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

poverty and the shitty life in the third world. Do you think we should
take responsibility for that?'
'What are you on about?' she said. But she was only half awake and her
words were losing coherence.
Looking down at her creased face, with its puzzled expression, Allen felt
the urge to tell her everything about Lou, to finally broach it. Pain?
Ignorance is hardly pain. He fought the urge down, and turned on his side.
But Lou's face was in his mind now. Her smile. The way she smiled but
tried to hide her teeth, as if she were ashamed of them. The little
cheloid scar at the coign of her arm where she had spilt hot tea over
herself as a girl. The sweetness of the smell of her skin.

The next day was Friday, and he got to work telling himself he was going
to really apply himself to his work. But after half an hour's hurried
shuffling of papers he found himself staring out of the window again. He
had not seen Louise in over a year; had not really thought about her at
all for the last three months. Didn't know where she was. She had said:
'Allen, I shall make love to you one more time, and that will be
everything finished between us.' He had said: 'Louise, one more time will
round everything off.' And he had believed it, thought that it could be
that way, a perfect inviolate round that didn't touch his marriage, his
friends, his job. Just the bubble of pleasure, and afterwards the
occasional sweet memory. But after it had finished he had started
obsessing about it, thinking about it, wanting to start it up again. Moira
noticed something was wrong, but had nothing to accuse him of because he
never saw Lou again. A half dozen agonised phone-calls, rambling
ill-written letters, and in reply on a typed postcard in a clean envelope
telling him she was moving jobs abroad, and not saying where.
But in what sense did that count? Whom had he hurt? Only himself. Only
himself, really. Maybe Louise had been a bit discomforted by the way he
had acted after the affair was over, by his intensity, but hadn't she
enjoyed herself too? Didn't her orgasms in the bed, on the stairs, in the
bath, didn't they outweigh that? With a jolt he realised that this was
what really itched in his mind. The thought of the possible pleasure: all
of it, simultaneously, a great rising wave of pure physical ecstasy. All
the women he had loved, all the pleasure he had caused, paid back to him
in one supreme moment.
And Moria had not been hurt. How could she have been hurt? She had never
known. He was certain she had never known.

He spent about an hour on the phone to various clients in Texas and
Mexico. Two paint firms who had subsidiary relationships with British
companies, and some tangled accounting circumstances. Conversations were
in English, but there was a photocopied sheet on the desk in front of him,
which displayed a few wheel-greasing politenesses in Spanish, to drop in
at the end of the conversation with the contact at Guillhelm et Sancho.
Obligado. Allen found his mind wandering. His voice was skittering down
electrical cables laid in the ocean bed. The men who had done that
wearying work, who had laid the cables, struggling through mountainous
oceans and freezing weather; who had broken bones and chapped skin off