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

said at length. “My ways are not your ways. But I have a brother
who stands in the sun, who could tell you more.”
Hayley looked across the street, where the sunlight blazed on
shoppers and glinted off shop windows. She had often vaguely
wondered why the musician always stood here, on the shady side of
the street. She turned back to ask if the brother was a musician as
well.
But here Martya dashed up in a panic and seized Hayley’s arm.
“You don’t go, you don’t go! Your baba kills me! So sorry,” she
gasped at the musician. “She bother you.”
He smiled his blue-eyed smile. “Not at all,” he said.
Martya gave him a flustered glare and dragged Hayley back to
the shop, where she and Mr Ahmed had settled the argument by
getting Grandma both oranges and orangeade. Grandma was not
pleased when they got home. She had wanted orange juice.
Thereafter, whenever they went to the shops, Hayley always
tried to tempt Martya to walk on the sunny side of the street, in
hopes of meeting the musician’s brother. Martya nodded and smiled
as if she quite understood and then stayed on the usual side of the
road. Nodding and smiling turned out to be a habit with Martya.
She used it instead of understanding English. She used it
particularly when Grandma told her to clean the silver or sweep the
stairs. Grandma soon began saying Martya was a lazy slattern.
“Now let us see,” Grandma said, one afternoon a few days later,
“if you can manage to do one simple thing, Martya. No, don’t nod,
don’t smile. Just look at Hayley’s shoes.” She pointed. Martya and
Hayley both looked down at Hayley’s neat black shiny shoes. “Now
go to the shoe shop,” Grandma said, “with this note and this money,
and get Hayley another pair just the same but half a size larger.
Can you do that?”
“I can do that, Grandma,” Hayley said joyfully. The shoe shop
was on the sunny side of the street.
“I’m talking to Martya,” Grandma said. “Martya is doing the
buying. I want the same kind exactly, Martya. No other colour, no
fancy bits. Have you understood?”
Martya nodded and smiled vigorously, and the pair of them set
off towards the shops. On the way, Martya said, rather helplessly,
“I don’t know how is shoes. What is fancy bits?”
“I’ll show you,” Hayley said.
The shoe shop was quite a long way down the road from The
Star, where the musician was playing as usual. Hayley waved to
him across the street, but she was not sure he saw her. When they
reached the shoe shop, Hayley led Martya in front of the window
and pointed to the various different shoes inside it. “Look—those
pink ones with cowboy fringes have the fancy bits, and so do those
with a flower on front. Do you see?”
While Martya pulled her hair aside in order to bend down and
stare at the shoes, and then did her usual nodding and smiling,
Hayley suddenly began hearing sweet distant snatches of music. It
was not violin music. She was not sure what instrument it was, but