Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [147]
Not only for the ladies was this a bad time. Padraig too was in despair. His father was now talking of having him apprenticed as a clerk in a solicitor’s office in Dublin, a prospect which no person of sensitivity could tolerate. Faith told the Major that Padraig was going about telling the ladies that he would prefer to dress himself in a scarlet cloak and leap from the battlements of the Majestic. The Major told her to tell him on no account to go near the battlements, they weren’t safe. The ornamental façade might give way at any moment.
Wearing mittens and a Balaclava helmet, the Major sat in the residents’ lounge on a bright February morning reading of the day’s disasters in the Irish Times. Looking up, he noticed that Edward had come into the room. He gave a violent start. With Edward was Sarah! Her face was pale and tense; she looked unhappy. Edward stared sightlessly past her, but his lips were moving rapidly as he spoke to her in an undertone. Only for an instant, as he came to the end of what he was saying, did he allow his eyes to focus on her face before retiring to scan the empty reaches of the room once more. Sarah was protesting bitterly about something. The Major dropped his eyes and pretended to be engrossed in the newspaper. Sarah stood talking with Edward near the fire for a few moments. The Major was aware that her glance rested on him once or twice, as if waiting for the moment when he would look up and their glances would meet. However, he continued to scrutinize the Irish Times, frowning with concentration. Presently he was aware that she and Edward were moving away again through the chairs and tables towards the door. When he at last permitted himself to look up they were no longer there. “What a fool I am! It would have been much better if I’d gone up to her and made some cheerful remark and then wandered away again, so that she’d have realized how little she means to me since she told Edward about the letters I wrote her.”
Edward’s experiments were languishing once again. His toad, spread out invitingly on the marble slab, had been devoured during the night by the omnipresent cats—they had evidently been undeterred by the fact that the toad had been marinated in formalin, which had turned it a blue-black colour, more like damson jam than strawberry. Edward still sat among his books and implements, lost in thought, his face extinct. But now sometimes his seriousness gave way abruptly to disconcerting bouts of hilarity; he became once more a player of mild practical jokes. To the Major, who had no sense of humour, practical jokes were disagreeable in the normal course of affairs; in cold weather they became intolerable—one simply had no energy left to cope with them. But nevertheless he was obliged to keep a constant watch on Edward, jokes or no jokes; he was obliged to haunt him, in fact, flitting along chilly corridors, taking walks in the grounds whenever Edward went to commune with his piglets, or repeatedly passing the ballroom windows to ascertain that he was still at his desk. The reason, of course, was that sooner or later Sarah would come again to visit Edward. Honour required the Major to seize the opportunity of making some casual remark to her which would indicate his indifference.
The three of them met head-on in one of the high-hedged privet alleys of the Chinese Garden.
“Hello, Brendan,” she said with a smile.
“Oh, hello...you’re back, are you?” replied the Major casually, turning pale. Even though he had been prepared for this inevitable meeting, it had still come as a dreadful shock. She looked very pretty in her winter coat of heavy grey wool trimmed with dark musquash, fingers buried in a fur muff, ears hidden by a fur cape. Her eyes remained steadily on the Major’s, disconcerting him.