Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [25]
A few moments later, with the cat cradled in his arms, he spotted Angela. She was on the next terrace below the tennis court carrying a spray of beech leaves and walking swiftly towards a flight of steps some distance away. Thinking that if he could find the entrance she was making for he might be able to intercept her, he set off rapidly, taking the cat with him for company. The cat did not like the idea, however, leapt out of his arms and vanished back the way they had come. The Major pressed on down the corridor he was following, relatively certain this time that he was going in the right direction. On his way he passed one of the old ladies he had been introduced to the evening before. She was leaning on a stick, arrested half-way between two sharp bends in a long section of the corridor without doors or windows. As he passed she murmured something indignantly but he merely nodded cheerfully, pretending not to hear. He was in a hurry. Excited, he turned another corner at the end of which, by his calculations of the exterior of the building and the distance he had walked, there should be a glass door through which Angela would enter at any moment. But there wasn’t. At the end of the corridor there was merely a blank wall and a musty, dilapidated sitting-room. “This is absurd,” he thought, half irritated and half amused. “To hell with her. I’ll see her at lunch.”
But Angela failed to appear at lunch. The Major sat beside Edward, who was by turns morose and indignant about the state of the country. Another R.I.C. barracks had been attacked and stripped of arms; the young hooligans had nothing better to do these days, it seemed. They preferred shooting people in the back to doing an honest day’s work. But for all that, he hadn’t noticed many of them coming forward when Sir Henry Wilson had called for volunteers to join in a fair fight. At this the “friend of Parnell,” who was sitting at the next table, stirred uncomfortably and muttered something.
“What’s that you say?” demanded Edward.
“Thousands of Nationalists fought against Germany,” the old man murmured, his voice still scarcely above a whisper. “Constitutional Nationalists who fought not only for France’s and Belgium’s freedom but for Ireland’s too. Not all Nationalists belong to Sinn Fein, you know...”
“But they’re all tarred with the same brush. Sinn Fein demands a republic. Why? Because they hate England and sided with Germany during the war. Would they change their tune if Ireland was given Dominion Home Rule? Of course they wouldn’t! It would merely whet their appetites for more. There’s no middle of the road in Ireland, for the simple reason that the Home Rulers are playing right into the hands of Sinn Fein. Perhaps they mean well. Maybe they’re just fools. But the result is the same.”
“They’re not fools!” cried the old man, raising his voice. A faint flush had crept over his gaunt cheeks and water slopped on to the table-cloth from the trembling glass he had been in the process of lifting to his lips. “Irishmen fought in the British Army in defence of the Empire. Those men have a right to a voice in the settlement of their country’s future.”
“Exactly so,” agreed Edward with a contemptuous smile. “And you know as well as I do that the bulk of those who served and died came from the Unionist families of the south and west. Who have a better right to a voice than the survivors of the men who fought at Thiepval, their fathers, sons and brothers? And yet everyone seems to take it for granted that they can be suppressed or coerced just for the sake of a temporary peace or because a rabble of Irish immigrants in America have been kicking up a fuss. My dear fellow, it simply won’t wash. No British Government, not even one with a tremendous victory under its belt, could get away with being so rash and unjust. If you simple-minded Dominion-Home-Rulers got your way and tried to coerce Ulster we’d end up with a bloodbath and the Empire in ruins. I repeat, there