Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

It was getting dark and was still cold, but not for us. I wouldn’t have noticed if it had been raining ice. They began by marching me slowly around the Piazza del Duomo to see the great gothic cathedral and the Palazzo Reale, and along the high glass arcade into the Piazza della Scala to gaze at the opera house, which Gabriella solemnly told me was the second largest theatre in Europe, and could hold three thousand six hundred people.

‘Where is the largest?’ said Patrick.

‘In Naples,’ she said smiling. ‘It is ours too.’

‘I suppose Milan has the biggest cathedral, then,’ he teased her.

‘No,’ she laughed, showing an unsuspected dimple, ‘Rome.’

‘An extravagant nation, the Italians.’

‘We were ruling the world while you were still painting yourselves blue[195].’

‘Hey, hey,’ said Patrick.

‘Leonardo da Vinci lived in Milan,’ she said.

‘Italy is undoubtedly the most beautiful country in the world and Milan is its pearl.’

‘Patrick, you are a great idiot,’ she said affectionately. But she was proud indeed of her native city, and before dinner that evening I learned that nearly a million and a half people lived there and that there were dozens of museums, and music and art schools, and that it was the best manufacturing town in the country, and the richest, and its factories made textiles and paper and railway engines and cars. And, in fact, aeroplanes.

We ate in a quiet warmly lit little restaurant which looked disconcertingly like Italian restaurants in London but smelled quite different, spicy and fragrant. I hardly noticed what I ate: Gabriella chose some sort of veal for us all, and it tasted fine, like everything else that evening. We drank two bottles of red local wine which fizzed slightly on the tongue, and unending little gold cups of black coffee. I knew even then that it was because we were all speaking a language not our own that I felt liberated from my usual self. It was so much easier to be uninhibited away from everything which had planted the inhibitions: another sky, another culture, a time out of time. But that only made the way simpler, it didn’t make the object less real. It meant I didn’t have chains on my tongue; but what I had said wasn’t said loosely, it was still rooted in some unchanging inner core. On that one evening in Milan I learned what it was like to be gay deep into the spirit, and if for nothing else I would thank Gabriella for that all my life.

We talked for hours: not profoundly, I dare say, but companionably: at first about the things we had done and seen that day, then of ourselves, our childhood. Then of Fellini’s[196] films, and a little about travel, and then, in ever widening ripples, of religion, and our own hopes, and the state the world was in. There wasn’t an ounce of natural reforming zeal among the three of us, as perhaps there ought to have been when so much needed reforming; but faith didn’t move mountains any more, it got bogged down by committees, Patrick said, and the saints of the past would be smeared as psychological misfits today[197].

‘Could you imagine the modern French army allowing itself to be inspired and led into battle by a girl who saw visions[198]?’ he said. ‘You could not’.

It was true. You could not.

‘Psychology,’ Patrick said, with wine and candle light in his yellow eyes, ‘is the death of courage.’

‘I don’t understand,’ protested Gabriella.

‘Not for girls,’ he said. ‘For men. It is now not considered sensible to take physical risks unless you can’t avoid them. Ye gods, there’s no quicker way to ruin a nation than to teach its young men its’ foolish to take risks. Or worse than foolish, they would have you believe.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘Ask Henry. He’ll cheerfully go out and risk his neck on a racehorse any day of the week. Ask him why.’

‘Why?’ she said, half-serious, half-laughing, the glints of light in her dark eyes outpointing the stars.

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s fun.’

Patrick shook his red head. ‘You look out, pal, you mustn’t go around admitting that sort of thing these days. You’ve got to say you do it only for the money, or you’ll be labelled as a masochistic guilt complex before you can say – er – masochistic guilt complex.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said, laughing.