"Jo Walton - Farthing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Walton Jo)

Farthing
Jo Walton


1



It started when David came in from the lawn absolutely furious. We were down at Farthing for one of
Mummy’s ghastly political squeezes. If we could have found any way out of it we would have been
somewhere else, but Mummy was inexorable so there we were, in my old girlhood bedroom that I’d left
behind so happily when I’d married David, him in a morning suit and me in a little knee-length beige
Chanel thing.

He burst in, already drawing breath to speak. “Lady Thirkie thinks you should sack me, Lucy!”

I didn’t see at first that he was spitting mad, because I was busy trying to get my hair to stay on top of my
head without disarranging my pearls. In fact, if my hair had been less recalcitrant about that sort of thing
probably it would never have happened, because I’d have been on the lawn with David, and then Angela
would never have been so dim. In any case, at first the whole thing struck me as funny, and I absolutely
gurgled with laughter. “Darling, you can’t sack a husband, can you? It would have to be divorce.
Whatever have you been doing that Angela Thirkie thinks is enough for me to divorce you?”

“Lady Thirkie appears to have mistaken me for the hired help,” David said, coming around behind me so
I could see him in the mirror, and of course, when I saw him, I realized at once that he wasn’t the
slightest bit amused by it, and that I shouldn’t have laughed, and in fact that laughing was probably the
worst thing I could have done in the circumstances, at least without bringing David around to seeing the
funny side of things first.

“Angela Thirkie is a complete nincompoop. We’ve all been laughing at her for years,” I said, which was
completely true but didn’t help even a shred, because David, of course, hadn’t been laughing at her for
years, hadn’t been there for years to laugh at her, so it was another thing pointing up the difference
between me and him and just at the time when he’d had the difference rather shoved down his throat in
the first place because of Angela’s idiocy.

He looked rather grim in my mirror, so I turned around to see if he looked any better the right way
around. I kept my hands up in my hair because I nearly had it right at last. “She thought I shouldn’t be
helping myself to cocktails and she said she’d tell your mother and recommend she sack me,” he said,
smiling but in a way that meant he didn’t find it even the least bit funny. “I suppose I do look rather like a
waiter in this getup.”

“Oh darling, you don’t; you look delicious,” I said, automatically soothing, although it was true. “Angela’s
a nitwit, truly. Hasn’t she been introduced to you?”

“Oh yes, at one of the engagement parties, and then again at the wedding,” David said, his smile
becoming even more brittle. “But no doubt we all look the same to her.”

“Oh darling!” I said, and let my hands go out towards him, abandoning my hair for the time being,
because there was nothing I could say—he was right and we both knew he was. “I’ll come back out with
you now and we can give her such a snub.”