Читать книгу Heathcliff Redux - Lily Tuck - Страница 16

The next time I saw Cliff was at the Keswick Hunt Club Ball. (I normally tried to avoid those events. Not only did I have to get dressed up, but I had to get a babysitter. Also, Charlie tended to drink too much, and I’d have to drive the truck home at God knows what hour in the morning.) Cliff was dancing cheek to cheek with a woman I knew slightly. Her name was Sally. When Sally saw me looking at her and Cliff, she waved at me with the hand that was resting on Cliff’s shoulder and I waved back.

Sally was a rich widow in her late forties. She owned a grand historic house that had once been a plantation and was often compared to Monticello. The house was open to the public a few times a year to benefit a local charity and, several times, it had been written up and photographed in fashion magazines. Sally’s husband, who died the year before in a car accident (his car overturned in a drainage ditch at night, and he was pinned inside it and not found until the next morning, when it was too late), had been at least fifteen years older than Sally, and he had made his fortune with some paper products—I’ve forgotten what they were exactly. Packaging, I think. They did not have children. Sally wasn’t beautiful, but she was attractive and had a good, trim figure. She was an excellent sportswoman—she rode (she was a whipper-in at the local hunt), was a good shot, played golf and tennis, and I don’t know what else. She was also on a bunch of committees—at the library in town, a small liberal arts college in Lynchburg, the hospital—because she gave to them generously. I couldn’t fault her for that. In fact, I couldn’t fault her for anything—not even for dancing with Cliff.