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

O’Toole came towards us and I saw a chance of escaping, for I was feeling very tired and my ear hurt. I said, “This is Maria. She is studying English literature like your daughter.” He was a sad and serious man. They would get on well together. It was nearly two in the morning. I wanted to find some unobtrusive corner where I could sleep awhile, but half-way across the lawn I found the Czech in conversation with Mr. Visconti. Mr. Visconti said, “Henry, we have an offer.”

“An offer?”

“This gentleman has two million plastic straws which he would let us have at half the cost price.”

“That’s nearly the whole population of Paraguay,” I said.

“I am not thinking of Paraguay.”

The Czech said with a smile, “If you could persuade them to drink maté through a plastic straw…” He wasn’t taking the business discussion very seriously, but I could see that Mr. Visconti’s imagination had taken wing[317] – I was reminded of Aunt Augusta when she began to embroider one of her anecdotes. It was probably the sound of that very round de luxe number – two million – that had excited Mr. Visconti.

He said, “I was thinking of Panama. If our agent there could get them into the Canal Zone. Think of all those American sailors and tourists…”

“Do American sailors take soft drinks?” the Czech asked.

“Have you never heard,” Mr. Visconti said, “that beer is much more intoxicating drunk through a straw?”

“Surely that is only a legend.”

“There speaks a Protestant,” Mr. Visconti said. “Any Catholic knows that a legend which is believed has the same value and effect as the truth. Look at the cult of the saints.”

“But the Americans may be Protestants.”

“Then we produce medical evidence. That is the modern form of the legend. The toxic effect of imbibing alcohol through a straw. There is a Doctor Rodriguez here who would help me. The statistics of cancer of the liver. Suppose we could persuade the Panama government to prohibit the sale of straws with alcoholic drink. The straws would be sold illicitly from under the counter. The demand would be tremendous. Remote danger is a great attraction. From the profits I would found the Visconti Research Institute…”

“But these are plastic straws.”

“We can call them cured straws; there will be articles showing that the cure is quite useless like filters on cigarettes.”

I left the two of them to their discussion. As I skirted the dance-floor I saw my aunt dancing the galop with the Chief of Police: nothing seemed to tire her. The Chief’s daughter Camilla was in the arms of the customs officer, but the dancers had thinned out and a car with a CD plate was driving away.

I found a chair in the yard behind the kitchen, where a few crates of furniture still remained unopened, and almost immediately I fell asleep. 1 dreamt that the rabbit-nosed man was feeling my pulse and telling Mr. Visconti that I was dead of the fluke – whatever that might mean. I tried to speak out to prove that I was alive, but Mr. Visconti commanded some shadowy figures in the background, in a jumbled phrase from Maud, to bury me deeper, only a little deeper. I tried to cry out to my aunt, who stood there pregnant in a bathing dress, holding Mr. Visconti’s hand, and I woke gasping for breath and for words and heard the sound of the harp and the guitar playing on.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly four. Sunrise was not far off, the lights had been turned out in the garden, and the flowers seemed to breathe their scent more deeply in the small chill of the dawn. I felt oddly elated to be alive, and I knew in a moment of decision that I would never see Major Charge again, nor the dahlias, the empty urn, the packet of Omo on the doorstep or a letter from Miss Keene. I walked down towards the little wood of fruit trees nursing my decision close to my heart – I think even then I knew there would be a price to pay for it.The dancers who remained must all be in the sala now, for the lawn was empty, and there were no cars left outside the gates so far as I could see, though I heard the sound of one receding down the road towards the city. Again lines from Maud came to mind in the early sweet-scented morning: “Low on the sand and loud on the stone the last wheel echoes away.” It was as though I were safely back in the Victorian world where I had been taught by my father’s books to feel more at home than in our modern day. The wood sloped down towards the road and up again to the back gate, and as I entered the little hollow I trod on something hard. I stooped down and picked the object up. It was Wordsworth’s knife. The tool for taking stones out of a horse’s hoof was open – perhaps he had meant to open the blade and in his hurry he had made an error. I struck a match and before the flame went out I saw the body on the ground and the black face starred with white orange petals, which had been blown from the trees in the small breeze of early morning.