The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [197]
The Major made no reply. Edward sighed faintly and his uptilted gaze wandered around the panelled walls at the various antlers, at the winter forest of stags, at the ibex and antelope and zebra watching the men with calmly accusing glass eyes. For an instant the dreadful thought occurred to the Major that Edward had now gone completely insane and was looking for a place on the wall to mount the Sinn Feiner. But no, Edward had tugged a bloodstained handkerchief from his pocket and was patting his nostrils gingerly. His face had assumed a faintly martyred expression.
“What you don’t realize, Brendan, is that we’re at war...If people come and blow things up they must take the consequences! They must be taught a lesson!”
“Oh, Edward, these are our own people! They aren’t the Germans or the Bolshevists...This is their country as much as it is ours...more than it is ours! Blowing up statues is nothing!”
Edward’s face darkened and he said bitterly: “I always knew you were on their side, Brendan. I’m only thankful that poor Angie didn’t live to see it. A man of your background, I’d have thought you’d have been more loyal.”
“Oh for God’s sake shut up, Edward.”
“I caught them at it red-handed. I don’t shoot innocent people from behind hedges. It was perfectly fair.”
“For days you’ve been waiting for them to come!” Edward grunted but made no attempt to deny it. In any case it was now clear to the Major why he had been spending so much time up on the roof. For days Edward had been using the statue of Queen Victoria the way a big-game hunter uses a salt-lick in the jungle, knowing that sooner or later it would become too much for them to resist. And what was the difference, he wondered, between shooting someone from behind a hedge and shooting them from a roof?
“It was perfectly fair!” Edward repeated, cracking his knuckles.
True, the Major was thinking. Edward probably did not see Sinn Feiners as people at all. He saw them as a species of game that one could only shoot according to a very brief and complicated season (that is to say, when one caught them in the act of setting off bombs).
“It was perfectly fair!” Edward said for the third time and the Major thought: “No, it wasn’t that at all. It was an act of revenge. Revenge for his piglets. Revenge for Angela. Revenge for a meaningless life. Revenge for the accelerating collapse of Unionism. Revenge for the destruction of the sort of life he’d been brought up to. Revenge for the loss of Ireland.” He didn’t see Sinn Feiners as human beings at all. And after all, would the Sinn Feiners be any more likely to see Edward as a human being and take pity on him?
Edward was frightened, the Major realized abruptly. The man was terrified! That bullet-proof waistcoat had not been an idle whim, it had been a desperate measure to shore up his crumbling nerve. Suddenly this was so clear to the Major that he wondered why he had not realized it before.
“You’d better go upstairs and go to bed,” the Major said, not unsympathetically. “You’re exhausted. I’ll see to the doctor and the D.I. when they get here.”
But when Edward had left him alone with the presence bulging under the tablecloth all the horror returned. He saw Edward triumphantly dragging the dead Sinn Feiner across the gravel. He closed his eyes...Edward comes nearer and nearer, one of the dead man’s ankles gripped under each armpit like the shafts of a hand-cart. Behind him the heavily muscled shoulders and lolling head leave a long trail on the dew-laden gravel and the friction causes the arms to spread out wide into the attitude of crucifixion. Released from somewhere inside the house, the Afghan hound comes bounding up and whisks cheerfully around the body which Edward is dragging towards the potting-shed.
“Thank heaven I sent the twins away. Edward will go too now. Today or tomorrow. As soon as possible.”
The Major underwent a craving to light his