Saving Agnes

Начало книги

THE house, like the party, was subsiding. It didn’t lurch or tilt Titanically, crockery and silverware crashing to the floor, women in tight taffeta dresses flung screaming across the room; like the party, it wasn’t a large-scale Hollywood affair. As yet the only evidence of its sinking was a crack, a long narrow wound in the sitting-room wall, and Agnes Day felt that it presaged a destiny altogether more menacing.

She stood at the foot of the stairs where a handful of stragglers, having not long ago heroically resisted the two o’clock exodus, now lingered with an air of having in some way been cheated. On the far side of the room, one or two people stood immobile in the landscape of bottles and ashtrays, overturned candles and shattered glass, of wine pools banked by little white hillocks of salt and fringed with crumpled cigarette packets, like contorted statues in an abstract sculpture park. She realised there was no one here she wanted to talk to, no one she could even bear talking to.

Читать дальше →