The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [167]
“Where have you been?” demanded the Major bitterly. “And thanks for leaving me to cope with everything.”
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” Edward said curtly. Turning to Sarah he added: “I must take you home.” They left the Major standing resentfully amid the broken glass in the middle of the floor.
Unknown to the Major there still remained two Auxiliaries at the Majestic. After Charity’s fall the two young men who had been escorting them, the somewhat dubious Matthews and the clean-limbed Mortimer, winked at each other and hastened to assist the girls up the stairs. Charity needed this assistance; she had become extraordinarily sleepy and lethargic all of a sudden; she could hardly keep her eyes open or put one foot in front of the other. Faith, on the other hand, raced up the stairs unaided and even tugged at Mortimer’s sleeve (which made Matthews wonder whether his great experience of women, which had led him to choose the more intoxicated of the twins, had guided him to such a wise choice after all) whenever Mortimer, who had become strangely talkative, hung back to chat with his friend Matthews. The truth was that Mortimer, though determined to put the best possible face on it in front of Matthews (to whom he had once, in a moment of weakness, confided the description of one or two fictitious conquests), was distinctly alarmed by the turn events had taken and was secretly wondering just what he was in for...that is to say, he already knew more or less what he was in for, having had (or almost had) a thoroughly nauseating experience in a brothel in France, one of those “reserved for officers” (one shuddered to think what those reserved for the other ranks had been like). Even now, chatting garrulously on the stairs about Jack Hobbs hitting long-hops over the pavilion, he had only to close his eyes to see glittering-ringed fingers parting thick white curtains of fat to invite him into some appalling darkness.
Gay as a skylark and with more energy than she could find a use for, Faith had now begun to climb using only one leg, her crinoline ballooning prettily with each hop—but even so she found she was ascending more quickly than the others. Back she came to tug at Mortimer’s sleeve again, telling him that he was a slowcoach and that he should forget his beastly cricket and come on up and...“My God! Just look at Catty! You’d think she was sleep-walking!”
Indeed, Charity was swaying helplessly, loose-limbed as a puppet, divinely relaxed. Her eyelids kept creeping down and it took all her strength to force them up a millimetre or two to see what was going on. Climbing unaided would have been out of the question but fortunately Matthews’s shoulder was under her left armpit, his powerful arm was wrapped round her back and a hand like a steel hook gripped the bottom of her rib-cage as if it were the handle of a suitcase (this hurt, she knew, but for some reason she couldn’t feel it)...“Jolly decent of him to help me, anyway,” she kept thinking.
“Hey! Are you all right, Catty?” Faith’s grinning face was saying a few inches in front of her own, emerging out of a grey fog of sleep.
“Of course I am!” she said crossly—or would have said if she had not been so busy with the weight of her eyelids.
“Of course she is!” Matthews echoed her thoughts, though rather defensively. “She’s as right as rain.” But at the same time he was becoming increasingly anxious lest he had picked the wrong one. This one was too drunk—either that