"The Magus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fowles John)

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I heard that the British Council were recruiting staff, so in early August I went along to Davies Street and was interviewed by an eager lady with a culture-ridden mind and a very upperclass voice and vocabulary. It was frightfully important, she told me, as if in confidence, that “we” were represented abroad by the right type; but it was an awful bore, all the posts had to be advertised and the candidates chosen by interview, and anyway they were having to cut down on overseas personnel—actually. She came to the point: the only jobs available were teaching English in foreign schools—or did that sound too ghastly?

I said it did.

In the last week of August, half as a joke, I advertised: the traditional insertion. I had a number of replies to my curt offer to go anywhere and do anything. Apart from the pamphlets reminding me that I was God’s, there were three charming letters from cultured and alert swindlers. And there was one that mentioned unusual and remunerative work in Tangiers—could I speak Italian?—but my answer went unanswered.

September loomed: I began to feel desperate. I saw myself cornered, driven back in despair to the dreaded Educational Supplement and those endless pale gray lists of endless pale gray jobs. So one morning I returned to Davies Street.

I asked if they had any teaching jobs in the Mediterranean area, and the woman with the frightful intensifiers went off to fetch a file. I sat under a puce and tomato Matthew Smith in the waiting room and began to see myself in Madrid, in Rome, or Marseilles, or Barcelona… even Lisbon. It would be different abroad; there would he no common room, and I would write poetry. She returned. All the good things had gone, she was terribly afraid. But there were these. She handed me a sheet about a school in Milan. I shook my head. She approved.

“Well actually then there’s only this. We’ve just advertised it.” She handed me a clipping.