Читать книгу A Daughter’s a Daughter - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 11

‘Mrs Prentice in?’ asked Dame Laura Whitstable.

‘Not just at present she isn’t. But I should fancy she mayn’t be long. Would you like to come in and wait, ma’am? I know she’d want to see you.’

Edith drew aside respectfully as Dame Laura came in.

The latter said:

‘I’ll wait for a quarter of an hour, anyway. It’s some time since I’ve seen anything of her.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Edith ushered her into the sitting-room and knelt down to turn on the electric fire. Dame Laura looked round the room and uttered an exclamation.

‘Furniture been shifted round, I see. That desk used to be across the corner. And the sofa’s in a different place.’

‘Mrs Prentice thought it would be nice to have a change,’ said Edith. ‘Come in one day, I did, and there she was shoving things round and hauling them about. “Oh, Edith,” she says, “don’t you think the room looks much nicer like this? It makes more space.” Well, I couldn’t see any improvement myself, but naturally I didn’t like to say so. Ladies have their fancies. All I said was: “Now don’t you go and strain yourself, ma’am. Lifting and heaving’s the worst thing for your innards and once they’ve slipped out of place they don’t go back so easy.” I should know. It happened to my own sister-in-law. Did it throwing up the window-sash, she did. On the sofa for the rest of her days, she was.’

‘Probably quite unnecessary,’ said Dame Laura robustly. ‘Thank goodness we’ve got out of the affectation that lying on a sofa is the panacea for every ill.’

‘Don’t even let you have your month after childbirth now,’ said Edith disapprovingly. ‘My poor young niece, now, they made her walk about on the fifth day.’

‘We’re a much healthier race now than we’ve ever been before.’

‘I hope so, I’m sure,’ said Edith gloomily. ‘Terribly delicate I was as a child. Never thought they’d rear me. Fainting fits I used to have, and spasms something awful. And in winter I’d go quite blue—the cold used to fly to me ’art.’

Uninterested in Edith’s past ailments, Dame Laura was surveying the rearranged room.

‘I think it’s a change for the better,’ she said. ‘Mrs Prentice is quite right. I wonder she didn’t do it before.’

‘Nest-building,’ said Edith, with significance.

‘What?’

‘Nest-building. I’ve seen birds at it. Running about with twigs in their mouths.’

‘Oh.’

The two women looked at each other. Without any change of expression, some intelligence appeared to be imparted. Dame Laura asked in an off-hand way:

‘Seen much of Colonel Grant lately?’

Edith shook her head.

‘Poor gentleman,’ she said. ‘If you were to ask me, I’d say he’s had his conger. French for your nose being put out of joint,’ she added in an explanatory fashion.

‘Oh, congé—yes, I see.’

‘He was a nice gentleman,’ said Edith, putting him in the past tense in a funereal manner and as though pronouncing an epitaph. ‘Oh, well!’

As she left the room, she said: ‘I’ll tell you one who won’t like the room being rearranged, and that’s Miss Sarah. She don’t like changes.’

Laura Whitstable raised her beetling eyebrows. Then she pulled a book from a shelf and turned its pages in a desultory manner.

Presently she heard a latch-key inserted and the door of the flat opened. Two voices, Ann’s and a man’s, sounded cheerful and gay in the small vestibule.

Ann’s voice said: ‘Oh, post. Ah, here’s a letter from Sarah.’

She came into the sitting-room with the letter in her hand and stopped short in momentary confusion.

‘Why, Laura, how nice to see you.’ She turned to the man who had followed her into the room. ‘Mr Cauldfield, Dame Laura Whitstable.’

Dame Laura summed him up quickly.

Conventional type. Could be obstinate. Honest. Good-hearted. No humour. Probably sensitive. Very much in love with Ann.

She began talking to him in her bluff fashion.

Ann murmured: ‘I’ll tell Edith to bring us tea,’ and left the room.

‘Not for me, my dear,’ Dame Laura called after her. ‘It’s nearly six o’clock.’

‘Well, Richard and I want tea, we’ve been to a concert. What will you have?’

‘Brandy and soda.’

‘All right.’

Dame Laura said:

‘Fond of music, Mr Cauldfield?’

‘Yes. Particularly of Beethoven.’

‘All English people like Beethoven. Sends me to sleep, I’m sorry to say, but then I’m not particularly musical.’

‘Cigarette, Dame Laura?’ Cauldfield proffered his case.

‘No, thanks, I only smoke cigars.’

She added, looking shrewdly at him: ‘So you’re the type of man who prefers tea to cocktails or sherry at six o’clock?’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m not particularly fond of tea. But somehow it seems to suit Ann—’ He broke off. ‘That sounds absurd!’

‘Not at all. You display perspicacity. I don’t mean that Ann doesn’t drink cocktails or sherry, she does, but she’s essentially the type of woman who looks her best sitting behind a tea-tray—a tea-tray on which is beautiful old Georgian silver and cups and saucers of fine porcelain.’

Richard was delighted.

‘How absolutely right you are!’

‘I’ve known Ann for a great many years. I’m very fond of her.’

‘I know. She has often spoken about you. And, of course, I know of you from other sources.’

Dame Laura gave him a cheerful grin.

‘Oh yes, I’m one of the best-known women in England. Always sitting on committees, or airing my views on the wireless, or laying down the law generally on what’s good for humanity. However, I do realize one thing and that is that whatever one accomplishes in life, it is really very little and could always quite easily have been accomplished by somebody else.’

‘Oh, come now,’ Richard protested. ‘Surely that’s a very depressing conclusion to come to?’

‘It shouldn’t be. Humility should always lie behind effort.’

‘I don’t think I agree with you.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. I think that if a man (or woman, of course) is ever to accomplish anything worth doing, the first condition is that he must believe in himself.’

‘Why should he?’

‘Come now, Dame Laura, surely—’

‘I’m old-fashioned. I would prefer that a man should have knowledge of himself and belief in God.’

‘Knowledge—belief, aren’t they the same thing?’

‘I beg your pardon, they’re not at all the same thing. One of my pet theories (quite unrealizable, of course, that’s the pleasant part about theories) is that everybody should spend one month a year in the middle of a desert. Camped by a well, of course, and plentifully supplied with dates or whatever you eat in deserts.’

‘Might be quite pleasant,’ said Richard, smiling. ‘I’d stipulate for a few of the world’s best books, though.’

‘Ah, but that’s just it. No books. Books are a habit-forming drug. With enough to eat and drink, and nothing—absolutely nothing—to do, you’d have, at last, a fairly good chance to make acquaintance with yourself.’

Richard smiled disbelievingly.

‘Don’t you think most of us know ourselves pretty well?’

‘I certainly do not. One hasn’t time, in these days, to recognize anything except one’s more pleasing characteristics.’

‘Now what are you two arguing about?’ asked Ann, coming in with a glass in her hand. ‘Here’s your brandy and soda, Laura. Edith’s just bringing tea.’

‘I’m propounding my desert meditation theory,’ said Laura.

‘That’s one of Laura’s things,’ said Ann, laughing. ‘You sit in a desert and do nothing and find out how horrible you really are!’

‘Must everyone be horrible?’ asked Richard dryly. ‘I know psychologists tell one so—but really—why?’

‘Because if one only has time to know part of oneself one will, as I said just now, select the pleasantest part,’ said Dame Laura promptly.

‘It’s all very well, Laura,’ said Ann, ‘but after one has sat in one’s desert and found out how horrible one is, what good will it do? Will one be able to change oneself?’

‘I should think that would be most unlikely—but it does at least give one a guide as to what one is likely to do in certain circumstances, and even more important, why one does it.’

‘But isn’t one able to imagine quite well what one is likely to do in given circumstances? I mean, you’ve only got to imagine yourself there?’

‘Oh Ann, Ann! Think of any man who rehearses in his own mind what he is going to say to his boss, to his girl, to his neighbour across the way. He’s got it all cut and dried—and then, when the moment comes, he is either tongue-tied or says something entirely different! The people who are secretly quite sure they can rise to any emergency are the ones who lose their heads completely, while those who are afraid they will be inadequate surprise themselves by taking complete grasp of a situation.’

‘Yes, but that’s not quite fair. What you’re meaning now is that people rehearse imaginary conversations and actions as they would like them to be. They probably know quite well it wouldn’t really happen. But I think fundamentally one does know quite well what one’s reactions are and what—well, what one’s character is like.’

‘Oh, my dear child.’ Dame Laura held up her hands. ‘So you think you know Ann Prentice—I wonder.’

Edith came in with the tea.

‘I don’t think I’m particularly nice,’ said Ann, smiling.

‘Here’s Miss Sarah’s letter, ma’am,’ said Edith. ‘You left it in your bedroom.’

‘Oh, thank you, Edith.’

Ann laid down the still unopened letter by her plate. Dame Laura flashed a quick look at her.

Richard Cauldfield drank his cup of tea rather quickly and then excused himself.

‘He’s being tactful,’ said Ann. ‘He thinks we want to talk together.’

Dame Laura looked at her friend attentively. She was quite surprised at the change in Ann. Ann’s quiet good looks had bloomed into a kind of beauty. Laura Whitstable had seen that happen before, and she knew the cause. That radiance, that happy look, could have only one meaning: Ann was in love. How unfair it was, reflected Dame Laura, that women in love looked their best and men in love looked like depressed sheep.

‘What have you been doing with yourself lately, Ann?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Going about. Nothing much.’

‘Richard Cauldfield is a new friend, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. I’ve only known him about ten days. I met him at James Grant’s dinner.’

She told Dame Laura something about Richard, ending up by asking naïvely, ‘You do like him, don’t you?’

Laura, who had not yet made up her mind whether she liked Richard Cauldfield or not, was prompt to reply:

‘Yes, very much.’

‘I do feel, you know, that he’s had a sad life.’

Dame Laura had heard the statement made very often. She suppressed a smile and asked: ‘What news of Sarah?’

Ann’s face lit up.

‘Oh, Sarah’s been enjoying herself madly. They’ve had perfect snow, and nobody seems to have broken anything.’

Dame Laura said dryly that Edith would be disappointed. They both laughed.

‘This letter is from Sarah. Do you mind if I open it?’

‘Of course not.’

Ann tore open the envelope and read the short letter. Then laughed affectionately and passed the letter to Dame Laura.

Darling Mother, (Sarah had written)

Snow’s been perfect. Everyone’s saying it’s been the best season ever. Lou took her test but didn’t pass unfortunately. Roger’s been coaching me a lot—terribly nice of him because he’s such a big pot in the skiing world. Jane says he’s got a thing about me, but I don’t really think so. I think it’s sadistic pleasure at seeing me tie myself into knots and land on my head in snow-drifts. Lady Cronsham’s here with that awful S. American man. They really are blatant. I’ve got rather a crush on one of the guides—unbelievably handsome—but unfortunately he’s used to everyone having crushes on him and I cut no ice at all. At last I’ve learned to waltz on the ice.

How are you getting on, darling? I hope you’re going out a good deal with all the boy friends. Don’t go too far with the old colonel, he has quite a gay Poona sparkle in his eye sometimes! How’s the professor? Has he been telling you any nice rude marriage customs lately? See you soon, Love, Sarah.

Dame Laura handed back the letter.

‘Yes, Sarah seems to be enjoying herself … I suppose the professor is that archaeological friend of yours?’

‘Yes, Sarah always teases me about him. I really meant to ask him to lunch, but I’ve been so busy.’

‘Yes, you do seem to have been busy.’

Ann was folding and refolding Sarah’s letter. She said with a half sigh: ‘Oh dear.’

‘Why the Oh dear, Ann?’

‘Oh, I suppose I might as well tell you. Anyway you’ve probably guessed. Richard Cauldfield has asked me to marry him.’

‘When was this?’

‘Oh, only today.’

‘And you’re going to?’

‘I think so … Why do I say that? Of course I am.’