The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [152]
Edward was too excited to sleep. It was all the Major could do to prevent him setting off there and then on a tour of the premises, notebook in hand, summoning from their beds masons and carpenters, plumbers, painters and glaziers. When in a little while the Major climbed the stairs to bed he left Edward wandering from one silent, sleeping room to another, raising branched candlesticks to gaze with inspired eyes at cobwebbed walls and dusty brocade curtains which, after all the years they had hung there, still glinted dimly with their heavy gold thread, woven into the dusty, tattered cloth like the thread of hope that runs from youth to age.
Edward continued to move through the house, treading softly as a ghost, staring and staring, his heart beating strongly, his eyes full of tears. He sat down once on the arm of a chair, as if he were drunk, overcome by exhilaration, gazing around at this house which he had somehow never really seen before. And he continued for a while to sit there with tears of joy coursing down his cheeks, thinking now of his wife, now of Angela, now of his friend the Major. He sat there until his candles had burned down to thin liquid wafers of wax. Suddenly the thought came to him that he should give a ball—a magnificent ball, the kind of ball they used to give here in the old days. His excitement surged to new heights. This would mark the rebirth of the Majestic! He must go and tell the Major immediately, wake him up if necessary. A Spring Ball will be held at the Majestic in Kilnalough. The pleasure of your company is requested...the formal delicacy of this phrase enchanted him. The pleasure of your company.
Faintly from outside in the park there came the shattering, lonely cry of a peacock. For a moment the sound of that cry disturbed him—aching, beyond hope. As he got to his feet there was a threatening movement in the darkly swaying shadows. But it was only one of the multitude of cats, out for the purposes of hunting or mating in the Majestic’s endless forest of furniture.
One evening towards the end of March Edward and the Major were to be seen standing together in the foyer, the latter smoking a thin Havana cigar, the former keeping an apprehensive eye on the drive. The Major was impeccably dressed in white tie and tails—it was easy to see that both he and his tailor were men of distinction. Edward was also dressed in tails, but of a more antique cut—which was strange when one considered the care he normally took about his appearance. Moreover, the contours of his body had changed somewhat over the years that had elapsed since the tailor had done his work: the years revealed themselves in the horizontal strain marks where the top of his trousers surrounded his stomach, in the severe grip that the coat exerted across his shoulders from one armpit to another, encouraging his arms to hang outwards, penguin fashion. Nevertheless he was an imposing figure. Evening dress suited his craggy, leonine features by putting them in a civilized perspective. They made him look both fierce and harmless, a lion in a cage. Even the red carnation he wore in his buttonhole—on Edward’s person it gave one a mild shock, as if one had just come face to face with a prizefighter with a flower behind his ear.
“This looks like somebody.”
A Bentley had come nosing up the drive and now, at a walking pace, was making a wide turn in front of the statue of Queen Victoria. A pale glimmer of faces showed at its windows, staring out at the hotel.
“That’s deuced odd. They’re making off again. You don’t think they might have changed their minds at the last moment, do you?”
But the Major did not answer. He was not worried about some guests who could not make up their minds out there in the darkness.