英语短篇小 An Anxious Man.docVIP

An Anxious Man James Lasdun I Joseph Nagel slumped forward, head in hands. ‘My God,’ he groaned. Elise snapped off the car radio. ‘Calm down, Joseph.’ ‘That’s four straight days since we got here.’ ‘Joseph, please.’ ‘What do you think we’re down now? Sixty? Eighty thousand?’ ‘It’ll come back.’ ‘We should have sold everything after the first twenty. That would have been an acceptable loss. Given that we were too stupid to sell when we were actually ahead – ‘ Joseph felt the petulant note in his voice, told himself to shut up, and plunged on: ‘I did say we should get out, didn’t I? Frankly, it was irresponsible committing all that money – ‘shut up, shut up ‘- not to mention the unseemliness of buying in when you did – ‘ Oh God … His wife spoke icily: ‘I didn’t hear you complain when we were ahead.’ ‘All right, but that’s not the point. The point is – ‘ ‘What?’ Her face had tightened angrily on itself, all line and bone. ‘The point is…’ But he had lost his train of thought and sat blinking, walled in a thick grief that seemed for a moment unaccounted for by money or anything else he could put his finger on. Elise got out of the car. ‘Let’s go for a swim, shall we, Darcy?’ She opened the rear door for their daughter and led her away. Glumly, Joseph watched them walk hand in hand down through the scrub oaks and pines to the sandy edge of the kettle pond. He gathered the two bags from the shopping expedition into his lap, bur remained in the car, heavily immobile. Money … For the first time in their lives they had some capital. It had come from the sale of an apartment Elise had inherited, and it had aroused volatile forces in their household. Though not a vast amount – under a quarter of a million dollars after estate taxes – it was large enough, if considered as a stake rather than a nest eff, to form the basis of a dream of real riches, and Joseph had found himself unexpectedly susceptibl