"Paul J. McAuley - Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

and,
as Tolley watched, a train drove out of the misty distance and slid
past,
the lights of its passenger cars like a string of yellow beads, the
roar
of its passage dragging behind as it dwindled towards Birmingham.
Tolley dipped his chin inside the collar of his Burberry and started
across the grass. There had once been a narrow road there, a
continuance
of the track, but now it was overgrown. Humps on either side marked
where
houses and cottages once stood. Not a stone showed now.
He went on towards the copse and, as he walked past the first clump of
trees, realised that he was amongst the ruins of the manor house his
family had once owned. But curiously, the realisation struck no chord
in
him, for all that he had looked forward to the moment.
Perhaps it was because there was hardly anything left. Here was a low
hummock, narrow and straight, all that remained of a wall; there was a
huge brier patch that might have once been a rose garden. Beyond the
trees
was the only part of the house still standing, ragged shoulders of wall
either side of a great chimney, a cluster of octagonal stacks that must
have been Elizabethan. Here and there were heaps of stone blocks
covered
with ivy and grass; nothing else.
Tolley took a few photographs in the doubtful light with his pocket
Olympus; only when he had finished did he notice the building standing
a
few hundred yards beyond the ruins, a small, undistinguished church with
a
low, square tower. The hedge around its graveyard had grown wild, long
whips of briers trailing from it like unkempt hair, and the headstones
stood in waist-high grass obviously untrimmed since spring. Yet the
gravel
path was free of weeds, and a hand-sized pane broken from one of the
stained-glass windows had been patched with hardboard; obviously, the
church was still cared for, although its congregation had long since
deserted it, or lay under the long grass. Tolley stood at the wicket
gate,
then turned away. It was growing dark, the sun a smear in clouds low
over
the cold fields; too dark, he told himself, to examine the gravestones,
to
look in the church for relics of his family. He would come back
tomorrow.
Perhaps it was just as well his grandfather had squandered the family
fortune: these grassed-over ruins were not much of an inheritance. He
wondered how it had come to such a state. The end of the line. Well, he
might as well see everything, he thought, and walked down to the river.