The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [131]
After some deliberation he wrote Sarah a letter asking if they could meet some time to talk things over—but she did not reply. Presently, he wrote her another letter saying that whatever her virtues, constancy was not one of them (not that she had ever claimed that it was). The only conclusion he could come to, he concluded, was that she was simply a plain, old-fashioned flirt, which was fine, of course, if that was what she wanted to be. A little later he wrote yet another letter disclaiming the one before, which, he regretted to say, had been written in a spirit of bitterness. Neither of these subsequent letters achieved a reply, however, and he thought: “All I’ve managed to do is to have an argument with myself in these letters. She’ll think me quite mad.” And he forbade himself to write any more. At the very end of November, while getting dressed one morning, he became extremely depressed and one by one the buttons dropped off his shirt, like leaves off a dying plant.
This was also a bad time for Rover, who was gradually being supplanted as the favourite among the harem of dogs. By degrees he was going blind; his eyes had turned to milky blue and he sometimes collided with the furniture. The smells he emitted while sitting at the feet of the whist-players became steadily more redolent of putrefaction. Like the Major, Rover had always enjoyed trotting from one room to another, prowling the corridors on this floor or that. But now, whenever he ventured up the stairs to nose around the upper storeys, as likely as not he would be set upon by an implacable horde of cats and chased up and down the corridors to the brink of exhaustion. More than once the Major found him, wheezing and spent, tumbling in terror down a flight of stairs from some shadowy menace on the landing above. Soon he got into the habit of growling whenever he saw a shadow... then, as the shadows gathered with his progressively failing sight, he would rouse himself and bark fearfully even in the broadest of daylight, gripped by remorseless nightmares. Day by day, no matter how wide he opened his eyes, the cat-filled darkness continued to creep a little closer.
To share his place another dog had been summoned from the yard, a spindle-legged Afghan hound with pretty golden curls. Little by little this animal usurped the affection dedicated to Rover. True, he had some bad habits. If one managed, in spite of the draughts, to doze off in an armchair after lunch, there was a good chance of being promptly awoken by a warm wet tongue licking one’s cheek—but some of the ladies did not seem to mind this. Besides, compared with Rover he smelled like a rose.
As December arrived, a curious thing happened at the Majestic: in a steady trickle more guests began to appear. There had always been the odd one or two coming or going; someone would be stranded in Kilnalough and obliged to stay the night before going on to Dublin in the morning. But now the number of old ladies (and there were even one or two old gentlemen), was increasing noticeably. It was a little while before it dawned on the Major that what they were com-ing for was...Christmas! He could not help thinking that far from enjoying a merry Christmas they would be lucky if the place did not fall on their heads. Of course they probably had some idea what to expect. They had heard, perhaps, that the place was not what it used to be; but the habits of a lifetime are hard to break. So many people, now elderly, had banked their few warm and glorious memories of childhood at the Majestic that, even though they knew it was not quite the same, they somehow found it hard to stay away.
At first the Major would sometimes be on hand when they arrived (neither Edward nor Murphy nor any of the servants would be) to cushion the shock. But soon he realized that it was easier to stay away like everyone else. The new arrivals would sort