The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [79]
“Can we eat him?” they wanted to know.
“He’s already buried.”
“We could dig him up,” Faith suggested. “Aren’t rabbits’ feet supposed to be lucky?”
But the Major said he had forgotten where the grave was.
“Were the bullet-holes bad?”
“How d’you mean? They were bad for the rabbit.”
“No, I was just thinking we could have made a fur hat,” said Charity, “if there weren’t too many holes in him.”
“I say, Brendan, you aren’t any good at arithmetic, are you? Daddy has set that dreadful tutor person on us and now he’s threatening to look at our homework when it’s been corrected.”
“Try Mr Norton. He’s supposed to be good at that sort of thing.”
Mr Norton was a man in his seventies, a recent arrival at the Majestic; he had the reputation, fostered by himself, of having been a mathematical genius, drained in his youth, however, of energy and fortune by a weakness for beautiful women.
“We asked him...”
“But he always wants us to sit on his knee as if we were children.”
“And his breath smells horrid.”
Now that the Imperial Bar had been rendered uninhabitable by the colony of cats the Major sometimes took one of Edward’s motor cars into Kilnalough in the evening for a drink at the Golf Club. There one evening he met Boy O’Neill, the solicitor, who greeted him like an old friend, although it was almost a year since the Peace Day parade when they had last met. O’Neill’s appearance had changed dramatically and the Major could now scarcely recognize the timid, bony invalid he had first met at Angela’s tea-party. Dressed in a baggy tweed jacket with bulging pockets, O’Neill appeared more swollen and aggressive than ever. There was a subdued irritation about the man which made one ill at ease when talking to him; one had the feeling that O’Neill was capable at any moment of abandoning reason altogether and finishing the argument with an uppercut. The Major sat watching the wads of jaw-muscle thickening as he talked: he had just finished eighteen holes, he declared, and had never felt better in his life. A hot shower, a drink, and now he was off home for a good meal. He unslung the clinking golf-bag from his shoulder and heaved it into an armchair, showing no impatience to depart. Eyeing the golf-bag, the Major noticed nestling between a mashie niblick, a jigger and the bulging wooden head of a driver what he at first thought was a club without a head—but no, it was the barrel of a rifle.
“No half measures, eh?”
“I can see you haven’t been reading the papers, Major. Couple of army chaps were shot down on a links in Tipperary the other day...unarmed men. Didn’t have a chance out there with no shelter, nobody passing by. The Shinners are brave enough when the other fella doesn’t have a gun. They’ll run like rabbits if they know you’re armed.”
The Major only glanced at the newspaper these days, tired of trying to comprehend a situation which defied comprehension, a war without battles or trenches. Why should one bother with the details: the raids for arms, the shootings of policemen, the intimidations? What could one learn from the details of chaos? Every now and then, however, he would become aware with a feeling of shock that, for all its lack of pattern, the situation was different, and always a little worse.
Satisfied with the Major’s look of dismay, O’Neill was now saying confidently that there was no need to worry. “All this will be cleared up now within five or six weeks, you can take it from me.”
“How d’you know?” asked the Major hopefully, thinking that perhaps O’Neill had heard something. “Two reasons,