Tightrope by Simon Mawer

Author:Simon Mawer
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4087-0619-0
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

They retreated to a pub just round the corner. She was shaking, a mixture of fright and elation. Ned was laughing. ‘Little sister bearding the great philosopher. The poor man will scurry back to Cambridge with his tail between his legs.’

‘Did I make a fool of myself? But I couldn’t believe some of the things he said, could you? Doesn’t he understand the horrors? I mean …’

What did she mean? Perhaps she meant that anything was better than what she had witnessed during her captivity. But more than that, she had an idea for the future, perhaps an absurd one, but nevertheless a possibility. Maybe the only hope. ‘Like poison gas,’ she suggested to Ned. ‘Think how poison gas was so awful and so indiscriminate that no one used it in the last war. Mightn’t atomic weapons be like that? As long as both sides were equal in some way, neither would employ them because the other would. And any idiot could see that if that were to happen everyone would be destroyed. Russell hadn’t thought of that, had he? The great mathematical philosopher hadn’t thought of that possibility.’

‘Meanwhile,’ Ned said, ‘we’ve got to survive five, maybe ten years while the Russians catch up.’

‘Is that the difference?’

He shrugged. ‘That’s what people say.’

The pub was filling up, men jostling at the bar. Trevor had been dispatched to get drinks. He came back with two pints of bitter and a half of mild for Marian. ‘I thought you did all right,’ he said. ‘Gave Lord Bertrand a real earful.’ He was a rather handsome young man, with a mocking expression. He referred to Ned as ‘Teddy’ and there was something vulgar about his accent. She couldn’t place it precisely. She still wasn’t used to English accents, couldn’t tell Yorkshire from Lancashire, or Birmingham from Liverpool. This, she rather thought, was Liverpool. It suggested lack of education, yet it transpired that he had read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and admired the man greatly, despite what he’d heard that evening. ‘Trouble is,’ Trevor said, ‘Russell could argue the hind legs off a donkey and donkeys can’t always argue back.’

She laughed. ‘Are you calling me a donkey?’

He seemed a bit put out. ‘That’s not quite what I meant. And you’re certainly not an ass. Not like Teddy here.’

There was more laughter. Ned the donkey. She watched the two of them together, their bantering, the tension between them that seemed at the same time to push them apart and yet draw them together, as though there were a force between them, one of Ned’s mysterious forces of electromagnetism or gravity or something. He had explained to her once how objects cause gravity by distorting space, bending it, giving it curve and flex. Here, in the narrow confines of the pub, space had indeed been distorted, the distance between two men warped by their own presence, their bodies distorting the space separating them so that even when they were apart it seemed that they were together.

Trevor glanced at his watch.

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.