[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Do you think I'm getting old?'
'Positively ancient, Ken.'
'Thanks. How're the twins?'
'Oh, glowing.'
'Still taking them to Windscale for their hols then, are you?'
'Ha! Oh, Ken, you're still so comparatively witty.'
'Have you tried switching it on?' Fergus suggested, squatting on the floor in
front of the dishwasher again. His voice echoed inside the machine as he tried
to stick his head inside amongst the racks.
'Don't be catty, Ferg,' Fiona told him. She smiled at her brother. 'Haven't
seen young Rory out here for a while, and he never calls us; he okay?'
'Still in that squat in Camden, last we heard, living off his ill-gotten
sub-continental gains.'
'A squat?' Fergus said, words muffled. 'Thought he made a packet on that. . .
travel book thingy.'
'He did,' Ken nodded.
'About India, wasn't it?'
'Yep.'
'Ferg,' Fiona said, exasperated. 'You bought the book, remember?'
'Of course I remember,' Fergus said, reaching into the dishwasher to fiddle
with something.
'Just haven't read it, that's all. Who needs to read a book to find out about
Page 45
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
India? Just go to bloody Bradford . . . What's he doing living in a squat?
Ken ground his teeth for a second, looking appraisingly at Fergus's ample
rear. He shrugged.
'He just likes living with the people there. He's a social animal, Ferg.'
'Have to be a bloody animal to live in a squat,' Fergus muttered, echoing.
'Hoi, don't be horrible about my brother,' Fiona said, and tapped Fergus's
backside with her foot.
Fergus glanced quickly round and glared at her, his plump, slightly reddened
face suddenly
file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20The%20Crow%20Road.txt (35 of
187) [5/21/03 1:52:23 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20The%20Crow%20Road.txt grim.
Kenneth felt his sister stiffen next to him. Then Fergus gave a little
wavering smile, and with a quiet grunt turned back to the opened machine and
its instruction booklet. Fiona relaxed again.
Kenneth wondered if things were really all right with the couple. He thought
he sensed a tension between them sometimes, and a couple of years earlier, not
long after the twins had been born, he'd thought Fergus and Fiona had seemed
distinctly cold towards each other. He had worried for them, and he and Mary
had discussed it, wondering what might have caused this unhappiness, and if
there was anything they could do (they had decided there wasn't, not unless
they were asked).
Still, he had tried broaching the subject with Fergus once, after a dinner
party, while they nursed whiskies in the conservatory of the old Urvill house
and watched the lights of the navigation buoys and lighthouses scattered
around and through the Sound of Jura as they winked on and off.
Fergus hadn't wanted to talk. Mary had had no more success with Fiona. And
anyway it had all seemed to come gradually right again.
Maybe I'm just jealous, he thought to himself, as Fiona pulled away from him
and went to the big new Aga, sitting squat, cream and gleaming against one
wall of whitewashed stone. She put a hand over part of the cooker's surface,
gauging the heat. The silence in the kitchen went on.
Kenneth had never given Freud much credence; mainly because he had looked as
honestly into himself as he could, found much that was not to his taste, found
a little that was even just plain bad, but nothing much that fitted with what
Freud's teachings said he ought to find. Still, he wondered if he did resent
Fergus, at least partly because he had taken his sister away, made her his.
Well, you never knew, he supposed. Maybe everybody's theories were right,
maybe the whole world and every person, and all their relationships within it
were utterly bound up with one another in an intricate, entangled web of cause
and effect and underlying motive and hidden principle. Maybe all the
philosophers and all the psychologists and all the theoreticians were right .
. . but he wasn't entirely sure that any of it made much difference.
'Mary and the kids with you?' Fiona said, turning from the Aga to look at him.
'Taking in the view from the battlements,' Kenneth told her.
'Good,' she nodded. She glanced at her husband. 'We're getting an observatory,
did Ferg tell you?'
'No.' He looked, surprised, at the other man, who didn't turn round. 'No, I
didn't know. You mean a . . . a telescope; an astronomical observatory?'
'Bloody astronomically expensive,' Fergus said, voice echoing in the
dishwasher.
'Yes,' Fiona said. 'So Ferg can spend his nights star-gazing.' Mrs Urvill
looked at her husband, still squatting in front of the opened machine, with an
expression Kenneth thought might have been scorn.
'What's that, my dear?' Fergus asked, looking over at his wife, an open,
innocent expression on his face.
'Nothing,' his wife said brightly, voice oddly high.
'Hmm,' Fergus adjusted something inside the dishwasher, scratched above his
Page 46
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
ear with his pipe again. 'Jolly good.'
Kenneth looked away then, to the windows, where the rain spattered and ran.
*
Conceived in a howling gale, Verity was born - howling - in one, too. She came
into the world a month before she was due, one windy evening in August 1970,
by the shores of Loch Awe - a birth-
place whose title, Prentice at least had always thought, could hardly have
been more apt.
Her mother and father had been staying at Fergus and Fiona Urvill's house in
Gallanach for the previous two weeks, on holiday from their Edinburgh home.
For the last night of their holiday the young couple decided to visit a hotel
at Kilchrenan, an hour's drive away to the north east up the side of the loch.
They borrowed Fergus's Rover to make the journey. The bulging Charlotte had
that week developed a craving for salmon, and duly dined on salmon steaks,
preceded by strips of smoked salmon and followed by smoked salmon mousse,
which she chose in preference to a sweet. She complained of indigestion.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]