Read Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream for Free Online Page A

just beginning to consider the very vague possibility of maybe thinking about perhaps leaving. Oh no, she wasn't going to leave, no way, not like that, absolutely not, she had put in a lot of effort, she had pondered the matter, she had expended both time and indecision on me. She would only leave with a 'Yes' or a 'No'. Although she would probably make do with an 'I'll see what I can do, I'll do my best', or 'But I'll want this in exchange', one can always make a promise and then go back on one's word, it happens often enough. 'Well, it depends', however, would definitely not be good enough.
    'No, no, really, just tell me what it is. Please, tell me.' It did not take me long to cancel my attempted rebellion, it did nottake me long to surrender. Politeness is a poison, it's our undoing. I didn't want to go to bed in the early hours without having something sorted out. I stroked the dog, he was obviously tired from the weight of water pressing down on his almost aerial walk, tis tis tis, he was gradually drying off. He wasn't particularly young. He was dozing now. I patted his back, he straightened his neck as his mistress had, just for a second, when he felt my friendly hand; he rather haughtily allowed himself to be patted, then lowered his head and took no further notice of me, I was, after all, just a passing stranger. He really wasn't up to getting a soaking like that.
    'The day after tomorrow or the day after that, I think, or next week at the latest,' Pérez Nuix began, after all, she had been given the green light and wasn't going to miss the opportunity, 'you'll be asked to interpret someone I know, probably in person and possibly on video too. I want to ask you not to spoil his chances, not to let Bertie rule him out, I mean, not to let Tupra just dismiss him or give a bad, overall final report either because he doesn't trust him or because he trusts him too much. He'd have no reason to do so: I know this acquaintance of mine is not the deceitful sort, I know that, I know him. But Bertie can be very arbitrary at times, or else when he does see something very clearly, he sometimes goes against that clarity, precisely because he sees it so clearly. I mean, oh, I don't know, but anyway.' She herself noticed how lacking in clarity her own last sentence was. I realised that, despite the long build-up, what Pérez Nuix did not as yet know was in which order to expound, tell, persuade, ask. Hardly anyone knows that, and so they fail. Even those who write. But she carried on, she wasn't going to start all over again. 'I've seen someone make such a horrendous impression on him that he's decided, out of hand, to help him and to offer him some incredible opportunity; and vice versa too, with someone who had everything to recommend him, I've seen him refuse to have anything to do with him or even to accept his help, again completely out of hand. He doesn't like things too clear or too simple, or anything that is apparently unmixed, because he's convinced that there is always some admixture and that the only reason we cannot see it is because of some very clever concealment or because of some momentary laziness on the part of our own perspicacity. And so if he isn't offered any doubts, he creates them himself. When we're the ones who lack the doubts — Rendel, Mulryan, you, me, the out-of-house people, Jane Treves, Branshaw, or whoever - he provides them. He sets them out for us, invents them. He so distrusts the indubitable that he modifies his verdict accordingly, contrary to his own certainty, not to mention ours. It doesn't happen very often because such total conviction is so rare, and he would never put his hand in the fire for any human being. Tupra knows very well that no one is as straight as a die, that no one is consistently the person he is or even was, not even the person he aspires to be and has not yet been for a single day. "It's the way of the world," he says and then he moves on, he expects nothing and nothing