Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [127]
“He looks a wild young fellow,” the Major said as he handed the binoculars back. Before turning away he watched another huge wave tower over the young Irishman, hang for a moment, and at last topple to boil impotently around his feet. It was, after all, only the lack of perspective that made it seem as if he would be swept away.
By the following morning the wind had dropped and mild autumnal sunshine bathed the old brick and woodwork of the Majestic.
With the milder weather the Major’s nest of pillows in the linen room became hotter than ever, almost equatorial in fact. It was impossible to open the window, which had swollen with the rain and been painted shut many years ago. The heat mounted. After a couple of hours of tortured reflection on his relationship with Sarah, his naked body glistening like a savage’s, he would be obliged to gulp down several pints of cold water. It was true that later, when the meal had been cooked and the stoves banked down for the night, the heat would drop to a more pleasant temperature—but by that time he had worn out his emotions, written two or three feverish letters with sweaty hiatuses on the paper where the ink refused to stay. In some of these letters, forgetting that he could not permit himself to be weak, he capitulated completely (“Sarah, I love you, you must come back to me, ah, the heat is intolerable”). But fortunately he mastered himself sufficiently never to post them, thinking: “She’d only think me a bit of an ass.”
“I shall never see you again,” he groaned aloud one afternoon, sitting high up on one of the blanket racks with a glass of whiskey and swinging his damp hairy legs in the air. But at that moment there was a knock at the door.
“Who is it?”
“Me. Can I come in?” came Charity’s voice.
“Certainly not.” The Major hastily jumped down and began to pull on his clothes. “What d’you want?”
“That girl wants to see you.”
“Which girl?”
“The one you all make such a fuss of. The one with the spots and the limp.”
“You mean Sarah? Tell her I’ll be down immediately.”
But Charity was still mooning outside the door when he opened it, and gave him a surly, reproachful look.
“How did you know where I was?”
“I saw you go in one day. What d’you do in there anyway?”
Although some days had passed since they had seen each other, Sarah seemed to be treating her visit as entirely normal. She greeted him as if unaware of the heartache that this separation had caused him. She was cheerful. She was delighted to see him. By herself she had been miserable. Why had he not come to see her?
“Eh?”
“I’ve been most horribly sick (ugh! It’s disgusting to mention such things). You might at least have come and cheered me up.”
“Was it an unmentionable disease?” asked the Major gaily, infected by her good spirits.
“All diseases are unmentionable, Brendan, but I shall tell you anyway. I spent a whole night vomiting. Isn’t that re-volting?”
The Major laughed, although secretly somewhat taken aback by this frankness. Of course Sarah was a law unto herself.
But she was irresistible. She chattered away gaily to him as they strolled arm-in-arm back and forth over the dusty floor of the ballroom. Yes, she had talked to Captain Bolton... What a strange, cold man he was! Those blue eyes of his! They said in Kilnalough that once he had glanced for a moment at a glass of water on Father O’Byrne’s table and ice had formed on it an inch thick...Oh, the Major was impossible! Of course it wasn’t true literally, it was true in some other way, how should she know in what way it was true? And, and... the miracle, had he seen the miracle after that absurd little scene at the Golf Club? Well, she’d taken a peek at the statue and there didn’t seem to be much blood flowing anywhere but there were a couple of brown spots...but they might have been anything, they