The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [207]
The Major was now thinking about Sarah...and about love. And then, without being aware of any transition, he was thinking about Ovid, an author he had read without pleasure at school. Strange to think that some people should actually enjoy reading Ovid as much as, say, that story of T.C. Bridges which had been serialized in the Weekly Irish Times last year. What a charming story! There was one episode which had particularly taken his fancy: the young man confessing to his girl-friend that although in appearance a gentleman he is really a burglar, and that consequently it is inevitable that she must detest him...But the girl (and what a splendid surprise this had been both to the young man of the story and to the Major)...the girl sticks by him, stoutly says she loves him and doesn’t believe him capable of stealing. (And true enough, there had been something rather rum about his theft. He had had a bump on the head or he’d been hypnotized and couldn’t actually remember doing it.) Jolly decent of the girl, in any case, to stick by him. Sarah, of course, would undoubtedly do the same in that situation. And with this agreeable thought the Major’s weary, salt-caked eyelids crawled down over his eyes and he slept, or became unconscious, it would have been difficult to say which.
When he next woke up he was again buried up to his neck in sand. The sun had risen and was blazing directly into his eyes, dancing on the surf not far away. This light blinded him, so that for some time he was aware of nothing but the pain of his retina. When he had become more accustomed to it, however, he realized that he was no longer alone. Scarcely more than a yard to the left there was another head poking out of the sand on the same level as his own. He recognized the fellow immediately: it was the young Cockney who had come up to him on a bicycle the day before...He had invited the chap to tea.
“Why didn’t you come to tea?”
But the man made no reply, merely continued to stare round at the Major in an insolent fashion with one cloudy blue eye opened very wide and the other one closed to a glinting slit. From his open mouth a wisp of something dark was trailing: it might have been seaweed. Presently a bluebottle came buzzing round and at last decided to settle on that wide blue eye. But the eye did not blink.
As the sun rose higher the Major’s awareness improved and once again he did his best to rally the thoughts that sped here and there like small slippery fish, impossible to grasp. “Death!” he thought. And: “To drown.” But this seemed inadequate, so he made a further effort and achieved: “To drown is awful...”; but this, although also inadequate, exhausted him for a while. Soon, however, he was able to scale another flight of steps up to consciousness and said to himself: “My side is deuced painful. Hurts like the devil.” Then thoughts of Sarah, Edward and the twins occupied his mind, but they were no help to him. He must think of something else.
The movements of his limbs had in the meantime worked a gap of three or four inches between his body and the sand which moulded it. This gap had filled with water oozing up through the sand. He now noticed that the water had a reddish tinge and knew that he must be bleeding. At the same time as his consciousness improved he was tortured by thirst, and the aching of