"a_taste_of_heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lovegrove James)

bearded face I saw, smiling if its owner caught my
eye and offered a greeting, but smiling without any
joy or conviction. And then, as I served out food to
the shuffling, murmuring queue, each face would
come under scrutiny again. Harold might, after all,
have shaved his beard. He might have got rid of --
far more likely lost -- the battered, greasy Homburg
that never left his head, even on hot days. He might
even have had to part company with his army-surplus
greatcoat. But however he looked I would have
recognised him instantly, had he shambled up to me,
plate outstretched, to receive his helping of mashed
potato. You do not easily forget the face of a friend.

Finally I became so concerned that I called the
police, though I knew they would tell me that there
was about as much chance of tracking down a
missing vagrant as there was of finding a lost sock at
a launderette. Which they did, albeit somewhat more
tactfully. I gave them a description of Harold and a
list of his known haunts, and was assured that an eye
would be kept out for him. This was the best I could
hope for, but it didn't prevent me from feeling
aggrieved and frustrated. Vivian, the shelter
supervisor, sympathised but pointed out that someone
like Harold, who had fallen through a hole in the net
of society, would always be in danger of slipping out
of sight altogether. "These people have already, to a
certain degree, disappeared," she said, raising a
wise eyebrow. "There's little to stop them taking a
last little hop-skip-and-jump to the left and vanishing
completely."

I didn't understand precisely what she meant, but I
accepted the basic truth of the statement. In
desperation, I pinned my home and office
phone-numbers to the shelter noticeboard, with a
request to the other volunteers to get in touch with
me, no matter what time of day or night, should
Harold show up. And winter deepened, and a rare
December snow came down in thick flurries and left
London with an ankle-deep coating of sooty slush,
and Christmas came and went, and a New Year
crawled over the horizon filled with the promise of
much the same as last year, and January turned bitter,
and the last spark of hope that Harold might still be
alive winked out, and I learned to live with the fact
that I would never see him again.

Then one morning, around about four o'clock, the