Читать книгу The Sixth Form - Tom Dolby - Страница 10

The following Saturday afternoon, after the normal half day of classes, Ethan arrived at Hannah’s, ready to work. He had wolfed down a turkey sandwich in the dining hall and was craving something sweet. The memory of Hannah’s blueberry cobbler from several days ago had stayed with him, permanently erasing any recollection he had of his mother’s sad concoction. Hannah’s cobbler had been spicy, tinged with nutmeg, cardamom, cinnamon, and a hint of ginger; the rich, buttery crust had littered the top with its sweet wreckage, covering the layer of plump blueberries.

He rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. It was chilly outside, so he let himself in, sat down at the kitchen counter, and continued his reading of Pride and Prejudice. In the quiet of Hannah’s living room, Ethan could hear the turning of each page. He looked out onto the golf course, where a few students were playing on the third hole. From this vantage point, he felt invisible. He could go into Hannah’s bedroom, go through her drawers. He could find out things about her.

Ethan got up to take a look around, keeping one eye on the driveway where Hannah would park her car. He gravitated again to the fireplace’s mantel. There was a photograph of an older woman he thought he recognized from somewhere, though he couldn’t place her. He looked again at the pictures of the boy; they were the most contemporary of all the images. (Why, he wondered, were there not pictures of anyone else? No parents, no friends, no one, Ethan guessed, from the last fifty years or so.) But of the boy, these were recent photos. He had pale cheeks and dark brown hair, similar to Ethan’s own; his face was defiant, nearly a sneer, as if he were issuing a challenge to the person taking the photograph. It could have been Ethan’s imagination, but he appeared to have some of Hannah’s features: a thin, delicate nose, wavy hair. Perhaps he was a younger brother, or a cousin. Ethan looked again at the background of the photo taken on a street corner, picking up the frame and studying it closely. It didn’t look like an American city.

As he examined the photograph, Ethan heard Hannah’s car pull in from the road, its tires chewing on the gravel. He quickly wiped off any fingerprints with the sleeve of his sweater, replaced the frame on the mantel, and went out to greet her.

“I was out of supplies,” she said, stepping out of the car, a burgundy Peugeot convertible. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting long.”

Ethan helped her unload several sacks of groceries—sandbags of flour and sugar, two dozen eggs, three gallons of milk, baskets of blueberries, pears, apples, raisins, loaves of bread—from her car. They brought them into the kitchen, placing them on the counter. Ethan helped her put away the groceries as Hannah explained how she wanted her books organized. There were several hundred of them in the shelves in the living room, and even more in her study.

“I want them all in order,” she said. “Nonfiction by subject matter, fiction by author.”

Ethan examined the shelves. They were all mixed up: fiction, biography, history, criticism.

“How do you find things now?” he asked.

“I know where most things are, more or less. But I hate not being able to find something quickly when I need it. When I moved in, I couldn’t deal with sorting it all out. Too many memories.” She took a volume from the shelf, a copy of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. “This, for example, I remember reading this in Paris, when Alain and I first met.”

“Alain?”

“My husband. Ex-husband, I guess.”

Ethan nodded.

“God, I love that city—the tea shops, the flea markets, the book stalls on the river. I miss it so much!”

“What were you doing in Paris?”

She paused. “I think that’s a story for another time.”

Ethan wasn’t sure how to respond, so he started sorting through the volumes. The project could take several weeks, but he didn’t mind. He liked being part of her world, seeing what she read, what inhabited her imagination. The books varied in size and shape. Some were contemporary fiction, with colorful covers. Others were older copies of the classics. Mixed in were pulp fiction, books on painting, theater, opera.

The sun started setting, and Ethan realized he had been working for almost four hours. The time had gone quickly, and he was pleased with his progress. It was only sorting books, but it gave him a feeling of accomplishment. He was doing something separate from his studies at Berkley, something no other student was privy to.

Hannah had been working in her study, tapping away at her laptop. She came into the living room and sat on the armrest of one of the club chairs. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “Shall I make us some dinner? I have an apple pie for dessert.”

“I should really be getting to the dining hall.”

There was a look of longing in her face, as if he might disappoint her terribly if he left now. “This’ll be more fun. And I promise it will taste better.”

“Oh, of course,” Ethan said, blushing. He knew she was an excellent cook. But how had sorting books turned into an invitation for dinner?

In twenty minutes, the meal was ready. She had made a salad and pasta with fresh pesto and chopped tomatoes.

“This looks amazing,” Ethan said.

“It’s nothing,” Hannah said, as she poured herself a glass of red wine. “Help yourself to a soda.” Ethan got himself a Coke from the refrigerator, and the two of them sat down to eat.

“You know,” Hannah said after a few bites, “the students at Berkley aren’t the same anymore. They used to be wonderful. We would hang out here all the time, after classes, whenever.”

Ethan nodded, not sure what she was getting at.

“You and Todd are more like the kids I used to be friends with.” She pulled her blond hair out of its ponytail, shook it out, and then reattached the band she had been using to hold it together.

Ethan noticed how attractive she looked with her hair down. Her eyes stood out: blue, flecked with hazel, like the speckled wing of a butterfly. He imagined her as an angel in a Renaissance fresco.

He looked down at his plate and continued eating.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m probably embarrassing you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, through a bite of pasta. “I’m not—I don’t feel too similar to any of them, really. Even Todd. I wish I were more like them. They’re so relaxed about everything. Like they’ve got it all together.”

“There’s a saying, ‘You don’t want to peak when you’re sixteen.’ And you don’t want to peak at seventeen or eighteen, either. All these kids—the ones who seem so cool, especially—they’re not the ones who are going to make a difference in the world. They’re having their moment now, and then they’re going to get ordinary jobs, and marry ordinary people, and have ordinary families. You’re not like that. You want something more from your life.”

Ethan nodded. “I don’t know. Sometimes, with Todd, it’s like nothing bothers him.”

“Please,” Hannah said. “He’s as insecure as they come. Underneath all that bravado, he’s just like you.”

Her frankness surprised him, though perhaps she was right. Maybe the only difference between Todd and him was confidence. And confidence could be learned, couldn’t it?

Ethan realized he had inhaled his food.

“How about a piece of apple pie?”

He nodded a yes.

“Good,” she said. “We can’t have you getting too skinny, can we?” She patted him on the shoulder as she got up.

The pie sat on the kitchen counter, its crust sprinkled with powdered sugar that crawled across its surface like a tiny trail of white ants. Ethan excused himself to use the bathroom while Hannah put on a pot of tea. Her first-floor powder room smelled of scented soaps and bath salts. He noticed that the set of blue towels on the rack was monogrammed with the initials H.M.R.

When he returned to the kitchen, Hannah had cut herself a thin slice of pie, and a fat one for Ethan.

“They say you should never trust a thin chef,” Hannah said, coming back to the table with their plates. “I’m hoping I’m the exception to that rule.”

Ethan kept eating until he had finished every last crumb.

After leaving Hannah’s house, he cut across the golf course toward his dorm, the autumn breeze crisp against his cheeks. He was the only Berkley student experiencing this taste of the outside world, of life beyond the brick gates of the school. He had wanted to say something to Hannah when he left her house, to let her know what this job meant to him, how much he appreciated that she seemed to understand him. But he hadn’t been sure how to put those feelings into words. He took one more breath of the fresh night air and ducked into the back entrance to his dorm.

As Ethan made his way up to the third floor, he had none of the familiar anxieties of where he was going to hang out on a Saturday night, whether he would have people to talk to. In a burst of warmth, he felt his life sprawl forward in a great parade of possibilities: meeting his true love in a bookshop in New Haven, working as an artist in New York, visiting friends who lived in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire. Some of these things might happen; some of them might not. It didn’t matter, for it was suddenly all there for the taking, as if the world had offered itself to him, as if he had found a door, and needed only to open it to be let in.