Читать «Endless Night / Бесконечная ночь. Книга для чтения на английском языке» онлайн - страница 7

I just stood there, feeling queer as though something very unusual had happened to me. Those fancy shoes now, I’d have liked them to wear. I mean I take quite a bit of trouble with my clothes. I like to dress well so as to make an impression, but I never seriously thought in my life of buying a pair of shoes in Bond Street. I know the kind of fancy prices they ask there. Fifteen pounds a pair those shoes might be. Hand-made or something, they call it, making it more worthwhile for some reason. Sheer waste of money that would be. А classy line in shoes, yes, but you can pay too much for class. I’ve got my head screwed on the right way.

But this picture, what would that cost? I wondered.

Suppose I were to buy that picture? You’re crazy, I said to myself. You don’t go for pictures, not in a general way. That was true enough. But I wanted this picture… I’d like it to be mine. I’d like to be able to hang it and sit and look at it as long as I liked and know that I owned it! Me! Buying pictures. It seemed a crazy idea. I took a look at the picture again. Me wanting that picture didn’t make sense, and anyway, I probably couldn’t afford it. Actually I was in funds at just that moment. А lucky tip on a horse. This picture would probably cost a packet. Twenty pounds? Twenty-five? Anyway, there would be no harm in asking. They couldn’t eat me, could they? I went in, feeling rather aggressive and on the defensive.

The inside of the place was all very hushed and grand. There was a sort of muted atmosphere with neutral-colour walls and a velvet settee on which you could sit and look at the pictures. А man who looked a little like the model for the perfectly dressed man in advertisements came and attended to me, speaking in a rather hushed voice to match the scenery. Funnily, he didn’t look superior as they usually do in high-grade Bond Street shops. He listened to what I said and then he took the picture out of the window and displayed it for me against a wall, holding it there for me to look at as long as I wanted. It came to me then – in the way you sometimes know just exactly how things are, that the same rules didn’t apply over pictures as they do about other things. Somebody might come into a place like this dressed in shabby old clothes and a frayed shirt and turn out to be a millionaire who wanted to add to his collection. Or he could come in looking cheap and flashy, rather like me perhaps, but somehow or other he’d got such a yen for a picture that he managed to get the money together by some kind of sharp practice.

‘A very fine example of the artist’s work,’ said the man who was holding the picture.

‘How much?’ I said briskly.

The answer took my breath away.

‘Twenty-five thousand,’ he said in his gentle voice.

I’m quite good at keeping a poker face. I didn’t show anything. At least I don’t think I did. He added some name that sounded foreign. The artist’s name, I suppose, and that it had just come on the market from a house in the country, where the people who lived there had had no idea what it was. I kept my end up and sighed.