Gender Readings. Top Ten. Ренц Т.Г - 56 стр.

  6           GRAHAM GREENE
              THE INVISIBLE JAPANESE GENTLEMEN

      There were eight Japanese gentlemen having a fish dinner at
Bentley’s. They spoke to each other rarely in their incomprehensible
tongue, but always with a courteous smile and often with a small bow.
All but one of them wore glasses. Sometimes the pretty girl who sat in
the window beyond gave them a passing glance, but her own problem
seemed too serious for her to pay real attention to anyone in the
world except herself and her companion.
      She had thin blonde hair and her face was pretty and petite in a
Regency way, oval like a miniature, though she had a harsh way of
speaking — perhaps the accent of the school, Roedean or Chelten-
ham Ladies’ College, which she had not long ago left. She wore a
man’s signet-ring on her engagement finger, and as I sat down at my
table, with the Japanese gentlemen between us, she said, “So you see
we could marry next week.”
      “Yes?”
      Her companion appeared a little distraught. He refilled their glasses
with Chablis and said, “Of course, but Mother...” I missed some of the
conversation then, because the eldest Japanese gentleman leant across
the table, with a smile and a little bow, and uttered a whole paragraph like
the mutter from an aviary, while everyone bent towards him and smiled
and listened, and I couldn’t help attending to him myself.
      The girl’s fiancè resembled her physically. I could see them as
two miniatures hanging side by side on white wood panels. He should
have been a young officer in Nelson’s navy in the days when a certain
weakness and sensitivity were no bar to promotion.
      She said, “They are giving me an advance of five hundred
pounds, and they’ve sold the paperback rights already”. The hard
commercial declaration as a shock to me; it was a shock too that she
was one of my own profession. She couldn’t be more than twenty. She
deserved better of life.
      He said, “But my uncle¾”
      “You know you don’t get on with him. This way we shall be
quite independent.”
      “You will be independent,” he said grudgingly.

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