The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [129]
He had been there for half an hour by now. The foyer was silent and peaceful. Nothing stirred. Nobody came or went. For a while he played hopefully with the thought that Sarah might have forgotten that she had said she would come back, that she was waiting anxiously for him in some other part of the building. But no, he had to abandon it. It did not hold water. So that was that.
He chose the corridor that led away from Edward’s study and as he mechanically followed it he experienced a sharp craving for something sweet. There was a bar of chocolate in his pocket. He gobbled it rapidly. But the acid continued to eat into his soul.
In this unbearably sensitive state he took an unfamiliar route—through a grimy bar that no one ever visited, through a door like a cupboard that contained a flight of wooden uncarpeted steps. It was as if he had been skinned alive; the thought of contact with anyone was more than he could endure. The slightest banal word would produce a scream of agony.
The staircase took him up into a round, many-windowed turret, the floor of bare wooden boards, empty of everything except a carved lion and unicorn, worm-eaten and hanging from a nail. A strong smell of boiled cabbage hung in the air and somehow seemed to belong to the silence.
Another door led into a covered catwalk spanning thirty feet of empty air to another, identical turret. Below lay the dank, sunless remains of a rock-garden. The Major ventured circumspectly on to the catwalk, testing the wooden planks with his foot before putting any weight on them. There were no windows. Slatted trays of apples banked up from floor to ceiling allowed him barely enough room to squeeze through. The smell of apples was overpowering. He picked one up and, sniffing its wrinkled, greasy skin, somehow found this autumnal smell soothing. The turret at the end of the passage was as empty as its sibling. Steps led down from it on to an open veranda on which a man was standing, elbows on the iron rail, smoking a cigarette. It was the tutor.
“Hello.”
The tutor turned towards him and nodded without surprise. He was wearing roughly darned plus-fours and a tweed jacket with pleated, bulging pockets which reached almost to his knees. Since the education of the twins had lapsed once more the Major could not remember having set eyes on him. He was seldom to be seen about the hotel. He ate his meals in some other part of the building, perhaps with the servants. Presumably he was still responsible for cooking the stew of sheeps’ heads for the dogs. If he had other duties the Major did not know of them. In all probability he had been forgotten in this remote part of the house and lived his own life, waiting for better days.
“They come here every evening at this time,” the tutor said.
The Major had joined him on the veranda and having had a look round now knew where he was. Below was a paved courtyard full of rubbish and dead leaves, although there was no tree in sight. Just round the corner would be the back door to the kitchens. Beyond that, on the other side of a wall, the dogs would be lounging, bored as the ladies of a harem, waiting for someone to come and give them some exercise. Immediately below the veranda yawned four giant, malodorous dustbins. A number of old women dressed in black were rummaging in these bins with fingers as gnarled as hens’ feet, head and shoulders swathed in black shawls that concealed their faces.
“They’re looking for food. They come up from the beach every evening when it begins to get dark—they can get in easily that way provided there isn’t a high tide. I told Mr Spencer about it but he hasn’t done anything.”
The Major stared down at the moving black figures, smelling the aromatic scent of the tutor’s cigarette. A shrill, incoherent argument had broken out between two of the women over a greasy newspaper containing scraps and bones.