"Stewart, Mary - Thorny Hold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mary Stewart - Thorny Hold)

the astonished and offended curate, and my mother, for once warmly
sympathetic, followed me and mopped up. By the time grief and horror
had subsided the curate, rabbit and all, had gone. The incident was
never mentioned again.

They say that the mind makes its own de fences Looking back now down
the years, I can recall very little about this part of my childhood.

The occasional treat trips by bus with my father, walking with him
round the parish, the kindness of some of the miners' wives who called
me "Jilly' and treated me with the same sort of fond respect they
accorded my father, and then looked sideways and asked, with a
different kind of respect, after my mother. And the hours spent alone
in my cold bedroom, drawing and painting always animals or flowers or
standing looking out of the window over the graveyards and the sycamore
trees, at the red dusty sunset beyond the pit-heap, and wishing wishing
what? I never knew.

Then one day, without warning, she came again. Cousin Geillis, paying
what she called a farewell visit, before leaving on a trip to see her
and my mother's family in New Zealand. She would, she said, take
messages or gifts, and she would be gone for some time. In those days,
before air travel, such a journey took months, and a year was hardly
too long to reckon on for a trip which would take the traveller right
round the world. There were so many places, she said, that she wanted
to see. The names went by over my head; Angkor Wat, Cairo, Delhi, the
Philippines, Peru . She would come back when she had seen them all,
and meanwhile. Meanwhile she had brought a dog for me to keep.

It was a collie, black and white, thin and eager and loving. A lost
dog that she had taken in, and would not leave to chance and man's
unkindness.

"Here is the licence. It is Geillis's dog. She needs-" I thought she
was going to say "something to love" , and went cold, but she finished
merely, "companionship. Someone to go walks with."

"What's his name?" I was down on the cold flags of the kitchen floor
with the dog. It was too good to be true. I dared not look at my
mother.

"That's for you to give him. He's yours."

"I shall call him Rover," I said, into the dog's fur. He licked my
face.

"Un peu banal," said my cousin Geillis, "but he's not proud.

Goodbye. " She did not kiss me when she went. I never saw her kiss
anyone. She walked out of the house, and a moment later the bus came