The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [127]
“I shall never see you again,” he groaned aloud one afternoon, sitting high up on one of the blanket racks with a glass of whiskey and swinging his damp hairy legs in the air. But at that moment there was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?”
“Me. Can I come in?” came Charity’s voice.
“Certainly not.” The Major hastily jumped down and began to pull on his clothes. “What d’you want?”
“That girl wants to see you.”
“Which girl?”
“The one you all make such a fuss of. The one with the spots and the limp.”
“You mean Sarah? Tell her I’ll be down immediately.”
But Charity was still mooning outside the door when he opened it, and gave him a surly, reproachful look.
“How did you know where I was?”
“I saw you go in one day. What d’you do in there anyway?”
Although some days had passed since they had seen each other, Sarah seemed to be treating her visit as entirely normal. She greeted him as if unaware of the heartache that this separation had caused him. She was cheerful. She was delighted to see him. By herself she had been miserable. Why had he not come to see her?
“Eh?”
“I’ve been most horribly sick (ugh! It’s disgusting to mention such things). You might at least have come and cheered me up.”
“Was it an unmentionable disease?” asked the Major gaily, infected by her good spirits.
“All diseases are unmentionable, Brendan, but I shall tell you anyway. I spent a whole night vomiting. Isn’t that re-volting?”
The Major laughed, although secretly somewhat taken aback by this frankness. Of course Sarah was a law unto herself.
But she was irresistible. She chattered away gaily to him as they strolled arm-in-arm back and forth over the dusty floor of the ballroom. Yes, she had talked to Captain Bolton... What a strange, cold man he was! Those blue eyes of his! They said in Kilnalough that once he had glanced for a moment at a glass of water on Father O’Byrne’s table and ice had formed on it an inch thick...Oh, the Major was impossible! Of course it wasn’t true literally, it was true in some other way, how should she know in what way it was true? And, and... the miracle, had he seen the miracle after that absurd little scene at the Golf Club? Well, she’d taken a peek at the statue and there didn’t seem to be much blood flowing anywhere but there were a couple of brown spots...but they might have been anything, they might have been, say, oxtail soup. Oh well, if it was blasphemy to say so then so much the better, she’d have a sin to confess for once, which would make a nice change, her life was so dull...she could never think of any sins to commit, let alone confess, particularly when she felt sick and vomited all the time, it left her feeling much too weak to do any sinning...and anyway, since he, the Major, was a “beastly Prod,” she didn’t see why he should mind her saying something blasphemous, in fact he should positively encourage her, but never mind about that, what was it she wanted to say, yes, she wanted to know everything, absolutely everything that had been going on while she had been sick...
“You mean, going on here?”
“Of course I mean here. Where d’you think I mean?”
But the Major could think of nothing but the fact that he had spent three whole days hollow-eyed with love for her.
By now they were strolling in the residents’ lounge, shielded from the curiosity of the whist players by a bank of potted shrubs which had been evacuated from the Palm Court by Edward.
“Take a look at this.” Grasping a heavy plush sofa that stood in the middle of the room beside a table of warped walnut, he dragged it aside. Beneath, the wooden blocks of parquet flooring bulged ominously upward like a giant abscess. Something was trying to force its way up through the floor.
“Good heavens! What is it?”
The Major knelt and removed three or four of the blocks to reveal a white, hairy wrist.
“It’s a root. God only knows where it