Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [208]
“Why didn’t you come to tea?”
But the man made no reply, merely continued to stare round at the Major in an insolent fashion with one cloudy blue eye opened very wide and the other one closed to a glinting slit. From his open mouth a wisp of something dark was trailing: it might have been seaweed. Presently a bluebottle came buzzing round and at last decided to settle on that wide blue eye. But the eye did not blink.
As the sun rose higher the Major’s awareness improved and once again he did his best to rally the thoughts that sped here and there like small slippery fish, impossible to grasp. “Death!” he thought. And: “To drown.” But this seemed inadequate, so he made a further effort and achieved: “To drown is awful...”; but this, although also inadequate, exhausted him for a while. Soon, however, he was able to scale another flight of steps up to consciousness and said to himself: “My side is deuced painful. Hurts like the devil.” Then thoughts of Sarah, Edward and the twins occupied his mind, but they were no help to him. He must think of something else.
The movements of his limbs had in the meantime worked a gap of three or four inches between his body and the sand which moulded it. This gap had filled with water oozing up through the sand. He now noticed that the water had a reddish tinge and knew that he must be bleeding. At the same time as his consciousness improved he was tortured by thirst, and the aching of his limbs became intolerable. Neverthe-less he decided that, however painful it might be, he must move his head to see who else was on the beach beside himself and the insolent young Cockney. Millimetre by millimetre, a fraction of a degree at a time, he twisted his neck and moved his sluggish eyeballs, first in one direction, then in the other. On the beach there was not a soul to be seen. It was completely deserted.
The water took on a deeper shade of red. “Soon Sarah will come and dig me out,” he thought with a mixture of love and agony as the swimming sunlight crept nearer and nearer. Then, once more, he lost consciousness.
Another three-quarters of an hour elapsed before some rescuers arrived to assist the buried Major. These rescuers were led, not by Sarah, but by Miss Johnston and Miss Staveley. Miss Bagley, though terrified and out of breath, was not very far behind. Bringing up the rear was poor Mrs Rice, who could not see very well and who had been given the spade to carry. Puffing and exhausted, she kept calling out to the others to wait for her, she was afraid she might fall and break her hip and then...heaven only knew what! Pneumonia, perhaps. When one gets on in years one must be careful.
In due course they set to work. Miss Staveley, who had seized the spade while Mrs Rice had a little rest, began to dig (and not a minute too soon). But she too was very tired (none of them had slept a wink, having returned from Valebridge to find the Major gone) and tiredness made her clumsier than ever, so that she seemed to be shovelling as much sand back into the hole round the Major as she was taking out of it. When at last the water was beginning to surge round her ankles, Miss Johnston, who had taken charge of the operation and was becoming apoplectic with impatience, seized the spade in her turn and, pneumonia or no pneumonia, began to dig with frenzy. But in the end it was only Miss Bagley (feebly assisted by Mrs Rice)—Miss Bagley whom the Major had never really liked as much as the others—who could muster the strength to lift out the heavy rock which pinned him in his watery grave. The young Cockney, however, was left for a second immersion.
From a window on the fourth floor of the Majestic a shadowy figure paused to watch the old ladies drag the Major’s inert body back from the advancing sea.
“Dead!” Murphy’s wrinkled old face convulsed with glee as he wandered on, crooning a song he had learned some fifty years earlier as a young man in Wicklow Town. “Ní shéanfad do ghrá-sa ná do pháirt ’n fhaida