The Empire Trilogy (59 page)

“Why didn't you come to tea?”

But the man made no reply, merely continued to stare round at the Major in an insolent fashion with one cloudy blue eye opened very wide and the other one closed to a glinting slit. From his open mouth a wisp of something dark was trailing: it might have been seaweed. Presently a bluebottle came buzzing round and at last decided to settle on that wide blue eye. But the eye did not blink.

As the sun rose higher the Major's awareness improved and once again he did his best to rally the thoughts that sped here and there like small slippery fish, impossible to grasp. “Death!” he thought. And: “To drown.” But this seemed inadequate, so he made a further effort and achieved: “To drown is awful...”; but this, although also inadequate, exhausted him for a while. Soon, however, he was able to scale another flight of steps up to consciousness and said to himself: “My side is deuced painful. Hurts like the devil.” Then thoughts of Sarah, Edward and the twins occupied his mind, but they were no help to him. He must think of something else.

The movements of his limbs had in the meantime worked a gap of three or four inches between his body and the sand which moulded it. This gap had filled with water oozing up through the sand. He now noticed that the water had a reddish tinge and knew that he must be bleeding. At the same time as his consciousness improved he was tortured by thirst, and the aching of his limbs became intolerable. Neverthe-less he decided that, however painful it might be, he must move his head to see who else was on the beach beside himself and the insolent young Cockney. Millimetre by millimetre, a fraction of a degree at a time, he twisted his neck and moved his sluggish eyeballs, first in one direction, then in the other. On the beach there was not a soul to be seen. It was completely deserted.

The water took on a deeper shade of red. “Soon Sarah will come and dig me out,” he thought with a mixture of love and agony as the swimming sunlight crept nearer and nearer. Then, once more, he lost consciousness.

Another three-quarters of an hour elapsed before some rescuers arrived to assist the buried Major. These rescuers were led, not by Sarah, but by Miss Johnston and Miss Staveley. Miss Bagley, though terrified and out of breath, was not very far behind. Bringing up the rear was poor Mrs Rice, who could not see very well and who had been given the spade to carry. Puffing and exhausted, she kept calling out to the others to wait for her, she was afraid she might fall and break her hip and then...heaven only knew what! Pneumonia, perhaps. When one gets on in years one must be careful.

In due course they set to work. Miss Staveley, who had seized the spade while Mrs Rice had a little rest, began to dig (and not a minute too soon). But she too was very tired (none of them had slept a wink, having returned from Valebridge to find the Major gone) and tiredness made her clumsier than ever, so that she seemed to be shovelling as much sand back into the hole round the Major as she was taking out of it. When at last the water was beginning to surge round her ankles, Miss Johnston, who had taken charge of the operation and was becoming apoplectic with impatience, seized the spade in her turn and, pneumonia or no pneumonia, began to dig with frenzy. But in the end it was only Miss Bagley (feebly assisted by Mrs Rice)—Miss Bagley whom the Major had never really liked as much as the others—who could muster the strength to lift out the heavy rock which pinned him in his watery grave. The young Cockney, however, was left for a second immersion.

From a window on the fourth floor of the Majestic a shadowy figure paused to watch the old ladies drag the Major's inert body back from the advancing sea.

“Dead!” Murphy's wrinkled old face convulsed with glee as he wandered on, crooning a song he had learned some fifty years earlier as a young man in Wicklow Town. “Ní shéanfad do ghrá-sa ná do pháirt 'n fhaida mhairfe mé...”

And as he shuffled from one silent, deserted room to another he watered the carpets with the liquid from the watering-can he was carrying; he sprinkled everything with it, the flowers on the curtains and the coronets on the faded red carpet in the corridor. He soaked the bedding with it and poured it into empty drawers and cupboards, crooning gently all the time. When he came upon a pair of long-abandoned ladies' shoes in a dusty drawing-room, chuckling, he filled them till they were brimming. Several times he padded slowly down the creaking stairs to fill his watering-can from the tank in the garage. Then the sound of his wheezing breath would alert the cats to the fact that their friend Murphy was back amongst them once more and they would all come galloping up, postponing whatever they had been doing—their bloody territorial battles in the attics or their fierce and appalling carnal endeavours on the battlements.

“Pussies!” Murphy would mutter. “Have a sup now, will ye?”

And he would sprinkle the seething quadrupeds until their fur became slick and oily (and the cats inside the fur became definitely displeased). Lick themselves though they might, there was nothing that would make their fur return to normal; howling with grief they slunk away, sticky and wretched.

“Dead!” said Murphy, standing in a patch of afternoon sunlight. “Sure I'll drink to that...” And gripping the watering-can, he raised it to his blue lips and began to gulp, pausing every now and then to make a smacking sound, it tasted so good.

“Now then, where're me matches?”

Wearily he turned out his pockets. On to the floor he dropped, one after another, a penknife, a raw potato with a bite out of it, two silver teaspoons, a devotional communication from the Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary, a ball of twine, a lump of tobacco, and a dead thrush. But no matches! Murphy scowled and popped the tobacco into his mouth, chewing morosely until he remembered how he used to make fire without matches as a boy. Once more he descended the creaking stairs, this time to Edward's study where he had seen a magnifying glass. Then up to the sunlight on the fourth floor where he trained the blazing golden eye on a piece of paper. Just as it was beginning to smoke, however, the sun passed behind a cloud. Murphy took another drink and sat down to wait impatiently for it to reappear.

The Major was not yet dead, however, though by now not very far from it. He was about a mile and a half from the Majestic, lying on Dr Ryan's kitchen table. The old ladies would never have had the strength to transport him here by themselves. Fortunately they had come upon Seán Murphy who, although he had gone into hiding, had been unable to resist lurking in the vicinity of his familiar potato diggings. At first he had seemed too frightened of the I.R.A. to help, but a brief conversation had convinced him that he was even more terrified of Miss Johnston. So the limp Major had been trundled up to the house in a wheelbarrow and then put in the Standard. The journey had reopened his wound, however, and now as he lay on the table he was once more bleeding copiously.

While the ladies were trying to staunch the flow of blood with towels the doctor, who was tired and upset by this sudden invasion, wandered away to look for a needle with which to stitch the wound. “Ach, old women! What a fuss they make! Always making a fuss, always talking, gossiping, good for nothing except drinking tea and causing trouble.” It annoyed him to think that he had once actively sought the company of these creatures. What a young fool he must have been! he was thinking as he rummaged through the instruments scattered on his desk (now what was it he was looking for?). A young man is better off minding his studies. The musty, faded smell of old women drifted up out of his imagination as he slumped wearily in his armchair beside the empty grate. Women! Ah, his wife had been different of course, yes, but that had been many years ago. Years before the rise of the new Ireland. The new Ireland would get rid of all these old women. They wouldn't be allowed. His wife had smelled of skin, like a young girl, not of lavender water and peppermints. Ah, she was different, he was thinking sleepily; “people are insubstantial. They never last. All this fuss, it's all fuss about nothing. We're here for a while and then we're gone. People are insubstantial. They never last at all.” As his ancient wrinkled eyes gently closed, he said to him-self absently: “Now wait, there was something I was going to do...”

In the kitchen the Major's face was as grey as oatmeal and the blood was flowing faster than ever, so that the old ladies were beside themselves with desperation. The sight of the blood all over the place would have been enough to make anyone quail, let alone an old lady who was not used to that sort of thing. But they hung on grimly, determined that the Major should live, come what might. By now they were pale and trembling themselves. Mrs Rice had already fainted, revived, fainted again, and now she was drinking a cup of tea to give her strength and courage. Meanwhile, where was that dratted doctor?

In due course the doctor awoke, refreshed by his nap, and remembered that he had been looking for a needle and that he had to stitch that young fool the Major, who had got himself into a scrape. He had told the silly ass to go while the going was good! He had known that something would happen. Only young fools would get themselves into trouble for nothing. And really, he thought, more disgruntled than ever, it was all for nothing! What purpose did anything serve? It all ended in the graveyard. He ought to know. He'd been to enough funerals in his time. And he tottered peevishly back to the kitchen, muttering: “People are insubstantial. They never last, they never last...”

“Of course they don't!” snapped Miss Johnston. “If you treat them all like this!”

“Old women!” snorted the doctor petulantly, looking more senile than ever. But the hands with which he set to work were surprisingly deft and steady for such an old man.

Presently the Major, stitched, bandaged, and given some beef tea, had been tucked into bed and his body had at long last been allowed to start on the business of repairing itself. The four ladies had all locked themselves into one of the upstairs bedrooms for fear of being molested by that dreadful old man. The doctor, for similar reasons, had locked himself into his study, and soon everyone was fast asleep. By this time the sun had set and it had grown quite dark. But about an hour later, while down on the beach the young Cockney was being immersed for the third time, yet another sunset lit up the sky, for Murphy had at last realized that the cloud behind which the sun had disappeared was, in fact, a hill to the west. And so he had resorted to matches instead, having come upon a box in an old silk dressing-gown of Edward's.

By the time the inhabitants of Kilnalough had noticed the glow in the sky and motored, ridden or walked out to the hotel, the Majestic was an inferno. Streams of fire the size of oak trees blossomed out of the windows of the upper storeys. Caterpillars of flame wriggled their way down the worn and threadbare carpets and sucked at the banisters and panelling until all the public rooms were ablaze. The heat grew so intense that the spectators were driven back with flushed faces, first to the edge of the gravel, then farther and farther back over the grass, which the heat quickly shrivelled to raffia—until at last they were standing right back among the trees, gazing with shaded eyes at the blinding magnificence of the burning Majestic. By now only the attics under the roof were recognizable, their windows still black and empty.

It was from these black windows that flaming, shrieking creatures suddenly began to leap—hundreds of them, seething out of the windows on to the gutters and leaping out into the darkness. Those not already ablaze exploded in mid-air or ignited like flares as they hurtled through the great heat towards the earth. Someone in the crowd remarked that it was like watching the fiery demons pouring out of the mouth and nose of a dying Protestant. But that was not all, for now a hideous, cadaverous figure was framed for an instant, poised on the roof, his clothes a cloak of fire, his hair ablaze: Satan himself! Then he vanished and was never seen again in Kilnalough. But he was thought to have swooped down to eat a meal of children in the infernal regions.

For a few minutes more the Majestic became brighter and brighter until, like a miniature sun, it was impossible to look at for more than a moment with the naked eye. Then with a shuddering roar it caved in upon itself and an immense ladder of sparks climbed into the sky.

And that was the end of the Majestic. It continued to burn and smoke, however, for two more days and nights. Nobody considered burying the charred and scorched demons that littered the surrounding land. Soon they began to smell atrocious.

In July Dr Ryan received a visit from Mrs O'Neill and her daughter Viola. He had been asleep on the couch in his study and was displeased at having been woken. For some time it was not clear whether the visit was a social one or whether his professional services were required. Assuming the former, since both mother and daughter looked to be in good health, he showed them into his front room, a damp and depressing place which rarely encouraged visitors to prolong their stay more than was absolutely necessary. Having done this, he sank into a chair and closed his eyes. Mrs O'Neill chatted away sociably about this and that, while Viola smiled prettily, showing her dimples, occasionally directing a meaning glance at her mother (“Is he asleep?”).

At last, after a long silence which the doctor had found agreeable but which his guests had found disturbing, Mrs O'Neill said: “Viola would like you to recommend a diet for her, Doctor. She finds she's getting rather plump and needs to lose a bit of weight.”

With an effort the doctor got to his feet and shuffled off down the corridor to his study followed by Mrs O'Neill and Viola, both of whom wrinkled their noses when they saw the state the place was in. But still, one had to make allowances. He was elderly, and the only doctor in Kilnalough.

When Viola had partially undressed, the doctor looked briefly at her breasts and at her stomach and then motioned her to get dressed again.