Mourning Raga

Начало книги

The whole affair began, as the unexpected and chaotic so often did, with Tossa’s mother. And as usual, on the telephone.

Tossa’s mother was herself unexpected and chaotic, though contained in as neat and trim a package as you could wish, slim and brown and perennially young, even after three marriages and two widowhoods. She had begun life – indeed, she still continued it, with unflagging verve and success – as Chloe Bliss, a perfect name for the stage though it also happened to be her own by the grace of fate; had been in succession Chloe Barber, until Tossa’s professor father inconsiderately died in his charming prime, Chloe Terrell, until the infinitely less interesting and less suitable Herbert Terrell fell off a mountain in Slovakia and got the worst of it in the consequent collision with a slab of white trias limestone, and Chloe Newcombe, which after two years, rather surprisingly, she still was. Perhaps Paul Newcombe, on the face of it a depressingly solid and stolid type of business manipulator, was more durable than he looked; perhaps, even, there was more to him than met the eye. If he was to hold Chloe’s vagrant interest much longer there would certainly need to be.

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