The Empire Trilogy (38 page)

They would stand there looking round at the dusty gilt cherubs and red plush sofas and grimy chandelier and statue of Venus. While they waited uneasily for someone to come (for Murphy would have melted into the deepest jungle of the Palm Court at the sight of the carriage laden with heavy suitcases coming up the drive) they would taste the bittersweet knowledge that nothing is invulnerable to growth, change and decay, not even one's most fiercely guarded memories.

The Major's relationship with Edward had further disimproved, no doubt as a result of the kiss in the foyer he had witnessed. Not only was the Major jealous of Edward, but Edward seemed to be jealous of
him
, a fact which for a little while helped the Major to extract a little comfort from Edward's coldness. One day he received an unpleasant surprise, however, when Edward abruptly said: “Oh, by the way, Sarah's gone away for a couple of weeks or so.”

“Oh, has she?”

“She told me to tell you. And to thank you for your letters.”

The Major nodded calmly and turned away, but he was bleeding internally. He had been betrayed again.

Whatever satisfaction Edward might have got from tormenting the Major, he appeared anything but cheerful himself. He reacted, moreover, to the increasing number of guests by making himself scarcer than ever. Although his appearance for breakfast, and dinner in the evening, remained inflexible, he was now seldom seen for the rest of the day. On one occasion he murmured to the Major (perhaps he was momentarily ashamed of himself for sadistically revealing the fact that Sarah had confided in him about the Major's letters), as a sort of oblique explanation of everything, that he was devoting himself to his biological studies. The Major had already noticed the parcels of books and equipment that had started to arrive from Dublin. Once or twice he came upon Edward in a remote bedroom surrounded by books and papers. On another occasion he stumbled upon Edward's makeshift laboratory, set up in the bathroom adjoining the bridal suite on the first floor. Afraid lest Edward should think he was snooping, the Major backed out again quickly—but he had had time to glimpse a microscope on the table beside the bath of peeling gilt and black marble in which, no doubt, many a bride of the last century had washed away her illusions of love. Beside the microscope there was a litter of glass slides, a Bunsen burner, some jars containing a greenish fluid, a few sticks of rotting celery and a dead mouse. It was not clear whether the mouse had merely happened, by accident, to expire there or whether it formed a part of Edward's experiments.

The Major was concerned, not only because Edward had become moody and hostile and peculiar again, but also for more practical reasons. After all, it was not
his
job to run the hotel. But it badly needed to be run by somebody. If there was an increase in the number of guests arriving (which was bad enough, since nobody seemed to want them) there were also one or two defections among the regulars, which meant that life at the Majestic was really getting beyond a joke. The Major ventured to suggest to Edward that if any more of the regulars left they might well start a stampede which would leave the place denuded after Christmas.

“I say, do you really think so?” Edward asked, brightening for a moment. But then: “Some of them have nowhere to go, of course.” He became despondent once more and turned back to the tome he was reading.

“Oh well, if you actually
want
them to go...” the Major replied crossly.

The thing that most worried the Major was that the Majestic was literally beginning to fall to pieces. Edward was making no effort to keep it in repair. The Major supposed that the way he looked at the situation (if he looked at it at all) was logical enough. After all, the hotel had over three hundred rooms. Even if half the building fell down he would still be left with a hundred and fifty—which was more than enough to house himself and the twins and the servants and anyone else who survived the strangulation of the hotel's trade. Meanwhile, no matter how much they might grumble, the residents adapted themselves remarkably well to the nomadic existence of moving from room to room whenever plumbing or furniture happened to fail them.

True, the amenities had gone from bad to worse (not that the Major really noticed any more). The foliage evacuated from the Palm Court now looked like taking command of the residents' lounge; the mirrors everywhere had become more fogged and grimy than ever; the gas mantles which had until recently burned on the stairs and in the corridors had now stopped functioning, so that the ladies had to grope their way to bed with their hearts going pit-a-pat; the soup in the dining-room became clearer and colder as the days went by, and as the cook was left more and more to her own devices bacon and cabbage followed by baked apples appeared more frequently on the menu; outside in the grounds a tall pine keeled over and flattened a conservatory with such a terrible crash that two ladies (Miss Devere and a Mrs Archibald Bradley) packed their bags then and there; on the few remaining tennis courts a peculiarly tough and prolific type of clover continued its advance, so that if anyone had been thinking of playing tennis (which nobody was) they would have found that even the most firmly hit service would never rise more than six inches. But Edward these days had that far-away look in his eyes and if one of the recent arrivals went to com-plain to him he scarcely seemed to be listening, though he would nod his head rapidly and say from time to time, almost with eagerness: “I say, do you want your money back?” Or puffing at his pipe and looking at his shoes he would murmur: “Really, that is most unfortunate...Let me assure you that no charge will be made...I mean, none could possibly...” and his voice would trail off.

One unseasonably warm day the giant M of MAJESTIC detached itself from the façade of the building and fell four storeys to demolish a small table at which a very old and very deaf lady, an early arrival for Christmas, had decided to take tea in the mild sunshine that was almost like summer. She had looked away for a moment, she explained to Edward in a very loud voice (almost shouting, in fact), trying to remember where the floral clock had been in the old days. She had maybe closed her eyes for a moment or two. When she had turned back to her tea, it had gone! Smashed to pieces by this strange, seagull-shaped piece of cast iron (she luckily had not recognized it or divined where it had come from). Edward made a feeble effort to penetrate the submarine silence in which the old lady lived, muttering an apology and tugging nervously at his thickly matted grey hair. She wanted an explanation, she said, ignoring his words (which she could not hear anyway) but mollified nevertheless to see that his lips were moving and that his expression showed alarm. For a while she continued grumbling and it gradually emerged that her main grievance was that her tea had been demolished along with the table. It appeared that she had spent a good part of the afternoon shuffling along distant corridors trying to find someone willing to take her order for afternoon tea. In the end she had come upon Murphy taking a nap on a royal-blue ottoman behind a screen of ferns in a remote sitting-room (it was probable that he was the only person to know of its existence until that moment). He had been aroused by a poke in the chest from the heavy blackthorn that the old lady had brought with her to punt her frail body over the vast, dustily shining expanse of the ballroom. Unmanned by this experience, he had gone to make tea for her himself. After getting lost a couple of times on the way back, and stopping for a rest at frequent intervals, she had at last regained the veranda. And now this hard-earned tea had been pulverized by a twisted piece of metal which had apparently fallen from the sky! It wasn't good enough.

Edward ordered fresh tea and, anxiously looking up at the other letters clinging insecurely to the building, suggested that she might like to move her chair along the veranda a little to where there was a better view.

As a result of this incident Edward seemed to abandon whatever ambition he might still have nourished of running the place as a hotel. It marked, at any rate, the end of that period during which guests might consider themselves encouraged to come to the Majestic. He did not lock the gates, however, and a trickle of Christmas guests continued to arrive, unencouraged, to claim hospitality.

The Major, unfortunately, was unable to match Edward's indifference. He worried about everything, about the cats proliferating in the upper storeys, about the lamentable state of the roof (on rainy days the carpets of the top floor squelched underfoot), about the state of the foundations, about the septic tank, about the ivy advancing like a green epidemic over the outside walls (someone told him that far from holding the place together, as he had hoped, it would pull it to pieces with all the more speed). It is true that the Major's nerves were in a poor condition; he sometimes wondered himself if he wasn't being unduly alarmist—the Majestic had held up splendidly in all weathers for many years. Presently, however, a piece of stucco ornamentation the size of a man fell from the coping of the roof into the dogs' yard. A foot or two to the left and it would have squashed Foch, a long-haired dachshund.

Anxious to report this, he went in search of Edward. The laboratory had been evacuated from the bridal suite; Edward had set up his table in the very middle of the ballroom. One needed space to allow one's thoughts to expand, he explained. In the bathroom he had felt compressed, his ideas had been restricted, had refused to flow freely.

While the Major told him about the near-disaster to the dog Foch, Edward picked up the dead mouse and absent-mindedly began to squeeze its thorax between finger and thumb like a piece of india-rubber.

“Missed him, did it?” he remarked brightly. “Well, that was a stroke of luck.”

“Hadn't we better get a mason in to look the place over?”

“That's a capital idea. I expect there's some johnny in Kilnalough who does that sort of thing. I'll get in touch with him.”

That night the Major dreamed that he was in a dirigible. The captain and crew had fallen overboard, leaving only Mrs Rice and himself. Later Mrs Rappaport appeared in the uniform of one of the Bavarian line regiments, together with her marmalade cat, now as big as a sheep. Fortunately she took command and, after bombing Dublin, brought them down safely.

There was no sign of the mason. Instead, a plump and pretty girl wearing a straw boater over her stiff pigtails came wobbling up the drive on a bicycle. It was Viola O'Neill, come to play with the twins. The twins gave her a desultory kiss on the cheek and led her away upstairs. As she went her eyes lingered disconcertingly on the Major, who was standing in the foyer listening sympathetically to an old gentleman in stockinged feet. The Major watched her slender white hand trail up spiral after spiral of the staircase and heaved a melancholy sigh. “Why couldn't Sarah want me like that?”

“Do you have any idea where they would be?” the old gentleman asked crossly, not for the first time.

“Where what would be?” The Major's mind had wandered again. “Oh yes, of course, you've lost your shoes. I'll make inquiries.”

The old gentleman, a new arrival at the Majestic, had left his shoes outside his bedroom door. Not only had they
not
been cleaned, they had disappeared altogether! And all his other shoes were in a cabin trunk that had yet to be delivered from the railway station. The Major left him in the foyer and went to ask Murphy to ask the maids.

Later in the day, while hunting languidly for the shoes along one of the upper landings, he opened a door and was greeted by cries of surprise and dismay: through a blue mist of cigarette-smoke he perceived three figures in petticoats. He closed the door again discreetly. He was shocked, however, and thought: “I must tell Edward. If those girls go on the way they're going....” But he was annoyed with Edward and did not see why
he
should have to bring up his daughters for him; let him see to it himself! Besides, young women these days...

The matter of the shoes was cleared up in the course of the afternoon. It seemed that the cook, on her way down to prepare breakfast, had noticed them outside the gentleman's door and had naturally supposed that he was throwing them away—a perfectly good pair of shoes! She had picked them up and given them to Seán Murphy, who had been digging energetically in them all morning.

At the end of the first week of December Padraig was also sent up to the Majestic to visit the twins, not by old Dr Ryan but by his father who, it turned out, was not only a staunch Unionist but something of a snob into the bargain. The Major intercepted Padraig (who was looking pale and anxious—it was clear he had little appetite for visiting the twins) to ask him about his grandfather.

“Oh, he's well enough. I don't see him so much now. He has a cook and a maid but he'll hardly let anyone into the house.”

“Is he still not speaking to your parents?”

Padraig nodded. “He's very stubborn and bad-tempered.

“He's told my father he's a traitor to Ireland for approving the British the way he does.”

“I didn't know he was a Sinn Feiner.”

“Ah, you wouldn't mind him,” Padraig said, his eyes flickering uneasily to the landing above, where three pretty faces had appeared over the banister. “He's very old.”

“Well, here's your guest,” the Major called up sternly. “I hope you'll look after him properly and behave yourselves.”

Padraig mounted the stairs as if under sentence of death, was seized by the girls and whisked away. The Major went about his business.

Curiously enough, Padraig seemed to enjoy himself. He reappeared on the following day looking cheerful and confident, then again on the day after. Soon he became a frequent visitor. “It was probably just a question of breaking the ice,” reflected the Major.

The Major's nerves were once more in a deplorable state. He could hardly bear to open the newspaper, for it seemed that the war, which he thought he had escaped, had pursued and caught him after all. Martial law was proclaimed in Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Limerick. On the night of December 11th Cork was sacked by Auxiliaries and Black and Tans after a patrol had been ambushed. Reading about it, the Major was reminded of how Edward had once said to him that he would welcome a holocaust, that he would like to see everything smashed and in ruins so that the Irish would really taste the meaning of destruction. He read about the scarlet flames that lit up the night sky as the shopping district of Cork was set on fire: firemen's hoses cut by axes; uniformed police and military staggering through the flaming streets with looted goods; Auxiliaries drunk on looted whiskey singing and dancing with local girls in the smoke. It was said that the clock on the tower of the City Hall, rising out of an ocean of flame and smoke, went on striking the hour until dawn, when it finally toppled into the inferno below.