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

“He what?” Isabella’s flow stopped abruptly.

“That’s what the guy said when I tucked him in last night.”

“Jesus.”

Gabriel blew into his cupped hands awhile and then said, “Even if it’s all true, it doesn’t change much—Mum is still Mum.”

“Of course, Gabs, of course.” Isabella knitted her brow. “Come on, I’m not—”

“We’ve been adopted, that’s all. Happens all the time. But she was our mother all our lives. From the first moments of consciousness until… until she died.”

“Of course. I’m not arguing with you about that. I feel the same.” Isabella softened, hooked her hair behind her ear. “I feel exactly the same. In one way, it changes nothing.” She paused a moment. “But in another… Anyway, Christ, come on—we don’t even know if Dad is actually our dad. I mean, it’s that basic, Gabs. We don’t know the first thing about who we are. We might not—”

“Okay. Okay, I agree. You’re right, we do have to know. But regardless of whether we have been lied to or not, the truth, as far as I’m concerned, is that Dad is Dad and Mum is Mum.” There was another pause. Gabriel put his hands in his armpits. “Why don’t you go?” he said. “Go now. You’ll be at Waterloo in forty minutes.”

“I’m not going. I can’t. I…” Isabella tailed off and dipped her head to bury the lower half of her face in the scarf she was wearing. “Dad… Dad makes me feel so… so nauseous.” The scarf dropped from her chin as her head came up again. “And anyway, look at the state of me. I can’t be calm. I can’t even pretend to be calm. I will row with him. I will. I’ll start a terrible argument. I’ll be absolutely furious from the minute I see him. I will be storming out before I’ve even stormed in. I can’t hide it like you can. I haven’t got your ability to… I can’t… I can’t make myself unreadable like you can. I’m polished glass to Dad.”

Gabriel said nothing.

Isabella pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “And you know, the thing is that Arkady is… He is kind of like a solution. Not a problem.”

“I’m not saying the guy is a problem.” Gabriel grimaced. “Jesus, can’t you do something about this intense cold?”

“Sorry, no.” Isabella bit her lip. “I know you’re not saying he is a problem, Gabs. But he’s more than not a problem. Think about it. He’s the answer. He’s kind of brought us back from the brink—well, he’s brought me back to my senses, anyway. You may well be past help.” She smiled. “I mean, the guy has got nothing at all. He’s totally fucked. He has absolutely nowhere to stay. He’s got no money. He was actually saying that he needed to start walking to the airport for his flight tomorrow because the trains are too expensive.”

“They are too expensive.” Gabriel’s eyes ran around the room and back to meet his sister’s. “How long is his visa?”

“Six months. But that’s not the point. He can’t afford another ticket if he misses the flight. That’s it. He’s stuck.”

“We’ll buy him one if he wants to stay.”

“More than that, he’s given us the excuse we need, Gabs. He’s the reason. Now you have to go.”

“Now I have to go? Why me?”

“And…” Isabella dipped her head into the scarf again. “And he does look like her.”

“Does he?”

“More than we do. Come on. He’s got Mum’s eyes.”

“What do you mean, I have to go? If I am going, you are going.”

She hesitated. “I don’t know if I can stand it—even being in the same room. Seriously. We need to make him talk. Not fight.”

“Is, if I am going, then you are going. At least to Paris.”

“What about Arkady?”

“We give him some money, obviously. He can stay at Grafton Terrace if he wants. Or he can fly back tomorrow as he planned.”

“But what do we tell him about the course? The conservatory.”

“That depends.” Gabriel stood up. “Can we make some tea, at least? We need something that’s warm in here to focus on. I’ve got a bitch of a hangover, and I’ve been at the police station since eight trying to convince them that I haven’t been robbing myself.”

“Yes. Make tea. Why do they think that?”

“Divert attention from my robbing everyone else, apparently.”

“Makes sense.” Isabella smiled again. “Depends on what? What does what we say to Arkady depend on?”

“On whether it’s all true. If Arkady is Mum’s son for real, then Dad is going to pay for him to finish his course and a whole lot more. Whether the bastard fucking well wants to or not. Even if I have to walk out with an armful of his precious paintings to raise the money.”

This, then, is what it came down to: a dribbling and diminished old man sitting in silence beneath a blanket beside an easel on which there was a portrait he could not paint while a dirty winter’s rain fell into the raddled old Seine outside.

Waiting.

Waiting for the light to thicken. Waiting for the day to end. Waiting for the week to pass. Waiting for a son who was not his son, a daughter who was not his daughter. Waiting, in essence, for the second stroke of death that surely must be coming—any night soon.

And suddenly now so fearful. Fearful of everything, even as it existed in his own imagination. Fearful of stagnation, fearful of travel; fearful of speed, fearful of stairs, fearful of the sea; fearful of other races, of the street-corner young, of every neighbor’s real intentions. And every stranger suddenly an attacker, terrorist, swindler, or thief; every pavement a desperate, seething deathtrap of violence and crime; every ache or sneeze the herald of plague. Fearful of his own bones grown too brittle, his body too slow to heal, his mind too narrow, obsessive, or stale. Fearful of too much company, fearful of none. Fearful of conversation.

Fitting, though. Well shaped. He would give the Fates that. Those three squint-eyed goddesses, spinning their threads, black shawls about their heads, reckoning and rectitude in their every callused fingertip. Clotho: that he who had so traduced the family now had none. Lachesis: that he who scorned convention should feel convention’s scorn. Atropos: that he who would so rudely take life’s secret temperature in the bodies of a thousand lovers should now be left so cold and unconnected.

And yet. He felt no remorse. There were things he owed to Gabriel and Isabella. There were the duties of the truth. And he would pay these now—for in his own way he loved them both. He was the only father they had known. If they came, he would tell them everything. He would give them all the explanations they required. But no… no excuses.

For still he felt it—the old defiance, the lifelong no. Sluggish, furred, but undiluted and stirring in his blood still. That great and resolute no, swimming the wrong way around his heart. Perhaps this was what had caused the clot in his brain. One day this no of his had simply grown too gnarled and swollen to pass along the channels of his lifeblood. The same no that had kept him alive all these years was now trying to kill him. His eyes swept the sodden ashes of the winter’s sky.

The train rolled through those somber fields of northern France, the rain hanging in the air, the sky all bruised, low, lowering, washed-out purple giving way to gunmetal gray, the farms here and there, the narrow roads riding the slight rise and fall of the ground, and he sat by the drizzle-straggled window, bad coffee cooling, and thought the same thoughts he thought every time he passed this way: about the two generations of soldiers, unimaginably heroic, those who dug themselves into this mud and those who, twenty-odd years later, hurried back and forth across it, pursued or pursuing. Men dying for a cause, right or wrong. And this imagining kept his thoughts from anything else. Kept him silent and still, imagining most of all the sadness of all the million unwitnessed moments, the horror and the terror and the pain that a certain man might see or find himself amid, for just a second, utterly alone, with no other to corroborate the experience, testify. The loneliness of that second. Then, immediately, more fighting, or death. What generations they must have been.