"Dave Hutchinson - Discreet Phenomena" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

"When I first came here, the only thing Betty served was steak sandwiches and fries-sorry," he added for our
benefit. "Chips." He thought about it for a moment. "And fried onion rings." He looked at us. "You know, I
miss fried onion rings." I glanced at Pauline. She was staring at Harvey with a bemused expression on her
face.
"It's the journalists," Domino said. "Betty thinks she should have something a bit more exotic than chips
and steak sandwiches and onion rings for her new clientele."
Harvey nodded sadly. "These do not appear to be people who would be impressed by a Ploughman's
Lunch, it is true. And your apology is accepted," he added to me.
"What apology?"
"Your apology for not introducing me to your friend while I drove you all back here."
Oh, for heaven's sake... "Harvey Menzel, Pauline Niven. Pauline Niven, Harvey Menzel, Baronet,
Fourteenth Earl Seldon."
Pauline raised her eyebrows. Harvey leaned across the table, delicately lifted her hand, kissed it, and
said, "Enchanted," in his best Donald Sinden voice.
Synchronicity does some pretty weird things. Six years ago, on the very afternoon that I was signing my
life away in return for the world's most unprofitable garage, some miles to the East Sir James
Dawson-Fairleigh, Thirteenth Earl Seldon, was riding to hounds.
At a little after two o'clock that afternoon, Sir James's horse abruptly refused to jump a hedge, hurling Sir
James into the air, over the hedge, and piledriving him headfirst into the field on the other side. Alex Saxon,
the local GP, was riding in the same hunt, so he was on the scene immediately, but Sir James was dead the
moment he hit the ground. One drunken evening a couple of years later, Alex confided to me that the
Thirteenth Earl's head had been driven so far down between his shoulders that he looked as if he had been
killed by a single catastrophic shrug.
Five months after the accident, on the same day that Karen and I were moving into our new home in
Seldon, a student named Harvey Menzel was called out of his class at Harvard Medical School and told that,
as the only living-if astonishingly remote-relative of Sir James Dawson-Fairleigh, he had inherited a large
house and a small village in Wiltshire.
"So I had to ask myself," Harvey said, "did I want a career in medicine, saving lives and that kind of thing?
Or did I want to spend the rest of my life as a feudal warlord with the power of life and death over my
tenants?"
Pauline was sitting with her chin propped up on her fist, her eyes wide. "So which did you choose?" she
asked innocently, and I decided I liked her.
Harvey looked crestfallen. It was rare to see the famous Menzel charm-inherited, according to Harvey,
from his great-great grandfather, who was a full-blood Menominee-fail. But to give him his due, he recovered
quickly and fought his way across the now-crowded snug to get us some more drinks.
"He's got a good heart," I said when he was out of earshot.
Pauline raised an eyebrow.
"He's very lonely," I told her. "Most of what you see is just a front. How do you think you'd react if you
were suddenly told you'd inherited Kodak or Chase Manhattan?"
She made a rude noise. "I'd turn cartwheels."
"Well, Harvey's different. He wasn't entirely kidding about the power of life and death, you know. The whole
village belongs to him, and ultimately the responsibility for it ends with him. That must have been pretty scary
for a twenty-four-year-old medical student."
"I thought the National Trust owned this place."
"Only the Gardens. They were laid out by the Seventh Earl, but he was the only Dawson-Fairleigh who
was remotely interested in them. The rest were only interested in making money. The Twelfth Earl turned
them over to the Trust in the Sixties in his will. Everything else belongs to the family. To Harvey."
She looked across the snug. "What does he think of this... invasion?"
"I think he's quite tickled by it, to be honest. He hangs out with the CNN and NBC people quite a lot. I
think he likes having people around he can talk to about the Superbowl."