The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells & Charlotte Collins

Author:Benedict Wells & Charlotte Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

A January day: gray, sooty evening light slanted into the compartment, the edges of the clouds had a metallic sheen. The train decelerated, rolled to a halt. In Lucerne, Alva was waiting for me on the platform. She kissed me on the cheek, three times, then led me to her car where her husband was waiting for me.

“I can’t believe you’ve actually come,” she said as we walked, summarizing what I was thinking, too.

A. N. Romanov was already sixty-seven, but looked at least ten years younger.

“Alexander,” he said, and held out his hand. “Very pleased to meet you.”

His accent was barely noticeable. Romanov was a tall, slim, distinguished figure with wavy gray hair, still elegant that evening in a suit and shirt with the top buttons left undone. His angular face looked chiseled, there was an impish set to his mouth, and he also exuded an old-fashioned manliness; you couldn’t imagine him dodging a fight in his younger years, or not knowing how to repair a leaky drainpipe.

Alva called her husband not Alexander but Sasha, the Russian diminutive. As she drove us up to the chalet, Romanov told me about the area. I was overwhelmed to be listening to this man’s sonorous voice after reading so many of his intimate thoughts on paper. Romanov had had his breakthrough in his early twenties: an intellectual dandy whose novels and novellas had been translated into thirty languages. Now, though, his fame had waned and was only to be found online, where, alongside articles about his first marriage, I’d also found lots of black-and-white photos, some taken with famous artists of the day, some of him smoking alone outside a club in Camden.

He and Alva no longer lived in Lucerne; for the past two years they’d been in a small mountain village called Eigenthal, at the foot of Mount Pilatus. It was a very rural area; hardly anyone lived up here apart from a few farmers and locals, and most of the holiday homes appeared to be unoccupied. In the distance, the melodious honking of the yellow postal van.

We reached an extensive property enclosed by a rotten wooden fence. The chalet itself was a massive building with a stone base; the uppermost floor with the shingle roof was made of wood. Behind it lay a garden and a meadow, both coated in a thin layer of ice. An isolated place that seemed never to have made the connection with the modern world. I stowed my things in the guest room, and wondered for a moment what I was actually doing here.

For dinner there was raclette, potatoes and white wine. The record player on the chest of drawers was playing jazz.

“Time Further Out,” I said. “You listen to something like this during dinner?”

Romanov was pleased. “Sometimes. Do you like it?”

“My mother liked Brubeck a lot.”

“I saw Dave in San Francisco once. Very sociable guy; we ended up in the same bar after a show, chatted for hours.”

Alva glanced at me briefly. “What you have to know is that Sasha stalked him all through the Sixties.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.