A Pure Clear Light. Madeleine John St.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ tread, and when she sat, her frame folded, just so, her back very straight. Where could she have learned to do all that? She moved – now he came to think of it – now that he’d actually watched her, properly, for the first time in all these years of intermittent brief meetings – like one of those old-time actresses. Deportment. A nice old-fashioned word for a nice old-fashioned thing. She sipped at the drink. There was something just right about the way she did that, too. Who, now he came to think of it (he must once have been told, but he hadn’t actually been listening), was she? Who are you, Lydia?

      ‘Have you lived here long?’ he said, looking around the room again. Shabby didn’t begin to say it: the curtains, for instance, were half in tatters, and the large Aubusson-style carpet on the floor was virtually threadbare – here and there you could just discern a rose-petal or two, the end of a blue riband, half a spray of foliage.

      Lydia considered. ‘I bought it three and a half years ago,’ she said.

      ‘Oh, you own it then.’

      ‘Yes. My mother had one of her fits of conscience, and gave me the money.’

      ‘Ah.’

      ‘One of these days she may have another such fit, and I’ll be able to do it up properly.’

      ‘What about your father?’

      ‘He has no conscience.’

      ‘Your mother –’

      ‘Lives in Australia. She ran off with an abstract expressionist when I was fourteen years old.’

      Simon began to laugh, and then stopped. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.

      ‘Your father, then –’

      ‘My father’s remarried and has another family; they all live in Bucks. I was my parents’ only child. Now you know everything there is to know about me: I need only add that art is long and life is short – as I dare say you have already realised.’ Her glance fell on him briefly, teasingly, dismissively. Now you can go, she might have said: and he was for the moment paralysed; he did not know how, politely, gracefully, to make a move. It was as if she had heard his unspoken question and had teasingly, then dismissively, answered it – but only to leave him wondering still further. Yes, but who are you?

      He looked into his glass and then drained it and put it down on the low table in front of the sofa. ‘I really must be going,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the Chartreuse.’

      ‘That’s alright,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the lift, and everything.’

      He was standing up. It had all taken an almost superhuman effort; she rose in one swift, easy movement, like a bird taking flight, and walked over to the door and opened it. She stood, waiting for him to follow her and depart, her head slightly tilted. That smile again. He stood in the doorway, not twelve inches from her. She was almost as tall as he – much taller than Flora: her eyes almost directly met his. ‘Well, good-bye,’ he said. And, oh God, for one terrible instant he was seized by the impulse to lean forward and kiss her on the mouth; to extinguish that smile, subdue that teasing, alien glance. How could this be? He stopped himself just in time, of course.

      But there was worse. For as he turned to go, finally, truly to depart, he saw that she had seen this impulse come and go, and thought as little of him for having resisted it as she would have thought of him for succumbing to it. He hastened down the stairs almost at a run, and escaped the terrible house. He did not see her again for another six months or so, and when he did, had all but forgotten that dreadful moment in the doorway: but looking at her at the other end of a dinner table – at the Carringtons, was it? – he thought, she’s not my type at all, not remotely. Could she be anyone’s?

       7

      Apparently not. Apparently no one wanted to hook up with Lydia. ‘But how old exactly is she now? Thirty-five-ish?’ Simon asked Flora, on the way home from that particular dinner party.

      Flora was driving; Simon had been knocking back the Pinot Noir like no one’s business. ‘She’s, well, a bit older than I am,’ said Flora. ‘She came up late to Cambridge: she went out to Australia for a few years after she left school.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Simon. He made no mention of his having heard the tale of Lydia’s errant mother. You’d have thought his interest in the subject was nil. Well, and so it was.

      ‘Her mother lives out there,’ Flora went on. ‘She has a gallery. In Sydney.’

      ‘No kidding,’ said Simon. Flora glanced at him. Well! It was, after all, he who had raised the topic of Lydia. ‘Isn’t it time old Lydia found herself a bloke?’ he’d said, as they were driving along the embankment. ‘She isn’t old,’ Flora had replied.

      Simon thought, for one last moment, of Lydia: there was only one way to find out who she was, and he wasn’t going to do so. He didn’t even want to. Would anyone?

       8

      ‘All the same,’ said Flora, ‘I think I should ask her to come to France with us.’

      ‘Please, Mum, don’t,’ said Janey. ‘Please.’

      ‘She can sleep in my room,’ said Nell. ‘She can come with me.’

      ‘Can Fergus come too?’ asked Thomas. ‘Can we ask Fergus to come to France with us? Fergus can sleep with me.’

      ‘You won’t even have room for her,’ said Simon. A futile discussion ensued about the number and disposition of the beds and bedrooms at the gîte; ‘I mean in the car, anyway. It’ll be a squash as it is.’

      ‘It would have been even squashier if you’d been coming,’ said Flora.

      ‘The whole advantage of my not coming,’ said Simon, ‘is that you won’t be squashed in the car. Just think about it.’

      ‘Can Fergus come?’ Thomas asked again. ‘Fergus won’t squash.’

      ‘She probably can’t come anyway,’ said Flora. ‘She probably has too much to do here, at this time of the year.’

      ‘Sure to,’ said Simon. ‘Leave her to get on with it.’

      Lydia with advancing years and a receding economy had become unemployable, so had had perforce to employ herself: she was now the sole proprietor – and, indeed, employee – of Floating World Postcards Ltd, and had been trading, latterly at a small profit, for almost three years. The postcards depicted London in its more insolite aspects (she resorted to a small stable of freelance photographers, followers of E. Atget and A. Monnier and that ilk) and were gradually finding their way into the collections of the better class of tourist. ‘I’ll give her a ring, anyway,’ said Flora weakly.

      ‘Please don’t ask her to come to France, Mum, said Janey. ‘I do implore you.’

      ‘Can СКАЧАТЬ