"A Pool In The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

accounts, she had done it in the evening, after supper was cleared away and
there were no other demands till morning, and the kitchen was peaceful while
everyone watched TV in the parlour. But she found she was often too bone weary
to pay the necessary attention, so she had taught herself to do it in the edgy
time between breakfast and lunch, when the phone was liable to ring, and her
mother to be contemplating having one of her bad days, and her father to call
her down to the shop to wait on a customer. One afternoon a week she took the
car to the mall and shopped for everything they had to have. After the narrow
confines of the house, the car park seemed liberating, the neon-edged sky vast.
The months mounted up, and turned into years.
One year the autumn gales were so severe that ruining the harvest and breaking
fences for the stock to get through out in the countryside wasnТt enough, and
they swept into the towns to trouble folk there. Trees and TV aerials came down,
and some chimney-pots; there was so much rain that everyoneТs cellars flooded.
The wood stored in their cellar had to come up into the parlour, whereupon there
was nowhere to sit except the kitchen. EveryoneТs tempers grew short with
crowding, and when the TV was brought in too, there was nowhere to put it except
on counter space Hetta couldnТt spare. The only time there was armistice was
during programmes interviewing farmers about how bad everything was. Her father
watched these with relish and barked УHa!Ф often.
That season in spite of the weather she spent more time than ever in the garden.
The garden had still been tended by her great-grandfather when she was very
small, but after he died, only her grandmother paid any attention to it. As her
motherТs illness took hold and her fatherТs business took off, it grew derelict,
for her grandmother had done the work Hetta did now, with a bad hip and hands
nearly frozen with arthritis. Hetta began to clear and plant it about a year
after she stopped school; gardening, she found, was interesting, and it got her
out of the house. Her father grumbled about having to contain his heaps of wood
chips and discarded bits too broken to be mended, but permitted it because she
grew vegetables and fruit, which lowered the grocery bills, and she canned and
froze what they didnТt eat in season. No one else even seemed to notice that the
view from the rear of the house looked any different than the frontЧalthough
Ruth liked bugs, and would sometimes come out to look at the undersides of
leaves and scrape things into jarsЧand so long as Hetta wasnТt missing when
someone wanted her, nothing was said about the hours she spent in the garden.
Their house was the oldest on the street and had the largest garden. It had been
a pretty house once, before the shop destroyed its front, but the shop at least
made it look more in keeping with the rest of the row. There were proper walls
around their garden, eight foot tall on three sides, and the house the fourth.
It was her own little realm.
That autumn there was a heaviness to the air, and it smelled of rain and earth
and wildness even on days when the sun shone. Hetta usually left as much as she
could standing over the winter, to give shelter to RuthТs bugs and the birds and
hedgehogs that ate them, but this year she brought the last tomatoes and
squashes indoors early (where, denied the wet cellar, she balanced them on piles
of timber in the parlour), and she cut back and tied in and staked everything
that was left. Even with the walls protecting it, the wind curled in here,
flinging other peopleТs tiles at her runner-bean teepees and stripping and
shredding the fleece that protected the brassicas. Sometimes she stopped and
listened, as if the whistle of the wind was about to tell her something.