Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [197]
Touching the face gave him an unpleasant shock. The skin was still soft and pliable to his fingertips. It so obviously belonged to someone! He shuddered as he gently squeezed the chin until the lips closed.
But when he took his hand away the mouth fell open once more. He tried again and the same thing happened. The position of the head was wrong, that was the trouble. On the shelf below the silver cups he found a copy of Wisden’s Almanac for 1911 which he judged to have the right thickness. He blew the dust from it and slipped it under the boy’s head. This time the mouth stayed closed. Taking a deep breath, the Major went to sit down in one of the armchairs by the empty grate.
He sat for five minutes without moving a muscle. Then there was a knock on the door and Edward came in, somewhat apologetically.
“Ah, there you are, Brendan. I was wondering where you’d got to.”
He looked round the room and gave a slight start when his eye fell on the bulging tablecloth. But he made no comment as he came to sit down opposite the Major. Nor did the Major speak.
Presently Edward, with his head tilted back and mouth open in a way that strangely resembled the corpse’s attitude of a few minutes earlier, said: “My nose has been bleeding... divil of a time trying to get it to stop. They say you should put a cold key down the back of your shirt, don’t they, Brendan? Or is that collywobbles, I can never remember ?”
The Major made no reply. Edward sighed faintly and his uptilted gaze wandered around the panelled walls at the various antlers, at the winter forest of stags, at the ibex and antelope and zebra watching the men with calmly accusing glass eyes. For an instant the dreadful thought occurred to the Major that Edward had now gone completely insane and was looking for a place on the wall to mount the Sinn Feiner. But no, Edward had tugged a bloodstained handkerchief from his pocket and was patting his nostrils gingerly. His face had assumed a faintly martyred expression.
“What you don’t realize, Brendan, is that we’re at war...If people come and blow things up they must take the consequences! They must be taught a lesson!”
“Oh, Edward, these are our own people! They aren’t the Germans or the Bolshevists...This is their country as much as it is ours...more than it is ours! Blowing up statues is nothing!”
Edward’s face darkened and he said bitterly: “I always knew you were on their side, Brendan. I’m only thankful that poor Angie didn’t live to see it. A man of your background, I’d have thought you’d have been more loyal.”
“Oh for God’s sake shut up, Edward.”
“I caught them at it red-handed. I don’t shoot innocent people from behind hedges. It was perfectly fair.”
“For days you’ve been waiting for them to come!” Edward grunted but made no attempt to deny it. In any case it was now clear to the Major why he had been spending so much time up on the roof. For days Edward had been using the statue of Queen Victoria the way a big-game hunter uses a salt-lick in the jungle, knowing that sooner or later it would become too much for them to resist. And what was the difference, he wondered, between shooting someone from behind a hedge and shooting them from a roof?
“It was perfectly fair!” Edward repeated, cracking his knuckles.
True, the Major was thinking. Edward probably did not see Sinn Feiners as people at all. He saw them as a species of game that one could only shoot according to a very brief and complicated season (that is to say, when one caught them in the act of setting off bombs).
“It was perfectly fair!” Edward said for the third time and the Major thought: “No, it wasn’t that at all. It was an act of revenge. Revenge for his piglets. Revenge for Angela. Revenge for a meaningless life. Revenge for the accelerating collapse of Unionism.