Читать книгу Springtime - Michelle De Kretser - Страница 11

FRANCES’S PREOCCUPATIONS—Luke’s next visit, her work—kept her from thinking about the woman in the old-fashioned dress. Walking beside the river pushed ideas around her mind like chairs. Sentences arrived ready-made: Our perception, in short, is directed to the irreducible materiality of the world. When she remembered the woman in the garden, the scene might have been a tapestry, something that existed at an angle to life. But sometimes, passing under the she oaks, Frances found herself anticipating a figure in pink. She still couldn’t pinpoint where the woman lived, so the sight of her always brought a small shock. The season was no aid to location, proliferating flowers where there had last been green drapery, or stripping away petals while buds worked loose in a neighboring yard. For weeks, Frances placed the woman’s house next door to a hand-lettered sign, fastened to a gate, that advertised UGG boots. But one morning, the sign was nowhere near when she saw a familiar shape at a fence. The woman was there too, under overhanging branches, as silent and white as her dog. Their house merged with the sun in Frances’s mind: it was something else that shifted about and wasn’t always where she looked.