Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

90 страница из 119

"Hello," Bella said, and then something made her tone grow hard and her thin shoulders stiffen beneath her striped jersey.

"What are you doing? What do you want? Excuse me." She was being elaborately polite. "But I do sometimes answer the telephone. It's my house as much as his. Yes, he's right here in the room. For heaven's sake stop being formal!"

Bella set down the receiver and got out of the Windsor chair. Her lips were drawn into a thin grimace which was more of a grin than a smile. Those bony shoulders of hers, her whole delicate body, were stiff and taut.

"It's Joe," she said. "He wants to speak to you."

"All right," I said. "That's what you get for running to the telephone."

The grimace about Bella's lips changed to a Mona Lisa smile, an expression with which I was familiar. It was a look of hauteur. She was no longer a play girl, but an aristocrat.

"You might tell Joe that he needn't call up here," she said. "There's such a thing as a sense of decency, when people are divorced."