The Burden - Christie Agatha (читать книги TXT) 📗

He looked at Laura and the crowing Shirley, and his brow contracted angrily. 'Where will they be,' he thought, 'in ten years' time-in twenty years-in twenty-five? Where shall I be?'

The answer to that last question came quickly.

'Under the turf,' said Mr. Baldock to himself. 'Under the turf.'

He knew that, but he did not really believe it, any more than any other positive person full of the vitality of living really believes it.

What a dark and mysterious entity the future was! In twenty-odd years what would have happened? Another war, perhaps? (Most unlikely!) New diseases? People fastening mechanical wings on themselves, perhaps, and floating about the streets like sacrilegious angels! Journeys to Mars? Sustaining oneself on horrid little tablets out of bottles, instead of on steaks and succulent green peas!

"What are you thinking about?" Laura asked.

"The future."

"Do you mean to-morrow?"

"Farther forward than that. I suppose you're able to read, young Laura?"

"Of course," said Laura, shocked. "I've read nearly all the Doctor Dolittles, and the books about Winnie-thePooh and-"

"Spare me the horrid details," said Mr. Baldock. "How do you read a book? Begin at the beginning and go right through?"

"Yes. Don't you?"

"No," said Mr. Baldock. "I take a look at the start, get some idea of what it's all about, then I go on to the end and see where the fellow has got to, and what he's been trying to prove. And then, then I go back and see how he's got there and what's made him land up where he did. Much more interesting."

Laura looked interested but disapproving.

"I don't think that's the way the author meant his book to be read," she said.

"Of course he didn't."

"I think you should read the book the way the author meant."

"Ah," said Mr. Baldock. "But you're forgetting the party of the second part, as the blasted lawyers put it. There's the reader. The reader's got his rights, too. The author writes his book the way he likes. Has it all his own way. Messes up the punctuation and fools around with the sense any way he pleases. And the reader reads the book the way he wants to read it, and the author can't stop him."

"You make it sound like a battle," said Laura.

"I like battles," said Mr. Baldock. "The truth is, we're all slavishly obsessed by Time. Chronological sequence has no significance whatever. If you consider Eternity, you can jump about in Time as you please. But no one does consider Eternity."

Laura had withdrawn her attention from him. She was not considering Eternity. She was considering Shirley.

And watching that dedicated devoted look, Mr. Baldock was again conscious of a vague feeling of apprehension.

Part 2. Shirley-1946

Chapter One

1

Shirley walked at a brisk pace along the lane. Her racket with the shoes attached was tucked under one arm. She was smiling to herself and was slightly out of breath.

She must hurry, she would be late for supper. Really, she supposed, she ought not to have played that last set. It hadn't been a good set, anyway. Pam was such a rabbit. Pam and Gordon had been no match at all for Shirley and-what was his name? Henry, anyway. Henry what, she wondered?

Considering Henry, Shirley's feet slowed up a little.

Henry was something quite new in her experience. He wasn't in the least like any of the local young men. She considered them impartially. Robin, the vicar's son. Nice, and really very devoted, with rather a pleasant old-world chivalry about him. He was going in for Oriental Languages at the S.O.A.S. and was slightly highbrow. Then there was Peter-Peter was really terribly young and callow. And there was Edward Westbury, who was a good deal older, and worked in a bank, and was rather heavily political. They all belonged here in Bellbury. But Henry came from outside, and had been brought along as somebody's nephew. With Henry had come a sense of liberty and detachment.

Shirley savoured the last word appreciatively. It was a quality she admired.

In Bellbury, there was no detachment, everybody was heavily involved with everybody else.

There was altogether too much family solidarity in Bellbury. Everybody in Bellbury had roots. They belonged.

Shirley was a little confused by these phrases, but they expressed, she thought, what she meant.

Now Henry, definitely, didn't belong. The nearest he would get to it, she thought, was being somebody's nephew, and even then it would probably be an aunt by marriage-not a real aunt.

'Ridiculous, of course,' said Shirley to herself, 'because after all, Henry must have a father and a mother, and a home like everybody else.' But she decided that his parents had probably died in an obscure part of the world, rather young. Or possibly he had a mother who spent all her time on the Riviera, and had had a lot of husbands.

'Ridiculous,' said Shirley again to herself. 'Actually you don't know the first thing about Henry. You don't even know what his surname is-or who brought him this afternoon.'

But it was typical of Henry, she felt, that she should not know. Henry, she thought, would always appear like that-vague, with an insubstantial background-and then he would depart again, and still nobody would know what his name was, or whose nephew he had been. He was just at attractive young man, with an engaging smile, who played tennis extremely well.

Shirley liked the cool way in which, when Mary Crofton had pondered: "Now how had we better play?" Henry had immediately said:

"I'll play with Shirley against you two," and had thereupon spun a racket saying: "Rough or smooth?"

Henry, she was quite sure, would always do exactly as he pleased.

She had asked him: "Are you down here for long?" and he had replied vaguely: "Oh, I shouldn't think so."

He hadn't suggested their meeting again.

A momentary frown passed over Shirley's face. She wished he had done so…

Again she glanced at her watch, and quickened her steps. She was really going to be very late. Not that Laura would mind. Laura never minded. Laura was an angel…

The house was in sight now. Mellow in its early Georgian beauty, it had a slightly lop-sided effect, due, so she understood, to a fire which had consumed one wing of it, which had never been rebuilt.

Irresistibly Shirley's pace slackened. Somehow to-day, she didn't want to get home. She didn't want to go inside those kindly enclosing walls, the late sun streaming in through the west windows on to the gentle faded chintzes. The stillness there was so peaceful; there would be Laura with her warm welcoming face, her watchful protecting eyes, and Ethel stumping in with the supper dishes. Warmth, love, protection, home… 'All the things, surely, most valuable in life? And they were hers, without effort or desire on her part, surrounding her, pressing on her…

'Now that's a curious way of putting it,' thought Shirley to herself. 'Pressing on me? What on earth do I mean by that?

But it was, exactly, what she was feeling. Pressure-definite, steady pressure. Like the weight of the knapsack she had carried once on a walking tour. Almost unnoticed at first, and then steadily making itself felt, bearing down, cutting into. her shoulders, weighing down on her. A burden…

'Really, the things I think of!' said Shirley to herself, and running up to the open front door, she went in.

The hall was in semi-twilight. From the floor above, Laura called down the well of the staircase in her soft, rather husky voice:

"Is that you, Shirley?"

"Yes, I'm afraid I'm frightfully late, Laura."

"It doesn't matter at all. It's only macaroni-the au gratin kind. Ethel has got it in the oven."