Читать книгу Virginia Woolf in Manhattan - Maggie Gee - Страница 18

11

Two o’clock in the afternoon, though several lifetimes have slipped away. Two fragile organisms, blown together. Dandelion clocks on a dirty bedstead. Angela, Virginia.

She was washed downriver like a broken doll. He had to identify her three weeks later. Children thought she was a log in the water. They stoned it, hard, to make it sink. The happy bird-calls of adolescents. Then one boy realised it was a body.

Down in the street, the cold is beginning a slow fight-back against the spring heat-wave. The dark, repressed, pauses, alerted. Soon it will be able to creep back into the gullies. Then it will climb up the buildings again.

Angela looks around her and shivers. ‘Mrs Woolf, are you all right?’