Nidere: переводы

→‘Brace yourself,’ said Miles Mollison, standing in the kitchen of one of the big
houses in Church Row.

→The husband called 999 on his mobile.
The ambulance had to come from the neighbouring city of Yarvil, and it took
twenty-five minutes to reach them. By the time the pulsing blue light slid over the
scene, Barry was lying motionless and unresponsive on the ground in a pool of his
own vomit; Mary was crouching beside him, the knees of her tights ripped, clutching
his hand, sobbing and whispering his name.

→Mary screamed – and kept screaming. Several men came running from the bar.
One of them sprinted back inside the building to see whether either of the club’s
retired doctors was present. A married couple, acquaintances of Barry and Mary’s,
heard the commotion from the restaurant, abandoned their starters and hurried outside
to see what they could do.

→Then pain such as he had never experienced sliced through his brain like a demolition
ball. He barely noticed the smarting of his knees as they smacked onto the
cold tarmac; his skull was awash with fire and blood; the agony was excruciating
beyond endurance, except that endure it he must, for oblivion was still a minute
away.

→Mary switched off the mirror light and closed the passenger side door. Barry
pressed the auto-lock on the key-ring in his hand; his wife’s high heels clacked
on the tarmac, the car’s locking system beeped, and Barry wondered whether his
nausea might abate once he had eaten.

→Barry parked
the people-carrier outside the club restaurant, the Birdie, and stood for a moment
beside the car, while Mary reapplied her lipstick. The cool evening air was pleasant
on his face. As he watched the contours of the golf course disintegrating into
the dusk, Barry wondered why he kept up his membership. He was a bad golfer:
his swing was erratic and his handicap was high. He had so many other calls on his
time. His head throbbed worse than ever.

→The golf club lay a mere four minutes away from the Square, a little beyond the
point where the town petered out in a final wheeze of old cottages.

→All Barry could think of as he twiddled the steering wheel, navigating the familiar
turns, were the mistakes he was sure he had made, rushing to finish the article
he had just emailed to the Yarvil and District Gazette. Garrulous and engaging in
person, he found it difficult to carry his personality onto paper.

→They drove down Church Row, the steeply sloping
street where the most expensive houses stood in all their Victorian extravagance and
solidity, around the corner by the mock-Gothic church, where he had once watched
his twin girls perform Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and across
the Square, where they had a clear view of the dark skeleton of the ruined abbey that
dominated the town’s skyline, set high on a hill, melding with the violet sky.

→Barry’s headache continued to thump behind his ear as he reversed out of the
drive and set off through the pretty little town of Pagford, where they had lived as
long as they had been married.

→Barry and Mary’s four children were past the age of needing a babysitter. They
were watching television when he said goodbye to them for the last time, and only
Declan, the youngest, turned to look at him, and raised his hand in farewell.

→Mary had softened and smiled, so Barry had telephoned the golf club, because it
was nearby and they were sure of getting a table. He tried to give his wife pleasure in
little ways, because he had come to realize, after nearly two decades together, how
often he disappointed her in the big things. It was never intentional. They simply
had very different notions of what ought to take up most space in life.

→‘Mary, I want to take you out to dinner,’ he had lied, to break the frost. ‘Nineteen
years, kids! Nineteen years, and your mother’s never looked lovelier.’

→It did not help that he had been writing about
Krystal, whom Mary disliked, although she pretended otherwise.

→However, his wife had been a little stiff and uncommunicative over lunch, and
Barry deduced that his anniversary card had not mitigated the crime of shutting himself
away in the study all morning.

→Sunday
Barry Fairbrother did not want to go out to dinner. He had endured a thumping headache
for most of the weekend and was struggling to make a deadline for the local
newspaper.

→Charles Arnold-Baker
Local Council Administration,
Seventh Edition

→(c) on the day of his death …

→(b) when his notice of resignation is received; or

→(a) when a local councillor fails to make his declaration of acceptance of office
within the proper time; or