Читать онлайн «Holiday»
Автор Stanley Middleton
Contents
About the Author
Also by Stanley Middleton
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Copyright
About the Author
Stanley Middleton was joint winner of the Booker Prize with
Also by Stanley Middleton
Holiday
Stanley Middleton
1
Light shimmered along the polished pews as the congregation heaved itself to its feet, hailing the Lord’s Anointed. Grain arrows waved darkly in the wood under the coating of shellac, the brightness of elbow-grease. Brass umbrella-holders gleamed, but the metal rectangle to house the name of the pew’s occupier had been allowed to blacken in disuse.
Edwin Fisher glanced at his hymn book as he listened to the voice of the woman next to him. ‘He comes,’ she sang, ‘with succour speedy, And bid the weak be strong. ’ Her voice pierced, and she enunciated without inhibition so that a boy and a girl two rows forward turned round to stare at her. Their mother gently handled them back to propriety.
Fisher hummed, not opening his mouth. The walls of the church stood white, thick, while the narrow, pointed windows were leaded into small diamonds of cleanish glass.
Above his head the gallery stretched, supported on metal pillars in regency blue. Typically, he smiled to himself, the chaste colours of the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries applied, not without success, in this Victorian building intended for dark browns and country cream. The woman next door lifted her head as sunshine caught the hair of the small boy who, now climbing on to his seat, leaned against his mother, tried to finger her hymn-book. ‘Love, joy, hope, like flowers, Spring in His path to birth. ’The congregation, Fisher guessed from the rear, were almost all middle-aged or elderly, and the majority women, in flowered hats, bonnets of convoluted ribbon and pale summer coats. Holiday-makers enjoying a full church, hearty singing, a popular preacher. There was, he noticed, no choir to speak of; two girls, an old lady and a grey-haired man occupied the stalls in front of the organ. Fisher did not like this: nonconformity as he recalled it demanded a large, fractious choir, bossy with prima donnas’ whispers, to drill the congregation’s singing into disciplined enthusiasm. The members here must be themselves on holiday or at home in the boarding houses laying the tables, basting joints.
