Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [196]
It was at this moment that Maitland, who had taken a sip of Murphy’s bitter brew, took the lid off the sugar-bowl in front of him. Instead of lumps of sugar it contained a pile of dully glistening metal lozenges...revolver bullets! Making a droll face he picked one up, dropped it into his coffee and began to stir it with the barrel of the revolver beside his plate.
This was altogether too much for the undergraduates. They had been close to bursting all evening. Now all they could do was throw back their heads and howl with laughter till their ribs ached.
This great gale of youthful laughter filled the dining-room and echoed away down dim, empty corridors, ringing faintly through all the familiar sitting-rooms, dusty, silent and forgotten; penetrating to the floors above with their disused bedrooms and dilapidated bathrooms and to the damp, sleeping cellars, quiet now for eternity, unvisited except by the rats. It was such healthy, good-natured laughter that even the old ladies found themselves smiling or chuckling gently. Only Captain Roberts at one table and the Major at the other showed no sign of amusement. They sat on in silence, chin in hand, perhaps, or rubbing their eyes wearily, waiting in patient dejection for the laughter to come to an end.
The body might well have been left in the potting-shed where it had first been carried, or dragged rather, and laid out on a pile of old potato sacks. But the shed was a damp and draughty place, smelling strongly of earth and rotting vegetation. Gardening implements hung from nails, some of them so rusty that they were now only skeletons of themselves: a spade with its broad face eaten away, a rake with its teeth flaked into threads as thin as needles, all thanks to some gardener who in happier times had been too idle or trusting to oil the metal. Not so long ago, perhaps only two or three years earlier, some lazy person had dumped a pile of grass under the work-bench, the mowing from one of the lawns. In the interim it had turned into a yellowish, putrid mass with a hard outer crust indented with the print of a boot.
Altogether the potting-shed had seemed to the Major too stark and comfortless a place to leave a young man’s body, even for so short a time. So with the help of Seán Murphy he had carried it into the house and placed it on a side table in the gun room. Here at least one could be fairly sure that the sight of it would not disturb the ladies. All the same, once it had been laid out on the table and Seán Murphy had retired, his friendly face still registering shock at this sudden contact with mortality, the Major found himself wondering whether it might not have been better to have left it where it was. The ragged clothes of a labourer, the muddy boots laced with string, the threadbare jacket and patched trousers—all this seemed out of keeping with the gracious oak panelling and the antlers on the walls, even when stretched horizontal with death on a side table. It was almost as startling, mused the Major, as finding a chimney-sweep lounging on the sofa in one’s drawing-room. Now that it was here in the gun room the body seemed to have been more at ease in the potting-shed.
He stood back, head on one side and finger to his mouth. Well, it would be absurd to have it carried back to the potting-shed now. He would have done better to leave it as it was, perhaps, but there was no point in worrying about that. His eye fell on another incongruity: above the body on a shelf there were a great many tarnished silver cups, for Edward had been a marksman in his day. Still was, apparently, in spite of his shaking hands. But the less one thought about that the better.
Shaking his head wearily he looked round for something to throw over the dead man. But there was nothing, so he left the room for a moment and returned with a clean tablecloth which he unfolded and threw over the body, taking another look as he did so at the young man’s white face and bright red hair, at the bluish eyelids which he had closed himself. The mouth was