The Heroes’ Welcome. Louisa Young
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Название: The Heroes’ Welcome
Автор: Louisa Young
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007361489
isbn:
So my filing system is right.
‘Do you know what his name means?’ he asked his uncle.
‘Whose name?’
‘Odysseus,’ said Peter.
‘No,’ said his uncle.
‘Sower of discord, bringer of trouble. Same root as odium. And odious.’
‘Ah,’ said his uncle.
‘He was tremendously unpopular,’ Peter said. ‘After all, he lost all his men. He comes down as being wise and wily and so forth, but he lost eleven ships with all hands, and his own entire crew. Seven hundred men. Makes me seem a lightweight.’ He watched for some response.
‘Mmm,’ said his uncle.
Uncle, I have just confessed to you that I let my men die – Uncle?
Uncle?
It’s just as well. If they knew what was going on in my mind, they’d put me away.
Sometimes he heard the barrage still, crumping away. He supposed it couldn’t be real. Some trick of the ear and the brain and the nature of time. An echo. Unless it’s still going on, and we’re being kept in the dark, as usual.
Peter’s new system did not match the one everybody else used. It was, he said, better. And he was right. But that did not seem to be the point.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll put everything back. No really, it’s no trouble.’
And he did, thinking about the Augean Stables. For weeks.
At a meeting in late February, Uncle Eric suggested that new stationery might be in order, as the old was looking rather fusty. New world, new times, and so on. That afternoon Peter, without consulting or budgeting, chose a design, approved it and ordered a large consignment.
‘But why waste time?’ he said. ‘You said it needed doing; I did it.’
The next day he sacked the assistant, who was, unbeknownst to Peter, the son of Uncle Eric’s mistress. ‘He wasn’t helping me,’ Peter protested. ‘I don’t need an assist-ant. I don’t need help. I know you resent paying the doorman extra – so we can save money here. And I’m up to date on the contracts now, so I’ve an idea or two for this year and next …’
Uncle Eric suggested that Peter, with his academic and archival talents, might like to have a go at applying his new filing system to the old pre-war archive, which was kept in the Birmingham office.
Peter smiled his distant, charming smile, and felt himself drifting away, back, back, blown by winds he could not control.
Uncle Eric, without telling Peter, rehired the assistant to go through and check everything that Peter had recently refiled.
A few times during February and March, while he was trying to be civil in town, returning each night to Locke Hill or Chester Square, Peter was asked by someone or other at his club what he was up to now; or his mother would telephone from Scotland, inviting him to visit and wanting to know how he was. He actually could not say that Locke & Locke had rejected him. And of course they hadn’t. They still paid him. He still had a desk, in his oppressive office. If he went in, which he didn’t much, Uncle Eric would enquire mildly about the archive in Birmingham – to which Peter never went. Other than that, they didn’t say anything.
‘I know what’s happening here,’ Peter told the barman at the club, politely. ‘I’m HMS Iolaire. Two hundred men after four years of war, shipwrecked and dead on the shore of their childhood home, their families waiting on shore to welcome them. Like Odysseus’ last boat, when the crew let all the winds out of the sack just as they reached Ithaca, and the storms blew them away. For another ten years. Nearly home, starting to relax, and your own damn folly sends you back out there. I do understand. I really do.’
The barman wiped the glasses.
Sometimes, when he caught sight of Julia from behind, in a doorway, or when the dog bounced up to him, his tail high and feathery and hopeful, Peter would be struck with a poignant scrap of … something … a little taste in his mouth of how things used to be – of how I used to be – and then he could almost see a thin skein of desire strung across some part of his being, a high wire, a cobweb, invisible except in certain lights when it might flicker, or glisten, inaccessible, and he would imagine for a moment that if he could only reach that evanescent, tiny wire, and somehow take hold of it, follow it, walk along it, even, balance on it over the void, through this chasm, then it would take him … somewhere … somewhen? No such word. There should be.
He used to like the dog so much. No more. Dirty creatures. Eating God knows what they found in the fields.
That winter he and Riley had walked out on the Downs, in the brisk wind which, as it made conversation impossible, was appropriate to their shared silence about their shared experience. Once or twice, he had felt a wild urge to tell Riley about the dreams where summer rain turned into blood, the dead men, the cheap women, the drink and the shame. He had wanted to tell him that he could not continue to sleep with his wife because the weight of her body beside his was that of the dying Hun boy in the shell crater, and he could not make love to his wife because the feeling of her body in his arms was – not even was like, but was – Bloom’s corpse, which he was carrying in. Bloom, Burdock, Knightley, Atkins, Jones … Remember Jones? He looked like a sausage – well, he did! A big raw pink sausage. And then in the summer – ’17? – he got sunburn, and he looked like a half-cooked sausage. And Burdock – was it Burdock? – joked about wanting to leave him out in the sun to cook all the way through, so they could eat him. (And Burdock had pulled Jones’ corpse in, and someone had said: ‘He’s all yours now, Birdy, cook him however you like.’ And the next day Burdock caught it himself. Or so we assumed, because no one ever saw him again. Though Smiler Rogers saw some guts and a bit of fair hair.)
He wanted to tell Purefoy about the dying German boy.
‘Captain,’ he murmured, on one occasion, but Riley, when he caught the military word, shot him a look, and Peter could say nothing.
He was quite certain that Riley had things he wasn’t saying either. They were both able to take a bit of comfort from leaving it at that.
And СКАЧАТЬ