• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5797 0

The jam-jars had proliferated around him, so that now, if one listened carefully, one could hear a symphony of drips against the percussion of rain from above. As for the toad, it reminded the Major only too horribly of things he still saw in his nightmares—indeed, for all its resemblance to a toad it might have been strawberry jam scooped out of one of the jars and thinly spread on Edward’s marble slab. As for the old ladies, they now had no other resource than to grit their teeth and survive as best they could the awful weeks between Christmas and Easter, keep their noses above the surface somehow or other until the green leaves were back on the trees. As for Padraig, he had not been seen for a few days. Although Dermot had by now gone back to school with his boxing-gloves, the two young Auxiliaries, Matthews and Mortimer, claimed to have found another prospective sparring-partner for him, the son of a farmer of the region—a lad who, although only twelve years old, was reputed to have to shave twice a day. As for the Major himself, the start of the new year could not help but fill him with a young man’s irrational optimism. Perhaps nineteen-twenty-one was the year he would get married (to Sarah, naturally, since matrimony involving any other girl was quite unthinkable)—but even if he did not (and he could not escape the unpleasant fact that for the moment he did not even know where she was), even if he did not, it was still a new year. Something new was sure to happen.

Moreover, any new year was a gift that the Major somehow felt that he did not deserve. Although the Weekly Irish Times no longer published those inky photographs of dead men on the front page, the last stragglers having by now made up their minds whether to live or die (and those that were going having gone), he still had the same grateful but uneasy sensation. “You must do the living for all the others as well as yourself,” a kindly Scottish doctor had once said to him in hospital, trying to coax him back out of the cold areas of chagrin and indifference where his mind had chosen to stray. But of course that was easier said than done, particularly at the Majestic.

The weather continued bitterly cold for the next few days. Getting out of bed in the morning, taking a bath with an icy draught sighing underneath the bathroom door, became an agony. The Major’s teeth chattered and he thought with physical distress of sunshine and Italy. People spoke little during this cold weather; the ladies curled themselves up in tight little bundles and compressed their lips to preserve every particle of warmth in their bodies. Twelfth Night came and went, but nobody thought of taking down the decorations. One had to keep one’s arms tightly hugging one’s sides these days; lift them for a moment and the chilly sword of pneumonia would run you through.

Not only for the ladies was this a bad time. Padraig too was in despair. His father was now talking of having him apprenticed as a clerk in a solicitor’s office in Dublin, a prospect which no person of sensitivity could tolerate. Faith told the Major that Padraig was going about telling the ladies that he would prefer to dress himself in a scarlet cloak and leap from the battlements of the Majestic. The Major told her to tell him on no account to go near the battlements, they weren’t safe. The ornamental façade might give way at any moment.

Wearing mittens and a Balaclava helmet, the Major sat in the residents’ lounge on a bright February morning reading of the day’s disasters in the Irish Times. Looking up, he noticed that Edward had come into the room. He gave a violent start. With Edward was Sarah! Her face was pale and tense; she looked unhappy. Edward stared sightlessly past her, but his lips were moving rapidly as he spoke to her in an undertone. Only for an instant, as he came to the end of what he was saying, did he allow his eyes to focus on her face before retiring to scan the empty reaches of the room once more. Sarah was protesting bitterly about something. The Major dropped his eyes and pretended to be engrossed