Автор оригинального сценария – Simon Stephens Скрипт подготовила – Benedict in love
Sea Wall Alex: She had us, both of us, absolutely round her linger. Fundamentally she achieved this through the way she looked at us. It shouldn't have been a surprise that the way she moved her head to one side: should leave me basically on my knees or more akin, I should say, to a slightly tepid pool of just water, but what was more surprising was the effect it had on him. Anything she wanted he gave to her. Anything she demanded he agreed to. And he agreed to everything with this same little smile on his face. The smile of a man who in actual fact was little more than four years old. I'm not saying I wouldn't have agreed to the same and more in his position, but it just seemed in some way more, what? Downright surprising? Coming from him. He wasn't that kind of man. He was a soldier. When I say 'was’ I mean was, I mean he used to be. Between 1968 and 1984 he was a soldier in the British infantry. He reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He did five tours of Northern Ireland. And this was when, you know, doing a tour of Northern Ireland was more than just a few games of pool and a chat with some kids outside a fish and chip shop. Some of the photographs he took. He used to have a Polaroid camera and some of the things that, after he'd had a few drinks, he’d get out of his box to show us. You wouldn't have thought they were of Northern Ireland. There was something about them that I found in some way, you know, surprising. He always refused to talk about South Georgia. I asked him about it one time and his face turned, within the matter of a few seconds, literally gray. Slate grey. And even when he eventually retired from the army he retrained as a maths teacher for Christ's sake! I would have liked to have seen him teach. I can imagine the kind of teacher he was. I don't think he would have worn many cords. I don't think he would have shared too many coffees with the sixth-formers. Come and play with me. Read me a story. Can I sit on your lap? Where's Grandpops? Oh! There he is. Not his kind of, scene, you know? But he did it with her. The first thing I learned about photography I learned when I was a kid. If you're taking a portrait photograph, if you possibly can, then take it from below the subject. It renders the subject actually oddly, what it does is it renders them not more heroic, not more godlike, oddly it renders them more human. And if you can take it in natural lights, if you can capture the way the light falls, at the start of or at the end of a day especially, then it can be – He used to try to convince me that the existence of, the discovery of and the understanding of the relevance and importance of the irrational number which is commonly and internationally and historically known as Pi, that is, to five decimal places, the number 3.14159, is irrevocable proof of the existence of God. It's just so illogical, he told us, that it could ever work, that it must just prove that there's something more than us. And it's so incredible that we can discover it. That proves something. I think he's wrong. I told him. I think you're wrong. I told him, for somebody so palpably intelligent, Arthur, sometimes you think like your head's full of wool.
He liked me. He never got too cross. We'd talk about beer together. He never bothered about me coming from - He watched an unusual amount of tennis. Everything was tennis with him. His conversation was peppered with tennis metaphors. Sometimes I'd watch tennis with him. I never liked it much. Is it a terrible thing to say that sometimes the company of men is kind of, in some way, comforting? I don't mean it to sound. You know? I don't mean anything other than – He had a house in the eastern suburbs of Toulon in a town called Carquerraine. In the south of fucking France for fuck's sake. When I go there with Helen for the first time