The Empire Trilogy (6 page)

“If I were you, Major,” Ripon said gesturing up to the left, “I should aim for a room up there somewhere around the third floor...that part of the place is in reasonable condition by the look of it.” He must have noticed the Major's look of astonishment because he added: “A lot depends on how the roof is. We're not as watertight as we might be...though the weather does seem fairly settled at the moment.”

Could it be that Ripon was actually suggesting that he should go and forage for a room by himself while he remained slumped in a deck-chair? A moment later and there was no doubt of it. Ripon said: “In my experience it's usually best to have a look before the sun goes down because sometimes, you know, one finds that not all the lights are working.”

“How incredibly...well,
Irish
!” thought the Major bitterly. The fellow might at least have collared a servant and told him to show him up to a room. And was one expected to draw one's own bath? However, he would no doubt have accustomed himself to the idea since the quickest way to find a bed and a bath was plainly by not depending on the Spencers, had not the wretched, cruel (though crippled) girl Sarah not immediately divined his suffering and said: “Ripon, you can't possibly let the Major who looks so pink and exhausted and offended wander all over the hotel by himself trying to find a pillow on which to lay his head. Major, you mustn't let the thoughtless and inconsiderate Ripon treat you this way.” A surge of anger took hold of the Major. He would gladly have strangled her. As he stood up Ripon said: “Oh, the Major doesn't mind fending for himself, do you?” Then, possibly concluding that the Major did, after all, mind, he added: “I'm going upstairs anyway so I may as well give you a hand.”

Ripon got to his feet and led the way out, but not before Sarah had caught the Major's sleeve and said: “I'm sorry... I'm always saying stupid things that come into my head.”

She must have known, of course, that that would only make things worse—but no, perhaps she really wanted, in spite of everything, to be forgiven.

The room he found, though dusty, was a pleasant one on the third floor facing the sea. He had chosen it after looking at only three or four others. Ripon had disappeared immediately, but arrangements, he hoped, had been made for someone to clean it and make up the bed later on. In the meantime he had unpacked his suitcase and was glad to find that his bottles of cologne and macassar were unbroken after all; for some time he had been intending to achieve a smarter appearance, hoping that this might dissipate the notion that he was unstable and suffered from “nerves.” Having arranged the bottles on the dressing-table beside his silver hairbrushes he investigated the adjoining bathroom. A great gush of rust-coloured water came out of the taps at first, but then gradually it cleared to a pale amber and though it never became quite warm enough for comfort he endured it and felt better afterwards.

It was true that there was a curious smell in the room, a sweetish and disturbing smell which lingered even when he opened wide the French window on to the balcony. But he decided to forget about it and enjoy the splendid view over the series of terraces descending to the sea, until at last he heard the distant boom of the gong and made his way downstairs in search of the dining-room.

He found the Spencers waiting for him around a dimly lit table above which a faint aura of exasperation seemed to hang. He assumed that they were displeased at being made to wait for him. As soon as he made his appearance Edward picked up a heavy hand-bell and rang it vigorously. This done, he went to a small concealed door in the oak panelling (which the Major took to be a broom cupboard) and whisked it open. An elderly lady stepped out. She was dressed entirely in black except for a white lace cap pinned haphazardly to her faded bundle of grey hair. She was evidently blind, for Edward led her to the table and sat her down before instructing her in deafening tones that Brendan, that was to say the Major, Angela's Major, had come home, home from the war...

“Angela's Major,” she murmured. “Where is he?”

And the Major was apologized to and led forward to kneel beside the chair while the old lady ran a withered hand over his features. Suddenly she cried petulantly: “That's not him! That's someone else!” and there was confusion for a moment while old Mrs Rappaport (for the Major had identified her as Angela's widowed grandmother) was shifted into a position suitable for addressing the steaming plate of brown soup in front of her. A silver spoon was put in her hand, a napkin was tied round her neck and, still protesting feebly, she began to siphon up her soup with great rapidity.

Thereafter the meal became lugubrious and interminable, even to the Major who thought that in hospital he had explored the very depths of boredom. Edward and Ripon were annoyed with each other for some reason and disinclined for conversation. The tutor apparently did not eat with the family; at any rate he was nowhere to be seen. The food was entirely tasteless except for a dish of very salty steamed bacon and cabbage that gave off a vague, wispy odour of humanity. But the Major did not really mind. He was hungry once more and chewed away with a weary ferocity. Indeed, he was light-headed with fatigue and as he chewed his thoughts kept wandering to the bed that awaited him, as a bridegroom throughout a long wedding-feast might contemplate his bride.

In the farthest shadowy reaches of the dining-room a handful of guests dotted here and there at small tables occasionally revealed their presence by a cleared throat or a rattle of silver. But silence collected between the tables in layers like drifts of snow. Once in the course of the meal a brief, querulous argument broke out at the other end of the room; someone complained that his private jar of pickles had been used without his consent (it seemed to be the old man Ripon had described as a “friend of Parnell” but the Major could not be sure); but then silence returned, and once again the clinking of cutlery. Why are we all sitting here in shadowy silence clinking our chains like souls in perdition? Even in Kilnalough, he felt sure, in the wretched whitewashed cottages he had seen or in the parlours behind the straggling shop-fronts there would be identical shadowy figures clinking in silence as they ate their meals around a hearth. And it was too much for him, tired as he was, to endure. For this was the Major's first night in Ireland and, like a man struggling to retain his consciousness as he inhales the first fumes of chloroform, he had not yet allowed himself to surrender to the country's vast and narcotic inertia. He would leave the Majestic tomorrow, he told himself, or the day after, at latest. He would settle his business with Angela and go. After all, he had never really believed that they would get married. At most it had never been more than a remote possibility.

The meal progressed to some form of apple pudding which the Major, gorged on bacon and cabbage, declined politely. Edward and Ripon maintained their sullen feud. (What the devil was it all about?) Old Mrs Rappaport ate noisily and voraciously. As for Angela, his erstwhile “fiancée,” she seemed to have exhausted herself completely with her afternoon's evocation of the splendours of her youth. Pale and listless, oblivious of her Major's return from the war or of her ritual “every day I miss you more and more,” she toyed with her napkin ring and kept her eyes, unfocused and unseeing, on the sparkling silver crown of the cut-glass salt-cellar in front of her.

When at last it was over (no question of the women retiring while the men drank port; at the Majestic everyone retired together, “like a platoon under fire,” thought the Major sourly), and in the pitch-black corridor of the third floor he felt his hand close over the handle of the door to his room the Major was assailed by an immense sensation of relief and surrender. With a sigh he opened the door.

Inside, however, he received a truly terrible shock. Either he was in the wrong room or his bed had not been made up! But he
was
in the right room: his suitcase was there, his bottles of cologne and macassar were standing on the dressing-table.

He had no sheets to sleep in.

Now this was really too much! He picked up a china pitcher and dashed it savagely against the wall. It made a terrible crash as it splintered. But then silence descended, the all-absorbing silence of the mild Irish night. A squadron of fat brown moths zoomed clumsily in through the open window, attracted by the light. He closed it and sat disconsolately on the bed. The house was dark and silent now. He could hardly rouse the Spencers and demand sheets. He would simply have to sleep here as best he could, wrapped in dusty blankets. (It was true, of course, that he had slept in worse circumstances, but all the same...!)

Then he noticed again, more strongly than before, the sweetish, nauseating odour he had decided to forget about earlier. It was an awful smell. He could not stand it. But the thought of opening the window to more moths made his skin crawl. He took a slipper from his suitcase and stalked the fluttering moths. But after he had splattered one or two against the wall he stopped, his nerves jangled by remorse, and wished he had left them alive. So while the others continued to whiz and circle around the electric light he started to search for the source of the smell, looking in cupboards, sniffing the washbasin, peering under the bed (none of these things, as it happened, smelled very savoury).

A small cupboard stood beside the bed. He wrenched open the door. On the top shelf there was nothing. On the bottom shelf was a chamber-pot and in the chamber-pot was a decaying object crawling with white maggots. From the middle of this object a large eye, bluish and corrupt, gazed up at the Major, who scarcely had time to reach the bathroom before he began to vomit brown soup and steamed bacon and cabbage. Little by little the smell of the object stole into the bathroom and enveloped him.

“Let us pray. Let us thank the Lord for all His mercies, let us thank Him for His Justice enshrined in the peace treaty signed in Versailles last week in which the Prussian tyranny is accorded punishment...For the righteous shall triumph, saith the Lord; and in this world we are all subject, great and small, to God's Justice and to His Order. For there
is
an order in the universe...there
is
an order. Everything is ordained for a purpose in this life, from the lowest to the highest, for God's universe is like a pyramid reaching from the most lowly amongst us up to Heaven. Without this purpose our life here below would be nothing more than a random collection of desperate acts...I repeat, a random collection of desperate acts. Ripon, would you have the common decency to put that cigarette out and wait until I've finished?”

“What?” said Ripon, looking surprised. “Oh, sorry.”

Edward waited impressively while his son dropped his cigarette into the murky water of a vase containing a few pale-yellow roses.

“Now,” Edward went on with a frown, his concentration disturbed, “let us...let us never forget our position, the part each one of us must play in the Divine Purpose. We must not shirk. For there
is
an order. Without it our lives would be meaningless. So let us thank Him for the duties that accompany our privileges and pray that we may always discharge them as His faithful servants...Now let us thank the Lord for all His other mercies to us, for the reunion of families, for the produce of the land which comes to our table...”

Edward, inspiration gone, eye flitting round the room in search of reasons for giving thanks, was obliged to pause every now and then to collect and review fresh evidence of the divine magnanimity. In this way, among the more commonly acknowledged gifts of heaven he came to give thanks for some curious things: “the chairs on which we rest our tired bodies,” for example, “the faithful dogs” of Kilnalough, or, most curious of all, “the splendid century made by Hobbs against Lancashire yesterday.” It seemed to the Major that there might possibly be no end to this list: after all, if one was going to give thanks for chairs, dogs, and cricketers, why should one ever stop?

As it happened, however, Edward did stop, after a particularly long and distressing pause, by giving thanks for all those present who had come safely through “the dark watches of the night.” “Amen to that, anyway,” thought the Major peevishly.

But Edward had not quite finished. He still had to commemorate the Fallen. The Major, who was hungry again (either because the country air was giving him an appetite or because he had vomited up the only solid meal he had consumed in the last twenty-four hours) and who had been entertaining disabused thoughts about Edward's prayers, now felt displeased with himself. With his eye distractedly on a giant silver dish bearing a domed lid surmounted by an ornamental spike (strangely reminiscent of a Boche helmet) beneath which he believed eggs, bacon and kidneys to be cooling, he did his best to reverse his thoughts into a more pious direction.

The breakfast room, though small by comparison with the dining-room, was spacious, airy, and on sunny days presumably sunny since it faced south and was lit by immense windows, the upper part of which (beyond where a man with his feet planted on the low sill might be able to reach) was opaque with grime. The Spencer family and a number of the hotel guests were grouped round the largest table, hands on the backs of chairs and chins on chests (with the exception of Ripon who with his head on one side was staring up at a generous cobweb billowing near the ceiling). Behind them, grouped at random in an attitude of devotion or subjection (rather as if they had been left chairless in a frantic game of Musical Chairs) stood Murphy, three or four maids in uniform, a hugely fat lady in an apron and Evans, the tutor, his face pitted and pale as death. The servants, the Major assumed, were not taking part in this alien act of worship but merely waiting for it to be over so that they could serve breakfast. But Edward was still going through his ritual.

To the wall behind the table was attached a carved wooden memorial in the shape of a gigantic book with open pages; from behind them rose the head of a unicorn. Book and unicorn together made up the Spencer family crest; all Angela's letters had been embossed with it. In this case the varnished, elaborately curling pages had recently had two long lists of names chiselled into them, startling in their newness, the white wood beneath the varnish exposed like wounds.