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

house and Mercer was able to set up ladders and start the
repainting, Troy explained the rules of hide-and-seek and the other
indoor games. Hayley rushed shrieking through the rooms and
corridors with her cousins as if she had been doing it all her life.
She ate huge meals. She went with the rest of them in a convoy of
cars to the seaside, where the sea took her breath away, first by its
size and strength, and again when Troy and Harmony tried to
teach her to swim and an enormous wave rolled in and swamped all
three of them.
“Getting quite rosy and plump, isn’t she?” beautiful Aunt Alice
said to Aunt May as the two of them lay stretched on towels,
watching. And Aunt May agreed, rather proudly, feeling personally
responsible for the change in Hayley.
Apart from that one day by the sea, the young ones played the
game most mornings and Hayley soon began to feel a veteran of the
mythosphere. Harmony always insisted that Hayley go with Troy
for safety, but Hayley did not mind, even when Tollie chanted,
“Baby, baby! Has to have her hand held!”
“Take no notice,” Harmony said. “He’s a brat.”
“I know,” said Hayley. “Harmony, why do you always manage
the game? Don’t you ever want to play too?”
A thoughtful, amused look came over Harmony’s face. “Well,” she
said, “for one thing, I’m the only one who can manage it. And for
another, when I was small, I used to ramble all over the
mythosphere, until my mother caught me at it and threatened to
tell Uncle Jolyon.”
“Daren’t you go now?” Hayley asked anxiously, thinking of how
angry Grandma had been.
Harmony laughed. “Don’t worry. I still go out there a lot—but
mostly when I’m away at Music College, so that I won’t get Mother
into trouble.” She took up the bundle of markers and looked around
the paddock, where everyone was waiting to start that morning’s
game. “Where’s Troy got to?”
Troy came into the paddock as Harmony asked this. He said to
Harmony, “Mercer’s going to finish the painting today.”
Hayley was surprised. She had grown so used to seeing Cousin
Mercer up a ladder painting water-stained ceilings that it almost
seemed like his permanent occupation—and from the number of
ceilings needing painting, anyone would have thought Cousin
Mercer would be up a ladder at least for the next year.
Harmony looked musingly down at the card table, with the clock
and the bundle of cards on it. “I think we’d better make this the last
game then,” she said.
Everybody groaned.
Harmony simply fixed Tollie with a meaning stare. “Isn’t that so,
Tollie?”
Tollie shuffled his trainers in the trampled grass. “I told him all
about the game. He’s going to phone Uncle Jolyon as soon as he’s
finished,” he admitted.
“You little sneak,” Harmony said to him, in a dangerously kind,