Читать книгу The Emperor Waltz - Philip Hensher - Страница 41

‘and in the end I suppose I spent about forty-eight hours on it,’ Carraway was saying. ‘It was a whole weekend, dawn till dusk, and in the end,’ he burped sadly, and looked down at his plate, smeared with rice and gravy, looked down at it with the sad realization that he had in fact told this story before, told it earlier in the same evening to the same people, wondered only whether he had told it when the fat divorced woman had been there, drawing some comfort, anyway, from the thought that one person round the table hadn’t heard it before, if he had told it before, which he wasn’t one hundred per cent sure of, ‘in the end, I was really proud of it as a piece of work.’

‘He’s an odd boy in some ways,’ Vivienne was saying on the other side of the table, not listening to Carraway at all, ‘I would say rather old-fashioned. I don’t know who he takes after. He has hobbies in the way that children, these days, don’t seem to have hobbies, real, old-fashioned hobbies. Do your boys have hobbies?’

‘Hobbies?’ Caroline Carraway said, with a sharpness in her voice. ‘What do you mean, hobbies?’

‘Oh, things to pass the time, hobbies, you know,’ Vivienne said. ‘My son has half a dozen, and a strange couple of collections, too. It seems so old-fashioned nowadays – he plays the cello and the organ, he keeps a record of the morning temperature, he’s done that for years now, since he was seven. He did all the usual things that children do, like getting obsessed with dinosaurs, only with him it was cactuses, cacti I should say, he always corrects me.’

‘No,’ Charles Carraway said heavily. ‘I don’t think Nick or Nathan do any of that, actually.’

‘Can Bina take your plate away, Vivienne?’ Shabnam Khan said.

‘This was truly delicious, Shabnam, delicious – thank you – thank you! Well, children are all so