Читать книгу Uncle Rudolf - Paul Bailey - Страница 16

—Annie burns the toast to perfection, said Uncle Rudolf in the old language. I have trained her well.

It was at breakfast, on my third day in England, that he announced he had to visit Paris. Urgent business. A chance to sing, perhaps, at the Opéra. He wished he could take me with him, but it would not be fun for me, waiting in some lonely hotel room for an uncle who was engaged elsewhere. Annie and Teddy would keep me amused, and Charlie would drive me around London, showing me all of the sights, and he would call me on the telephone, speaking the words we both understood. I was not to be worried or upset. He would be back with me by Friday, at the very latest. I was in safe hands.

Those safe hands were Annie’s, Teddy’s and Charlie’s – my uncle’s doting servants. I sat in the kitchen with the perspiring Annie, watching as she prepared the food that was so different from anything Mama had cooked for me; and I walked with Teddy Grubb to the bank that was proud to have Rudolf Peterson’s custom, and where I was given a freshly minted pound note by the cashier, and then I was Charlie’s happy passenger for an entire rainy afternoon, seeing nothing of the promised sights but revelling in the fact – the unlikely fact – that I was in a car the like of which the people in our town would not have believed existed.

I rode in state that day, I realize, and innumerable times after. The Debt Collector’s grandson might have been a prince, to look at him.

What I remember – what I cannot fail to remember in the light of what I was to learn – of that first telephone conversation with my uncle is that he did not tell me the truth. It was part of his deceitful plan to save me for as long as possible from griefs I was too young to bear. He sounded buoyant as he told me he had been in the company of a beautiful woman. Paris was the place for beautiful women.

He brought me back a souvenir. It was a model of the Eiffel Tower, from the top of which, thirteen years later, he and I would survey the city he had arrived in thirty years earlier with the intention of becoming the finest lyric tenor in the world.