The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [135]
The old gentleman, a new arrival at the Majestic, had left his shoes outside his bedroom door. Not only had they not been cleaned, they had disappeared altogether! And all his other shoes were in a cabin trunk that had yet to be delivered from the railway station. The Major left him in the foyer and went to ask Murphy to ask the maids.
Later in the day, while hunting languidly for the shoes along one of the upper landings, he opened a door and was greeted by cries of surprise and dismay: through a blue mist of cigarette-smoke he perceived three figures in petticoats. He closed the door again discreetly. He was shocked, however, and thought: “I must tell Edward. If those girls go on the way they’re going....” But he was annoyed with Edward and did not see why he should have to bring up his daughters for him; let him see to it himself! Besides, young women these days...
The matter of the shoes was cleared up in the course of the afternoon. It seemed that the cook, on her way down to prepare breakfast, had noticed them outside the gentleman’s door and had naturally supposed that he was throwing them away—a perfectly good pair of shoes! She had picked them up and given them to Seán Murphy, who had been digging energetically in them all morning.
At the end of the first week of December Padraig was also sent up to the Majestic to visit the twins, not by old Dr Ryan but by his father who, it turned out, was not only a staunch Unionist but something of a snob into the bargain. The Major intercepted Padraig (who was looking pale and anxious—it was clear he had little appetite for visiting the twins) to ask him about his grandfather.
“Oh, he’s well enough. I don’t see him so much now. He has a cook and a maid but he’ll hardly let anyone into the house.”
“Is he still not speaking to your parents?”
Padraig nodded. “He’s very stubborn and bad-tempered.
“He’s told my father he’s a traitor to Ireland for approving the British the way he does.”
“I didn’t know he was a Sinn Feiner.”
“Ah, you wouldn’t mind him,” Padraig said, his eyes flickering uneasily to the landing above, where three pretty faces had appeared over the banister. “He’s very old.”
“Well, here’s your guest,” the Major called up sternly. “I hope you’ll look after him properly and behave yourselves.”
Padraig mounted the stairs as if under sentence of death, was seized by the girls and whisked away. The Major went about his business.
Curiously enough, Padraig seemed to enjoy himself. He reappeared on the following day looking cheerful and confident, then again on the day after. Soon he became a frequent visitor. “It was probably just a question of breaking the ice,” reflected the Major.
The Major’s nerves were once more in a deplorable state. He could hardly bear to open the newspaper, for it seemed that the war, which he thought he had escaped, had pursued and caught him after all. Martial law was proclaimed in Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Limerick. On the night of December 11th Cork was sacked by Auxiliaries and Black and Tans after a patrol had been ambushed. Reading about it, the Major was reminded of how Edward had once said to him that he would welcome a holocaust, that he would like to see everything smashed and in ruins so that the Irish would really taste the meaning of destruction. He read about the scarlet flames that lit up the night sky as the shopping district of Cork was set on fire: firemen’s hoses cut by axes; uniformed police and military staggering through the flaming streets with looted goods; Auxiliaries drunk on looted whiskey singing and dancing with local girls in the smoke. It was said that the clock on the tower of the City Hall, rising out of an ocean of flame and smoke, went on striking the hour until dawn, when it finally toppled into the inferno below.
The Major’s sleep was as short and disturbed as it had been during his convalescence in hospital, punctuated by nightmares which continually returned him to the trenches. Any sharp noise, a book clapped down flat on a table or a dropped plate, would have him ducking involuntarily like