Free The Empire Trilogy by J. G. Farrell

walked down corridors, through deserted rooms in twilight, often as not curtains still drawn from the evening before (perhaps even from many, many evenings before), up a staircase here, down a staircase there. Shortly before eleven o’clock, attracted by a smell of coffee, he found his way to the kitchens, which were chilly and cavernous, the whitewashed walls hung with an armoury of giant pots and pans (some of them big enough to braise an entire sheep, legs and all) which for the most part were rusted beyond recognition, so that they looked more like huge reddish-brown growths sprouting from the walls. In the middle of the table a tortoiseshell cat lay in a veined meat-dish, dozing.
    Here in the kitchens the Major was given a cup of tea (the coffee had been an olfactory illusion) stewed black and bitter by numerous reheatings, served to him by the extremely fat lady he had noticed at breakfast. She was the cook, he gathered, but though she appeared garrulous her accent was such that he could understand little of what she said. He did believe her to say, however, that “the mistress” might be found arranging flowers in the dining-room above.
    â€œThe mistress?” he repeated, wanting to make sure (he had been trailing long enough through empty rooms). He pointed up at the ceiling. The cook nodded vigorously and began to speak again, rapidly and with considerable urgency. Evidently what she was saying was important. Her face was working with emotion; between volleys of words there were shuddering intakes of breath; her shoulders shook, causing the gelatinous layers of flesh on her arms to shiver. “Good heavens!” thought the Major with concern. “What can it all be about?” Here and there he recognized a word: “heaven”... and “poor creature”...and “gone to the angels”; but to capture the sense of what she was saying was impossible. Presumably the good lady was referring to Angela’s mother who also, come to that, might be described as “the mistress”—dead of an embolism, he remembered, on St Swithin’s Day, 1910. But the cook obviously thought that he had understood her tirade, so to show sympathy he nodded glumly as she stopped speaking and began to chop away with extraordinary speed and ferocity, using a kitchen knife as big as a bayonet. And then, to make things worse, he noticed that her eyes were streaming with tears. She was weeping without restraint! And it was all his fault. He swallowed his tea (making a face, it was as bitter as wormwood) and stole out of the kitchen. But a little later, as he felt his way along the damp, stone corridor to the stairs, it occurred to him that the cook had been chopping onions—a fact which might have contributed to her display of emotion.
    It took him a little time to find the right stairway to make the ascent to the dining-room. This was because he did not fathom immediately that it was necessary to go on down a few steps before joining the main staircase, from where one could go on up or down as the case might be (though God only knew where “down” might lead to). In other words, the kitchens were situated, for a reason that the architect alone could have explained, on a tributary staircase. Other similar staircases branched off here and there, but though he was curious to see where they led the Major was now hastening upwards to find Angela.
    He was not surprised, however, to find that there was no sign of Angela in the dining-room. He stood there for a moment looking round. It was very silent. Some of the tables, it was true, were decorated with fresh flowers. On one of the tables a bunch of carnations and feathery green leaves lay on a newspaper waiting to be arranged in vases. A pair of scissors lay beside them, giving the impression that they had perhaps been abandoned a moment before he had stepped into the room. It was, he presumed, out of the question that Angela was