Old Flames by John Lawton

Author:John Lawton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: blt, UK
ISBN: 9781611859911
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 1996-03-29T13:00:00+00:00

§48

Warriss heard him out in silence. Troy asked for the house-to-house, and for flyers to be posted. Warriss nodded, and when Troy had finished said simply, ‘Fine. When are you leaving?’

§49

He left on the next train. Half an hour sitting on a bench in front of the Swiss-style waiting room on the up platform, watching Oliver Hardy tend a flowerbed, bent over his charges, as far as his bulk would allow bending, clutching a trowel and tossing the weeds behind him onto the platform. He spoke not a word to Troy—Troy concluded he spoke to no one, but he thought it a great pleasure to watch a man delight quietly in his work—and ten minutes before the train was due, Hardy disappeared up the slope and came back down on his electro-trolley at the head of another caravan of burbling pigeons.

It was mid-afternoon. The train gathered speed slowly, out of the cutting and onto the flood plain of the Derwent, into a half-mile tunnel and out into the flatlands that in a mile or two were recognisable as the English Midlands. Khrushchev’s words, as they often did, came back to him, more for their forcefulness than their poetry. There was little or no poetry in ‘Bugger England’, but ‘Bugger England’ it was that came back to him, and if this was, if this had been, his experience of Middle England, then bugger Middle England too.

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