Читать книгу The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 13

MY FATHER NAMED me Miranda. He was a teacher at a pureblood girls’ boarding school in Virginia: not an English teacher, as you might expect from a name like that, but an art teacher. Painting, mostly, although he also taught sculpture, as the traffic allowed.

Still, he loved books, especially old ones. He taught me to read when I was very small, two or three years old, and by the time I was five we were decanting Shakespeare aloud to each other, each of us taking parts. We sat in his study, a fusty, tiny, comfortable room with large windows. I took the leather chesterfield sofa while he filled the armchair nearby. We drank cocoa and the air smelled of chocolate and leather and especially books—you know the smell I mean—I don’t know if it’s the ink or the paper or the glue in the bindings, but it’s a very particular odor. I still smell it, somewhere in my memory, and it carries me back to that room and the sound of my father’s voice as he began John of Gaunt’s dying speech—

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired

And thus expiring do foretell of him …

He had a beautiful round baritone, and as he sat there in his armchair and spoke, one leg crossed over the other, wearing his soft shirt and tweed jacket and woolen vest while his blue eyes fixed not on the page—he knew the words—but upon or rather through the opposite wall of the study, I might have thought he really was the Duke of Lancaster, the great Plantagenet prince, splendid in his despair. To my mind, there was no man more heroic than my father.

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation throughout the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it

(here his voice shook with agony)

Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame …

And he named me Miranda. Prospero’s daughter, raised alone by her magician father on an uncharted island of fairies and strange creatures. I used to wonder why he chose that particular character, that particular daughter, that particular play. I think it had something to do with the sea, which he always loved, and with tempests, which also fascinated him. There may be more than that, but I’ll never know. He embarked for England—“This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this precious stone set in the silver sea”—on the second day of November 1943, when I was ten years old, and I last glimpsed him waving at the rail of a gray-painted troop ship, before it dissolved like a ghost into the dark mist of New York Harbor. That was all.

Still, I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven the sea for swallowing up my father like that. As I stood there at the end of the Greyfriars dock, watching the lobster boat tear toward me, the drone of its engine filled me with an unnamable thrill. Terror or joy, I couldn’t tell. It just seemed to me that watery Neptune, having swallowed my father, was now spitting something back eight years later.

Something in the shape of a stripling boy with dark, curling hair and tanned skin, who could rescue a man from drowning.