The Empire Trilogy by J. G. Farrell

hand-bell and rang it vigorously. This done, he went to a small concealed door in the oak panelling (which the Major took to be a broom cupboard) and whisked it open. An elderly lady stepped out. She was dressed entirely in black except for a white lace cap pinned haphazardly to her faded bundle of grey hair. She was evidently blind, for Edward led her to the table and sat her down before instructing her in deafening tones that Brendan, that was to say the Major, Angela’s Major, had come home, home from the war...
    â€œAngela’s Major,” she murmured. “Where is he?”
    And the Major was apologized to and led forward to kneel beside the chair while the old lady ran a withered hand over his features. Suddenly she cried petulantly: “That’s not him! That’s someone else!” and there was confusion for a moment while old Mrs Rappaport (for the Major had identified her as Angela’s widowed grandmother) was shifted into a position suitable for addressing the steaming plate of brown soup in front of her. A silver spoon was put in her hand, a napkin was tied round her neck and, still protesting feebly, she began to siphon up her soup with great rapidity.
    Thereafter the meal became lugubrious and interminable, even to the Major who thought that in hospital he had explored the very depths of boredom. Edward and Ripon were annoyed with each other for some reason and disinclined for conversation. The tutor apparently did not eat with the family; at any rate he was nowhere to be seen. The food was entirely tasteless except for a dish of very salty steamed bacon and cabbage that gave off a vague, wispy odour of humanity. But the Major did not really mind. He was hungry once more and chewed away with a weary ferocity. Indeed, he was light-headed with fatigue and as he chewed his thoughts kept wandering to the bed that awaited him, as a bridegroom throughout a long wedding-feast might contemplate his bride.
    In the farthest shadowy reaches of the dining-room a handful of guests dotted here and there at small tables occasionally revealed their presence by a cleared throat or a rattle of silver. But silence collected between the tables in layers like drifts of snow. Once in the course of the meal a brief, querulous argument broke out at the other end of the room; someone complained that his private jar of pickles had been used without his consent (it seemed to be the old man Ripon had described as a “friend of Parnell” but the Major could not be sure); but then silence returned, and once again the clinking of cutlery. Why are we all sitting here in shadowy silence clinking our chains like souls in perdition? Even in Kilnalough, he felt sure, in the wretched whitewashed cottages he had seen or in the parlours behind the straggling shop-fronts there would be identical shadowy figures clinking in silence as they ate their meals around a hearth. And it was too much for him, tired as he was, to endure. For this was the Major’s first night in Ireland and, like a man struggling to retain his consciousness as he inhales the first fumes of chloroform, he had not yet allowed himself to surrender to the country’s vast and narcotic inertia. He would leave the Majestic tomorrow, he told himself, or the day after, at latest. He would settle his business with Angela and go. After all, he had never really believed that they would get married. At most it had never been more than a remote possibility.
    The meal progressed to some form of apple pudding which the Major, gorged on bacon and cabbage, declined politely. Edward and Ripon maintained their sullen feud. (What the devil was it all about?) Old Mrs Rappaport ate noisily and voraciously. As for Angela, his erstwhile “fiancée,” she seemed to have exhausted herself completely with her afternoon’s evocation of the splendours of her youth. Pale and listless, oblivious of her Major’s return from the war or of her ritual