Waiting for the Olympians

Начало книги

If I had been writing it as a romance, I would have called the chapter about that last day in London something like “The Day of the Two Rejections”. It was a nasty day in late December just before the holidays. The weather was cold, wet, and miserable—well, I said it was London, didn’t I?—but everybody was in a sort of expectant holiday mood; it had just been announced that the Olympians would be arriving no later than the following August, and everybody was excited about that. All the taxi drivers were busy, and so I was late for my lunch with Lidia. “How was Manahattan?” I asked, sliding into the booth beside her and giving her a quick kiss.

“Manahattan was very nice,” she said, pouring me a drink. Lidia was a writer, too—well they call themselves writers, the ones who follow famous people around and write down all their gossip and jokes and put them out as books for the amusement of the idle. That’s not really writing, of course. There’s nothing creative about it. But it pays well, and the research (Lidia always told me) was a lot of fun. She spent a lot of time travelling around the celebrity circuit, which was not very good for our romance. She watched me drink the first glass before she remembered to ask politely, “Did you finish the book?”

Читать дальше →