Читать онлайн «The Separation»

The Separation

Christopher Priest 

Part One: 1999 

1

The rain was falling steadily on Buxton that Thursday afternoon in March, the town veiled by drifting low clouds, grey and discouraging. Stuart Gratton was sitting at a small table in the brightly lit bookshop window with his back to the street, but from time to time he turned to look outside at the slow-moving cars and trucks, the pedestrians splashing along with their faces averted, umbrellas low over their shoulders.

On the table before him was a glass of wine which he had almost finished drinking and next to it a half-empty half-bottle of hock. Beside the wine glass was a narrow-necked flute, with a single red rose standing upright in the water. On the table to his right was a pile of unsold copies of his most recent hardcover book, The Exhausted Rage, an oral history of the experiences of some of the men who took part in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. To his left, on the edge of the table, were two smaller piles of unsold copies of his books, both paperback editions reissued to coincide with the new hardcover. One of the titles was The Last Day of War, the book published in 1981 which had established his reputation and which had been in print more or less ever since. The other was called The Silver Dragons, another oral history, this one recounted by some of the soldiers and airmen who took part in the Sino-American War in the mid-1940s.

His ballpoint pen lay on the table next to his hand.

The manager of the bookshop, an attentive and clearly embarrassed man whose name Gratton remembered only as Rayner, was standing beside him when the signing session had begun, half an hour earlier, but he had been called away to attend to other business a few minutes before. Now Gratton could see him on the far side of the shop, apparently involved in some problem with the till or PC. The area manager from his publishers, who was supposed to come along to support Gratton at the signing, had called on his mobile to say there had been a traffic accident on the M1 and that he was going to be late.

The bookshop, situated in a side street but close to the main department and chain-stores in the centre of Buxton, was not busy. People came in from the rain from time to time, looked curiously at him and at the poster on the wall beside him announcing his signing, but none of them seemed interested in buying any of his books. One or two of them even shied away when they realized why he was sitting there.

It had not been like this when the signing began: two or three people had been waiting for him, including a friend of his, Doug Robinson, who had magnanimously driven over from his home in Sheffield to give moral support. Doug even bought one of the paperbacks, saying he needed to replace his old, worn-out copy. Gratton gratefully signed that, as well as the copies requested by the other customers, but now all of them were gone. By arrangement, Doug would be waiting for him in the bar of The Thistle, two doors down from the bookshop. Rayner, the manager, had asked him to sign some extra copies, a few ‘for stock’, and three or four more for mail-order customers who had ordered the books in advance, but in effect that was that. Somewhere, somehow, people must be buying his books because his work attracted consistently good sales and in his field Gratton was considered a leading author. However, few of his readers appeared to be in Buxton during that afternoon of dismal rain.