"Ian Watson - The Embedding" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

The Embedding
IAN WATSON
Copywrite Ian watson 1973
ISBN 0-575-04784-4
e-book ver. 1.0


ONE

CHRIS SOLE DRESSED quickly. Eileen had already called him once. The second time she called him, the postman had
been to the door.
"There's a letter from Brazil," she shouted from the foot of the stairs. "It's from PierreтАФ"
Pierre? What was he writing for? The news bothered him. Eileen had been so distant and detached since their boy
was bornтАФinvolved in herself and Peter and memories. It wasn't a detachment he found it particularly easy to break
through any moreтАФor, to be frank, that he cared to. So what effect would this letter from her one-time lover have on
her? He hoped it wouldn't be too troublesome.
The landing window gave a quick hint of black fields, other staff houses, the Hospital half a mile away on top of the
hill. He glanced momentarilyтАФand shivered with morning misgivings. They often attacked him between waking up
and getting to the Hospital.
In the kitchen, three-year-old Peter was making a noisy mess of his breakfastтАФmashing cornflakes and milk in his
bowl, while Eileen stood skimming through the letter.
Sole sat down opposite Peter and buttered a slice of toast. Casually he examined the boy's face. Didn't these thin
foxy features add up to an image of the Pierre who so many years ago had been photographed as a small boy in a field
of marguerites somewhere in France? Already the boy had the same pointed urgency as Pierre, and the glossy brown
eyes of a dog fox on the prowl.
Sole's own face had a sort of phoney distinction about it. It was too well balanced. Slide a mirror up against his nose
and he wasn't split into two different faces, like most people, but a pair of identical twins. This balance of the features
was initially impressive, but the end result was a cancelling out of one side of the man by the other, more visible as
the years went by.
He glanced at Eileen as she read. She was slightly taller than he was and her eyes had an in-between colour that her
last passport described as grey, but which could easily be blue. They'd seemed bluer in AfricaтАФthe blue of swimming
pools and open skies, which the airmail paper now briefly reflected.
Africa. Those hot still evenings when the open louvres brought no air into their flat and the beer came warm from
the overloaded icebox. The brightly-lit university buildings there on the hill, and the yellow glow of the city a dozen
miles away by the sea, with the sticky darkness in between syncopated by the mutter of drums. It had been good then,
that rapport, that togetherness, before the sadness and the contradictions entered in. Before Pierre slipped over the
border into Free Mozambique with Frelimo guerrilla fighters to study the sociology of liberation among the Makonde
people on the far side of the Ruvuma river. Before Sole ever heard of the good and profitable destiny awaiting him in
this English hospital unit. Before that final diffident encounter with Pierre in Paris four years ago, when Eileen had
gone away with the Frenchman for a night and come back the next morning knowing how far their lives had separated
and gone down different tracks.
"It seems he's living with this tribe in the Amazon," she said, "but they're being floodedтАФfighting with poison
arrowsтАФand taking drugsтАФ"
"Can I read it?"
She held on to the letter a moment longer, her fingers crumpling the paper to give it a touch of ownership; before
surrendering it with a sad lost eroticism of gesture that made him ache, since it wasn't directed at him.
 "Shall I read it out?" he asked.
He suspected his voice might rob these lines of the emotional content they possessed for her, so that what had been
a love letter would become a mass of folklore and politics. Why do it then? To make some kind of physical
contribution to the dialogue of Pierre and Eileen тАФwhich he hadn't been able to join emotionally, though he reaped