Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [146]
The Major looked dubiously at the white froth in the measuring-jar.
“I’m drafting a paper to send to the Royal Society. Maybe you’d like to see it before I send it off.”
“Yes, I would,” the Major said.
Above them, against the streaming, echoing bubble of blackness, the rain increased in intensity. Presently Edward said: “I always wanted to make a contribution, however small.”
The Major said nothing. Together they listened to the steady, musical drips in the jam-jars around them.
Nineteen-twenty-one. The rain continued to fall virtually without interruption into the New Year. By now most of the seasonal guests had disappeared, manifestly dissatisfied with their stay. But oh, if they had only known (reflected the Major) how much worse it might easily have been! He himself was so hardened that he no longer found it easy to sympathize about such matters as cold rooms and cold food, dirty towels and damp sheets. Besides, the near-escape of the dog Foch was still at the back of his mind. Compared with death itself these things pale into insignificance.
In spite of the continuing bad weather Edward refused to remove himself from the ballroom. The Major looked in on him once or twice and saw him sitting there, calmly dissecting a toad under an umbrella. The jam-jars had proliferated around him, so that now, if one listened carefully, one could hear a symphony of drips against the percussion of rain from above. As for the toad, it reminded the Major only too horribly of things he still saw in his nightmares—indeed, for all its resemblance to a toad it might have been strawberry jam scooped out of one of the jars and thinly spread on Edward’s marble slab. As for the old ladies, they now had no other resource than to grit their teeth and survive as best they could the awful weeks between Christmas and Easter, keep their noses above the surface somehow or other until the green leaves were back on the trees. As for Padraig, he had not been seen for a few days. Although Dermot had by now gone back to school with his boxing-gloves, the two young Auxiliaries, Matthews and Mortimer, claimed to have found another prospective sparring-partner for him, the son of a farmer of the region—a lad who, although only twelve years old, was reputed to have to shave twice a day. As for the Major himself, the start of the new year could not help but fill him with a young man’s irrational optimism. Perhaps nineteen-twenty-one was the year he would get married (to Sarah, naturally, since matrimony involving any other girl was quite unthinkable)—but even if he did not (and he could not escape the unpleasant fact that for the moment he did not even know where she was), even if he did not, it was still a new year. Something new was sure to happen.
Moreover, any new year was a gift that the Major somehow felt that he did not deserve. Although the Weekly Irish Times no longer published those inky photographs of dead men on the front page, the last stragglers having by now made up their minds whether to live or die (and those that were going having gone), he still had the same grateful but uneasy sensation. “You must do the living for all the others as well as yourself,” a kindly Scottish doctor had once said to him in hospital, trying to coax him back out of the cold areas of chagrin and indifference where his mind had chosen to stray. But of course that was easier said than done, particularly at the Majestic.
The weather continued bitterly cold for the next few days. Getting out of bed in the morning, taking a bath with an icy draught sighing underneath the bathroom door, became an agony. The Major’s teeth chattered and he thought with physical distress of sunshine and Italy. People spoke little during this cold weather; the ladies curled themselves up in tight little bundles and compressed