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

“I know that. I was saying that he wanted to make life last longer. So he decided on a tour round the world (there were no currency restrictions in those days), and he began his tour curiously enough with the Simplon Orient, the train we are travelling by next week. From Turkey he planned to go to Persia, Russia, India, Malaya, Hong Kong, China, Japan, Hawaii, Tahiti, U.S.A., South America, Australia, New Zealand perhaps – somewhere he intended to take a boat home. Unfortunately he was carried off the train at Venice right at the start, on a stretcher, after a stroke.”

“How very sad.”

“It didn’t alter at all his desire for a long life. I was working in Venice at the time, and I went to see him. He had decided that if he couldn’t travel physically, he would travel mentally. He asked me if I could find him a house of three hundred and sixty-five rooms so that he could live for a day and a night in each. In that way he thought life would seem almost interminable. The fact that he had probably not long to live had only heightened his passion to extend what was left of it. I told him that, short of the Royal Palace at Naples, I doubted whether such a house existed. Even the Palace in Rome probably contained fewer rooms.”

“He could have changed rooms less frequently in a smaller house.”

“He said that then he would notice the pattern. It would be no more than he was already accustomed to, travelling between Newmarket, Epsom, Goodwood and Brighton. He wanted time to forget the room which he had left before he returned to it again, and there must be opportunity too to redecorate it in a few essentials. You know there was a brothel in Paris in the Rue de Provence between the last two wars. (Oh, I forgot. There have been many wars since, haven’t there, but they don’t seem to belong to us like those two do.) This brothel had rooms decorated in various styles – the far West, China, India, that kind of thing. Your uncle had much the same idea for his house.”

“But surely he never found one,” I exclaimed.

“In the end he was forced to compromise. I was afraid for a time that the best we could do would be twelve bedrooms – one room a month – but a short while afterwards, through one of my clients in Milan…”

“I thought you were working in Venice,” I interrupted with some suspicion.

“The business I was in,” my aunt said, “was peripatetic. We moved around – a fortnight’s season in Venice, the same in Milan, Florence and Rome, then back to Venice. It was known as la quindicina.”

“You were in a theatre company?” I asked.

“The description will serve[71 - The description will serve – (зд.) Можно и так сказать]”, my aunt said with that recurring ambiguity of hers. “You must remember I was very young in those days.”

“Acting needs no excuse.”

“I wasn’t excusing myself,” Aunt Augusta said sharply, “I was explaining. In a profession like that, age is a handicap. I was lucky enough to leave in good time. Thanks to Mr. Visconti.”

“Who was Visconti?”

“We were talking about your Uncle Jo. I found an old house in the country which had once been a palazzo or a castello[72 - palazzo, castello – (итал.) дворец, замок] or something of the kind. It was almost in ruins and there were gypsies camping in some of the lower rooms and in the cellar – an enormous cellar which ran under the whole ground floor. It had been used for wine, and there was a great empty tun abandoned there because it had cracked with age. Once there had been vineyards around the house, but an autostrada had been built right across the estate not a hundred yards from the house, and the cars ran by all day between Milan and Rome and at night the big lorries passed. A few knotted worn-out roots of old vines were all that remained. There was only one bathroom in the whole house (the water had been cut off long ago by the failure of the electric pump), and only one lavatory, on the top floor in a sort of tower, but of course there was no water there either. You can imagine it wasn’t the sort of house anyone could sell easily – it had been on the market for twenty years[73 - it had been on the market for twenty years – (зд.) он уже лет двадцать выставлен на продажу] and the owner was a mongoloid orphan in an asylum. The lawyers talked about historic values, but Mr. Visconti knew all about history as you could guess from his name. Of course he advised strongly against the purchase, but after all poor Jo was unlikely to live long and he might as well be made happy. I had counted up the rooms, and if you divided the cellar into four with partitions and included the lavatory and bathroom and kitchen, you could bring the total up to fifty-two. When I told Jo he was delighted. A room for every week in the year, he said. I had to put a bed in every one, even in the bathroom and kitchen. There wasn’t room for a bed in the lavatory, but I bought a particularly comfortable chair with a footstool, and I thought we could always leave that room to the last – I didn’t think Jo would survive long enough to reach it. He had a nurse who was to follow him from room to room, sleeping one week behind him, as it were. I was afraid he would insist on a different nurse at every stopping place, but he liked her well enough to keep her as a travelling companion.”

“What an extraordinary arrangement.”

“It worked very well. When Jo was in his fifteenth room he told me – I was back that week in Milan on my tour and I came out to see him with Mr. Visconti on my day off – that it really seemed at least a year since he had moved in. He was going on next day to the sixteenth room on the floor above with a different view and his suit-cases were all packed and ready (he insisted on everything being moved by suitcase, and I had found a second-hand one which was already decorated with labels from all kinds of famous hotels – the George V in Paris, the Quisisana in Capri, the Excelsior in Rome, Raflfes in Singapore, Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Pera Palace in Istanbul).

“Poor Jo! I’ve seldom seen a happier man. He was certain that death would not catch him before he reached the fifty-second room, and if fifteen rooms had seemed like a year, then he had several years of travel still before him. The nurse told me that about the fourth day in each room he would get a little restless with the wanderlust, and the first day in the new room he would spend more than his usual time in sleep, tired after the journey. He began in the cellar and worked his way upwards until at last he reached the top floor, and he was already beginning to talk of revisiting his old haunts. ‘We’ll take them in a different order this time,’ he said, ‘and come at them from a different direction.’ He was content to leave the lavatory to the last. ‘After all these luxury rooms,’ he said, ‘it would be fun to rough it a bit[74 - to rough it a bit – (разг.) пожить без удобств]. Roughing it keeps one young. I don’t want to be like one of those old codgers one sees in the Cunard[75 - Cunard – крупнейшая компания по организации круизов; имеет филиалы в разных частях света] travelling first-class and complaining of the caviar.’ Then it was that in the fifty-first room he had his second stroke. It paralysed him down one side and made speech difficult. I was in Venice at the time, but I got permission to leave the company for a couple of days and Mr. Visconti drove me to Jo’s palazzo. They were having a lot of difficulty with him. He had spent seven days in the fifty-first room before the stroke knocked him out, but the doctor was insisting that he remain in the same bed without a move for at least another ten days. ‘Any ordinary man,’ the doctor said to me, ‘would be content to lie still for a while.’

“‘He wants to live as long as possible,’ I told him.

“‘In that case he should stay where he is till the end. With any luck[76 - With any luck – (разг.) Если повезет] he’ll have two or three more years’.

“I told Jo what the doctor said, and he mouthed a reply. I thought I made out, ‘Not enough.’

“He stayed quiet that night and all the next morning, and the nurse believed that he had resigned himself to staying where he was. She left him sleeping and came down to my room for a cup of tea. Mr. Visconti had bought some cream cakes in Milan at the good pastry-cook’s near the cathedral. Suddenly from up the stairs there came a strange grating noise. ‘Mamma mia,’ the nurse said, ‘what’s that?’ It sounded as though someone were shifting the furniture. We ran upstairs, and what do you think? Jo Pulling was out of bed. He had fixed an old club tie of his, the Froth-blowers or the Mustard Club or something of the kind, to the handle of the suitcase because he had no strength in his legs, and he was crawling down the passage towards the lavatory tower pulling the suitcase after him. I shouted to him to stop, but he paid me no attention. It was painful to look at him, he was going so slowly, with such an effort. It was a tiled passage and every tile he crossed cost him enormous exertion. He collapsed before we reached him and lay there panting, and the saddest thing of all to me was that he made a little pool of wee-wee on the tiles. We were afraid to move him before the doctor came. We brought a pillow and put it under his head and the nurse gave him one of his pills. ‘Cattivo,’ she said in Italian, which means, ‘You bad old man,’ and he grinned at the two of us and brought out the last sentence which he ever spoke, deformed a bit but I could understand it very well. ‘Seemed like a whole lifetime,’ he said and he died before the doctor came. He was right in his way to make that last trip against the doctor’s orders. The doctor had only promised him a few years.”

“He died in the passage?” I asked.

“He died on his travels,” my aunt said in a tone of reproof. “As he would have wished.”

“‘Here he lies where he longed to be,’” I quoted in order to please my aunt, though I couldn’t help remembering that Uncle Jo had not succeeded in reaching the lavatory door.

“Home is the hunter, home from sea,” my aunt finished the quotation in her own fashion, “and the sailor home from the hill.”

***

We were silent for quite a while after that as we finished the chicken à la king. It was a little like the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day[77 - Armistice Day – 11 ноября, отмечается во многих странах как годовщина окончания Первой мировой войны (1918)]. I remembered that, when I was a boy, I used to wonder whether there was really a corpse buried there at the Cenotaph[78 - Cenotaph – памятник, воздвигнутый в Лондоне в честь погибших во время Первой мировой войны], for governments are usually economical with sentiment and try to arouse it in the cheapest possible way. A brilliant advertising slogan doesn’t need a body, a box of earth would do just as well, and now I began to wonder too about Uncle Jo. Was my aunt a little imaginative? Perhaps the stories of Jo, of my father and of my mother were not entirely true.

Without breaking the silence I took a reverent glass of Chambertin to Uncle Jo’s memory, whether he existed or not. The unaccustomed wine sang irresponsibly in my head. What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions. Hamlet is no less real now than Winston Churchill, and Jo Pulling no less historical than Don Quixote. I betrayed myself with a hiccup while I changed our plates, and with the blue cheese the sense of material problems returned.

“Uncle Jo,” I said, “was lucky to have no currency restrictions. He couldn’t have afforded to die like that on a tourist allowance.”

“They were great days,” Aunt Augusta said.

“How are we going to manage on ours?” I asked. “With fifty pounds each we shall not be able to stay very long in Istanbul.”

“Currency restrictions have never seriously bothered me”, my aunt said. “There are ways and means.[79 - There are ways and means. – (зд.) Всегда можно найти выход из положения.]”

“I hope you don’t plan anything illegal.”

“I have never planned anything illegal in my life,” Aunt Augusta said. “How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”

Chapter 8

It was my aunt herself who suggested that we should fly as far as Paris. I was a little surprised after what she had just said, for there was certainly in this case an alternative means of travel; I pointed out the inconsistency.

“There are reasons,” Aunt Augusta said. “Cogent reasons. I know the ropes[80 - know the ropes – (разг.) знаю все ходы и выходы; хорошо ориентируюсь] at Heathrow”.

I was puzzled too at her insistence that we must go to the Kensington air terminal and take the airport bus.

“It’s so easy for me,” I said, “to pick you up by car and drive you to Heathrow. You would find it much less tiring, Aunt Augusta.”

“You would have to pay an exorbitant garage fee,” she replied, and I found her sudden sense of economy unconvincing.

I arranged next day for the dahlias to be watered by my next-door neighbour, a brusque man called Major Charge. He had seen Detective-Sergeant Sparrow come to the door with the policeman, and he was bitten by curiosity. I told him it was about a motoring offence and he became sympathetic immediately. “A child murdered every week,” he said, “and all they can do is to pursue motorists.” I don’t like lies and I felt in my conscience that I ought to defend Sergeant Sparrow, who had been as good as his word and posted back the urn, registered and express.

“Sergeant Sparrow is not in homicide,” I replied, “and motorists kill more people in a year than murderers.”

“Only a lot of jaywalkers,” Major Charge said. “Cannon fodder.” However, he agreed to water the dahlias.

I picked my aunt up in the bar of the Crown and Anchor, where she was having a stirrup-cup[81 - was having a stirrup-cup – (разг.) тяпнула «на посошок»], and we drove by taxi to the Kensington terminal. I noticed that she had brought two suitcases, one very large, although, when I had asked her how long we were to stay in Istanbul, she had replied, “Twenty-four hours.”

“It seems a short stay after such a long journey.”

“The point is the journey,” my aunt had replied. “I enjoy the travelling not the sitting still.”

Even Uncle Jo, I argued, had put up with each room in his house for a whole week.

“Jo was a sick man,” she said, “while I am in the best of health.” Since we were travelling first-class (which seemed again an unnecessary luxury between London and Paris) we had no overweight, although the larger of her suitcases was unusually heavy. While we were sitting in the bus I suggested to my aunt that the garage fee for my car would probably have been cheaper than the difference between first and tourist fares. “The difference,” she said, “is nearly wiped out by the caviar and the smoked salmon, and surely between us we can probably put away half a bottle of vodka. Not to speak of the champagne and cognac. In any case, I have more important reasons for travelling by bus.”

As we approached Heathrow she put her mouth close to my ear. “The luggage,” she said, “is in a trailer behind.”