"Murdoch, Iris - An Unofficial Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murdoch Iris)
'I'll bring him up to it!' She rose to her feet. Now I'm going to interview Felix. Where is that boy? Is he still felling trees?'
'When I last saw him he was carrying logs the size of himself into the woodshed. I told him to leave them for Smeed and the boy, but he took no notice.'
'He's trying to take his mind off things,' said Mildred, 'instead of using it on things. That's what I want to talk to him About. What are you going to do, Piggy?'
'I think I'll just drive over to Grayhallock.'
'I know, dominoes and whisky. That's where Felix ought to be too, now that the cat's away, only the boy is so confoundedly honourable. I suppose there's no word of the cat coming back?'
'None at all, so far as I know.'
'Well, enjoy yourself, only remember what I told you!'
'But you didn't tell me anything this time!'
'Well, remember what I would have told you if I hadn't thought you'd heard it so often before!'
Mildred drew a light shawl about her shoulders and issued from the house. She paused upon the step to survey the garden. Against a sky of intense blue the thrush sang upon the cedar tree, winding all the visible things into the endless thread of his song. The stream seemed motionless, a line of green enamel beneath the chestnut trees, but the bamboos moved ever so slightly, like the secret gestures of friends.
The garden, so long familiar that it seemed a part of her mind, rapt Mildred into a trance of recollection, so that for the moment she forgot about Felix. Who knows what may be the results of random and seemingly isolated actions? She herself had embraced men whoso faces, even whose names, she had forgotten: gone, killed in two wan. So much of the past is annihilated and swept away. But other pieces live, and grow in the memory like powerful seeds. Perhaps some of her own forgotten actions were, in the minds of distant and unheeded persons, just such seeds. And Hugh, did he know, did he at all guess, what thing he planted, with what long consequences, when suddenly on that summer evening he had turned from looking at her reflection in the stream, and throwing his Ann over her shoulder had kissed her, holding her tightly for a long moment before he let her go? They had not spoken, then or since: But that quite isolated moment had had, for her, results. She recalled it now with such clarity, saw it in such detail, that the relentless interval of time seemed itself a dream. She remembered. And after the citronella Hugh had certainly remembered too; she had tricked him into remembering, she had, with such joy, seen him remembering.
He had set her, then, upon a long path. And just as she had started, so secretly and happily, upon her task of loving him, he had fallen in love with Emma Sands. Mildred, in those early days of her transformed consciousness of Hugh, had suffered. Emma was an old acquaintance of Mildred's, they had been at college together: someone, even then, a little nervously and uneasily to be reckoned with, never quite a friend. And it was with much curiosity, some triumph, and a little sympathy that Mildred had invited Emma to stay with her at Seton Blaise after the catastrophe. In another clairvoyant crystal of memory Mildred saw Emma on the lawn in a short white tennis dress, being captivated and consoled by the boy Felix. But her dark eyes had rested thoughtfully upon Mildred and she had read Mildred's mind, and her sharp clever dog-face had closed and hardened. They had parted then, not to meet again.
She need not have hated me, thought Mildred, for I gained nothing by her loss. And for a moment she felt quite sentimental about herself and about the years which the locusts had eaten. Yet the next moment she told herself that in a way she had quite enjoyed it all, she had enjoyed making up her myth of being in love with Hugh, and embellishing it and adding to it, and having it as a secret when in a way it was hardly a thing at all. But now, she thought, now I shall make all those shadows into the shadows of something. I shall make that long road a road that shall have led, after all, somewhere.
As she now went down the steps she heard from the stables the sound of Humphrey starting up the Rover, and as she reached the lawn she saw Felix at the side of the house, his head deep inside the bonnet of the very dark blue Mercedes. She came towards him, and saw beyond him the Rover disappearing down the drive.
'Really, Felix,' said Mildred, 'I believe you love that car more than you love any of us! '
Felix lifted his head and smiled. He leaned on the side of the bonnet wiping his hands on a bit of newspaper. 'It's the only thing I've got to look after! '.
'And whose fault is that, pray?' said Mildred.
Felix was Mildred's half-brother, and fifteen years her junior. He was a very tall man in his early forties with a big face and very blue eyes and a lot of short receding colourless fair hair which stood up fluffily upon his head. His face was pleasantly weather-beaten and worn into all. Expression of non-committal professional superiority, and revealed little of what, if anything, he felt. There was no subtle play of light, no gradual dawning of awareness, but only the sudden gaiety of a very brilliant smile and then a return to routine solemnity. Felix treated his sister with an unvarying amused politeness and usually foiled her attempts to run him by ignoring them altogether. He did not reply to her last remark, but bent forward again to inspect the interior of the Mercedes.
'Felix, I want to talk to you seriously,' said Mildred. 'Close the bonnet of the car.'
Felix obediently closed it arid went on wiping his hands. He let Mildred draw him by the sleeve, and they began to pace together upon the lawn.
'Felix,' said Mildred, 'it's about Ann. Now what are you going to do about Ann?'
Felix was silent. He threw the piece of newspaper down in the comer of one of the rose-beds and waited while his sister picked it up and stuffed it into his pocket. He said,' Must we have this ШMildred?' He had a way of pronouncing her name which made it sound like a monosyllable.
'Yes, we must,' said Mildred. 'I wish you weren't so infernally clammed up! I want to help you, but you won't give me a chance.' She thrust her Ann through his. He was so much taller than her that she could not see his face properly.
'I'd rather you didn't help me, actually, said Felix. They walked on slowly.
'Mildred,' said Felix, 'I'm sorry to disappoint you, I mean to disappoint your curiosity and your interest, but there is nothing here.'
'What do you mean, "nothing here"? Must you talk like a telegram?'
'Nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen.'
Mildred was silent for a moment. 'Have it your own way. Let us talk about a related subject. You want to get married. Or, let me make things even easier for you, and simply say I want you to get married. I want the Meechams to go on, since the Finches obviously aren't going to. I want your children, Felix. I can't be a grandmother, but I shall be a quite formidable aunt.'
'Sorry, Mildred, to disappoint you again.'
'Come, come,' said Mildred. She drew him along coaxingly. 'What about that froggy girl, the one you met in Singapore? Come, unbend a little about her. Do that tiny thing for your aged sister: 'Marie-Laure,' said Felix stiffly.
'That's right. What was her name?'
'Marie-Laure Auboyer: 'Well, what about her? Where is she now, anyway?'
'I'm sorry to keep saying the same things, but there's nothing there either. She's in Delhi, I think.'
'Delhi!' cried Mildred. 'And you want to persuade me there's nothing I With you going so conveniently to look after those Gurkhas I Not that I want you to marry a frog, but she sounded quite a nice girl, and at least she's a girl.'
They reached the seat under the cedar tree and sat down. The thrush was silent. The garden, dissolved in granular points of colour by the intense evening light, seemed to quiver quietly before them.
'I'm not going to Delhi, as it happens,' said Felix. He crossed his legs and thrust his hands into his pockets and looked away towards the bridge. 'I'm going to take a job in England.'
'Felix!' cried Mildred. You might have told me! I'd quite counted on our going to India together. You are a pig.'
'Sorry, Mildred -- it's only just been decided. Well, it's not entirely fixed yet, but more or less.'
'You mean you've only just decided it. What is it to be? Guarding Buck House?'
'No, I've done my stint. It's a thing in the War Office, in the Military Secretary's department, actually, dealing with postings and pro., motions and decorations. All that. Very dull.'
'At least they'll promote you, dear boy, you'll be a brigadier?'
'Yes.'
'But without a brigade?'
'Quite.' It was a sore point.
'Ah well,' said Mildred, 'I always thought you were far too nice for the Anny. I can't think now why you ever went into it. I never advised it. Not that you haven't done frightfully well. Anyhow, you'll be in England after all. And that brings us back to Ann.'
' Mildred -- will you -leave off?' said Felix. He cast her a frowning sidelong glance and made to rise. She detained him.
'Please, Felix, don't be cross with me because I see you think only of that. And don't try, this time round, to put me off with your "nothing here" stuff. You must make some decision about Ann. You're fretting yourself to pieces and preventing yourself from thinking about other women that you might have. And you must be worrying Ann too.'
Felix was very stiff now, sitting very upright and staring ahead of him. The colours in the garden had reached their peak and were now subsiding into twilight as one by one the nebulous grains turned to blue and purple. One huge bright star trembled above the darkening chestnut grove. He said, 'You think I'm -- acting improperly.'
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