The Empire Trilogy (14 page)

His face appeared less drawn and yellow than when the Major had seen him at the Majestic and his listless manner had been replaced by a disquieting nervous energy. He'd never felt better, he assured the Major. Found a new doctor who'd done him the world of good...indeed, he felt a new man. He wouldn't give a farthing for your Harley Street specialists. “I feel a new man,” he repeated categorically. Saying this, he looked angrily round the room, as if expecting the Major to disagree with him.

The O'Neills were going to spend the afternoon and evening in Kingstown. There were two ships in Kingstown harbour, H.M.S.
Umpire
and H.M.S.
Parker
, which were to be illuminated that evening to supplement the bonfires and fireworks. It should be a splendid sight. Would the Major not care to come along? The Major, whose patriotic zest had lapsed once again into apathy, declined. He said vaguely that he had to go and visit an acquaintance. When the O'Neills had gone the Major had lunch and went for a stroll. The streets were still packed with rowdy, enthusiastic men and women of all classes, many of them still wearing rosettes or Union Jacks. But now (or so it seemed to the Major, who was out of sorts) their enthusiasm had already begun to wear an aimless air. Peace had been celebrated; now there was the future to think about. The pubs were doing a thriving business, full of shouting and good cheer. As he passed their open doors he kept hearing the same song: “Tipperary” and other songs from the first year of the war. To the Major they sounded incongruous and pathetic. Dublin was still living in the heroic past. But how many of these revellers had voted for Sinn Fein in the elections?

On Monday morning the Major read in the
Irish Times
that Peace Day had been a splendid success: “The section of demobbed soldiers and sailors revealed the spirit of camaraderie that prevails in their ranks and the democratic side of army life. Men with top-hats walked beside men in their working clothes. Spats moved in time with hobnailed boots.” There was also an account of how an ex-Dublin-Fusilier had marched over the whole route from the Castle to St Stephen's Green on crutches. By the time he reached the Green his palms were bleeding from the friction. When asked why he did not fall out he replied: “No, I knew it was my last march and I wouldn't fall out while I had a breath left in my body.”

Only towards evening had a rowdy element manifested itself. Young men carrying Sinn Fein flags and singing “The Soldier's Song” had gathered outside the Post Office in Sackville Street. There had been a few scuffles before the po-lice arrived to disperse them. Later in the evening a large crowd had threatened to throw a soldier into the Liffey at Ormond Quay. A police sergeant coming to his rescue had been shot at close range and was now lying gravely ill in hospital. But when one considered the magnificence of the occasion, the nobility of the marching troops, the enthusiasm of the cheering crowds, perhaps these incidents might represent only the tiniest flaw in the smooth and majestic edifice of Peace Day—a flaw that was scarcely visible to a man of broad vision.

The Major was now faced with the alternative of abandoning Angela and crossing to England or returning to Kilnalough to assume his heavy but nebulous responsibilities as her fiancé. Unable to make up his mind to do the one thing he was equally unable to make up his mind to do the other. The result was that for the time being he remained irresolutely in Dublin.

One day, while on a tram returning from Kingstown where he had spent the afternoon looking at the yachts and sitting in tea-shops, he suddenly found himself in the middle of a disturbance. The tram had come to a halt at the end of Northumberland Road just short of the canal bridge. A dense crowd had formed and motor cars had stopped on each side of the bridge. All the passengers were on their feet trying to see what was going on. Impatient with the delay, the Major decided to walk and forced his way through the crowd as far as the bridge. Abruptly shots rang out from close at hand and the crowd convulsed, forcing him back against the parapet. He almost fell but somehow managed to cling to the brick-work and pull himself up. On the far side of the canal two men in trench coats sprinted away in the direction of the quays. A tall, strongly built man lumbered after them, his movements impeded by a sandwich-board that hung to his knees; in his right hand he carried a revolver. Behind the southern wall of the canal the Major glimpsed the khaki uniforms of British soldiers. There was a volley of rifle shots and the man in the sandwich-board was buffeted by an invisible wind. A few yards farther on he paused, raised his revolver and fired back across the canal at the soldiers; then he hastened on again. More rifle shots. Once more the big man was buffeted, then ran on clumsily a few yards. He was shouting something. His companions had vanished by now. Abruptly he collapsed inside the sandwich-board, subsided slowly to his knees and hung there, head lolling, arms trailing, still supported by the boards, like an abandoned puppet.

Slowly the crowd began to move again, stunned and cautious, releasing the Major. He moved forward a few steps until he could see what had stopped the traffic on the bridge. An old man—white moustache, grey face spattered with scarlet—lay on his back, eyes rolled up beneath the lids so that only the whites were visible. A gold watch, linked by a chain to the top buttonhole of his waistcoat, still lay in the palm of his right hand encircled by long ivory fingernails.

Shaken, the Major shoved his way through the crowd in the direction of Mount Street. The big man still hung like a rag doll strapped into the sandwich-board. The Major was close enough now to read in black letters HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD PRAY FOR US SINNERS! The sandwich-board was made not of wood but of iron; the metal, deeply scored by bullets, gleamed through the torn paper. The big man had been using it as a suit of armour.

The next day he read an account of the incident. The old man was an Englishman, of course, a retired army officer who worked in the Intelligence Department in Dublin Castle. He was a widower and lived near by in Northumberland Road. He had been coming home from his office after work when a man carrying a sandwich-board had stepped out of the crowd and asked him the time. And someone had heard the man say: “Ah then, your time has come!” and with that he had raised a revolver to the old man's head and pulled the trigger. But the assassin had been unlucky. A party of British sol-diers had just finished searching a house beside the church on the corner and they had been ready for trouble. The man in the sandwich-board had died without giving his name. Who was he? Nobody knew. The unknown murderer had been carrying a sandwich-board with a religious message (the Major overheard someone in Jury's say with a laugh) because it was thought that Englishmen, Protestants, would turn their eyes away from the name of Our Lady, and these days so many people were being stopped and searched for arms...

The Major read this newspaper account and the next day found one or two more. But although it was mentioned in passing once or twice, the murder of the old man had been classified and accepted. It was odd, he thought. An old man is gunned down in the street and within a couple of days this senseless act is both normal and inevitable. It was as if these newspaper articles were poultices placed on sudden inflammations of violence. In a day or two all the poison had been drawn out of them. They became random events of the year 1919, inevitable, without malice, part of history. The old man lying on the bridge with his watch in his hand was a part of history. And thus, the Major reflected—looking out of his window at the bustling traffic of Dame Street, at the gentlemen in bowler hats, at the fine ladies in their billowing dresses, at the flower and fruit sellers, at the ragged women with babies and barefoot children clinging to their skirts begging in the street below “For the Mercy of God”...“For the Holy Vargin!”...at the gleaming motor cars, at the friendly faces, at the jaunting—cars with their nodding horses and at all the other things which would not be recorded—a particle of the history of this year is formed. A raid on a barracks, the murder of a policeman on a lonely country road, an airship crossing the Atlantic, a speech by a man on a platform, or any of the other random acts, mostly violent, that one reads about every day: this was the history of the time. The rest was merely the “being alive” that every age has to do.

This thought must have displeased him, for he said to himself: “I'll leave tonight and go back to London. And then perhaps I'll go abroad and spend the winter in Italy.” The boat train left Westland Row at ten past seven. He would get into Euston at half past five tomorrow morning. “I have plenty of time. I'll ring for someone to pack my bags.”

But at this moment there was a knock on the door. It was the chambermaid in her black uniform and white apron and cap. She had a telegram for him. It was from Edward to say that Angela had died the night before and would he return to Kilnalough as soon as possible.

Gone to the angels. The Major thought about her on the train back to Kilnalough. He thought about the tea-party the day he had arrived in Kilnalough a few weeks earlier; indeed, it was his only memory of her. He had no other. And somehow he could not help smiling sadly when he remembered her fierce nostalgia in the tropical gloom of the Palm Court.

And now Angela had gone to join the ancient pre-Raphaelite poets and the steady-eyed explorers who had shed their earthly envelopes (as the saying goes). She had gone to join the dead rowing blues (they were most probably among those blurred chaps on Edward's War Memorial) who had quaffed pre-war champagne out of her slippers. She had gone to the place where all the famous people go, and the obscure ones too for that matter.

“I'm dying,” she had said to him, “of boredom,” and even that remembered statement seemed to lack pathos or tragedy. It was almost as if one might expect to find “of boredom” written on her death certificate. “Well,” he thought, “I don't mean to laugh at her, poor girl. She must have been ill even then.” Indeed, it made him feel sad to think of her now, sitting there in that pseudo-tropical clearing in Kilnalough and dying “of boredom,” if not of something that reminded her more painfully of the harshness of reality, of the transience of youth, and of her own mortality.

The Major did not arrive at the Majestic until after dark and it would not have surprised him to find nobody there to greet him. However, as he climbed the stone steps and dragged open the massive front door he saw that there was a glimmer of light in the foyer. The electric light appeared not to be functioning but an oil lamp was burning dimly on the reception desk and beside it, asleep on a wooden chair, was the old manservant, Murphy. He started violently as the Major touched his arm and gave a gasp of terror; it was true that there was something eerie about this vast shadowy cavern and the Major himself felt a shiver of apprehension as his eyes tried to probe beyond the circle of light into the darker shadows where the white figure of Venus flickered like a wraith. He bent an ear; Murphy was wheezing some information.

Edward had retired early on Dr Ryan's instructions, worn out. He would see the Major in the morning. The twins, Miss Faith and Miss Charity, had returned from their holidays earlier that same evening for their sister's funeral which would be held tomorrow at eleven. If the Major required anything to eat he would find sandwiches in the dining-room.

Murphy took the oil lamp and led the way to the dining-room without volunteering to carry the Major's suitcase. But the Major was by now an old hand at the Majestic, so he picked it up without a murmur and plunged down the corridor in the wake of the dancing lamp. Soon he was wearily masticating soda-bread sandwiches which contained some sort of fish; he supposed it to be salmon. There was no sound except for the creaking of the wind outside and an occasional flash of rain against the window-panes. Murphy had gone away with the oil lamp and the only illumination was provided by the two-branched silver candlesticks that flanked his plate of sandwiches.

A great melancholy stole over him. He sat there at the table in his mackintosh (which he had not bothered to remove) and thought of Angela and felt sorry for her, and he felt sorry for Edward too. And presently, thinking of the old man dead on the canal bridge, he felt sorry not only for the dead but for the mortal living too...it made so little difference. Having eaten, he drank a glass of beer and climbed the creaking, treacherous stairs to the room he had used before. It was exactly as he had left it. The sheets had not been removed (thank heaven!) and the bed had not been made. He undressed and crawled beneath a generous pile of damp blankets.

The sun shone brilliantly on the day of Angela's funeral. The Major woke very late and by the time he had gone downstairs to breakfast dressed in a dark suit and black tie for the sombre occasion Edward had already left for the church. So had the twins, apparently. There was no sign of them. Only Ripon was left, looking pale and wretched, unable to find anything to say. He looked relieved when the Major refused his offer of a lift to the church, saying that he would prefer to walk.

“Angela had leukaemia,” Ripon told him in reply to his question. “We thought you knew.”

“Well, no, actually, I didn't,” replied the Major, sounding rather cross. How typical of the Spencers to leave him to find out for himself!

He entered the churchyard by a side gate of wrought iron which at some time in the distant past had been left open so long that it had rusted that way and was now immovable, embroidered by thick green threads of grass into the bank behind it. In earlier days it had borne an inscription in Gothic letters so ornate that one could hardly read them...The Lord is...My shepherd? Rust had entirely dislodged the rest of the scroll. “My defence,” perhaps. Whatever it was it lay in dark flakes somewhere in the grass.

A little farther on he came to a pile of fresh, dark earth and it gave him a disagreeable shock when he realized that this was where Angela was to be interred. As he passed he was unable to resist a glance down into the neat oblong trench along the sides of which the white knuckles of roots showed like nuts in a slice of fruit-cake. Down there, in the course of a year or two, these slender white fingers would grow out again and wrap themselves round the wooden box imprisoning this unfortunate English lady (poor Angela, he was sure that her thoughts had always been returning like little lost dogs to such places as Epsom and Mayfair, Oxford and Cowes) for ever in Irish soil. He moved on now into the deep blue shadow cast by the tower of the church, a structure as modest as the headstones in the churchyard and made of the same grey, granitic stone quarried on the coast (Edward had once told him) ten or so miles away. The Roman Catholic chapel, as it happened, was also made of this stone.