Заметки к истории болезни [Notes for a Case History ru/en]

Потом медленно повесила трубку. Он ее подвел. Он велел ей и молча, и словами опомниться, стать человеком, а теперь взял и подвел.

Успокоившись, Морин позвонила Стэнли.

Стэнли подошел, она приветливо сказала: «Хэлло!»

Молчание. Она слышала его частое дыхание. Ей представилось его оскорбленное лицо.

— Ну что ж, так и будем молчать? — Ей хотелось говорить непринужденно, но она расслышала в своем голосе страх — да, она могла потерять и, наверное, уже потеряла его. Чтобы скрыть свой ужас, она сказала: — Неужели ты шуток не понимаешь? — И засмеялась.

— Шуток?!

Она опять засмеялась. Ничего, вышло довольно естественно.

— Я думал, ты рехнулась, совсем спятила…

Он тяжело дышал в трубку. Она вспомнила его горячее дыхание на своей шее и руках, и ее дыхание участилось в ответ, хотя думала она при этом: «Я его не люблю, совсем не люблю», и кротко произнесла:

— Ну, Стэн, ну, я просто валяла дурака.

Молчание. Осторожно, настает переломный момент.

— Стэн, ну как ты не понимаешь, иначе было бы такое занудство, правда!

И засмеялась опять.

— Очень мило по отношению к родителям, ничего не скажешь.

— Да ну, им все равно. Когда ты ушел, они так хохотали, хотя сначала разозлились. — Она торопливо добавила, чтобы он не подумал, что они смеялись над ним: — Они уже привыкли, правда.

Еще одна долгая пауза. Она сосредоточила всю силу воли, чтобы растопить этот холод. Но он молчал и только пыхтел в трубку.

— Стэнли, я же просто пошутила, ну скажи, что ты больше не сердишься?

Теперь в ее голосе угадывались слезы, она прикинула, что так будет лучше.

Поколебавшись, он сказал:

— Знаешь, Морин, мне это как-то не понравилось, я не люблю таких шуточек.

Она разрешила себе еще поплакать, и вскоре он сказал, снисходительно и раздраженно даруя ей прощение:

— Ну ладно, чего уж теперь плакать, будет тебе!

Ему досадно, что он простил ее, догадалась она, потому что и сама она на его месте испытала бы то же. За последние два часа он уже бросил ее и распрощался с нею; ему было даже приятно, что он бросает ее не по своей воле. Теперь он снова свободен, и ему непременно подвернется что-нибудь получше, он встретит девушку, которая не станет нагонять на него страх выходками вроде сегодняшней.

— Давай сходим в кино, Стэн…Даже теперь он колебался. Наконец обронил торопливо и неохотно:

— Ну ладно. Лестер-скуэр, перед «Одеоном», в семь часов. — И бросил трубку.

Обычно он подъезжал за ней на угол в машине.

Она стояла и улыбалась, а слезы текли у нее по щекам. Она знала, что плачет по Тони, который ее так подвел. Она вернулась домой подправить грим, думая о том, что она во власти Стэнли: теперь равновесие нарушено, перевес на его стороне.

Notes for a Case History

Maureen Watson was born at 93 Nelsons Way, N.I., in 1942. She did not remember the war, or rather, when people said 'The War,' she thought of Austerity: couponed curtains, traded clothes, the half-pound of butter swapped for the quarter of tea. (Maureen's parents preferred tea to butter.) Further back, at the roots of her life, she felt a movement of fire and shadow, a leaping and a subsidence of light. She did not know whether this was a memory or a picture she had formed, perhaps from what her parents had told her of the night the bomb fell two streets from Nelson's Way and they had all stood among piles of smoking rubble for a day and night, watching firemen hose the flames. This feeling was not only of danger, but of fatality, of being helpless before great impersonal forces; and was how she most deeply felt, saw, or thought an early childhood which the social viewer would describe perhaps like this:

Maureen Watson, conceived by chance on an unexpected grant-ed-at-the-last-minute leave, at the height of the worst war in history, infant support of a mother only occasionally upheld (the chances of war deciding) by a husband she had met in a bomb shelter during an air raid: poor baby, born into a historical upheaval which destroyed forty million and might very well have destroyed her. As for Maureen, her memories and the reminiscences of her parents made her dismiss the whole business as boring, and nothing to do with her.

It was at her seventh birthday party she first made this clear. She wore a mauve organdie frock with a pink sash, and her golden hair was in ringlets. One of the mothers said: 'This is the first unrationed party dress my Shirley has had. It's a shame, isn't it?' And her own mother said: 'Well of course these war children don't know what they've missed.' At which Maureen said: I am not a war child.' What are you then, love?' said her mother, fondly exchanging glances.

'I'm Maureen,' said Maureen.

'And I'm Shirley,' said Shirley, joining cause.

Shirley Banner was Maureen's best friend. The Watsons and the Banners were better than the rest of the street. The Watsons lived in an end house, at higher weekly payments. The Banners had a sweets-paper-and- tobacco shop.

Maureen and Shirley remembered (or had they been told?) that once Nelson's Way was a curved terrace of houses. Then the ground-floor level had broken into shops: a grocers, laundry, a hardware, a baker, a dairy. It seemed as if every second family in the street ran a shop to supply certain defined needs of the other families. What other needs were there? Apparently none; for Maureen's parents applied for permission to the Council, and the ground floor of their house became a second grocery shop, by way of broken-down walls, new shelves, a deepfreeze. Maureen remembered two small rooms, each with flowered curtains where deep shadows moved and flickered from the two small fires that burned back to back in the centre wall that divided them. These two rooms disappeared in clouds of dust from which sweet-smelling planks of wood stuck out. Strange but friendly men paid her compliments on her golden corkscrews and asked her for kisses, which they did not get. They gave her sips of sweet tea from their canteens (filled twice a day by her mother) and made her bracelets of the spiralling fringes of yellow wood. Then they disappeared. There was the new shop. Maureen's Shop. Maureen went with her mother to the sign shop to arrange for these two words to be written in yellow paint on a blue ground.

Even without the name, Maureen would have known that the shop was connected with hopes for her future; and that her future was what her mother lived for.

She was pretty. She had always known it. Even where the shadows of fire and dark were, they had played over a pretty baby. 'You were such a pretty baby, Maureen.' And at the birthday parties: 'Maureen's growing really pretty, Mrs Watson.' But all babies and little girls are pretty, she knew that well enough… no, it was something more. For Shirley was plump, dark — pretty. Yet their parents' — or rather, their mothers' — talk had made it clear from the start that Shirley was not in the same class as Maureen.

When Maureen was ten there was an episode of importance. The two mothers were in the room above Maureen's Shop and they were brushing their little girl's hair out. Shirley's mother said: 'Maureen could do really well for herself, Mrs Watson.' And Mrs Watson nodded, but sighed deeply. The sigh annoyed Maureen, because it contradicted the absolute certainty that she felt (it had been bred into her) about her future. Also because it had to do with the boring era which she remembered, or thought she did, as a tiger-striped movement of fire. Chance: Mrs Watsons sigh was like a prayer to the gods of Luck: it was the sigh of a small helpless thing being tossed about by big seas and gales. Maureen made a decision, there and then, that she had nothing in common with the little people who were prepared to be helpless and tossed about. For she was going to be quite different. She was already different. Not only The War but the shadows of war had long gone, except for talk in the newspapers which had nothing to do with her. The shops were full of