Читать книгу The Silent Fountain - Victoria Fox, Victoria Fox - Страница 10

The woman hears the door go. They have so few visitors that it shakes her with a jolt. She hasn’t been sleeping but she hasn’t been awake: somewhere in between.

Distant voices. One is Adalina’s; the other belongs to a stranger.

The woman sits, unease racing from her toes to her stomach, where it settles. She watches the walls, listens for the telltale creaks of a board, wonders how long it will be before Adalina explains her absence. What will the maid say? How much will she elaborate? The woman has been clear about the story she wishes to tell, but whether that story gets translated, behind locked doors, in hidden corridors, in hushed voices in the old servants’ quarters, is another thing. She is no fool.

It is an effort to bring her legs out of bed, but the floor feels welcome on her naked soles. Sometimes she pictures the materials of this house, the solid wood and hard marble, the cool stone, absorbing every thought and feeling her body has expelled. If she squeezes the drapes, tears will seep out, like the wringing of a cloth; if she scratches the stairways, secrets will plume and curl in a thin ribbon: grey smoke.

She goes to the door and checks it is locked. At the window, she parts the shutters and checks the approach for some clue of the girl who has entered her home. There is none. Just the distant spread of olive groves and a wide, empty sky.

Her reflection is transparent in the glass, a see-through woman. It is forgiving, this trick: it makes her appear young, no shadows, no creases – no evidence of the painful years that have scarred her face. She can seldom recall the person she was; it is like peering into someone else’s life, a life that bears no relation whatsoever to one’s own. It is peculiar to think of that other self. She sees the photographs and watches the movies; she reads the items they printed about her in magazines, that bright white smile, the lacquered waves of blonde hair, that slick of raspberry lipstick… She’d been beautiful. There was no denying it. She’d been charming. She’d been witty. She’d been scintillating. Everybody had wanted to know her.

How quickly the world forgot. How efficiently tragedy brought leprosy on whomever it inflicted. She ought to be grateful for her obscurity. Most days she was, but on others she thought about the woman she had given up, or who had given up on her, and the difference between her life then and her life now was so staggering, so acute and painful that it stole her breath away. That vanished her would have flung the door wide and gone to greet their guest. She would have intimidated her with beauty and standing, and enjoyed the effect those assets had. No female would have got the better of her. But that was another world. She has learned a lot since then.

The shutters close, blink-quick. One glimpse of the fountain is enough. Adalina cannot understand why she doesn’t switch rooms. It might make her sleep better, chase the nightmares away. But she cannot. Instead she rests her forehead against the wall, a shiver of cold rinsing her body. She fights the bleeding cough that rattles in her throat, fights with all her might but still it breaks free, a warning, a candle slowly licking itself to extinction. A thread of sunlight filters through the shutters and on to the floor, where it pools, and at its centre a black beetle circles pointlessly, round and round, round and round, intent on its journey, going nowhere.

She’d been going somewhere, once. Years ago, in another life, a young girl with her toe on the brink… She’d had it all ahead of her, the map undrawn.