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Автор: Hilary Mantel
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Современная зарубежная литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780007354924
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      An Experiment in Love

      Hilary Mantel

      

       Copyright

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by Viking 1995

      Published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2004 Published by Fourth Estate 2010

      Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1995

      PS section copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2010

      PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

      Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      The lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Whispers of Immortality’ are reprinted from Collected Poems 1909-1962, 1974, by kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780007172887

      Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007354924 Version: 2016-09-08

       Dedication

       For Gerald

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

      Dedication

      

       Four

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Ten

       Keep Reading

       Praise

       P.S.

       About the Author

       A Kind of Alchemy

       Life at a Glance

       A Writing Life

       Read on

       Have You Read?

       Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

       One

      This morning in the newspaper I saw a picture of Julia. She was standing on the threshold of her house in High-gate, where she receives her patients: a tall woman, wrapped in some kind of Indian shawl. There was a blur where her face should be, and yet I noted the confident set of her arms, and I could imagine her expression: professionally watchful, maternal, with that broad cold smile which I have known since I was eleven years old. In the foreground, a skeletal teenaged child tottered towards her, from a limousine parked at the kerb: Miss Linzi Simon, well-loved family entertainer and junior megastar, victim of the Slimmer’s Disease.

      Julia’s therapies, the publicity they have received, have made us aware that people at any age may decide to starve. Ladies of eighty-five see out their lives on tea; infants a few hours old turn their head from the bottle and push away the breast. Just as the people of Africa cannot be kept alive by the bags of grain we send them, so our own practitioners of starvation cannot be sustained by bottles and tubes. They must decide on nourishment, they must choose. Unable to cure famine—uninterested, perhaps, for not everyone has large concerns—Julia treats the children of the rich, whose malaise is tractable. No doubt her patients go to her to avoid the grim behaviourists in the private hospitals, where they take away the children’s toothbrushes and hairbrushes and clothes, and give them back in return for so many calories ingested. In this way, having broken their spirits, they salvage their flesh.

      I found myself, this morning, staring so hard at the page that the print seemed to blur; as if somewhere in the fabric of the paper, somewhere in its weave, I might find a thread which would lead me through my life, from where I was then to where I am today. ‘Psychotherapist