The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [671]
‘What are you going to do about this poor fellow?’ Matthew asked in order to change the subject.
Each shell that had exploded had produced a groan from beneath an elegant lacquered writing-desk which supported a field-telephone ‘for emergencies’ which no one could get to work and an ordinary telephone, as well as several other things. Presently the author of the groan crept out and went to slump down under the Major’s chair. With his refined sense of imminent danger The Human Condition had evidently sensed that these strange new explosions boded ill for his chances of survival.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to take him to the vet this evening. We may as well bring him along at the same time as you go to the boat, poor creature.’ At these words The Human Condition rolled his eyeballs up to the Major’s face and uttered a piteous whine, licking the Major’s hand at the same time.
‘I think that dog must be rotting internally,’ remarked Dupigny objectively.
62
Ehrendorf made his way, carrying a towel and swimming trunks, towards the Blacketts’ compound, lingering for a moment among the exotic blooms which glowed like lamps amid the dark leaves. For a while he watched the butterflies which still swooped and fluttered in this little glade, impervious to the bombs that had fallen round about. Then, with a melancholy sigh which was partly counterfeit because he was now seeing himself as the ill-starred hero of his novel in its first version (innocent American abused by cynical Europeans), he moved on in the direction of the swimming pool.
Although he had paid a brief visit to Walter by darkness the other evening, it was several weeks since Ehrendorf had last seen the Blacketts’ house by daylight. It seemed to him to have a forlorn and deserted air. During the raid on Tanglin a bomb had fallen at one edge of the lawn, uprooting the ‘flame of the forest’ tree beneath which, several months ago, he had been standing with Joan when she had thrown wine in his face at the garden-party. No effort had been made to fill in the crater on whose raised lip the grass lawn continued peacefully to grow; in the façade of the house itself several of the windows which had once been glazed for the air-conditioning now gaped darkly where once they had sparkled with reflections from the pool.
He plodded past the tennis courts whose white lines, washed out by the monsoon rains and not repainted, were by now scarcely visible. Normally, too, there would have been several Tamils working in the flower-beds or cutting back the lalang but today he could not see a soul. He paused to stare uncomprehendingly at an untidy mass of broken spars and tattered paper which stood at the margin of the nutmeg grove and which he failed to recognize as the remains of damaged floats for the jubilee celebrations. Can Walter and Joan have left already? he wondered and, resigned though he already was to the fact that he was unlikely ever to see Joan again, he was nevertheless surprised by the intense and chilling sadness which suddenly enveloped him.
The summer-house, in which the Blacketts in happier times had invited their guests to change their clothes, remained undamaged; Ehrendorf changed rapidly and plunged into the pool which was full of dead leaves and other flotsam. He dived and swam under water for a few feet but the water was murky and disagreeable. How different everything was! Surfacing he bumped into a piece of floating wood on which the words ‘… in Prosperity’ were written. He took a deep breath and dived again; this time he dragged himself on and on through the silent grey corridors, counting the grey tiles on the bottom, inspecting weird grey objects which lay there: a broken flowerpot from which still trailed a slimy grey plant which wavered slightly at his passage, a brick, a rusting metal