The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [175]
“Shut up, for God’s sake! Go home and have some sleep and we’ll talk about it in the morning. It must be almost five. There! Now good night and go straight home!”
Devlin was standing uncertainly at the top of the steps. He seemed anxious to continue his apologies but the Major’s patience was at an end. He slipped back inside the door and closed it. Then, without waiting to see whether Devlin was going to take himself off, he climbed the stairs to bed. “And Sarah?” he thought as he was climbing between the sheets.
“Wake up, Brendan! Wake up!”
The Major was floating in soft black water in a disused quarry. The depth of the water was so great that when he dropped a white pebble into it he could still see it minutes afterwards, winking in the darkness as it sank. Then he was sinking beside it, down and down. “Death is the only peace on earth,” he thought as he was sinking.
“Wake up!”
A hand touched him and he sat up with a start. The room was black and he could see nothing. But he knew that he was not still dreaming: a hand was grasping his wrist, warm breath fanning his cheek.
“Who is it?”
“Where are the matches? I can’t see a thing.” It was one of the twins.
“What’s the matter?”
“Brendan, are you awake?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“There’s been a terrible fight downstairs. We think it must be the Sinn Feiners.”
A match flared, illuminating Charity. She held it up above her head, looking for the Major’s candles. Presently the match was swamped by darkness; then another match was struck, this time on the other side of the bed, and Charity was lighting the candles.
“We were too frightened to go down.”
Unable for a moment to recall the events of the past few hours, the Major waited with instinctive dread for consciousness to start the first few rolling pebbles that would generate an avalanche of remembered disasters. Then, as one memory after another hurtled down on him, he heaved his drugged limbs over the side of the bed and massaged his face wearily. He stood up and for a while looked in vain for his dressing-gown. Then he realized that he was still wearing it.
“I’ll go down and see. You’d better wait here and lock the door if you hear anyone coming. Get into my bed or you’ll catch cold.”
It seemed to him that there would never be an end to this blundering through the darkened, empty corridors of the Majestic. What time was it? Surely it should be light by now! But the black windows he passed were lit only by the reflected flame of his candle.
After the darkness of the corridor the study seemed glaringly bright. Still holding the candle and oblivious of the drips of hot wax that spilled over his clenched fingers, the Major stood in the doorway and looked about with shocked eyes at the bizarre scene of destruction that greeted him. At his feet the floor was littered with broken glass and tarnished silver cups. A framed cartoon by Spy which had once hung over the desk lay on the floor, its glass cobwebbed; the desk itself had been swept clean except for an upturned ink-well which was still leaking a steady black drip on to the dusty carpet. Even the air showed traces of the room’s chaos—hazy with white powder, turf-ash scattered half across the floor from the embers of the fire, in which, moreover, a man’s shoe lay smouldering. Beyond the fireplace a Welsh dresser had tilted forward to unload a shelf of books and half a row of dusty upturned brandy glasses on to the floor. As he watched, another glass crept forward, slithered off the topmost shelf, turned slowly in the air and dissolved in a bright puff as it struck the edge of the dresser.
In the middle of all this confusion Sarah was sitting, alone. She said calmly: “Go away, Brendan. Things are difficult enough already.” And then, as the Major neither moved nor