Buch lesen: «The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы»

© Берестова А. И., адаптация, сокращение, словарь, 2019

© ООО «Издательство «Антология», 2019

The Coven

“That man was like a black rock, and very cold.”

– Isabel Gowdxe, in 1662

“Now after the devil had ended his admonitions, he came down out of the pulpit, and made all the company come and kiss his arse, which they said was cold like ice; his body was hard like rock, as those who touched him thought.”

– Agnes Sampson, in 1590

“Sukie said a man has bought the Lenox mansion,” Jane Smart said in her hasty but resolute manner.

“A man?” Alexandra Spofford asked, her peaceful aura that morning disturbed by the assertive word.

“From New York,” Jane hurried on, dropping the r in Massachusetts style. “No wife and family, evidently.”

“Oh. One of those,” Alexandra said. Hearing this rumor about a homosexual that had come up from Manhattan to invade them, delivered in Jane's northern voice, she felt intersected where she was, in this mysterious sullen state of Rhode Island. She had been born in the West, where white and violet mountains lift in pursuit of the fluffy clouds, and tumbleweed rolls in pursuit of the horizon.

“Sukie isn't so sure,” Jane said swiftly. “He appears quite sturdy, and the backs of his hands are so hairy, she says. He told the people at Perley Realty he needed large space because he was an inventor with a lab. And he's got a number of pianos.”

Alexandra giggled. The sound of her laughter little changed since her Colorado girlhood; it seemed it was produced not out of her throat but by a little bird perched on her shoulder. “How many pianos can a man have?”

This seemed to offend Jane. Her voice bristled like a black cat's fur, iridescent. She said defensively, “Well, it's just what Marge Perley told Sukie at last night's meeting of the Horse Trough Committee.” This committee supervised the planting and, after vandalism, the replanting of a big blue marble trough for watering horses that historically stood at the center of Eastwick, where the two main streets met. The town was shaped like an L, fitted around Narragansett Bay. Dock Street held the downtown businesses, and Oak Street at right angles to it was where the lovely big old homes were. Marge Perley, whose horrid canary-yellow For Sale signs jumped up and down on trees and fences according to the tides of economics and fashion (Eastwick had for decades been semi-depressed and semi-fashionable) and people moved in or out of the town, was a heavily made-up, energetic woman who, if one at all, was a witch of a different type from Jane, Alexandra, and Sukie. There was a husband, a tiny fussy Homer Perley always trimming their hedge, and this made a difference. “The papers were passed in Providence,” Jane continued.

“And with hairy backs to his hands,” Alexandra mused. As if in a crystal ball she saw that she would meet and fall in love with this man and that little good would come of it. “Didn't he have a name?” she asked.

Jane only remembered that it was one of those names with a 'van' or a 'von' or a 'de' in it.”

“When is he going to move in?”

“He said soon. He could be in there now!” Jane sounded alarmed. Alexandra visualized the other woman's rather too thick (for the rest of her thin face) eyebrows lifting in halfcircles above her dark resentful eyes. If Alexandra was the large type of witch, always spreading herself thin, trying to merge with the landscape, and in her heart rather lazy and cool, Jane was hot, short, concentrated like a pencil point, and Sukie Rougemont, busy downtown all day long gathering news and smiling hello, had an oscillating nature. So Alexandra mused, hanging up. Things fall into threes. And magic occurs all around us when nature finds the predestined forms, and things crystalline and organic fall together at angles of sixty degrees, the equilateral triangle being the mother of structure.

She returned to putting jars of spaghetti sauce on the shelf, sauce for more spaghetti than she and her children could consume in a hundred years. It was, she vaguely felt, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her present lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. She made that sauce of her own tomatoes. Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, an extravagant fecundity had overtaken the plants, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun shone through the line of willows each long afternoon. The little tomato branches broke under the weight of so much fruit. Tomatoes seemed the most human of all plants, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red balls, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. She recognized as she worked in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce that will be poured upon the white spaghetti. The fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of the past? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it must be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order. Yet she sometimes despised herself as lazy, in taking a lover of a race so tolerant of stoutness.

Alexandra's lovers in a few years since her divorce had been husbands let stray by the women who owned them. Her own former husband, Oswald Spofford, rested on a high kitchen shelf in a jar, reduced to multi-colored dust, the cap screwed on tight. Thus she had reduced him as her abilities unfolded after their move to Eastwick from Norwich, Connecticut. Ozzie had known all about chrome and had transferred from a Fixture factory in that hilly city to a rival manufacturer in a plant south of Providence, amid the strange industrial vastness of this small state. They had moved seven years ago. Here in Rhode Island her powers had expanded like gas in a vacuum. He quite lost touch with the expanding universe within her. He had become much involved with their sons' Little League activities, and with the Fixture company's bowling team. As Alexandra accepted at first one and then several lovers, her cuckolded husband shrank to the dimensions and dryness of a doll, lying beside her in her great wide b ed at night like a painted log or a stuffed baby alligator. By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become just dirt – matter in the wrong place, as her mother had briskly defined it long ago – some polychrome dust she swept up and kept in a jar as a souvenir.

The other witches had experienced similar transformations in their marriages; Jane Smart's ex-husband, Sam, hung in the cellar of her ranch house among the dried herbs and was occasionally added to a love-philter, for piquancy; and Sukie Rougemont had reduced hers to plastic and used him as a place mat. This last had happened rather recently; Alexandra could still visualize Monty standing at cocktail parties in his Madras jacket and parsley-green slacks, relating the details of the day's golf round. Monty had had wonderful teeth, long and very even but not false, and, undressed, rather touching, thin bluish legs, much less muscular than his brown golfer's forearms. He had been one of Alexandra's first lovers. Now, it felt queer and queerly satisfying to set a mug of Sukie's tarry coffee upon a glossy plastic Madras, leaving a dirty ring.

This air of Eastwick empowered women. Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street in part was built upon culverts and pilings, and saltwater slipped and slapped and slopped against them, so that an unsteady veiny aqua sea-glare shimmered and shuddered on the faces of the local matrons as they carried orange juice and low-fat milk, luncheon meat and whole-meal bread and filtered cigarettes out of the Bay Superette. The real supermarket, where one did a week's shopping, lay inland, in the part of Eastwick that had been farmland in the eighteenth century. Aristocratic planters, rich in slaves and cattle, had paid social calls on horseback here. Where corn, that remarkable agricultural artifact of the Indians, had flourished for generations, windowless little plants with names like Dataprobe and Computech manufactured tiny electro-mechanical works.

Rhode Island is the smallest of the fifty states, but it contains some American vastnesses, tracts hardly explored amid industrial sprawl, heathlike marshes and desert shores on either side of the Bay. Through such a stretch Alexandra now drove to have a look again at the old Lenox mansion. She took her black Labrador, Coal, with her. She had left the last of the sterilized jars of sauce on the kitchen counter and had pinned a note to the refrigerator door for her four children:

Milk in frig. Oreos in breadbox.

Back in one hour. Love.

The Lenox family in the days when Roger Williams was still alive had tricked the chiefs of the Narragansett tribe out of land enough to form a European barony, but with years the family had taken a generally downward trend. When Alexandra arrived in Eastwick there was only one Lenox left in South County, an old widow, Abigail, in the stagnant village of Old Wick; she went about the village muttering, and children threw pebbles at her. Stopped by the local constable, they said that they were defending themselves against her evil eye. The vast Lenox lands had long been broken up. The Lenox mansion had been built of brick on an island the family still owned, in the tracts of salt marsh behind East Beach. It was a diminished but locally striking imitation of the palatial summer “cottages” erected in Newport during the Gilded Age.¹ There was a causeway between the shore and the island, but the mansion was always cut off during the high tide. It had been occupied by a succession of owners since 1920, and had been allowed by them to slip into disrepair. Yet, from afar, the mansion still looked rather grand, Alexandra thought. She had parked on the shoulder of the beach road to gaze across the quarter-mile of marsh.

This was September, season of full tides; the time now was after four; it would be an hour or two before the causeway in and out became passable. Thin white smoke was lifting from one of the chimneys of the mansion. Someone was inside.

That man with hairy backs to his hands. Alexandra's future lover.

She decided it might be a workman or watchman he had hired. Her eyes smarted from trying to see so far, so intensely. She felt dark inside, a sense of herself as a pathetic onlooker. Female yearning was in all the papers and magazines now; the sexual equation had become reversed as girls of good family flung themselves toward brutish rock stars, green unshaven guitarists from the slums of Liverpool or Memphis who were somehow granted indecent power, dark suns turning these children of sheltered upbringing into suicidal orgiasts. Alexandra thought of her tomatoes, the juice of violence beneath the plump complacent skin. She thought of her own older daughter, alone in her room with those Monkees and Beatles… one thing for Marcy, another for her mother to be mooning so, straining her eyes. She got back into the car with Coal and drove the half-mile of straight black road to the beach.

In September, if no one was on the beach, you could walk with a dog unleashed. But it was unusually warm, and the narrow parking lot was filled by cars; many young people wearing bathing suits lay on the sand with their radios as if summer and youth would never end. Acting according to beach regulations, Alexandra fixed a length of clothesline she kept on the backseat floor to Coal studded collar. He pulled her along through the resisting sand. She tugged off her beige espadrilles and dropped the shoes behind a tuft of beach grass near the end of the boardwalk. Coal pulled her on, past a heap of square-cut rocks that had been part of a jetty built when this beach was the toy of rich men and not an overused public playground. Rock from the young people's radios washed around her as she walked along aware of her heaviness, of the witchy figure she must present with her bare feet and men's baggy denims and worn-out green brocaded jacket, something from Algeria she and Ozzie had bought in Paris on their honeymoon seventeen years ago. Though she turned a gypsyish olive in summer, Alexandra was of northern blood; her maiden name had been Sorensen. She wore her hair in a single thick braid down her back; sometimes she pinned the braid up to the back of her head. Her hair had never been a true Viking blond but of a muddy pallor now further dirtied by gray. Most of the gray hair had appeared in front; the nape was still as fine as those of the girls that lay here basking in the sun.

Coal ran on, snorting, imagining some animal scent in the ocean air. His desire to run burned the rope in her hand. She was drawing near to where a concrete wall topped by rusted barbed wire marked the end of public beach; still there were groups of youth and seekers of youth and she did not feel free to set loose poor Coal. Three young men were playing Frisbee, and as she passed through their triangle it seemed to her she heard the word “hag”. The beach narrowed here and became intimate, as you could see from cans and bottles and burnt driftwood and the condoms like small dried jellyfish corpses. The cement wall had been spray-painted with linked names. Everywhere, desecration had set its hand and only footsteps were washed away by the ocean.

Alexandra felt irritated and revengeful. She resented the overheard insult “hag” and the general vast insult of all this youth preventing her from letting her dog, her friend, run free. She decided to clear the beach for herself and Coal by willing a thunderstorm. One's inner weather was always related to the outer; it was simply a question of reversing the current, which occurred rather easily if power had been given to the primary pole, that is, to oneself as a woman. So many of Alexandra's remarkable powers had flowed from this mere return to herself. Only in her midlife did she truly believe that she had a right to exist, that the forces of nature had created her not as an afterthought and companion – a rib, as the notorious Malleus Maleficarum had it – but as the mainstay of the continuing Creation, as the daughter of a daughter and a woman whose daughters in turn would bear daughters. Alexandra closed her eyes and willed this vast interior of herself – this continuum reaching back through the generations of humanity and primates and beyond them through the lizards and the fish to the algae that produced the planet's first DNA, a continuum that in the other direction led to the end of all life – she willed these depths of herself to darken, to condense, to generate an interface of lightning between tall walls of air. And the sky in the north did rumble, so faintly only Coal could hear. His ears came alive. Mertalia, Musalia, Dophatia: silently she spoke the forbidden names. Onemalia, Zitanseia, Goldaphaira, Dedulsaira. A blast of cold air hit from the north. A collective sigh of surprise arose from the youthful naked crowd at the other end of the beach. The air blackened. The offending youths had seen their Frisbee sail away from their hands like a kite and were hurrying to gather up their portable radios and their six-packs, their sneakers and jeans and tops. Coal barked at nothing, in one direction and then the other, as the drop in barometric pressure maddened his ears.

Now the ocean, so recently calm all the way to Block Island, sensed the change. Its surface rippled, the waves grew higher. The sails hurried toward harbor. Then the rain began, great icy drops that hurt like hailstones. Footsteps pounded past Alexandra as honey-colored lovers raced toward cars parked at the far end, by the bathhouses. Thunder rumbled, the large hurtful drops broke up into a finer, thicker rain. Alexandra stood still; through veils of rain she saw that the beach was empty. She undid the rope leash and set the dog free.

But Coal was frightened by the storm and stayed at her feet. Tiny speckled sand crabs were emerging now from their holes and scurrying sideways toward the frothing sea. The color of their shells was so sandy they seemed transparent. Alexandra steeled herself and crushed one with her bare foot. Sacrifice. There must always be sacrifice. It was one of nature's rules. She danced from crab to crab, crushing them. Her face from hairline to chin streamed and all the colors of the rainbow were in this liquid film, because of the agitation of her aura. Lightning kept taking her photograph. She had a cleft in her chin and a tiny one in the tip of her nose; her handsomeness derived from the candor of her broad forehead beneath the gray-edged wings of hair swept symmetrically back to form her braid, and from the clairvoyance of her eyes. The form of her mouth had the appearance of a smile. She had attained her height of five-eight by the age of fourteen and had weighed one-twenty at the age of twenty; she was somewhere around one hundred sixty pounds now. One of the liberations of becoming a witch had been that she had stopped constantly weighing herself.

As the little sand crabs were transparent on the speckled sand, so Alexandra, wet through and through, felt transparent to the rain, one with it, its temperature and that of her blood brought into harmony. The short storm was coming to an end. Coal, his terror passed at last, ran in circles, wider and wider. Alexandra strode to the end of the purged public beach, to the wire-topped wall, and back. She reached the parking lot and picked up her espadrilles where she had left them.

She opened the door of her Subaru and called loudly for Coal, who had disappeared into the dunes. “Come, doggie!” this stately plump woman sang out. “Come, baby! Come, angel!” To the eyes of the young people hiding with their wet towels and goose bumps inside the bathhouse and underneath the pizza shack's striped awning, Alexandra seemed miraculously dry, not a hair of her massive braid out of place, not a patch of her brocaded green jacket damp. It was these unverifiable impressions that spread among us in Eastwick the rumor of witchcraft.

Alexandra was an artist. Using simple tools like toothpicks and a stainless-steel butter knife, she made little lying or sitting figurines, always of women in colorful costumes painted over naked contours; they sold for fifteen or twenty dollars in two local boutiques called the Yapping Fox and the Hungry Sheep. Alexandra had no clear idea of who bought them, or why, or exactly why she made them, or who was directing her hand. The power of sculpture had appeared with her other powers, in the period when Ozzie turned into colored dust. The impulse had visited her one morning as she sat at the kitchen table, the children off at school, the dishes washed up. That first morning, she had used one of her children's Play-Doh, but later she began to buy extraordinarily pure kaolin clay she dug herself in an old widow's back yard. She paid the widow twelve dollars a sack. If the sacks were too heavy she helped her lift them; like Alexandra she was strong. The widow was at least sixty-five, but she dyed her hair a glittering brass color and wore very tight pants suits of turquoise or magenta. This was nice. Alexandra read a message for herself here: Getting old could be jolly, if you stayed strong. She always returned from these trips heartened and joyful, full of the belief that a league of women upholds the world.

Self-taught, Alexandra had been at sculpture for five years – since before the divorce, to which it, like most manifestations of her blossoming selfhood, had contributed.

Jane Smart, too, was an artistic person – a musician. She gave piano lessons to make ends meet, and substituted as choir director in local churches sometimes, but her love was the cello; its vibratory melancholy tones would at some moonlit hours on warm nights come out of the windows of her low little ranch house where it stood amid many like it on the curved roads of the Fifties development called Cove Homes. Her neighbors on their quarter-acre lots, husband and wife, child and dog, would move about, awakened, and discuss whether or not to call the police. They seldom did, confused and, it may be, frightened by something naked, a splendor and sadness, in Jane's playing. It seemed easier to fall back to sleep, lulled by the sad sounds of the cello.

Sukie had nothing of what Alexandra would call an artistic talent but she loved social existence and had been made by the financial difficulties that follow divorce to write for the local weekly newspaper, the Eastwick Word. She loved her two friends, and they her. Today, after typing up her account of last night's meetings at Town Hall, Sukie looked forward hungrily to Alexandra's and Jane's coming over to her house for a drink. They usually gathered on Thursdays, in one of their three houses. Sukie lived in the middle of town, which was convenient for her work, though her small house was a great step down from the farmhouse – six bedrooms, thirty acres, a station wagon, a sports car, a Jeep, four dogs – that she and Monty had shared. But her girlfriends made it seem fun; they usually chose some colorful bit of costume for their gatherings. In a gold-threaded shawl Alexandra entered, stooping, at the side door to the kitchen; in her hands were two jars of her tomato sauce.

The witches kissed, cheek to cheek. “Here sweetie, I know you like nutty dry things best but,” Alexandra said, in her thrilling contralto. Sukie took the twin gifts into her own, more slender hands. “The tomatoes came on like a plague this year for some reason,” Alexandra continued. “I put about a hundred jars of this up and then the other night I went out in the garden in the dark and shouted, 'Fuck you, the rest of you can all rot!'”

“I remember one year with the zucchini,” Sukie responded, putting the jars dutifully on a cupboard shelf from which she would never take them down. As Alexandra said, Sukie loved dry nutty things – celery, cashews, pilaf, pretzel sticks. When alone, she never sat down to eat,just dipped into some yoghurt with a Wheat Thin while standing at the kitchen sink or carrying a bag of onion-flavored chips into her TV den with a stiff bourbon. “I did everything,” she said to Alexandra, “Zucchini bread, zucchini soup, salad, zucchini stuffed with hamburger and baked, cut into slices and fried, cut into sticks to use with a dip, it was wild. I even threw a lot into the blender and told the children to put it on their bread instead of peanut butter. Monty was desperate; he said even his shit smelled of zucchini.”

Alexandra almost laughed at this pleasurable reminiscence of Sukie's married days and prosperity, but mention of an old husband stopped her. Sukie was the most recently divorced and the youngest of the three. She was a slender redhead, her hair down her back trimmed straight across and her long arms covered with freckles. She wore copper bracelets and a pentagram on a cheap thin chain around her throat. What Alexandra, with her heavily Hellenic, twice-dimpled features, loved about Sukie's looks was the cheerful simian thrust: Sukie's big teeth pushed her profile below the short nose out in a curve, a protrusion especially of her upper lip, which was longer and more complex in shape than her lower, with a plumpness on either side of the center that made even her silences seem puckish. Her eyes were hazel and round and rather close together. Sukie moved easily in her miniature kitchen, everything crowded together. With one hand, she pulled a can of Planter's Beer Nuts from a cupboard shelf and with the other took from the drainer on the sink a little dish to hold them. She strewed crackers on a platter around a wedge of red-coated Gouda cheese. The pattern on the platter resembled a crab. Cancer. Alexandra feared it, and saw its emblem everywhere in nature. “Your usual?” Sukie asked tenderly, for Alexandra, as if older than she was, had with a sigh dropped her body, without removing her shawl, into an old blue easy chair.

“I guess it's still tonic time,” Alexandra decided. ”How's your vodka supply?” Someone had once told her that vodka was less fattening and irritated the lining of your stomach less than gin. Irritation, psychic as well as physical, was the source of cancer. Those get it who leave themselves open to the idea of it; all it takes is one single cell gone crazy. Nature is always waiting, watching for you to lose faith so she can insert her fatal stitch.

Sukie smiled, broader. “I knew you were coming.” She produced a bottle.

The tonic bottle fizzed in Sukie's fingers as if scolding. Perhaps cancer cells were more like bubbles of carbonation, penetrating through the bloodstream, Alexandra thought. She must stop thinking about it. “Where's Jane?” she asked.

“She said she'd be a little late. She's rehearsing for that concert at the church'.”

“With that awful Neff,” Alexandra said.

Raymond Neff taught music at the high school, a roly-poly womanish man who however had fathered five children upon his untidy, sallow, steel-bespectacled, German-born wife. He wanted to sleep with everybody. Jane was sleeping with him these days. Alexandra had slept with him a few times in the past but the episode had moved her so little – Sukie was perhaps unaware of its afterimage. Sukie herself seemed to be chaste vis-a-vis Neff, but then she had been available least long. Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly: sooner or later you land on all the properties. The two friends wanted to save Jane because they disapproved of Neff's hideous wife Greta. When you sleep with a married man, you in a sense sleep with the wife as well, so she should not be an absolute shame.

Laughingly discussing Greta Neff's various imperfections, the women took their drinks into the “den,” a little room with peeling wallpaper and a sharply slanting ceiling because the room was half tucked under the stairs that went up to the attic-like second floor.

“She doesn't even wash herself, have you ever noticed her smell?” Alexandra asked.

“And those granny glasses!” Sukie agreed. “She looks like John Lennon.” She made a kind of solemn sad-eyed thin-lipped John Lennon face.

“A cabbagy smell,” Alexandra continued. “He carries it on his clothes,” she said, thinking simultaneously that this was a little like Monty and the zucchini and that this intimate detail would show Sukie that she had slept with Neff. Well, she had slept with Monty, too; and had never smelled zucchini. One interesting aspect of sleeping with husbands was the viewpoint they gave you on their wives: they saw them as nobody else did. Neff saw poor dreadful Greta as a kind of a sweet bit of edelweiss he had brought from a dangerous romantic height (they had met in a Frankfurt beer hall while he was stationed in West Germany instead of fighting in Korea), and Monty… Alexandra tried to remember what Monty had said about Sukie. He had said little, being such a would-be gentleman. But once he had come to Alexandra's bed from some awkward consultation at the bank, and his words had been: “She's a lovely girl, but bad luck, somehow. Bad luck for others, I mean. I think she's fairly good luck for herself.” And it was true, Monty had lost a lot of his family's money while married to Suki, though everyone had blamed his own calm stupidity for this.

“Greta must be great in the sack,” Sukie was saying. “All those Kinder.”

“We must be nice to her,” Alexandra said, back to the subject of Jane. “Speaking to her on the phone yesterday, I was struck by how angry she sounded. That lady is burning up.”

Sukie glanced over at her friend, since this seemed a slightly false note. Some intrigue had begun for Alexandra, some new man.

“Angrier than anybody else?” Sukie asked, meaning themselves.

“Oh yes. We're in lovely shape,” the older woman answered, her mind drifting from this irony toward the subject of that conversation with Jane – the new man in town, in the Lenox mansion.

“Oh I know about him!” Sukie exclaimed, having read Alexandra's mind. “I have such tons to tell, but I wanted to wait until Jane got here.”

The kitchen doorbell rang, and Jane let herself in. She was not physically radiant like Sukie, yet an appeal shone from her as light from a filament lamp.

“That Neff is so awful,” Jane said. “He had us do the Haydn over and over. He said my intonation was prissy. Prissy. I burst into tears and told him he was a disgusting male chauvinist.”

“They can't help it,” Sukie said lightly. “It's just their way of asking for more love.”

“Hi there, you gorgeous creature,” Jane addressed Alexandra. “Tell me, though – was that thunderstorm the other day yours?”

Alexandra confessed that she had driven to the beach and seen smoke from the chimney.

“Greta came into the church,” Jane said, “right after he called my Haydn prissy, and laughed.”

Sukie did a German laugh: “Ho hoho.”

“Do they still have sex, I wonder?” asked Alexandra. “How could he stand it? It must be like excited sauerkraut.”

“No,” Jane said firmly. “It's like – what's that pale white stuff they like so? – sauerbraten.”

“They marinate it,” Alexandra said. “In vinegar, with garlic, onions, and bay leaves. And I think peppercorns.”

“Is that what he tells you?” Sukie asked Jane mischievously.

“We never talk about it, even at our most intimate,” Jane prissily said. “All he ever confessed on the subject was that she had to have it once a week or she began to throw things.”

“A poltergeist,” Sukie said, delighted. “A polter-frau.”

“Really,” Jane said, not seeing the humor of it, “you're right. She is an impossibly awful woman. So pedantic; so smug; such a Nazi. Ray is the only one who doesn't see it, poor soul.”

“I wonder how much she guesses,” Alexandra mused.