The Empire Trilogy (58 page)

“They're all elderly. They mustn't be put under any strain. If there's no chance of them reaching Dublin before night-fall you'd better send them back here and we'll try again tomorrow.”

“Very well, Major.” There was a pause. “By the way, I'm sending one of my men over to have a look round the Majestic.”

“Why?” asked the Major. But Murdoch had hung up the receiver.

“How dead everything is!” thought the Major as he wandered aimlessly through the empty rooms and corridors. Utter silence. He could no longer even hear that strange underwater cracking sound. Strange to think that Edward and a few old ladies could make such a difference to the place.

The parting had been a painful one. Convinced that they would not live to see their dear friend the Major again on this earth, the ladies had allowed themselves to surrender to their emotions. He had been obliged to kiss one faded tear-stained cheek after another, clasped to one frail lavender-scented bosom after another—all this combined with the alarms and distractions usually attendant on old ladies travelling: forgotten purses, mislaid tickets, letters for the Major to post, tips that they had forgotten to administer (but who was there left to tip at the Majestic, unless the Major himself?), addresses and timetables that had to be remembered and consequently were swiftly forgotten, little parcels (containing handkerchiefs on which his name and rank had been elaborately embroidered) for him to open after they had gone, urgent visits to the lavatory that had to be made at the last minute when everyone was ready to leave. The Major endured all this with good humour and insisted on remaining cheerful, chaffing the ladies briskly lest they should incapacitate themselves completely with sobs and be obliged to lie down, missing the train.

But at last the ladies motoring to Dublin in the Daimler with Edward had moved away, followed by the hired char-à-banc taking the rest to the railway station at Valebridge. The Major had found himself standing alone in the drive. Of the ladies nothing remained except a faint odour of smelling-salts on the still air.

Not yet accustomed to the strangely silent and deserted house, he had decided to continue his interrupted stroll through the grounds. On his way he began to come across traces of Edward's activities that he had been too preoccupied to notice before; a small cache of ammunition wrapped in an oilskin package was the first thing he happened to see. All the time that he had been working frantically to close down the Majestic Edward had been outside in the park planning its defence. Now that he was looking for them he began to find oilskin packages of ammunition everywhere. But that was not all. There were foxholes too dug in the potato field and in the meadow beyond, and first-aid boxes lodged in hollow trees in the woods. Every rise in the ground had some cover, in some places metal shields cut from segments of old boilers and equipped with slits to fire from—all facing outwards towards the boundaries of the estate as if, just out of sight over the rise of the next hill, silent armies had been massed, waiting to attack a slightly mad old English gentleman who drank too much whiskey and raved about the loss of Ireland. Poor Edward! No wonder he had discoursed with such energy to the tittering girl guides at the dinner-table about fields of fire, flanking attacks and strategic emplacements! Sitting on the steps the other day for a moment, he must have had a vision of being left alone with the Major to man all these positions against the vast and ruthless armies of the Pope.

Standing at the highest point of the meadow, the Major scanned the bright, peaceful countryside looking for the menace. He thought of a competition he had seen in one of the newspapers. There was a photograph of some footballers frozen at a dramatic moment in the game, but with the image of the football itself removed from the picture. Readers were asked to make a cross on the photograph where they thought the ball must be. Somewhere before his eyes in the sleeping countryside there was a threat to his safety. He knew it was there somewhere. But to him it was invisible.

As he was walking back to the house he paused at the edge of the drive to wait for a young man on a bicycle who had just emerged from the trees and was pedalling towards him. He had a rifle slung across his back and was wearing a curious mixture of uniforms: his pedalling legs were clad in darkgreen R.I.C. trousers; the upper part of his body, however, was clothed in khaki service uniform, while on his head was perched a flat civilian cap bearing the crowned-harp badge of the R.I.C. A long white hen's feather was stuck into this cap behind the badge. “A fine expression of the muddled will of the great British people!”

This strangely clad individual had now halted his bicycle by dragging his boots along the ground and, not without suspicion, had spoken out in tones of pure Cockney, wanting to know if the Major was the Major.

“Yes I am. What can I do for you?”

He had been told to have a look round the Majestic in case there was trouble. The whole countryside knew that the people living in the Majestic had moved away and there might be hooligans coming to loot the place. He patted the butt of his rifle, but without confidence, more as if he were superstitiously touching wood.

“By all means have a look round the out-houses. But be careful; a lot of the timber is rotten and you could easily break your neck. Another thing...if you happen to see a mad old man with a wrinkled face, don't shoot him. He's one of the servants. When you've finished come inside and ring the bell on the reception desk. I'll give you a cup of tea.”

For an hour the Major tried to read an out-of-date copy of
Punch
in the gun room, but the silence made him uneasy and he found it hard to concentrate. Once more the telephone rang in Edward's study down the corridor, but it stopped before he had time to reach it. He waited for it to ring again, but it didn't, so he made his way down to the kitchens in order to brew some tea for himself and the young Black and Tan. On his way he smiled: he had caught himself glancing nervously into the open doorways he was passing. “Really, I've become an old lady myself, I've spent so much time with them. When all this is over I really must find myself some younger members of the sex!”

By five o'clock the teapot had grown cold and there was still no sign of the Black and Tan, so the Major went out to look for him. First he wandered through the kitchen garden towards the stables—but they were empty, as were the garages and out-houses. The door of the barn was open, so he peered in. A pleasant scent of summer hay greeted his nostrils. There was no sign of the young man. With misgiving he approached the ladder up to the loft and set his foot on the worm-eaten bottom rung. It took his weight, so he began to climb. When his head and shoulders had emerged through the trap-door he looked around. It was lighter up here. One of the wooden leaves of the loading-gate was open, allowing a shaft of sunlight to fall on the floor.

Someone had been here recently. Dust hung in the air and, where the sun touched it, blazed like a furnace. On each side the towering banks of hay had a grey look, as if cut many years ago and abandoned. But there was no one here now. He cautiously backed down the ladder. “I could look for him here for ever and not find him.”

He continued, however, to move through a succession of courtyards, past the well and the pump, towards the apple house, of which the door also stood open. It was here that the superfluity of the Majestic's huge apple crop was stored: windfalls and “cookers” for the most part. At the time of the Major's first visit they had been piled on top of each other, bruised and rotting, to within a few feet of the roof; but in the interim the cook had made her daily visit to fill a coal-scuttle with apples for pies and desserts (and perhaps the old crones in black had also been filling their flour sacks). The result was that a hollow had been scooped out of this ocean of apples, a valley that built up from knee height to shadowy slopes reaching well above the Major's head. There was silence here too, and a pungent smell of rotting fruit. “In a few weeks,” the Major was thinking, “this place will be so full of wasps that one won't be able to get near it...But then, in a few weeks will it matter any longer?” And he took a few steps forward into the gloom. As he did so there was a convulsion of the shadows behind him and he pitched forward into the apples. Losing consciousness, he was aware that the apples had begun to roll; a great avalanche of apples thundered down on him and buried him in blackness. But he was not dead yet, so he had to be dragged out by the heels.

The Major was left lying on the ground for a few moments while his wrists were tied behind his back. When he was picked up again a pool of blood was left in the place where he had lain. All the way down the steps from one terrace to the next, past the black and silent swimming-pool with its skeletal diving-board, past the derelict tennis courts and the empty weather-beaten urns that lined the route like grim sentinels, blood continued to splash every few paces. Presently the lowest terrace was reached. Then the Major's limp body was conveyed lower still, on to the rocks, and from there with considerable difficulty was handed down to the beach.

Some distance away was the young Black and Tan whom the Major had been attempting to summon for tea. Bound, gagged and, like the Major, scarcely conscious, he had been buried up to his neck in the sand, ready for the incoming tide. His head was lolling to one side and he did not raise it as the sound of clinking pebbles drew nearer and came to a halt beside him. His eyes were closed, his young face had a peaceful expression, and his breathing was slow and steady.

Beside the Black and Tan a hole was begun for the Major; but before it was more than two feet deep the digging spade rang against rock and this hole had to be abandoned. The spit of sand was narrow, the shape of a blade pointing towards the sea. Since the Black and Tan already occupied the only suitable position another hole was dug a few yards farther back. This time there was no impediment.

When the new hole was deep enough the Major's limp body was lowered into it and the crook of a walking-stick was used to drag his bound ankles back into a kneeling position. A heavy rock was then laid on the back of his calves, packed down with smaller stones and covered with sand. By this time only his head remained visible.

His wound had stopped bleeding now but he was still unconscious. Gradually, as darkness fell, the tide crept up the beach towards him. It was a mild, windless evening and the sea was calm. As it grew darker lonely, heart-rending shrieks were heard from some distance away—but it was only the peacocks, whom nobody had remembered to feed that day, preparing to roost for the night in the branches of an oak on the highest terrace.

Meanwhile the flooding tide continued its advance. Soon after the moon rose there was a snorting, gasping sound from further down the beach but presently silence and peace closed in once more.

When the whispering fringe of surf was still a few feet short of the Major's head, however, the tide reached its height and in due course began to ebb once more. By this time he was semi-conscious. Questions, impossible to seize and examine, loomed in the shadows. What was he doing buried in the sand? Had he been left to drown? And his mind wandered away, buoyant and aimless as a drifting balloon, to the trenches—to some “show” or other in some godforsaken wood without a name.

At first light people came to dig him up and he became feebly conscious once more. They dug with care, as if aware of the danger of slashing his bound wrists with the spade. They used their hands to feel out the edges of the heavy rock that lay on his calves and gently lifted it away. Then, in turn, they lifted out the Major and laid him on the sand.

By now he was completely numb. He could feel nothing. But the involuntary movement of his limbs had awoken a terrible cramp, so that it seemed as if his body was doing its best to tear itself to pieces. Each muscle in his stomach, thighs and shoulders had contracted as hard as marble, vying with its opposite number to snap his bones and ligaments. Yet at the same time his mind was quite peaceful. It was as if, after all, this body did not belong to him. As he lay there quietly on the sand, a great feeling of serenity stole over him—the sort of feeling one might have for a few moments after a serious accident when one realizes that one is no longer one's own responsibility. Other people were taking care of him. He could hear their voices faintly from farther down the beach where they were probing the sand with the spade. Presently they began to dig another hole.

The Major was now thinking about Sarah...and about love. And then, without being aware of any transition, he was thinking about Ovid, an author he had read without pleasure at school. Strange to think that some people should actually enjoy reading Ovid as much as, say, that story of T.C. Bridges which had been serialized in the
Weekly Irish Times
last year. What a charming story! There was one episode which had particularly taken his fancy: the young man confessing to his girl-friend that although in appearance a gentleman he is really a burglar, and that consequently it is inevitable that she must detest him...But the girl (and what a splendid surprise this had been both to the young man of the story and to the Major)...the girl sticks by him, stoutly says she loves him and doesn't believe him capable of stealing. (And true enough, there had been something rather rum about his theft. He had had a bump on the head or he'd been hypnotized and couldn't actually remember doing it.) Jolly decent of the girl, in any case, to stick by him. Sarah, of course, would undoubtedly do the same in that situation. And with this agreeable thought the Major's weary, salt-caked eyelids crawled down over his eyes and he slept, or became unconscious, it would have been difficult to say which.

When he next woke up he was again buried up to his neck in sand. The sun had risen and was blazing directly into his eyes, dancing on the surf not far away. This light blinded him, so that for some time he was aware of nothing but the pain of his retina. When he had become more accustomed to it, however, he realized that he was no longer alone. Scarcely more than a yard to the left there was another head poking out of the sand on the same level as his own. He recognized the fellow immediately: it was the young Cockney who had come up to him on a bicycle the day before...He had invited the chap to tea.