Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

“Of course not.”

“Well… no rush.” She was mocking him but not with her eyes.

“Are we still playing it cool?” he asked.

“Yes. We’re learning to become friends.” She nodded slowly, as if ticking off a wayward pupil. “As we should have done in the first place.”

“I think I am addicted to you. I’ve been missing you like… like… like something I am addicted to.”

She smiled. “Well, sort your life out and you won’t bloody have to.”

“I am doing.”

“Feels like it.”

“Connie.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t try to be cute. You know how much I hate all this mess. I really hate it.”

There was nothing he could say. There was never, ever anything he could say.

She relented. “Are you okay?”

And she meant it. She felt for him.

“Yes. I’m fine.” And her generosity and understanding and inexhaustible patience made it worse. “I brought the stuff—I’ve read it through and made some suggestions.” She was writing a script for some radio and awards thing she was hosting. He’d taken unbelievable pains to imagine her voice and edit accordingly.

She beamed her thanks. “Good job Wayne is watching or I’d have to kiss you. A lot.”

“Does Wayne ever fall asleep?”

“Gabriel.”

“Sorry. You started it.”

“Never. Wayne never sleeps.”

“That’s a shame.” He smoothed the piece of paper on which he would write the callers’ names. “I mean, that’s a shame, mate ”

“One minute, thirty seconds. No, mate, you started it—if you remember.”

“Mate, I remember everything.”

She said, “I keep thinking about when we went to Rome. I think about you all the time.”

He said, “I get scared when I am thinking about you that it’s getting in the way of thinking about you.”

“Soulmates.”

“Soulmates.”

Even though the red light was off, they were talking in hushed voices—partly because they were in a radio studio, partly because the excitement of being in each other’s presence again demanded it, and partly because they were lovers and here they were, somewhere half secret, and it was the dead of night and it felt like they were the last people awake in the middle of a great city and only hushed voices would do. The song played on.

“Fifty seconds.”

He said, “We could try breaking up completely—after this.”

“We’re not together, so how can we break up?”

“We’ve done it before.”

“Yeah… about a hundred times, and it’s never worked.”

“We could try extra-hard this time. No calls. No texts. Nothing.” He took out his favorite pen. “No sudden collapses. Not even any action.”

She made a suspicious face, then lightened. “Okay… Okay. Good. It’s a deal. We leave each other alone. You take some proper time to work out what it is you want and what it is you’re doing.”

“But I can’t stop wanting you, Connie, and I can’t imagine my life without you.”

“Nor mine without you. So.”

“So?”

“So sort your life out, Gabriel—for the love of Jesus, sort your life out.” She gave him an expression that mixed exasperation with desire. “I’m going to introduce you in the usual way, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Signal me if it gets too heavy and we’ll move on to someone else.”

“Okay.”

The song ended in applause. The red light came on. And her voice spoke softly to the hearts of three thousand sleepless Londoners: “You are listening to Radio Rabbit with me, Connie Carmichael, and that was ‘Strange Weather,’ by Tom Waits. Who I still haven’t met, despite the celebrity-stuffed life I lead. Well, it’s midweek and it’s midnight and that means it’s time for our self-help phone-in. With me in the studio is our regular guest, your friend and mine, the editor of the Randy K. Norris Self-Help! magazine, Gabriel Glover. How’s the week shaping up for you, Gabriel?”

“Terrific, so far.”

The river slunk and the city slept. Parisians dreamed in three million darkened rooms. But Nicholas was still awake, sitting alone in his high-backed leather chair.

The pipes groaned, and the wood seemed to creak in the beam. He had the window open a fraction for the night air, though the flames of the false fire were turned up as high as they would go. He set down his malt, took out the letter from its cheap Russian envelope again, and held it to the angled light. His eyesight was as good as it had ever been. And yet, although he was alone, it suited some indefinite part of him to act as if it were fading.

The English, he thought, was surprisingly lucid—though lucid in the old-fashioned elegant manner rather than merely plain in the modern way. The handwriting, however, was quite unable to stay within the confines of its institutional origins. He read the letter through again. The opening sentence began with the specific use of his name: “Dear Nicholas Glover…”

The writer was intelligent enough not to commit any specific threat to paper. He merely asked for a meeting. But it was there, Nicholas was sure, betrayed perhaps by the square hook of those gallows-shaped r ’s—the grim Cyrillic Γ in thin disguise.

He allowed the letter to dangle between finger and thumb and played the whisky through his crooked teeth.

My God, Masha, your bloody son is alive after all. You knew this all along, of course… Christ, why am I always so slow-witted compared to you? Only now do I begin to see what has been under my vain nose all along. You went back to find him. Didn’t you? This was the reason. Only now do I begin to see. It was not the call of your country at all, was it? It was the call of your blood. Alive all along. Known about. And yet… you did not tell me. Even when I came to you at the end. Even as we sat together. Your quid pro quo for all the things I did not tell you—was that it? Ah, but what a shame that we played chess with our secrets like this. A shame, dear Masha. A shame on our lives.

Somewhere down on the embankment a drunk had started sobbing like a child bereft. Nicholas rose to pull the window shut, the flames wavering a moment in his draft as he passed. He eased the frame up a millimeter or two on its old hinges so that it would close more easily and turned the handle through ninety careful degrees. Then he fetched his bottle and returned Bach’s harpsichord to its beginning so that he would not have to move again.

I was very close to your wife here in Petersburg and I wondered whether or not it might be possible to meet up as there are a number of important things that I wish to discuss.

And what exactly am I supposed to do now that the bastard—sorry, but we are all bastards, Masha, except you—now that the bastard has tracked me down? What is he to me? Or I to him? And what kind of man are we dealing with? Is he our everyday comrade—brutal, avaricious, mercenary, desperate to get out? Or is there some of your nobility in his character—is it just a meeting he wants, friendship, a lifelong correspondence about Turgenev?

Or will it be money?

Wait, though. Wait… is this what you were doing in Petersburg, Masha, giving him money? After everything was said and resaid and asserted and defied, did it come down to money for you too? Oh no. Wait. I know you, my Mashenka!

He leaned forward in his chair, childishly enlivened by the rare excitement of a thought he had not had before.

My father’s money was stolen from Russia. It came to me. I gave it to you. You gave it back to Russia. That’s how you will have seen it! That’s exactly how you will have seen it! Oh Masha, did this become your life’s project? This son of yours and his birthright…