"Robert Holdstock - Mythago Wood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

Two


Intrigued by what Christian had said, and worried by his apprehension of me, I nonetheless restrained my


file:///G|/rah/Robert%20Holdstock%20-%20Mythago%20Wood.htm (10 of 197) [2/14/2004 12:50:08 AM]
 Mythago Wood

curiosity and spent an hour exploring the house again from top to bottom, inside and out, everywhere save
father's study, the contemplation of which chilled me more than Christian's behaviour had done. Nothing
had changed, except that it was untidy, and untenanted. Christian had employed a part-time cleaner and
cook, a woman from a nearby village who cycled to the Lodge every week and prepared a pie or stew that
would last him three days. Christian did not go short of farm produce, so much so that he rarely bothered
to use his ration book. He seemed to get all he needed, including sugar and tea, from the Ryhope estate,
which had always been good to my family.

My old room was almost exactly as I remembered it. I opened the window wide and lay down on the bed
for a few minutes, staring out and up into the hazy, late summer sky, past the waving branches of the
gigantic beech that grew so close to the Lodge. Several times, in the years before my teens, I had climbed
from window to tree, and made a secret camp among the thick branches; I had shivered by moonlight in
my underpants, crouched in that private place, imagining the dark activities of night creatures below.

Lunch, in mid-afternoon, was a substantial feast of cold pork, chicken and hard-boiled eggs, in quantities
that, after two years in France on strict rations, I had never thought to see again. We were, of course,
eating his food supply for several days, but the fact seemed irrelevant to Christian, who in any case only
picked at his meal.

Afterwards we talked for a couple of hours, and Christian relaxed quite noticeably, although he never
referred to Guiwenneth, or to father's work, and I never broached either subject.

We sprawled in the uncomfortable armchairs that had belonged to my grandparents, surrounded by the
time-faded mementoes of our family . . . photographs, a noisy rosewood clock, horrible pictures of exotic
Spain, all framed in cracked mock-gilded wood, and all pressed hard against the same floral wallpaper
that had hugged the walls of the sitting-room since a time before my birth. But it was home, and Christian
was home, and the smell, and the faded surrounds, all were home to me. I knew, within two hours of
arriving, that I would have to stay. It was not so much that I belonged here (although I certainly felt that)
but simply that the place belonged to me - not in any mercenary sense of ownership, more in the way that
the house and the land around the house shared a common life with me; we were part of the same
evolution. Even in France, even in the village in the south, I had not been separated from that evolution,
merely stretched to an extreme.

As the heavy old clock began to whirr and click, preceding its laboured chiming of the hour of five,
Christian abruptly rose from his chair and tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the empty fire grate.

'Let's go to the study,' he said, and I rose without speaking and followed him through the house to the
small room where our father had worked. 'You're scared of this room, aren't you?' He opened the door and
walked inside, crossing to the heavy oak desk and pulling out a large leather-bound book from one of the