The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [143]
“Sent ’em home,” grunted the doctor.
“But for heaven’s sake! You can’t cook for yourself! And how about your family?”
The feud with his family was maintained, it seemed. “Unionists!”
“Look here, why don’t you come back to the Majestic with me...If you like we could take that chicken of yours with us and get the kitchen staff to see to it.”
But the old man was obstinate. He’d sworn he’d not go near the place again! He’d not sit down with the British! He’d not have fellow-Irishmen working to feed his stomach while they had nothing to put in their own! The Major listened to this nonsense with consternation. The old man was becoming a Bolshevist in his dotage!
While they talked Dr Ryan scraped feebly at a potato he was trying to peel. A man of his class peeling his own potatoes! This was too much for the Major. Elbowing the old doctor aside, he seized the potato from him and began to peel it in his place, and then another and another (by this time he had taken off his jacket). Dr Ryan, unable to leave well alone, tottered back and forth from the pantry collecting things.
“Will ye not stop and eat with me, Major?” But the Major had eaten already; his only interest was to see that the doctor ate. Still, he might stay to sample a little, see what it tasted like. And he became absorbed in the preparation of the meal —which luckily presented no great difficulties since the servants had left the chicken stuffed and it had only to be put in the oven. Ah, but there was no bread, except for the remains of a pan loaf, hard as steel, that was serving as a paperweight in the doctor’s study. They would have to make do with the potatoes and Brussels sprouts. And so he set to work again. But all that peeling and chopping took him an age, and Dr Ryan kept wanting to help, getting in the way and giving advice, as if the Major didn’t know what he was doing, which was more than the perspiring and exasperated Major could stand.
“Look, why don’t you go and sit down and leave it to me?” he exploded at last.
But the old man had become bad-tempered too. He was probably hungry, although he said he wasn’t. His mind had begun to wander as well...Fanny would soon be here, he said, with her mother and father, they were expected for Christmas. The Major did not know who Fanny was. He supposed she must be the doctor’s wife, dead, though, forty years or more. And no one did come, which in the circumstances was perhaps just as well.
But then the doctor seemed to realize that he was being disagreeable and wandered away, returning almost immediately with two wine glasses and a bottle of sherry. So they had a drink and wished each other Merry Christmas...However, while the chicken was in the oven and they were waiting in vague desperation (the Major, too, had become horribly hungry, as if he hadn’t eaten for days) for the wretched thing to cook, the old doctor, although he was plainly trying to be nice to the Major, kept bursting out “British blackguard!”, which distressed the Major considerably.
Soon a tantalizing smell pervaded the kitchen, the smell of roasting chicken—but if anything this made them more hungry and bad-tempered than ever and, besides, there was still a great deal of work to be done. It was time, the Major judged, to put the vegetables on to boil. Should one put salt in the water with them?
“British blackguard!” muttered the doctor irritably. But then his mood changed and he murmured almost tenderly that the Major shouldn’t worry, that life was a fugitive affair at best, he should know, he’d been a doctor for sixty years... Then he shuffled away to the lavatory, for the cold weather and the port he had been drinking made him incontinent, and when he came back he was saying that, really, people are insubstantial, they never last. He himself wouldn’t last much longer, but that was a law of Nature, the body wears out... the Major wouldn’t last very long either, but one had to accept it and make