Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [16]
“We should like to know,” began Miss Johnston impressively, “whether you had tea this afternoon in the Palm Court.”
“Tea? Why, yes, thank you, I did,” replied the Major, staring at them in surprise. The ladies were exchanging significant glances.
“Thank you, Major. That was all we wanted to know,” Miss Johnston said in clipped tones and the Major felt himself to be dismissed.
In the meantime, to the Major’s relief, Ripon had sloped off somewhere and there was a prospect of being able to relax undisturbed in one of the deck-chairs by the tennis court. Hardly had he sat down, however, when Ripon reappeared with a glass of beer in his hand and sat down beside him. Without offering the Major a drink he began to make comments in a confidential tone about anyone who happened to stray within his field of vision. The old ladies? Permanent residents “battening on the poor old Majestic like leeches, impossible to get rid of, most of them won’t even pay their wretched bills unless one gets a bit sticky with them...” That poor old blighter sitting by himself near the summerhouse, the chap with the drop on the end of his nose? “Used to be a friend of Parnell and a man of great influence with the Parliamentary Party. These days no one speaks to him, he’s a dreadful old bore...” That young fellow with the pale face lurking on the steps down to the next terrace? “The twins’ tutor...but since they don’t need a tutor (or refuse to have one, it comes to the same thing) the chap never does a stroke, always lurking around and toadying to Father. I can hardly bear to look at his neck, his collar always looks like a dirty, bloodstained bandage. Frightful fellow. Another thing, I have it on reliable authority that he has a cloven hoof; he has been observed bathing.”
Ripon fell silent. Sarah was approaching with Angela, who wanted to know if the Major had met her “best friend in the world” ...the person without whom she didn’t know what she would do in Kilnalough, where life was so dull and the people, although kindness itself, so uncultured that one hardly knew what to say. Did the Major know that, apart from the one in the vestry at St Michael’s and perhaps one at the chapel (she didn’t know about that) and two or three broken-down old things here at the Majestic, Sarah was the only person in Kilnalough who owned a piano and that this piano had been brought down from Pigotts of Dublin? The Major, as he listened and nodded politely, began to wonder, not for the first time, whether Angela was conscious of having written him so many letters. Could it be, he wondered as Angela explained how the beast’s legs had been sawn off and reattached, that this was a case of automatic writing, that one night in every week she would throw back the bedclothes and with staring eyes and arms outstretched, clad only in a shimmering nightdress, walk mechanically to her writing-desk and set to work?
Sarah said: “Angela, how are you these days? I see so little of you.”
“Much the same,” Angela murmured. “Much the same.” And there was silence for a moment except for the sound of scuffling feet and hard breathing from the near-by tennis court. Brightening, however, she added: “But how are you, Sarah? Life must be such a trial for you—yes, I know it must be—the things all the rest of us take for granted and yet you’re like a perfect angel, never a word of complaint!