"Gill, B.M. - Nursery Crimes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gill B M)

Zanny arranged her pillow more comfortably and didn't answer.

"Don't you know, sweetheart?"

She smiled and shook her head.

He tried the oblique approach. "I see that Monkey has crept back into your bed." The cuddly toy had been given to Willie, he remembered, as a forcible peace offering after Willie had poked his tongue out at Zanny and she had retaliated by jabbing her finger in his eye.

"You must be kind to your little guests," Clare had said, sounding impossibly prissy.

"Bugger!" Zanny had replied, "and I learnt it from him."

Zanny rubbed Monkey's ear up and down her cheek. Monkey was hers again now. For ever. She said she had fetched it from Willie's bed.

"Willie won't be sleeping there any more, Zanny."

"No," Zanny agreed happily. "His body will be put in a box - like Mick. And his soul will go to Jesus - like Mick." Mick, the labrador, had died of old age six months ago. She asked her father if Willie would be buried in the garden.

At that point Graham nearly lost his cool and it was a moment or two before he could answer. He told her that only animals and birds were buried in the garden and that Willie would be buried in a cemetery.

"With his Mummy and Daddy?"

Graham said yes. Willie's parents had been killed in an air-raid and you didn't bury bits, but you didn't harass your six-year-old daughter with that kind of information.

Zanny chewed Monkey's toe. It was a beautiful long toe like a hand. When she had caught Willie chewing it she had pushed it down his throat and then withdrawn it quickly before he was sick.

"That's all right then," she said.

"What is, Zanny?"

"Willie will have his Mummy and Daddy -- and Jesus -and Mick."

"Well - yes - but - " Graham got up from the bed and began roaming around the room. He had slept in this same room when he was a boy. There should be something comforting about the place. The walls should be steeped in normal happy memories. His father had beaten him here once at the age of ten for drinking an illicit whisky. Sane - occasionally painful - pre-war days. No evacuees. No Willie.

No beloved daughter with honey curls and eyes as serenely blue as the summer evening sky.

Oh, Christ.

"Darling, you did like Willie, didn't you?"

The clouding of the serenely blue eyes answered him. He interrupted the truth before the lips formed it.

"Well, of course you did. He was a nice little boy. Awkward at times -- you quarrelled at times -- well, naturally. But you liked him. You liked him like you would a brother."

He went and sat on the bed again and took her hand in his. A ridiculously small hand, though Willie's had been smaller.

"You know what policemen are, don't you, darling?"

"Good, kind men who tell you the time and find you when you're lost," Zanny parroted.