Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [168]
Gay as a skylark and with more energy than she could find a use for, Faith had now begun to climb using only one leg, her crinoline ballooning prettily with each hop—but even so she found she was ascending more quickly than the others. Back she came to tug at Mortimer’s sleeve again, telling him that he was a slowcoach and that he should forget his beastly cricket and come on up and...“My God! Just look at Catty! You’d think she was sleep-walking!”
Indeed, Charity was swaying helplessly, loose-limbed as a puppet, divinely relaxed. Her eyelids kept creeping down and it took all her strength to force them up a millimetre or two to see what was going on. Climbing unaided would have been out of the question but fortunately Matthews’s shoulder was under her left armpit, his powerful arm was wrapped round her back and a hand like a steel hook gripped the bottom of her rib-cage as if it were the handle of a suitcase (this hurt, she knew, but for some reason she couldn’t feel it)...“Jolly decent of him to help me, anyway,” she kept thinking.
“Hey! Are you all right, Catty?” Faith’s grinning face was saying a few inches in front of her own, emerging out of a grey fog of sleep.
“Of course I am!” she said crossly—or would have said if she had not been so busy with the weight of her eyelids.
“Of course she is!” Matthews echoed her thoughts, though rather defensively. “She’s as right as rain.” But at the same time he was becoming increasingly anxious lest he had picked the wrong one. This one was too drunk—either that or not drunk enough. Fortunately, while his right hand, fingers dug deep into the soft, elastic flesh of her waist, was holding Charity up by the ribs, his left hand was gripping the neck of a bottle of chilled champagne that he had thoughtfully caught up out of an ice-bucket in case a further anaesthetic should be needed. But what was the matter with that ass Mortimer? Was he showing the white feather in spite of all his big talk? In which case...
But meanwhile they had at last reached the second floor and Faith had picked out two adjoining rooms which she knew to be unoccupied. Having deposited one twin in each of them, the young men emerged for a hasty conference, Matthews suggesting that Mortimer might like to swap...“I think this one prefers you, anyway.”
But Mortimer considered his honour to be at stake and rather haughtily rejected the suggestion, though he knew (and knew that Matthews knew) that he would have been only too glad to accept if it had not been a question of honour.
“But you aren’t going to be a cad, are you, Matthews? I mean, your one is dead to the world.”
“Matter of fact, you’re wrong there. She’s already getting interested...”
Matthews and Mortimer separated on this disagreeable note, the former with every intention of being a cad if he possibly could, the latter determined to put up a good show (or at least not to be sick like last time). Matthews, returning to the room where Charity lay fast asleep on a dusty counterpane, cast an expert eye over her inert form and saw at a glance that he would have to be quick.
It’s not at all easy to undress someone who is unconscious —and Charity was wearing a great many layers of clothes. Fortunately Matthews was deft and experienced at removing ladies’ garments, otherwise he might have been so discouraged as to give the whole thing up as a bad job, thereby losing a heaven-sent opportunity. Besides, he knew himself to be a good worker and was proud of his skill. This was something of a challenge, all the more so since the clothes Charity was wearing were unfamiliar: crinoline and petticoats and odd pantaloons with all sorts of hooks and ribbons and laces and safety-pins in places where one would not expect them. He lit the oil lamp, removed his jacket and made a rapid preliminary check to make sure that what ought to be there was there—and it was (for even divinely beautiful girls are constructed on the same general principles as their more homely sisters). Then he rubbed his chilly fingers and set to work,