The Empire Trilogy (40 page)

“I've been trying to reproduce some experiments Cannon made before the war on hunger and thirst. He was the chap who discovered that hunger-pangs come from a periodic contraction of the stomach. He got one of his students to swallow a balloon like this, inflated later, of course...then with each contraction the balloon in the stomach would be compressed, driving the air up along this tube, passing through the esophagus and in turn making the float rise by forcing up the water-level. Pretty ingenious, really. The trouble is that the wretched Murphy simply refuses to swallow the damn balloon.”

“Ah.”

“The point is that Cannon used a young man for his experiments. I wanted to see whether the average sixty-second period between contractions would be different in an old man like Murphy.”

Hands thrust in pockets, the Major gloomily surveyed Edward's machine. On his table there was no sign of the dead mouse. Presumably it had been devoured by the cats during the night.

“I took a lot of trouble building this,” Edward added with resentment. “One feels badly at being let down at the last moment.”

“Look, Edward, I've been meaning to ask you about the mason. Did you ever get hold of him?”

“Who? Oh, yes, you're quite right. It went clean out of my head. Thanks for reminding me. I'll see to it today.”

Edward frowned and got to his feet, picking up a glass measuring-jar which he tossed absently from hand to hand. Presently he said: “There's another experiment I'd like to try...one on thirst. There are lots of conditions that result in thirst apart from the simple lack of water—wounds, for instance. Severely wounded men very often complain of a raging thirst. The one that interests me, though, is the sensation of being thirsty through fear, the mouth going dry and so forth. There are lots of instances recorded but nobody has ever actually measured it to my knowledge.”

“How can it be measured?”

“Just a question of measuring the amount of saliva available in the mouth in the normal everyday state and comparing it with the amount of saliva produced in a state of fear.” Edward's face became faintly animated. “This might be a small but significant contribution to scientific knowledge. Of course Murphy's already deuced peculiar and one doesn't want to give him a heart attack...”

“Look, you won't forget about the mason, will you? We don't want the place to fall down.”

“I'll see to it right away.”

Unhopefully the Major wandered out of the ballroom, leaving Edward to ruminate.

Meanwhile the days were slipping away towards Christmas and still nothing had been done about decorations. The ladies became sulky and despondent at the comfortless prospect of spending the festival at the Majestic. Miss Staveley talked openly of going to stay at the Hibernian in Dublin where they knew how to do things properly. She might have gone, too, had it not been common knowledge at the Majestic that respectable ladies were being raped by Sinn Feiners every day of the week in Dublin; indeed, the aunt of someone's friend had only the other day been violated by a Sinn Feiner posing as a licensed masseur. Miss Staveley had no desire to suffer a similar fate, so she stayed on at the Majestic, but with bad grace.

At length the Major decided that something must be done, so he took the twins, Viola, Padraig, and Seán Murphy into the park to collect holly and mistletoe, while he himself chopped down a puny and naked Christmas tree he had noticed near the lodge. At the sight of this activity the ladies cheered up and soon they were helping to make paper decorations. The residents' lounge became a hive of industry. Miss Johnston mounted the largest and most drastic shopping expedition hitherto, and returned from Kilnalough with a great supply of glass ornaments and coloured ribbons. In due course this enthusiasm spread to everyone, servants and guests alike; even the newcomers became eager to lend a hand. The old ladies underwent a gay metamorphosis and showed themselves full of energy, humming and singing as they worked, reach-ing up with trembling hands to pin mistletoe strategically over doors or intrepidly making their way up shivering step-ladders to hang coloured paper streamers. The Major watched them and admired their daring. Whenever a step-ladder began to get a fit of the shakes he would spring forward and anchor it firmly, but then perhaps another step-ladder would begin to rattle on the other side of the room and he would have to watch helplessly, with that mixture of resentment and admiration one feels as one watches trapeze artistes sailing dangerously here and there under the circus roof.

There was only one casualty. One of the less prominent ladies, Mrs Bates, fell off a high stool while trying to deposit a glass fairy on top of the grandfather clock in the writing-room and broke her hip. By an unusual stroke of luck there happened to be a young doctor staying in the hotel overnight on his way back to Dublin. He took charge of everything and Mrs Bates was whisked out of sight before her fate had time to affect the morale of her fellow-guests. A few days later the Major motored over to visit her in the Valebridge nursing-home...but he was too late. She had caught pneumonia and died in the meantime. “Poor Mrs Bates.” Ankle-deep in a drift of dead leaves, he stood outside the nursing-home and sucked his moustache distractedly.

In the midst of all this cheerful activity and confusion Edward moved like a sleepwalker, silent and remote. If you called to him: “Where's the hammer?” or “Have you seen my scissors?” he would shake his head wordlessly, not bothering to understand. He seemed unaware that the grim walls around him were blossoming into festive colour. He remained where he was, at his table in the middle of the cavernous ballroom, slumped in a chair with a book open on his knee. The ladies, awed by his silence, tiptoed around the perimeter of the room as they executed their decorations. One day Miss Archer came to the Major and said: “He has a shotgun.”

“Who has a shotgun?”

“Edward. It's on his table in the ballroom.”

“Good God, what does he want that for?”

They stared at each other in consternation. Later, while Edward was out visiting his piglets, he went to have a look. It was perfectly true. On Edward's table there lay a shotgun, broken and unloaded. Beside it a dead frog lay on its back with its legs in the air, exposing a flabby white stomach.

All this time Padraig and Viola O'Neill visited the Majestic every day and roamed around with the twins, who had swiftly tired of helping with the decorations. For a few days they continued playing their game of dressing up Padraig as a girl. All of Angela's clothes were spilled out of their trunks, cupboards and packing-cases; the dresses that suited him were put in one pile, those that didn't in another. For a while they found this engrossing enough, but presently the job was finished. Just as interest was once again beginning to subside Viola remembered that they still had to consider the rest of Padraig's clothing, his underwear, petticoats, corsets and so forth. Soon they were all bubbling with hilarity as they struggled with eye-hooks and tugged on the strings of Angela's corsets—not that Padraig's shapely body needed any artificial correction of course, but they thought they might as well do the thing properly. After a day or two of trying to persuade the Major to go upstairs and have a look at Padraig clad variously in a camisole, a nightdress, and Angela's 1908-style swimming-costume (all of which invitations the Major declined firmly) the question of underwear similarly began to pall. It was clearly time to look for a new game.

The girls mooned about aimlessly for the next three or four days, telling people that they were bored and asking them for money—so that they could run away to Dublin and get raped like everyone else (they weren't too sure what this meant but it sounded interesting). Padraig, however, continued to dress up and sit with the ladies or glide along corridors with whispering skirts. Indeed, he had become such a familiar sight that scarcely anyone paid any attention to him now beyond, say, an absent-minded smile or a “Yes, dear...that
is
a lovely dress.” The truth was that most of the ladies had probably forgotten by this time that he wasn't, in fact, a girl. Only once did he provoke a strong reaction: Mr Norton unaccountably exploded with anger one day and shouted: “Get out of my sight, you filthy little swine!” Everyone considered this to be amazing behaviour, but then old Mr Norton had always been considered uncouth, in spite of his mathematical genius. Padraig was made a special fuss of that day to compensate for his hurt feelings.

One bright, chilly December afternoon the Major came upon Padraig on one of the upper landings, standing mournfully by a window. He was dressed in a glistening evening dress of powder-blue satin with gloves to match and he wore a string of pearls round his neck. The Major felt sorry for him. He looked very lonely standing there by himself. With a sigh the Major moved to the window to see what he was looking at. The view from here was almost identical with that from Angela's room: there stood her “two elms and an oak,” the oak supposed to be a hundred and fifty years old, the edge of a path where the dogs sometimes wandered...and beyond, beyond what Angela's clouding eyes had been able to descry, the ground sloped down to a wood. Walking up from this wood were the twins and Viola, escorted by a couple of young Auxiliaries who were laughing and prancing about them, throwing their berets in the air like schoolboys. The girls clung tightly together but looked charmed nevertheless. They had found a new game.

In the course of the next few days the Major glimpsed them all together once or twice again, walking and laughing in some distant part of the grounds. Sometimes Padraig would be in the vicinity too, not with them but sulking hopefully at a distance (ignoring them when they shouted at him, however). The Major clicked his tongue. He should really tell Edward that the twins were meeting the young Auxiliaries. But these days it was no use telling Edward anything! Moreover, Edward was taking advantage of his good nature, there was no doubt about it, leaving him to do everything while he amused himself chopping up rats in the ballroom. Depression came down on the Major like a blanket of fog, suffocating him. What dreadful days these were! The future of the British Isles could never have seemed so dismal since the Romans had invaded; there was trouble everywhere. The ultimate stunning blow arrived just two days before Christmas with the news that, in spite of courageous resistance by Hobbs and Hendren, England had been defeated in the first test match in Australia by the appalling total of three hundred and seventy-seven runs.

And then it was Christmas, which, at least to begin with, turned out to be a more cheerful day than anyone had the right to expect. Edward, who had been expected to spend the day in the ballroom with his rats ignoring the festivities, surprised everyone by the way he bustled around full of cheerful greetings for whoever crossed his path. His good spirits persisted throughout the morning service in church: he lustily sang the Christmas hymns and repeatedly nodded with agreement during the sermon (the pleasure and virtue to be found in turning the other cheek). He cast twinkling glances at the surrounding pews and smiled indulgently at the young children fretting impatiently beside their parents. Certainly he talked too loudly at the church-door afterwards, and again during the gathering for sherry in the lounge before lunch, but compared with what one might have expected...! The Major heaved a genuine, though tentative, sigh of relief.

After lunch it occurred to the Major to ask Padraig how Dr Ryan was getting along. It was a considerable time since he had heard any news of the old man.

“Oh, much the same really.”

“Hasn't he made it up with your parents then?”

“No.” Padraig shook his head. He was ill at ease. His parents had given him boxing-gloves for Christmas and they were hung round his neck by their laces like swollen severed hands. A small fat boy in short trousers called Dermot had arrived two days earlier to spend the holiday with his parents and by a singular misfortune he had also been given boxing-gloves. The twins, aided by two attentive, curly-headed young men in mufti (whom the Major recognized, nevertheless, as the Auxiliaries from the garden), were ruthlessly trying to promote an afternoon fight between him and Padraig, an encounter for which neither of them had any stomach.

In the middle of the afternoon the Major took the Standard and motored over to the doctor's house to see how he was faring. Padraig had at first agreed to come with him in the hopes of avoiding his boxing-match with Dermot. But then Dermot's mother had intervened to say that she wanted her son to “save” some of his toys for the morrow, otherwise he would quickly get bored and complain that he had nothing to do. After a period of reflection Dermot elected to save his boxing-gloves. Besides, as Miss Archer pointed out tactfully, it was wrong to fight on Christmas Day...that sort of thing should be postponed until St Stephen's Day.

“Very well, then,” said Matthews (one of the curly-headed young men), “the boxing will be for tomorrow.” The other curly-headed young man was called Mortimer and his curls were almost as blond as those of the twins. He had frank blue eyes, moreover, good manners and a pleasant smile, not to mention the fact that he had been to a public school. It was clear to the Major that Mortimer did not owe his rank simply to the war-shortage of officers: this young chap was quite plainly officer material and could certainly be trusted to keep his somewhat more dubious companion, Matthews, under control. The Major was relieved about this—there was no telling what the twins might get up to with a little encouragement.

Winking at Padraig, the two young men took the twins off to play touch rugger in the ballroom with Viola and another young man, using an old Teddy bear belonging to the twins as a ball. Dermot and Padraig shyly exchanged a glance of mutual dislike and despair.

The Major found Dr Ryan at home and by himself as he had expected. What he had not expected was to find the old man in the kitchen laboriously trying to prepare his Christmas dinner. Where on earth were the bloody servants? the Major wanted to know. They had no business leaving a man of his age to fend for himself.