"Gwyneth Jones - A North Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Gwyneth)

on a pick-up truck, clasping her red-faced builder to her side). Sheridan sat there in
his black biker jacket and his black jeans, one long leg crossed over the other, saying
little, grinning secretly. "Jaysus," remarked Noreen, in astonishment. "It seems like
we've been friends for ever! And will you look at the time. Jonas'll be home and no
dinner cooked!"
They went out to eat at a roadhouse with pretensions (Noreen exhorting them
from the doorstep to be careful of "the drunk driving"). In the morning Camilla
declined to rise for the Full Irish Breakfast. Folded between sickly polyester
surfaces, the smell of bad laundry in her nostrils, she listened to middle-aged
Americans tramping heavily down the stairs. She could tell by the sound of their
voices that there was nothing worth getting up for in that dining-room. I won't stay
another night, she thought. I won't. A quarter-hour later, a tap on the door: Noreen
with a tray of tea and wheaten bread. "Are yez poorly?" asked the young housewife,
gravely concerned. "He says I'm to tell you he's gone out to take a look around the
possibilities. He says you'll know what he means."
"Sheridan's a photographer," said Camilla. "He loves the light here. How nice of
you to bring me the tea. You shouldn't have. I'm so sorry to be a nuisance."
So Noreen stayed, and talked, and stayed, and told terrible stories about rude
unreasonable tourists (Camilla having deftly established that she and Sheridan were
actually neither English nor American). Downstairs baby Roisin's grizzling rose to a
roar. Camilla heard her, but Noreen didn't. When she left at last her round eyes were
as bright as stars, she turned at the door for a lingering glance: came back and patted
Camilla's toned and slender forearm with shy, blundering tenderness.
"You have a good lie-in, Camilla. Ye'll be right as rain."
It's so simple, so harmless, such a breeze, to elicit the kindness of strangers. The
wheaten bread, poisonously tainted with an overdose of soda, was crumbled,
uneaten. Camilla sat up in bed, licking her lips and smiling. She negotiated the battery
cage to reach the tiny ensuite, and crouched on the edge of the bath that doubled for
a showerstall, which was the only way to get a good look in the mirror above the
basin.
"I'm not a bad person," she murmured.
Whatever possesses anyone to build a bathroom with a light from the north? An
unkind light, clear and shadowless, that picks out every tiny pore. But this is not a
luxury hotel. An Irish B&B is not designed to coddle the guest's sensitive
amour-propre. Passing trade, never passing this way again, too much attention to
detail would not be cost-effective. A fine ruthlessness, thought Camilla, indulgently,
as she applied her make-up. She could afford to be indulgent. She was feeling much
better, all the draining little experiences of yesterday soothed.


Outdoors, in the clear light that had painted a disquieting picture on Camilla's
mirror, Sheridan walked around the shore of the sea lough. He stopped on a rocky
outcrop above the water and sat cross-legged, taking camera lenses out of his bag.
A boy of twelve or thirteen came sailing along on a bicycle. The tall man had seen
the boy coming from a long way off. Without appearing to do so, he was displaying
his wares. The bike swerved to a halt, leaving an impressive skid mark on the gravel
track. Sheridan grinned at the sound, and went on thoughtfully laying out his big
black truncheons of lenses, his electronic light meters, his tripod. Here comes the
boy, the last, late beauty of childhood wrecked by a bullet-headed haircut,
magnetically attracted to the stranger: a dignified scowl on his face.