Reader, I Married Him. Tracy Chevalier

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ world to be just the story of a particular woman’s life, a study of Jane, and not the usual kind of fiction with a plot that has been figured out in advance to make it seem exciting. The red room in that book – it’s there towards the beginning when Jane is being punished by her terrible aunt – and the idea that it might surround a person, that colour, might make her see things in a particular way … well, that detail stayed with me. All that opening section, actually, because I related to it, maybe, with being an orphan too and my parents only adopting me when I was four so I can remember that other part of my life, not in detail, maybe, the orphanage or “home”, as people always called it, but I can remember my mother and father walking towards me that day they came to collect me, and my mother getting down on her knees in front of me and opening her arms and I ran towards her … And I can remember, too, exactly how I felt, being held in her arms that first time … So yes, the early section of Jane Eyre, it stayed with me, how it must have been for Jane to have that terrible aunt and not someone like my mother and what it must have been like, growing up so alone … And “seeing red”, well, altogether it seems a likely expression for me to use – cliché or not – when that book had been so clearly in my mind.

      I saw red with what those kids were doing. So instead of walking on, I went straight up to those boys, young men, whatever, and said, “What on earth are you doing?”

      Let me tell you, that was a moment. A moment, right then, of silence. Then one of the men said, “Fuck off, bitch,” and the one beside him, “Yeah. Fuck off,” and then someone else said, in a low and dangerous voice, “Get her, Rocky. Get her,” and the dog turned.

      Now again, as I say, I’m not tall and what do I know? And I’m not brawny in any way and I’m not confrontational with strangers, but neither do I believe anyone is inherently mean, human or animal, boy or dog … I just don’t believe it. It’s like bodies. You can be overweight or your tone can be shot to hell or you’ve got no endurance, no core strength … but I can work with you on that. Take my classes and you’ll see, straight away, how together we can improve things. I’m saying all this as a kind of metaphor, I guess, as a way of showing that I wasn’t about to walk away from that situation, even though the boy who held the dog lengthened the chain and the dog lit out at me and someone said, “Get her, Rocky,” again, but then the boy with the chain pulled it back just in time, so that nothing happened, even though the little guy’s teeth were bared and his eyes like a shark because he was ready to get me all right, he’d been commanded.

      “You’re being very cruel to that dog,” I said then. “How old are you all, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? You should know better. Here …” and at that point I got down on my knees, just like my mother got down on her knees that day at the orphanage, and the little dog looked at me, and his expression changed. His ears went up. He put his head to one side.

      “Look at him,” I said to the boys, for now I could see that they were just boys, I’d kind of made that up about them being twenty or thirty, just to flatter them, because they wanted to be very, very tough. “Look,” I said again, from down there, though one of them was lashing some other chain he had, and another was muttering over and over in a dark low voice, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” just like that, and another turned to spit.

      “Look,” I said again, for the third time. And then I put out my balled fist and the dog stretched his head towards me. Then he stood up, took a step or two, his head still tilted to one side, while all the time I kept my fist in front of him, quite steady. Then he let out a little whimper and sat down again. He had a lovely face. His eyes, which had been black and scary-flat like a killer fish, were now full of thoughts and interest. He gave a little bark, like a puppy. He was really just a puppy. He put out his head towards my hand and smelled my hand all over and then he licked it. And I opened my hand then to let him sniff my palm and then, when he’d done that, too, I gave him a little scratch around his ears and fondled his muzzle.

      “There,” I said to him, and sort of to the boys as well. “There, you see? Everything’s all right.”

      The boys kind of shuffled, reassembled slightly. The one with the chain just let the chain hang.

      “You see,” I said, “you think you’ve got a mean dog here, boys. But” – I wasn’t looking at them as I spoke. I was just looking at the dog – “he’s not mean at all.”

      “He should be fucking mean,” said one of them, the one who had been swinging a length of chain attached to his jeans, though he wasn’t swinging it now. “He should fucking be.”

      “But he’s not, Steve,” said the guy holding the actual dog chain. “Look at him. He’s a pussy. He’s a mummy’s dog.”

      “My old mum wouldn’t be seen dead with a dog like that,” the third boy said. “She wouldn’t be seen dead.”

      “His name’s not even Rocky,” I said then. “It’s Mr Rochester. Little Roc, for short, because look, he’s only a puppy …” By now the boys could see that the little dog was wriggling with pleasure, tail wagging, only wanting to play. Not the kind of dog they’d thought he was at all. “He’s named after a guy I’ve been reading about in this book about someone’s life,” I said. “That guy is a bit like this little dog of yours. He may seem all tough and mean but really …” And I gave Little Roc a lovely rub all over his haunches and down his back. “Really,” I said, “this little guy wants – like all of us want – like you boys yourself want” – and by now I had the puppy snuggled up right by me, his eyes closed with pleasure – “someone to give him attention and to love him and to love them back.”

      “Hah!” they all went then, the four kids, and snorted like young ponies.

      “You be some crazy bitch,” one of them said, the third one again.

      “Well, this book I’ve been reading, that I was telling you about, Jane Eyre … She seems crazy too, I suppose, but her story is not so different from Mr Rochester here, this little guy, not so different from all of you, too, I reckon. Listen …” I said then, and I stood up – and I still can’t believe I did all this, spoke that way to total strangers, acted so cool and so assured, because all the time, let me tell you, my heart was beating, it was going like bam, bam, bam as though those boys could hear it because, remember, this was seven something in the morning, inner London but in a park, there was no one else around – and I started speaking then, like it was all prepared. I told them about my life and about Jane Eyre and the writing classes and about my mother and father and how I missed them – and really, this is the heart of the short story, the reason Reed said I should write it in the first place, because I had a central “incident” or “pulse moment”, as he calls it, the unexpected bit coming – bang – just like in Jane Eyre, you might say, a certain thing happening that’s like – whew! – this doesn’t seem like real life, but it is. And I said then, “Listen, boys. Why don’t you let me have this dog? I can see he’s not yours. And you don’t know what to do with him.”

      “That’s the truth,” one of them said.

      “We didn’t even want the fucking dog,” said another, right away, but looking at me as he spoke, and then saying, “It wasn’t my idea, you know.”

      And then someone else said, “Yeah, Keith. She’s right. You didn’t know what you were going to do with him. None of us did.”

      And so the conversation went on. And Keith, for he was the one who’d taken on Mr Rochester in the first place, told me he’d promised to look after the dog for someone who didn’t want him but might be able to sell him on, but that if Keith took him off his hands, he could have the money, if there was any. They’d only got him the night before at СКАЧАТЬ