Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [200]
Their sense of duty overcoming their distaste, the ladies would sometimes take their knitting and climb the stairs to the first floor to sit with him. And while they knitted he would gabble long, incomprehensible equations interlarded with scarcely more intelligible descriptions of his encounters with that sex to which, all his life, he had devotedly attempted to unite himself (only to finish his days, old and alone, between these chilly, rumpled sheets). The Major was sorry for him but glad, on the whole, that his reminiscences were so difficult to fathom...The snatches that one could understand were extraordinarily indecent, even to the Major’s hardened military ears.
One day, afraid lest Mr Norton’s ramblings should offend the ladies (particularly those whose honour had remained unimpaired by marriage), the Major brought him an arithmetic textbook belonging to the twins which he had happened to come across in a waste-paper basket unemptied since the previous winter. Mr Norton seized it with delight and in the few days that remained to him (before his rela-tions whisked him away to a more suitable institution) recited mathematical problems without pausing for breath, answering each one promptly before proceeding to the next. The Major sometimes paused to listen to this litany, and one of the problems, in particular, remained in his mind. It concerned a man who was unable to swim and found himself in a leaking rowing-boat so many hundreds of yards from land. He was faced with the alternative of baling rapidly with a tin cup (volume so many cubic inches; maximum rate of baling movement so many times per minute), the water entering at such-and-such a speed; or of ignoring the leak and rowing furiously (at so many miles per hour) for the nearest land... or, of course, a combination of now one, now the other. How should this man best proceed?
“Can he make it?”
“Afraid not quite, old chap,” replied Mr Norton with unexpected clarity.
“Ah,” said the Major absently and wandered off puffing his pipe.
The Major was working hard these days, helped by Mrs Roche, Miss Archer and some of the other ladies. Edward’s frame of mind had improved to some extent since he had killed a Sinn Feiner. An abscess had been lanced and a quantity of poison had been allowed to escape. Nevertheless the Major was aware that it would fill up again, given time.
Surprisingly docile at first, Edward had agreed to go to England and spend some time with the twins. He had even shown one or two faint traces of remorse. The Major had come upon him cleaning the congealed blood from the work bench in the potting-shed. On seeing the Major, however, he had stopped and walked out into the light drizzle, a hat-less and derelict figure. Latterly the Major had detected signs of renascent fear and bitterness. He was watching him more carefully now and it soon became clear that Edward was preparing plans for the defence of his estate. One evening when, in spite of the Major’s absolute refusal to accommodate them, a frighteningly determined and aggressive young schoolmistress had succeeded in installing a brood of girl guides at the Majestic for the night, Edward, incoher-ent with whiskey and raddled with anger over the loss of Ireland, had discoursed to his tittering young guests and the gloomy, silent Major on fields of fire, enfilading machine-guns, flanking attacks and suchlike. It all boded ill. One must work quickly.
The explosion and the shooting had had at least one good effect: it had caused three of the less important ladies to leave immediately and had decided the others that they too must find a place to go. There was considerable distress, of course, in the residents’ lounge, much weeping and sniffing of salts. But the Major was doing what he could to counter this despondency. He had written to the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Aid Association and was considering other possibilities. There must be girls’ boarding schools in Egypt, India and other places (remote, certainly, but where the natives were