"Mortimer, John - Rumpole and the Old Familiar Faces" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mortimer John)

We were greeted cheerfully by Poppy. Hilda's friend had one of those round, childishly pretty faces often seen on seriously fat women. She seemed to keep going on incessant cups of hot, sweet tea and a number of cardigans. If she moved like an enormous tent, her husband Eric was a slender wraith of a man with a high aquiline nose, two flapping wings of grey hair on each side of his face, and a vague air of perpetual anxiety broken, now and then, by high and unexpected laughter. He made cruciform gestures, as though re-membering the rubric "spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch" and forgetting where these important articles were kept.

"Eric," his wife explained, "is having terrible trouble with the church tower.

"Oh dear." Hilda shot me a look of stern disapproval, which I knew meant thatit would be more polite if I abandoned my overcoat while tea was being served. "How worrying for you, Eric."

The Rev. Eric went into along, excited and high-pitched speech. The gist ofit was that the tower, although of rare beauty, had not been much restored since the Saxons builtit and the Normans added the finishing touches. Fifty thousand pounds was needed for essential repairs, and the thermometer, erected outside the church for the appeal, was stuck at one hundred and twenty pounds-the proceeds from an emergency jumble sale.

"You particularly wanted Horace to come this Christmas?" Hilda asked the Man of God with the air of someone anxious to solve a baffling mystery. "I wonder why that was?"

"Yes. I wonder!" Eric looked startled. "I wonder why on earth I wanted to ask Horace. I don't believe he's got fifty thousand smackers in his back pocket!" At this, he shook with laughter.

"There," I told him, "your lack of faith is entirely justi-fied." I wasn't exactly enjoying Coldsands Rectory, so I was a little miffed that the Reverend couldn't remember why he'd asked me there in the first place.

"We had hoped that Donald Compton would help us our," Poppy told us. "I mean, he wouldn't notice fifty thousand. But he took exception to what Eric said at the Remembrance Day service."

"Armistice Day in the village." Eric's grey wings of hair trembled as he nodded in delighted affirmation. "And I prayed for dead German soldiers. It seemed only fair."

"Fair perhaps, darling. But hardly tactful," his wife told him. "Donald Compton thoughtit was distinctly unpatriotic. He's bought the Old Manor House," she explained to Hilda. From then on the conversation turned exclusively to this Compton and was carried on in the tones of awe and muted wonder with which people always talk about the very rich. Compton,it seemed, after a difficult start in England, had gone to Canada where, during a ten-year stay, he had laid the founda-tions of his fortune. His much younger wife was quite charm-ing, probably Canadian, and not in the least standoffish. He had built the village hall, the cricket pavilion, and a tennis court for the school. Only Eric's unfortunate sympathy for the Ger-man dead had caused Compton's bounty to stop short at the church tower.

"I've done hours of hard knee-work," the rector told us, "beg-ging the Lord to soften Mr. Compton's heart towards our rower. No

result so far, I fear."

Apart from this one lapse, the charm-ing Donald Compton seemed to be the per-fect English squire and country gent. I would see him in church on Christmas morning, and we had also been invited for drinks before lunch at the manor. The Reverend Eric and the smiling Poppy madeit sound as though the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury would be our with the carol singers and we'd been invited to drop in for high tea at Windsor Castle. I prayed for a Yule log blazing at the manor so that I could, in the true spirit of Christmas, thaw our gradually.

"Now, as a sign of Christmas fellow-ship, will you all stand and shake hands with those in front of and behind you?" Eric, in full canonicals, standing on the steps in front of the altar, made this suggestion as though he had just thought of the idea. I stood re-luctantly. I had found myself a place in the church near a huge, friendly, gently hum-ming, occasionally belching radiator and I was clinging toit and strokingit as thoughit were a newfound mistress (nor that I have much experience of new or even old-found mistresses). The man who turned to me from the front row seemed to be equally reluc-tant. He was, as Hilda had pointed our ex-citedly, the great Donald Compton in person-a man of middle height with silver hair, dressed in a tweed suit, and with a tan whichit must have been expensive to pre-serve during winter, He had soft brown eyes which looked almost at once away from me as, with a touch of dry fingers, he was gone and I was left, for the rest of the service, with no more than a well tailored back and the sound of an uncer-tain tenor voice joining in the hymns.

I turned to the row behind to shake hands with an elderly woman who had madness in her eyes and whispered conspirato-rially to me, "You cold, dear? Like to borrow my gloves? We're used to a bit of chill weather round these parts." I declined politely and went back to hugging the radiator, and as I did so a sort of happiness stole over me. To start with, the church was beautiful, with a high timbered roof and walls of weathered stone, peppered with marble tributes to dead inhabitants of the manor. It was decorated with holly and mistletoe. A tree glowed and there were candles over a crib. I thought how many genera-tions of Coldsands villagers, their eyes bright and faces flushed with the wind, had belted our these hymns. I also thought how depressed the great Donald Compton-who had put on little gold half-glasses to read the prophecy from Isaiah: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonder-

ful"-would feel if Jesus' instruction to sell all and giveit to the poor should ever be taken literally.

And then I wondered whyit was that, as he had touched my fingers and turned away, I had felt that I had lived through that precise moment before.

There was, asit turned our, a huge log fire cracking at the manor, throwing a dancing light on the marble floor of the cir-cular entrance hall with its great staircase leading up into private shadows. The cream of Coldsands was being entertained with champagne andcanapВs by the new Lord of the Manor. The decibels rose as the champagne went down and the little group began to sound like an army of tourists in the Sistine Chapel- noisy, excited, and wonderstruck.

"They must all be his ancestors." Hilda was looking at the pictures on the walls and, in particular, at a general in a scarlet coat, on a horse prancing at the front of some distant battle.

My mouth was full of cream cheese enveloped in smoked

salmon. I swallowedit and said, "Oh, I shouldn't think so. After all, he only bought the house recently."

"But I expect he brought his family portraits here from somewhere else."

"You mean, he had them under the bed in his old bachelor flat in Wimbledon and now he's hung them round an acre or two of walls?"

"Do try and be serious, Rumpole. You're nor nearly as funny as you think you are. Just look at the family resemblance. I'm absolutely certain that all of these are old Comprons." Andit was when she said this that I remembered everything perfectly clearly.

He was with his wife. She was wearing a black velvet dress and had long, golden hair that sparked in the firelight. They were talking to a bald, pink-faced man and his short and dumpy wife, and they were all laughing. Compton's laughter stopped as he saw me coming towards him. He said, "I don't think we've met."