"Michael Moorcock - Breakfast in the Ruins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

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Breakfast in the Ruins
The Sequel to "Behold the Man"
Michael Moorcock
Scanned by Iczelion for proofing
Scan Date: February, 3, 2002

1
In The Roof Garden: 1971: Scarlet Sin Commonwealth immigrants to Britain were 22 per cent down in
April. There were 1,991 compared with 2,560 in April last year.

THE GUARDIAN, June 25, 1971.

WHEN in doubt, Karl Glogauer would always return to Derry and Toms. He would walk down Kensington
Church Street in the summer sunshine, ignoring the boutiques and coffee shops, until he reached
the High Street. He would pass the first of the three great department stores which stood side by
side to each other, stern and eternal and bountiful, blotting out the sky, and would go through
the tall glass doors of the second store, Derry's. The strongest of the citadels.

Weaving his way between the bright counters, piled with hats and silks and paper flowers, he would
reach the lifts with their late art nouveau brass work and he would take one of them up to the
third floor - a little journey through time, for here it was all art deco and Cunard style pastel
plastics which he could admire for their own sake as he waited for the special lift which would
come and bear him up into the paradise of the roof garden.

The gate would open to reveal something like a small conservatory in which two pleasant middle-
aged ladies stood to greet the new arrivals and sell them, if required, tea-towels, postcards and
guide books. To one of these ladies Karl would hand his shilling and stroll through into the
Spanish Garden where fountains splashed and well-tended exotic plants and flowers grew. Karl had
a bench near the central fountain. If it was occupied when he arrived, he would stroll around for
a while until it was free, then he would sit down, open his book and pretend to read. The wall
behind him was lined with deep, airy cages. Sometimes these cages were completely deserted but at
other times they would contain a few parrots, parakeets, canaries, cockatoos, or a mynah bird.
Occasionally pink flamingos were present, parading awkwardly about the garden, wading through the
tiny artificial streams. All these birds were, on the whole, decently silent, almost gloomy,
offering hardly any reaction to the middle-aged ladies who liked to approach them and coo at them
in pathetic, sometimes desperate, tones.

If the sunshine were warm and the number of visitors small Karl would sit in his seat for the best
part of a morning or an afternoon before taking his lunch or tea in the roof garden restaurant.
All the waitresses knew him well enough to offer a tight smile of recognition while continuing to
wonder what a slightly seedy looking young man in an old tweed jacket and rumpled flannels found
to attract him in the roof garden. Karl recognized their puzzlement and took pleasure in it.

Karl knew why he liked to come here. In the whole of London this was the only place where he
could find the peace he identified with the peace of his early childhood, the peace of ignorance
(or "innocence" as he preferred to call it). He had been born at the outbreak of the war, but he
thought of his childhood as having existed a few years earlier, in the mid-thirties. Only lately
had he come to understand that this peace was not really peace, but rather a sense of coziness,