Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [141]
In the midst of all this cheerful activity and confusion Edward moved like a sleepwalker, silent and remote. If you called to him: “Where’s the hammer?” or “Have you seen my scissors?” he would shake his head wordlessly, not bothering to understand. He seemed unaware that the grim walls around him were blossoming into festive colour. He remained where he was, at his table in the middle of the cavernous ballroom, slumped in a chair with a book open on his knee. The ladies, awed by his silence, tiptoed around the perimeter of the room as they executed their decorations. One day Miss Archer came to the Major and said: “He has a shotgun.”
“Who has a shotgun?”
“Edward. It’s on his table in the ballroom.”
“Good God, what does he want that for?”
They stared at each other in consternation. Later, while Edward was out visiting his piglets, he went to have a look. It was perfectly true. On Edward’s table there lay a shotgun, broken and unloaded. Beside it a dead frog lay on its back with its legs in the air, exposing a flabby white stomach.
All this time Padraig and Viola O’Neill visited the Majestic every day and roamed around with the twins, who had swiftly tired of helping with the decorations. For a few days they continued playing their game of dressing up Padraig as a girl. All of Angela’s clothes were spilled out of their trunks, cupboards and packing-cases; the dresses that suited him were put in one pile, those that didn’t in another. For a while they found this engrossing enough, but presently the job was finished. Just as interest was once again beginning to subside Viola remembered that they still had to consider the rest of Padraig’s clothing, his underwear, petticoats, corsets and so forth. Soon they were all bubbling with hilarity as they struggled with eye-hooks and tugged on the strings of Angela’s corsets—not that Padraig’s shapely body needed any artificial correction of course, but they thought they might as well do the thing properly. After a day or two of trying to persuade the Major to go upstairs and have a look at Padraig clad variously in a camisole, a nightdress, and Angela’s 1908-style swimming-costume (all of which invitations the Major declined firmly) the question of underwear similarly began to pall. It was clearly time to look for a new game.
The girls mooned about aimlessly for the next three or four days, telling people that they were bored and asking them for money—so that they could run away to Dublin and get raped like everyone else (they weren’t too sure what this meant but it sounded interesting). Padraig, however, continued to dress up and sit with the ladies or glide along corridors with whispering skirts. Indeed, he had become such a familiar sight that scarcely anyone paid any attention to him now beyond, say, an absent-minded smile or a “Yes, dear...that is a lovely dress.” The truth was that most of the ladies had probably forgotten by this time that he wasn’t, in fact, a girl. Only once did he provoke a strong reaction: Mr Norton unaccountably exploded with anger one day and shouted: “Get out of my sight, you filthy little swine!” Everyone considered this to be amazing behaviour, but then old Mr Norton had always been considered uncouth, in spite of his mathematical genius. Padraig was made a special fuss of that day to compensate for his hurt feelings.
One bright, chilly December afternoon the Major came upon Padraig on one of the upper landings, standing mournfully by a window. He