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Читать онлайн «Falling Slowly»

Автор Анита Брукнер

ANITA BROOKNER Falling Slowly

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

PENGUIN BOOKS

FALLING SLOWLY

Anita Brookner was born in London in 1928, spent some postgraduate years in Paris and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. Of her novels, Penguin publish Lewis Percy, A Start in Life, Brief Lives, Hotel du Lac, A Closed Eye, Providence, Family and Friends, Look at Me, Fraud, A Family Romance, A Private View, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Altered States, Visitors and Falling Slowly.

1

On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who still thought of herself as Miriam Sharpe, paused as usual to examine the pictures in the windows of the Duke Street galleries. She hoped one day to find the image she unconsciously sought, without knowing why she sought it, something to lift the spirits, to transport her on an imaginary journey, to give a hint of the transcendence which was so blatantly lacking in her everyday life of words and paper. Today there was a Dutch flower piece, badly darkened by age and varnish, and a portrait of an Elizabethan boy, snug in his ruff, his lashless eyes denoting a childhood of unchildish amusements – nothing, in short, to appeal to the vague restlessness she always felt before settling down to another silent day’s work. But further down the street, in a gallery specializing in images of the nineteenth century destined for easy consumption – girls in frills on swings, neat northern townscapes – she found something to her taste, a smoky winter scene by an artist of whom she had never heard, Eugène Laloue. It was clearly signed at the lower left, and on the frame a small brass plate proclaimed; ‘Place du Châtelet under Snow’. She looked closer, drawn in by the dirty yellow sky, smoky where it met the roofs of the buildings, under which she could imagine herself trudging home after a cold day. That yellow sky supplied its own illumination, although there were lights on in the buildings to the left, and even in a shop, too small to be of much consequence but surprising in this vaguely affluent setting. On the ground snow had been puddled into water by passing feet; it dusted the tops of the street lamps and the bench on which no one would sit. Groups of people stood waiting for the horse-drawn omnibus which could be seen approaching in the distance. In the centre of the picture a mother in a long black coat and a large black hat guided a dressed-up child to the nearer pavement. All this was suitably animated. But what continued to draw the eye was the yellow sky, lit from beneath as by a bonfire, stronger, stranger than the human crowd below. Somewhere, in the remote distance, a flag flew.

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