Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [59]
“Where is the master?” he called after her. But she had scurried away and he was left listening to the fading clatter of her shoes on the tiles. A little later, however, he realized that there was a person following him, though very slowly, along the corridor. It turned out to be an old lady, a gentlewoman to judge by her clothing, moving forward with two sticks which she planted firmly in front of her one after the other in the manner of an Alpine guide. He halted and allowed her to catch up, her eyes on the ground, her breathing stertorous.
“Where is Mr Spencer?” he demanded.
The lady lifted her watery eyes and surveyed him; then she raised one of her sticks in a trembling, arthritic hand. The brass ferrule that tipped it performed a wavering figure-eight a little above his head. He took her to be indicating that his way led upwards.
He was not a young man himself. His chest had been giving him trouble. His blood-pressure was too high. He’d started with nothing, d’ye see, and done it all himself. Self-raising, like his own flour, was what they said in Kilnalough.
“Now what I’d better be doing is...”
He was alone once more and, one way or another, had climbed to the floor above. The only reason he knew this for certain was that he happened to be standing at a surprisingly clean window looking down on the drive and, incidentally, on Edward’s Daimler. It was raining very hard—so hard that a mist of spray was rising off the roof and bonnet of the car. Where was he? When had it started raining? He shouldn’t let himself get in a rage because these days there was always a thick mist, bloody and opaque, waiting to roll in and blot out the landmarks. Now wait, the motor car had been left in front of the building, he remembered seeing it. Well, the great staircase with the chandelier was in the front of the building too...so that meant that he was on or beside the staircase.
He was squeezed by a really breathtaking grip of anger when, on looking round, he found that this was not so. There was no staircase in sight. It was unfair and spiteful—a real British trick, the kind of murthering, hypocritical...Mother of God! he would like to have smashed a window, he had even raised the heavy ash handle of his furled umbrella to shatter the glass. He was restrained, though, by the sudden thought that the Englishman might consider it bad form. Besides, the window was already broken...that is, had obviously been broken on some other occasion, since it lacked its pane entirely. He could not have done it himself. There were no jagged edges. That was why it looked so clean. The rain, moreover, was pattering on the window sill and had darkened the faded crimson carpet (strewn with tiny three-pronged crowns) in the shape of a half-moon.
Having regrouped his forces, Mr Noonan set out along a carpeted corridor (while Edward continued to search disconsolately for him on the floor below), peering through the open doors of the many rooms he passed—nobody made any attempt to close doors here, it appeared—at double beds, enormous and sinful, without a trace of religion, at wash-basins and towels starched like paper and grey with dust. And this was what his only daughter was supposed to be marrying into!
In one room he came upon a vast pile of stone hot-water bottles, maybe two or three hundred of them. In another a makeshift washing-line had been stretched and forgotten, the clothing on it dry and riddled with moth-holes. In yet another he heard voices. He stopped and listened...but no, he had been mistaken (Edward at this moment was peering into the room directly below). At the next door, however, he definitely heard voices, so he entered with some confidence. He found himself, not in a bedroom but on a gallery