Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [172]
It seemed to the Major that the night had already lasted an eternity, but the clock on the mantelpiece of the residents’ lounge (specially repaired and wound to mark off the bliss-ful moments of Edward’s ball) had scarcely conceded three o’clock. A few moments ago he had caught sight of himself in a mirror unexpectedly: two eyes round with worry in a pale face had stared at him unblinking as an owl, making him think of shell-shock cases in hospital, men who used to sit up in bed all night, wide-eyed, smoking one cigarette after another as they tried to probe the darkness around them.
“I hope this will be a lesson to you!”
All the lessons that were being learned that evening! But what good did they do? By the time one had learned them it was too late. He would move on, but life would not go with him. Life would stay where Sarah was; all the great explosions of joy would take place in her vicinity.
“Drink it all up. Every drop. If it tastes bad you should have thought of that beforehand!”
The house was empty now and silent, except for an occasional faint scratching sound; the Major postulated a rat under the floor-boards. Edward had disappeared once more, leaving him to cope with everything as usual, but he was too tired to feel any resentment. Besides, in a moment he would go to bed.
The Major was standing beside the dying fire, resting one elbow on the mantelpiece, his hand sifting slowly through his untidy mass of hair. Next to him, huddled in dressing-gowns, sat the twins, looking pallid and chastened, each of them nursing an enormous glass of bicarbonate of soda mixed with water from which, wrinkling their noses in disgust, they sipped miserably.
“Anyway, you’re sure you didn’t do anything you shouldn’t have done? It’s far better to tell me now if you did...”
“Oh no, Brendan!” murmured Charity hoarsely, avoiding the Major’s eye.
“What sort of thing do you mean?” inquired Faith more strategically.
“Never you mind. Just drink up. Come on now, take a deep breath and drink it down all in one go. It’s the only way.”
Half an hour earlier the Major had come upon a strange quartet proceeding slowly down the stairs. First had come Mortimer, grunting and dishevelled, wobbling dangerously under the weight of the limp and senseless Matthews (who had “bumped his head in the dark”). A few stairs above the labouring Mortimer the two sisters were supporting each other, pale as ghosts, their clothing disarranged and somehow...well, different, he could not help thinking (in their debilitated state they had left off some of the inner layers that had earlier exercised Matthews’s skill to the utmost). With one dismayed glance at the twins the Major had leaped to assist Mortimer with his unfortunate friend; the “bump” was a bad one, the poor chap was out cold, though breathing steadily enough.
Once Matthews had been deposited on a sofa in the foyer the Major telephoned the camp at Valebridge and asked for an ambulance. “No, no, it was an accident,” he had explained several times. In due course the ambulance arrived; the men who came with it looked around suspiciously for a while (“No, nothing whatsoever to do with Sinn Feiners. He simply bumped his head!”) and then left with poor Matthews who still had not regained consciousness. Indeed, it was several hours before he finally came round and even then was unable to remember just how he had come to bump his head in the dark, an uncertainty of memory that was to persist, together with bouts of double vision and absent-mindedness, for the rest of his life.
The twins had heaved a sigh of relief when they saw him go. Charity in particular experienced a surge of joy and for a moment almost forgot to appear more ill than she felt (she and Faith had had the presence of mind to powder their faces with chalk in order to incite sympathy and deflect punishment). She did feel ill, of course, inside, though luckily she had vomited the contents of her stomach.