• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1104 0

eye on the drive. The Major was impeccably dressed in white tie and tails—it was easy to see that both he and his tailor were men of distinction. Edward was also dressed in tails, but of a more antique cut—which was strange when one considered the care he normally took about his appearance. Moreover, the contours of his body had changed somewhat over the years that had elapsed since the tailor had done his work: the years revealed themselves in the horizontal strain marks where the top of his trousers surrounded his stomach, in the severe grip that the coat exerted across his shoulders from one armpit to another, encouraging his arms to hang outwards, penguin fashion. Nevertheless he was an imposing figure. Evening dress suited his craggy, leonine features by putting them in a civilized perspective. They made him look both fierce and harmless, a lion in a cage. Even the red carnation he wore in his buttonhole—on Edward’s person it gave one a mild shock, as if one had just come face to face with a prizefighter with a flower behind his ear.

“This looks like somebody.”

A Bentley had come nosing up the drive and now, at a walking pace, was making a wide turn in front of the statue of Queen Victoria. A pale glimmer of faces showed at its windows, staring out at the hotel.

“That’s deuced odd. They’re making off again. You don’t think they might have changed their minds at the last moment, do you?”

But the Major did not answer. He was not worried about some guests who could not make up their minds out there in the darkness. He was listening intently. Had he just heard a deep, ominous miaowing issue from some distant reaches of the building?

Those wretched cats, the trouble they had caused! First they had tried hunting them out of the upper storeys with broomsticks, sweeping them out of the rooms, along the corridors and down the stairs into the yard. But it is impossible to control a herd of cats; each one makes up its own mind where it wants to go. You start off with a vast furry flock, terrified and resentful. But then, quick as lightning, they double back or flash between your legs or over your head, zoom up the curtains or on to the top of wardrobes, and sit there spitting at you while you try to reach them with your broom and the rest of the flock disperses. You are lucky if you succeed in ushering out one scarred old ginger warrior whom, likely as not, you find waiting for you once again at the top of the stairs, having slipped back in through a broken window or down a chimney.

“Hello, they seem to be coming back.”

The Bentley had reappeared on the lamplit crescent of gravel travelling slowly backwards, having locked antlers with an immense De Dion-Bouton on the narrow drive. Both motor cars stopped this time and disgorged their occupants, so Edward opened the door and with a welcoming smile on his lips moved out on to the steps. As the Major followed him he again heard that ominous caterwauling in the distance and remembered Edward’s brainwave: “Bring the dogs in from the yard and quarter them in the upper storeys...that’ll get rid of the bloody cats!” Well, they had tried this, of course. But it had been a complete failure. The dogs had stood about uncomfortably in little groups, making little effort to chase the cats but defecating enormously on the carpets. At night they had howled like lost souls, keeping everyone awake. In the end the dogs had been returned to the yard, tails wagging with relief. It was not their sort of thing at all.

The Major was now shaking hands repeatedly and smiling as he was introduced. More carriages were arriving. Horns were sounding cheerfully. The Hammonds, the FitzPatricks, the Craigs with son and daughter-in-law, the Russells from Maryborough, the Porters, the FitzHerberts and FitzSimons, the Maudsley girls, Annie and Fanny, from Kingstown, Miss Carol Feldman, the Odlums and the O’Briens, the Allens and the Douglases and the Prendergasts and the Kirwans and the Carrutherses and Miss Bridget O’Toole...The Major’s head began to swim and his smile became fixed.

“One doesn’t shoot