Winter. Christopher Nicholson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ member of that company, young and healthy and full of joie de vivre. Yet, as he was well aware, there were other reasons that lay behind his sentiments towards her, and these had their origin in an incident that had occurred many summers earlier, on what he remembered, whether correctly or not, to have been his forty-seventh birthday.

      He had spent the day at the house. During the morning he had worked hard on the final draft of a novel, and during the afternoon he and Emma, his first wife, had taken tea in the garden. The sun shone, but he had been in a reflective mood; birthdays always filled his consciousness with a sense of the brevity of life. How many years were left before Death laid its cold hand upon his shoulder? How much more had he to do before he could feel that he had accomplished his life’s aims? True, he came from a long-lived family, but longevity was not something upon which anyone could count with certainty. He was not yet financially secure; and the house was proving much more expensive to run than he had originally anticipated. What if he were to fall ill, or what if, for some reason, his novelistic powers were to leave him? He felt no waning of ability, but there were many examples of writers whose once bright careers had ended badly. Such were the thoughts that came to oppress him, that summer’s afternoon.

      There was another reason for the cloud that hung on his spirits. His relations with Emma, which for so long had been excellent, had undergone a sharp turn for the worse. It was not largely his fault, or so he felt. Not long before, she had claimed – he recalled this distinctly – that he loved his mother more than her. This charge had caught him by surprise, although in an earlier novel he had written about just such a problem – there one of the central characters had been fatally torn between the demands made by his mother and those made by his wife.

      He had considered Emma’s words – which had struck a gaping wound in his heart – and rejected them. It seemed to him that she was asking him to choose between her and his mother, when no choice was necessary. Surely, he had said to her, it was possible for a man to love and respect his mother, and also to love and respect his wife. The one did not make the other impossible. But this careful, emollient response she had immediately and wilfully misinterpreted as confirmation of his elevation of his mother above her.

      In truth, this dispute was merely a symptom of deeper division. They talked less to each other than they had once, and laughed even less. She was dissatisfied here in the country, and lately had begun to make disparaging remarks about the house: ‘an ugly, misshapen house, on the edges of a narrow, ugly, superstitious town’. Such words, never to be forgotten! Now, this very day – his birthday – as they sat over tea, she had gone further, saying that they should sell up and return to London, where they would be among people of their own class and education.

      Everything in this offended him deeply, even if he took care not to show it. The house did not, he thought, merit such an attack, and nor did the worthy folk of the town and its surrounding villages deserve to be dismissed in such terms. Among them were old friends and acquaintances, not to mention relatives, whom he had known his entire life; to him they were intensely interesting.

      As for returning to London, he could scarcely have been more strongly opposed. True, there was a good deal to be said in favour of London, but even more on the other side. When he and Emma had last made their home in the city, when they had lived in the convenient suburban locality of Tooting – their house overlooking the Common – he had fallen so gravely ill that for a time the doctors, who seemed unable to decide whether he was suffering from a kidney stone, an internal haemorrhage, or some altogether different malady, had doubted that he would live. As he lay in what might have been his death-bed, with a strange glare of light in the room from the snow which, although it was October, had fallen a few days before and was now slowly melting, the countryside had beckoned him with a series of alluring, radiant images and he had understood that he and the city, for all its glitter, would never be wholly reconciled.

      Emma had felt the same; she had been delighted to move back to Dorsetshire. Now, it seemed, she had changed her mind! The fickleness of women! Well, he had no intention of leaving. Here he was, and with quantities of novelistic material at hand. Even now, he was brooding on his next story – that of a beautiful young countrywoman destroyed by Fate – which, he thought, might be his best yet. To return to London would be fatal.

      Thus the tea which he and his wife took that birthday afternoon on the sunlit lawn, and which, to an observer positioned some distance away and having no knowledge with which to interpret the scene, would have seemed an expression of a warm and harmonious marriage, was in reality a chilly affair in which few words were exchanged between the man and woman.

      Towards the end of it Emma had returned to the subject that divided them.

      ‘I must ask you to change your mind, Thomas,’ she had stated in a peremptory tone.

      ‘If by that you mean that we should move back to London, I cannot,’ was his reply.

      ‘Then,’ said she, ‘you are no longer the man I married.’

      On this melodramatic note she had left him, stalking across the lawn to the house; and when, that night, he betook himself to bed, he found that she had moved to a room in the attic. Well, he thought, if he was not the man she had wed, neither was she the woman he had met at the altar. ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure’ – that old saying was as true nowadays as it had ever been – and it struck him, not for the first time, but more forcibly than it had ever done hitherto, that the vows of lifelong love made by each party in the solemn rite of matrimony ran contrary to nature, forcing husbands and wives to endure each other’s company when the fire that had brought them together was naught but ashes.

      He slept badly. Waking before dawn and in need of a space of further reflection, he decided on a walk. He took a familiar path, one that crossed the low-lying meadows by the river and that, if followed long enough, led to the little church at Stinsford.

      It was one of those lovely dawns often encountered in the Wessex countryside in early summer. The sky was a clear grey-blue, the air deliciously clean, and the birds were singing loudly. A still mist had risen from the damp earth and spread itself like a white lake over the meadows, and as he descended from the higher ground into this thin, gaseous stratum he found his feet, legs and waist swallowed up, while his chest and head remained clear. The pollarded crowns of the willows on the river-bank floated on a bed of nothingness, the rising sun shone brightly on the dancing particles, and the cables of a thousand spider webs swayed and shimmered. How, he asked himself, can I possibly leave this Eden for London?

      The path took him close to the buildings of a farm, and he heard light female voices penetrating the vapour. Presently the luminous shapes of the dairymaids, five in number, each one carrying a stool and a bucket, came into view as they made their way from the barton towards the river. To his gaze, they seemed to him as much spiritual as physical beings; humble country lasses, but also angels, he thought to himself. Among them was one whose beauty stood out from the rest, and who fastened on his mind with the power of a dream: a girl with long dark hair and pale features. She and the rest passed down the slope without even a glance in his direction, entirely taken up with their own chatter.

      Not being in a hurry, he followed them as they receded into the lake of mist. At first he was frustrated to find that the girl who had so engaged his interest seemed to have vanished. Then she reappeared, only to duck behind the body of one of the cows. He waited, hoping that the uneven textures of the mist might thin enough to afford him a further view of the maiden, and was presently rewarded by another vision of her face, revealing a full mouth, dark eyebrows and large eyes.

      She was a type of womankind to whom he was particularly susceptible. When, in thought, he used to picture his ideal woman, the face that he conjured was very like that of this innocent young Madonna of the meadows. How is this possible? he thought. Why has it taken until now for me to find her? What shall I do?

      She СКАЧАТЬ