Longshot полностью

About mid-afternoon, when we stopped taping, he lent me his Volvo to go to Didcot to fetch the parcel of books from the station and to do the household shopping, advising me not to slide into any ditches if I could help it. The roads, however, were marginally better and the air not so brutally cold, though the forecasters still spoke of more days’ frost. I shopped with luxurious abandon for food and picked up the books, getting back to Shellerton while Tremayne was still out in his yard at evening stables.

He came into the house with Mackie, both of them stamping their feet and blowing onto their fingers as they discussed the state of the horses.

‘You’d better ride Selkirk in the morning,’ Tremayne said to her. ‘He’s a bit too fresh these days for his lad.’

‘Right.’

‘And I forgot to tell Bob to get the lads to put two rugs on their mounts if they’re doing only trotting exercise.’

‘I’ll remind him.’

‘Good.’

He saw me in the kitchen as I was finishing stowing the stores and asked if the books had arrived. They had, I said.

‘Great. Bring them into the family room. Come on, Mackie, gin and tonic.’

The big logs in the family room fireplace never entirely went cold; Tremayne kicked the embers smartly together, adding a few small sticks and a fresh chunk of beech to renew the blaze. The evening developed as twice before, Perkin arriving as if on cue and collecting his Coke.

With flattering eagerness Tremayne opened the package of books and handed some of them to Mackie and Perkin. So familiar to me, they seemed to surprise the others, though I wasn’t sure why.

Slightly larger than paperbacks, they were more the size of video tapes and had white shiny hard covers with the tide in various bright black-edged colours: Return Safe from the Jungle in green, Return Safe from the Desert in orange, Return Safe from the Sea in blue, Return Safe from the Ice in purple, Return Safe from Safari in red, Return Safe from the Wilderness in a hot rusty brown.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Tremayne said. ‘Real books.’

‘What did you expect?’ I asked.

‘Well... pamphlets, I suppose. Thin paperbacks, perhaps.’

‘The travel agency wanted them glossy,’ I explained, ‘and also useful.’

‘They must have taken a lot of work,’ Mackie observed, turning the pages of Ice and looking at illustrations.

‘There’s a good deal of repetition in them, to be honest,’ I said. ‘I mean, quite a lot of survival techniques are the same wherever you find yourself.’

‘Such as what?’ Perkin asked, faintly belligerent as usual.

‘Lighting fires, finding water, making a shelter. Things like that.’

‘The books are fascinating,’ Mackie said, now looking at Sea, ‘but how often do people get marooned on desert islands these days?’

I smiled. ‘Not often. It’s just the idea of survival that people like. There are schools where people on holiday go for survival courses. Actually the most lethal place to be is up a British mountainside in the wrong clothes in a cold mist. A fair number of people each year don’t survive that.’

‘Could you?’ Perkin asked.

‘Yes, but I wouldn’t be up there in the wrong clothes in the first place.’

‘Survival begins before you set out,’ Tremayne said, reading the first page of Jungle: he looked up, amused, quoting “Survival is a frame of mind.” ’

‘Yes.’

‘I have it,’ he said.

‘Indeed you do.’

All three of them went on reading the books with obvious interest, dipping into the various sections at random, flicking over pages and stopping to read more: vindicating, I thought, the travel agency’s contention that the back-to-nature essentials of staying alive held irresistible attractions for ultra-cosseted sophisticates, just as long as they never had to put them into practice in bitter earnest.

Gareth erupted into the peaceful scene like a rehearsing poltergeist.

‘What are you all so busy with?’ he demanded, and then spotted the books. ‘Boy, oh boy. They’ve come!’

He grabbed up Return from the Wilderness and plunged in, and I sat drinking wine and wondering if I would ever see four people reading Long Way Home.

‘This is pretty earthy stuff,’ Mackie said after a while, laying her book down. ‘Skinning and de-gutting animals, ugh.’

‘You’d do it if you were starving,’ Tremayne told her.

‘I’d do it for you,’ Gareth said.

‘So would I,’ said Perkin.

‘Then I’ll arrange not to get stranded anywhere without you both.’ She was teasing, affectionate. ‘And I’ll stay in camp and grind the corn.’ She put a hand to her mouth in mock dismay. ‘Dear heaven, may feminists forgive me.’

‘It’s pretty boring about all these jabs,’ Gareth complained, not being interested in gender typing.

‘ “Better the jabs than the diseases”, it says here,’ Tremayne said.

‘Oh well, then.’

‘And you’ve had tetanus jabs already.’

‘I guess so,’ Gareth agreed. He looked at me. ‘Have you had all these jabs?’

‘Afraid so.’

‘Tetanus?’

‘Especially.’