Читать книгу The Book of Rapture - Nikki Gemmell - Страница 30

Motl became someone else after the soldiers left. He appeared in the kitchen with pyjamas poking from trouser legs and his old green sneakers without socks. He spray-painted I BET YOU MISS above the basketball hoop on the garage. He strode around the house with a book by Kafka like a vicar with a Bible clutched at his chest. He chopped onions while wearing swimming goggles and muttered under his breath.

‘Don’t worry,’ you said breezily to the kids, ‘Dad’s just sorting things out.’

‘Yay!’ the boys squealed. Because to them, he’s the champion at that. The chief surgeon at the toy hospital where patients are checked in overnight and by morning limbs are secured and remote controls have sprung into life.

But as you watched those onions being methodically attacked you couldn’t help throw across, ‘I prefer to cry, mate.’

‘Be quiet, be quiet, I’m thinking,’ your husband exploded.

You all went quiet. For the depth of Motl’s anger was shocking. You’d never seen it before and you thought you knew him so well. Thought, suddenly, my God, who is this man? You didn’t recognise him at all, he was someone new.

A person who the world had caught out, yes. A man whose finely crafted code of goodness, that had spined his whole life, had been overturned in the blink of an eye. He used to say that a gentleman always does the kind thing but that didn’t work any more. He was one of those old-fashioned sorts of people who was caring and polite and thought it was the proper way to exist. Mouse asked him once, as a toddler, ‘Daddy, are you from the past?’ He was the man who never told his parents he knew the tooth fairy wasn’t real because he didn’t want to hurt their feelings, who fed sparrows in his garden until they were too fat to fly, who opened doors and stood on buses and wrote thank you notes. You married him for all that. He attracted extreme people like a magnet because of his core of stability and quiet. But those types of men now seemed soft and naïve and weak. In this new, sour-spirited world, people like Motl were swallowed up. And he knew it.

Ask your heart to decide; righteousness is what the soul and the heart feel tranquil about; and sinfulness is what is fixed in the soul, and roams about in the breast.