Troubles - James Gordon Farrell [79]
The Major agreed, but thought to himself that these “men from the trenches” who were being paid a pound a day to keep a few wild Irishmen in order might well have trouble taking anything very seriously—whether the Irish, the old ladies, or their own selves.
At the same time he was disturbed by their presence. These men (individually they were charming, Edward told him) were unpredictable and still estranged from the accepted standards of life in peacetime—not that one could call Ireland very peaceful these days. As he was passing the Prince Consort wing a day or two later a window exploded in a sparkling burst of splinters, a laughing head appeared and a hand was held out to see if it was raining. Occasionally too one heard pistol shots and laughter in the long summer evenings; Edward had laid out a pistol-range in the clearing behind the lodge where the I.R.A. notice had been posted. In no time at all the notice had melted away under a hail of bullets and hung in unrecognizable shreds. One day the Major picked up a dead rabbit on the edge of the lawn. Its body was riddled with bullets.
This rabbit, as it happened, had been a favourite of the Major’s. Old and fat, it had been partly tamed by the twins when they were small children. They had lost interest, of course, as they grew older, and no longer remembered to feed it. The rabbit, however, had not forgotten the halcyon days of carrots and dandelion leaves. Thinner and thinner as time went by, it had nevertheless continued to haunt the fringes of the wood like a forsaken lover. Poor rabbit! Moved and angry (but the “men from the trenches” were not to know that this was not a wild rabbit), the Major went to break the news to the twins, who were down by the tennis courts trying to persuade Seán Murphy to teach them how to drive the Standard (though Edward had forbidden this until they were older). The twins were not as upset as the Major expected them to be.
“Can we eat him?” they wanted to know.
“He’s already buried.”
“We could dig him up,” Faith suggested. “Aren’t rabbits’ feet supposed to be lucky?”
But the Major said he had forgotten where the grave was.
“Were the bullet-holes bad?”
“How d’you mean? They were bad for the rabbit.”
“No, I was just thinking we could have made a fur hat,” said Charity, “if there weren’t too many holes in him.”
“I say, Brendan, you aren’t any good at arithmetic, are you? Daddy has set that dreadful tutor person on us and now he’s threatening to look at our homework when it’s been corrected.”
“Try Mr Norton. He’s supposed to be good at that sort of thing.”
Mr Norton was a man in his seventies, a recent arrival at the Majestic; he had the reputation, fostered by himself, of having been a mathematical genius, drained in his youth, however, of energy and fortune by a weakness for beautiful women.
“We asked him...”
“But he always wants us to sit on his knee as if we were children.”
“And his breath smells horrid.”
Now that the Imperial Bar had been rendered uninhabitable by the colony of cats the Major sometimes took one of Edward’s motor cars into Kilnalough in the evening for a drink at the Golf Club. There one evening he met Boy O’Neill, the solicitor, who greeted him like an old friend, although it was almost a year since the Peace Day parade when they had last met. O’Neill’s appearance had changed dramatically and the Major could now scarcely recognize the timid, bony invalid he had first met at Angela’s tea-party. Dressed in a baggy tweed jacket with bulging pockets, O’Neill appeared more swollen and aggressive than ever. There was a subdued irritation about the man which made one ill at ease when talking to him; one had the feeling that O’Neill was capable at any moment of abandoning reason altogether and finishing the argument with an uppercut. The Major sat watching the wads of jaw-muscle thickening as he talked: he had just finished eighteen holes, he declared, and had never felt better in his life. A hot shower, a drink, and now he was off home for a good meal. He unslung