Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [78]
“Which is which, and how can I tell?”
“I’m Charity and she’s Faith,” one of them said. “Faith is bigger there,” she added, pointing at Faith’s chest. Both girls smiled wanly.
Throughout the afternoon, as they motored through the low rolling hills, the twins sat on the back seat in attitudes of meek dejection, slim fingers lifted to entwine the braided velvet straps, each the mirror-image of the other. “What charming girls! Edward is being much too hard on them.”
He modified this opinion a day or two later, however. As an additional punishment a daily lesson with Evans, the tutor, had been ordained by Edward to take place in the writing-room. Passing the open door one afternoon, the Major paused to listen.
“How do you say in French, Mr Evans, ‘The buttons are falling off my jacket and I need a clean collar’?” one of the twins was asking innocently.
“How do you say, ‘I’ve got boils on my neck because I never wash it’?”
“How do you say, ‘I have ideas beyond my station’?”
“What does ‘amavi puellam’ mean?”
“How do you say in Latin, Mr Evans, ‘My pasty white face is blushing all over’?”
“Sharpen my pencil, Evans, ’fraid I’ve just broken it again.”
“Any more of this and I’ll report you to your father.”
“Any more of what? We’re only asking questions.”
“Aren’t we even allowed to ask questions?”
The Major moved on. He had heard enough.
Later that same afternoon, while taking a stroll with old Miss Johnston in the Chinese Garden (“If you ask me it’s an Irish Chinese Garden,” Miss Johnston said with a sniff, looking round at the thick beds of tangled weeds and seeded flowers), their path crossed that of a young man in khaki tunic, breeches and puttees, wearing on his head a tam o’shanter with the crowned-harp badge of the R.I.C. The Major’s eyes were drawn to the bandolier he wore across his chest and the black leather belt holding a bayonet scabbard; on his right thigh rested an open revolver holster. It was shocking, somehow, to meet this man in the peaceful wilderness of the garden, a sharp and unpleasant reminder of the incidents the Major had read about in the newspapers but could never quite visualize, any more than he could now visualize the shooting of the old man in Ballsbridge that he had witnessed. As they passed, the young man grinned sardonically and, winking at the Major, drew a finger across his throat from ear to ear.
“Gutter-snipe!” hissed Miss Johnston indignantly. “To think the R.I.C. is taking on young men like that!”
And it took all the Major’s considerate inquiries about her nephews, her nieces and the state of her health (“Chilblains even in midsummer in this hotel, Major. I’ve never known such draughts...”) to smooth her ruffled plumage.
And yet they were all ex-officers, these men, so Edward assured him later. One had to remember, though, that to be an officer in 1920 was not the same thing as being an officer in 1914. A lot of the older sort (their very qualities of bravery, steadfast obedience to the call of duty, chivalry and so forth acting as so many banana skins on the road to survival) had disappeared in the holocaust and had had to be replaced. It was also true that these new men, and the great number who would soon be following them to a meagre six weeks of police training at the Curragh, were among the least favourably placed of the countless demobilized officers who now found themselves having to earn a living once more. All the same, though one made allowances (and Edward was always ready to make allowances for men who had served in the trenches), there were limits. The old kind, the officer who was also a gentleman, would never have gone about frightening old ladies.