The Empire Trilogy (37 page)

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.

In this unbearably sensitive state he took an unfamiliar route—through a grimy bar that no one ever visited, through a door like a cupboard that contained a flight of wooden uncarpeted steps. It was as if he had been skinned alive; the thought of contact with anyone was more than he could endure. The slightest banal word would produce a scream of agony.

The staircase took him up into a round, many-windowed turret, the floor of bare wooden boards, empty of everything except a carved lion and unicorn, worm-eaten and hanging from a nail. A strong smell of boiled cabbage hung in the air and somehow seemed to belong to the silence.

Another door led into a covered catwalk spanning thirty feet of empty air to another, identical turret. Below lay the dank, sunless remains of a rock-garden. The Major ventured circumspectly on to the catwalk, testing the wooden planks with his foot before putting any weight on them. There were no windows. Slatted trays of apples banked up from floor to ceiling allowed him barely enough room to squeeze through. The smell of apples was overpowering. He picked one up and, sniffing its wrinkled, greasy skin, somehow found this autumnal smell soothing. The turret at the end of the passage was as empty as its sibling. Steps led down from it on to an open veranda on which a man was standing, elbows on the iron rail, smoking a cigarette. It was the tutor.

“Hello.”

The tutor turned towards him and nodded without surprise. He was wearing roughly darned plus-fours and a tweed jacket with pleated, bulging pockets which reached almost to his knees. Since the education of the twins had lapsed once more the Major could not remember having set eyes on him. He was seldom to be seen about the hotel. He ate his meals in some other part of the building, perhaps with the servants. Presumably he was still responsible for cooking the stew of sheeps' heads for the dogs. If he had other duties the Major did not know of them. In all probability he had been forgotten in this remote part of the house and lived his own life, waiting for better days.

“They come here every evening at this time,” the tutor said.

The Major had joined him on the veranda and having had a look round now knew where he was. Below was a paved courtyard full of rubbish and dead leaves, although there was no tree in sight. Just round the corner would be the back door to the kitchens. Beyond that, on the other side of a wall, the dogs would be lounging, bored as the ladies of a harem, waiting for someone to come and give them some exercise. Immediately below the veranda yawned four giant, malodorous dustbins. A number of old women dressed in black were rummaging in these bins with fingers as gnarled as hens' feet, head and shoulders swathed in black shawls that concealed their faces.

“They're looking for food. They come up from the beach every evening when it begins to get dark—they can get in easily that way provided there isn't a high tide. I told Mr Spencer about it but he hasn't done anything.”

The Major stared down at the moving black figures, smelling the aromatic scent of the tutor's cigarette. A shrill, incoherent argument had broken out between two of the women over a greasy newspaper containing scraps and bones. Watching them, the Major thought with despair: “She doesn't love me at all. She doesn't love me at all.”

Below, the argument was at last settled. One of the women withdrew and, squatting on the ground, opened the newspaper to pore over its contents, counting them over and carefully examining the fragments of meat. When she had finished she stowed them in an empty flour bag before returning to the huge bins.

“If you ask me, the cook sometimes throws away perfectly good food on purpose. They can get away with murder if no one keeps an eye on them.”

The Major nodded. His whole life would be spent without Sarah. Although it was now almost dark the black crones, oblivious of the Major's anguish hanging like a bitter fruit a few feet above them, continued to pick deftly through the rubbish.

* * *

THE PREMIER AND IRELAND

Mr Lloyd George, speaking at the Guildhall banquet in London last night, referred to the situation in Ireland. He said: “Before I sit down, if you permit me, I must touch on one of the few disturbed corners of the Empire. I am sure you will not guess what I am referring to (laughter)—Ireland (laughter). I hope soon it will be less disturbed. There we witness the spectacle of organized assassination of the most cowardly character (Hear, hear), firing on men who are unsuspecting, firing from men who are dressed in the garb of peaceable citizens and are treated as such by the officers of the law, firing from behind—cowardly murder (Hear, hear).

“Unless I am mistaken by the steps we have taken, we have murder by the throat (Hear, hear). I ask you not to pay too much heed to the distorted accounts by partisans, who give detailed descriptions of the horror of what they call reprisals but slur over the horrors of murder (Applause). I ask the British public—I am sure it is not necessary to ask them—I apologize for asking them—not to be ready to credit the slanders on the brave men (Hear, hear) who at the peril of their lives are tracking murder in the dark (Hear, hear).

“I am told that the result of the steps we are tak-ing is that you have had more murders than ever in the last few weeks. Why? Before this action was taken in vast tracts of Ireland police were practically interned in their own barracks. They dare not go out. Terror was triumphant. We had to reorganize the police. But as long as men are in dug-outs the casualties are not as great as when they go out to face danger. And the police are going out seeking danger in order to stamp it out (Hear, hear). And believe me they are doing it. They are getting the right men. They are dispersing the terrorists.

“If it is necessary to have further powers we shall seek them (Hear, hear), for civilization cannot permit a defiance of this kind of the elementary rules of its existence (Hear, hear). These men who indulge in these murders say it is war. If it is war, they, at any rate, cannot complain if we apply some of the rules of war (Loud cheers). In war if men come in civilian clothes behind your lines armed with murderous weapons, intending to use them whenever they can do so with impunity, they are summarily dealt with (Hear, hear). Men who carry explosive bullets are summarily dealt with in war. If it is war, the rules of war must apply. But until this conspiracy is suppressed there is no hope of real peace or conciliation in Ireland and everyone desires peace and conciliation—on fair terms—fair to Ireland, yes, but fair to Britain (Hear, hear). We are offering Ireland not subjection but equality. We are offering Ireland not servitude, but a partnership. An honourable partnership, a partnership in that Empire at the height of its power, a partnership in that Empire in the greatest day of its glory.” (Loud and prolonged cheering.)

* * *

The Major should have left for Italy now, but he did not, of course. A letter arrived for him from Cook's answering a variety of questions about trains, hotels and steamers which he could no longer remember having asked. He dutifully read it through twice, but five minutes later he was unable to recall a single word. By this time it was almost the end of November. Icy draughts played around the rooms and corridors of the Majestic and sent their freezing breath up the legs of his trousers as he sat in the lounge.

After some deliberation he wrote Sarah a letter asking if they could meet some time to talk things over—but she did not reply. Presently, he wrote her another letter saying that whatever her virtues, constancy was not one of them (not that she had ever claimed that it was). The only conclusion he could come to, he concluded, was that she was simply a plain, old-fashioned flirt, which was fine, of course, if that was what she wanted to be. A little later he wrote yet another letter disclaiming the one before, which, he regretted to say, had been written in a spirit of bitterness. Neither of these subsequent letters achieved a reply, however, and he thought: “All I've managed to do is to have an argument with myself in these letters. She'll think me quite mad.” And he forbade himself to write any more. At the very end of November, while getting dressed one morning, he became extremely depressed and one by one the buttons dropped off his shirt, like leaves off a dying plant.

This was also a bad time for Rover, who was gradually being supplanted as the favourite among the harem of dogs. By degrees he was going blind; his eyes had turned to milky blue and he sometimes collided with the furniture. The smells he emitted while sitting at the feet of the whist-players became steadily more redolent of putrefaction. Like the Major, Rover had always enjoyed trotting from one room to another, prowling the corridors on this floor or that. But now, whenever he ventured up the stairs to nose around the upper storeys, as likely as not he would be set upon by an implacable horde of cats and chased up and down the corridors to the brink of exhaustion. More than once the Major found him, wheezing and spent, tumbling in terror down a flight of stairs from some shadowy menace on the landing above. Soon he got into the habit of growling whenever he saw a shadow... then, as the shadows gathered with his progressively failing sight, he would rouse himself and bark fearfully even in the broadest of daylight, gripped by remorseless nightmares. Day by day, no matter how wide he opened his eyes, the cat-filled darkness continued to creep a little closer.

To share his place another dog had been summoned from the yard, a spindle-legged Afghan hound with pretty golden curls. Little by little this animal usurped the affection dedicated to Rover. True, he had some bad habits. If one managed, in spite of the draughts, to doze off in an armchair after lunch, there was a good chance of being promptly awoken by a warm wet tongue licking one's cheek—but some of the ladies did not seem to mind this. Besides, compared with Rover he smelled like a rose.

As December arrived, a curious thing happened at the Majestic: in a steady trickle more guests began to appear. There had always been the odd one or two coming or going; someone would be stranded in Kilnalough and obliged to stay the night before going on to Dublin in the morning. But now the number of old ladies (and there were even one or two old gentlemen), was increasing noticeably. It was a little while before it dawned on the Major that what they were com-ing for was...Christmas! He could not help thinking that far from enjoying a merry Christmas they would be lucky if the place did not fall on their heads. Of course they probably had some idea what to expect. They had heard, perhaps, that the place was not what it used to be; but the habits of a lifetime are hard to break. So many people, now elderly, had banked their few warm and glorious memories of childhood at the Majestic that, even though they knew it was not quite the same, they somehow found it hard to stay away.

At first the Major would sometimes be on hand when they arrived (neither Edward nor Murphy nor any of the servants would be) to cushion the shock. But soon he realized that it was easier to stay away like everyone else. The new arrivals would sort themselves out somehow or other. In the meantime it was less embarrassing to keep out of their way. Still, the Major would give them a friendly thought as they stood in the shabby magnificence of the foyer beside their mountain of suitcases, probably in silence waiting for someone to come, listening, perhaps, to the heavy tick-tock of the clock over the reception desk (which the Major had wound as a token of welcome) and wondering, could that really be the time? (which of course it couldn't) or glancing with misgiving at the numbered rack of heavy room-keys which, ominously, seemed to be nearly all there—the only thing about the hotel that
was
all there, they might decide later, including Edward and the staff.