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

She let her head fall forward against my shoulder, and we were still standing like that, with my cheek on her hair, when Patrick came back with his bag. Without a word, smiling resignedly, he pulled her round, tucked her arm into his, and said briefly, ‘Come on. You’ll get run in if you stay here much longer like that.’

She looked at him blindly for a moment, and then laughed shakily. ‘I don’t understand why this has happened,’ she said.

‘Struck by the Gods,’ said Patrick ironically. ‘Or chemistry. Take your pick.[203]’

‘It isn’t sensible.’

‘You can say that again.[204]’

He began to walk down the road, pulling her with him. My feet unstuck themselves from the pavement and reattached themselves to my watery legs and I caught them up. Gabriella put her other arm through mine, and we strolled the mile and a half to where her sister lived, gradually losing the heavy awareness of passion and talking normally and laughing, and finally ending up on her doorstep in a fit of giggles.

Lisabetta, Gabriella’s sister, was ten years older and a good deal fatter, though she had the same smooth olive skin and the same shaped fine dark eyes. Her husband, Giulio, a softly flabby man approaching forty with a black moustache, bags under his eyes, and less hair than he’d once had, lumbered ungracefully out of his arm-chair when we went into his sitting-room and gave us a moderately enthusiastic welcome.

Neither he nor Lisabetta spoke English or French so while the two girls made yet more coffee, and Patrick talked to Giulio, I looked around with some interest at Gabriella’s home. Her sister had a comfortable four-bedroomed flat in a huge recently built tower, and all the furnishings and fabrics were uncompromisingly modern. The floors were some sort of reconstituted stone heated from underneath and without carpet or rugs, and there were blinds, not curtains, to cover the windows. I thought the total effect rather stark, but reflected idly that Milan in mid-summer must be an oven, and the flat had been planned for the heat.

Several children came and went, all indistinguishable to my eyes. Seven of them, there should be, I remembered. Four boys, three girls, Patrick had said. Although it was nearly midnight, none of them seemed to have gone to bed. They had all been waiting to see Patrick and tumbled about him like puppies.

When Lisabetta had poured the coffee and one of the children had handed it round Giulio asked Patrick a question, looking at me.

‘He wants to know what your job is,’ Patrick said.

‘Tell him I look after the horses.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing else.’

Giulio was unimpressed. He asked another question.

Smiling faintly, Patrick said, ‘He wants to know how much you earn?’

‘My pay for a single trip to Milan is about one fifth of yours.’

‘He won’t like that.’

‘Nor do I.’

He laughed. When he translated Giulio scowled.

Patrick and I slept in a room which normally belonged to two of the boys, now doubling with the other two[205]. Gabriella shared a third bedroom with the two elder girls, while the smallest was in with her parents. There were toys all over the place in our room, and small shoes kicked off and clothes dumped in heaps, and the unchanged sheets on the boys’ beds were wrinkled like elephant skins from their restless little bodies. Patrick had from long globetrotting habit come equipped with pyjamas, slippers, washing things, and a clean shirt for the morning. I eyed this splendour with some envy, and slept in my underpants.

‘Why,’ said Patrick in the dark, ‘won’t you tell them you have a title?’

‘It isn’t important.’

‘It would be to Giulio.’

‘That’s the best reason for not telling him.’

‘I don’t see why you’re so keen to keep it a secret.’

‘Well, you try telling everyone you’re an earl’s son, and see what happens.’

‘I’d love it. Everyone would be bowing and scraping in all directions. Priorities galore. Instant service. A welcome on every mat.[206]’

‘And you’d never be sure if anyone liked you for yourself.’

‘Of course you would.’

‘How many head grooms have you brought here before?’ I asked mildly. He drew in a breath audibly and didn’t answer.

‘Would you have offered me this bed if Timmie had kept his big mouth shut[207]?’

He was silent.

I said, ‘Remind me to kick your teeth[208] in the morning.’

But the morning, I found, was a long way off. I simply couldn’t sleep. Gabriella’s bed was a foot away from me on the far side of the wall, and I lay and sweated for her with a desire I hadn’t dreamed possible. My body literally ached. Cold controlled Henry Grey, I thought helplessly. Grey by name and grey by nature. Cold controlled Henry Grey lying in a child’s bed in a foreign city biting his arm to stop himself crying out. You could laugh at such hunger: ridicule it away. I tried that, but it didn’t work. It stayed with me hour after wretched hour, all the way to the dawn, and I would have been much happier if I’d been able to go to sleep and dream about her instead.