The Hollow hp-24

by Agatha Christie

  But Henrietta did not answer. She was standing by the round table staring down at the bridge score she had kept last night.

  She said, rousing herself, "Sorry, Lucy, what did you say?"

  "I wondered if there were any police left over?"

  "Like remnants in a sale? I don't think so. They've all gone back to the police station, to write out what we said in proper police language."

  "What are you looking at, Henrietta?"

  "Nothing."

  Henrietta moved across to the mantelpiece.

  "What do you think Veronica Cray is doing tonight?" she asked.

  A look of dismay crossed Lady Angkatell's face.

  "My dear! You don't think she might come over here again? She must have heard by now."

  "Yes," said Henrietta thoughtfully. "I suppose she's heard…"

  "Which reminds me," said Lady Angkatell, "I really must telephone to the Careys. We can't have them coming to lunch tomorrow just as though nothing had happened."

  She left the room.

  David, hating his relations, murmured that he wanted to look up something in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The library, he thought, would be a peaceful place.

  Henrietta went to the French windows, opened them, and passed through. After a moment's hesitation Edward followed her.

  He found her standing outside looking up at the sky. She said:

  "Not so warm as last night, is it?"

  In his pleasant voice, Edward said, "No, distinctly chilly."

  She was standing looking up at the house.

  Her eyes were running along the windows.

  Then she turned and looked towards the woods. He had no clue to what was in her mind.

  He made a movement towards the open window.

  "Better come in. It's cold."

  She shook her head.

  "I'm going for a stroll. To the swimming pool."

  "Oh, my dear-" He took a quick step towards her. "I'll come with you."

  "No, thank you, Edward." Her voice cut sharply through the chill of the air. "I want to be alone with my dead."

  "Henrietta! My dear-I haven't said anything. But you do know how-how sorry I am."

  "Sorry? That John Christow is dead?"

  There was still the brittle sharpness in her tone.

  "I meant-sorry for you, Henrietta. I know it must have been a-a great shock."

  "Shock? Oh, but I'm very tough, Edward! I can stand shocks. Was it a shock to you? What did you feel when you saw him lying there? Glad, I suppose… You didn't like John Christow."

  Edward murmured, "He and I-hadn't much in common."

  "How nicely you put things! In such a restrained way. But, as a matter of fact, you did have one thing in common. Me! You were both fond of me, weren't you? Only that didn't make a bond between you-quite the opposite."

  The moon came fitfully through a cloud and he was startled as he suddenly saw her face looking at him. Unconsciously he always saw Henrietta as a projection of the Henrietta he had known at Ainswick. To him she was always a laughing girl, with dancing eyes full of eager expectation. The woman he saw now seemed to him a stranger, with eyes that were brilliant but cold and which seemed to look at him inimically.

  He said earnestly:

  "Henrietta, dearest, do believe this-that I do sympathize with you-in your grief, your loss."

  "Is it grief?"

  The question startled him. She seemed to be asking it, not of him, but of herself.

  She said in a low voice:

  "So quick-it can happen so quickly…

  One moment living, breathing, and the next -dead-gone-emptiness. Oh! the emptiness!

  And here we are, all of us, eating caramel custard and calling ourselves alive -and John, who was more alive than any of us, is dead. I say the word, you know, over and over again to myself. Dead-dead-dead-dead-dead… And soon it hasn't got any meaning-not any meaning at all… It's just a funny little word like the breaking off of a rotten branch. Dead-dead-dead-dead- It's like a tom-tom, isn't it, beating in the jungle? Dead-dead -dead-dead-dead-dead-'' "Henrietta, stop! For God's sake, stop!"

  She looked at him curiously.

  "Didn't you know I'd feel like this? What did you think? That I'd sit gently crying into a nice little pocket handkerchief while you held my hand. That it would all be a great shock but that presently I'd begin to get over it. And that you'd comfort me very nicely.

  You are nice, Edward. You're very nice, but you're so-so inadequate."

  He drew back. His face stiffened. He said in a dry voice:

  "Yes, I've always known that."

  She went on fiercely:

  "What do you think it's been like all the evening, sitting round, with John dead and nobody caring but me and Gerda! With you glad, and David embarrassed and Midge distressed and Lucy delicately enjoying the News of the World come from print into real life! Can't you see how like a fantastic nightmare it all is?"

  Edward said nothing. He stepped back a pace, into shadows.

  Looking at him, Henrietta said:

  "Tonight-nothing seems real to me, nobody is real-but John!"

  Edward said quietly, "I know… I am not very real…"

  "What a brute I am, Edward! But I can't help it. I can't help resenting that John who was so alive is dead."

  "And that I who am half dead am alive…"

  "I didn't mean that, Edward."

  "I think you did, Henrietta… I think, perhaps, you are right."

  But she was saying, thoughtfully, harking back to an earlier thought:

  "But it is not grief. Perhaps I cannot feel grief… Perhaps I never shall… And yet-I would like to grieve for John…"

  Her words seemed to him fantastic. Yet he was even more startled when she added, suddenly, in an almost businesslike voice:

  "I must go to the swimming pool."

  She glided away through the trees.

  Walking stiffly, Edward went through the open window.

  Midge looked up as Edward came through the window with unseeing eyes. His face was grey and pinched. It looked bloodless.

  He did not hear the little gasp that Midge stifled immediately.

  Almost mechanically he walked to a chair and sat down. Aware of something expected of him, he said:

  "It's cold…"

  "Are you very cold, Edward? Shall we- shall I-light a fire?"

  "What?"

  Midge took a box of matches from the mantelpiece. She knelt down and set a match to the fire. She looked cautiously sideways at Edward. He was quite oblivious, she thought, of everything.

  She said, "A fire is nice. It warms one…"

  How cold he looks, she thought. But it can't be as cold as that outside. It's Henrietta!

  What has she said to him?

  "Bring your chair nearer, Edward. Come close to the fire."

  "What?"

  "Your chair. To the fire."

  She was talking to him now, loudly and slowly, as though to a deaf person.

  And suddenly, so suddenly that her heart turned over with relief, Edward, the real Edward, was there again. Smiling at her gently.

  "Have you been talking to me. Midge?

  I'm sorry. I'm afraid I was-thinking of something."

  "Oh, it was nothing. Just the fire."

  The sticks were crackling and some fir cones were burning with a bright clear flame.

  Edward looked at them. He said:

  "Ifs a nice fire."

  He stretched out his long thin hands to the blaze, aware of relief from tension.

  Midge said, "We always had fir cones at Ainswick…"

  "I still do. A basket of them is brought in every day and put by the grate."

  Edward at Ainswick… Midge half closed her eyes, picturing it. He would sit, she thought, in the library, on the west side of the house. There was a magnolia that almost covered one window and which filled the room with a golden green light in the afternoons. Through the other window you looked out on the lawn and a
tall Wellingtonia stood up like a sentinel. And to the right was the big copper beech, Oh, Ainswick-Ainswick…

  She could smell the soft air that drifted in from the magnolia which would still, in September, have some great, white, sweetsmelling, waxy flowers on it… And the pine cones on the fire… and a faintly musty smell from the kind of book that Edward was sure to be reading… He would be sitting in the saddle-back chair, and occasionally, perhaps, his eyes would go from the book to the fire, and he would think, just for a minute, of Henrietta…

  Midge stirred and asked:

  "Where is Henrietta?"

  "She went to the swimming pool."

  Midge stared. "Why?"

  Her voice, abrupt and deep, roused Edward a little.

  "My dear Midge, surely you knew-oh, well-guessed. She knew Christow pretty well…"

  "Oh, of course, one knew that! But I don't see why she should go mooning off to where he was shot. That's not at all like Henrietta. She's never melodramatic."

  "Do any of us know what anyone else is like? Henrietta, for instance…"

  Midge frowned. She said:

  "After all, Edward, you and I have known Henrietta all our lives."

  "She has changed."

  "Not really. I don't think one changes."

  "Henrietta has changed." Midge looked at him curiously.

  "More than we have, you and I?"

  "Oh, I have stood still, I know that well enough. And you-"

  His eyes, suddenly focussing, looked at her where she knelt by the fender. It was as though he was looking at her from a long way off, taking in the square chin, the dark eyes, the resolute mouth. He said:

  "I wish I saw you more often. Midge my dear."

  She smiled up at him. She said:

  "I know. It isn't easy, these days, to keep touch."

  There was a sound outside and Edward got up.

  "Lucy was right," he said. "It has been a tiring day-one's first introduction to murder! I shall go to bed. Good night."

  He had left the room when Henrietta came through the window.

  Midge turned on her.

  "What have you done to Edward?"

  "Edward?" Henrietta was vague. Her forehead was puckered. She seemed to be thinking of something far away.

  "Yes, Edward. He came in looking dreadful-so cold and grey."

  "If you care about Edward so much, Midge, why don't you do something about him?"

  "Do something? What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. Stand on a chair and shout! Draw attention to yourself. Don't you know that's the only hope with a man like Edward?"

  "Edward will never care about anyone but you, Henrietta. He never has."

  "Then it's very unintelligent of him." She threw a quick glance at Midge's white face. "I've hurt you. I'm sorry. But I hate Edward tonight-"

  "Hate Edward? You can't…"

  "Oh, yes, I can! You don't know-"

  "What?"

  Henrietta said slowly:

  "He reminds me of such a lot of things I would like to forget."

  "What things?"

  "Well, Ainswick, for instance."

  "Ainswick? You want to forget Ainswick?"

  Midge's tone was incredulous.

  "Yes, yes, yes! I was happy there. I can't stand, just now, being reminded of happiness… Don't you understand? A time when one didn't know what was coming. When one said confidently, everything is going to be lovely! Some people are wise-they never expect to be happy. I did."

  She said abruptly:

  "I shall never go back to Ainswick."

  Midge said slowly:

  «I wonder…"

  Chapter XIV

  Midge woke up abruptly on Monday morning.

  For a moment she lay there bemused, her eyes going confusedly towards the door, for she half expected Lady Angkatell to appear-What was it Lucy had said when she came drifting in that first morning?

  A difficult week-end? She had been worried … had thought that something unpleasant might happen.

  Yes, and something unpleasant had happened-something that was lying now upon Midge's heart and spirits like a thick black cloud. Something that she didn't want to think about-didn't want to remember.

  Something, surely, that frightened her…

  Something to do with Edward…

  Memory came with a rush. One ugly stark word-murder!

  Oh, no, thought Midge, it can't be true.

  It's a dream I've been having. John Christow, murdered, shot-lying there by the pool. Blood and blue water-like the jacket of a detective story… Fantastic, unreal … The sort of thing that doesn't happen to oneself… If we were at Ainswick, now.

  It couldn't have happened at Ainswick.

  The black weight moved from her forehead.

  It settled instead in the pit of her stomach, making her feel slightly sick.

  It was not a dream. It was a real happening-a News of the World happening-and she and Edward and Lucy and Henry and Henrietta were all mixed up with it.

  Unfair-surely unfair-since it was nothing to do with them if Gerda had shot her husband.

  Midge stirred uneasily.

  Quiet, stupid, slightly pathetic Gerda-you couldn't associate Gerda with melodrama-with violence.

  Gerda, surely, couldn't shoot anybody.

  Again that inward uneasiness rose. No, no, one mustn't think like that… Because who else could have shot John? And Gerda had been standing there by his body with the revolver in her hand. The revolver she had taken from Henry's study.

  Gerda had said that she had found John dead and picked up the revolver… Well, what else could she say? She'd have to say something, poor thing…

  All very well for Henrietta to defend her -to say that Gerda's story was perfectly possible.

  Henrietta hadn't considered the impossible alternatives.

  Henrietta had been very odd last night…

  But that, of course, had been the shock of John Christow's death.

  Poor Henrietta-who had cared so terribly for John!

  But she would get over it in time-one got over everything. And then she would marry Edward and live at Ainswick-and Edward would be happy at last…

  Henrietta had always loved Edward very dearly. It was only the aggressive, dominant personality of John Christow that had come in the way. He had made Edward look so-so pale by comparison.

  It struck Midge, when she came down to breakfast that morning, that already Edward's personality, freed from John Christow's dominance, had begun to assert itself.

  He seemed more sure of himself, less hesitant and retiring.

  He was talking pleasantly to the glowering and unresponsive David.

  "You must come more often to Ainswick, David. I'd like you to feel at home there and to get to know all about the place."

  Helping himself to marmalade, David said coldly:

  "These big estates are completely farcical. They should be split up."

  "That won't happen in my time, I hope," said Edward, smiling. "My tenants are a contented lot."

  "They shouldn't be," said David. "Nobody should be contented."

  "If apes had been content with tails-" murmured Lady Angkatell from where she was standing by the sideboard, looking vaguely at a dish of kidneys. "That's a poem I learnt in the nursery, but I simply can't remember how it goes on. I must have a talk with you, David, and learn all the new ideas.

  As far as I can see, one must hate everybody but at the same time give them free medical attention and a lot of extra education, poor things! All those helpless little children herded into schoolhouses every day-and cod liver oil forced down babies' throats whether they like it or not-such nastysmelling stuff."

  Lucy, Midge thought, was behaving very much as usual.

  And Gudgeon, when she passed him in the hall, also looked just as usual. Life at The Hollow seemed to have resumed its normal course. With the departure of Gerda, the whole business seemed like a dream.

  Then there was a scrunch
of wheels on the gravel outside and Sir Henry drew up in his car. He had stayed the night at his club and driven down early.

  "Well, dear," said Lucy, "was everything all right?"

  "Yes. The secretary was there-competent sort of girl-She took charge of things. There's a sister it seems. The secretary telegraphed to her."

  "I knew there would be," said Lady Angkatell. "At Tunbridge Wells?"

  "Bexhill, I think," said Sir Henry, looking puzzled.

  "I daresay-" Lucy considered Bexhill. "Yes-quite probably."

  Gudgeon approached.

  "Inspector Grange telephoned, Sir Henry. The inquest will be at eleven o'clock on Wednesday."

  Sir Henry nodded. Lady Angkatell said:

  "Midge, you'd better ring up your shop."

  Midge went slowly to the telephone.

  Her life had always been so entirely normal and commonplace that she felt she lacked the phraseology to explain to her employer that after four days' holiday she was unable to return to work owing to the fact that she was mixed up in a murder case.

  It did not sound credible. It did not even feel credible.

  And Madame Alfrege was not a very easy person to explain things to at any time.

  Midge set her chin resolutely and picked up the receiver.

  It was all just as unpleasant as she had imagined it would be. The raucous voice of the vitriolic little Jewess came angrily over the wires.

  "What ith that, Mith Hardcathtle? A death? A funeral? Do you not know very well I am short-handed. Do you think I am going to stand for these excutheth? Oh, yeth, you are having a good time, I darethayl"

  Midge interrupted, speaking sharply and distinctly.

  "The poleeth? The poleeth, you thay?" It was almost a scream. "You are mixed up with the poleeth?"

  Setting her teeth, Midge continued to explain. Strange how sordid that woman at the other end made the whole thing seem. A vulgar police case. What alchemy there was in human beings!

  Edward opened the door and came in, then seeing that Midge was telephoning, he was about to go out. She stopped him.

  "Do stay, Edward. Please. Oh, I want you to."

  The presence of Edward in the room gave her strength-counteracted the poison.

  She took her hand from where she had laid it over the receiver.

  "What? Yes. I am sorry. Madam… But, after all, it is hardly my fault-"