The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [74]
“But this is an enormous letter,” thought the Major, appalled, hefting the wad of crinkly paper in his hand. “It would take a prodigious effort even to write such a letter if one were weakened by illness, if one were unable to take proper nourishment (he thought with a pang of the untouched trays of food ferried up and down the stairs) and...and the detail in it is intolerable.”
(“Of course, I was a child then, too young to remember those days, but my father had seen it and my uncles too, God rest them, they were old men before thirty with the worry and the trouble...and I remember the way people talked of it, you know. It must be God’s will, they’d say. He sent it to punish us, d’ye see? so what is there for a man to do? Sure we’ll have to go to another country, says he, to America on a ship because in Ireland we’ll never do any good; we’ll die for sure and there’ll be no help for it...Man, I’d say, what need is there to leave? The hunger is over and there’s food enough. But sure it’ll come again, says he, you’d never know...’tis best to leave Ireland. B’the Lord Harry, in those days they were leaving so quick they were even starving there on the quays of New York. There’s no luck in Ireland, they’d tell you...”)
“There’s no luck in Ireland,” agreed Edward, winking at the Major, who was thinking: “Such detail is intolerable,”—the design of the carpet over which the shrinking white feet of the patient still continued to patter day after day, morning and evening, to perform her ablutions...till the day inevitably came (he had been waiting for it with despair), till the page inevitably came when the pitcher and the bowl and the sponge came to her over the carpet and the carpet dropped out of her world and she too prepared to drop out of her world. “Such detail is quite obviously intolerable,” thought the Major as Edward reached out in the gloom to feel whether the teapot’s plump belly was still warm, at the same time absent-mindedly handing the sugar-bowl to the doctor, who did not need it and was muttering incoherent words to the effect that if Edward or anyone else laughed at what he was saying it was because he or they, was or were, British black-guards and fools (some part of the Major’s brain had remained on duty to straighten out the grammar while he thought: “Really, when I arrived and attempted to kiss her hand she flinched away from me as she might have flinched from some uncouth stranger.”).
“Those were the days,” declared Edward absently, perhaps still thinking of the day he had bowled a cricket-ball up Dawson Street.
“They certainly were not!” snapped the doctor.
So why should she write all this? Page after page to someone she scarcely knew. The relentlessly regular handwriting lapped rhythmically on. Only on the last few pages did it begin to waver a little.
I shall not die now.
Brendan, if I die who will look after you when I am gone?
And there were a number of other observations, feebly scratched out, which the Major had not the heart to decipher.
“People are insubstantial,” murmured the doctor, as his bowler-hatted head drooped sleepily on to his chest. “They never last. Of course, it makes no difference in the long run.”
It was signed, without the usual qualification about the “loving fiancée,” quite simply: Angela.
“The old chap’s fallen asleep,” Edward said. “Such a lot of rot he talks...I’m afraid he’s becoming a bit you-know-what.”
Getting to his feet he shouted deafeningly to Murphy to bring more candles because it had become infernally dark. The Major returned the letter to his pocket. Glancing down, he noted with dismay that his own flies were undone. He fumbled with them hastily before Murphy arrived with more candles.
“Can I have some peacock feathers?” demanded Padraig stubbornly. “You promised.”
“Of course, of course,” Edward told him genially. “Look, why don’t you go and ask the twins for some; I’m sure they have lots of that sort of thing. Murphy, show this young man where he can find the girls.”
When Padraig had departed