Broken Voices (A Novella). Andrew Taylor

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      Was there a ghost? Was there, in a manner of speaking, a murder?

      Ask me these questions and I cannot answer a simple yes or no. I did not know at the time and now, more than forty years later, I am even less able to answer them. Perhaps an easier question is this: what exactly do I remember about Faraday and me in the few days we were together? Those years before the war seem so remote now. The First World War, that is, the one that was meant to end them all.

      He and I didn’t know each other long, not properly – four or five days, perhaps. And nights, of course. I suppose there must be records – a report in the local newspaper, surely, and a police file. Perhaps letters from Faraday’s guardian. There must also have been correspondence between the school and my parents, but I found no trace of it after my mother died. We never spoke of it when she was alive, not directly, and my father wasn’t able to speak about anything after they brought him back from France in 1915.

      So – all I can really rely on is my memory. But memory may, paradoxically, make matters worse. It is not a passive record of what happens, though it may misleadingly give that impression. It plays an active role too, selecting and shaping the past. Memory speculates about itself; it ruminates and dreams, edits and deletes: over time, the fruits of these processes become the memories themselves and the entire process begins again.

      So СКАЧАТЬ