Part 13 (1/2)
”Of course. You're perfectly right. All the same, the Major here is an army man and I'm sure he'll want to come with me.” Bolton was smiling contemptuously once more. Without turning towards her the Major was aware of Sarah's eyes on his face.
”Certainly,” he said. ”I'm ready to go whenever you like.”
The wind that had been blowing since early morning continued without slackening throughout the afternoon, a solid rus.h.i.+ng of air that kept the branches of the trees pinned back and combed the gra.s.s flat on the hill-slope where the Major was standing. The wind sifted through Captain Bolton's short fair hair and ballooned the jacket of his tunic as he sat on a shooting-stick, peering through binoculars. His wind-swollen shoulders gave him the appearance of a hunchback. After a moment he dropped the binoculars, removed the leather thong from round his neck and, without a word, handed them to the Major. The Major raised them to his eyes and looked down the slope towards the sea.
”Funny thing,” Bolton mused. ”I never cared much for the Irish even before all this. An uncouth lot. More like animals than human beings...used to make me sick sometimes, just watching them eat.”
The Major had by now focused the binoculars on the seminary, which stood beside a rocky promontory. The crowd had a.s.sembled in a meadow in front of the grey stone campanile, whose bell, moved by the wind, struck an irregular, querulous chime, scarcely audible at this distance.
”I hope they all get rheumatism from kneeling in the wet gra.s.s.”
”They're standing up again now. A young man is making a speech by the look of it.”
”Let's have a look.” Bolton took the gla.s.ses, looked through them briefly and handed them back.
Even though earlier in the afternoon he had seen the roads packed with people and carriages, the Major was astonished by the size of the crowd. With the foreshortening of perspective the heads seemed to be piled one on top of another. A number of women stood on the fringes of the crowd and three or four carts in which invalids lay propped on mattresses had been dragged over the rough ground to the front of the seminary so that they could hear the speaker. At the upper windows of the seminary building white-faced boys craned to hear, grasping the heavy iron bars for support, while on the steps a group of black-skirted priests stood and stared and cupped their ears into the rus.h.i.+ng gale of air. The young man now stood way out by himself on a jetty of rock that ran some distance into the sea.
He had a strong jaw above a thick, muscled neck in which the Major imagined he could see veins starting out, bulging furiously as the mouth opened and closed to articulate his soundless words of rage. He stood on a level a little below that of the listening crowd and the wind from the sea blew his matted hair forward over his face.
”Are we going down there?”
”You can go if you like, but I prefer not to get a bullet in the spine if I can help it.” Bolton stared mockingly at the Major and then went on: ”I get fed up, you understand, with all the heroes in the Golf Club. You must excuse me for not being able to resist calling their bluff from time to time.”
”I see.”
”Sarah Devlin was telling me the other day what a fine man Edward Spencer is. A man of courage and principles who would never be capable of a cowardly or unworthy act-a real gentleman, in fact. She compared him favourably with me, a ruthless and unprincipled fellow whose men hara.s.s innocent people, burn their houses and destroy their property as the whim takes them.”
”What she says is true, isn't it?”
Bolton smiled and picked up a dry twig, snapping it thoughtfully into small pieces between his fingers. ”I do whatever the situation requires, Major. What I tried to explain to Sarah was that people like you and Edward can only afford to have fine feelings because you have someone like me to do your dirty work for you. I become a little upset when people who rely on me to stop them being murdered in their beds start giving themselves superior moral airs.”
”As a matter of fact I think you're wrong about Edward. If anything he supports reprisals.”
”Perhaps, but without dirtying his own hands with them. That makes all the difference.”
The Major raised the binoculars and gazed once more at the young man on the rock jetty, wondering what he was saying to the crowd. Behind him as he spoke great towering breakers would build up; a solid wall of water as big as a house would mount over his gesticulating arms, would hang there above him for an instant as if about to engulf him, then crash around him in a torrent of foam.
”He looks a wild young fellow,” the Major said as he handed the binoculars back. Before turning away he watched another huge wave tower over the young Irishman, hang for a moment, and at last topple to boil impotently around his feet. It was, after all, only the lack of perspective that made it seem as if he would be swept away.
By the following morning the wind had dropped and mild autumnal suns.h.i.+ne bathed the old brick and woodwork of the Majestic.
With the milder weather the Major's nest of pillows in the linen room became hotter than ever, almost equatorial in fact. It was impossible to open the window, which had swollen with the rain and been painted shut many years ago. The heat mounted. After a couple of hours of tortured reflection on his relations.h.i.+p with Sarah, his naked body glistening like a savage's, he would be obliged to gulp down several pints of cold water. It was true that later, when the meal had been cooked and the stoves banked down for the night, the heat would drop to a more pleasant temperature-but by that time he had worn out his emotions, written two or three feverish letters with sweaty hiatuses on the paper where the ink refused to stay. In some of these letters, forgetting that he could not permit himself to be weak, he capitulated completely (”Sarah, I love you, you must come back to me, ah, the heat is intolerable”). But fortunately he mastered himself sufficiently never to post them, thinking: ”She'd only think me a bit of an a.s.s.”
”I shall never see you again,” he groaned aloud one afternoon, sitting high up on one of the blanket racks with a gla.s.s of whiskey and swinging his damp hairy legs in the air. But at that moment there was a knock at the door.
”Who is it?”
”Me. Can I come in?” came Charity's voice.
”Certainly not.” The Major hastily jumped down and began to pull on his clothes. ”What d'you want?”
”That girl wants to see you.”
”Which girl?”
”The one you all make such a fuss of. The one with the spots and the limp.”
”You mean Sarah? Tell her I'll be down immediately.”
But Charity was still mooning outside the door when he opened it, and gave him a surly, reproachful look.
”How did you know where I was?”
”I saw you go in one day. What d'you do in there anyway?”
Although some days had pa.s.sed since they had seen each other, Sarah seemed to be treating her visit as entirely normal. She greeted him as if unaware of the heartache that this separation had caused him. She was cheerful. She was delighted to see him. By herself she had been miserable. Why had he not come to see her?
”Eh?”
”I've been most horribly sick (ugh! It's disgusting to mention such things). You might at least have come and cheered me up.”
”Was it an unmentionable disease?” asked the Major gaily, infected by her good spirits.
”All diseases are unmentionable, Brendan, but I shall tell you anyway. I spent a whole night vomiting. Isn't that re-volting?”
The Major laughed, although secretly somewhat taken aback by this frankness. Of course Sarah was a law unto herself.
But she was irresistible. She chattered away gaily to him as they strolled arm-in-arm back and forth over the dusty floor of the ballroom. Yes, she had talked to Captain Bolton... What a strange, cold man he was! Those blue eyes of his! They said in Kilnalough that once he had glanced for a moment at a gla.s.s of water on Father O'Byrne's table and ice had formed on it an inch thick...Oh, the Major was impossible! Of course it wasn't true literally literally, it was true in some other way, how should she know in what way it was true? And, and... the miracle, had he seen the miracle after that absurd little scene at the Golf Club? Well, she'd taken a peek at the statue and there didn't seem to be much blood flowing anywhere but there were a couple of brown spots...but they they might have been anything, they might have been, say, oxtail soup. Oh well, if it was blasphemy to say so then so much the better, she'd have a sin to confess for once, which would make a nice change, her life was so dull...she could never think of any sins to might have been anything, they might have been, say, oxtail soup. Oh well, if it was blasphemy to say so then so much the better, she'd have a sin to confess for once, which would make a nice change, her life was so dull...she could never think of any sins to commit commit, let alone confess, particularly when she felt sick and vomited all the time, it left her feeling much too weak to do any sinning...and anyway, since he, the Major, was a ”beastly Prod,” she didn't see why he should mind her saying something blasphemous, in fact he should positively encourage her, but never mind about that, what was it she wanted to say, yes, she wanted to know everything, absolutely everything that had been going on while she had been sick...
”You mean, going on here?”
”Of course I mean here. Where d'you think I mean?”
But the Major could think of nothing but the fact that he had spent three whole days hollow-eyed with love for her.
By now they were strolling in the residents' lounge, s.h.i.+elded from the curiosity of the whist players by a bank of potted shrubs which had been evacuated from the Palm Court by Edward.
”Take a look at this.” Grasping a heavy plush sofa that stood in the middle of the room beside a table of warped walnut, he dragged it aside. Beneath, the wooden blocks of parquet flooring bulged ominously upward like a giant abscess. Something was trying to force its way up through the floor.
”Good heavens! What is it?”
The Major knelt and removed three or four of the blocks to reveal a white, hairy wrist.
”It's a root. G.o.d only knows where it comes from: probably from the Palm Court-one of those wretched tropical things. There's a two-foot gap between this floor and the brick ceiling in the cellars, packed with earth and gravel and wringing wet from some burst drain or waste-pipe.”
”Why d'you think it wants to come up into the lounge?”
”Looking for nourishment, I suppose. There may be lots more of them for all I know. One shudders to think what it may be doing to the foundations.”