Читать книгу The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 26

ISOBEL DROVE HOME from the Monks’ house at a crawl, because she’d drunk so much gin and tonic over bridge, and the road, I think, was playing tricks on her. Overhead, the sky was gray and troubled, and a few fat drops of rain smacked against the windshield. Isobel switched the wipers on and off and peered up to check the state of the clouds.

“Peaches, darling,” she said. “Do you know what I hate most about the Island and everybody in it? Except you, I suppose.”

“What’s that?”

“Nobody ever says what they really mean. There is this vast fabric of tender little lies, and all the important things are unspoken. Boiling there underneath. We only bother telling the truth when it’s too small to count.”

“I don’t think that’s true at all.”

“You haven’t been here long enough. It’s like a sport, it’s the only real sport they know, and because I love sports I play them at their game, but I hate it. If I had my horses, now …”

“Why don’t you?”

“There isn’t room. Poor dears, they’re on Long Island, getting fat.” She paused to negotiate a sharp curve, surging and slowing the Plymouth as if she couldn’t decide her approach. She was a wholly different driver when drunk, I thought, and as I watched the bony grip of her hands on the wheel, fighting the turn, I wondered if I should offer to take over. Before I could work up the nerve, she straightened out the car and said, “Don’t you ever miss Foxcroft?”

I turned my head to stare out the window at the meadow passing by, the occasional driveway marked by stone pillars. The air was growing purple with some impending downpour, and I felt its approach in my gut. “I haven’t been gone long enough.”

“I do. When I was there, I couldn’t wait to leave. All those books and rules and studying. But now I think, at least there was something new every day. Here, everything’s the same. The same damned summer, over and over, the same day, the same people, the same small talk, the same small sports and parlor games and lies, of course. There’s no escape.”

“It’s only a few months. Sometimes it’s nice to spend a few months doing nothing.”

“But then in September we go back to the city and do nothing there. What hope is there? Tell me, Miranda. I really want to know.”

I turned to stare at her sharp profile, and for the first time I noticed a tiny bump along the bridge of her nose, as if she’d broken it some time ago. “You might have gone to college,” I said.

“That’s just putting off the inevitable. Beside, I’m not like you. Books bore me. All your Shakespeare and Dickens and old men like that. Marriage is going to bore me even more.” She opened the window a few inches and tossed her spent cigarette into the draft. “My God, I should’ve been born ten years earlier.”

“Why?”

“Why, because of the war. I’d have trained as a nurse or a Resistance agent, I’d have been splendid at that. I’d have made some use of myself, some purpose. It would have transformed me. I’d never have been the same, I would have had no tolerance at all for this.” She waved her hand at the Island. “I don’t understand how everybody could come back from the war and just sit there with a gin and tonic and play bridge. God, what a drag. It’s like they’ve all gone to sleep.”

“Because it wasn’t an adventure, Isobel. It was hell. People died.”

“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry. Your father.” She paused respectfully. We had reached the Greyfriars drive, and she began to slow in preparation for the turn. Another handful of raindrops smacked the windshield. The drive was bordered with giant, mature rhododendrons, transported at great cost from the mainland—Isobel had told me how much as we drove away this morning—so that you couldn’t see the house until you rounded the last curve, so that you found yourself straining and straining as you approached your destination. Now Isobel drove even more slowly, a walking pace, while I checked the sky and the windshield and clenched the muscles of my abdomen.

Isobel waited until she began the last turn before she continued. “Still. You’d think they couldn’t stand all this shallow hypocrisy, after what they’d been through. And yet they embrace it. They want it to stretch on into infinity, never changing, never deviating one square inch from the old, dull, habitual ways. Marrying suitable boys you don’t really love, having children you don’t really want. I tell you, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m about to explode, Miranda, but nobody knows it yet. Nobody but you. Just watch. I’m going to …”

Her sentence drifted off, as if she’d lost her train of thought. I looked up and followed her gaze, and at first I saw nothing amiss, nothing out of order. Greyfriars rambled before us in its immaculate, elegant way, not a window out of place, gray shingle meeting white trim and green lawn. The grass, the young trees, the rosebushes, the neatly fenced kitchen garden, the tall boxwoods guarding the swimming pool—all these features as tidy as money could make them. Only the gathering rhythm of the rain disturbed the expensive Fisher tranquillity.

Then I noticed the front door, which was open, and the person leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette attached to a long black holder. A woman wearing a magenta dress, a towering hairdo, and a large white flower pinned above her right ear.

“My God. Who’s that?” I asked.

Isobel switched off the ignition and rested her arms on the top of the steering wheel. A prolonged rumble of thunder shook the windows. The woman straightened from the doorway and beckoned us with her cigarette in its holder.

In a voice of wonder, Isobel said, “It’s my mother.”