"Adam Roberts - Balancing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)

serious. 'I'll have to think about it,' she said.

: 3 :
On Thursday Allen woke up without a thought of the Devil in his head. The
dinner party had taken his thoughts away from all that. He had thought of
sharing the incident with the whole group, making a joke of it, but he had
decided that to do so would only be to open himself to ridicule. Then he
had only drunk the wine, and let his eyes unfocus slightly, and follow the
ebb and swell of the conversation wherever it took him. By bedtime he had
forgotten the whole ridiculous incident. He woke the next morning feeling
muggy, had to rush his shower and run to the tube.
It was only when he stepped into the lobby that the memory of the previous
day returned. He jogged through to the lift, and once inside began
coughing. It had seemed so very vivid.
Vivid.
Allen found it almost impossible to focus on his work after that. He sat
in his office staring out of the window most of the morning. Had he been a
bad man? It was so idiotic a thought. You couldn't spend your life
wondering about that sort of thing.
His secretary, Natalie, came through to give him a copy of the Kaufmann
report. Natalie with her bad skin and her twitchy manner. How old was
Natalie? In her fifties, certainly.
'Thank you Natalie,' he said. And then, on a whim: 'Natalie, would you
like to go for lunch today?'
'Lunch?' she replied.
Allen smiled at her. She had been working for him for years. How many
years? He couldn't say. But hadn't he been a good boss for her? Been
polite, considerate? Or, on the other hand, surely a good boss would know
exactly how long she had worked. Maybe he had been a bad boss, neglectful,
aloof. Maybe she hated him.
'Yes, I just wondered. Just a light lunch.'
'That's nice,' she said, looking a little worried. 'But I had arranged to
meet my boyfriend for lunch today. Of course, if it's important I could
always put him off...'
Natalie had a boyfriend? 'No, no, it's nothing important.' He smiled, and
opened the report. Natalie, looking a little startled, went out of his
office. Wouldn't a good boss (he thought) have known that she had a
boyfriend?
That evening, as he lay in bed with Moira's arm crooked into his armpit
and his hand stroking her arm, he asked her: 'When you were hanging around
with your revolutionary friends...'
'What?' she asked.
'Well, I don't know.'
'That was years ago,' she said, mumbly. 'Years and years.'
'I know, but its just a question of seeing the world. You know, the way
you used to see the world.'
She shifted, and looked up at his face. 'What are you going on about?'
'It's a question of whether we, you know, the west are guilty, just guilty
by virtue of who we are. Guilty by virtue of having the affluent
lifestyle. I'm thinking, you know, of all the starving millions. The