Canarino. Katherine Bucknell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ an amazing picture, Dave, seriously. Beats the hell out of all her magazine covers.’ He raised his free hand toward the picture. ‘This takes her right out of time; shows her as the beauty of the ages. Forget Helen of Troy. Lizzie knows exactly what she’s up to with visual effects, doesn’t she?’ He dropped both arms. ‘So how old are your kids now?’

      ‘Gordon is seven; Hope is four.’

      ‘They look pretty happy. A little stir-crazy, maybe. You think they belong in America?’

      David shrugged. ‘Elizabeth thinks so.’

      ‘How can she? If she’s having them painted like that? That’s nothing to do with America, that painting!’

      ‘Well, maybe that’s why she left it behind. Or maybe it just marks the end of something. A souvenir.’

      ‘That’s a huge painting, Dave! They’re lost in it, the three of them—as if they didn’t belong anywhere at all. I mean not anywhere real.’

      David just looked for a while. The figures were about life-sized, he thought, but the drawing-room around them had no distinct edge to it. The blue and red oriental carpet flowed away over an endless floor, the walls soared out of sight as if to the sky. There was the great swag of dove-colored silk at the back, curtaining one of the French doors, but none of the other furniture that used to be in the room was shown.

      Finally he said, ‘Yeah, well, there’s nothing Elizabeth likes more than empty space, I guess. Big houses, big rooms, open fields, long driveways.’

      Leon looked at David. ‘Still trying to get away from everyone, is she?’

      They both laughed.

      ‘Is that a real dog?’ Leon pointed.

      David laughed. ‘That’s Puck.’

      ‘Puck? I hope not! One face-off and his brains would be all over the ice. Jeez, David!’

      ‘It’s hockey for me; Shakespeare for Elizabeth. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The children thought it was funny. Well, I think it’s funny anyway. Maybe the children don’t even know. I can’t remember.’

      The grilled chicken and the rice had grown cold by the time the door slammed behind them and the bike started up. Francine went into the dining-room and looked at the two untouched plates of food she had put out, the bowl of salad, and the bottle of white wine on the little round table. Then she went back into the hall, walked to the front door, opened it, and looked out in the street. She could still hear the bike, maybe half a block away. She shut the door, went back to the dining-room, and sat down in the second chair she had carried up from the kitchen. Quietly, contentedly, she ate Leon’s plateful of dinner; that plateful had been her own to begin with anyway.

      David and Leon went to the top of the Oxo Tower because David couldn’t possibly get enough, now, of the London night. The restaurant was noisy and smoky; the city twinkled and floated just out of arm’s reach on the other side of the glass walls, its invisible depths landmarked by the familiar dome of St Paul’s, the carnivalesque Millennium Wheel, the glinting black Thames snaking through it.

      There were certain things that had to be established between them; David thought the best way to start was by ordering margaritas. They ordered food, too, scallops, steak. The staring emptiness of David’s house had made them both self-conscious, and they began to recover from it only after their second drink.

      Still, they carried on a businesslike series of questions and answers. When was the last time they had seen each other? Why had it been so long? What had each of them been doing during all that time?

      ‘I remember that place you had in the Village. You sold it?’

      Leon shrugged. ‘Sometimes I regret that; I’ve got another place now, much bigger. I’m hardly ever there, though. I was in Boston for a long time. The fund manager thing I went up there for was boring, and at first I thought I should never have quit trading. Fifteen star years I had. Anyhow, I knew right away I shouldn’t have left New York. But I liked lecturing at the Business School. That kept me sane. What kept me in town, though, was the ice hockey team.’

      ‘What—the Harvard ice hockey team?’ David was surprised.

      ‘My second youth, man! I went to a few of their home games, and I gave them some cash, and then I wheedled my way into some coaching. Just specialized stuff, you know—mental toughness, into-the-net-not-near-it, winning a man down. It was a blast. Pure boyish fantasy.’

      David laughed. ‘You must have felt like a shit when they played Princeton! Who’d you root for?’

      ‘You root for the team you’re involved with. You can’t help it, can you?’ Leon tried to sound dismissive, but then he grinned. ‘Of course I felt like a shit! And they all knew it—they all knew I had played for Princeton!’

      ‘So why aren’t you an ice hockey coach now?’ David egged him on.

      ‘Not enough money. And—’ Leon waved two fingers in the air and called out to a hurrying waiter, ‘Can you bring us two more margaritas, please?’

      The waiter fluttered, as if he’d been accosted while daydreaming, then showily collected himself. ‘Of course, sir, two more margaritas.’

      ‘And?’ said David.

      ‘And—you’re joking, aren’t you? Hockey is where I came from, man; it’s not where I’m going. It never was.’ Leon sounded impatient.

      David looked at Leon, thinking about where he came from—Babbit, Minnesota. David had never been there, but he could remember meeting Leon’s parents the week he and Leon had graduated from college—gray, defiant, taciturn, overwhelmed by Princeton. He remembered his painful sense of obligation to try to like them and draw them into the hectic partying for Leon’s sake and for the sake of some self-conscious idea of social equality, of wanting to come across as an ordinary, unsnobby guy. He also remembered his fear that he would fail and later his certainty that he had failed. It had been impossible, despite vast quantities of alcohol consumed on all sides.

      David’s own parents had come down ahead of time for his father’s class reunion, and then they’d gone straight home to New Canaan until the morning of graduation. They preferred their own friends and their own generation. They had barely shaken hands with the Halbergs; nevertheless, David’s mother had quietly observed that people didn’t get to be like Mr and Mrs Halberg without a lot of hardship, struggle, barbarity. It shocked David still, his mother’s remark and his own sense that she was right about the barrenness of their demeanor. The Halbergs appeared to have no conversation, no joy, no desires even. Leon’s father wasn’t even sure that he should have taken a week off from the iron mine to watch his son graduate, to meet Leon’s friends, to see where Leon had spent the last four years.

      And yet amidst the landslide of seven other children, the Halbergs had produced Leon. They had put him out on the ice in hockey little league by the time he was four. All they had ever seemed to understand about Leon was that year after year he was the best hockey player in his age group that anyone in the town had ever seen. He was the best in any age group by the time he was ten. They couldn’t understand why he wanted to leave Babbit, how he got himself to Hotchkiss, to Princeton, why he didn’t want to play professional hockey. David liked to think that he himself did understand, but for all the comfort of his own upbringing, there was something in David that was just as СКАЧАТЬ