"David Garnett - Still Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Garnett David)

effects of the drugs hadn't worn off yet. They hadn't told her what had
been done, and she felt almost exactly the same as she had the day she
entered the clinic. There were no scars or any sign that her body had been
operated on. Perhaps it had all been a hoax, a joke fashioned by the prime
minister's warped sense of humor; maybe he'd raped her every day while
she'd been unconscious. Corinne didn't really care.
Robert sat on the edge of the chair opposite, staring at her. "I've been
through hell, Corinne. I thought you were in hospital or had been
kidnapped ... or were dead. All I could hope was that you'd decided to go
on that holiday without me. I tried the police, the security forces, the
medical authorities. No one knew, and no one wanted to know." He shook
his head. "It's good to see you, marvelous to see you. Are you going to tell
me what happened?"
Corinne shrugged, trying to keep her heavy eyelids from touching. "I
had to get away, Robert, that's all. I'm sorry I couldn't let you know. But
..." She shrugged again.
"Corinne. Corinne, Corinne.тАЭ Robert stood up and paced the room.
"When we went to the studio that night and found you gone, we thought
you must have come back here and we'd missed you. Then when you never
arrived. . . . Oh, God, I can't begin to tell you. . . . Why the hell couldn't you
let me know you were all right?"
Corinne watched him as he paused and stared out of the window. She
frowned. "'We?'" she asked.
"Yeah. Juliet was here, my niece. You know her, Louisa's daughter."
"Juliet?" repeated Corinne, trying to remember.
"Yes, Juliet. She's started at art college now and she wanted to see you
again. She phoned up because she was in London, and I invited her
around that evening."
Corinne stood up and walked over to Robert, putting her arms around
him and resting her head on his shoulder. He ran his fingers through her
hair and held her tight.
Corinne wanted to cry, but there were no more tears.
Corinne wished she had never painted that portrait of Robert, or that
she'd destroyed it when she had the opportunity тАФ yet she didn't want to
be without it, either. While it hung on the wall of the house in Kent where
they'd moved after their two-year world tour, it reminded her of how
Robert had been.
The portrait was how she always thought of him, and whenever she
studied him properly it came as a surprise to notice how much he'd
altered. His hair was thinning on top and the black lightening to gray at
the sides, while the skin around his cheeks was more creased and drawn;
his face was gaunter, a maze of broken veins; he'd put on weight,
particularly around the middle; he no longer stood so straight, and his
shoulders seemed more hunched, as though the passing years were
dragging him down. He was forty-eight years old, one year more than
Corinne.
Yet Corinne hadn't altered since she had returned from the clinic.
She studied her image in the mirror every day, looking for signs of
aging тАФ for deeper wrinkles on her face, for her skin to become drier and
lose its tautness, for the first gray hair to show itself. But there was