The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [30]
“You know what I did to ‘aggravate my tenants,’ as old Ryan says? I asked them to sign a piece of paper saying they were loyal not to me, mind you, not to me but to the King... and that they wouldn’t get mixed up in any of these Sinn Fein goings-on. Is that so terrible? Is it aggravating them to ask them to abide by the law? Well, I’ll be damned if the blighters don’t refuse point-blank to sign. It’s Donnelly that’s put them up to it, an old fellow with no teeth...‘What’s the meaning of this, Donnelly?’ I ask him. ‘Ah sure,’ says he, ‘we’d be in danger.’ ‘In danger from who?’ He can’t tell me the answer to that one. ‘You’d never know,’ he says. ‘Well, Donnelly, I can tell you,’ I said to him, ‘if you don’t sign it quick sharp you’ll be in danger from me!’” Massive and imposing, Edward punctuated his explanation with sharp jabs of the hoe.
There was silence for a moment. The Major was surprised to see that Edward, who had been scowling angrily, now had a rueful smile on his face. He threw down his hoe with a sigh and fell into step beside the Major, who had decided to take a stroll round the southern corner of the hotel. “The joke is that I don’t really give a damn about all that. I only lease them the land because I have to; they’d starve if I didn’t. But I have no interest in it and it only causes me endless trouble. I’m not a farmer, never have been. I’d sell them the land in a trice but they couldn’t even pay me the half of what it’s worth. I’m not as young as I was but I often think I’d like to do something with my life. Yes, do something completely different...go back to the university, maybe, and do some research (I still take one or two scientific journals, you know, but in Kilnalough it’s impossible to keep up). Have you ever thought, Brendan, how many completely different lives there are to be lived if only one could choose? I can tell you one thing, I certainly wouldn’t choose to be a landlord in Ireland. One gets no thanks for it. However, that’s the job I’ve been called to, so I suppose I must make the best of it.”
As they walked they were joined by a shabby spaniel that appeared out of a clump of rhododendrons and trotted along behind Edward.
“Does old Ryan even know his doctoring? Frankly I doubt it. He must have been in the College of Surgeons when all they knew was leeches and bloodletting. And yet he’s the only doctor in Kilnalough, so everyone treats him as if he’s God Almighty.” Edward was scowling again. He halted suddenly at a diamond-shaped bed of lavender and his scowl faded.
“Planted by my dear wife.” After a moment, as if to clear up a possible misunderstanding, he added: “Before she died.”
The spaniel mutely lifted a leg against an acute angle of the diamond and they set off again. The Major looked up at the great turreted wall that hung over them. They were so close to it at this point that it was impossible to gauge its size. A few yards farther on, however, they made another turn and this allowed him to see the back of the hotel which was really, in fact, the front, since the building had been designed to relate entirely to the sea. It was into the Irish Sea (and not into Ireland) that the most magnificent flight of steps led, and they were in the middle of the crescent whose curving arms spread out to embrace the distant coast of Wales across the vast expanse of windswept water. The Major was staggered to see for the first time just what this side of the crescent looked like: the extraordinary proliferation of turrets and battlements and crenellated cat-walks that hung from the building amid rusting iron balconies and French windows with drooping shutters. In the very heart of the crescent above the staircase of white stone and running from the slate roofs on one side to the slate roofs on the other was a great construction of glass which at this moment caught a stray gleam of sunlight and flared gold for a few seconds.
This, Edward was explaining, was the ballroom the Major might already