“Darling,” said his mother, “whatever can you mean?”
“They don’t want us there,” Edwin said. He glanced around the table, at all the silent staring faces. “Not a great deal of ambiguity on that point, I’m afraid.” He listened to his own voice as if from some distance away, with wonderment. Gilbert’s mouth had fallen open.
“Young man,” his father said, “we have brought nothing but civilization to these people—”
“And yet one can’t help but notice,” Edwin said, “that on balance, they rather seem to prefer their own. Their own civilization, that is. They managed quite well without us for some time, didn’t they? Several thousand years, wasn’t it?” It was like being strapped to the roof of a runaway train! He actually knew very little about India, but he remembered having been shocked as a boy by accounts of the 1857 rebellion. “Does anyone want us anywhere?” he heard himself ask. “Why do we assume these far-flung places are ours?”
“Because we won them, Eddie,” Gilbert said, after a brief silence. “One assumes that the natives of England were perhaps not unanimously delighted by the arrival of our twenty-second great-grandfather, but, well, history belongs to the victors.”
“William the Conqueror was a thousand years ago, Bert. Surely we might strive to be somewhat more civilized than the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider.”
Edwin stopped talking then. Everyone at the table was staring at him.
“？‘The maniacal grandson of a Viking raider,’？” Gilbert repeated softly.
“Although one should be grateful, I suppose, that we’re a Christian nation,” Edwin said. “Imagine what a bloodbath the colonies would be if we weren’t.”
“Are you an atheist, Edwin?” Andrew Barrett inquired, with genuine interest.
“I don’t quite know what I am,” Edwin said.
The silence that followed was possibly the most excruciating of Edwin’s life, but then his father began speaking, very quietly. When Edwin’s father was furious, he had a trick of beginning speeches with a half-sentence, to catch everyone’s attention. “Every advantage you’ve ever had in this life,” his father said. Everyone looked at him. He began again, in trademark fashion, only slightly louder, and with deadly calm: “Every advantage you’ve ever had in this life, Edwin, has derived in some manner or another from the fact of your being descended from, as you so eloquently put it, the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider.”
“Of course,” Edwin said. “It could be so much worse.” He raised his glass. “To William the Bastard.”
Gilbert laughed, in a nervous way. No one else made a sound.
“I do beg your pardon,” Edwin’s father said, to their guests. “One might reasonably mistake my youngest son for a grown man, but it seems he’s still a child. To your room, Edwin. We’ve heard quite enough for one evening.”
Edwin rose from the table with great formality, said, “Good night, everyone,” went to the kitchen to request that a sandwich be delivered to his room—the main course hadn’t yet been served—and then retired to await his sentence. It came before midnight, with a knock on the door.
“Come in,” he said. He’d been standing by the window, staring fretfully out at the movements of a tree in the wind.
Gilbert came in, closed the door behind him, and sprawled into the ancient stained armchair that was among Edwin’s most treasured possessions.
“Quite the performance, Eddie.”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Edwin. “Actually, no, that’s not true. I do know. I am absolutely certain there was not a single thought in my head. It was like a kind of void.”
“Are you unwell?”
“Not at all. Never better.”
“It must have been rather thrilling,” Gilbert said.
“It was, actually. I won’t say I regret it.”
Gilbert smiled. “You’re to go to Canada,” he said gently. “Father’s making arrangements.”
“I was always going to go to Canada,” Edwin said. “It’s planned for next year.”
“Now you’re to go a little sooner.”
“How much sooner, Bert?”
“Next week.”
Edwin nodded. He felt a touch of vertigo. There had been a subtle shift in the room’s atmosphere. He was going to go forth into an incomprehensible world and the room was already receding into the past. “Well,” Edwin said, after a moment, “at least I’ll still be on a different continent to Niall.”