Шоколад / Chocolat - стр. 45
She flushed and looked away, as if expecting to find someone standing at her shoulder.
“You don’t understand,” she muttered.
“I think I do.” With my fingertips I touched the scarf which hid her face. “Why do you wear this?” I asked abruptly. “Do you want to tell me?”
She looked at me in hope and panic. Shook her head. I pulled gently at the scarf.
“You’re pretty,” I said as it came loose. “You could be beautiful.”
There was a fresh bruise just beneath her lower lip, bluish in the failing light. She opened her mouth for the automatic lie. I interrupted her.
“That’s not true,” I said.
“How can you know that?” Her voice was sharp. “I hadn’t even said?”
“You didn’t have to.”
Silence. Across the water a flute scattered bright notes among the drumbeats. When she spoke at last her voice was thick with self-loathing. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?” Her eyes were tiny crescents. “I never blame him. Not really. Sometimes I even forget what really happened.” She took a deep breath, like a diver going under. “Walking into doors. Falling downstairs. St-stepping on rakes.” She sounded close to laughter. I could hear hysteria bubbling beneath the surface of her words. “Accident-prone, that’s what he says I am. Accident-prone.”
“Why was it this time?” I asked gently. “Was it because of the river people?”
She nodded.
“They didn’t mean any harm. I was going to serve them.” Her voice rose shrilly for a second. “I don’t see why I should have to do what that bitch Clairmont wants all the time! Oh we must stand together,” she mimicked savagely. “For the sake of the community. For our children, Madame Muscat”– breaking back into her own voice with a stricken intake of breath – “when in normal circumstances she wouldn’t say hello to me in the street – wouldn’t give me steam off her shit!” She took another deep breath, controlling the outburst with an effort. “It’s always Caro this, Caro that. I’ve seen the way he looks at her in church. Why can’t you be like Caro Clairmont?” Now she was her husband, his voice thick with beery rage. She even managed his mannerisms, the thrust-out chin, the strutting, aggressive posture. “She makes you look like a clumsy sow. She’s got style. Class. She’s got a fine son doing well at school. And what have you got, he?”
“Josephine.”
She turned towards me with a stricken expression.
“I’m sorry. For a moment I almost forgot where?”
“I know.”
I could feel rage pricking at my thumbs.
“You must think I’m stupid to have stayed with him all these years.”
Her voice was dull, her eyes dark and resentful.
“No, I don’t.”
She ignored my reply. “Well I am,” she declared. “Stupid and weak. I don’t love him – can’t remember a time when I ever loved him – but when I think of actually leaving him-” She broke off in confusion. “Actually leaving him,” she repeated in a low, wondering voice. “No. It’s no use.” She looked up at me again and her face was closed, final. “That’s why I can’t talk to you again,” she told me in calm desperation. “I couldn’t leave you guessing – you deserve better than that. But this is how it has to be.”
“No,” I told her. “It doesn’t.”
“But it does.” She defends herself bitterly, desperately, against the possibility of comfort. “Can’t you see? I’m no good. I steal. I lied to you before. I steal things. I do it all the time!”