The Empire Trilogy (56 page)

He sat for five minutes without moving a muscle. Then there was a knock on the door and Edward came in, somewhat apologetically.

“Ah, there you are, Brendan. I was wondering where you'd got to.”

He looked round the room and gave a slight start when his eye fell on the bulging tablecloth. But he made no comment as he came to sit down opposite the Major. Nor did the Major speak.

Presently Edward, with his head tilted back and mouth open in a way that strangely resembled the corpse's attitude of a few minutes earlier, said: “My nose has been bleeding... divil of a time trying to get it to stop. They say you should put a cold key down the back of your shirt, don't they, Brendan? Or is that collywobbles, I can never remember ?”

The Major made no reply. Edward sighed faintly and his uptilted gaze wandered around the panelled walls at the various antlers, at the winter forest of stags, at the ibex and antelope and zebra watching the men with calmly accusing glass eyes. For an instant the dreadful thought occurred to the Major that Edward had now gone completely insane and was looking for a place on the wall to mount the Sinn Feiner. But no, Edward had tugged a bloodstained handkerchief from his pocket and was patting his nostrils gingerly. His face had assumed a faintly martyred expression.

“What you don't realize, Brendan, is that we're at war...If people come and blow things up they must take the consequences! They must be taught a lesson!”

“Oh, Edward, these are our own people! They aren't the Germans or the Bolshevists...This is their country as much as it is ours...
more
than it is ours! Blowing up statues is nothing!”

Edward's face darkened and he said bitterly: “I always knew you were on their side, Brendan. I'm only thankful that poor Angie didn't live to see it. A man of your background, I'd have thought you'd have been more loyal.”

“Oh for God's sake shut up, Edward.”

“I caught them at it red-handed. I don't shoot innocent people from behind hedges. It was perfectly fair.”

“For days you've been waiting for them to come!” Edward grunted but made no attempt to deny it. In any case it was now clear to the Major why he had been spending so much time up on the roof. For days Edward had been using the statue of Queen Victoria the way a big-game hunter uses a salt-lick in the jungle, knowing that sooner or later it would become too much for them to resist. And what was the difference, he wondered, between shooting someone from behind a hedge and shooting them from a roof?

“It was perfectly fair!” Edward repeated, cracking his knuckles.

True, the Major was thinking. Edward probably did not see Sinn Feiners as people at all. He saw them as a species of game that one could only shoot according to a very brief and complicated season (that is to say, when one caught them in the act of setting off bombs).

“It was perfectly fair!” Edward said for the third time and the Major thought: “No, it wasn't that at all. It was an act of revenge. Revenge for his piglets. Revenge for Angela. Revenge for a meaningless life. Revenge for the accelerating collapse of Unionism. Revenge for the destruction of the sort of life he'd been brought up to. Revenge for the loss of Ireland.” He didn't see Sinn Feiners as human beings at all. And after all, would the Sinn Feiners be any more likely to see Edward as a human being and take pity on him?

Edward was frightened, the Major realized abruptly. The man was terrified! That bullet-proof waistcoat had not been an idle whim, it had been a desperate measure to shore up his crumbling nerve. Suddenly this was so clear to the Major that he wondered why he had not realized it before.

“You'd better go upstairs and go to bed,” the Major said, not unsympathetically. “You're exhausted. I'll see to the doctor and the D.I. when they get here.”

But when Edward had left him alone with the presence bulging under the tablecloth all the horror returned. He saw Edward triumphantly dragging the dead Sinn Feiner across the gravel. He closed his eyes...Edward comes nearer and nearer, one of the dead man's ankles gripped under each armpit like the shafts of a hand-cart. Behind him the heavily muscled shoulders and lolling head leave a long trail on the dew-laden gravel and the friction causes the arms to spread out wide into the attitude of crucifixion. Released from somewhere inside the house, the Afghan hound comes bounding up and whisks cheerfully around the body which Edward is dragging towards the potting-shed.

“Thank heaven I sent the twins away. Edward will go too now. Today or tomorrow. As soon as possible.”

The Major underwent a craving to light his pipe, but respect for the dead young man across the room prevented him. Thwarted, the craving for tobacco transformed itself into a craving for something else that was normal—anything: to go fishing, to watch a cricket match, to take tea with his aunt in Bayswater. He couldn't, of course. Everything had to be settled in Kilnalough. Besides, his aunt was dead also—for a moment he found himself thinking of her with great sadness and love. But then the bulging tablecloth restored him to that morning's tragedy.

He looked at his watch and was astonished to see that it was not yet eight o'clock, scarcely breakfast-time. Had his watch stopped? No. Which meant that little over an hour had elapsed since he had been woken by the explosion which had preceded the firing of a single shot.

At first, examining the body in the potting-shed, he had been unable to find any trace of a wound and had wildly hoped that he had been deceived, that there had been no shot from the roof, that the lad had been killed in some other way—by the blast from the explosion, perhaps. But then, looking more carefully at the lolling head he had seen the widened, blood-rimmed hole in the ear, which the bullet had exactly entered. Suddenly the head moved. Balanced on folded potato sacks, it had rolled a little to one side. Now, from that neatly circular but too large hole in the young man's ear, liquid began to well up—slow and thick, like dark oil from the neck of a bottle. The Major had watched it drip from the ear to the work-bench and from the work-bench to the putrid mown grass. Presently, however, it diminished and stopped.

“Who is it?”

A maid was standing timidly at the gun room door saying that the doctor and the man from the police...But they had already edged past her and entered the room, the doctor struggling forward with his frail, white head on a level with his shoulders. It was intolerable, thought the Major, that an old man should be got out of bed at such an hour of the morning. His shoelaces were undone and a sparse frost of white beard showed on his cheeks. As he came forward he glanced once, briefly, at the Major with eyes that were alert and curiously full of sympathy, as if this body under the tablecloth were in some way related to the Major instead of a complete stranger.

“When you've finished here I shall go back with you into Kilnalough. I must speak to the boy's father...”

“That would be absurd, Major.”

The Major passed a hand over his brow, which was damp with perspiration. “Of course he must have been told by now. There's nothing I can say to console him, I realize that. All the same I must speak to him. He must be told that Edward acted only for himself. What he did was inhuman and intolerable...I tried to get him to leave with the twins but he refused, yet perhaps I didn't try hard enough to persuade him. I should have realized what he was up to, but I never thought...For the past few weeks he has been full of hatred and despair. I tried to get him to leave...He's a little mad, I'm sure. Why should I be responsible for everything he does? The man is no concern of mine. This morning he accused me of being disloyal! It's intolerable...and yet what can I do? People must be told that Edward is no longer able to control himself. I'll see that he goes away, of course, whether he wants to or not. Clearly he can't stay here. The boy's father mustn't be allowed to think of his son as a martyr of the British, that would be unjust. What hope is there for Ireland if people are allowed to behave in this way? That poor boy was the victim of a private hatred and despair...I'm sure you understand me, Doctor. If you don't understand me, nobody will!”

The old man sighed and shook his head, raising a feeble hand to pat the Major's arm. But he had nothing to say.

Later, while waiting for the doctor, the Major stood beside the shattered statue of Queen Victoria and talked with the D.I., whose name was Murdoch, a curiously dry, pedantic man with a crooked smile which lit up one side of his face in wrinkles, leaving the other perfectly smooth. He had reacted to the death of the Sinn Feiner with equanimity, if not indifference. At most he had betrayed a mild, as it were, official satisfaction that a criminal had received punishment. The Major conceived a dislike for him and turned his attention to the statue.

It had been damaged but not completely destroyed. Although a gaping hole had appeared in the horse's flanks, the august cavalier had managed to remain in the saddle, leaning acutely sideways in the manner of a bareback rider in a circus ring. The blast had immodestly lifted her steel skirts a few inches, he noticed.

“Gelignite and a coffee tin,” explained Murdoch at his elbow. “A temperamental explosive which kills the Shinners and British with perfect impartiality. In Irish they call the stuff ‘
Bas gan Sagart
'—‘Death without the priest.'” And while one half of Murdoch's face remained smooth and solemn, the other half lit up with wrinkled glee.

Later again the Major sat for a long time in the room of the priest, Father O'Byrne, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence. The room was very small, dark and cluttered with books. The Major was abominably tired. He frequently looked at his watch, but the hours of the morning refused to pass.

“Edward Spencer is a coward and a murderer, Major... You're a poor sort of man that you'd take it on yourself to make excuses for him.”

The Major was abominably tired. Yet he was fascinated by the priest's threadbare cassock and by the hatred in his eyes. At length he lifted his eyes from the Major's face to the crucifix on the wall. To the Major the steadiness of this gaze on the crucifix seemed blind, inhuman, fanatical. The yellowish naked body, the straining ribs, the rolling eyes and parted lips, the languorously draped arms and long trailing fingers, the feet crossed to economize on nails, the cherry splash of blood from the side...

“That boy got what he deserved,” he said harshly. “I only hope it may serve as an example to some of the other young cut-throats who are laying Ireland to waste!”

And with that he turned and strode out of the house, slamming the door with a crash.

In the weeks which had elapsed since the night of the ball the health of Mr Norton had declined steadily. It was hard to say whether this was because the poor man had over-exerted himself on the dance-floor or whether it was merely a natural and inevitable decline of the faculties. In any event, he was now confined to bed, his mind wandering indiscriminately between mathematics and the boudoir, sometimes chuckling to himself, sometimes in tears, but constantly demanding company and attention.

Their sense of duty overcoming their distaste, the ladies would sometimes take their knitting and climb the stairs to the first floor to sit with him. And while they knitted he would gabble long, incomprehensible equations interlarded with scarcely more intelligible descriptions of his encounters with that sex to which, all his life, he had devotedly attempted to unite himself (only to finish his days, old and alone, between these chilly, rumpled sheets). The Major was sorry for him but glad, on the whole, that his reminiscences were so difficult to fathom...The snatches that one
could
understand were extraordinarily indecent, even to the Major's hardened military ears.

One day, afraid lest Mr Norton's ramblings should offend the ladies (particularly those whose honour had remained unimpaired by marriage), the Major brought him an arithmetic textbook belonging to the twins which he had happened to come across in a waste-paper basket unemptied since the previous winter. Mr Norton seized it with delight and in the few days that remained to him (before his rela-tions whisked him away to a more suitable institution) recited mathematical problems without pausing for breath, answering each one promptly before proceeding to the next. The Major sometimes paused to listen to this litany, and one of the problems, in particular, remained in his mind. It concerned a man who was unable to swim and found himself in a leaking rowing-boat so many hundreds of yards from land. He was faced with the alternative of baling rapidly with a tin cup (volume so many cubic inches; maximum rate of baling movement so many times per minute), the water entering at such-and-such a speed; or of ignoring the leak and rowing furiously (at so many miles per hour) for the nearest land... or, of course, a combination of now one, now the other. How should this man best proceed?

“Can he make it?”

“Afraid not quite, old chap,” replied Mr Norton with unexpected clarity.

“Ah,” said the Major absently and wandered off puffing his pipe.

The Major was working hard these days, helped by Mrs Roche, Miss Archer and some of the other ladies. Edward's frame of mind had improved to some extent since he had killed a Sinn Feiner. An abscess had been lanced and a quantity of poison had been allowed to escape. Nevertheless the Major was aware that it would fill up again, given time.

Surprisingly docile at first, Edward had agreed to go to England and spend some time with the twins. He had even shown one or two faint traces of remorse. The Major had come upon him cleaning the congealed blood from the work bench in the potting-shed. On seeing the Major, however, he had stopped and walked out into the light drizzle, a hat-less and derelict figure. Latterly the Major had detected signs of renascent fear and bitterness. He was watching him more carefully now and it soon became clear that Edward was preparing plans for the defence of his estate. One evening when, in spite of the Major's absolute refusal to accommodate them, a frighteningly determined and aggressive young schoolmistress had succeeded in installing a brood of girl guides at the Majestic for the night, Edward, incoher-ent with whiskey and raddled with anger over the loss of Ireland, had discoursed to his tittering young guests and the gloomy, silent Major on fields of fire, enfilading machine-guns, flanking attacks and suchlike. It all boded ill. One must work quickly.