"Mary Stewart - Madam will you talk" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

where I had just come across it, and picked up a frock instead. I shook
it out and laid it over a chair, ready to put on. I don't think my
expression changed at all. But Louise happens to know me rather well.

She ground out her cigarette, and her voice changed.

"Oh God, Charity, I'm sorry. I forgot. I am a fool. Forgive me."

"Forget it," I said, lightly enough, "I do."

"Do you?"

"Of course. It's a long time now. I'd be silly and unnatural not to. And
I am lucky, as you said." I grinned at her. "After all, I'm a wealthy
widow ... look at these."

"My dear girl i What gorgeous undies. . . ."

And the conversation slipped comfortably back to the things that really
matter.


When Louise had gone to her own room, I washed, changed into a white
frock with a wide blue belt, and did my face and hair very slowly. It
was still hot, and the late sun's rays fell obliquely across the
balcony, through the half-opened shutter, in a shaft of copper-gold.
Motionless, the shadows of thin leaves traced a pattern across it as
delicate and precise as a Chinese painting on silk. The image of the
tree, brushed in like that by the sun, had a grace that the tree itself
gave no hint of, for it was merely one of the nameless spindly affairs,
parched and dust-laden, that struggled up towards the sky from their
pots in the hotel court below. But its shadow might have been designed
by Ma Yuan.

The courtyard was empty; people were still resting, or changing, or, if
they were the mad English, walking out in the afternoon sun. A
white-painted trellis wall separated the court on one side from the
street, and beyond it people, mules, cars, occasionally even buses,
moved about their business up and down the narrow thoroughfare. But
inside the vine-covered trellis it was very still and peaceful. The
gravel between the gay little chairs was carefully raked and watered;
shade lay gently across the tables, some of which, laid for dinner,
gleamed invitingly with glass and silver. The only living thing in the
court
MADAM, WILL YOU TALK? 9


was a thin ginger cat, which was curled round the base of my spindly
tree, like--who was it? Nidhug?--at the root of Yggdrasil.