Учебно-методическое пособие для факультативных занятий по английскому языку. Таганрог: Изд-во тти, 2013. 200 с
parties, in restaurants, at small dinner-parties, they had only to meet each
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parties, in restaurants, at small dinner-parties, they had only to meet each other's eyes... Julia soon earned the reputation of being delicate and easily tired, it occurred so often that they left a cocktail party after a quarter of an hour or abandoned a dinner after the coffee —"Oh dear, I'm so sorry, such a vile headache, so stupid of me. Philip, you must stay..." "Of course I'm not going to stay." Once they had a narrow escape from discovery on the stairs while they were laughing uncontrollably. Their host had followed them out to ask them to post a letter. Julia in the nick of time changed her laughter into what seemed to be a fit of hysterics... Several weeks went by. It was a really successful marriage . . . they liked—between whilesm — to discuss its success, each, attributing the main merit to the other. "When I think you might have married Josephine," Julia said. "Why didn't you marry Josephine?" "I suppose at the back of our minds we knew it wasn't going to be permanent." "Are we going to be permanent?" "If we aren't, nothing will ever be." It was early in November that the time bombs began to go off. No doubt they had been planned to explode earlier, but Josephine had not taken into account the temporary change in his habits. Some weeks 161 passed before he had occasion to open what they used to call the ideas- bank in the days of their closest companionship—the drawer in which he used to leave NOTES for stories, scraps of overheard dialogue and the like, and she would leave roughly-sketched ideas for fashion advertisements. Directly he opened the drawer he saw her letter. It was labelled heavily Top Secret in black ink, with a whimsically-drawn exclamation mark in the form of a girl with big eyes (Josephine suffered in an elegant way from exophthalmic goitre 11 ) rising genie-like out of a bottle. He read the letter with extreme distaste: Dear, you didn't expect to find me here, did you? But after ten years I can't now and then say, Goodnight or good morning, how are you? Bless you. Lots o f love (really and truly). Your Josephine. The threat of "now and then" was unmistakable. He slammed the drawer shut and said "Damn" so loudly that Julia looked in. "Whatever is it, darling?" "Josephine again." She read the letter and said. "You know I can understand the way she feels. Poor Josephine. Are you tearing it up, darling?" "What else do you expect me to do with it? Keep it for a Collected Edition of her letters?" "It just seems a bit unkind." "Me unkind to her? Julia, you've no idea of the sort of life that we led those last years. I can show you scars: when she was in a rage she would stub her cigarettes anywhere." "She felt she was losing you, darling, and she got desperate. They are my fault really, those scars, every one of them." He could see growing in her eyes that soft amused speculative look which always led to the same thing. Only two days passed before the next time bomb went off. When they got up Julia said, "We really ought to change the mattress. We both fall into a kind of hole in the middle." "I hadn't noticed." "Lots of people change the mattress every week." "Yes. Josephine always did." They stripped the bed and began to roll the mattress. Lying on the springs was a letter addressed to Julia. Carter saw it first and tried to push it out of sight, but Julia saw him. "What's that?" 162 "Josephine of course. There'll soon be too many letters for one volume. We shall have to get them properly edited at Yale like George Eliot's." "Darling, this is addressed to me. What were you planning to do with it?" "Destroy it in secret." "I thought we were going to have no secrets." "I had counted without Josephine." For the first time she hesitated before opening the letter. "It's certainly a bit bizarre to put a letter here. Do you think it got there accidentally?" "Rather difficult, I should think." She read the letter and then gave it to him. She said with relief "Oh, she explains why. It's quite natural really." He read: жүктеу/скачать 1,77 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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