The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [24]
It took him a little time to find the right stairway to make the ascent to the dining-room. This was because he did not fathom immediately that it was necessary to go on down a few steps before joining the main staircase, from where one could go on up or down as the case might be (though God only knew where “down” might lead to). In other words, the kitchens were situated, for a reason that the architect alone could have explained, on a tributary staircase. Other similar staircases branched off here and there, but though he was curious to see where they led the Major was now hastening upwards to find Angela.
He was not surprised, however, to find that there was no sign of Angela in the dining-room. He stood there for a moment looking round. It was very silent. Some of the tables, it was true, were decorated with fresh flowers. On one of the tables a bunch of carnations and feathery green leaves lay on a newspaper waiting to be arranged in vases. A pair of scissors lay beside them, giving the impression that they had perhaps been abandoned a moment before he had stepped into the room. It was, he presumed, out of the question that Angela was deliberately avoiding him, so, in theory at least, all he had to do was to station himself beside these cut flowers which she certainly would not leave for long before putting into water.
A ponderous creaking began on the far side of the room. Ah, it was the dumb-waiter rising from the kitchen, he could see the ropes shivering as it rose. He walked over to have a look at it. Abruptly he had an intuition that there was something strange or terrifying on it: a decaying sheep’s head, for example, or something even stranger, perhaps the cook’s weeping head on a platter surrounded by chopped onions. The dumb-waiter stopped for a moment and then started again. When it reached the top he smiled at what it contained. It was the tortoiseshell cat he had seen in the kitchen, still sitting on the meat-dish. When the conveyance had come to a halt it jumped off and wound through his legs. The dumb-waiter started down again empty.
A few moments later, with the cat cradled in his arms, he spotted Angela. She was on the next terrace below the tennis court carrying a spray of beech leaves and walking swiftly towards a flight of steps some distance away. Thinking that if he could find the entrance she was making for he might be able to intercept her, he set off rapidly, taking the cat with him for company. The cat did not like the idea, however, leapt out of his arms and vanished back the way they had come. The Major pressed on down the corridor he was following, relatively certain this time that he was going in the right direction. On his way he passed one of the old ladies he had been introduced to the evening before. She was leaning on a stick, arrested half-way between two sharp bends in a long section of the corridor without doors or windows. As he passed she murmured something indignantly but he merely nodded cheerfully, pretending not to hear. He was in a hurry. Excited, he turned another corner at the end of which, by his calculations of the exterior of the building and the distance he had walked, there should be a glass door through which Angela would enter at any moment. But there wasn’t. At the end of the corridor there was merely a blank wall and a musty, dilapidated sitting-room. “This is absurd,