The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [205]
As he was walking back to the house he paused at the edge of the drive to wait for a young man on a bicycle who had just emerged from the trees and was pedalling towards him. He had a rifle slung across his back and was wearing a curious mixture of uniforms: his pedalling legs were clad in darkgreen R.I.C. trousers; the upper part of his body, however, was clothed in khaki service uniform, while on his head was perched a flat civilian cap bearing the crowned-harp badge of the R.I.C. A long white hen’s feather was stuck into this cap behind the badge. “A fine expression of the muddled will of the great British people!”
This strangely clad individual had now halted his bicycle by dragging his boots along the ground and, not without suspicion, had spoken out in tones of pure Cockney, wanting to know if the Major was the Major.
“Yes I am. What can I do for you?”
He had been told to have a look round the Majestic in case there was trouble. The whole countryside knew that the people living in the Majestic had moved away and there might be hooligans coming to loot the place. He patted the butt of his rifle, but without confidence, more as if he were superstitiously touching wood.
“By all means have a look round the out-houses. But be careful; a lot of the timber is rotten and you could easily break your neck. Another thing...if you happen to see a mad old man with a wrinkled face, don’t shoot him. He’s one of the servants. When you’ve finished come inside and ring the bell on the reception desk. I’ll give you a cup of tea.”
For an hour the Major tried to read an out-of-date copy of Punch in the gun room, but the silence made him uneasy and he found it hard to concentrate. Once more the telephone rang in Edward’s study down the corridor, but it stopped before he had time to reach it. He waited for it to ring again, but it didn’t, so he made his way down to the kitchens in order to brew some tea for himself and the young Black and Tan. On his way he smiled: he had caught himself glancing nervously into the open doorways he was passing. “Really, I’ve become an old lady myself, I’ve spent so much time with them. When all this is over I really must find myself some younger members of the sex!”
By five o’clock the teapot had grown cold and there was still no sign of the Black and Tan, so the Major went out to look for him. First he wandered through the kitchen garden towards the stables—but they were empty, as were the garages and out-houses. The door of the barn was open, so he peered in. A pleasant scent of summer hay greeted his nostrils. There was no sign of the young man. With misgiving he approached the ladder up to the loft and set his foot on the worm-eaten bottom rung. It took his weight, so he began to climb. When his head and shoulders had emerged through the trap-door he looked around. It was lighter up here. One of the wooden leaves of the loading-gate was open, allowing a shaft of sunlight to fall on the floor.
Someone had been here recently. Dust hung in the air and, where the sun touched it, blazed like a furnace. On each side the towering banks of hay had a grey look, as if cut many years ago and abandoned. But there was no one here now. He cautiously backed down the ladder. “I could look for him here for ever and not find him.”
He continued, however, to move through a succession of courtyards, past the well and the pump, towards the apple house, of which the door also stood open. It was here that the superfluity of the Majestic’s huge apple crop was stored: windfalls and “cookers” for the most part. At the time of the Major’s first visit they had been piled on top of each other, bruised and rotting, to within a few feet of the roof; but in the interim the cook had made her daily visit to fill a coal-scuttle with apples for pies and desserts (and perhaps the old crones in black had also been filling their flour sacks). The result was that a hollow had been scooped out of this ocean of apples, a valley that built up from knee height to