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

rushing after her. Martya was so agitated at losing Hayley that she
forgot to speak English at all and shouted a torrent of her own
language, while the shop lady kept saying, “I don’t care where you
come from. You haven’t paid for those shoes.”
Flute twisted up one side of his face, so that half of it seemed to
be smiling at Hayley and the other half looking seriously at the
shop lady, and said, “I think I’d better sort this out for you.” He said
to the lady, “It’s all right. She thought this little girl had gone
missing, you see.” Then he spoke to Martya in what was clearly her
own language.
Martya replied with a gush of Darkest Russian, clapping the pink
shoes together in front of her bosom, as a substitute for wringing
her hands. They were very big shoes, much more Martya’s size
than Hayley’s. Flute spoke to her soothingly while he collected his
hat and shut his flute into a long case. By the time they were all
walking back to the shoe shop, he was wearing rather battered
green boots that Hayley had certainly not seen him put on.
He did do some magic! Hayley thought. Quite a lot of it! she
added to herself, as she watched Flute calming everyone in the shop
down and making sure that Martya counted out enough of
Grandma’s money to pay for the large pink shoes. Then he smiled
at Hayley, said, “I’ll see you,” and left.
Martya and Hayley went home, where Grandma was far from
pleased. Hayley said repeatedly, “It wasn’t her fault, or Flute’s,
Grandma. They both thought you meant the shoes were for her .”
While Martya nodded and smiled and hugged the shoes happily.
“Be quiet, Hayley,” Grandma snapped. “Martya, I have had
enough of this nodding and smiling. It’s just an excuse for laziness
and dishonesty. You’ll have to leave. Now.”
Martya’s ugly face contorted inside her beautiful hair. “Laziness I
am?” she said to Grandma. “Then of you, what? You do nothing all
day but give orders and make rules! I go and pack now—and take
my shoes!” She went stumping up the stairs, scowling. “Your baba
is a monster!” she said as she stamped past Hayley. “You I pity
from the depths of my chest!”
It startled Hayley. She had not thought of Grandma as a
monster—she had just thought life was like that: long and boring
and full of rules and things you mustn’t do. Now here was Martya
actually pitying her for it. She wondered if it made sense.
But there were no more walks, to the shops or out on the
common, for a while after that. Until a new maid was found to
clean things and take Hayley out in the afternoons, Hayley was
sent into the back garden instead. There she wandered about
among the dark, crowding laurel bushes, thinking about her
parents, longing for the mythosphere, and wondering if Grandma
really was a monster. Sometimes, when she was right in the midst
of the laurels and knew she could not be seen from any of the
windows, she crouched down—careful not to get her knees
dirty—and secretly built bowers out of twigs, castles made of
pebbles and gardens from anything she could find. “Mythosphere