"Adams, Douglas - The Long Dark Tea-Time of The Soul" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

There was an idea.




Tenerife.




Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.




She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry tangles of traffic and thought that however cold and miserable the weather was here, that was nothing to what it would be like in Norway.




Or, indeed, at home. Home would bc about as icebound as Norway right now. Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of steam bursting out of the grnund, catching in the frigid air and dissipating bctween the glacial cliff faces of Sixth Avenue.




A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the course of her thirty years would reveal her without any doubt to be a New Yorker. For though she had lived in the city very little, most of her life had been spent at a constant distance from it. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Europe, and a period of distracted wandering around South America five years ago following the loss of her newly mamed husband, Luke, in a New York taxihailing accident.




She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them to. That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit at a table staring at red paper napkins for wasn't real pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it.




London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it amved at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this simple principle? For some odd reason it was the one frustration she could never learn simply to live with and accept, and about once a month or so she would get very depressed, phone a pizza restaurant, order the biggest, most lavish pizza she could describe - pizza with an extra pizza on it, essentially - and then, sweetly, ask them to deliver it.




"To what?"




"Deliver. Let me give you the address - "