Читать книгу The Vivero Letter - Desmond Bagley, Desmond Bagley - Страница 11

I spent that night alone at Hay Tree Farm. Perhaps I should have stayed at the Cott and saved myself a lot of misery, but I didn’t. Instead I wandered through the silent rooms, peopled with the shadowy figures of memories, and grew more and more depressed.

I was the last of the Wheales – there was no one else. No uncles or aunts or cousins, no sisters or brothers – just me. This echoing, empty house, creaking with the centuries, had witnessed a vast procession down the years – a pageant of Wheales – Elizabethan, Jacobean, Restoration, Regency, Victorian, Edwardian. The little patch of England around the house had been sweated over by Wheales for more than four centuries in good times and bad, and now it all sharpened down to a single point – me. Me – a grey little man in a grey little job.

It wasn’t fair!

I found myself standing in Bob’s room. The bed was still dishevelled where I had whipped away the blankets to cover him and I straightened it almost automatically, smoothing down the counterpane. His dressing-table was untidy, as it always had been, and stuck in the crack up one side of the mirror was his collection of unframed photographs – one of our parents, one of me, one of Stalwart, the big brute of a horse that was his favourite mount, and a nice picture of Elizabeth. I pulled that one down to get a better look and something fluttered to the top of the dressing-table.

I picked it up. It was Halstead’s card which Hannaford had spoken of. I looked at it listlessly. Paul Halstead. Avenida Quintillana 1534. Mexico City.

The telephone rang, startlingly loud, and I picked it up to hear the dry voice of Mr Mount. ‘Hello, Jeremy,’ he said. ‘I just thought I’d tell you that you have no need to worry about the funeral arrangements. I’ll take care of all that for you.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ I said, and then choked up.

‘Your father and I were very good friends,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think I’ve ever told you that if he hadn’t married your mother, then I might have done so.’ He rang off and the phone went dead.

I slept that night in my own room, the room I had always had ever since I was a boy. And I cried myself to sleep as I had not done since I was a boy.