"Harris, Joanne - Blackberry Wine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harris Joanne)

expansiveness. He likes to remind us of his seniority, of
the longevity of yellow Jura wines. He makes much of this,
as he does of his honeyed bouquet and unique pedigree.
The Sancerre has long since turned vinegary and speaks
even less, occasionally sighing thinly over her vanished
youth.
And then, six weeks before this story begins, the others
came. The strangers. The Specials. The interlopers who
began it all, though they too seemed forgotten behind the
bright new bottles. Six of them, each with its own small
handwritten label and sealed in candle wax. Each bottle
had a cord of a different colour knotted around its neck:
raspberry red,.elderflower green, blackberry blue, rosehip
yellow, damson black. The last bottle, tied with a brown
cord, was no wine even I had ever heard of. 'Specials, 1975,'
said the label, the writing faded to the colour of old tea. But
inside was a hive of secrets. There was no escaping them;
their whisperings, their catcalls, their laughter. We pretended
indifference to their antics. These amateurs. Not a
whiff of grape in any of them. They were inferiors, and we
begrudged them their place among us. And yet there was an
appealing impudence to these six freebooters, a hectic clash
of flavours and images to send more sober vintages reeling.
It was, of course, beneath our dignity to speak to them. But
oh I longed to. Perhaps it was that plebeian undertaste of
blackcurrant which linked us.
10
From the cellar you could hear everything that went on in
the house. We marked events with the comings and goings
of our more favoured colleagues: twelve beers Friday night
and laughter in the hallway; the night before a single bottle
of Californian red, so young you could almost smell the
tannin; the previous week -- his birthday, as it happened -- a
half-bottle of Moet, a demoiselle, that loneliest, most revealing
of sizes, and the distant, nostalgic sound of gunfire and
horses' hooves from upstairs. Jay Mackintosh was thirty-
seven. Unremarkable but for his eyes, which were pinot
noir indigo, he had the awkward, slightly dazed look of a
man who has lost his way. Five years ago Kerry had found
this appealing. By now she had lost her taste for it. There
was something deeply annoying about his passivity and the
core of stubbornness beneath. Precisely fourteen years ago
Jay wrote a novel called Three Summers with Jackapple Joe.
You'll know it, of course. It won the Prix Goncourt in
France, translated into twenty languages. Three crates of
vintage Veuve Clicquot celebrated its publication -- the '76,
drunk too young to do it justice, but then Jay was always
like that, rushing at life as if it might never run dry, as if
what was bottled inside him would last for ever, success
following success in a celebration without end.