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

exactly the kind of man he would be in his forties, safely ensconced in the Jaguar belt with three carefully
spaced children away at carefully chosen schools. But the marriage had not worked out. Carmel, to all
appearances the kind of soft maternal creature whom you would have sworn would make the ideal wife
and mother, combined with this a possessiveness so clinging that it had threatened to drown her family
like warm treacle. The eldest girl had gone first, off into the blue with a casually defiant announcement
that she had got a job in Canada. The second daughter had torn herself loose at nineteen and followed
her Air Force husband to Malta without a backward look. The husband had gone next, leaving a positive
embarrassment of riches in the way of evidence for the divorce. Which left the youngest child, Timothy,
whom I vaguely remembered meeting around his grandfather's stables during school holidays; a slight,
darting, quicksilver boy with a habit of sulky silences, readily forgivable in any child exposed to the full
blast of his mother's devotion.

She was moaning comfortably over him now, having disposed (as far as I had been able to follow her) of
her dressmaker, her doctor, her current escort, her father, my mother, two more cream cakes and, for
some reason which I cannot now remember, the Postmaster General. . . .

". . . And as a matter of fact I don't know what to do. He's being so difficult. He knows just how to get
on my nerves. Dr. Schwapp was saying only yesterday-"

"Timmy's being difficult?"

"Well, of course. Not that his father wasn't just the same, in fact his father started the whole thing. You'd
really think he'd have the decency to keep out of Timmy's life now, wouldn't you, after what he did?"

"Is he coming back into Timmy's life?"

"My dear, that's the whole point. It's all just come out, and that's why I'm so upset. He's been writing to
Timmy, quite regularly, imagine, and now apparently he wants him to go and see him."

I said, feeling my way: "He's abroad, isn't he, your-Tim's father?"

"Graham? Yes, he's living in Vienna. We don't write," said Carmel with what was, for her, remarkable
brevity.

"And has he seen anything of Timothy since the divorce?" I added awkwardly: "I didn't know what the
arrangements were at the time, Aunt Carmel."

She said with an irritation momentarily more genuine than any feeling she had shown up to now: "For
goodness' sake don't call me that, it makes me feel a hundred! What do you mean, you don't know what
the arrangements were? Everybody knew. You can't tell me your mother didn't tell you every single
detail at the time."

I said, more coldly than I had meant to: "I wasn't at home, if you remember: I was still in Edinburgh."

"Well, Graham got access, if that's what you mean by 'arrangements.' But he went abroad straight away,
and Timmy's never seen him since. I never even knew they were writing. . . . And now this!" Her voice
had risen, her blue eyes stared, but I still thought that she sounded aggrieved rather than distressed.

"I tell you, Timmy just burst it on me the other day, boys are so thoughtless, and after all I've been to him,
father and mother both, all the poor boy has . . . And all without a word to me! Would you believe such