30   .  B2.  
 


     B2           .

 ,    ,     ,   .   ,    ,    :  ,   ,    .         .





 

30   .  B2.  



30   

 B2.     




How to Use This Book /    


This book contains thirty stories  one for every evening of a month. It is written for people who can already read English with some confidence and want something more than a textbook can give them: real stories, real characters, and English as native speakers actually use it  with irony, understatement, jokes, and a lot of meaning hidden between the lines.

           .   ,    -     ,    :  ,    ,       ,   , ,    ,   .

At this level, grammar is no longer the problem. You know the tenses; you know the conditionals. What is harder  and far more interesting  is the gap between what people say and what they mean. When a British colleague calls your idea "very brave", is that a compliment? (It isn't.) When someone says "I'll bear it in mind", will they? (They won't.) Many of the stories in this book play with exactly this gap.

       .   ,   .         ,   ,  ,     .           ? (.)     ,  ? (.)         .

The stories are also told in different ways. Most are ordinary narratives, but one is a diary, one is a year of text messages, one is a series of angry letters to a local newspaper, and in one story the same day happens twice. Some endings are happy, some are bittersweet, and a few are left open  for you to decide.

    -.    ,   ,     ,       ,           .   ,    ,       .

As in every book in this series, each paragraph appears twice: first in English, then in Russian. The Russian is not a word-for-word translation but a literary one  it tells the same story in natural Russian. Try to read the English first and only glance at the Russian when you really need it. At this level, you will often find you don't need it at all.

     ,    :  -,  -.     ,   :        .        ,     .      ,      .

After each story you will find Words & Phrases  a dozen expressions worth remembering. Most of them are not single words but idioms, collocations and phrasal verbs: the small, slippery pieces of English that dictionaries explain badly and native speakers use without thinking.

       :  ,   .       ,  ,     :     ,    ,     .

One story takes about fifteen minutes. And, as before, keep an eye on the first story and the last. Some of you may even recognise the narrator.

      . ,   ,      . -  , ,   .






DAY 1





Not Bad, Actually



On my first morning at Hartley & Webb Architects, the receptionist looked up from her screen, smiled and said, "You alright?"

            ,   :

 You alright?

I had been in Britain for three years by then. I had cleaned offices, I had survived ten weeks of evening classes, I had passed an English exam with a score I was secretly very proud of. So I answered her properly. I told her that yes, I was fine, although I had slept badly because I was nervous, and the bus had been late, and I thought I might be getting a cold.

        .   ,     ,      ,    .      . ,  ,     ,    ,   ,  , , ,   .

She listened to all of it with an expression of polite alarm. Then she said, "Oh dear. Well, Priya will be down in a minute," and went back to her screen.

       .  : , . ,   ,     .

That was my first lesson. "You alright?" is not a question. It is a way of saying hello. The correct answer is "Yeah, you?", and the correct answer to that is "Yeah." Nobody wants to know about your cold.

    . You alright?   .   .  : Yeah, you?,     : Yeah.       .

Priya turned out to be the office manager  a small, fast-talking woman of about forty with silver rings on every finger and a laugh you could hear from the car park. She showed me my desk, the kitchen, the printer that only worked if you spoke kindly to it, and the fire exit. Then she looked at me thoughtfully.

  -  ,             ,     .     , , ,  ,      ,   .     .

"Your English is very good," she said.

     ,   .

"Thank you."

 .

"No, I mean it. Which is why you're going to have a terrible week."

 ,  .       .

I didn't understand what she meant. By Wednesday, I did.

  ,     .   .

* * *

The job itself was not difficult. I was a project coordinator: I kept track of deadlines, booked meetings, chased suppliers, and made sure that the people who drew beautiful buildings also remembered to send invoices for them. In Russia I had done something similar for an engineering company for eight years. I knew how projects worked. What I didn't know was how the English worked.

   .    :   ,  ,        ,  ,   ,      .       -    .   ,  .   ,   .

On Tuesday there was a meeting with a client  a property developer called Mr Hollis, who wanted to turn an old chocolate factory into flats. He had an idea. His idea was to paint the entire building purple, "to remind people of chocolate wrappers".

         ,         .    .    ,       ,     .

Malcolm Webb, the senior partner, listened with his fingertips pressed together. He was in his sixties, tall and grey, with the kind of calm face that made you want to confess things. When Mr Hollis had finished, Malcolm nodded slowly.

 ,  , ,   .      , ,    ,      .    ,   .

"That's a very interesting idea," he said. "Very brave. We'll certainly bear it in mind."

   ,   .   .    .

I wrote it down carefully in my notebook: ACTION  Malcolm to consider purple paint. After the meeting, I put it in the project plan and sent the plan to everyone.

    :      .            .

Ten minutes later, Priya appeared next to my desk. She was trying very hard not to laugh.

       .       .

"Nadia, love. Item six."

 , .  .

"The purple paint?"

  ?

"There is no purple paint. There will never be any purple paint. 'Very interesting' means he thinks it's mad. 'Very brave' means it's the worst idea he's heard this year. And 'We'll bear it in mind' means it's already dead and buried."

    .    .   :    .     ,      .          .

"But he said"

   

"I know what he said." She took a paper napkin from her pocket, smoothed it out on my desk and drew a line down the middle. On the left she wrote What they say. On the right, What they mean. "Right," she said. "Lesson one."

  ,   .       ,         .  :  .      .  ,   .   .

* * *

The napkin filled up quickly.

  .

With the greatest respect  You are wrong, and possibly an idiot.

      , , .

I'm sure it's my fault, but  It is your fault.

   ,    .

Quite good  Not good. (Unless an American says it. Then it's good. Don't ask.)

   . (     .  .  .)

I hear what you're saying  I disagree and I'm not going to discuss it.

 ,            .

Could we possibly?  We are going to do this.

    ?    .

Not bad  Good.

  .

I stared at the last line. "So when they say something is bad, it's good?"

    .

    ,  , , ?

"No. When they say something is not bad, it's good. When they say it's bad, it's bad. When they say it's interesting, it's terrible."

 .   , , .     .     .

"This is a very stupid language," I said.

   ,   .

"It's not the language," said Priya. "It's the people. My parents came from Gujarat. Took my mum twenty years to work out that when the neighbour said 'You must come round for dinner sometime', it meant 'Please never come round for dinner.'"

    ,   .    .     .     ,  :       -     ,   ,       .

* * *

On Wednesday Malcolm stopped by my desk and looked at my spreadsheet for a long moment.

            .

"I'm sure it's my fault," he said gently, "but I don't quite follow this."

    ,    ,      ,    .

I had the napkin in my drawer. I didn't need it. My face went hot. "I'll redo it," I said.

     .    .  .

  ,   .

"Oh, there's no rush," said Malcolm, which  I checked later  meant by tomorrow morning.

 ,  ,   ,          .

I stayed late that evening and rebuilt the whole thing. I colour-coded it. I added a summary page. On the bus home I thought about my first evening class, three years ago, when I couldn't even spell my own name without shaking. Then the problem had been the words. Now I knew the words. The problem was everything in between them.

        .   .   .               ,         ,  .    .    .   ,   .

* * *

By Thursday I was becoming almost paranoid. When the tea round came to me  Priya had explained that in an English office, whoever wants a cup of tea must offer to make one for everybody, or face silent but eternal judgement  I took orders like a waitress, with a notebook.

      .          ,     ,   ,     ,    ,   ,    ,  ,  .

"Milk, no sugar," said Dave from structural engineering.

  ,  ,      .

"Do you mean that," I asked, "or do you mean the opposite?"

   ,   ,      ?

Dave looked at me for a very long time. Then, slowly, as if speaking to a dangerous animal, he said: "Milk. No sugar."

     .  ,     , :

  .  .

Priya laughed so loudly that Malcolm came out of his office to see what had happened.

   ,      ,  .

* * *

On Friday afternoon I sent Malcolm my first proper report  a full review of the chocolate factory project, with timelines, risks and costs. I had worked on it all week. I had checked every number twice and every sentence three times. I had even included, in a small footnote on page nine, a polite suggestion that a dark brown door might "reference the building's history without the risks associated with a fully purple facade". I was rather proud of that sentence.

                 ,   .      .    ,    .          : -         ,     .   , , .

At four o'clock he came out of his office holding the printed report. He stopped by my desk. The whole office went slightly quiet, the way offices do.

          .    .    ,     .

"Nadia," he said. He turned a few pages. He paused at page nine, and something happened at the corner of his mouth. Then he closed the report and looked at me over his glasses.

 ,   .   .   ,      - .         .

"Not bad," he said. "Not bad at all, actually."

 ,   .   , -.

And he walked back to his office.

    .

I sat very still. Not bad. After a week of work. Not bad at all  which surely meant quite good, which, according to the napkin, meant not good. I felt my eyes getting hot. I stood up, walked calmly to the ladies' toilet, locked myself in and stood there breathing, the way I used to stand outside the classroom door three years ago.

   . .   .    , ,   ,  ,  ,  .  .  ,     ,   ,  ,   ,        .

There was a knock. "Nadia? It's me."

 .

 ?  .

I opened the door. Priya was standing there with two mugs of tea and an expression I had not seen on her face before. It was something close to awe.

 .           ,       .   -   .

"Did he say 'actually'?" she asked.

   -?   .

"Yes. 'Not bad at all, actually.'"

 .  , -.

She put down the mugs on the edge of the sink, very carefully, as if her hands had stopped working.

             .

"Nadia. I have worked for that man for six years. He has said 'not bad' to me perhaps four times. He has never  not once  said 'actually'. Dave has been here eleven years. Dave would kill for an 'actually'."

 .       .    , ,  .           -.    .     -.

"So it's good?"

 ,  ?

"From Malcolm, that's practically a standing ovation."

      .

I started to laugh, and then I couldn't stop, and then Priya was laughing too, and the two of us stood in the ladies' toilet of Hartley & Webb Architects holding our tea and laughing until the receptionist knocked to ask if we were alright  and this time I knew exactly what to say.

      ,     ,                 ,     ,      ,        ,  .

"Yeah," I said. "You?"

 Yeah,   .  You?

* * *

That evening, at home, I took the napkin out of my bag and smoothed it on the kitchen table. Misha read it over my shoulder and laughed for a long time. Then I took a pen and added a new line at the bottom.

            .          .         .

Not bad, actually  Excellent. (Very rare. Keep this napkin.)

, -  . ( .   .)

I still have it. It's on the fridge, under a magnet shaped like a London bus. Three years ago I thought that learning a language meant learning its words. Now I know that's only half of it. The other half lives in the spaces between the words  and that, it turns out, is where most of the English actually are.

     .         .     ,        .   ,    .           ,  , -  .    .




Words & Phrases /   


You alright?  (., .) !  ? (,   )



to keep track of   , 

to chase (suppliers)  ,  ()

to bear something in mind    ,  (    =   )

brave (idea)   ();     = 

dead and buried   ,  

with the greatest respect     (=    )

to work out  , 

there's no rush     ( =  )

the tea round   :    

a standing ovation   

actually  -,    (      )




DAY 2





Reply All



At 9:47 on a grey Monday morning in Glasgow, Callum Reid pressed Send, leaned back in his chair, and took a long, satisfied sip of coffee. It was the last peaceful moment of his day.

 9:47         ,       ,   .       .

The email had taken him most of Sunday evening. It was addressed  or so he believed  to his friend Aisha, who sat four desks away and who had spent the whole of Friday's all-staff meeting drawing tiny horses in the margin of her notebook. The meeting had been about Project Unicorn.

       .           ,                  .     .

Project Unicorn was the personal vision of Morag Dunlop, founder and chief executive of Kelpie Creative, a marketing agency of a hundred and forty people on the fourth floor of an old shipping office near the river. Under Project Unicorn, the agency would change its name to KLP ("It's cleaner," said Morag), adopt the new company value "Be More Kelpie" (nobody knew what this meant), and begin every Friday with a fifteen-minute "energy huddle" in which staff would stand in a circle and share one thing that made them "feel unstoppable".

             ,      ,         .        KLP ( ,   ),        (  ,   )       ,         - ,      .

Callum had written five points. They were, he thought, rather good points. Point one explained, politely but firmly, that "KLP" sounded like a medical condition. Point two noted that a kelpie, in Scottish legend, was a water horse that drowned people, and asked whether this was really the brand message they wanted. Point three suggested that the energy huddle would make half the office want to resign and the other half actually resign. Point four was a joke about Morag's new standing desk, which he regretted slightly. And point five  the one he'd rewritten six times  was a serious, carefully argued plan for what the agency should do instead.

   . ,   ,   .  ,   ,  KLP    .   ,        ,   ,   ,        .    ,        ,       .                .    ,     ,   ,    ,        .

He had started typing "Aisha" into the address box, the computer had helpfully suggested a name beginning with A, and he had pressed Enter without looking.

      ,      ,    Enter  .

The name beginning with A was All Staff.

     .

* * *

He realised at 9:49, when the office went quiet in a way he had never heard before. It wasn't silence exactly. It was the sound of a hundred and forty people reading.

    9:49,     ,      .     .       .

Then someone near the window laughed, and quickly turned it into a cough. Then someone else did the same. Then Aisha's head appeared above her monitor, her eyes enormous, and she mouthed a single word at him that cannot be printed in a book for language learners.

 -          .  - .         ,      ,        .

Callum looked at his screen. He looked at the address line. He felt his stomach drop through the floor, through the three floors below, and into the river.

   .    . ,       ,        .

There was a button called Recall This Message. He pressed it. A little box appeared to tell him that the recall had failed for 139 recipients and succeeded for one. The one was Aisha, who had already read it.

   .   .     ,      139     .    ,    .

* * *

By ten o'clock, things had escalated.

    - .

Somebody in Accounts replied all with the words "Please remove me from this list." Somebody in Design replied all with "Me too." A junior copywriter replied all with a GIF of a horse falling into a swimming pool, and was immediately replied to, by all, by an HR manager reminding everyone of the company's policy on appropriate use of email. Fourteen people then replied all asking everyone to stop replying all.

-    : ,     . -    :  .     ,     ,            ,      .             .

Callum ran down two flights of stairs to the IT room, where a large, calm man called Rab was eating a sausage roll.

     ,  -,           .

"Rab. You have to delete an email. From everybody's inbox. Right now."

 .    .   .  .

Rab chewed thoughtfully. "Is it the one about the water horse?"

  .

     ?

"Yes."

 .

"Aye, I read it. Point two was brilliant." He wiped his fingers. "I can delete it, but I need written approval from the chief executive."

 , .    .    .   ,       .

"Rab, the chief executive is the subject of the email."

 ,      .

"Then you've got a wee problem," said Rab, not unkindly, and went back to his sausage roll.

     ,          .

* * *

There was one piece of good news, and Aisha delivered it at the coffee machine. Morag was in London all day, pitching to a client, and her assistant had confirmed that she never read email during pitches. She was taking the 3:30 train back, which arrived at Glasgow Central just before eight.

   - ,      .          ,    ,         .     15:30,        .

"So she'll read it on the train," said Callum. "Four and a half hours of wifi and nothing to do."

 ,   ,   .         .

"Unless," said Aisha slowly, "the wifi on that train is as bad as it usually is."

  ,    ,        ,  .

They looked at each other. It was a long shot, but it was the only shot they had.

 .   ,    .

For the rest of the afternoon Callum considered his options. He could resign before she sacked him. He could claim his account had been hacked  but nobody would believe a hacker had written a careful, four-page argument about brand architecture. He could move to Canada. He wrote three different resignation letters and deleted them all. By five o'clock he had decided on the only thing that seemed even slightly dignified: he would tell her himself, face to face, before she read it.

    .   ,    .  ,   ,     ,           .    .          .       ,     :    ,   ,    .

* * *

At 7:50 he was standing on platform 1 at Glasgow Central, holding a coffee he had bought for Morag as a kind of peace offering and then realised he didn't know how she took it. The train came in eleven minutes late. Morag Dunlop got off near the front  a small woman in a long red coat, phone in hand, reading.

 19:50          ,      ,     ,   ,    .       .             ,    .  .

She looked up and saw him. She did not look surprised.

     .    .

"Callum," she said. "Is that for me?"

 ,   .   ?

He handed her the coffee. "I didn't know how you take it. I'm sorry. About  everything. I meant to send it to Aisha, and the address"

   .

   ,   . .  .     ,  

"The wifi was excellent today," said Morag. "For the first time in living memory." She took a sip of the coffee and made a small face. "I've read it three times."

    ,   .     .       .     .

Callum waited for the end of his career.

    .

"Point four is unkind and also wrong," she said. "My standing desk is excellent for my back, and I'll thank you not to mention it again." She paused. "The other four points are correct."

         ,   .         ,         .   .     .

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

  ,      .

"Do you know what I find interesting?" Morag went on, walking towards the exit so that he had to follow her. "I presented Project Unicorn to the senior team three weeks ago. Eight people. Every one of them said it was 'an exciting direction'. One of them said it was 'bold'. Not one of them told me it sounded like a skin disease named after a horse that drowns people." She glanced at him. "Why do you think that is?"

 ,    ?   ,   ,      .         .  .  ,    .  ,   .     ,      ,    ,   .     .    , ?

"Because you're the boss?"

    ?

"Because I'm the boss." She sighed. "When you run a company, people stop telling you the truth. Not because they're bad people. Because it's easier. And then one day you look up and you're standing in a circle on a Friday morning asking grown adults what makes them feel unstoppable."

    .   .    ,     .  ,   .   .                   ,      .

They had reached the street. It was raining, as it generally is in Glasgow.

   . ظ        .

"Point five," said Morag. "The plan. Can you actually do that?"

  ,   .  .     ?

"I  yes. I think so. With a small team."

 ߅ . , .   .

"Good. You're leading it. You start tomorrow. I want a proposal by Friday." She pulled out her phone, typed for a few seconds, and pressed a button with obvious pleasure. "There."

 . .  .    .    ,         .  .

Callum's phone buzzed in his pocket. It was an email, from Morag Dunlop, to All Staff.

     .    .  .

Callum is right. Project Unicorn is cancelled. So is the energy huddle. Callum will be leading what happens next  please give him all your support. And please, for the love of God, stop replying all.  M.

 .   .    .         . ,   ,   .  .

By the time he got home, he had forty-three replies. Every single one of them had been sent to All Staff.

  ,     ,    .       .




Words & Phrases /   


reply all    (  )

all-staff meeting    

to feel one's stomach drop  ,  

to escalate  ,  - 

a long shot   ,  

wee  (.) 

aye  (., .) 

a peace offering     

in living memory    ,   

I'll thank you not to     (-)

for the love of God    

bold  ,  (     )




DAY 3





The Ghostwriter



Imogen Pryce had written eleven books, and her name was on none of them.

    ,          .

She had been a footballer who had never read a book in his life, a pop star who had found peace in Bali, a former government minister who had been "misunderstood by history". She had been a racehorse trainer, a reality-TV villain and, once, rather memorably, a dog. She sat with these people for hours, recorded their voices, learned the way they spoke and the jokes they told, and then she went home to her small flat in Hackney and became them on the page. When the books came out, their faces were on the cover, and in the acknowledgements, if she was lucky, she was "my brilliant editor, Imogen".

  ,        , -,    ,  ,    .     ,  -        .      ,   , ,       ,               .   ,     ,   ,  ,       .

She didn't mind. Ghostwriting paid the rent, and she was good at it. The trick, she always said, was to disappear completely.

Ÿ   .     ,      .  ,    ,  ,   .

Her twelfth book was going to be her biggest. Dominic Hale was the most loved chef in Britain  not the most talented, perhaps, but the most loved. For twenty-five years he had been on television every Saturday morning, cheerful and red-faced, cooking simple food for ordinary families. And every programme, sooner or later, came back to the same story.

     .      -     , ,   .            ,         .             .

"When I was a lad in Sheffield," he would say, stirring something, "we had nothing. Nothing in the cupboard. And my mum  God bless her  she'd take an onion and two potatoes and turn them into a feast. That's what cooking is. Love and an onion."

     ,   , - ,      .  .                 .    .   .

The publishers had already chosen the title: Nothing in the Cupboard. They had paid Imogen half of a very large fee. The other half would arrive when the manuscript did.

   :  .      .        .

* * *

The interviews went well. Dominic was charming, generous, a natural storyteller. He told her about the cold house, the coins in the electricity meter, his mother's famous Sunday stew. He cried, a little, every time. Imogen recorded it all and went home and started writing, and the voice came easily.

  .   , ,  .      ,  ,    ,      .     .   ,  ,  ,    .

It was only in the third month that something began to feel wrong. It was a small thing. Dominic had said his school was "the roughest in Sheffield", but when Imogen looked it up, she found it had been a grammar school  selective, academic, rather posh. She mentioned it lightly at their next meeting, and Dominic laughed and said she must have the wrong school. But he changed the subject a little too quickly.

      ,  -  . .  ,        ,    , ,       ,   ,  .        ,    ,  ,  ,  .      .

A good ghostwriter checks everything. So the following weekend, Imogen took the train to Sheffield.

   .          .

* * *

Dominic's older sister, Carol, lived in a neat semi-detached house in the suburbs, the kind with a conservatory and a very clean car. She was a retired pharmacist, sharp and dry, and she agreed to talk only because Imogen said she was "filling in background details".

  , ,            ,        .   ,     ,     ,   ,    .

"Nothing in the cupboard?" Carol repeated, and laughed so hard she had to put her tea down. "Love, our dad was a bank manager. We had a cupboard full of things. We had a holiday in Spain every summer."

  ?      ,     .  ,     .    .       .

"And your mother's Sunday stew?"

     ?

"Mum couldn't boil an egg. Lovely woman. Terrible cook. She'd have burned water if you let her." Carol's face softened. "No. If you want to know where Dommie learned to cook, it was next door. Mrs Nowak."

     .  .  .     ,    .    .  .   ,    ,    .   .

Mrs Nowak, it turned out, had come to Sheffield from Poland after the war. She had been a widow with no children and a tiny kitchen that always smelled of dill and frying onions. From the age of seven, Dominic had spent every afternoon there. She had taught him to make pierogi, soup from nothing, bread that rose properly. She had let him burn things and laughed at him and made him do it again.

 ,  ,       .   ,     ,         .          .     ,    ,  ,    .    - ,      .

"The onion and two potatoes," said Carol. "That was her. She'd lived through things none of us could imagine. She really had had nothing in the cupboard."

    ,   .   .   ,     .         .

"Why did he never mention her?"

       ?

Carol shrugged. "Some TV producer, years ago, decided the poor-boy story was better. Dommie went along with it. And then it was too late to stop, wasn't it? It got bigger every year." She looked at Imogen over her glasses. "You're not just filling in background details, are you?"

  .

 -     ,      .  .      , ?      .       .        ?

* * *

On the train home Imogen didn't write a word. She sat looking out of the window at the dark fields and thought about her options.

         .         ,  .

She could write the book exactly as Dominic wanted. Nobody would know. Carol had said she would never talk to the press  "I'm not ruining my brother over a stew." The other half of the fee would arrive, and Imogen would finally be able to pay off her credit card and perhaps even take a holiday. Ghostwriters didn't have opinions. That was the job. Disappear completely.

     ,   .    .  ,       :      - .     ,        ,  ,    .    .  .  .

Or she could refuse, walk away, and lose the money  and someone else would write the lie anyway.

   ,            - .

Somewhere near Leicester she realised there was a third option. It was riskier than either of the others. She opened her laptop and wrote until the train pulled into St Pancras.

-    ,    .    .     ,       -.

* * *

She went to see Dominic on Monday morning, at his restaurant, before it opened. He was in the kitchen, alone, chopping onions  he said it calmed him. She didn't say anything about Sheffield. She just handed him six printed pages.

  ,  ,      .          ,    .      .      .

"New first chapter," she said. "Tell me if I've got the voice right."

   ,   .  ,     .

The chapter began: The first person who ever fed me properly was not my mother.

  :  ,  -  ,    .

It was about a seven-year-old boy standing on a chair in a tiny kitchen next door. It was about a woman with a strong accent and strong hands, who had lost almost everything and who taught a comfortable middle-class child that food was not about money but about attention. It was about dill and onions, and burning things, and doing them again. Imogen had written it in Dominic's voice  his exact voice, his jokes, his rhythms. She had never written anything better.

    ,        .        ,           ,       ,   .    ,  ,  -     .         ,   ,  .      .

Dominic read it standing up, with the knife still in his hand. Halfway through, he put the knife down. When he got to the end, he didn't look up for a long time.

  ,      .     . ,     .

"You've been to see Carol," he said at last.

    ,    .

"Yes."

 .

"I always meant to tell it properly. Every year I meant to. And every year it seemed" He shook his head. "The producers loved the poor-boy thing. The viewers loved it. And Mrs Nowak died in 1998, so who was it hurting?"

       .   .        .       .  .             ?

"Her," said Imogen quietly. "She's the reason you're standing in this kitchen. And nobody knows her name."

 ,    .   -      .      .

Dominic wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, and this time, she noticed, it wasn't for the camera. "The publishers will go mad," he said.

     ,    ,  ,   .

  ,   .

"Probably."

  .

"They've already printed the posters."

    .

"Posters can be reprinted."

   .

He looked at the pages again for a long time. Then he picked up his phone, and Imogen heard him say: "Sarah? It's Dominic. Sit down, love. We need to talk about the title."

     .   ,   :

 ?  . , .     .

* * *

The book came out the following autumn under a new title: Mrs Nowak's Kitchen. Some newspapers were unkind about the change of story; most were not. It sold more copies than any book Imogen had ever written, and Dominic's next television series was filmed partly in Poland, in the village where Mrs Nowak had been born.

          . -      ;   .   ? ,     ,        ,  ,    .

Imogen's name, of course, was not on the cover. But on the first page, under the dedication, there were two lines that she read in the bookshop at King's Cross, standing up, with her coat still on.

   , ,  .    ,  ,   ,       -  ,   .

For Mrs Nowak, who fed me.



And for Imogen, who made me tell the truth.

 ,   .



 ,     .

For the first time in twelve books, the ghost had not completely disappeared. She found that she didn't mind that either.

       . ,      .




Words & Phrases /   


ghostwriter  ,  : ,     

to pay the rent   ; (.)    

a natural storyteller   

grammar school  (.)      

posh  (.) , ,  

semi-detached house      (  )

to go along with something  , 

to pay off (a credit card)   (  )

to walk away  ,   

to get the voice right     

to go mad  (.)   

for the camera   , 




DAY 4





Overheard



I should say at the start that I am not in the habit of listening to other people's conversations. That is not quite true. I spent forty-one years as a professor of linguistics at Cambridge, and listening to other people's conversations was, in a sense, my job. Old habits die hard.

 ,        .    .         ,     ,   ,  .   .

Since my wife died and I retired, I have taken my morning coffee at a small caf called the Blue Teapot, on a side street not far from the river. I sit at the table by the window with a newspaper I rarely read, and I listen. Students, tourists, tired parents, two elderly sisters who have been arguing about a family recipe since 2019. For a man like me, it is better than television.

          ,              .       ,   ,  . , ,  ,   ,   2019     .       .

On the Tuesday in question, a young couple sat down at the table next to mine. She was perhaps twenty-five, with short dark hair and a notebook covered in coloured tabs; he was a little older, long and thin, with the nervous energy of someone who drinks too much coffee. They ordered two flat whites and a lemon tart to share, and then she opened the notebook and said, quite clearly:

         .         , ,    ;   ,   ,    ,     .    -     ,         :

"Right. So we get them into the vault, lock the door, and they've got sixty minutes."

 . ,    ,  ,     .

I turned a page of my newspaper.

   .

* * *

Now, a linguist does not jump to conclusions. A linguist collects data. "Vault" might mean many things  a wine cellar, a tomb, a bank. "Lock the door" was, I admit, less ambiguous. I listened more carefully.

    .   .       , , .    , ,   .    .

"And what if they try to get out early?" said the young man.

      ?    .

"They can't. Not without the code. And the code's hidden in the professor's books."

  .    .      .

"Which professor?"

  ?

"The professor. The old man. We need someone who really looks the part  grey hair, beard, glasses, tweed jacket. Someone they'll trust."

  . .   -,  -   :  , , ,  . -,   .

I have grey hair, a beard and glasses. I was, at that moment, wearing a tweed jacket. I lowered my newspaper half an inch.

   ,   .        .     .

* * *

Consider, if you will, the evidence as it appeared to me. A vault. A locked door. A strict time limit. An elderly man who must be trusted  and, presumably, deceived. I mentally underlined the modal verbs. We need someone. They can't get out. There was a disturbing confidence in their grammar. These were not people speculating. These were people planning.

,  ,   ,    . .  .   .  ,      ,   , .     .   -.    .      .      .   .

"How much are we charging?" asked the young man.

  ?    .

"Twenty-five each. Groups of six. If we do four sessions a day at weekends" she did some quick sums in the notebook "that's over a thousand pounds a weekend."

     .   .            -   ,       .

"Sessions," I thought. "Groups." A ransom operation? Some kind of organised scheme in which tourists were locked in a cellar and released only on payment? It sounded absurd. But I had read the newspapers I did not read. Stranger things had happened in Cambridge.

,   . . ? -  ,           ?  .     ,   .      .

"And the professor's house?" said the young man. "When do we get in?"

   ?    .     ?

"Thursday. The landlord's giving us the keys. We'll have to move fast  strip out the old furniture, fake the bookshelves, hide the clues."

  .    .    :   ,    ,  .

"Clues." That was an odd word for a criminal to use. I made a note of it.

.    .   .

* * *

I want to be honest about what happened next, because I am not proud of it. A sensible man would have finished his coffee and gone home. A brave man would have gone to the police. I did neither. Instead, I did what forty years of academic life had trained me to do: I constructed a theory and became completely attached to it.

  ,   ,      .        .     .     ,  .     ,       :        .

The theory went like this. The couple were planning to rent a house, fill it with fake books, lure groups of six people inside with the help of a respectable-looking old professor, lock them in a vault and charge them twenty-five pounds each to get out. The young woman was clearly the brains. The young man was the muscle, if one could describe him as muscular, which one could not.

  .    ,    ,             ,            .     .      ,      ,    .

It was a ridiculous theory. I knew it was ridiculous even as I built it. But I had been alone for three years, and nothing very much had happened to me in that time, and here, suddenly, was a mystery at the next table, with a lemon tart.

  .   ,    .      ,          ,        ,     .

Then the young woman looked up, straight at me, and said to her companion, in a low voice that carried perfectly:

     ,         ,    :

"Don't look now. The man at the window. He'd be perfect."

  .   .    .

* * *

There are moments in a man's life when he must choose between dignity and survival. I chose dignity. I folded my newspaper, finished my coffee, stood up, and walked the two steps to their table.

    ,       .   .  ,  ,        .

"Forgive me," I said. "I'm afraid I've heard everything."

 ,   .  ,   .

They looked at each other. The young man went pale. The young woman, however, smiled  a wide, delighted smile that was not at all the smile of a criminal who has been caught.

 .   .  , ,   ,  ,       .

"Oh, brilliant," she said. "Saves us asking. Would you be interested?"

 , ,   .       .    ?

"Interested," I repeated, "in what, exactly?"

    ?   .

"In being the professor. It's an escape room." She saw my face. "You know  a game. People pay to get locked in a room full of puzzles, and they've got an hour to find the clues and work out the code to escape. Ours is called The Professor's Study. There's a mad old professor who's hidden a secret formula in his library, and the players have to find it before he comes back. We were going to just use a recording of his voice, but it would be so much better with a real person. Just at the start. Five minutes, in costume, to set the scene."

  .  -.     .  ,   .  ,     ,  ,     ,   ,    .    .    ,       ,     ,    .       ,        .   .  ,  ,  .

"In costume," I said faintly.

  ,     .

"You're already wearing it," said the young man, who had recovered his colour.

      ,    ,     .

* * *

Her name was Hana and his was Ollie. They had met at university, studying  I was pleased to learn  English literature, and both had decided they would rather build puzzles than write essays about them. They had saved for two years for this. The "vault" was a cupboard under the stairs, painted to look like a bank safe. The "professor's books" were three hundred second-hand paperbacks they had bought by the kilo.

Ÿ  ,    .    ,         ,   ,      ,     .      .     ,    .         ,   .

I explained my theory to them. I left nothing out  the modal verbs, the word "sessions", my suspicion about the young man's lack of muscle. Hana laughed so much that the waitress came over to check she was alright. Ollie took it more personally.

    .       ,   ,        .   ,    ,    .       .

"It's a lesson, really," I said, when she had recovered. "I spent my whole career telling students that words mean nothing without context. 'Lock them in the vault' is a crime in one situation and a birthday party in another. And then I sat here for twenty minutes and forgot everything I'd ever taught."

 ,  , ,   ,   .      ,       .         ,     .         ,  - .

"So is that a yes?" said Hana.

   ?   .

I thought about my empty house. I thought about the newspaper I never read.

     .  ,    .

"It is a qualified yes," I said. "I have conditions."

    ,   .     .

"Name them."

 .

"I want to write my own speech. And I want a better beard. This one is real, and I'm told it lacks drama."

     .    .   ,   ,     .

* * *

Our escape room, The Professor's Study, opened in March. I appear at the beginning of every game on Saturdays and Sundays, four times a day, in a long coat and a magnificent false beard that Hana bought online. I tell the players, in a voice I once used for lectures on Old English, that they have exactly sixty minutes before I return  and then I lock the door.

 -,  ,   .    ,    ,              ,     . ,  -    ,   ,         ,    .

Some of them are students of mine from long ago. They are always delighted, and slightly frightened. I find I enjoy that more than I probably should.

     .       . , ,   , , ,  .

And on weekday mornings I still sit at the window of the Blue Teapot, listening. But I am more careful now about the stories I build. Context, as I used to tell my first-year students, is everything. It took two twenty-somethings and a lemon tart to remind me.

     -        .      ,  . ,    ,   .      ,     .




Words & Phrases /   


to be in the habit of doing something    - 

old habits die hard    

the  in question   ,    

to jump to conclusions    

to look the part     ,  

ransom  

to lure  

the brains / the muscle   () /  

to recover one's colour     (  )

escape room  -

a qualified yes    

to set the scene   ,    




DAY 5





One Star



The first review appeared on a Wednesday morning in February, and Marco Bellini read it standing in the kitchen of his restaurant in Bath, still in his coat.

       ,            ,    .

?????  Margaret_B



The minestrone was served at the temperature of a mild spring afternoon. The bread was yesterday's, and possibly the day before's. The waiter was charming and did not once look at me. One star, for the view of the abbey, which is not the restaurant's achievement.

?????  Margaret_B



   ,     .   ,  ,  .          .       ,     .

Marco read it twice. Then he took off his coat, went to the bread basket, picked up a roll and pressed it with his thumb. It was, he had to admit, yesterday's.

  .   ,     ,        .  ,   , .

* * *

Nonna Lucia had been open for six years. Marco had named it after his grandmother, who had cooked in a village near Naples until she was ninety and who had believed, with total conviction, that cream in a carbonara was a sin punishable by death. The restaurant did well. It had good reviews, a loyal crowd of regulars, and a table by the window from which you could see the golden stone of Bath Abbey. Marco was proud of it. Perhaps, he would later think, a little too proud.

     .      ,             ,      ,  .   .  ,      ,       .   . ,    , .

The second review came the following Wednesday.

     .

?????  Margaret_B



The tiramisu had the texture of a wet bath sponge and the personality of a tax form. I am told it is "homemade". I should like to meet the home.

?????  Margaret_B



      ,      .  ,   .      .

And the third, a week after that.

 ,   .

?????  Margaret_B



The risotto was competent. Competence is what one expects from an accountant. From a risotto, one expects love.

?????  Margaret_B



  .    .    .

* * *

The staff were furious. Bryony, the head waitress, wanted to report the account to the website. Luca, the young chef, wanted to find out where Margaret_B lived and, as he put it, "have a word". Marco said no to both. Instead, as the owner, he wrote a reply under each review  polite, professional, the kind of reply that business courses teach you to write. Dear Margaret, thank you so much for your valuable feedback. We are sorry your experience did not meet your expectations. We hope to welcome you again soon.

   . ,  ,      . ,  ,  ,   Margaret_B, ,   , .   .            , ,  ,    -.  ,      .  ,     .       .

The following week there was a fourth review. Under it, Margaret_B had added a short note in reply to his.

    .   Margaret_B      .

Dear Mr Bellini, your replies are like your risotto: correct in every detail and entirely without flavour. I shall be back on Tuesday.

  ,      :        .    .

Marco laughed out loud, alone in his office, for the first time in a month. It was not a pleasant laugh, exactly, but it was a real one. Whoever Margaret_B was, she could write.

    ,   ,   .       ,  .     Margaret_B,   .

* * *

He went through the booking system. The reviews always appeared on Wednesday; so she ate on Tuesday. There were no bookings under "Margaret" or anything beginning with B. So she didn't book. He asked Bryony about Tuesday lunchtimes.

   .       ,    .           . ,   .       .

Bryony thought for a moment. "There's an old lady," she said slowly. "Comes in on her own. Always takes the little table by the kitchen door  never the window. Orders soup, then something else, then dessert. Takes about two hours. Pays cash." She frowned. "To be honest, Marco, we don't really I mean, she's very slow, and she doesn't need much, and Tuesday lunch gets busy with the office people. We sort of leave her to it."

  .

    ,    .   .             .  ,  - ,  .   .  .   .   , ,     ,   ,    ,       .  ,  ,   .

The words came back to him  the waiter was charming and did not once look at me  and Marco felt something uncomfortable move in his chest.

  :          ,    ,      -.

* * *

On Tuesday he didn't stay in the kitchen. At half past twelve, a small, upright woman of about eighty came in from the rain, folded a tartan umbrella with great precision, and sat down at the little table by the kitchen door. She had white hair cut very short, a silk scarf and the sharp, bright eyes of a bird that has seen everything and been impressed by very little of it.

      .     , - ,         ,               .  ,   ,    ,   ,        .

Marco brought the soup himself. He had made it himself, too, at six that morning, from his grandmother's recipe, and he had tasted it nine times.

   .         ,   ,    .

"Minestrone," he said, putting it down. "Hot, this time. And the bread came out of the oven twenty minutes ago."

 ,   ,  .     .        .

She looked at the soup. Then she looked up at him for a long moment, and the corner of her mouth moved very slightly.

   .       ,       .

"Mr Bellini," she said. "You've found me out."

  ,   .    .

"May I sit down?"

   ?

"It's your restaurant."

  .

* * *

Her name was Margaret Beaumont. Forty years earlier, she told him, she had been a restaurant critic for a national newspaper  "when restaurant critics were feared, Mr Bellini, rather than followed". She had eaten in every great kitchen in Europe. She had made chefs cry, and once, in Lyon, a chef had made her cry, with a chicken so perfect she still dreamed about it.

Ÿ   .   ,  ,           ,  ,   ,     .       .   -  ,  ,  ,         ,         .

Her husband, Richard, had come with her everywhere. He had died four years ago. Since then, she said, in the same dry voice, she had discovered something about being an old woman eating alone.

Ÿ      .     .   ,      ,  -   ,      .

"You become invisible. Not unkindly. Nobody means it. They seat you by the kitchen door, and they bring your food, and they forget you're there. It's rather like being furniture." She tasted the soup, slowly, considering. "So I started writing reviews again. And do you know, Mr Bellini, you're the first person who has replied to me in four years? Even if it was," she added, "with that terrible business-school nonsense."

  .    .  .      ,    ,   .    .      , .        .  ,  ,  ,      ?  ,   ,      -.

"The tiramisu," said Marco. "Was it really that bad?"

  ,   .      ?

"Worse. I was being kind."

 .   .

He laughed. She didn't, but her eyes did.

 .   ,    .

"The soup," she said, putting down her spoon, "is very good. Your grandmother's?"

 ,   ,  ,   . ?

"How did you know?"

   ?

"Because it tastes like somebody cared about it. Which the risotto, I'm sorry to say, did not."

     ,    - . ,  ,    .

* * *

They talked until four o'clock, long after the office workers had gone. Before she left, Marco asked her a question he had been thinking about all afternoon. He was changing the menu in spring. Would she  he knew it was a strange request  would she come in before it launched, and taste everything, and tell him the truth?

       .      ,    .    .       ,   ,    ,      ?

Margaret Beaumont opened her umbrella with the same precision she had used to fold it.

       ,    .

"I'll come on one condition," she said. "Not by the kitchen door."

    ,   .      .

* * *

Now, every Tuesday, the table by the window  the one with the view of the abbey  has a small card on it that says Reserved. Margaret arrives at half past twelve. Marco cooks for her himself, and then sits down with her for coffee, and she tells him, without mercy, everything that is wrong with his food. Half of the new spring menu was her idea. The tiramisu has been completely rebuilt.

        ,    ,     .     .     ,       ,       ,      .       .    .

In May, a new review appeared on the website. Bryony printed it out and stuck it on the kitchen wall, next to a photograph of Nonna Lucia.

      .        ,     .

?????  Margaret_B



Four stars. I never give five. Five stars are reserved for God and for my late husband's mushroom risotto, and Mr Bellini is getting dangerously close to the second. The waiter looked at me. Several times.

?????  Margaret_B



 .     .             ,       .    .  .




Words & Phrases /   


regulars   , 

to have a word (with someone)  (.) ,  (  )

feedback  ,  

to leave somebody to it    ,  

to find somebody out  , 

upright  ,   

not unkindly   ,  

nonsense  , 

without mercy  

competent  ,  (    )

to rebuild from scratch / completely    

late (husband)   ()




DAY 6





Please Hold



"Thank you for calling Northpower Energy. Your call is important to us. You are currently number fourteen in the queue. Please hold."

       .      .     . ,   .

Then came the music. It was Vivaldi  the first thirty seconds of Spring, played on what sounded like a toy keyboard, over and over again, for ever.

  .         -   ,   ,  .

Dev Malhotra put his phone on speaker, laid it on the kitchen table in his flat in Leeds, and looked at the letter beside it. The letter said he owed Northpower Energy three thousand, one hundred and twelve pounds for one month of electricity. Dev lived alone in a one-bedroom flat. He owned a laptop, a kettle and a fridge that was mostly empty. Unless the fridge had been secretly mining Bitcoin, there had been a mistake.

    ,                .  ,             .      .    ,   ,    .       ,  .

He had taken the day off work for this call. He had a cup of tea. He was ready.

       .     .   .

* * *

At 10:43, after forty minutes of Vivaldi, the music stopped with a click. There was a crackling sound. And then a voice  not a recorded voice but a real, elderly, very Scottish one  said:

 10:43,    ,    . - .      ,  ,      :

"Hello? Hello? Is that a person?"

 ? ?  ?

Dev grabbed the phone. "Yes! Hello! Yes, I'm a person. Is this Northpower?"

  .

 ! ! ,  .  ?

"God, no. I was going to ask you the same thing." A pause. "I'm on hold to them. Have been for two hours and ten minutes. And then the music stopped and there you were."

  .         .  .      .     .    ,   .

"I'm on hold too. Forty minutes."

   .  .

"Forty minutes," said the voice, with something like pity. "You're just a boy."

  ,     -  .     .

They established, after some confusion, that their two calls had somehow got crossed inside Northpower's phone system. Neither of them was willing to hang up and lose his place in the queue. So they stayed.

    ,    -      .            .    .

"Hamish," said the voice. "Hamish Cormack. Aberdeen."

 ,   .   . .

"Dev. Leeds."

 . .

"Well, Dev from Leeds. What did they do to you?"

   ,   .    ?

* * *

Dev explained about the three thousand pounds. Hamish whistled.

     .  .

"That's a lot of toast."

    .

"And you?"

   ?

There was a pause on the line, longer than the others.

      .

"My wife's name is on the account. Jean. She died in March. I've written to them four times to change it to my name, and every month they send another letter addressed to her. 'Dear Mrs Cormack, we value you as a customer.' And every time I phone, they tell me they can only discuss the account with the account holder." He gave a short laugh with no humour in it. "I've said, well, you'll need a very long phone line."

    . .    .     ,    ,          .   ,     .   ,  , ,       .   ,   , .    : ,       .

"I'm sorry," said Dev, and meant it.

   ,   ,    .

"Aye. Well."

 .   .

"How did you meet her?" Dev asked, and then wondered if he shouldn't have.

    ?       ,  .

But Hamish sounded pleased to be asked. "At a dance in Peterhead, 1966. I stood on her foot twice in the first minute. She said, 'If you do that a third time, I'm marrying you, so you'd better be careful.'" He laughed, properly this time. "I did it a third time. On purpose."

 , ,  .

    ,   .         .  :         ,   .   ,    -.      . .

* * *

At 11:30 they were still waiting. The conversation had wandered, the way conversations do when there is nowhere else for them to go.

 11:30    .  ,   ,    .

"So what do you do, Dev? When you're not on hold."

    , ?     .

"I'm a software developer. Or I was. I'm  sort of between things."

  .   .      .

"Between things."

  .

Dev hadn't told anyone this. Not his parents, not his friends. He wasn't sure why he was telling a stranger in Aberdeen. Perhaps because he was a stranger in Aberdeen. "I quit three weeks ago. Just walked out. I was working sixty hours a week and I couldn't sleep and one morning I sat in the car park and couldn't make myself go in. So I didn't. I haven't told my parents. They think I took a day off today. I take a day off every day now."

    .  ,  .   ,      . ,  ,     .

     .  .      ,   ,            .   .   .  ,     .      .

Hamish was quiet for a moment.

  .

"I was a radio operator on the North Sea oil rigs," he said. "Thirty-one years. You know what the job was, mostly? Waiting. Sitting by the radio in the middle of the sea, waiting for something to happen. The young lads couldn't stand it. They wanted to do something. And I used to tell them  patience is a muscle. It hurts at first. Then it gets stronger."

         ,   .    . ,      ?  .       ,  - .     .   - .    :    .  .   .

"I don't think I'm very good at waiting."

 -,     .

"You've been on hold for an hour and a half, son. You're better than you think."

      , .    ,   .

* * *

At 12:15 Hamish taught Dev the words to a song his wife used to sing, which was mostly about a girl from Dundee and a fisherman who was very bad at his job. At 12:40 Dev explained to Hamish what an app was, and Hamish said he still didn't see the point. At 1:05 they discovered they had both, at different times, been to the same terrible seaside hotel in Scarborough, and spent twenty happy minutes describing the carpet.

 12:15     ,    ,           ,       .  12:40   ,   ,   ,        .  13:05 ,                 ,      ,   .

"Can I ask you something?" said Dev. "Why haven't you just  given up? Let them keep sending letters to Jean?"

  ?   .       ?     .

"Because every letter that comes with her name on it," said Hamish, "I open it thinking, just for a second, that it's for her. And then I remember." He cleared his throat. "I'd like them to stop. That's all. I'd like the post to be mine."

       ,   ,       ,   .   .   .   ,   .   . ,     .

* * *

At 1:52 p.m., the music stopped again, and a third voice came on the line  young, female, tired.

 13:52   ,        , , .

"Thank you for holding, you're through to Northpower, my name is Shona, can I take your account number please?"

   ,    ,   , , ,  .

"Which of us?" said Dev and Hamish together.

   ?      .

There was a long silence.

  .

"I'm sorry," said Shona. "Are there two of you?"

 ,   .   ?

They explained. Shona listened. She said that this had never happened before, that the system had been "doing strange things all week", and that technically she should end the call and ask them both to ring back separately.

 .  . ,     ,                  .

"With the greatest respect, Shona," said Dev  and he was surprised by how calm his voice was  "this gentleman has been waiting five hours and twenty minutes. His wife died in March. He has written to you four times. Every month you send a letter to a woman who isn't alive any more, and every month he has to open it. I'm not hanging up, and neither is he, until it's fixed. My bill can wait."

   , ,      ,     ,        .     .     .      ,     ,       .  ,     ,    .   .

There was another silence. When Shona spoke again, her voice had changed. It was quieter, and more human.

 .   ,    .    .

"Mr Cormack? Give me your postcode, love. Let's sort this out."

  ?   , .  .

It took eleven minutes. When it was done, Hamish's voice wasn't quite steady. Then Shona looked at Dev's account and discovered, in about thirty seconds, that someone had typed an extra zero into his meter reading. His bill was three hundred and eleven pounds and twenty pence. He would receive a correction by email.

   .    ,    .          ,  -       .       .     .

"Is there anything else I can help you with today?" asked Shona.

    -  ?   .

"No," said Dev. "You've been brilliant. Thank you."

 ,   .    . .

"Thank you," said Shona. "Honestly. I've had a horrible week. That was the nicest call I've had in months." She hesitated. "Shall I leave the line open for a minute? So you can say goodbye?"

  ,   .  .    .      .   .      ?    ?

* * *

They didn't say goodbye. They exchanged phone numbers instead.

   .    .

Dev told his parents about his job that weekend. It went better than he had feared. In September he found a new one  four days a week, a smaller company, a manager who went home at five and expected everyone else to do the same.

        .   ,   .          ,  , ,           .

And every Sunday at seven, his phone rings, and a voice from Aberdeen says, in a very bad imitation of a recorded message:

        ,        :

"Thank you for calling. Your call is important to us. Please hold."

   .      . ,   .

And then he hums the first thirty seconds of Vivaldi, badly, and they both laugh, and then they talk for an hour.

        ,   ,     .




Words & Phrases /   


to be on hold / please hold     /   

the queue  

to get crossed (lines, calls)  ,  ( )

to hang up   

account holder   

to wander (of a conversation)  ,     

between things / between jobs   ,  

to walk out  ,  ()

can't stand something    

to give up  ,  

to sort something out  , 

meter reading   




DAY 7





The Translator's Note



Agnieszka Wrbel had been translating English novels into Polish for fifteen years, and she believed that every book had a secret. Not a hidden message, usually  nothing so dramatic. Just a rhythm, a habit, a word the author loved too much. A translator's job was to find it and carry it, carefully, across the border into another language.

          ,      .        .  , , ,    .          ,   .

The Harbour Light was the last novel by Iain Ruthven, who had died of a heart attack the previous winter at the age of seventy-three. Ruthven had been the grumpy giant of Scottish literature  famous for his long, cold, beautiful sentences, his refusal to give interviews, and his habit of describing the sea as though it were a person who had personally offended him. The book had been published four months after his death. The critics called it his masterpiece. Agnieszka, working at the kitchen table of her flat in Edinburgh with the real sea grey outside the window, thought they were probably right.

      ,            .          , ,  ,        ,   ,     .        .    . ,        ,      , ,  , , .

The novel was about an old lighthouse keeper on an island in the far north who had stopped speaking to his only daughter. It had twenty-four chapters. Each chapter had a title  a single word or a short phrase. Agnieszka had translated nineteen of them before she noticed.

          ,       .      .           .     ,   .

* * *

It was a Tuesday night, very late. She had been struggling with the title of chapter twenty, Ghosts, because the Polish word sounded too much like a children's story, and she had opened the table of contents to see how the titles worked together. She was reading down the list, half asleep, when the first letters of the titles seemed to rise off the page.

 ,  .        ,        -,   ,  ,    .      ,        .

Keeper. Island. Rain. Salt. Tide. Years.

Keeper. Island. Rain. Salt. Tide. Years.  . . . . . .

She sat up.

 .

Ice. Water. Ash. Silence.

Ice. Water. Ash. Silence.  ˸. . . .

She took a pencil and wrote the letters down on the back of an envelope, one by one, her hand not quite steady. When she had finished, she looked at what she had written for a long time.

         ,   ;   . ,     .

KIRSTY I WAS WRONG FORGIVE ME

KIRSTY I WAS WRONG FORGIVE ME  ,   .  .

* * *

Everyone in the literary world knew that Iain Ruthven had a daughter called Kirsty, and everyone knew that they had not spoken for fifteen years. The story had been in the newspapers at the time. Kirsty had written a first novel at twenty-six. It had been sent to her father for his opinion before publication, and somehow  nobody ever found out how  his private comments had ended up in a newspaper. Competent. Clean. Without a single living sentence. The book had come out anyway, and sold almost nothing. Kirsty Ruthven had never published another. As far as Agnieszka knew, she had not even come to the funeral.

   ,         ,   ,      .        .        .       ,  -               . . .    .        .      .   ,      .

The next morning, Agnieszka phoned the English publisher. She spoke to an editor, then to a more senior editor. Neither had noticed the message. Both were very excited. The senior editor started talking about "a major news story" and "a special edition", and Agnieszka felt a cold, protective anger she couldn't quite explain.

       .   ,    .  ,     .    .         ,        ,       .

"Has anyone asked Kirsty?" she said.

   - ?   .

There was a pause. "Well  no. Not yet. We'd have to, obviously."

.

  .  . , .

"Then please don't do anything until somebody has."

 , ,   ,  -  .

She put the phone down and realised that the somebody would have to be her.

    ,   -   .

* * *

It took her three days to write the letter. She was a translator; she knew that every word mattered, and that the most important words were often the ones you left out. In the end, it was short.

    .   ;  ,           ,   .     .

Dear Ms Ruthven,



I am translating your father's last novel into Polish. In the course of my work I have found something in the book that I believe was meant for you, and only for you. I have not told anyone except his publisher, and I have asked them to wait. I don't know whether you have read the book, or whether you want to. If you would like me to tell you what I found, I will. If you would prefer me never to mention it again, I will do that instead.



With respect,



Agnieszka Wrbel

  ,



        .        , ,   ,      .      ,   ,    .   ,         .   ,   ,  ,   .  ,        ,    .



 ,



 

The publisher had an address for Kirsty, in Leith, twenty minutes' walk from Agnieszka's flat. She posted the letter on Friday and spent the weekend failing to translate chapter twenty.

       ,       .             .

* * *

The reply came on Wednesday, by email. It said only: There's a caf on the Shore called the Ship's Biscuit. Thursday, 10 a.m.

   ,   .    :      . , 10 .

Kirsty Ruthven was forty-one  the same age as Agnieszka, which for some reason surprised her. She had her father's heavy eyebrows and none of his famous coldness; she was a veterinary nurse, she said, and she smelled faintly of dog. She had not read The Harbour Light. She had not read anything he had written for fifteen years.

        ,  ,   -  .            ;    ,   ,      .     .         .

Agnieszka didn't explain. She simply took a copy of the novel out of her bag, opened it at the table of contents, and pushed it across the table. Then she looked out at the boats in the harbour, so that Kirsty could read without being watched.

    .      ,       .        ,      .

It took a long time. When Agnieszka finally looked back, Kirsty's finger was resting on the last word of the list, and her face was wet, and she was laughing  a strange, broken laugh.

   .    ,       ,   ,      ,  .

"Twenty-four chapters," she said. "He must have planned the whole book around it. The stubborn old" She stopped. "He couldn't just pick up the phone."

   ,   .  ,  ,     .     .       .

"Perhaps he didn't know how," said Agnieszka. "Perhaps this was the only language he trusted."

 ,   ,   .  ,    ,   .

* * *

They talked for two hours. About the newspaper story, which Kirsty now believed her father had never leaked. About the lighthouse keeper in the novel, who was obviously him, and his daughter, who was obviously her. About Agnieszka's own father in Gdansk, who had never once in his life said "I'm sorry", and probably never would.

   .       ,     .       ,   ,      ,   .      ,         , ,   .

"The publishers want to make it a news story," Agnieszka said at last. "A special edition. Interviews."

      ,    .   . .

"No." Kirsty said it without hesitation. "He hid it. He hid it so that only I would find it  or someone like you. That's how he wanted it." She looked at the book. "What about your translation? It won't work in Polish, will it? The letters will all be different."

 .      .    .  ,       -  .   .     .      ? -   ?   .

Agnieszka had been thinking about this for a week. She took the envelope out of her pocket  the one she had written the letters on  and turned it over. On the other side, in pencil, was a second line.

     .       ,    ,   .       .

KIRSTY TO MOJA WINA WYBACZ MI

KIRSTY TO MOJA WINA WYBACZ MI  - ,   .  .

"Twenty-four letters," she said. "Exactly. I counted it eleven times. Some of the chapter titles will have to change, of course. And there are two Ys, and Polish has almost no words that begin with Y  so one chapter will have to be named after the keeper's boat. I haven't solved the other one yet. But it can be done." She hesitated. "If you want it to be."

   ,   .  .    .   , ,  .      Y,        Y,         .      .   .   .     .

Kirsty looked at the envelope for a long moment. Then she nodded.

    .  .

* * *

The second Y took her until March. The Polish edition came out that spring. Agnieszka did not write a translator's note explaining the acrostic, although translators usually do. Some secrets, she decided, are not hers to explain. Perhaps, one day, a reader in Krakw or Wroclaw would notice it, late at night, half asleep, the way she had.

  Y     .      .         ,     .  ,  ,   .  ,  -          ,  ,   .




  .


   .

   ,     (https://www.litres.ru/book/aleksandra-panfilova/30-vecherov-s-angliiskim-uroven-b2-dvuiazychnye-rassk-74597302/)  .

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