Canarino. Katherine Bucknell

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СКАЧАТЬ bother reminding him that the speed limit on this road is fifty-five. Just tell him how special it is for the children to see everything first.’

      Almost instantly, the Land-Rover appeared in the right lane, slipping backwards beside the Mercedes.

      Elizabeth didn’t check whether it pulled in behind them as they passed. She knew she could depend on Norma.

      The chauffeur fiddled with the air-conditioning control and asked in a cautious voice, ‘Are you cool enough, ma’am?’

      ‘Oh, yes,’ she answered faintly, ‘don’t worry about me at all.’

      Otherwise, there was silence. On they crawled, at the speed of respect, dead slow in the far right lane now, dirgeless, joyless, tasteful, serene. Gordon gradually slumped down in his seat and dozed off like Hope.

      After the highway, the road rolled and curved through the humid green woods. Everywhere the high trees were drowning in honeysuckle vines,Virginia creeper, and poison ivy. From time to time a vista opened, then flashed closed as they passed fields, barbed-wire fences, pink-flowered spreading vetch; later, post-and-board fences, rampant, lumpy grass meadows, horses grazing. At last they slowed, along the pasture adjoining the farm lane, and turned in at the big, dark green post-and-board gates through the empty fields straight toward the haze-shrouded mountains.

      Elizabeth swiveled in her seat, reaching back to pat the children’s legs, coming suddenly to life.

      ‘Wake up now, Gordon. Wake up, Hope. We’re here, darlings. You’ve had a little rest, and now it’s time to wake up. Do you want to see the farm? Look, we’re passing the pond. There are the ducks. Do you see them?’ She roused them lovingly and mildly, stroking their bare skin, which was icy with air-conditioning.

      The driveway mounted and fell away over the small swelling hills; it was graveled in smooth gray stones and the grass alongside was rich and green, mown short, with about three feet clear to the double rows of dark green fences on either side. There were pairs of sapling oaks in full tender leaf every forty feet or so, each with its own enclosure of fence to keep away deer. Elizabeth surveyed it all with satisfaction. She had asked for the trees and the new fences the day she saw the farm. The gravel had been discussed later. The manicure was professional, she thought to herself. At least Mr Richards knows what he’s doing with stationary property.

      At the fork in the drive, they turned away from the mountains and through an enormous pair of decorative wrought-iron gates set in a tall laurel hedge. On the other side of the hedge, the white-columned portico of the house rose up two stories in front of them. Spotty fieldstone walls climbed three stories to the peaked eaves above, and spread away in two wings on either side.

      Again she tugged on the children’s legs as the car came to a stop. ‘Wake up, you two!’ she whispered urgently. She thought they would be excited to see it. She couldn’t help being a little excited herself. She had bought the place in the dead of winter, gone around it for a few days with the interior decorator, and since then worked from plans and photographs.

      She had been remodeling and decorating the house inside her head for six months. It represented a new, chosen, phase in her life. It was nothing to do with men, with giving or receiving. It was her own vision, executed unstintingly.

      Nothing in the house belonged to her personally, but everything—every painting, every chair, every light fixture, every doorknob—represented a choice she herself had made and which, taken all together, embodied and revealed her mature sensibility in finest detail. Decoration was one medium in which Elizabeth felt entirely at ease, entirely confident. It was an expensive medium, but she had no reason to hold back. She hadn’t asked David a single question about this house. She hadn’t asked him how much she could spend on it or what he might like. She had decided by herself how he would live and what would make him comfortable. Up until recently she had made such decisions with David’s face before her or with the phrase, What would David think…hovering somewhere in the back of her mind. She had for years divided herself in two, and the stronger part, the outspoken part, had been given over to David’s interests, David’s needs, David. That period of her life was finished. Now she was free to express herself, her neglected, buried self.

      It was only a house, only a piece of land; she knew that’s what most people would say. I would even have said it myself at one time, Elizabeth thought. But the years had taught her the power of physical beauty, the danger, the pleasure. Beauty was stable in a house, in an object. It could be worshipped there safely by anyone. Elizabeth felt that her personal beauty had been, unexpectedly, such a burden and had brought her mostly pain; as long as her beauty lasted, she would never be able to stop using it. She knew perfectly well that she was addicted to it, to the worship her beauty brought her. But she felt this as a weakness. Beauty had weakened her because it had given her a false power, false leverage. Either people were afraid of it, or they grew used to it, familiar, and the power faded.

      Elizabeth herself was a long way off fading, but she wasn’t anxious about that. It was hardly possible for her to take personal pleasure in her looks anymore. It had been years since she had earned any money by them, and she had never been entirely comfortable selling her looks anyway; however good at it, however successful she had been, she always felt that there was something wrong about it, something wanton—at least if you actually needed the money, as she once had. And there were people she would not have shown herself to, if it hadn’t been for the money. Part of her could never get far enough away from her public life, from those people, and from the sense that she had flaunted something private without realizing it, that she had given her maidenhood away to what she had later come to think of as a mob, a mob she feared and yet also held in contempt because it made of her looks what it liked, what it wanted for itself, without having any real understanding of her, Elizabeth, at all. You could use personal beauty, she had decided, but you couldn’t really control it; you couldn’t give it a particular meaning, a particular content.

      Even now, there was hardly anywhere that Elizabeth felt really alone, hardly anyone with whom she felt really safe, because she had once sold herself so widely. And because she knew, although she didn’t like to think about it, that she had been thrilled to do it at the time. Nowadays Elizabeth was certain there was nothing she could gain by her looks which could actually make her happy—unless she knew how to be happy anyway. What was the point of being worshipped?

      During her decade in England, she had come to feel that houses, homes, castles, country seats, and the many treasures accumulated in them, could all by themselves intimate something more reliable, a way of living that was beautiful. Rugs, paintings, antiques, she thought, colored the passage of time, shaped it, like emotions—love, happiness, sorrow. Objects and possessions, still and unregarding, offered no threat, and with their clearly proclaimed style and their slow, loyal accretions of patina, they silently, passively enriched the minutes, the hours, the passing days. How many well-protected hallways had she walked along in England—say, with wide dark boards, the walls hung with silk or molded paneling, mirrors, crystal sconces, scenes of hunting or of love between the paned windows, shafts of light angling in across a runner—and thought of countless others over countless years, however different their eyes or their circumstances, who must have walked along the same hallway, passing the same things, and been marked by them, influenced, persuaded? Such a hallway, the rooms it might lead to, long-established, well-appointed, resonant, made time seem whole and contained; they held time back, Elizabeth felt, held it still. They stopped change.

      And they stood for worthiness, for unassailable worth. Elizabeth believed that the care spent crafting an object was evident in the object itself. If the object was any good, it was proof of something in mankind that was higher than mere appetite, more refined, more complex. This was obvious in a masterpiece, less obvious but no less true in a minor but fine effort. And Elizabeth knew that she could tell—that she could select minor masterpieces СКАЧАТЬ