Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [158]
In the doorway he hesitated. He had seen Sarah and, although his mind continued to register calmly a variety of impressions which had nothing whatever to do with her, he was aware of a solid pulse throbbing in his neck and chest. Tonight he would propose!
The ballroom was decorated with banks of violets which added a sweet fragrance to the faint odours of cologne and perfume drifting from behind the delicate ears of the ladies and the heavier aroma of tobacco-smoke from the thickly moustached lips of their companions. Sarah was sitting beside one of these banks of violets, her face slightly blurred by a mist of green ferns. Behind her chair, with his right hand over his heart as if posing for a photograph, stood Captain Bolton, watching the dancers (of whom there did not seem to be a great many). It was Bolton’s other hand which caught the Major’s eye; the palm rested on the back of Sarah’s chair but the fingertips trailed carelessly forward on to her shoulder. As the Major watched, he bent his head to say something to her, delicately encircling her naked upper arm with finger and thumb as he did so. The finger whitened for an instant, but Sarah continued to look straight ahead. Her face was dark and closed. She might have been unaware that Bolton was standing behind her.
Having started in her direction, the Major now changed his mind. He had a great deal of dancing to do; he had cheerfully promised a number of the old ladies that he would dance with them. He began with a trembling but light-footed Miss Porteous, next came a waltz with the cumbersome Miss Johnston who made things difficult by wanting to lead, then it was time for a bewildered Mrs Rice to take the floor.
Edward was moving from one group of guests to another, making genial, incoherent remarks, red in the face and wearing an air of mingled triumph and discomfort in the tight grip of his tail-coat. The Major was afraid that this triumph might be premature. The guests had been carelessly chosen because, although there were a great many young men, thanks to the Auxiliaries, young ladies were in short supply. The twins, flushed and exultant, were besieged and claimed for every dance. Viola O’Neill was also discreetly holding court under the sharp eye of her parents, flirting with three or four young men at once. Even Sir Joshua’s daughters were being paid considerable attention: their long, horse-like faces were turned continually to where their mother was sitting, for encouragement or advice. A doting smile would appear on her face, which was an older, more wrinkled version of theirs, and she would nod affirmatively. And this horse face—the Major’s disabused eye noted as with flexed knees he foxtrotted a gasping and near-hysterical Miss Staveley round the floor—these equine features were repeated again and again all the way down the glittering ballroom, as if the Smileys had been reflected in a great hall of mirrors, from the oldest men and women to the youngest children. This was the face of Anglo-Ireland, the inbred Protestant aristocracy, the face, progressively refining itself into a separate, luxurious species, which had ruled Ireland for almost five hundred years: the wispy fair hair, the eyes too close together, the long nose and protruding teeth. “Ripon was right, in a biological sense as well as in several others, to marry Máire Noonan.”
If only there had been more young people! No doubt it was this absence of youth which lent the guests the appearance of wax figures, museum curiosities, unconnected with the present era, the seething modern world of 1921. The Major peered round Miss Staveley’s heaving shoulders. The handsome and distinguished young people from abroad were no longer to be seen. Even the lovely Miss Bond, who had briefly captivated him in the foyer, had vanished.
Thinking of the Auxiliaries, he cast a worried glance in their direction; they had stationed themselves near the buffet