"Mary Stewart - Wildfire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

So had Morelli, and his cousin Hugo Montefior, the dress designer, who happened to be my employer.
And there really was nothing against the idea that Montefior should re-create the dress with the lovely
green sleeves, and that I should wear it at the showing, and that there should be a sensation in the right
circles, thereby doing the cousins a lot of good. And, possibly, me too, though this honestly didn't occur to
me when Hugo put his idea in front of me. I was merely flattered, excited, and terribly nervous.

So I wore the Greensleeves gown at the show, and Morelli got his sensation, and I was so scared of the
fashionable crowd that when I spoke at all, it was in a tight, flat little voice that must have sounded the last
word in bored, brittle sophistication. I must have looked and sounded, in fact, like a pale copy of that
arrogant worldling behind me in Zollner's canvas, for that is what Nicholas Drury undoubtedly took me for,
when at length he elbowed his way through the crowds and introduced himself. I had heard of him, of
course, and this in no way increased my self-confidence: He had at that timeтАФhe was twenty-nineтАФthree
terrifyingly good novels to his credit, as well as a reputation for a scarifying tongue. I, for one, was so
thoroughly scarified that I froze into complete stupidity, and under his sardonic look stammered some
meaningless schoolgirl rubbish that, God help us both, he took for coquetry. We were married three months
later.

I have no wish to dwell on the three years that followed. I was wildly, madly, dumbly in love with him, of
course, a silly little star-dazzled adolescent, plunged into a life completely strange and rather terrifying. And
Nicholas, it became very quickly apparent, wasn't on his own ground either. What he had meant to marry
was a modern Gianetta Fox, a composed young sophisticate who could hold her own in the fast-moving
society to which he was accustomed; what he'd actually got was only Gianetta Brooke, not long out of
school, whose poise was a technique very recently acquired in Montefior's salons and the Mayfair
mannequin factory.

Not that this initial miscasting was the cause of our little tragedy; love is a great builder of bridges, and it
did seem at first as though what was between us could have spanned any gap. And Nicholas tried as hard
as I. Looking back now, I can see that; if I did achieve sophistication, and a little wisdom, Nicholas
struggled to rediscover tenderness. But it was too late; already, when we met, it was too late. The times
were out of Joint for us, the gap too wideтАФnot the ten years' gap between our ages, but the
thousand-year-long stretch of a world war that to me was only an adolescent memory hardly denting the
surface of my life, but to Nicholas was a still-recurring nightmare agony leaving scars on the mind which
were then only precariously skinning over. How was I, untouched nineteen, to apprehend the sort of
stresses that drove

Nicholas? And how was he to guess that, deep down under my precarious self-confidence, lurked the
destroying germs of insecurity and fear?

Whatever the causes, the break came soon enough. In two years the marriage was as good as over.
When Nicholas traveled, as he often did, in search of material for his books, he more and more frequently
found reasons for not taking me with him, and when at length I found he was not traveling alone, I felt no
surprise, but I was hurt and humiliated, and soтАФ1 have red hair, after allтАФblazingly outspoken.

If I had wanted to keep Nicholas, I should have done better to have held my tongue. I was no match for
him on a battlefield where love had become a weakness and pride the only defense against a cynicism both
brutal and unanswerable. He won very easily, and he cannot have known how cruelly. . . .

We were divorced in 1949. For the sake of my mother, who is so High Church as to be verging
(according to Father), on Popish Practices, I kept Nicholas's name, and I still wore my wedding ring. I even,
after a time, went back to London and to Hugo Montefior, who was angelically kind to me, worked me to