suitcase (this hurt, she knew, but for some reason she couldn’t feel it)...“Jolly decent of him to help me, anyway,” she kept thinking.
“Hey! Are you all right, Catty?” Faith’s grinning face was saying a few inches in front of her own, emerging out of a grey fog of sleep.
“Of course I am!” she said crossly—or would have said if she had not been so busy with the weight of her eyelids.
“Of course she is!” Matthews echoed her thoughts, though rather defensively. “She’s as right as rain.” But at the same time he was becoming increasingly anxious lest he had picked the wrong one. This one was too drunk—either that or not drunk enough. Fortunately, while his right hand, fingers dug deep into the soft, elastic flesh of her waist, was holding Charity up by the ribs, his left hand was gripping the neck of a bottle of chilled champagne that he had thoughtfully caught up out of an ice-bucket in case a further anaesthetic should be needed. But what was the matter with that ass Mortimer? Was he showing the white feather in spite of all his big talk? In which case...
But meanwhile they had at last reached the second floor and Faith had picked out two adjoining rooms which she knew to be unoccupied. Having deposited one twin in each of them, the young men emerged for a hasty conference, Matthews suggesting that Mortimer might like to swap...“I think this one prefers you, anyway.”
But Mortimer considered his honour to be at stake and rather haughtily rejected the suggestion, though he knew (and knew that Matthews knew) that he would have been only too glad to accept if it had not been a question of honour.
“But you aren’t going to be a cad, are you, Matthews? I mean, your one is dead to the world.”
“Matter of fact, you’re wrong there. She’s already getting interested...”
Matthews and Mortimer separated on this disagreeable note, the former with every intention of being a cad if he possibly could, the latter determined to put up a good show (or at least not to be sick like last time). Matthews, returning to the room where Charity lay fast asleep on a dusty counterpane, cast an expert eye over her inert form and saw at a glance that he would have to be quick.
It’s not at all easy to undress someone who is unconscious —and Charity was wearing a great many layers of clothes. Fortunately Matthews was deft and experienced at removing ladies’ garments, otherwise he might have been so discouraged as to give the whole thing up as a bad job, thereby losing a heaven-sent opportunity. Besides, he knew himself to be a good worker and was proud of his skill. This was something of a challenge, all the more so since the clothes Charity was wearing were unfamiliar: crinoline and petticoats and odd pantaloons with all sorts of hooks and ribbons and laces and safety-pins in places where one would not expect them. He lit the oil lamp, removed his jacket and made a rapid preliminary check to make sure that what ought to be there was there—and it was (for even divinely beautiful girls are constructed on the same general principles as their more homely sisters). Then he rubbed his chilly fingers and set to work, his eyes bright with concentration.
Charity was rol
led on to her front, so that the eye-hooks that meandered up her spine could be unfastened one by one...but then something became stuck in front, so she had to be rolled on to her back, then on to her front again so that half a dozen white laces in granny-knots could be untied. Next he had to work his forearm under her stomach in order to lift her off the bed an inch or two, with the other hand trying to work the clumsy hooped skirt upwards...but he found this too difficult and had to stop and scratch his head in perplexity. It was clear that the only way was to roll her backwards and forwards working the skirt up a few inches at a time.
Each time he rolled her over Charity groaned, dreaming that she was crossing the Irish Sea to school in a black gale; giant waves swept her up and down, up and down...Of course she was never seasick...it would be too shaming if she was sick...but what if the boat began to sink? Up and down, up and down...Ah, no wonder it hadn’t been moving, Matthews was thinking, there were a million pins he hadn’t even noticed, he must be losing his touch...Now over she goes again, a firm shove on the hip and on the shoulder and...“No, no, straighten out your legs,” he muttered crossly. “We’ll get nowhere like that...It’ll take us all night.”
The temperature had been dropping steadily as the night wore on. By now it was freezing in the room. His fingers were stiff with the cold and lacked their usual dexterity, but he worked on without a pause. In a moment the first layer of clothing would be lying on the carpet. After that, things should go more smoothly.
Next door it was cold as well; at least Faith thought so. She was sitting in bed with her knees up to her chin, naked and shivering. The room was pitch-dark except for a faint orange glow that leaked under the communicating door from the oil lamp by which Matthews was working. Mortimer was striding up and down in the darkness. Although she could not see him she could tell more or less where he was by the sound of his voice and the creak of the floor-boards.
For some minutes he had been telling her about a master at school who had got drunk on Speech Day. Young, handsome, courteous, artistic, a wonderful athlete, the whole school had loved him from the loftiest prefect to the most insignificant fag until that day when he had gone weaving across the quad in gown and mortarboard shouting that the Matron was a flabby old bitch before the horrified eyes of a lot of chaps’ parents...But Faith’s teeth were chattering and try as she might she was unable to see the relevance of this story to their present situation. Was Mortimer trying to say that he was drunk? No, it couldn’t be that. But what was it, then? Having failed, together with Charity and Viola, to understand and identify on her own person a fair proportion of the technical terms used in the brown-paper-wrapped book that Matthews had lent them, she was vague about what exactly was supposed to happen to begin with; but instinct told her that this sort of preamble was not necessary. Perhaps she had got undressed too promptly? On the other hand, what else was there to do? If only there had been a light burning she might have been able to see his face and get some clue as to what he was thinking. Mortimer had refused even to permit a candle to be lit. He had become hysterical when she had struck a match to see where the bed was. After that she had had to grope her way towards it in the dark. The whole thing was turning out to be decidedly odd and a much bigger bore than she had anticipated. Discouraged, she dolefully rested her trembling chin on her knees and wondered whether it wouldn’t be best to give it up and start slipping on a few clothes again.
Mortimer was now telling her in a rapid, high voice about a fellow in the army who had gone for a trip on a whaler before the war, all those mountains of blubber, cutting through the mountains of blubber with flensing-knives! Ah, he could have done with a flensing-knife himself...The truth was that he was finding it increasingly difficult to avoid the curtains of white fat in which the room was draped. But now, striding about excitedly in the darkness, he had completely lost his sense of direction so that presently, ducking to avoid some limp tassels of lard that hung from the ceiling, he caught his foot in a rug and crashed forward into the bed, winding himself badly. Seizing her opportunity, Faith cast aside her sheet and pinioned him promptly against the mattress planting lean, dry kisses on his lips.
As he recovered his breath it slowly dawned on Mortimer that the sensation of touching a naked girl wasn’t at all what he had expected...Little by little the curtains of white fat began to liquefy about the edges. Soon they were sliding down the walls to the floor and melting into a colourless liquid that seeped rapidly away through the cracks in the floorboards. His hand touched one of Faith’s shoulder-blades...splendid, hard as a rock, nothing flabby about that! Next it alighted on her hip-bone and pelvis...solid as an iron casserole, it would chime as clear as frost if one tapped it with a fork (no need to think now about the spongey tripes that might be cooking inside it). Then came the ribs, every one clean and hard as the iron bars of a railing, drag a stick along them and they’d chatter like a machine-gun, a jolly good show (provided one forgot about the two oozing octopuses that were busy squeezing slimily in and out behind the bars). “Really,” he was thinking, “girls seem to be perfectly splendid little creatures!” But at this moment his hand, which had been hovering in the darkness over her ribs, swooped down to land by misfor-tune on Faith’s ample bosom—which fled silkily in all directions, quivering like a beef jelly. A vast dough of white grease (which Mortimer had somehow failed to notice suspended above the bed) at this moment detached itself from the ceiling and dropped, engulfing him.
Next door Matthews was crouched low over the bed working on a last stubborn knot in the region of Charity’s lower vertebrae; his mouth was open as he worked, partly from concentration, partly because he suffered from catarrh. As he bent closer, anxiously trying to see the ins and outs of this knot, the vapour that sped like smoke from his lips stirred the tiny blonde hairs running up Charity’s spine, causing her to groan and mutter. For a moment she even tried to lift her head. Matthews shifted his worried gaze to her face. She was going to wake up any minute! That would be just his luck! She was already half-conscious and every few moments she would thrash out blindly with her legs; once she had caught him a painful blow on the elbow. Now that he had only one miserable knot left to deal with she would be bound to wake up and call the whole thing off!
His eyes moved to the bottle of champagne on the floor by the bed. Better give her some more to drink before she became sober enough to refuse it. He left the knot and shifted his attention to the bottle, hastily working the wire harness away from the cork. He had just begun to dig out the cork itself when he heard footsteps. He paused. He held his breath.
It seemed to come from from the floor below (in fact, he had just heard the Major carrying Padraig to the linen room), but supposing someone came up here and saw the light under the door! It would take some explaining away—him up here with a half-naked filly! He’d have to say he had just found her like that. Maybe he’d better give it up...But the sound had faded. All was silent once more.
He breathed again. In the room next door that idiot Mortimer had at last stopped pacing up and down and got down to business. Charity was lying peacefully again now. He judged that the champagne was no longer necessary. Putting the bottle down quietly on the floor by the bed he returned, rubbing his knuckles and blowing on his fingers, to deal with this last knot. It was definitely the last, he had assured himself of that...Charity was already naked to the waist; all that now remained was a wretched knee-length camisole, tied firmly round the waist with (of all things) coarse brown string. Really, the things girls trussed themselves up with! As it happened it was Faith who had tied this knot for her sister—and as a joke (Charity had not been able to see what she was doing behind her back) she had tied it as tightly as she could, one knot on top of another, so that Charity would never never ever be able to get it undone. Matthews had stubby, thick fingers which were stiff with the cold although he had tried warming them over the lamp. To make things worse, he was in the habit of biting his nails with the result that he was now picking away at the
knot as clumsily as if he had been wearing gloves. He could cut it with a penknife, of course. He paused, tempted. But no; that would be unsporting. This knot was a challenge and he wasn’t the kind of man to duck a challenge. He’d already got so far, besides, he didn’t like to think of all his patient work going to waste. Breathing through his dry mouth, tongue between his teeth with concentration, he applied himself to his task.
And then his parcel was untied at last! It had taken him another three or four minutes before his diligence was at last rewarded. All he had to do now was remove the final wrapping; he would just have to roll her over on to her front and on to her back a few more times to ease the camisole off and then...he would have opened the small locked door leading into the garden of delight.
All this time Charity was being tossed savagely to and fro on stormy seas and by now she was feeling alarmingly sick. One moment she was rocking back and forth on the mail-boat with that dreadful lurching one feels as one first leaves the protection of the Howth peninsula and forges out into the open sea; the next she was shipwrecked and bobbing about helplessly in the water. It was icy cold and she had lost all her clothes—a huge wave had just come and turned her completely over, dragging away the last stitch she had on—and then somehow she was lying on her back on a rock and some appalling Creature (that resembled a black sea-lion with a white shirt and black bow-tie, rather like an illustration from Alice in Wonderland), an appalling Creature was trying to dislodge her from the rock and send her sliding back into the black water...and now a moist pink tongue was licking her kneecaps and a scratchy moustache was tickling her thighs ...At this moment, as luck would have it, her roaming hand closed over a very cold, elongated stone and she swung it up and hit the Creature with it. With a soft moan the Creature vanished back into the water...but Charity continued to feel sick until at last she vomited enormously, volcanically, over the side of the bed. Then the waves calmed down and she felt very much better.
The Empire Trilogy Page 37