Unfinished Portrait

by Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott, Agatha

  Poor Grannie – so able and energetic and thrifty a housewife – defeated by age and failing sight, and forced to sit and see alien eyes surveying her defeat …

  She fought tooth and nail for every one of her treasures that this ruthless younger generation wanted to throw away.

  ‘Not my brown velvet. That’s my brown velvet. Madame Bonserot made it for me in Paris. So Frenchy! Everyone admired me in it.’

  ‘But it’s all worn, dear, the nap has gone. It’s in holes.’

  ‘It would do up. I’m sure it would do up.’

  Poor Grannie – old, defenceless, at the mercy of these younger folk – so scornful, so full of their ‘That’s no good, throw it away.’

  She had been brought up never to throw away anything. It might come in some day. They didn’t know that, these young folk.

  They tried to be kind. They yielded so far to her wishes as to fill a dozen old-fashioned trunks with bits and pieces of stuffs and old moth-eaten furs – all things that could never be used, but why upset the old lady more than need be?

  Grannie herself insisted on packing various faded pictures of old-fashioned gentlemen.

  ‘That’s dear Mr Harty – and Mr Lord – such a handsome couple as we made dancing together! Everyone remarked on it.’

  Alas, for Grannie’s packing! Mr Harty and Mr Lord arrived with the glass shattered in the frames. And yet, once Grannie’s packing had been celebrated. Nothing she packed was ever broken.

  Sometimes, when she thought no one was looking, Grannie would surreptitiously retrieve little bits of trimming, a jet ornament, a little piece of net ruching, a crochet motif. She would stuff them into that capacious pocket of hers, and would secretly transfer them to one of the great ark-like trunks that stood in her bedroom ready for her personal packing.

  Poor Grannie. Moving nearly killed her, but it didn’t quite. She had the will to live. It was the will to live that was driving her out of the home she had lived in so long. The Germans were not going to starve her out – and they were not going to get her in an air raid, either. Grannie meant to live and enjoy life. When you had reached ninety years you knew how extraordinarily enjoyable life was. That was what the young people didn’t understand. They spoke as though anyone old were half dead and sure to be miserable. Young people, thought Grannie, remembering an aphorism of her youth, thought the old people fools, but old people knew that young people were fools! Her aunt Caroline had said that at the age of eighty-five and her aunt Caroline had been right.

  Anyway, Grannie didn’t think much of young people nowadays. They had no stamina. Look at the furniture removers – four strapping young men – and they actually asked her to empty the drawers of her big mahogany chest of drawers.

  ‘It was carried up with every drawer locked,’ said Grannie.

  ‘You see, ma’am, it’s solid mahogany. And there’s heavy stuff in the drawers.’

  ‘So there was when it came up! There were men in those days. You’re all weaklings nowadays. Making a fuss about a little weight.’

  The young men grinned, and with some difficulty the chest was got down the stairs and out to the van.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Grannie approvingly. ‘You see, you don’t know what you can do until you try.’

  Among the various things removed from the house were thirty demijohns of Grannie’s home-made liqueurs. Only twenty-eight were unloaded the other end …

  Was this, perhaps, the revenge of the grinning young men?

  ‘Rogues,’ said Grannie. ‘That’s what they are – rogues. And call themselves teetotallers too. The impudence of it.’

  But she tipped them handsomely and was not really displeased. It was, after all, a subtle compliment to her home-made liqueur …

  10

  When Grannie was installed, a cook was found to replace Rouncy. This was a girl of twenty-eight called Mary. She was good-natured and pleasant to elderly people, and chattered to Grannie about her young man and her relations who suffered from an agreeable number of complaints. Grannie delighted ghoulishly in the bad legs, varicose veins, and other ailments of Mary’s relations. She gave her bottles of patent medicines and shawls for them.

  Celia began to think once more about taking up war work, though Grannie combated the idea vigorously, prophesying the most dire disasters if Celia ‘over-strained’ herself.

  Grannie loved Celia. She gave her mysterious warnings against all the dangers of life, and five-pound notes. One of Grannie’s fixed beliefs in life was that you should always have a five-pound note ‘handy’.

  She gave Celia fifty pounds in five-pound notes and told her to ‘keep it by her’.

  ‘Don’t even let your husband know you’ve got it. A woman never knows when she may need a little nest egg …

  ‘Remember, dear, men are not to be trusted. Gentlemen can be very agreeable, but you can’t trust one of them – unless he’s such a namby-pamby fellow that he’s no good at all.’

  11

  The move and all that had gone with it had successfully distracted Celia’s mind from the war and Dermot.

  Now that Grannie was settled in, Celia began to chafe at her own inactivity.

  How to keep herself from thinking of Dermot – out there?

  In desperation she married off ‘the girls’! Isabella married a rich Jew, Elsie married an explorer. Ella became a school teacher. She married an elderly man, somewhat of an invalid, who was charmed by her young chatter. Ethel and Annie kept house together. Vera had a romantic morganatic alliance with a royal prince, and they both died tragically in a motor accident on their wedding day.

  Planning the weddings, choosing the bridesmaids’ gowns, arranging the funeral music for Vera – all this helped to keep Celia’s mind from realities.

  She longed to be hard at work at something. But it meant leaving home … Could Miriam and Grannie spare her?

  Grannie required a good deal of attention. Celia felt she couldn’t desert her mother.

  But it was Miriam herself who urged Celia to leave home. She understood well enough that work, hard physical work, was the thing that would help Celia at the present time.

  Grannie wept, but Miriam stood firm.

  ‘Celia must go.’

  But, after all, Celia didn’t take up any war work.

  Dermot got wounded in the arm and came home to a hospital. On his recovery he was passed fit for home service and was sent to the War Office. He and Celia were married.

  10 Marriage

  1

  Celia’s ideas about marriage were limited in the extreme.

  Marriage, for her, was the ‘living happily ever afterwards’ of her favourite fairy tales. She saw no difficulties in it, no possibilities of shipwreck. When people loved each other they were happy. Unhappy marriages, and of course she knew there were many such, were because people didn’t love each other.

  Neither Grannie’s Rabelaisian descriptions of the male character, nor her mother’s warnings (so old-fashioned they sounded to Celia) that you had to ‘keep a man’, nor any amount of realistic literature with sordid and unhappy endings really made any impression on Celia at all. ‘The men’ of Grannie’s conversation never struck her as being the same species as Dermot. People in books were people in books, and Miriam’s warnings struck Celia as peculiarly amusing considering the extraordinary happiness of her mother’s own married life.

  ‘You know, Mummy, Daddy never looked at anybody but you.’

  ‘No, but then he’d spent a very gay life as a young man.’

  ‘I don’t believe you like Dermot or trust him.’

  ‘I do like him,’ said Miriam. ‘I find him extremely attractive.’

  Celia laughed, and said:

  ‘But you wouldn’t think anybody I married good enough for ME – your precious pet lamb pigeony pumpkin – come now, would you? Not the superest of supermen.’

  And Miriam had to confess that perhaps that was true.

  And Celia and Dermot were so happy together
.

  Miriam told herself that she had been unduly suspicious and hostile towards the man who had taken her daughter away from her.

  2

  Dermot as a husband was quite different from what Celia had imagined. All the boldness, the masterfulness, the audacity of him fell from him. He was young, diffident, very much in love, and Celia was his first love.

  In some ways, indeed, he was rather like Jim Grant. But whereas Jim’s diffidence had annoyed Celia because she was not in love with him, Dermot’s diffidence made him still dearer to her.

  She had been, half-consciously, a little afraid of Dermot. He had been a stranger to her. She had felt that though she loved him she knew nothing about him.

  Johnnie de Burgh had appealed to the physical side of her, Jim to the mental. Peter was woven into the very stuff of her life, but in Dermot she found what she had never yet had – a playmate.

  There was something that was to be eternally boyish in Dermot – it found and met the child in Celia. Their aims, their minds, their characters were poles apart, but they each wanted a playfellow and found that playfellow in the other.

  Married life to them was a game – they played at it enthusiastically.

  3

  What are the things one remembers in life? Not the so-called important things. No – little things – trivialities … staying persistently in the memory – not to be shaken off.

  Looking back on her early married life, what did Celia remember?

  Buying a frock in a dressmaker’s – the first frock Dermot bought her. She tried them on in a little cubicle with an elderly woman to help her. Then Dermot was called in to say which he would like.

  They both enjoyed it hugely.

  Dermot pretended, of course, that he had often done this before. They weren’t going to admit they were newly married before the shop people – not likely!

  Dermot even said nonchalantly:

  ‘That’s rather like the one I got you in Monte two years ago.’

  They decided at last on a periwinkle blue with a little bunch of rosebuds on the shoulder.

  Celia kept that frock. She never threw it away.

  4

  House-hunting! They must, of course, have a furnished house or flat. There was no knowing when Dermot would be ordered abroad again. And it must be as cheap as possible.

  Neither Celia nor Dermot knew anything about neighbourhoods or prices. They started confidently in the heart of Mayfair!

  The next day they were in South Kensington, Chelsea, and Bayswater. They reached West Kensington, Hammersmith, West Hampstead, Battersea, and other outlying neighbourhoods the day after.

  In the end they were undecided between two. One was a self-contained flat at three guineas a week. It was in a block of mansions in West Kensington. It was scrupulously clean and belonged to an awe-inspiring maiden lady called Miss Banks. Miss Banks radiated efficiency.

  ‘No plate or linen? That simplifies things. I never permit agents to make the inventory. I am sure you will agree with me that it is a sheer waste of money. You and I can check over things together.’

  It was a long time since anyone had frightened Celia as much as Miss Banks did. Every question she asked served to expose anew Celia’s complete lack of knowledge where flat-taking was concerned.

  Dermot said they would let Miss Banks know, and they got away into the street.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Celia breathlessly. ‘It’s very clean.’

  She had never thought about cleanliness before, but two days’ investigation of cheap furnished flats had brought the matter home to her.

  ‘Some of those other flats simply smelt,’ she added.

  ‘I know – and it’s quite decently furnished, and Miss Banks says it’s a good shopping neighbourhood. I’m not quite sure I like Miss Banks herself. She’s such a tartar.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘I feel she knows too much for us.’

  ‘Let’s go and look at the other again. After all, it’s cheaper.’

  The other was two and a half guineas a week. It was the top floor of an old decayed house that had known better days. There were only two rooms and a large kitchen, but they were big rooms, nobly proportioned, and they looked out over a garden which actually had two trees in it.

  It was, undeniably, not nearly as clean as the flat of the efficient Miss Banks, but it was, Celia said, quite a nice kind of dirt. The wallpaper showed damp, and the paint was peeling, and the boards needed restaining. But the cretonne covers were clean, though so faded as hardly to show the pattern, and it had big, comfortable, shabby armchairs.

  There was another great attraction to it in Celia’s eyes. The woman who lived in the basement would be able to cook for them. And she looked a nice woman, fat, good-natured, with a kindly eye that reminded Celia of Rouncy.

  ‘We shouldn’t have to look for a servant.’

  ‘That’s true. You’re sure it will be all right for you, though? It’s not shut off from the rest of the house, and it isn’t – well, it isn’t what you’ve been accustomed to, Celia. I mean your home is so lovely.’

  Yes, home was lovely. She realized now how lovely it was. The mellow dignity of the Chippendale and the Hepplewhite, the china, the fresh cool chintzes … Home might be getting shabby – the roof leaked, the range was old-fashioned, the carpets were showing wear, but it was still beautiful …

  ‘But as soon as the war is over’ – Dermot stuck out his chin in his determined way – ‘I mean to set to at something and make money for you.’

  ‘I don’t want money. And besides, you’re a captain already. You wouldn’t have been a captain for ten years if it hadn’t been for the war.’

  ‘A captain’s pay is no good, really. There’s no future in the army. I shall find something better. Now I’ve got you to work for, I feel I could do anything. And I shall.’

  Celia felt a thrill at his words. Dermot was so different from Peter. He didn’t accept life. He set out to change it. And she felt he would succeed.

  She thought:

  ‘I was right to marry him. I don’t care what anyone says. Some day they’ll admit that I was right.’

  Because, of course, there had been criticism. Mrs Luke, in particular, had shown heartfelt dismay.

  ‘But, darling Celia – your life will be too dreadful. Why, you won’t even be able to have a kitchenmaid. You’ll have simply to pig it.’

  Farther than no kitchenmaid Mrs Luke’s imagination refused to go. It was, for her, the supreme catastrophe. Celia magnanimously forbore to break it to her that they mightn’t even have a cook!

  Then Cyril, who was fighting in Mesopotamia, had written a long disapproving letter on hearing of her engagement. He said it was an absurd business.

  But Dermot was ambitious. He would succeed. He had a quality in him – a driving power – that Celia felt and admired. It was so different from anything she possessed herself.

  ‘Let’s have this flat,’ she said. ‘I like it best – I really do. And Miss Lestrange is much nicer than Miss Banks.’

  Miss Lestrange was an amiable woman of thirty with a twinkle in her eye and a good-natured smile.

  If this serious young house-hunting couple amused her, she did not show it. She agreed to all their suggestions, imparted a certain amount of tactful information and explained the working of the geyser to an awe-stricken Celia who had never met such a thing before.

  ‘But you can’t have baths often,’ she said cheerfully. ‘The ration of gas is only forty thousand cubic feet – and you’ve got to cook, remember.’

  So Celia and Dermot took 8 Lanchester Terrace for six months, and Celia started her career as a housewife.

  5

  The thing that Celia suffered from most in her early married life was loneliness.

  Dermot went off to the War Office every morning, and Celia was left with a long empty day on her hands.

  Pender, Dermot’s batman, served up a breakfast of bacon and eggs, cleaned up the flat, and
left to draw the rations. Mrs Steadman then came up from the basement to discuss the evening meal with Celia.

  Mrs Steadman was warm-hearted, talkative, and a willing if somewhat uncertain cook. She was, she admitted herself, ‘heavy in hand with the pepper’. There seemed to be no halfway course with her between completely unseasoned food or something that brought the tears to your eyes and made you choke.

  ‘I’ve always been like that – ever since a girl,’ said Mrs Steadman cheerfully. ‘Curious, isn’t it? And I’ve no hand for pastry, either.’

  Mrs Steadman took motherly command of Celia, who was anxious to be economical and was uncertain how to do it.

  ‘You’d better let me shop for you. A young lady like you would get taken advantage of. You’d never think to stand a herring up on its tail to test its freshness. And some of these fish salesmen are that artful.’

  Mrs Steadman shook her head darkly.

  Housekeeping was complicated by its being wartime. Eggs were eightpence each. Celia and Dermot lived a good deal on ‘egg substitutes’, soup squares which, no matter what their advertised flavour, Dermot always referred to as ‘brown-sand soup’, and their meat ration.

  The meat ration excited Mrs Steadman more than anything had done for a long time. When Pender returned with the first huge chunk of beef, Celia and Mrs Steadman walked admiringly round it, while Mrs Steadman gave tongue freely.

  ‘Isn’t that a beautiful sight now? Fairly makes my mouth water. I haven’t seen a bit of meat like that since the war began. A picture, that’s what I call it. I wish Steadman were at home, I’d get him up to see it – you not objecting, ma’am. It would be a treat for him to see a bit of meat like that. If you’re wanting to roast it, I don’t think it will go in that tiny gas oven. I’ll cook it downstairs for you.’