The Empire Trilogy (48 page)

It's not at all easy to undress someone who is unconscious —and Charity was wearing a great many layers of clothes. Fortunately Matthews was deft and experienced at removing ladies' garments, otherwise he might have been so discouraged as to give the whole thing up as a bad job, thereby losing a heaven-sent opportunity. Besides, he knew himself to be a good worker and was proud of his skill. This was something of a challenge, all the more so since the clothes Charity was wearing were unfamiliar: crinoline and petticoats and odd pantaloons with all sorts of hooks and ribbons and laces and safety-pins in places where one would not expect them. He lit the oil lamp, removed his jacket and made a rapid preliminary check to make sure that what ought to be there
was
there—and it was (for even divinely beautiful girls are constructed on the same general principles as their more homely sisters). Then he rubbed his chilly fingers and set to work, his eyes bright with concentration.

Charity was rolled on to her front, so that the eye-hooks that meandered up her spine could be unfastened one by one...but then something became stuck in front, so she had to be rolled on to her back, then on to her front again so that half a dozen white laces in granny-knots could be untied. Next he had to work his forearm under her stomach in order to lift her off the bed an inch or two, with the other hand trying to work the clumsy hooped skirt upwards...but he found this too difficult and had to stop and scratch his head in perplexity. It was clear that the only way was to roll her backwards and forwards working the skirt up a few inches at a time.

Each time he rolled her over Charity groaned, dreaming that she was crossing the Irish Sea to school in a black gale; giant waves swept her up and down, up and down...Of course she was never seasick...it would be too shaming if she was sick...but what if the boat began to sink? Up and down, up and down...Ah, no wonder it hadn't been moving, Matthews was thinking, there were a million pins he hadn't even noticed, he must be losing his touch...Now over she goes again, a firm shove on the hip and on the shoulder and...“No, no, straighten out your legs,” he muttered crossly. “We'll get nowhere like that...It'll take us all night.”

The temperature had been dropping steadily as the night wore on. By now it was freezing in the room. His fingers were stiff with the cold and lacked their usual dexterity, but he worked on without a pause. In a moment the first layer of clothing would be lying on the carpet. After that, things should go more smoothly.

Next door it was cold as well; at least Faith thought so. She was sitting in bed with her knees up to her chin, naked and shivering. The room was pitch-dark except for a faint orange glow that leaked under the communicating door from the oil lamp by which Matthews was working. Mortimer was striding up and down in the darkness. Although she could not see him she could tell more or less where he was by the sound of his voice and the creak of the floor-boards.

For some minutes he had been telling her about a master at school who had got drunk on Speech Day. Young, handsome, courteous, artistic, a wonderful athlete, the whole school had loved him from the loftiest prefect to the most insignificant fag until that day when he had gone weaving across the quad in gown and mortarboard shouting that the Matron was a flabby old bitch before the horrified eyes of a lot of chaps' parents...But Faith's teeth were chattering and try as she might she was unable to see the relevance of this story to their present situation. Was Mortimer trying to say that he was drunk? No, it couldn't be that. But what was it, then? Having failed, together with Charity and Viola, to understand and identify on her own person a fair proportion of the technical terms used in the brown-paper-wrapped book that Matthews had lent them, she was vague about what exactly was supposed to happen to begin with; but instinct told her that this sort of preamble was not necessary. Perhaps she had got undressed too promptly? On the other hand, what else was there to do? If only there had been a light burning she might have been able to see his face and get some clue as to what he was thinking. Mortimer had refused even to permit a candle to be lit. He had become hysterical when she had struck a match to see where the bed was. After that she had had to grope her way towards it in the dark. The whole thing was turning out to be decidedly odd and a much bigger bore than she had anticipated. Discouraged, she dolefully rested her trembling chin on her knees and wondered whether it wouldn't be best to give it up and start slipping on a few clothes again.

Mortimer was now telling her in a rapid, high voice about a fellow in the army who had gone for a trip on a whaler before the war, all those mountains of blubber, cutting through the mountains of blubber with flensing-knives! Ah, he could have done with a flensing-knife himself...The truth was that he was finding it increasingly difficult to avoid the curtains of white fat in which the room was draped. But now, striding about excitedly in the darkness, he had completely lost his sense of direction so that presently, ducking to avoid some limp tassels of lard that hung from the ceiling, he caught his foot in a rug and crashed forward into the bed, winding himself badly. Seizing her opportunity, Faith cast aside her sheet and pinioned him promptly against the mattress planting lean, dry kisses on his lips.

As he recovered his breath it slowly dawned on Mortimer that the sensation of touching a naked girl wasn't at all what he had expected...Little by little the curtains of white fat began to liquefy about the edges. Soon they were sliding down the walls to the floor and melting into a colourless liquid that seeped rapidly away through the cracks in the floorboards. His hand touched one of Faith's shoulder-blades...splendid, hard as a rock, nothing flabby about that! Next it alighted on her hip-bone and pelvis...solid as an iron casserole, it would chime as clear as frost if one tapped it with a fork (no need to think now about the spongey tripes that might be cooking inside it). Then came the ribs, every one clean and hard as the iron bars of a railing, drag a stick along them and they'd chatter like a machine-gun, a jolly good show (provided one forgot about the two oozing octopuses that were busy squeezing slimily in and out behind the bars). “Really,” he was thinking, “girls seem to be perfectly splendid little creatures!” But at this moment his hand, which had been hovering in the darkness over her ribs, swooped down to land by misfor-tune on Faith's ample bosom—which fled silkily in all directions, quivering like a beef jelly. A vast dough of white grease (which Mortimer had somehow failed to notice suspended above the bed) at this moment detached itself from the ceiling and dropped, engulfing him.

Next door Matthews was crouched low over the bed working on a last stubborn knot in the region of Charity's lower vertebrae; his mouth was open as he worked, partly from concentration, partly because he suffered from catarrh. As he bent closer, anxiously trying to see the ins and outs of this knot, the vapour that sped like smoke from his lips stirred the tiny blonde hairs running up Charity's spine, causing her to groan and mutter. For a moment she even tried to lift her head. Matthews shifted his worried gaze to her face. She was going to wake up any minute! That would be just his luck! She was already half-conscious and every few moments she would thrash out blindly with her legs; once she had caught him a painful blow on the elbow. Now that he had only one miserable knot left to deal with she would be bound to wake up and call the whole thing off!

His eyes moved to the bottle of champagne on the floor by the bed. Better give her some more to drink before she became sober enough to refuse it. He left the knot and shifted his attention to the bottle, hastily working the wire harness away from the cork. He had just begun to dig out the cork itself when he heard footsteps. He paused. He held his breath.

It seemed to come from from the floor below (in fact, he had just heard the Major carrying Padraig to the linen room), but supposing someone came up here and saw the light under the door! It would take some explaining away—him up here with a half-naked filly! He'd have to say he had just found her like that. Maybe he'd better give it up...But the sound had faded. All was silent once more.

He breathed again. In the room next door that idiot Mortimer had at last stopped pacing up and down and got down to business. Charity was lying peacefully again now. He judged that the champagne was no longer necessary. Putting the bottle down quietly on the floor by the bed he returned, rubbing his knuckles and blowing on his fingers, to deal with this last knot. It was definitely the last, he had assured himself of that...Charity was already naked to the waist; all that now remained was a wretched knee-length camisole, tied firmly round the waist with (of all things) coarse brown string. Really, the things girls trussed themselves up with! As it happened it was Faith who had tied this knot for her sister—and as a joke (Charity had not been able to see what she was doing behind her back) she had tied it as tightly as she could, one knot on top of another, so that Charity would never never ever be able to get it undone. Matthews had stubby, thick fingers which were stiff with the cold although he had tried warming them over the lamp. To make things worse, he was in the habit of biting his nails with the result that he was now picking away at the knot as clumsily as if he had been wearing gloves. He could cut it with a penknife, of course. He paused, tempted. But no; that would be unsporting. This knot was a challenge and he wasn't the kind of man to duck a challenge. He'd already got so far, besides, he didn't like to think of all his patient work going to waste. Breathing through his dry mouth, tongue between his teeth with concentration, he applied himself to his task.

And then his parcel was untied at last! It had taken him another three or four minutes before his diligence was at last rewarded. All he had to do now was remove the final wrapping; he would just have to roll her over on to her front and on to her back a few more times to ease the camisole off and then...he would have opened the small locked door leading into the garden of delight.

All this time Charity was being tossed savagely to and fro on stormy seas and by now she was feeling alarmingly sick. One moment she was rocking back and forth on the mail-boat with that dreadful lurching one feels as one first leaves the protection of the Howth peninsula and forges out into the open sea; the next she was shipwrecked and bobbing about helplessly in the water. It was icy cold and she had lost all her clothes—a huge wave had just come and turned her completely over, dragging away the last stitch she had on—and then somehow she was lying on her back on a rock and some appalling Creature (that resembled a black sea-lion with a white shirt and black bow-tie, rather like an illustration from
Alice in Wonderland
), an appalling Creature was trying to dislodge her from the rock and send her sliding back into the black water...and now a moist pink tongue was licking her kneecaps and a scratchy moustache was tickling her thighs ...At this moment, as luck would have it, her roaming hand closed over a very cold, elongated stone and she swung it up and hit the Creature with it. With a soft moan the Creature vanished back into the water...but Charity continued to feel sick until at last she vomited enormously, volcanically, over the side of the bed. Then the waves calmed down and she felt very much better.

The bottle of champagne had not broken, however, when she hit Matthews (who was now lying on the floor with a fractured skull); her fingers had released it and it lay like a block of ice between her thighs. The cork, meanwhile, had begun to travel imperceptibly away from the bottle as Charity floated peacefully onwards (and Faith in the next room groped around in the darkness trying to collect up as many of her garments as possible). Presently it gathered momentum and exploded. A long cry of pain broke from Charity's lips as the freezing liquid bubbled over the warm skin of her stomach.

Downstairs the Major paused and thought anxiously: “One of the twins?”—but he had Padraig to think of and hurried on.

In the next room Faith paused in alarm at her sister's bloodcurdling cry and thought that perhaps, after all, it mightn't be such a bad thing that her own escapade had proved a failure—while beside her in the oily darkness Mortimer thought bitterly: “What a cad the fellow is! Taking advantage of her like that...”

Another person heard the scream. This was Murphy, who had been lurking in the shadowy corridor and seen the twins come up with their young men. When he heard it he chuckled; then his gaunt figure melted back into the darkness. As he went, the moonlight from an uncurtained window glinted momentarily on a long, curving blade, for he had brought a scythe up from the barn, to hone and grease it in the attic where he kept his belongings.

It seemed to the Major that the night had already lasted an eternity, but the clock on the mantelpiece of the residents' lounge (specially repaired and wound to mark off the bliss-ful moments of Edward's ball) had scarcely conceded three o'clock. A few moments ago he had caught sight of himself in a mirror unexpectedly: two eyes round with worry in a pale face had stared at him unblinking as an owl, making him think of shell-shock cases in hospital, men who used to sit up in bed all night, wide-eyed, smoking one cigarette after another as they tried to probe the darkness around them.

“I hope this will be a lesson to you!”

All the lessons that were being learned that evening! But what good did they do? By the time one had learned them it was too late. He would move on, but life would not go with him. Life would stay where Sarah was; all the great explosions of joy would take place in her vicinity.

“Drink it all up. Every drop. If it tastes bad you should have thought of that beforehand!”

The house was empty now and silent, except for an occasional faint scratching sound; the Major postulated a rat under the floor-boards. Edward had disappeared once more, leaving him to cope with everything as usual, but he was too tired to feel any resentment. Besides, in a moment he would go to bed.