"Ian R. MacLeod - The Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

first time. The women sitting at the other tables smiled and nodded. A soldier. How they all loved soldiers
then. A waitress who'd been about to serve someone else came over and took his order for tea and cordial,
two sticky buns. He jumped when the trolley rumbled up. Outside, it started to rain.

"This is some place," he said, looking around in that same puzzled way he had in the Arboretum. "It's
what I think about, places like this. When I'm..." He began to pat his pockets.

"Building the roads?"
 "The roads..." He found his cigarette case. He cupped a match. His hands were trembling. "Yes, the
roads."

I drank my cordial, which tasted bitter rather than sweet from the saccharine they put in it. In the yard
at school I always just said that my father was a soldier. Sapper sounded like a corruption, a diminution --
as did the actual job, which was the same one he'd done in peacetime, of supervising the construction of
roads. But still; the roads. I had, in my own secret moments, in times when I lay in that deep indentation
in my mother's bed and the ceiling glowed with the pull of sleep, a vision of a man younger and crisper than
the one who sat before me now, and of the roads. White roads, straight roads, wide roads narrowing into
the shimmering distance. Ways to the future.

"This war," he said, drinking his tea, "isn't like anything anyone ever imagined. All the money that's
been spent, all the lives, all the effort. It's like one great experiment to see just how far we can go." He
ground out his cigarette. "Well now we know. The ones of us who are there. You think the whole world's
there until you come here and you the prams in the park and the women with mud on their skirts. And that
steamer..." He smiled and glanced out at the rain. "I'd like to have taken you across the lake on that
steamer."

"It's not working."

"No," he said. "And we should go home..."

He stood up. The waitress came over to take his money, fluttering her brown eyes.

Outside, the gutters streamed and the facades of the blackened buildings shone like jet. I wanted to
hurry as my father pulled his cap on and walked at his odd slow pace through the rain, his head held stiffly
erect. Trickles began to run down the woollen neck of my vest, but at least we weren't heading back
towards the station. The suitcase was forgotten.

We walked up the hill towards the houses, but instead of going left towards home along the alley at the
back of Margrove Avenue we went on past the grocers on Willow Way. A black sodden cat, waiting on a
doorstep, regarded us. Around the corner, we came to a brick wall.

"Isn't this right?" My father pressed his hand against it, as though expecting it to give way.

I said, "We should have turned left."

"Isn't there a short cut?"

Before I could answer, my father turned and strode off towards a strip of wasteland and some left-over
foundations of houses that had been started before the war and would, so we were all promised, be
finished as soon as it ended. The rain was torrential now. You could hardly see the grey roofs of Blackberry