The Empire Trilogy (21 page)

“Don't be a damn fool, Edward!” the doctor said distinctly.

“There, you see, Brendan,” Edward went on grimly. “You see what I mean. The good doctor and I have been having words about this already. D'you know that they've even been trying it on with me?” And leaping to his feet once again Edward seized a bread-knife and began to slash away at the foliage with it as if it were a machete. And it was true that the growth of ferns, creepers, rubber-plants and God only knew what had become so luxuriant as to be altogether beyond a joke. Whereas previously the majority of the chairs and tables had been available, here and there, in clearings joined by a network of trails, now all but a few of them had been engulfed by the advancing green tide. While Edward slashed away with the bread-knife the Major, anxious to change the subject, observed politely that he had never in his life seen indoor plants “succeed” so well. Edward, his exuberance subsiding abruptly, murmured something indistinct about the system of irrigation, then something further about sewage and the septic tank. “A devil's own job” something would be “and frankly the expense...” With a sigh he kicked the slashed leaves and twigs into a pile beside the table and slumped back into his chair.

“And anyway, what does it matter in the long run?” the Major understood him to murmur very softly, eyes raised, mouth open, to the great skylight above them, itself almost obliterated by vegetation. Rover, who had been dozing with his chin on the Major's instep, went over to inspect the pile of leaves, lifted a leg to sprinkle them with a few drops of urine before, inertia overcoming him, he rolled over on to his side to doze off once more.

There was a long silence as they sat there in the green-ish gloom. The old man was motionless, deeply sunk in an armchair just as the Major remembered him from his first visit and, for all one knew, fast asleep behind the drooping lids. The Major noted with dismay that the doctor's flies were undone; a fold of flannel was protruding like the stuffing from a broken doll. Really! someone should have reminded the poor old fellow; at his age one couldn't be blamed for such a lapse. And why had nobody thought of removing his hat? He looked absurd sitting there at the tea-table wearing a hat (though it was true that the foliage made one feel as if one were out of doors).

“You said I could have some peacock feathers,” Padraig said plaintively, but Edward made no reply and silence fell once more.

A faint rustling sound became audible, as of someone making his way with caution along one of the trails through the thicket. There had previously been a way through, the Major remembered, from one end of the Palm Court to the other (leading to a spiral staircase down into the cellars). It seemed, to judge by the steadily approaching rustle of leaves, that against all probability this trail was still practicable. The noise of movement stopped for a moment near at hand, and there was a deep sigh, a long exhalation of breath, almost a sob. Then the noise started again. In a moment whoever it was would step into view from behind an extraordinarily powerful tropical shrub which seemed to have drilled its roots right through the tiles of the floor into the oozing darkness below. No sound but for the rustling footsteps. Even the doctor appeared to have stopped breathing. The Major tried to see past the hairy, curving, reticulated trunk of this tree, to distinguish (between succulent, oily leaves as big as dinner-plates) the tiny figure that slowly shuffled into sight. It was old Mrs Rappaport.

She stopped in the clearing opposite the tea-table and turned her sightless eyes in their direction.

“Edward!”

Edward said nothing but continued to sit there as if made of stone.

“Edward, I know you're there,” the old lady repeated shrilly. “Edward!”

Edward looked agonized but said nothing. After a long pause the old lady turned and began to move forward again. For what seemed an age they listened to the decreasing rustle of her progress followed by a prolonged wrestling with the grove of bamboo shoots. Listening to the interminable thrashing as she tried to escape from the toils of bamboo, the Major wondered whether he should go to her assistance. But at last the thrashing stopped. Mrs Rappaport had won through into the residents' lounge.

Silence returned and it seemed to the Major that the greenish gloom had deepened into an intolerable darkness. If only the famous “Do More” generator had been working they could have repulsed this aqueous darkness with a cleansing flood of electric light. He looked round for the tall-stemmed lamp which Angela had once switched on in this very glade, but although it was no doubt still somewhere near at hand (few things being ever deliberately changed at the Majestic) there was no longer any way of telling which of these leafy shrubs possessed a tubular metal trunk and glass corolla.

“Have you had enough to eat, old chap?”

“Eh?” said the Major.

Edward was talking to the dog, however. After a moment, though, as if the sound of his own voice had startled him into activity, he stirred uncomfortably and looked at his guests. He stood up for an instant, without pushing his chair back, then sat down again.

“Glad to hear you're something of a sportsman,” he said to Padraig with an effort. “Good for a young fellow...cricket, hockey and so forth. Mind you, I was never much of a cricketer myself...Too impatient with it all, I suppose.”

“I hate cricket,” Padraig said sullenly.

Whether or not this exchange served to clear the air, Dr Ryan now also began to speak, though so softly that it was all the Major could do to make out what he was saying. Several moments passed before he realized that the old fellow had begun to speak hoarsely, comfortingly, consolingly to Edward of someone who had died...and several more moments before he realized that that someone was Angela, as if she had only been dead for a matter of hours rather than months.

People are insubstantial, he understood the old man to be saying, a doctor should know that better than anyone. They are with us for a while and then they disappear and there is nothing to be done about it...A man must not let himself become bitter and defeated because of this state of affairs, because really there is no point to it...There is no rock of ages cleft for anyone and one must accept the fact that a person (“You too, Edward, and the Major, and this young boy as well”)...a person is only a very temporary and makeshift affair, as is the love one has for him...And so Edward must understand that this young girl who had just died, his beloved daughter Angela whom he, Dr Ryan, had assisted into the world, even at the height of her youth and health was temporary and insubstantial because...people are insubstan-tial. They really do not ever last...They never last. A doctor should know. People never last.

Edward laughed heartily and, lighting a candle, said: “I remember one time some fellows in Trinity asked me to bowl in the practice nets with them (used to like to keep myself in trim during the vacations) and I'm damned if I didn't have such a swelled head in those days that I made up some cock-and-bull story about being a demon bowler. Well, they had the nets up against the wall, of course. First ball I bowled (fella called Moore was batting, later played for the Gentlemen of Ireland), first ball, mind you, I'm dashed if it didn't sail clean over the batsman, over the back of the net, over the wall, bounced on the roof of a carriage in Nassau Street and went half-way up Dawson Street! Eh? What? How about that for a piece of bowling, eh? You can bet my face was like a beetroot and, by Jove, did they laugh at me...Och, after that I stuck to the gloves, I can tell you.” Bubbling with mirth Edward gradually subsided once more.

On an impulse the Major had slipped Angela's letter out of his pocket and (overcome by curiosity and a vague dread as to what it might contain) was straining his eyes in the candle-lit gloom to read it, while the doctor began a rambling and incoherent monologue about there being a new spirit in Ireland (it was clear that the old chap was so exhausted and his mind so fogged that he no longer knew where he was or what he was talking about).

Ah, it was as he thought,
Dearest Brendan
—the regular handwriting, line after line like small waves relentlessly lapping a gentle shore.
On my dressing-table
—the mirror, the brushes, the jewellery-cases, even a photograph of himself.
From the window of my bedroom I can see
...but what could she see? Only two elms and an oak, reputed to be a hundred and fifty years old, the second or third oldest tree on the estate, the edge of a path where the dogs sometimes wandered, but at this distance she could hardly recognize them...Foch or Fritz? Collie or Flash? They were too far away, in a sense (thought the Major) they were too particular now...only a generality like the circling of the planets could hold her attention now. But
at twelve minutes past eleven the doctor came
and he and Angela had a long chat which, for all that, didn't prevent her noticing and recording that
one of his waistcoat buttons was dangling by a thread
and that there was a copious spot of what was undoubtedly porridge on his jacket...(Meanwhile the doctor muttered in the querulous tones of a tired old man: “There's a new spirit in Ireland; I can feel it, you know, and see it everywhere. The British are finished here. The issue is no longer in doubt, hasn't been for the last twenty years. There's nothing now except a huge army that'll keep Ireland under the British yoke. If you take my advice, Edward, you'll give in gracefully now while you still can, you'll give them the land they're asking for, because, if you don't, they'll take it anyway...Parnell was the last man who could have preserved some sort of life for the British in Ireland but the damn fools didn't realize it, thought he was their enemy! Serves 'em right. I've no sympathy for them, they've lived here for generations like cocks in pastry without a thought for the sufferings of the people. Now it's their turn and I'll shed no tears for them...Ach, things have changed since I was a boy...they have a different look to them, the people, it would take a fool not to see it.”)

“But this is an enormous letter,” thought the Major, appalled, hefting the wad of crinkly paper in his hand. “It would take a prodigious effort even to write such a letter if one were weakened by illness, if one were unable to take proper nourishment (he thought with a pang of the untouched trays of food ferried up and down the stairs) and...and the detail in it is intolerable.”

(“Of course, I was a child then, too young to remember those days, but my father had seen it and my uncles too, God rest them, they were old men before thirty with the worry and the trouble...and I remember the way people talked of it, you know. It must be God's will, they'd say. He sent it to punish us, d'ye see? so what is there for a man to do? Sure we'll have to go to another country, says he, to America on a ship because in Ireland we'll never do any good; we'll die for sure and there'll be no help for it...Man, I'd say, what need is there to leave? The hunger is over and there's food enough. But sure it'll come again, says he, you'd never know...'tis best to leave Ireland. B'the Lord Harry, in those days they were leaving so quick they were even starving there on the quays of New York. There's no luck in Ireland, they'd tell you...”)

“There's no luck in Ireland,” agreed Edward, winking at the Major, who was thinking: “Such detail is intolerable,”—the design of the carpet over which the shrinking white feet of the patient still continued to patter day after day, morning and evening, to perform her ablutions...till the day inevitably came (he had been waiting for it with despair), till the page inevitably came when the pitcher and the bowl and the sponge came to
her
over the carpet and the carpet dropped out of her world and she too prepared to drop out of her world. “Such detail is quite obviously intolerable,” thought the Major as Edward reached out in the gloom to feel whether the teapot's plump belly was still warm, at the same time absent-mindedly handing the sugar-bowl to the doctor, who did not need it and was muttering incoherent words to the effect that if Edward or anyone else laughed at what he was saying it was because he or they, was or were, British black-guards and fools (some part of the Major's brain had remained on duty to straighten out the grammar while he thought: “Really, when I arrived and attempted to kiss her hand she flinched away from me as she might have flinched from some uncouth stranger.”).

“Those were the days,” declared Edward absently, perhaps still thinking of the day he had bowled a cricket-ball up Dawson Street.

“They certainly were
not
!” snapped the doctor.

So why should she write all this? Page after page to someone she scarcely knew. The relentlessly regular handwriting lapped rhythmically on. Only on the last few pages did it begin to waver a little.

I shall not die now.

Brendan, if I die who will look after you when I am gone?

And there were a number of other observations, feebly scratched out, which the Major had not the heart to decipher.

“People are insubstantial,” murmured the doctor, as his bowler-hatted head drooped sleepily on to his chest. “They never last. Of course, it makes no difference in the long run.”

It was signed, without the usual qualification about the “loving fiancée,” quite simply:
Angela.

“The old chap's fallen asleep,” Edward said. “Such a lot of rot he talks...I'm afraid he's becoming a bit you-know-what.”

Getting to his feet he shouted deafeningly to Murphy to bring more candles because it had become infernally dark. The Major returned the letter to his pocket. Glancing down, he noted with dismay that his own flies were undone. He fumbled with them hastily before Murphy arrived with more candles.

“Can I have some peacock feathers?” demanded Padraig stubbornly. “You promised.”

“Of course, of course,” Edward told him genially. “Look, why don't you go and ask the twins for some; I'm sure they have lots of that sort of thing. Murphy, show this young man where he can find the girls.”