"Colin Greenland - A Passion For Lord Pierrot (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenland Colin)

'Not a bit,' answers Lady Dove, and proceeds with a catalogue of
symptoms
and grievances so anatomically detailed that Lord Pierrot's disciplined
scientific objectivity is almost overborne. Swiftly passing beyond
sympathy into squeamishness, he withdraws his attention, and recovers
equilibrium only by most meticulously buttering a muffin.
'I was thinking you might visit Aunt Penthesilea, my darling,' says
Lord
Pierrot, 'in the north-west. It is cooler there.'
'Your aunt is on a cruise,' says Lady Dove. 'To Percival's Star. She
has
gone to take the waters on Syringa. I told you so. You never listen to
me,
never.' She mashes her grapefruit clumsily with a spoon.
Lord Pierrot looks at her in rising anger. His wife is being petulant.
She
believes she is the one who should have been taken on a restorative
cruise
to Syringa, as if that or any other fanciful 'therapy' might make any
dent
in the arsenal of her ailments.
Lord Pierrot regards his wife, her wet lips drooping over her breakfast
dish. He is on the point of retorting that he too could wish her
halfway
across the galaxy; but he maintains his dignity.
'What a shame,' he says, and finishes his muffin in three quick bites.
Slender as he is, Lord Pierrot has always had a robust appetite.
He attempts a new, neutral subject. 'The skylings will be hatching any
day
now,' he observes.
 Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Lady Dove drops her spoon. It falls
from
her fingers and clatters among the crockery. She gives a small,
convulsive
quiver, but no sound.
To his horror, Lord Pierrot sees that she has begun to cry. There she
sits, silent and still as a great bolster, while tears well up in her
tiny
eyes and slither down her mountainous face.
Embarrassed by this unprovoked effusion, Lord Pierrot blots his lips
hurriedly with his napkin and flees the table, leaving his kedgeree
almost
untouched.
He spends the day in the laboratories, where his privacy is guaranteed.
While the brilliant primary of Triax moves pane by pane across the
stained
glass windows, dappling the apparatus with rainbows, Lord Pierrot tends
his vats. They are coming along very nicely. Suspended in their rich
brown
soup of nutrients, the fibrous lengths of pale pink matter slowly twist