Читать книгу The Pale Horse - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 7

The Espresso machine behind my shoulder hissed like an angry snake. The noise it made had a sinister, not to say devilish, suggestion about it. Perhaps, I reflected, most of our contemporary noises carry that implication. The intimidating angry scream of jet planes as they flash across the sky; the slow menacing rumble of a tube train approaching through its tunnel; the heavy road transport that shakes the very foundations of your house … Even the minor domestic noises of today, beneficial in action though they may be, yet carry a kind of alert. The dish-washers, the refrigerators, the pressure cookers, the whining vacuum cleaners—‘Be careful,’ they all seem to say. ‘I am a genie harnessed to your service, but if your control of me fails …’

A dangerous world—that was it, a dangerous world.

I stirred the foaming cup placed in front of me. It smelt pleasant.

‘What else will you have? Nice banana and bacon sandwich?’

It seemed an odd juxtaposition to me. Bananas I connected with my childhood—or occasionally flambé with sugar and rum. Bacon, in my mind, was firmly associated with eggs. However, when in Chelsea, eat as Chelsea does. I agreed to a nice banana and bacon sandwich.

Although I lived in Chelsea—that is to say, I had had a furnished flat there for the last three months—I was in every other way a stranger in these parts. I was writing a book on certain aspects of Mogul architecture, but for that purpose I could have lived in Hampstead or Bloomsbury or Streatham or Chelsea and it would have been all the same to me. I was oblivious of my surroundings except for the tools of my trade, and the neighbourhood in which I lived was completely indifferent to me, I existed in a world of my own.

On this particular evening, however, I had suffered from one of those sudden revulsions that all writers know.

Mogul architecture, Mogul Emperors, the Mogul way of life—and all the fascinating problems it raised, became suddenly as dust and ashes. What did they matter? Why did I want to write about them?

I flicked back various pages, rereading what I had written. It all seemed to me uniformly bad—poorly written and singularly devoid of interest. Whoever had said ‘History is bunk’ (Henry Ford?) had been absolutely right.

I pushed back my manuscript with loathing, got up and looked at my watch. The time was close on eleven p.m. I tried to remember if I had had dinner … From my inner sensations I thought not. Lunch, yes, at the Athenaeum. That was a long time ago.

I went and looked into the refrigerator. There was a small remnant of desiccated tongue. I looked at it without favour. So it was that I wandered out into the King’s Road, and eventually turned into an Espresso Coffee Bar with the name Luigi written in red neon light across its window, and was now contemplating a bacon and banana sandwich whilst I reflected on the sinister implications of present-day noises and their atmospheric effects.

All of them, I thought, had something in common with my early memories of pantomime. Davy Jones arriving from his locker in clouds of smoke! Trap doors and windows that exuded the infernal powers of evil, challenging and defying a Good Fairy Diamond, or some such name, who in turn waved an inadequate-looking wand and recited hopeful platitudes as to the ultimate triumph of good in a flat voice, thus prefacing the inevitable ‘song of the moment’ which never had anything to do with the story of that particular pantomime.

It came to me suddenly that evil was, perhaps, necessarily always more impressive than good. It had to make a show! It had to startle and challenge! It was instability attacking stability. And in the end, I thought, stability will always win. Stability can survive the triteness of Good Fairy Diamond; the flat voice, the rhymed couplet, even the irrelevant vocal statement of ‘There’s a Winding Road runs down the Hill, To the Olde World Town I love.’ All very poor weapons it would seem, and yet those weapons would inevitably prevail. The pantomime would end in the way it always ended. The staircase, and the descending cast in order of seniority, with Good Fairy Diamond, practising the Christian virtue of humility and not seeking to be first (or, in this case, last) but arriving about half-way through the procession, side by side with her late opponent, now seen to be no longer the snarling Demon King breathing fire and brimstone, but just a man dressed up in red tights.

The Espresso hissed again in my ear. I signalled for another cup of coffee and looked around me. A sister of mine was always accusing me of not being observant, not noticing what was going on. ‘You live in a world of your own,’ she would say accusingly. Now, with a feeling of conscious virtue, I took note of what was going on. It was almost impossible not to read about the coffee bars of Chelsea and their patrons every day in the newspapers; this was my chance to make my own appraisal of contemporary life.

It was rather dark in the Espresso, so you could not see very clearly. The clientele were almost all young people. They were, I supposed vaguely, what was called the off-beat generation. The girls looked, as girls always did look to me nowadays, dirty. They also seemed to be much too warmly dressed. I had noticed that when I had gone out a few weeks ago to dine with some friends. The girl who had sat next to me had been about twenty. The restaurant was hot, but she had worn a yellow wool pullover, a black skirt and black woollen stockings, and the perspiration poured down her face all through the meal. She smelt of perspiration-soaked wool and also, strongly, of unwashed hair. She was said, according to my friends, to be very attractive. Not to me! My only reaction was a yearning to throw her into a hot bath, give her a cake of soap and urge her to get on with it! Which just showed, I suppose, how out of touch with the times I was. Perhaps it came of having lived abroad so much. I recalled with pleasure Indian women with their beautifully-coiled black hair, and their saris of pure bright colours hanging in graceful folds, and the rhythmic sway of their bodies as they walked …

I was recalled from these pleasant thoughts by a sudden accentuation of noise. Two young women at the table next to me had started a quarrel. The young men who were with them tried to adjust things, but without avail.

Suddenly they were screaming at each other. One girl slapped the other’s face, the second dragged the first from her chair. They fought each other like fishwives, screaming abuse hysterically. One was a tousled red-head, the other a lank-haired blonde.

What the quarrel was about, apart from terms of abuse, I did not gather. Cries and catcalls arose from other tables.

‘Attagirl! Sock her, Lou!’

The proprietor behind the bar, a slim Italian-looking fellow with sideburns, whom I had taken to be Luigi, came to intervene in a voice that was pure cockney London.

‘Nah then—break it up—break it up—You’ll ’ave the whole street in in a minute. You’ll ’ave the coppers here. Stop it, I say.’

But the lank blonde had the red-head by the hair and was tugging furiously as she screamed:

‘You’re nothing but a man-stealing bitch!’

‘Bitch yourself.’

Luigi and the two embarrassed escorts forced the girls apart. In the blonde’s fingers were large tufts of red hair. She held them aloft gleefully, then dropped them on the floor.

The door from the street was pushed open and Authority, dressed in blue, stood on the threshold and uttered the regulation words majestically.

‘What’s going on here?’

Immediately a common front was presented to the enemy.

‘Just a bit of fun,’ said one of the young men.

‘That’s all,’ said Luigi. ‘Just a bit of fun among friends.’

With his foot he kicked the tufts of hair adroitly under the nearest table. The contestants smiled at each other in false amnesty.

The policeman looked at everybody suspiciously.

‘We’re just going now,’ said the blonde sweetly. ‘Come on, Doug.’

By a coincidence several other people were just going. Authority watched them go grimly. His eye said that he was overlooking it this time, but he’d got his eye on them. He withdrew slowly.

The red-head’s escort paid the check.

‘You all right?’ said Luigi to the girl who was adjusting a headscarf. ‘Lou served you pretty bad, tearing out your hair by the roots like that.’

‘It didn’t hurt,’ said the girl nonchalantly. She smiled at him. ‘Sorry for the row, Luigi.’

The party went out. The bar was now practically empty. I felt in my pocket for change.

‘She’s a sport all right,’ said Luigi approvingly, watching the door close. He seized a floor brush and swept the tufts of red hair behind the counter.

‘It must have been agony,’ I said.

‘I’d have hollered if it had been me,’ admitted Luigi. ‘But she’s a real sport, Tommy is.’

‘You know her well?’

‘Oh, she’s in here most evenings. Tuckerton, that’s her name, Thomasina Tuckerton, if you want the whole set out. But Tommy Tucker’s what she’s called round here. Stinking rich, too. Her old man left her a fortune, and what does she go and do? Comes to Chelsea, lives in a slummy room half-way to Wandsworth Bridge, and mooches around with a gang all doing the same thing. Beats me, half of that crowd’s got money. Could have any mortal thing they want; stay at the Ritz if they liked. But they seem to get a kick out of living the way they do. Yes—it beats me.’

‘It wouldn’t be your choice?’

‘Ar, I’ve got sense!’ said Luigi. ‘As it is, I just cash in.’

I rose to go and asked what the quarrel was about.

‘Oh, Tommy’s got hold of the other girl’s boy friend. He’s not worth fighting about, believe me!’

‘The other girl seemed to think he was,’ I observed.

‘Oh, Lou’s very romantic,’ said Luigi tolerantly.

It was not my idea of romance, but I did not say so.

It must have been about a week later that my eye was caught by a name in the Deaths column of The Times.

TUCKERTON. On October 2nd at Fallowfield Nursing Home, Amberley, Thomasina Ann, aged twenty, only daughter of the late Thomas Tuckerton, Esq., of Carrington Park, Amberley, Surrey. Funeral private. No flowers.

No flowers for poor Tommy Tucker; and no more ‘kicks’ out of life in Chelsea. I felt a sudden fleeting compassion for the Tommy Tuckers of today. Yet after all, I reminded myself, how did I know that my view was the right one? Who was I to pronounce it a wasted life? Perhaps it was my life, my quiet scholarly life, immersed in books, shut off from the world, that was the wasted one. Life at second hand. Be honest now, was I getting kicks out of life? A very unfamiliar idea! The truth was, of course, that I didn’t want kicks. But there again, perhaps I ought to? An unfamiliar and not very welcome thought.

I dismissed Tommy Tucker from my thoughts, and turned to my correspondence.

The principal item was a letter from my cousin Rhoda Despard, asking me to do her a favour. I grasped at this, since I was not feeling in the mood for work this morning, and it made a splendid excuse for postponing it.

I went out into King’s Road, hailed a taxi, and was driven to the residence of a friend of mine, a Mrs Ariadne Oliver.

Mrs Oliver was a well-known writer of detective stories. Her maid, Milly, was an efficient dragon who guarded her mistress from the onslaughts of the outside world.

I raised my eyebrows inquiringly, in an unspoken question. Milly nodded a vehement head.

‘You’d better go right up, Mr Mark,’ she said. ‘She’s in a mood this morning. You may be able to help her snap out of it.’

I mounted two flights of stairs, tapped lightly on a door, and walked in without waiting for encouragement. Mrs Oliver’s workroom was a good-sized room, the walls papered with exotic birds nesting in tropical foliage. Mrs Oliver herself, in a state apparently bordering on insanity, was prowling round the room, muttering to herself. She threw me a brief uninterested glance and continued to prowl. Her eyes, unfocused, swept round the walls, glanced out of the window, and occasionally closed in what appeared to be a spasm of agony.

‘But why,’ demanded Mrs Oliver of the universe, ‘why doesn’t the idiot say at once that he saw the cockatoo? Why shouldn’t he? He couldn’t have helped seeing it! But if he does mention it, it ruins everything. There must be a way … there must be …’

She groaned, ran her fingers through her short grey hair and clutched it in a frenzied hand. Then, looking at me with suddenly focused eyes, she said, ‘Hallo, Mark. I’m going mad,’ and resumed her complaint.

‘And then there’s Monica. The nicer I try to make her, the more irritating she gets … Such a stupid girl … Smug, too! Monica … Monica? I believe the name’s wrong. Nancy? Would that be better? Joan? Everybody is always Joan. Anne is the same. Susan? I’ve had a Susan. Lucia? Lucia? Lucia? I believe I can see a Lucia. Red-haired. Polo-necked jumper … Black tights? Black stockings, anyway.’

This momentary gleam of good cheer was eclipsed by the memory of the cockatoo problem, and Mrs Oliver resumed her unhappy prowling, picking up things off tables unseeingly and putting them down again somewhere else. She fitted with some care her spectacle case into a lacquered box which already contained a Chinese fan and then gave a deep sigh and said:

‘I’m glad it’s you.’

‘That’s very nice of you.’

‘It might have been anybody. Some silly woman who wanted me to open a bazaar, or the man about Milly’s insurance card which Milly absolutely refuses to have—or the plumber (but that would be too much good fortune, wouldn’t it?). Or, it might be someone wanting an interview—asking me all those embarrassing questions which are always the same every time. What made you first think of taking up writing? How many books have you written? How much money do you make? Etc. etc. I never know the answers to any of them and it makes me look such a fool. Not that any of that matters because I think I am going mad, over this cockatoo business.’

‘Something that won’t jell?’ I said sympathetically. ‘Perhaps I’d better go away.’

‘No, don’t. At any rate you’re a distraction.’

I accepted this doubtful compliment.

‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Mrs Oliver asked with vague hospitality. ‘There are some somewhere. Look in the typewriter lid.’

‘I’ve got my own, thanks. Have one. Oh no, you don’t smoke.’

‘Or drink,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I wish I did. Like those American detectives that always have pints of rye conveniently in their collar drawers. It seems to solve all their problems. You know, Mark, I really can’t think how anyone ever gets away with a murder in real life. It seems to me that the moment you’ve done a murder the whole thing is so terribly obvious.’

‘Nonsense. You’ve done lots of them.’

‘Fifty-five at least,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘The murder part is quite easy and simple. It’s the covering up that’s so difficult. I mean, why should it be anyone else but you? You stick out a mile.’

‘Not in the finished article,’ I said.

‘Ah, but what it costs me,’ said Mrs Oliver darkly. ‘Say what you like, it’s not natural for five or six people to be on the spot when B is murdered and all have a motive for killing B—unless, that is, B is absolutely madly unpleasant and in that case nobody will mind whether he’s been killed or not, and doesn’t care in the least who’s done it.’

‘I see your problem,’ I said. ‘But if you’ve dealt with it successfully fifty-five times, you will manage to deal with it once again.’

‘That’s what I tell myself,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘over and over again, but every single time I can’t believe it, and so I’m in agony.’

She seized her hair again and tugged it violently.

‘Don’t,’ I cried. ‘You’ll have it out by the roots.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Hair’s tough. Though when I had measles at fourteen with a very high temperature, it did come out—all round the front. Most shaming. And it was six whole months before it grew properly again. Awful for a girl—girls mind so. I thought of it yesterday when I was visiting Mary Delafontaine in that nursing home. Her hair was coming out just like mine did. She said she’d have to get a false front when she was better. If you’re sixty it doesn’t always grow again, I believe.’

‘I saw a girl pull out another girl’s hair by the roots the other night,’ I said. I was conscious of a slight note of pride in my voice as one who has seen life.

‘What extraordinary places have you been going to?’ asked Mrs Oliver.

‘This was in a coffee bar in Chelsea.’

‘Oh Chelsea!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Everything happens there, I believe. Beatniks and sputniks and squares and the beat generation. I don’t write about them much because I’m so afraid of getting the terms wrong. It’s safer, I think, to stick to what you know.’

‘Such as?’

‘People on cruises, and in hotels, and what goes on in hospitals, and on parish councils—and sales of work—and music festivals, and girls in shops, and committees and daily women, and young men and girls who hike round the world in the interests of science, and shop assistants—’

She paused, out of breath.

‘That seems fairly comprehensive to be getting on with,’ I said.

‘All the same, you might take me out to a coffee bar in Chelsea some time—just to widen my experience,’ said Mrs Oliver wistfully.

‘Any time you say. Tonight?’

‘Not tonight. I’m too busy writing or rather worrying because I can’t write. That’s really the most tiresome thing about writing—though everything is tiresome really, except the one moment when you get what you think is going to be a wonderful idea, and can hardly wait to begin. Tell me, Mark, do you think it is possible to kill someone by remote control?’

‘What do you mean by remote control? Press a button and set off a radioactive death ray?’

‘No, no, not science fiction. I suppose,’ she paused doubtfully, ‘I really mean black magic.’

‘Wax figures and pins in them?’

‘Oh, wax figures are right out,’ said Mrs Oliver scornfully. ‘But queer things do happen—in Africa or the West Indies. People are always telling you so. How natives just curl up and die. Voodoo—or ju-ju … Anyway, you know what I mean.’

I said that much of that was attributed nowadays to the power of suggestion. Word is always conveyed to the victim that his death has been decreed by the medicine-man—and his subconscious does the rest.

Mrs Oliver snorted.

‘If anyone hinted to me that I had been doomed to lie down and die, I’d take a pleasure in thwarting their expectations!’

I laughed.

‘You’ve got centuries of good Occidental sceptical blood in your veins. No predispositions.’

‘Then you think it can happen?’

‘I don’t know enough about the subject to judge. What put it into your head? Is your new masterpiece to be Murder by Suggestion?’

‘No, indeed. Good old-fashioned rat poison or arsenic is good enough for me. Or the reliable blunt instrument. Not firearms if possible. Firearms are so tricky. But you didn’t come here to talk to me about my books.’

‘Frankly no—The fact is that my cousin Rhoda Despard has got a church fête and—’

‘Never again!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You know what happened last time? I arranged a Murder Hunt, and the first thing that happened was a real corpse. I’ve never quite got over it!’

‘It’s not a Murder Hunt. All you’d have to do would be to sit in a tent and sign your own books—at five bob a time.’

‘We-e-l-l-l,’ said Mrs Oliver doubtfully. ‘That might be all right. I shouldn’t have to open the fête? Or say silly things? Or have to wear a hat?’

None of these things, I assured her, would be required of her.

‘And it would only be for an hour or two,’ I said coaxingly. ‘After that, there’ll be a cricket match—no, I suppose not this time of year. Children dancing, perhaps. Or a fancy dress competition—’

Mrs Oliver interrupted me with a wild scream.

‘That’s it,’ she cried. ‘A cricket ball! Of course! He sees it from the window … rising up in the air … and it distracts him—and so he never mentions the cockatoo! What a good thing you came, Mark. You’ve been wonderful.’

‘I don’t quite see—’

‘Perhaps not, but I do,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘It’s all rather complicated, and I don’t want to waste time explaining. Nice as it’s been to see you, what I’d really like you to do now is to go away. At once.’

‘Certainly. About the fête—’

‘I’ll think about it. Don’t worry me now. Now where on earth did I put my spectacles? Really, the way things just disappear …’