The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [301]
It was now the turn of his eyes to take offence. This room, so light, so airy, so nobly proportioned, had been utterly transformed by the invasion of the ladies. A narrow aisle led down the middle of the room to the first table, on which the two pretty Misses O’Hanlon had formed the habit of sleeping clasped in each other’s arms; now they were sitting cross-legged on their bedding in chemises and petticoats playing some silly game which caused them every now and again to clasp their hands to their mouths, stifling mirthful shrieks. The aisle continued to the next table, which had only one occupant, old Mrs Hampton, the Padre’s mother. She was very fat, short-sighted and almost helpless, unable to get off the table unaided. As the Collector entered she was sitting in her muddled bedding, peering unhappily around her as if marooned. On each side of the aisle charpoys or mattresses or both together had been set down higgledy-piggledy, in some cases partitioned off from their neighbours by sheets suspended from strings that ran from the wall to the chandeliers, or from one string to another. “Ah, the soft and milky rabble of womankind! How true!”
As he advanced down the aisle, not without difficulty because trunks, clothing, work-baskets and other possessions had overflowed into it from either side, a third of his senses was assaulted: this time his sense of smell...Near the door there was a powerful smell of urine from unemptied chamber-pots which thankfully soon gave way to a feminine smell of lavender and rose water...a scent which mingled with the smell of perspiration to irritate his senses. It made him conscious of the fact that many of the ladies were, when one thought about it, attractive young women, some of whom were only partly clothed or not wearing stockings, or perhaps still altogether unclothed behind their flimsy, inadequate screens. He advanced between them with a deliberately heavy and paternal step, glimpsing an occasional movement of white skin which, because it was not clear what part of the body it might belong to (and might, for all one could tell, belong to an intimate part), he could not help feeling aroused by. He thought sternly: “Really, they behave, here in their private territory, with as little modesty and restraint as, in public, with sobriety.”
“Mrs Rayne,” he boomed with a severity born of this unwelcome stimulation. “Could you please open the window? The doctors have ordered them to be left open during the day to guard against an epidemic from bad air and our cramped conditions.” The authority of his tone silenced the chatter, but his words produced some faint moans of protest and rebellion. They were so hot already! If the hot wind was allowed to blow through the room it became intolerable. They could not suffer it! “And a mouse ran over me last night!” cried Miss Barlow, the daughter of the Salt Agent. “I felt its nasty, scratchy little feet on my face.”
“The dhobi has begun to charge an outrageous price, Mr Hopkins,” complained a sleepy voice from behind one of the hanging sheets. “Can nothing be done to stop him?”
The Collector, suspecting that this was the voice of the passive, lovely, pregnant, perpetually weary Mrs Wright, widow of a railway engineer, experienced another annoying twinge of desire, and after listening to some further grievances relieved his feelings by delivering an unusually stern homily.
The cause of the trouble among the ladies was, as he suspected, not simple but compound. Many of the ladies were now having to look after themselves for the first time in their lives. They had to fetch their own water from the well behind the Residency when they wanted to wash. They had to light fires for