A Man Over Forty (27 page)

They both advanced on Honoria and her startled guests, and Balintore said, ‘I beg you to disregard what this man is going to tell you. It's an idle tale of no importance —'

‘Let them judge for themselves,' said O'Halloran.

‘I can't stop him telling it, without using force —'

‘Nobody's going to use force on me! And it's a story that, in my opinion, you'll enjoy. It's a story with a fine setting, for one thing: the beautiful town of Seville, no less. We were there together, on leave from the front, where we'd had a hard time of it, and we were in a mood to enjoy ourselves, as we deserved to. Yes, I'll grant him that. But Mr Balintore went too far —'

‘I was very young,' said Balintore.

‘He disgraced the regiment, the Tercio del Alcazar, and the
uniform we wore! We were at the bullring, you understand, and he was as pissed as a newt.'

‘He was
what?'
asked Honoria.

‘He was drunk,' said O'Halloran. ‘And what do you think happened to him?'

Before he could tell them, the house was shaken, as if by earthquake, by a deafening explosion that was repeated before the first blast had spent its energy. The double shock split, with a rending crash, the tall south window and lifted the heavy curtains as if a gale of wind were filling them. Pictures fell from the wall, and rugs blew across the floor. The ceiling shook, the floor trembled, and the two great chandeliers of Waterford glass began to swing in a wild and agitated movement with an incessant, high-pitched chatter and tinkle.

‘My chandeliers!' cried Honoria, who had fallen backwards on to a sofa.

‘Stand away!' shouted Palladis.

His warning came too late. After a violent and convulsive lurch, the chandelier nearer to the south window broke from its anchor in the ceiling and fell – exploding like shrapnel – in a brilliant hail of glittering, sharp-edged pieces. O'Halloran and Mrs Brennan were both hit and slightly wounded, but Balintore was knocked unconscious. At the centre of the chandelier had been a huge, many faceted pineapple of solid crystal, and this, breaking free with great velocity, had struck him with a shattering impact on the left temple. He lay motionless on the floor, and his larger need for sympathy helped the others to recover from their fright.

It Was not till late the following afternoon that Balintore recovered consciousness. He had stirred and wakened – or appeared to waken – a little before noon, but paid no attention to what was said to him. After about ten minutes his eyes had closed, and he relapsed into coma or deep sleep. At five o'clock Palladis, who was sitting with him, heard him sigh, or
lightly groan, and saw that his eyes were open and intelligent again.

Palladis asked gently if he was comfortable. There was a long silence before Balintore replied.

‘Who am I?' he asked.

‘You're still rather mixed up, aren't you? The question you ought to ask is
Where am I?'

‘Don't be a bloody fool! I know perfectly well where I am. But who am I? Who, who?'

‘At this moment you're an invalid suffering from a slight concussion.'

‘A damned ponderous concussion! What time is it?'

‘Five o'clock on Saturday afternoon.'

‘Was O'Halloran hurt?'

‘A cut on the cheek, not deep.'

‘That's a pity.'

‘Would you like a drink?'

‘Soda water.'

He drank thirstily and said, ‘Now I'm going to sleep again.'

He woke at ten to say he felt well, and was hungry. He insisted on getting up to wash, and then, sitting up in bed, ate toast and scrambled eggs, and drank several cups of tea.

‘What hit me?' he asked.

‘A piece of Waterford glass about the size of a pineapple.'

‘There was an explosion at the mine?'

‘It seems they had drilled holes for two sets of charges, loaded them, and by some mistake fired both together. A man called Ryan was more or less responsible, and he was drunk.'

‘Was he hurt?'

‘The roof fell in, and he and another man called Clancy were trapped. O'Halloran and the Doctor organized a rescue party, and got them out alive. But Ryan has a broken leg and Clancy a broken arm.'

‘And this house?'

‘The drawing-room looks as if a small shell had burst in it.'

‘It wasn't my fault,' said Balintore.

‘No one suggested that.'

‘Even if I had submitted to blackmail and promised him£500, it wouldn't have prevented an explosion.'

‘What was the story he was going to tell?'

‘A damned silly story. We'd been in the line for weeks on end – more than a month – and when we came out we got a few days' leave. We went to Seville, just the two of us, and got drunk. I was very drunk. I was only – how old was I? Twenty, I suppose.'

‘What happened?'

‘We went to a bullfight. We were standing at the barrera, and I had a flag that we'd taken from a battalion of FAI.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Federation Anarquista Ibérica
. It was a red and black flag, and I thought it would be amusing to wave it. But a couple of peons on the other side of the barrera thought different, so I jumped over to argue with them. I knocked one of them down, and ran out into the middle of the ring. Then I saw the bull, and waved the flag at him. He didn't seem to like Anarchists any more than I did, and charged. I turned and ran like hell, but not fast enough, and the next thing I knew I was on his horns. He threw me, and tried to steam-roller me. But they got him away, and I was invalided out of the army with a cornada in my left cheek.'

‘You've led an even fuller life than I had supposed,' said Palladis.

‘Now O'Halloran has got it into his head that I can't afford to let that story be made public, and I ought to pay £500 for his silence.'

‘But you refused.'

‘I refused. And I shan't see him again, if I can help it. I'm not going to be blackmailed, and I don't want to be persecuted!'

‘Don't get excited. You're quite safe from him here – and I think you ought to go to sleep again.'

The following morning Balintore ate a large breakfast, but was in a melancholy mood. He had slept poorly, he said, tormented by bad dreams.

‘That damned fellow was after me,' he said, ‘and I seemed to spend half the night running away from him in the senseless, agonized panic of nightmare. At one time my feet were stuck in a bog and I couldn't move, and the next moment I'd
be swimming in dark water or floating through the clouds. I was like Rimbaud's drunken boat,
”perdu sous les cheveux desanses, jeté par l'ouragan dans l'éther sans oiseau”
. And when I woke up, dog-tired, I began asking myself again, Who am I?'

‘Without reply?'

‘It's a question that will never be answered.' A few minutes later he asked, ‘Have you any strong feelings about incest?'

‘I can understand the Church's objection to it, and I suppose the biological arguments against it are sound enough, if it's carried to excess. But it must have been fairly common in northern countries in the winter; and in the slums of the industrial revolution. I suppose it's only in primitive or tribal society, governed by unbreakable tabu, that it has never occurred.'

‘I,' said Balintore, ‘have always had an intense desire to commit incest with my sister.'

‘But you haven't a sister.'

‘I may have a dozen sisters, or half-sisters. And whenever I'm strongly attracted to a woman, I always hope it's a guilty, incestuous attraction. But it never has been, and perhaps it never will be.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Sooner or later something happens, or she says something, that makes it quite impossible to suppose we're blood-relations. I can't believe a sister of mine would be so stupid as they always are.'

Dr Brennan came in about midday and assured Balintore that he had suffered no serious or incapacitating injury. ‘No fracture, not even a chip. Oh, there's nothing like a good thick head,' he said cheerfully, and put a thermometer into his patient's mouth.

‘A bit over 100,' he said. ‘100.4, if I can see it properly. You'd better stay in bed for another day or two. Eat what you like, and if you want to drink, put plenty of water in it.'

He went down to inspect the damage in the drawing-room, where he found Honoria, Palladis, and two men from the village who were re-glazing the south window. Two massive
portraits, their heavy frames split and showing plaster under the gilt, stood against a wall, and on a table were heaped, in a glittering pile, the many dismembered parts of the fallen chandelier. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling.

‘It might have been worse,' said Dr Brennan. ‘Oh, it might have been much worse. You'll be insured?'

Honoria was not so easily comforted. Being English, she set a higher value on material possessions than did Dr Brennan, and stood with a woebegone expression as she tried to arrange bright pendants and rosettes of scintillant glass in the patterns they had once adorned.

‘The story that Dan Clancy's telling now,' said the Doctor, ‘is that they drilled two sets of holes, one for a charge to be fired that night, and one the next morning. But Ryan, he says, was drunk, and that's like enough, and out of excessive zeal and devotion to duty loaded them with twice the proper dose of gelignite, and by a mistake that he can't understand fired all together. But Ryan says it was all Clancy's fault, and God knows what the truth is.'

‘What is O'Halloran doing?' asked Palladis.

‘You'd be heart-sorry for the man to see him now,' said the Doctor. ‘This drawing-room looks like the picture of an Ideal Home Exhibition in comparison with the mine, and he and Tom Devlin are working like heroes, trying to clear up the mess, and taking no heed at all of danger to themselves.'

‘You needn't expect me to sympathize with him,' said Honoria.

Palladis went out with the Doctor, and at the south-eastern corner of the house they looked at a pile of broken slates.

‘But it's an old roof,' said the Doctor. ‘A lot of those slates would have been lying loose, just waiting the excuse of a good westerly gale to come down. It's the foundations and walls of an old house that are made to last: if this was a new house, it wouldn't be a house at all today.'

In the afternoon Palladis took Honoria for a walk, and tried, with what skill and ingenuity he could muster, to find consolation for her. But she was deeply upset by what had happened, and the ruin of her drawing-room seemed to her like a mockery of the lonely years she had spent in Ireland since her
husband's death. It was not for her own pleasure she had chosen to live there, but to keep and preserve – for her son who was at school in England – the house and remaining acres of the estate that his father had loved and mismanaged. But what hope of conservation was there in a land where drunkards were left in charge of gelignite?

‘There's a quality of destruction in the country, and in the people too,' she said, ‘and sometimes I hate them for it, but sometimes I think they're right. For nothing lasts, and we shouldn't set our hearts on what can break or be lost. But oh, I loved those chandeliers!'

They turned and walked home in silence; and were the more surprised, when Palladis opened the front door, to hear a furious din of angry voices. It came from the drawing-room, where they found Balintore, bare-footed and wearing only pyjamas, brandishing a poker at an equally irate O'Halloran who, dirty and unshaven, had obviously come straight from the mine.

‘You maladroit, evil-minded, blackmailing bog-trotter!' shouted Balintore. ‘Get out of here, or I'll beat your head in!'

‘Put down that bloody poker,' said O'Halloran, ‘and for God's sake listen to the voice of reason! If I tell that story you'll be the laughing-stock of the world, and I'm offering you a fair bargain. I need that money—'

‘What you need is a strait-waistcoat and a gag in your mouth! You've a demented mind, and no one can blame you for that who didn't know your parents. It may be the only inheritance they were able to leave you—'

‘Don't you say a word against my saintly mother!'

‘– but your manners are what you've made for your own use, and what were the models you chose? A wart-hog for stark insensitivity, a wolverine for greed, and for impudence a Cairene belly-dancer!'

‘Now keep your tongue clean, Balintore! Can you not see there's a lady in the room?'

Still in the doorway, Honoria and Palladis had been listening to this exchange with some displeasure at so vulgar a debate; but with sufficient interest in what was being said to keep their displeasure silent. Now, however, Honoria came into the
room and said coldly, ‘I once invited you to dinner, Mr O'Halloran, but I didn't give you the freedom of the house. If you have come to apologize for the damage you did, please do so, and then go.'

‘It wasn't me that did the damage. You can't blame me for that!'

‘It was entirely your fault.'

‘I've suffered more than you. The mine's a ruin, and there's the only man rich enough to help me, and he'll do nothing for me, though we fought side by side in the bloody trenches of the Casa del Campo!'

‘I think you had better go,' said Palladis.

‘Not till I tell Madame O'Turke the story of the last time I saw him—'

‘I don't want to hear it.'

‘There he was, sitting on the horns of a great black bull that took him three times round the ring at Seville – him in the uniform of the Tercio del Alcazar – and twenty thousand people on their feet to see him, all jeering and throwing cushions at him!'

Honoria had gone to speak to Balintore, who, after his show of defiance, appeared to be exhausted, and sat listlessly in a chair still holding his defensive poker. She persuaded him to go back to bed, and promised to bring him a drink.