Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“There’s plenty of time to make plans,” I said. “You may not even want to settle here yourself. After all you are a great traveller, Aunt Augusta.”

“This is my journey’s end,” Aunt Augusta said. “Perhaps travel for me was always a substitute. I never wanted to travel as long as Mr. Visconti was there. What is there in Southwood which draws you back?”

The question had been in my mind for several days and now I did my best to answer it. I spoke of my dahlias, I even talked of Major Charge and his goldfish. The rain began to fall, rustling through the trees in the garden: a grapefruit tumbled heavily to earth. I spoke of the last evening with Miss Keene and her sad undecided letter from Kofiefontein. Even the admiral stalked through my memories, flushed with Chianti and wearing a scarlet paper cap. Packages of Omo were left on the doorstep. I felt a sense of relief as a patient must feel under Pentothal, and I let my random thoughts dictate my words. I spoke of Chicken and of Peter and Nancy in the Abbey Restaurant in Latimer Road, of the bells of Saint John’s Church and the tablet to Councillor Trumbull, the patron of the grim orphanage. I sat on the bed beside my aunt and she put her arm round me while I went over the uneventful story of my life. “I’ve been very happy,” I concluded as though it needed an excuse.

“Yes, dear, yes, I know,” she said.

I told her how very kind to me Sir Alfred Keene had been, and I told her of the bank and of how Sir Alfred threatened to remove his account if I did not remain as manager.

“My darling boy,” she said, “all that is over now,” and she stroked my forehead with her old hand as though I were a schoolboy who had run away from school and she was promising me that I would never have to return, that all my difficulties were over, that I could stay at home.

I was sunk deep in my middle age. All the same I laid my head against her breast. “I have been happy,” I said, “but I have been so bored for so long.”

Chapter 8

The party was larger than I had conceived possible after seeing my aunt alone in the empty unfurnished house, and I could only explain it by the fact that not one real friend was present among all the hundred guests, unless one could call O’Toole a friend. As more and more guests assembled I wondered from what highways and hedges Mr. Visconti had drummed them up. The street was lined with cars, among them two armoured ones, for the Chief of Police had arrived, as promised, bringing with him a very fat and ugly wife and a beautiful daughter called Camilla. Even the young officer who had arrested me was there, and he gave me a hearty slap on the back to show that there was no ill feeling on his part. (I had still a piece of plaster on my ear where he had struck me on the earlier occasion.) I think Mr. Visconti must have visited every hotel bar in town, and the most passing acquaintances[314] had been invited to bring their friends. The party was to be his apotheosis. After it no one would ever care to remember the former Mr. Visconti who had lain sick and impoverished in a mean hotel by the yellow Victorian station.

The great gates had been cleaned of rust and flung open; the chandeliers sparkled in the sala, lights were turned on in even the empty rooms, while coloured globes had been strung from tree to tree and over the boards of the dance-floor laid on the grass. On the terrace two musicians tuned a guitar and a harp. O’Toole was there, the Czech who had failed to sell two million plastic straws had brought his wife from the Hotel Guaraní, and suddenly I saw moving inconspicuously through the crowd and disappearing again as though into some warren in the garden the export-import merchant who had shared our table on the boat, grey and thin, twitching his rabbit nose. On the lawn the ox steamed and crackled on its iron frame, and the smell of roasting meat chased away the perfume of orange and jasmine.

My memories of the party are very confused, perhaps because I helped myself rather liberally to champagne before dinner. There were more women than men, as so often happens in Paraguay, where the male population has been reduced by two terrible wars, and I found myself on more than one occasion dancing or speaking with the beautiful Camilla. The musicians played mainly polkas and galops, the steps of which were unknown to me, and I was astonished to see how my aunt and Mr. Visconti picked them up on the spot by a kind of second nature[315]. Whenever I looked among the dancers, on the lawn or in the sala, they were there. Camilla who could speak very little English tried in vain to teach me: it was too much a matter of duty on her part for me to respond. I said, “I am glad I am not in prison tonight.”

“How?”

“That young man over there put me in a cell[316].”

“How?”

“Do you see this plaster? That’s where he hit me.”

I was trying to make light conversation, but when there was a pause in the music she hastened away.