"Madeline L' Engle - A Live Coal in the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Engle Madeleine)

Camilla nodded.
"She was-what's that word I just came across in a novel? She was-ravishing."
"Yes. And, as far as she knew, that's all she was. That was her only sense of
herself."
Raffi scowled. "At least I don't have that problem." "Most of us don't,"
Camilla
said. "And believe me, it is a problem. She believed that when her beauty
went
she would be nothing. She needed constant affirmation."
"That could be a bore," Raffi said.
"For my mother, ordinary affirmation wasn't enough. She needed the
affirmation
of many men. She had an affair with one of my favorite professors when I was
in
college."
"Ugly." Raffi looked sharply at her grandmother.
"Very ugly. But it's also how I met your grandfather." Camilla took their
plates
out to the kitchen, gently remov
Madeleine L'Engle┬╗22
who had taken her in out of the cold and given her coffee (undrinkable but
hot)
had for a moment superimposed itself over her mother and Professor Grantley
Grange. She shivered, determined to keep her mother's present infidelity from
Luisa. She was so angry that she was completely caught up in her own head and
could not get outside it, as had happened once when she'd had a bad case of
flu
and was nothing but a mass of aching bones and burning fever. That was
similar
to the present psychic pain in which she was trapped.
If this was not her mother's first affair, it was the first one in which Rose
had encroached on Camilla's own territory. Camilla was, or had been,
Professor
Grantley Grange's favor ite student. Now she never wanted to see him again,
even
while she knew she would be in her place when he taught his next afternoon's
class.
The door to the bath cubicle was pushed open and Luisa stuck her head in.
'Oh,
good, it's you.' Of course she hadn't knocked.
'Go away, Lu, I'm relaxing.'
'You won't relax until you wave your mother off. She been making waves again?'
'She's always making waves.'
'Thank God my mother never comes to visit, and if she did, she wouldn't be
taken
for my sister. The school of hard knocks shows in her face. Something's up. I
haven't seen you this tense in a long time.'
'I'm always tense when my mother's here.' 'Not this tense.'
'Get off my back, Luisa.'
Luisa perched on an old stool, once white but now with much of the surface