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'Look,' I said, 'why not tell people that I'm thinking about it?'
He looked back with a smile. 'What would be the point of that?'
'It might& No, you're right, it's a stupid idea.'
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He returned to the table, pocketing the hanky and taking a deep breath, his
head high. 'Oh, look at us, eh? I am ashamed at myself for spoiling a
perfectly good picnic, ruining a most pleasant holiday.'
'You haven't ruined anything, Suvinder,' I said, as he held my seat for me.
'Good. I must say, I'm still hungry. Let us eat, shall we?'
'Let's.'
He hesitated as he was about to take his seat. 'May I say one more thing?
Then I promise never to raise the subject again.'
'All right.'
'I think I love you, Kathryn.' He paused. 'But that is not why I asked you to
marry me.'
'Oh,' I said.
'I asked you to marry me because I think you will make a wonderful wife and
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because you are somebody I
can imagine being with for the rest of my life, when perhaps love, of a sort,
of a very important and special sort, might grow between us. I think it is
wonderfully romantic to marry for love alone, but I have seen so many people
do so and live to regret it. There are some lucky people, no doubt, for whom
everything works out just perfectly, but I have never met any. For most
people, I think, to marry for love is to marry& at the summit, as it were. It
must be downhill from there on. To marry for other reasons, with one's head
and not just one's heart, is to embark on a different sort of journey, uphill,
I suppose,' he said, looking embarrassed. 'My goodness, I do not choose my
metaphors so well, do I? But it is a journey which offers the hope that
things will become gradually better and better between the people concerned.'
He spread his hands and gave a sharp sort of laugh. 'There. My thoughts on
the Western romantic marriage ideal. I did not put it, or rather them, very
well, but there you are. No more.'
'You put it just fine, Suvinder,' I told him.
'I did?' he said, pouring some more tea from the padded pot. 'Oh, good.
Please, another sandwich? We cannot feed them all to the birds.'
Even moving higher than Thuhn, scaling tracks that seemed to zigzag up for
ever to still higher valleys, you could find yourself beneath the lowest limit
of an animal's domain; snow leopards that lived perpetually above the tree
line and bharals that even in winter never descended below four thousand
metres.
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'You what? You go to this remote Himalayan kingdom, the Prince proposes to
you and you turn him down
? Are you fucking insane
?'
'Of course I turned him down. I don't love him.'
'Ah, so what? Say yes anyway. What girl gets a chance to marry a prince
these days? Think of your grandchildren!'
'I don't want grandchildren. I don't want children!'
'Yes, you do.'
'No, I don't.'
'You do too. No one's mileage varies that much.'
'I'm telling you I don't, dammit!'
'Yeah, right.'
'Luce, I wouldn't lie to you. I've never lied to you.'
'Oh, come on, you must have. I'm your girlfriend, not your analyst.'
'What a terrible attitude! And I don't even have an analyst.'
'Exactly.'
'What do you mean "exactly"?'
'That just shows how much you need one.'
'What? Not having an analyst shows how much I need an analyst?'
'Yes.'
'You're mad.'
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'Yeah, but at least 've got an analyst.'
I
Slow-gliding in the air above them all slid the wing-spread shapes of the
bone-eating lammergeiers, forever cruising the blade-thin winds that sliced
across the frozen peaks.
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'Mr Hazleton?'
'Kathryn?'
'I just had a funny thought.'
'Funny? How do you mean? I thought you'd be ringing about Freddy '
'Mr Hazleton, I've just received a proposal of marriage from the Prince. Am I
supposed to& What about
Freddy?'
'You haven't heard? Oh dear. He was in a car crash. He's in what do they
call it nowadays?
Intensive Care. Kathryn, I'm very sorry to be the one to tell you, but they
don't seem to think he's going to make it. He was asking to see you. Though,
I don't know, by the time you'd be able to get there& '
Suddenly I remembered or half-remembered a joke Uncle Freddy had told me
once, something about a man, a fanatical hunter who was a great marksman with
a double-barrel shotgun and was forever bagging vast quantities of grouse and
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