"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

Hayley, was because Martya was from Darkest Russia, where they
used different letters as well as different language. It was Martya’s
bad English that first caused Hayley’s interest in the musician.
He was very tall and skinny, and he always wore a dark suit
with a blue scarf tucked in around the neck. He had stood, for as
long as Hayley could remember, rain or shine, in the exact same
place outside the pub called The Star, playing high sweet notes on a
shabby little violin that looked much too small for him. The case of
the violin lay open on the pavement by his feet and people
occasionally chucked coppers or 5p’s into it as they passed. Hayley
always wondered why he never seemed to play any real tunes—just
music, she thought of it.
Neither Hayley nor Martya ever had any coins to drop into the
case, but Martya never failed to nod and smile at the man;
whereupon he nodded back, violin and all, still playing away, and a
large beaming smile would spread up his thin face, making his eyes
gleam the same bright blue as his scarf. Up till then Hayley had
always assumed he was old. But he had such a young smile that she
now noticed that his hair, under the round black cap he always
wore, was not old white, but the same sort of fine white hair as
Martya’s.
“Is he some relation of yours?” she asked. “Is that why you nod?”
“No. Is polite,” Martya said. “He is musician.”
The way she said it, it sounded like “magician.” Hayley said,
“Oh!” very impressed, and from then on she too nodded and smiled
at the musician, with considerable awe. And he always smiled back.
Hayley longed to ask the musician about his magic powers, but
Martya always hurried her past to the shops before she had a
chance to ask.
Then one afternoon they were in the corner shop just beyond The
Star—where Hayley could still hear the violin in the distance, so
sad and sweet that she felt herself aching with the same longing
she felt about the mythosphere—when Martya fell into an
argument with Mr Ahmed who ran the shop. Both of them pointed
to Grandma’s list and Mr Ahmed kept saying, “No, no, I assure you,
this word is orangeade.” While Martya said, over and over, “Is
oranges we need!”
Hayley waited for them to stop, idly kicking at the base of the ice
cream machine while she waited. And something tinkled beside her
shoe. She looked down and saw it was a pound coin.
Without even having to think, she snatched it up and raced out of
the shop, round the bulging steps of The Star, back to where the
musician stood playing. There she dropped the coin into the violin
case and waited breathlessly in front of him.
After a moment he seemed to realise that she wanted something.
He took his bow off his violin and the violin down from his chin.
“Thank you,” he said.
He had a nice, light kind of voice. Much encouraged by it, Hayley
blurted out, “Please, I just wanted to know, are you a magician?”
He thought about it. “It depends what you mean by magician,” he