"Ian R. MacLeod - The Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

He considered for a moment, his eyes hidden under the shadow of his cap. "I left it down at the station.
Yes," he nodded to himself, "left luggage. My, you've grown..."
 "You haven't been home?"

"I thought I'd come here first. See you."

I stared up at him, wondering how he could possibly have found out, all the way from those sepia-tinted
postcard towns in France, about my habit of squeezing in through the Arboretum railings.

"We weren't..." I began.

"Expecting. No." My father breathed in, his moustache pricking out like a tiny broom. He seemed as
surprised as I was to find himself here, but apart from the sunlit air and the birdsong and the sound of a
child crying not far off in a pram, we were back straight away within the frozen silences that filled our
front room. And this time he hadn't even remembered the postcards -- they were always the first thing he
gave me. More than ever I wondered why he came back. All that travelling. Wouldn't it be simpler if he just
stayed in France and got on with the war?

"I'd forgotten how nice these gardens are," he said as I began to walk with him. "What's it like here,
son?" I felt, unseen behind me, the brief touch of his hands on my shoulders. "Does everyone hate the
Germans?"

"They're bad aren't they?"

"Bad..." My father considered, turning the word over in his mouth. "I suppose you could say... But
then..." It was unnerving; what I'd said seemed to mean something else to him entirely.

"Do you see many of them?"

"No," my father said. "I just build the roads."

I followed him out of the park through the turnstile.

"Are you hungry?" he asked. "Do you think we should eat? Is the Mermaid Cafe still open?"

We crossed the street and walked past the old bakery into town. Carts and cars and horses went by. My
father stopped and stared blankly at one driven by a woman. ""Will you look at that? It's a different world
here," he said, "isn't it?"

I nodded, already filled by the impression that I would remember this day, that these odd half-sensical
things he was saying would become like the messages on those unsent postcards. Something I would study
long after, looking for meaning.

It was growing darker now, the sun fading behind Saint Martin's church up the hill. A trolley bus went
by, the sparks thrown by the gantry looming suddenly blue-bright. Layers of shadow seemed to be falling. It
even felt cold now, so soon after the sun.

Across the square and through the doors of the Mermaid Cafe there was brass and linoleum, clattering
cutlery, drifts of tobacco and steam. My father removed his cap and walked between the chairs. The
gaslamps had been turned up against the sudden gloom, and I saw his face -- darkly, yellow-lit -- for the