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

Noreen was up in time to hear them go. She'd had a sleepless night, but no
staying in bed for Noreen. No one to bring her a tray. She had the breakfast for the
guests to cook, Jonas in a poor temper, the children giving her hell and the baby
fretful. But she was smiling. She stood in the porch and listened to the deep purr of
the big car's engine. There they go, the beautiful people. She was fingering a
rectangle of chaste cream pasteboard, simply inscribed Camilla Siibu. Nothing else,
no address, no phone number: that's arrogance, isn't it? But it doesn't matter. You
never do see them again, the passing trade. She tucked the card into the drawer,
where she kept a select collection of such trophies.
"I have lovely guests, sometimes," she murmured. "It's lovely to have them."
And she returned to her domestic servitude, with a gleam of secret triumph in that
beaming, rapacious smile; her naive hazel eyes no longer hungry, but replete.


They called ahead and booked a room in a place as far removed from that
primitive B&B as money could buy. The country house hotel set in its own lush
grounds: now this is more like it. Sheridan handed over the keys to the Bentley.
Camilla flashed an automatically dazzling smile at the boy who took their luggage,
and was faintly surprised to receive no eye-kick of appreciation in return.
They walked into the hotel, and how wide the lobby seemed. It was not crowded
but full of people. No one glanced her way. Or if they did, by chance, happen to
look in Camilla's direction, they appeared to see nothing. By the time they reached
the desk, she was feeling disquieted, and strangely weary, as if that short walk had
been a long trek across empty tundra. Camilla's progress through the human world
has been, for so long, a continuous sip, sip, at the nectar of attention. Full-blown
seduction is an occasional indulgence (she's not an addict, like Sheridan!). Her
eternal beauty, everlasting youth, is nourished by subtler means. She doesn't even
have to think about it, she is so used to eliciting the response. The admiration that
comes back to her, from almost any human being, male or female, young or old, is
her daily bread, the air she breathes. Beautiful people feed like this. The rest are there
to be fed upon. That's the law of nature.
All the way up to their room, Sheridan placidly silent and indifferent beside her,
she could not stop herself from peering at the glass walls of the lift, at a passing
chambermaid, at the bellboy waiting for his tip. Nothing. She might as well be
invisible. What's happened to me?
"What's wrong with you, Cam?"
"Nothing," she says, sitting in the middle of the vast acreage of their room, on the
king-sized bed, sumptuous with pillows; the white sheets crisp and fragrant. But
where's Noreen, with her humble, hungry eyes? "I think I'll have a shower."
She went into the bathroom.
As long as you can look at yourself in the mirror, you're not too far gone. That's
what Sheridan says. One day all the mirrors will be empty, and sometimes, tired of
the endless repetitive toil of her delicate feeding, she has looked forward to the day
when there will be no more subtlety, when they will have no choice but to be
monsters. Really, neither of them wants to cross that borderline. It will be a kind of
death. It's a fate they prefer to put off as long as possible. But this is something else.
A fair-haired woman's face looks back at her, naked and weary: a little pale, a few
fine lines, a few faint broken veins in the cheeks. There's nothing unusual about this