"Bragg, Melvyn - Crystal Rooms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bragg Melvyn)

The profound source of this inexpressible contentment was, he knew, hidden, out of reach of any analysis or memory he might have brought to it. It was a delicious euphoria, like the first gobfuls of glazed mountain air, like the first kiss after too long a parting, like the crystal glass of cheap champagne he had childishly allowed himself on this morning of a day of no formal work. The contentment made his almost tuneful song an anthem of joy. How could such a mood be held? Was that what gurus taught you? Was this what saints felt? Or Mozart? Or Galileo? "Oh what a beautiful day!" Or was this simply (simply!) a flood tide of anticipation? "Oh what a wonderful feeling!" An inkling of paradise.
Prue smiled as she slit the envelopes. One of his good mornings and goodness he needed one, she thought. Working far harder than anyone she knew, and the stresses, poor man, the problems, and the threats, nobody guessed. Prue was proud of him. Very good-looking too, she had to admit (a favourite phrase) in a "craggy, untidy, intelligent, amused way" (the memorised description had been in her weekly magazine). Prue had often pondered on the unfairness of nature which allowed men to age better than women: it was a recurrent point of conversation with her girlfriends in the wine bars of Fulham, and Mark was her prize, her personal example. She hummed along with his bathroom-booming melody.
Oh, just give me a moment or two more of this gliding feeling, total freedom, no past, no present, no pressure, Mark prayed.
The previous night's programme on Northern Ireland had been his best. It had snaked through the censors, it had nailed the IRA in a way he had aimed to do for years and it had made a nonsense of the government's more stubborn claims. Bagshaw, his departmental head, had left a negative message on his answering-machine requesting a meeting - in a bureau-speak tone of command, the prat. (Why did Bagshaw provoke the worst in him?) The reviews were generally good. Useful ammo.
His second divorce was now down the slipway. He had insisted on a gallant settlement, despite her reservations, and it had left him skint. But, he thought, she was probably as relieved as he was. The wounds were already healing, and perhaps in a year or two they would meet for a rueful lunch. It had not been a passionate marriage and it was not a lacerating split: there were no children.
He would see Rudolf Lukas, media mogul and husband of Jen, the love of Mark's life, with whom after lunch he would almost certainly enjoy complex, detailed and audacious sex. Lukas would
offer him serious money to take part in a television franchise bid. Mark, in his irritation with Bagshaw and all the bureaucratic Bagshaws who now roosted in his television world, was more tempted than he ever dreamt he could be. And the day was full of other goodies.
There would be Nicholas his close friend - at a lunch which would reek with some of the freshest political and media gossip if they bowled up at the Garrick and joined the corner table or lingered in the bar. Cabinet-level insider-information would be on offer. Or, if Nicholas decided on the latest fashionable watering-hole, the chat would be more personal and more amusing. Mark was fashion-blind and a non-starter in what he considered was the foodie farce and Nicholas enjoyed taunting him. There was nothing like a semi-drunken lunch to set you up for an afternoon's intense sex, he thought. The only thing better was for the partner to be with you at the lunch, but len, alas, was pre-booked.
The grey bathwater was indisputably tepid, the last wisps of the euphoria fading into the light of an ordinary naked bulb - there was only the afterglow, but that would do, that was better than most days. He heaved himself out like a suction pad leaving an obstinate gripping surface and towelled himself down to the growling words of his favourite Big Bill Broonzy.
Breakfast and letters dispatched, he took his third cup of coffee and his first small cigar into the sitting-room and settled blissfully into the corner of the large sofa to indulge himself on the phone. First the strictly business. Then the postmortem with the producer
- to include the reviews and other reactions. Mark passed on some of the pleasing messages he had found on his answering-machine. Dave, the producer, returned the ball with praise "from inside the building". The coolness and knuckle-rap from Bagshaw was thoroughly anticipated.
Dave had read in the morning gossips that Mark had been at a political pre-Christmas party, which had "starred Margaret Thatcher". Mark confirmed this and, answering Dave's eager question, said, "The odd thing was that you had to fight against feeling quite sorry for her. She looked so isolated and shorn, even, ridiculously, shorter - as if she had lost a few inches. No longer a power of the land, clout gone, authority gone, aura gone. The cabinet ministers there seemed to be edging away from her when once they would have pressed towards her. Perhaps they were just embarrassed but it was all a bit sickening."
Mark, in fact, had thought it a textbook example of the essential







significance of the Office itself. All of Mrs Thatcher's real and vaunted strengths were of no account at all now that she was no longer Prime Minister but a rather dumpy backbencher in a burgundy two-piece suit. Mark would have been shy to say it, but he considered it a substantial tribute to democracy. He reassured Dave about Bagshaw's reservations, took a slug of cold coffee and steadied himself to return Fred's call.
"Any news on the Dorothy front?" Fred would not dissemble. He wanted Mark, whom he had known and tagged since university, to open a door for Dorothy, his sole child, in what he called the "Meeja". "None," said Mark, cringing with guilt - why? Why did Fred Nightingale, author of two slim glum volumes of poetry, lecturer in English and American Literature, put the pincers of guilt on him? Perhaps that's what old friends were for. "It's a bad time, Fred. BSB collapsing. All the ITV companies going in for redundancies. BBC in a dither. The recession. Slimming down for the franchises. But I'm trying."
"I'm engaged in a rather interesting piece on the Thames," said Fred, sweeping on, as he always did, into his own immediate concerns. "They've sent me a spurious book to review but the idea of Thames as source and symbol rather appeals. You know -Spenser's silken meadows, Defoe's cure for the plague - the river had a rather similar function in the Blitz, actually - Dickens' decay and death, Conrad's imperial longings, Eliot's waste - one wonders if it is possible to use the river today as source or symbol
- and if not - what does that say about the state of our mythology? I'm thinking of Nietzsche here -'without a myth every culture loses its creative natural power'."
I'm thinking of Nietzsche here! Why did Fred not buy an away-day return, stand on Waterloo Bridge and work it out for himself? Mark thought, and then chided himself. Fred was a speaking encyclopaedia. That was his pitch. Fred's had been a life of the mind. And Dorothy, Mark's god-daughter, was a sweet unambitious young woman, blissfully enthralled by Greens, peace, antivivisection, rainforests, whales, dolphins, wild geese.
Abruptly, as usual, Fred rang off, and Prue brought him another mug of black, no sugar, instant. The euphoria was all but gone.
Nick - Sir Nicholas de Loit, MP - called to arrange the lunch. Drinks at the Garrick - "You must meet your critics - oh yes! Not a safe programme - and then move on smartly" - and lunch at The Ivy - "the boys from the Caprice have not tarted it up at all - very wise. I thought of Green's but I don't like feeding with
my own kind. And the division bell is such a tug on the conscience." Mark rather liked the division bell in Green's, liked to see the MPs scuttle away from their Parker Bowles Olde English Tuck. He was impressed. But Nick was the arbiter. His restaurant guide in the heaviest of the glossies had for ten years been a bible" in the reverent vocabulary of the foodies. Even now that he had abandoned it, he was received with undisguised ceremony by the best restaurateurs in the metropolis.
Mark failed to pick up the anxiety, even the desperation, in Nick's tone, and yet Nick put down the phone in his Albany flat still sweating from the fear of what he might do, the crime he might commit that afternoon, as his homosexuality, which had for years ~been comfortably enough closeted and recently unfussily acknowledged in quiet ways, found itself horribly possessed by an urgent, shameful lust. Mark must help him; Mark alone could and would.
Before ringing len, Mark, as he knew he would, heaved himself to the kitchen to take another glass of champagne. And one for Prue: rule of the house with drinks before ten.
Mark contemplated the next call with the deepest pleasure. len would be full of talk or tap him expertly for what he most wanted off his mind. The gale would prevent her going flying - he liked to think of her in the air, soaring over the Home Counties in the paths of the wartime Spitfires. What bored him in others intrigued him in her. Even the flying seemed more a mysterious act of desperation than the leisured affectation of a woman with too much time on her hands. He could not believe she still wanted him. Her dizzy wealth - her unique, understated, connoisseur's beauty and her acknowledged independence from her second husband, Rudolf Lukas, made her one of the most attractive women in London, in New York, or in any city she decided to visit. She was always visiting.
More than twenty years before, when len was a wild creature just turned adult, orphaned in London and landed up in television, more passionate for the moment and more forgetful of anything previous to the moment than anyone he had known, she and Mark had burned through an obsessive, outrageous affair which she had ended abruptly by disappearing to America where a year or so later her great reputation had begun. Mark now knew that he had never recovered from her departure and that this was a wholly unexpected and undeserved second chance.







She was back in London and, the miracle of his life, back with him.
He lifted the phone affectionately and tapped out the seven singing numbers. He hummed as he waited, happier, he knew, and luckier, than he had any right to expect. Oh what a beautiful day.





lake was excited and proprietorial. "Nowhere in the world," he boasted, "is there anything like this. No way." His arm swept magisterially around Leicester Square and solemnly he recited the names: "The Empire, the Odeon West End, the other Odeon with the tower on it, the Empire plus Dancing, the Prince Charles up the side street there ..." Harry fought to overcome the shivering but he too was impressed and very cautiously warmed by lake's good humour.
Men were drilling to lay new paving stones. A barricade of large boards, a wall of hoarding, was painted with cowboys and old movie stars, bigger than lifesize and unrecognisable. Less than two weeks to Christmas and mid-morning shoppers passed through with parcels and holly in plastic bags.