Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке

How different everything might have been if I had spoken then. I would never have heard the disturbing story of my birth, for she would have accompanied me to the funeral and my aunt would not have spoken in her presence. I would never have travelled with my aunt. I would have been saved from much, though I suppose I would have missed much too. Miss Keene said, “I shall be living near Kofiefontein.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t really know. Listen. It’s raining cats and dogs.[31 - It’s raining cats and dogs.

– (разг.) На улице льет как из ведра.]”

We got up and moved into the drawing-room for coffee. There was a Venetian scene copied from Canaletto[32 - Canaletto – Антонио Каналетто (1697–1768), итальянский художник] on the wall. All the pictures in the house seemed to represent foreign parts, and she was leaving for Kofiefontein. I would never travel so far, I thought then, and I wished that she was staying here, in Southwood.

“It seems a very long way to go,” I said.

“If there was anything to keep me here… Will you take one lump or two?”

“No sugar, thank you.” Was it an invitation for me to speak? I have always asked myself since. I didn’t love her, and she certainly didn’t love me, but perhaps in a way we could have made a life together. I heard from her a year later; she wrote, “Dear Mr. Pulling, I wonder how Southwood is and whether it’s raining. We are having a beautiful sunny winter.

My cousins have a small (!) farm of ten thousand acres and they think nothing of driving seven hundred miles to buy a ram. I am not quite used to things yet and I think often of Southwood. How are the dahlias? I have given up tatting. We lead a very open-air existence.”

I replied and gave her what news I could, but I had retired by then and was no longer at the centre of Southwood life. I told her of my mother’s failing health and how the dahlias were doing.

There was a rather gloomy variety in royal purple called Deuil du Roy Albert which had not been a success. I was not sorry. It was an odd name to give a flower. My Ben Hurs were flourishing.

I had neglected the telephone, feeling so sure that it was a wrong number, but when the ringing persisted, I left my dahlias and went in.

The telephone stood on the filing cabinet where I keep my accounts and all the correspondence which my mother’s death caused.