Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [83]
Dupigny had watched his English friend with the utmost curiosity. It had taken the Major time to settle down after the war. For a while he had been in hospital. And then he had evidently witnessed some unpleasantness in Ireland which had affected his peace of mind. The terrible unemployment of the post-war years had further unsettled him. In those days, too, he had perhaps still been yearning to capture a suitable young lady as a bride. There had no doubt been some woman in Ireland … but that Dupigny suspected only. For the Major himself never spoke of such matters.
Over the years Dupigny had noticed the Major becoming more private in his habits and, in some ways, undoubtedly a bit eccentric. If you had gone to take coffee with the Major in, let us say, 1930, you would have witnessed a strange ritual. The housekeeper would first appear with a silver jug containing just-boiled water. The Major, still chatting to you politely, would whip a thermometer from his breast pocket, plunge it into the water, remove it, read it, dry it on a napkin and, with a nod to the housekeeper, replace it in his pocket. The coffee could now be made! Ah, that was the bachelor life for you! And there were other things, too. He had taken to grumbling if his wine glasses did not sparkle as clear as rain-water … yet at the same time thought nothing of piling his cigar ash on the polished surface of his mahogany dining-table, or of dropping it, without ceremony, on the carpet.
You might also, if the Major had ushered you into his drawing-room in Bayswater about the year 1930, have found it hard to discover a satisfactory seat, since all the more comfortable chairs and the sofa were occupied by slumbering dogs, refugees for the most part from Ireland’s fight for independence and by now growing old. If you did find a seat it would be covered in fine dog hairs: these animals were always moulting for some reason. The Major himself would merely perch on the arm of a chair while the dogs gazed at him with bleary devotion from their cushions. Sometimes, if a bark was heard in the street outside, they would give answering barks, though without moving an inch from their chairs. Dupigny had known few more strange experiences than that of sitting in the company of the silent, withdrawn Major towards the end of a winter afternoon and hearing those dogs erupting round him in the gloom.
‘Eh bien! So all is up with the Major!’ one might have thought in 1930, looking at him perched on the arm of a chair across his penumbrous, dog-strewn drawing-room. ‘Nothing surely can save him now from the increasingly private comforts and exacting rules of his bachelor life.’ One by one over the next five years while he, Dupigny, was again in Indo-China the dogs had dropped away and were not replaced. The Major, perhaps, was no longer very fond of dogs and had kept them mainly from a sense of duty, just as he had kept the drawing-room itself exactly as it used to be when his aunt was still alive. By this time, without a doubt, he had become a confirmed bachelor. The marriages of his contemporaries no longer filled him with such envy. He had begun to see that being married can have drawbacks, that being single can have advantages.
Not, of course, that the Major had not continued to fall in love at regular intervals. But now he tended to fall in love with happily married women, the wives of his friends and thus, for a man of honour like himself, unattainable creatures who personified all the virtues, above all, the virtue of not being in a position to return his feelings. The love he bore them was of the chivalrous, selfless kind so fashionable among the British in late-Victorian and Edwardian times, perhaps because (selon l’hypothèse Dupigny) it handily acknowledged the female principle in the universe without incommoding busy males with real women. Still, Dupigny had had to admit that his poor friend had a life which suited him very well, y compris les amours.
Agreed, the Major’s reward in these encounters was not the tumultuous one of illicit embraces between