Читать книгу Imprint of Heart. Illumination with love - Елена Сперанская - Страница 6

Father met Lucy as usual with questions: “How did you get there? How did you rest? Where did you go to Moscow? What was the most memorable? How is your health?”

For a long time she retold the screenplay “Like the gods…” with the participation of folk artists, and herself tensely thought: “What has happened? Whence this cold? Alex was right, why did I go to the south? It would have been better if I stayed in the city to avoid conflict.”

Her father took the excitement with which she talked about the performance she saw, fatigue and overwork of her daughter, but, despite this, he asked:

“Lucy, what happened?” It seems to me that you are ill. You do not say something. Maybe you have complications at work? You’re very worried. Before you left, you had not been so nervous.

After these words, she could not stand it and burst into tears: “Here’s how it always is. My father understands me even more than I do myself.”

The next day she felt unwell. She wanted to call Alex, but he did not say if he wanted to hear her.

“Perhaps during my trip to the south he had another girl. No. So it can not go on. You can go crazy with the unknown. It is necessary to find out the relationship. Does he want to continue meeting or decided that I no longer want to see him? Let it be so, but I will say this first…”

This day Alex was loaded to the limit. It all began in the morning. He did not have time to appear in the shop, as a replacement master came up to him and said in a businesslike manner:

“You know what, Alex, two newcomers will come to our workshop today and we’ll have to debug the machine tools with programmed control. Actually, I already have watched them. They’re fine, but without you I can not let the guys go to work. You, Alex, have ‘golden hands’, ” she patted him on the shoulder. “Check the machines, please. Do not forget safety. In a word, do everything as expected. Young people need to be taught!”

“Young people need to be taught,” the last words of the master sounded in Alex’s mind.

He sat down at the computer. He had to check every machine in all working positions.

While he was working, the cell phone flashed Lucy’s number several times, but he was busy and did not answer. When released, he dialed the number himself, but no one picked up the phone.

After work, Alex went to her house: “Maybe something has happened? I am guilty myself, did not agree to a meeting in a human way.”

Lucy was alone. She met him in a light blue home dressing gown. Her hair was neatly stabbed; she looked very cute at home.

“I want to talk with you seriously,” she began first, when he came and sat down at the table in the kitchen, but Alex felt her voice tremble. “What kind of change? If you decided to part with me, then tell me honestly, and we will stop seeing each other. If you have another woman, tell me, why did you come to me?”

“Do not worry, I like you as before, but I thought that after a trip to the south, you had no desire to meet. I was busy, so I did not answer calls, but I came to you myself. If you want, we’ll go, take a walk or go to the movies, or better to a concert. The ensemble ‘Young Voices’ came on tour.”

“No, I see, you’re tired, sit down, I’ll pour you some tea and, please, do not refuse!”

Lucy set before Alex a plate of soup and a hot dish with meat. He ate everything, because he was really hungry.

“Yes, Lucy, you are an amazing person,” he said. “I love girls with a character.”

“I have adequate feelings for you,” she laughed.

Never did any of the girls with whom Alex was familiar before her liked him so much. The desire to make her an offer to marry him appeared with him when she was in the south, but he decided to wait.

“It is necessary to check the feelings. Lucy is a very nice girl and she will surely find a boyfriend, so if I’ll be in a hurry, can cause antipathy,” Alexey reasoned in a secret.

He stayed with her not for long, they still sat in the hall on the couch, listened to the music, Lucy showed him the albums of painting brought from Moscow.

They kissed and feelings seized Alexey when she offered to show him a red night dressing gown.

“French, look how handsome! Chanel,” she pulled out of the bedroom a coat rack with a nightgown on straps. “Try it on?”

“Let me touch,” Alexey got up and moved towards the bedroom, but then she blocked his way. “Come on… You allow me to smoke with you?”

“As you want.”

He lit a cigarette and went out into the kitchen again. He began to shake the ashes into a metal ashtray in the shape of a snake. Then he came back and pushed the curtains in the bedroom, and she was already dressed in a silk, blood-red shirt and lay on the bed on her side, leaning her elbows on the pillow. All the bends of the fragile body loomed. He imagined a fire in the snow from the sight of such a dazzling and burning picture. They actually froze from the air conditioner, which was switched on at full power. It seemed to him little – plus sixteen, but she forbade increasing degrees, and to smooth the trouble, she said:

“I have Crimean wine. Let’s try?”

“Prepare me something stronger to drink. Vodka can be mixed with this compote.”

“There’s no vodka. Father will be back soon,” she rose from the pillow and pulled him to her with an arm as he sat down beside her. “I’ll bring some glasses, do you mind?”

Defiantly she rose from the bed, and, causing an impression of flaming the fire of the dress, returned with a tray on which stood two tall crystal glasses filled with an amber drink.

They drank a glass of Crimean sherry and felt that they loved each other. Drink gave honey and grapes at the same time, causing secret desires, intoxicating and warming the body to the depths of the soul.

“If you want, I’ll read poetry for you. I have my friend’s notebook. It is called: ‘Illumination with Love’. She let me study.”

Without permission, Lucy began to read, turning the yellow sheets in half:

Trip to Yalta

“I will listen further, read, and then pour me a little more of your sherry. A fine style, something reminds me of the old fortress and the ruins of Chersonese, where I was with my parents when I was a child.”

She poured him and herself. They drank, and she began to flip through, choosing the most interesting poems in her opinion.

About Love

They became interested in poetry and forgot about time. Alexey was dozing, and sometimes he got up and went to the kitchen to smoke, and she stopped reading and lay relaxed and remembered her mother, their talking of love, the rocking on the waves in the sea, the table covered with a white tablecloth and tea appliances, paintings by Renoir, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Picasso, Kandinsky. The notebook consisted of several inserts that scattered on the floor.

“Take it, or it will break.” Alexey handed her several sheets. “I’ll hurry. I’m afraid of your father,” he got out of bed, dressed, and, slowly combing himself in the glass of the bookcase stuffed with books, he said:

“I want to explain something to you. My aunt was recently killed near the mail building. She was slaughtered by a nerd. She was on her way from work. He attacked from behind and stabbed her with an ordinary knife. The investigation was entrusted to lieutenant-colonel Kiryanov. Do you have any friends among private detectives? It’s just a perfect murder. There is no evidence, no instrument of crime, no criminal.”

Lucy put scattered sheets of poetry on the table and stood up. She rummaged in her memory and remembered that she had kept the telephone number of the private detective, Tatiana Alexandrovna Ivanova, when she investigated the theft of a large amount of money intended for encashment.

“Yes, I do, but for that, kiss.” She held out her thin hand to him.

He kissed the palm of her hand from the inside to the center. Every nerve of her hand shrank from the warm touch of his lips. With her other hand, she wrote the phone number of the detective on a green sheet with a sticky end and stuck to his arm.

“Call her for sure. A very knowledgeable woman but be careful. She does not like to be flirting with her.”

Lucy turned to Alexey’s face and removed this red glow from the Chanel caprone. The appearance of the girl turned pale and acquired quite real outlines.

Dressing and lightly beating up her forelock, she looked appraisingly at Alexey’s reaction. He was completely intoxicated and counted the number of drink wine glasses on his fingers. It turned out to be only three, but the bottle was full to the middle.

“What I do not like about you is that you are too businesslike,” the newly-made fiancé babbled, barely moving his tongue.

“Leave your comments for the cats and I need a real man with dignity and salary,” she said cheerfully, but her look corrected his perception of reality.

Her father appeared at the door of the apartment, when Alexey was already standing on the landing and looking through the cardholder where he had put the private detective’s phone number. Alexey dialed the number and immediately heard the order, the request for a date. He had nothing to do but go to a meeting with a lover of investigations by taxi, because he put off his dream of buying a car to start a wedding with Lucy, and then give her a beautiful car on wheels from Nissan-Teana.

Tanya appeared at the corner where the meeting should take place, not immediately. First she bought cigarettes, and then drove to her friends in the police, met with the homeless informant Venchik. He advised her to love her neighbor as herself for two hundred dollars an hour. That fact made her very happy and she jerked in the direction of Lucy’s house.

Two blocks later, near the restaurant “Mask”, the publishing house of the local newspaper “Regional News” and the snack-bar stood the victim and waited impatiently for her appearance.

He recognized the woman with the bag over her shoulder with supplies, including a Makarov pistol.

She smiled and invited Alexey to the shady avenues of the park called “Lime trees”, recalling Bunin’s “Dark alleys,” and, shifting her impressions on the shoulders of the classic, asked:

“Have you decided to become a lover again? Oh, I’m sorry; I’m just so simply speaking about life…”

He winced at the sagacity of the detective, but he did not give a look.

Alexey’s blossoming face and somewhat slovenly appearance spoke of the complete absence of female influence and adoration. But he tolerated the attack and immediately went to a business. Tanya listened and, making a few notes in the iPad, said goodbye to Izmailov. Before leaving for work there were only a few days. Lucy calmed down a little bit, because she realized that Alexey was still delighted with her, apparently, he had firm intentions.

Recollecting the frustrated love with Yuri, she was afraid to get used to Alexey and chased herself from all sorts of thoughts about a positive relationship with him. She liked his fatherly care, modesty, and most importantly, what attracted to Alexey the most was simple artlessness, inability to lie and dodge. This is how she imagined her future husband – a principled and honest.

The week went day by day. It was possible to postpone the arrival to the plant for another month, but she was quite well rested. After the holiday, she was impatient to go to work as soon as possible.

“Who would have thought that I would be so eager for the plant,” she told Irena on the phone. “I need money, and I do not want to borrow from my father, so that he does not think that during the holiday I completely lost his head.

“I decided on Monday to go to production, postpone and pull on there is nowhere else to wait.”

At the weekend it was cloudy. It was felt the approach of autumn. Autumn in the middle zone of Russia came quickly and imperceptibly. It seems that yesterday there was an unbearable heat, but today it was drizzling and the cool wind was blowing. Autumn no one expected, it came itself. Slowly, day by day it became cooler, and here the first frosts appeared…

On Monday, Lucy got up early in the morning and went to the plant for the production of electrical and office equipment: kettles, air conditioners, microwave ovens, irons, heaters, electricity meters and other household items.

At the entrance Lucy stopped and dialed Alexey’s number.

“Hi! Perhaps today they will tell me in which shop I will work.”

“Good luck,” he said approvingly.