The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [103]
At last he reached the fourth floor. He paused after a few paces along the corridor and steadied himself, thinking: “I must be feverish.” He had a sore throat. His throat was painfully dry. He had to keep swallowing.
Rover had been waiting for him to move forward but now pricked up his ears, alerted by some faint sound. Nose to the carpet he surged forward without waiting for the Major. He stopped outside one of the rooms and scratched at the door. A few feet away the Major halted and watched. Rover scratched the door again.
The door was opened a few inches. Rover vanished inside. The door closed again.
For a few moments the Major tried to visualize the scene that Rover would now be confronted with. Then he turned and tiptoed back the way he had come, stood for a while on the landing, thinking: “After all, it’s none of my business,” and finally made up his mind to retire to his own room. An hour or so later he got up and went to look down into the drive. The Rolls-Royce was no longer there. At six o’clock one of the maids pushed a note under his door. It was from Ripon and said: “Please don’t mention my being here to Father. Ripon.”
His incipient cold had taken away his appetite, so he did not go down for dinner. Instead, he got between the sheets fully dressed (the room was chilly) and dozed fitfully until late in the evening when there was a knock at the door. He sat up.
It was Edward. He stared in surprise as the Major, fully clad in waistcoat, collar and tie, threw aside his bedclothes and swung his trousered legs over the side of the bed.
“Look, about Ripon...” the Major began, dazed and forgetting Ripon’s instructions.
“Oh, he was in splendid form,” Edward told him cheerfully. “Spent the afternoon with him while Sarah was with her surgeon fellow in Harcourt Street. Mind you, he’ll need a bit of a helping hand...”
He was interrupted by a deafening volley of sneezes from the Major, whose head drooped wearily between his knees while he groped for a handkerchief.
“I say, you seem to have caught a bit of a cold,” Edward said sympathetically.
The Major nodded, his eyes streaming. On second thoughts he decided to swing his legs back into bed and pull the blankets up to his chin.
“You got your hair cut,” the Major mused.
“Eh? Yes, so I did. Stopped in at Prost’s this afternoon before going out to Ripon’s place in Rathmines. I mean, I couldn’t very well turn up there looking like an organ-grinder’s monkey, now, could I?”
“Of course not,” agreed the Major grimly.
All next morning Edward was in a terrible rage. His anger crashed and boomed around the Majestic, rattling the windows and scaring the wits out of servants and animals alike. A small dent had appeared in one of the wings of the Standard while he had been away in Dublin. Small though it was, it appeared to be this dent which was stimulating his explosions of passion. Naturally suspicion centred on Faith and Charity, although they wasted no time in swearing on their mother’s grave (and, when that failed to work, on their sister’s) that they were innocent. The Major was summoned to inspect the damage, but was unable to mollify Edward by saying that he thought it trivial. The twins, meanwhile, were darting covert glances in his direction, trying to warn him by telepathy not to mention it if he had seen them by the garages.
“Besides,” the Major lied weakly, unable to resist feminine distress, “they spent most of the day with me.”
The twins looked comforted, but Edward merely glanced at the Major in scornful disbelief. The twins were banished to separate rooms, locked in, and given only bread and water for lunch. Edward retired to the squash court to brood in the company of his piglets. It was the not owning up afterwards or, in other words, the telling of lies which was the real crime. He had made that quite plain. This was something he would not tolerate in his children.
The Major