"Christopher Priest - The Glamour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Priest Christopher)

up personal reserves and internal confidence, and it changed me.
Returning to school was a wrench. I had become an outsider to the other
children because I had been away so long. I was left out of activities and
games, groups formed without me, and I was treated as someone who did not know
the secret language or sighs. I hardly cared; it allowed me to continue with a
reduced form of my solitary life, and for the rest of my time at school I
drifted on the periphery, barely noticed by the others. I have never regretted
that long, lonely summer, and I only wish it could have lasted longer. I
changed as I grew up, and I am not now what I was then, but I still think back
to that happy time with a kind of infantile longing.
So perhaps it began there, and this story is the rest. At the moment I
am only "I" although soon I shall have a name. This is my own story, told in
different voices.




Part II




I


The house had been built so that it overlooked the sea. Since its
conversion to a convalescent hospital, two large wings had been added in the
original style, and the gardens had been relandscaped so that patients wishing
to move around were never faced with steep inclines. The graveled paths
zigzagged gently between the lawns and flower beds, opening out onto numerous
leveled areas where wooden seats had been placed and wheelchairs could be
parked. The gardens were mature, with thick but controlled shrubbery and
attractive stands of deciduous trees.
At the lowest point of the garden, down a narrow pathway leading away
from the main area, there was a secluded, hedged-in patch, overgrown and
neglected, with an uninterrupted view of the bay. In this place it was
possible to forget for a while that Middlecombe was a hospital. Even here,
though, were precautions: a low concrete curb had been embedded in the grass
to stop wheelchairs rolling too close to the rough ground and the cliff
beyond, and fairly prominent among the bushes at the back there was an
emergency signaling system connected directly to the duty nurse's office in
the main block. Very few of the patients visited this place. It was a long way
to walk down or back, and the staff were unwilling to push wheelchairs as far
as this. The main reason, though, was probably that the steward service did
not extend much beyond the terrace or the top lawns.
For all these reasons, Richard Grey came down here whenever he could.
The extra distance exercised his arms as he worked the wheels of the chair,
and anyway he liked the solitude. He could get privacy inside his room where
there were books, television, telephone, radio, but when actually inside the
main building there was subtle pressure to mix with the other patients.