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

"Them?"
"The kids?"
 "Ah." Camilla frowned, and looked away. "Don't worry. Your kids are safe."
She didn't explain the emphasis.
The steel-blue waves rushed in and out, the mothers sat behind the windbreaks, a
somewhat depleted cohort of local boys and girls jumped and splashed in the water.
"I suppose all your children are grown up and gone," sighed Noreen, shoving the
buggy over recalcitrant tidewrackтАж and compounded this faux-pas by adding
hurriedly, "Och, I mean, you must have been married very young!"
"Married?" Camilla dispelled the idea with a laugh, slightly put out that her dark
hint has been ignored. "Sheridan and I have been together so long we're almost like
brother and sister, but we've never been, ah, officially married."
"Not married?" gulped Noreen.
"I've never been married. I like my independence."
"But yez said, you was like, aтАж a kept woman?"
"That was my joke."
Never married! The buggy gave a jolt that made Roisin wail. Among the family
portraits so readily on display in the Guests' Lounge and TV Room, there are several
women who have never married, holding ugly babies against their bolster chests.
Noreen's astonished gaze is comparing Camilla with those crewel-working
great-aunts, finding a place for her among the failed huntresses, old maidsтАж
"You look so young!" she gasped, as if unmarried bliss was in her mind
inextricably linked with spinster middle age. "You look like a fashion model!"
Camilla squeezed the housewife's arm more tightly, and leaned close to rub her
cool pale cheek against Noreen's warm, rosy one. "I've been young for so long," she
murmured, "I can't remember being anything else."
"Ah!" sighed Noreen. "For two pins I'dтАФ"
What would she do? Take Camilla away from all this? The blushing ploughboy,
the sophisticated older woman, the configurations are endless; and pity may play a
part. It's all grist to Camilla's mill. It's like a transfusion of fresh blood, without any
of those ugly, depressing emergency-room details.
Love is the hunger on which we feed.


Sheridan prowled the woods and the shore. Camilla, no longer poorly, haunted
the kitchen of the B&B, where Noreen was penned for most of her life, incessantly
cooking, stowing the washing machine, ironing dank sheets. Noreen relayed tales of
the disastrous epidemic. The boy with the nightmares, and no one in that house gets
a wink of sleep. The girl that they rushed to hospital: but then the doctors couldn't
find anything wrong. So that was a whole day gone for nothing, with the driving her
there and the waiting in the waiting room, and the driving her back. In August, too.
Jesus God. Schadenfreude. Noreen is miraculously preserved.
 Camilla changes the subject. We are all kept women, she says. (Noreen has
confided that romance is long out of the window with her Jonas.) We can't do
without them, can we? We may look like the perfect couple, but the truth isтАж there
are things I тАФ She breaks off, and will say no more.


One day Sheridan came home from his adventures in a thoughtful mood, laid out
digital prints on the tired candlewick bedspread, and pondered them with a happy