"Colin Greenland - A Passion For Lord Pierrot (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenland Colin)

narrow
margin of the bed that is not occupied by the flesh of Lady Dove.
'I have been taking a stroll in the grounds,' he tells her, 'by the
light
of the moon.'
'Moonlight is not good for the brain,' declares his wife at once. 'The
radiance of the moon is unsettling. It tends to unbalance one.'
Lord Pierrot strokes her great hand consolingly. 'I find it more
calming
these days than the heat of the sun,' he tells her mildly.
 Lady Dove is full of opinions on what is and is not healthy. Her
capacity
for them has grown as her bulk has swelled, and as her own vitality has
declined. This stricture against moonlight is typical, mere feminine
superstition. As a scientist, Lord Pierrot would like to dispute it,
but
as long as he allows her to remain in error, he can be sure Lady Dove
will
leave him to pursue his nocturnal excursions uninterrupted, for fear of
moonlight.
And Daphne Dolores knows never to come near the house. So all is well.
He embarks on a trivial anecdote, the story of an amusing but entirely
logical error made by his automatic lepidopteron, which has been unable
to
grasp the subtleties of Triacian taxonomy. 'There it sat, solemnly
mounting and labelling an entire drawer of bluebottles!'
Lady Dove lies like a torpid hippopotamus, breathing hoarsely through
her
open mouth. Her heavy eyes never leave Lord Pierrot's countenance,
though
he does not assume she is attending to his anecdote. She is simply
watching his mouth move. Meanwhile, covertly, he is studying her.
Unintentionally, automatically, he compares her cumbersome flesh, her
stale and suffocating bosom and lank hair with the fragrant delights he
has tasted so recently in the arms of Daphne Dolores.
He remembers when he first set eyes on Lady Dove, at a gala concert on
Artemisia to celebrate the opening of the new Trans-Galactic Passage.
She
was a delicate flower then, a rose in bud adorning the arm of her papa,
Lord Panteleone, while he was but a subaltern in the ranks of science,
a
rising young buck of some promise in the Innovation Corps. Now he is
Lord
Pierrot, master of the tango and the heavy night, yearning madly for
the
moon.
'You seem tired tonight, Pierre,' says his wife. 'You drive yourself
too
strenuously.'
Lord Pierrot looks sharply at her. It would be unlike her, unworthy of