Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 29

Jim rang me from Liverpool but whatever had passed between him and Eric had cut deep and he was too proud to come back. ‘It's the strangest thing,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking I see you.’ And it was the strangest thing – I didn't keep thinking I saw him, but I did feel like he was seeing me, or a ghost of me I had shed and seen on to a northbound train at Euston.

London felt empty. Down none of the fifty-five thousand streets of the city was a long yellow coat moving quickly. Somewhere, on one of them, was Wilson, if Wilson was alive. How strange men were, how unanchored, that they contained within them this show-stopping coup de théâtre. They could disappear. It was the male miracle, this neat erasure, this tidy and total cancelling, the negative of giving birth. Men had secret powers. They were private in a way that women weren't. They seemed to know something we didn't about voids. They were amazing.