Tender

Начало книги

Dreams fled away, and something about a bedroom, and something about a garden, seen through an open window; and a windfall, something about a windfall — a line which made Catherine see apples, bruising and shriveling and rotting into the ground. Windfall-sweetened soil; that was it. And, the flank of an animal, rubbing against a bedroom wall — though that could not be right, could it? But it was in there somewhere, she knew it was; something of it had bobbed up in her consciousness as she lay on the lawn in front of James’s house, a wool blanket beneath her, one arm thrown over her eyes to do the job of the sunglasses she had not thought to bring.

The French windows were open. They were to the left of the front door, which seemed a bit strange, or pointless or something — if you wanted to walk out to the front of the house, wouldn’t you just use the door? Still, they were nice — elegant, that was what they were, and modern — and through them now came the noise of James and his parents, talking in the loud, excited way this family had. His mother shrieked at something James had said, and James swore at her — the fond, gleeful kind of swearing they did all the time, this family; Catherine could not get over them. They were talking, probably, about the local wedding James’s parents were going to that afternoon; James was also expected to go, but James was staying home, using Catherine’s visit as an excuse. Catherine was not sure how she felt about this: a mixture of panic and guilt and flattery, which did not make it easy to relax, lying here in an old bikini belonging to James’s sister, not that the fact of lying here in a bikini made relaxation easy in the first place.

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