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

beaming smile. “The chocolate ones, please,” she said. “And I’d like
bacon and egg and sausages and beans and fried bread, please.”
Tollie was the only person not anxious to look after her. He
looked up from a vast bowl of cereal and scowled.
Hayley turned her smile on him. “And fried tomato,” she added.
Tollie said, “Greedy pig,” and went back to his cereal.
“Yes, but I’m hungry,” Hayley said. She was too. She had no
trouble at all in packing away the biggest breakfast of her life, with
toast and marmalade and tea as well. When it was over she
sighed—a comfortable sigh of regret that she could manage no
more—and got up with the others to help carry plates and cups
back to the kitchen.
Meanwhile, the aunts were discussing what needed to be done to
clean up after the flood. Cousin Mercer said he would drive over to
the Golf Club and borrow the rollers they used to dry the greens
there.
“That’ll help with the carpets,” Aunt May said, “but we’re going
to need some of their big blow-dryers too for the walls and ceilings.
You can’t repaint those until they’re dry, Mercer. And we’ll have to
polish the floors and the stairs— it’s going to take days ! Harmony,
be an angel and keep the children out of the way while we work.”
“The game,” said the eldest Tigh boy.
Everyone else clamoured, “Yes! The game, the game! You
promised!”
“OK, OK!” Harmony said, laughing. “Wellies on, everyone. The
paddock’s bound to be soaking wet.”
There was a rush for the hall and the big cupboard under the
stairs, which seemed to contain every possible size of rubber
boots—though not many actual pairs. Troy ended up with one red
and one blue boot. Someone found Hayley a pink boot with a white
flower on it and someone else came up with another that was plain
black. Then everyone galloped, in a stampede of different-coloured
feet, out through the front door and round the house, to a sort of
sloping meadow at one side, where they milled around in the wet
grass, impatiently waiting for Harmony.
When Harmony appeared—in knee-high green boots that must
have been her own—she was carrying a folding card table and a
large plastic shopping bag with an eye-splitting swirly design on it.
Everyone cheered and crowded up to her while she opened the table
and set it up firmly by digging its legs into the slope. Then she put
the bag on it and fetched out of it a big bundle of the kind of pointed
plastic tags gardeners use to label plants. As she put those down on
the table, she said, “OK, let’s recap the vow first, since you haven’t
played for a year. Everyone say after me: ‘I swear not to say a word
about what we do in this game to anyone outside this paddock.’ You
say it too, Tollie, and you, Hayley.”
Wondering very much about this, Hayley obediently chorused
with the rest, “I swear not to say a word about what we do in this
game to anyone outside this paddock.” Everyone was saying it,
quite devoutly, even Tollie.