Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [176]
It seemed to him that there would never be an end to this blundering through the darkened, empty corridors of the Majestic. What time was it? Surely it should be light by now! But the black windows he passed were lit only by the reflected flame of his candle.
After the darkness of the corridor the study seemed glaringly bright. Still holding the candle and oblivious of the drips of hot wax that spilled over his clenched fingers, the Major stood in the doorway and looked about with shocked eyes at the bizarre scene of destruction that greeted him. At his feet the floor was littered with broken glass and tarnished silver cups. A framed cartoon by Spy which had once hung over the desk lay on the floor, its glass cobwebbed; the desk itself had been swept clean except for an upturned ink-well which was still leaking a steady black drip on to the dusty carpet. Even the air showed traces of the room’s chaos—hazy with white powder, turf-ash scattered half across the floor from the embers of the fire, in which, moreover, a man’s shoe lay smouldering. Beyond the fireplace a Welsh dresser had tilted forward to unload a shelf of books and half a row of dusty upturned brandy glasses on to the floor. As he watched, another glass crept forward, slithered off the topmost shelf, turned slowly in the air and dissolved in a bright puff as it struck the edge of the dresser.
In the middle of all this confusion Sarah was sitting, alone. She said calmly: “Go away, Brendan. Things are difficult enough already.” And then, as the Major neither moved nor spoke, she added impatiently: “Edward is a fool, an absurd and pitiful creature. Mother of God! And as for my father... He seemed to think that he was actually going to kill Edward...Of course he couldn’t even do that successfully.”
Sarah was sitting with her legs drawn up beneath her in a deep leather armchair. Around her shoulders she had swirled a vast khaki blanket which hung to the floor in an irregular cone. One naked arm clasped the blanket to her chin. The Major’s eye, stung by the nakedness of this arm, travelled away and was promptly stung again, more severely: this time by a door beside the desk that stood open to an adjoining room. He had never seen this door open before. Within he could glimpse an iron bed and a tangle of dirty sheets.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Hurt?” cried Sarah gaily. “If they had managed to hurt each other perhaps they wouldn’t have looked so ridiculous...Why is everyone here so ridiculous? Yes, you’re ridiculous too, goggling at me with your sheep’s eyes...Can you guess what happened? Did he cut Edward’s throat? At least that would have made some sense...but no, not even that! He kept shouting that his honour was besmirched...as if he had any honour to begin with! He said that Edward had bought me with thirty pieces of silver...Naturally Edward couldn’t find a word to say to all this. Oh, they make me sick, both of them. ‘Now look here, Mr Devlin, can’t we be sensible about this?’ Ah, and my father was drunk, of course, or else it would never have occurred to him to assault one of the gentry, a member of the quality, mind you, a Protestant gentleman...one of his own customers at the bank. My God! Can you imagine his daring? Oh yes, and Edward... don’t think that he was any better. He was worse...he was ready to grovel too...and I used to think he was a man with dignity, shows what a poor little fool I am. You should have seen them fighting, you’d have died laughing. They make me sick!”
Sarah’s face had turned white and against this pallor her eyes seemed black and very large. As if to give substance to her words, she leaned forward, hanging her head over the arm of the chair as if she were, in fact, about to be sick. The Major took a step forward to comfort her, but stopped again. Lying folded on the arm of the sofa his eyes encountered an oblong of grey silk that might have been a woman’s dress. He stood there, painfully absorbing every detail; when he turned his head away every tiniest thread was stitched into his memory. He was certain that Sarah