Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [139]
While Angela was still alive the Spencers had eaten at a table separated by the width of the dining-room from the guests, but now, drawn together by death, growing chaos, and the advancing winter, everyone ate together at two long tables, Edward normally at the head of one, the Major at the head of the other. According to the ritual the Major now picked up the heavy handbell and rang it vigorously, before crossing to the small door concealed in the oak panelling. He held it open and waited for Mrs Rappaport to step out. She did so, followed by the marmalade “kitten” (now a powerfully built cat). Having taken hold of his arm, she allowed herself to be led to the table. In silence the Major helped her into her chair at the end of the table nearest to the fire, tied a napkin round her neck and put a silver spoon in her hand. A stool had been placed beside her chair for the cat, which had recently become too big and cumbersome to remain on her lap while she was eating. Disasters had occurred; hot soup had dribbled on to its striped back; once while it was sleeping peacefully a portion of scalding shepherd’s pie had slid off a fork and dropped like a poultice into one of its ears.)
The Major said grace and took his seat at the other end of the table.
“Where’s Daddy?” whispered Faith.
Beneath his thick growth of moustache the Major’s mouth shaped the words: “Busy. Eat up.”
“Busy doing what?”
The Major frowned but offered no reply. It hardly mattered what Edward was doing. The important thing was that he had broken one of his own rules.
“Cheer up, Brendan,” said Charity and reached under the table to pat his knee. The Major frowned more sternly than ever and, lifting a spoonful of tepid grey soup to his lips, drank it down with a slight shudder, like medicine. “He’s broken one of his own rules,” he thought again, not without a certain bleak satisfaction. “He’s beginning to go to pieces.”
Next day Edward was by turns impatient, irascible and resigned. His experiments were being baulked at every turn. The trouble seemed to be that Murphy, whom he wanted to perform his experiments upon, was being difficult.
“The man has no apprehension of the needs of scientific inquiry,” he said. The Major noticed that look of mild self-mockery, which had so surprised him at their first meeting, pass fleetingly over Edward’s leonine features. But then his face hardened and he added petulantly: “Pretty soon the bloody servants will be giving us orders.”
“What exactly is this contraption?”
On Edward’s table lay the partly dismantled graph-drum from the barometer. The inking-nibs had been rearranged to connect with a tangle of wires and rubber pipes; one of these pipes was attached to a glass funnel containing water and a wooden float, terminating in a deflated rubber balloon.
“I’ve been trying to reproduce some experiments Cannon made before the war on hunger and thirst. He was the chap who discovered that hunger-pangs come from a periodic contraction of the stomach. He got one of his students to swallow a balloon like this, inflated later, of course...then with each contraction the balloon in the stomach would be compressed, driving the air up along this tube, passing through the esophagus and in turn making the float rise by forcing up the water-level. Pretty ingenious, really. The trouble is that the wretched Murphy simply refuses to swallow the damn balloon.”
“Ah.”
“The point is that Cannon used a young man for his experiments. I wanted to see whether