"Innes, Hammond - Dead and Alive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Innes Hammond)

Hammond Innes - Dead or AliveTHE QUEST...
Find out what happened to Monique, the letter said.
Pinned to it was a worn and faded photograph of a long-legged girl with an oval
face and eyes and mouth that had a suggestion of laughter. I stared at it for
some time, seated on the half-completed bridge as the slanting rays of the dying
threw the shadow of the ship on the wet sands.
I was thinking of the docks of Naples, of the narrow dirty streets below the
Castello San Elmo of Terracina, Cassino, Formia, and all the other towns where
the rubble had been ground fine in the jaws of war.This photograph might be the
likeness of a beautiful girl - or the memory of a skeleton buried beneath a
shattered building.
CHAPTER ONE
Trevedra
As soon as she opened the door I was certain I should not have come. The little
farmhouse, cream-washed against the green of the valley side and the grey
granite outcrops, looked just as I had known it before. There was the same sound
of running water in the rock below the rotten planks of the water wheel. There
was the same smell of dung and new-mown grass. And there were spring flowers
bright in the lichen-covered wall. The warmth of the setting sun swept time
aside and memory took me by the hand and we came back tired and happy after a
day in the sun and the sea. There would be chicken and fresh peas and new
potatoes and a great bowl of Cornish cream to be eaten with whortleberry jam.
And then Mrs Penruddock opened the door and I knew I had been a fool to come
back to Trevedra. The lines of her face and the greying hair told me of the
passage of the years and I remembered that Jenny would never walk with me again
through the purple and gold of the slopes above the granite cliffs.
It was loneliness that held my hand as I entered that house, so packed full of
memories. The dim hall was just the same - but the hat-stand was bare. It was
our room that I was shown into. I went over to the window and gazed down the
Rocky Valley to the sea. The land was warm in the dying sun. And I felt a
desperate urgency to pick up my suitcase and run out of Trevedra - run without
stopping until I was in the train and on my way back to London.
Sarah - we'd always called her Sarah - touched my arm. 'How is she?' I sensed by
the sympathy in her voice that she knew.
'She's dead,' I told her bleakly.
She didn't say anything. That somehow made it harder. And I felt an awful desire
to put my head in her arms and cry.
Instead I said, 'We weren't married when we came here. We said we were. But we
weren't.' I said it brutally, unsteadily - I wanted to dam her sympathy at all
costs.
But all she said was, 'I knew that. But you were in love. That's as good when
the world is going mad and you haven't much time.' The sun had gone down now and
the valley was darkening with the chill of the night. A fresh breeze, tangled
with the sea, blew in through the window. 'Did you ever get married, Mr David?'
she asked.
'No,' I said, and turned away from the window. 'No, we never got married. She
married an R.A.F. officer while I was out in the Mediterranean.'.
I started to unpack. I had to do something.
She said, 'I understand how you feel, dear. Mr Penruddock died just two years
ago. His ship went down off Anzio. It's hard to forget - this house is too full