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By Root 5455 0

restlessly from one room to another. Wandering aimlessly one day, he entered the writing-room, which was hardly ever used these days, and had a look round. The walls were panelled in dark oak but partly obscured by vast greyish tapestries depicting hunting scenes. Above the mantelpiece, for example, stretching up to the dim ceiling was an immense doe lying on its side on a table laden with fruit and round loaves of bread. One of the animal’s hind legs was twisted up at an angle to the table while in the foreground the graceful head lolled on its long neck. Once scarlet, the blood which dripped picturesquely from the slit white gullet was now as grey as the fruit on the table, as grey as dust. Tables, chairs and desks were distributed here and there in clusters.

A faint sound alerted him. Edward was fast asleep in a cavernous winged armchair of worn leather, his head lolling on one side, mouth open, face collapsed by weariness, by the beginnings of old age and despair. The Major stood there for a long moment in the silent room, appalled to see Edward looking so vulnerable, so disarmed. Then, as he was preparing to tiptoe away, a black shadow slipped from beneath a dusty escritoire and settled itself comfortably in Edward’s abandoned lap (for the great army of cats from the Imperial Bar had recently begun to commandeer certain other little-frequented rooms in the Majestic). Edward woke up, saw the Major watching him, muttered: “Fell asleep,” and cleared his throat with a long weary hooting sound which might have been the cry of a dying animal. Neither of them could think of anything to say.

Since the burning of the fields the weather had taken a turn for the worse: perhaps this was adversely affecting Edward’s spirits. In any case, it was clearly no comfort to him that the burned crop would very likely have been flattened by the rainstorms that howled around the Majestic and left shining puddles on the floor of the ballroom, even if it had escaped the fire. The storms retired to lash and grumble their way over the Irish Sea towards Wales, leaving a steady, interminable downpour that seemed to hang from the sky like a curtain of glass beads.

“Where’s my revolver?” demanded Edward one morning of one of the maids, having spent an hour rummaging through various drawers in his study.

“The cook has it, sir. She does have it safe in the press in the kitchen.”

“What the devil does she have it for?”

“She does be afraid of the Volunteers.”

Edward wasted no time in recovering the weapon—it was covered in floury fingerprints and wrapped in buttered paper —but told nobody what he intended to do with it. As the days passed, the old ladies continued to huddle in shivering groups like nomads round a camp-fire while the Major’s breath steamed up one window after another in various parts of the house. From one or other of these windows he would spot Edward stalking down the drive, oblivious of the water that beat heavily on his tweed cap and raised a faint spray from the shoulders of his trench coat. Very often this trench coat sagged heavily on one side and the Major glimpsed the butt of a revolver protruding from the pocket. Once he hurried after Edward with an umbrella, afraid that he might be about to do something foolish. But Edward was simply making his way towards the pistol-range. There the Major saw him standing at the edge of the clearing under the dripping trees, his cheeks scalded purple by the cold deluge, right arm raised stiff and straight to fire at...it was by no means clear what he was firing at, perhaps at a dandelion that grew uncomfortably from a crevice in the lodge wall. The hand on the end of this stiff arm wobbled violently between the explosions, but Edward’s face was impassive, dead. A thin needle of water streamed without interruption from the metal eye on the end of the butt. The Major withdrew into the sodden shrubbery and made his way thoughtfully up the drive with the rain drumming on his umbrella.

On the following day, however, the rain came to a stop and gave way to weak intermittent sunshine. The change