The Model

Helen Fenwick had not intended to come back to Bridge Street at four in the morning. She had intended to sleep in her flat in Leeds, in the clean white bed with the view of the river that she had paid a great deal of money for, and to drive to Hollin Bridge at nine like a reasonable person. Instead she had lain awake until half past two, and then got up, and dressed, and driven forty minutes through the empty dark, and let herself into an old house that smelled of paint and somebody else’s life.

模型

She did not turn on the heaters. She stood at the window of the front room in her coat with her arms folded and looked across the road. The bakery’s window was the only lit thing in the street, a warm yellow rectangle in the stone, and in it, every so often, a figure crossed: a tall man with a grey beard, a small young woman with short black hair, carrying trays, bending, laughing at something. She could not hear them. She did not need to.

ヘレン・フェンウィックは、朝の四時にブリッジ・ストリートへ戻ってくるつもりなど毛頭なかった。大枚をはたいて手に入れた川を望むリーズの自宅フラットの清潔な白いベッドで眠り、まともな人間らしく九時にホリン・ブリッジへ車を走らせるつもりだったのだ。それなのに二時半まで目が冴えたまま横になり、起き上がり、服を着て、人気のない暗闇を車で四十分走り、ペンキと誰か別の人の生活の匂いが漂う古い家へと入っていったのだった。

Behind her, on the long table, the model of the new Bridge Street glowed faintly white in the light from the street. Twenty-two flats. A roof garden. The café on the ground floor with its tiny white chairs, where the oven now stood. She had paid an architect in Leeds eleven thousand pounds for that model, and she had been proud of it, and she still believed in every square metre of it. That was the problem. Belief, in her experience, was a great deal less comfortable than doubt.

彼女はヒーターをつけなかった。腕組みをしたままコート姿で表の部屋の窓辺に立ち、通りを隔てた向かい側を見つめた。石造りの家並みの中で、明かりがついているのはパン屋の窓だけで、温かみのある黄色い長方形を描いていた。その中を、時折人影が横切った。灰色の顎髭を蓄えた背の高い男と、黒い短髪の小柄な若い女が、トレイを運び、屈み、何事かに笑い合っている。声は聞こえなかった。聞く必要もなかった。