"Guy N. Smith - The Lurkers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Guy N)

cloud for most of the time, a perpetual atmosphere of damp and cold. Hodre was
a typical dilapidated Welsh country cottage, the kind of place unscrupulous
owners could charge a hundred pounds a week for in the holiday season simply
because escapist urban dwellers thought they were 'getting away from it all'.
That was fine when the sun shone and bees worked diligently gathering pollen
amongst the masses of wild flowers; now the flowers and the bees were gone and
she faced stark reality.

At thirty-six life had settled to a nice even pattern for Janie: a husband who
went out to work at eight in the morning and came home at six, a mortgage
within their means because they hadn't tried to keep up with the Jones's and
moved to a detached house. A car on HP and a few pounds left over for a ride
out at the weekends. Now that Gavin was at school Janie could have got a job,
but it would have spoiled it all because she would not have had time to do her
household chores as meticulously as she liked. Life wasn't boring because this
was the kind of existence she had dreamed of for years, conventionally perfect
in every aspect.

And then Peter had gone and ruined it all by writing that damned book, working
on it two or three evenings a week for over a year. She had actually
encouraged him at the time because it kept him in the house instead of out in
his garage workshop until eleven o'clock at night. But she would never in her
wildest fantasies have thought that it would have been the springboard for all
this. Thousands of people wrote books that were never published. Only
exceptionally lucky ones received royalties. And certainly only a meagre
handful made it really big on a first book.

It was an experience that left Janie dazed and still waking up each morning in
the beginning thinking that maybe she had dreamed it all. Who in their right
minds would pay an advance of fifteen thousand pounds for a few hundred
typewritten pages of a novel when they did not even know whether or not it
would sell? Janie didn't know the details of this apparent madness but there
had been talk of some kind of auction - publishers trying to outbid one
another for Peter's book.

Peter should have been satisfied once he'd banked his cheque, a nest egg which
would allow them to live comfortably for many years without worrying about
recessions and inflation and all that sort of gloom which came out of the TV
screen at nine o'clock every night. But he wasn't satisfied; it had changed
him almost overnight, in her opinion anyway. He was greedy, he wanted to do it
all over again: another book and another fifteen grand. That was why they had
moved to Hodre for a year. A year! She'd go mad. The nearest village was three
miles away, and their closest neighbours, the Ruskins at the big Hill farm on
the other side of the forest, weren't exactly the friendliest people you could
meet. They seemed resentful that the Foggs had moved in. Driving by in their
Land Rover or tractor, father and sons glared down at the small stone cottage.
Peter said it was because they desperately wanted Hodre and its meagre three
or four acres to complete their monopoly of an upland sheep empire, but Clive
Blackstone, Hodre's owner who lived somewhere much more civilised down on the
south coast, was rich enough and stubborn enough to resist tempting offers. So