"Mary Stewart - Airs Above The Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

AIRS ABOVE THE GROUND

Mary Stewart



CHAPTER ONE

Nor take her tea without a stratagem.

edward young: Love of Fame

Carmel Lacy is the silliest woman I know, which is saying a good deal. The only reason that I was having
tea with her in Harrods on that wet Thursday afternoon was that when she rang me up she had been so
insistent that it had been impossible to get out of; and besides, I was so depressed anyway that even tea
with Carmel Lacy was preferable to sitting alone at home in a room that still seemed to be echoing with
that last quarrel with Lewis. That I had been entirely in the right, and that Lewis had been insufferably,
immovably, furiously in the wrong was no particular satisfaction, since he was now in Stockholm, and I
was still here in London, when by rights we should have been lying on a beach together in the Italian
sunshine, enjoying the first summer holiday we had been able to plan together since our honeymoon two
years ago. The fact that it had rained almost without ceasing ever since he had gone hadn't done anything
to mitigate his offence; and when, on looking up "Other People's Weather" in the Guardian each
morning, I found Stockholm enjoying a permanent state of sunshine, and temperatures somewhere in the
seventies, I was easily able to ignore the reports of a wet, thundery August in southern Italy and
concentrate steadily on Lewis's sins and my own grievances.

"What are you scowling about?" asked Carmel Lacy.

"Was I? I'm sorry. I suppose I'm just depressed with the weather and everything. I certainly didn't mean
to glower at you! Do go on. Did you decide to buy it in the end?"

"I haven't made up my mind. It's always so terribly difficult to decide . . ." Her voice trailed away
uncertainly as she contemplated the plate of cakes, her hand poised between a meringue and an eclair.
"But you know what they're like nowadays, they won't keep things for you. If I wait much longer they'll
simply sell it, and when that happens, one realizes one's really wanted it like mad all along."

And if you wait much longer, I thought, as she selected the eclair, it won't fit you any more. But I didn't
think it unkindly; plumpness suits Carmel Lacy, who is one of those blonde, pretty women whose looks
depend on the fair, soft colouring which seems to go on indestructibly into middle age, and to find a
whole new range of charm when the fair hair turns white.

Carmel-whose hair was still a rather determined shade of gold-had been my mother's contemporary at
school. Her kind of prettiness had been fashionable then, and her good-tempered softness had made her
popular; her nickname, according to my mother, had been Caramel, which seemed appropriate. She had
not been a close friend of Mother's at school, but the two girls were thrown together in the holidays by
the nearness of their families and by professional connections between them. Carmel's father had owned
and trained race horses, while my grandfather, who was a veterinary surgeon, had been, so to speak,
surgeon in attendance. Soon after the girls left school their ways parted: my mother married her father's
young partner and stayed in Cheshire; but Carmel left home for London where she married
"successfully"; that is, she acquired a wealthy London banker whose dark, florid good looks told you