Читать книгу Self Condemned онлайн

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In a street in Welwyn, to this day, a herd of these animals may be encountered: a whole tribe of people, neighbours and friends, who stand quietly like obedient ponies, or like Yaks on a secluded hillside, or in the cages of a zoo, presenting you with a profile in which is a big, amused, contemplative eye. One of these Welwynites was known to René, a colleague, a lecturer in physics. This strange professor would stand there, before his academic audience, as if thunderstruck with quiet fun, in front of a chart of the astral universe, making the entire galaxies and starry clusters seem delightfully ridiculous. René had watched him with uneasiness, almost with alarm, and with his brother-in-law Percy Lamport, most true to type and capable of remaining in profile with the 'Welwyn eye' as René called it for minutes at a time, he was never quite at his ease.

This great retiring mansion situated near the crest of Hampstead Hill, far from the built-over bog-lands of the Thames-side, had been selected in the 'twenties' by Percy Lamport and his wife Mary, to meet the needs of a growing family, and in view of his mounting prosperity. As an executive in a big Insurance business, now in his early fifties, Percy was a minor magnate. Ultra-liberal Welwyn-origins accounted for his reading-matter: the News Chronicle and The New Statesman and Nation and other left-wing periodicals. And as a matter-of-fact, the richer he became, the more to the left these newspapers and weeklies moved. An enlightened interest in the Fine Arts was also, with him, of radical origins. He had become the possessor of an original Matisse, two or three Vlaminks, a half-dozen Marie Laurençins, the painter most exactly corresponding to his taste. Shaw, G. D. H. Cole, Priestley, Katherine Mansfield, Wystan Auden, The Road to Wigan Pier, Father Brown, was the sort of literature to be found in his study. So his cultural habits of thought were orthodoxly-liberal and unusually developed for a City man.