by Mark Place
Poirot set about creating this impression of himself. The two men talked, cautiously, of Lady Mary Lytton-Gore and of Admiral Cronshaw. Other names were mentioned. Fortunately, Poirot knew someone’s cousin and had met somebody else’s sister-in-law. He could see a kind of warmth dawning in the squire’s eyes. The fellow seemed to know the right people. Gracefully, insidiously, Poirot slid into the purpose of his visit. He was quick to counteract the inevitable recoil. This book was, alas, going to be written. Miss Crale - Miss Lemarchant, as she was now called – was anxious for him to exercise a judicious editorship. The facts, unfortunately, were public property. But much could be done in their presentation to avoid wounding susceptibilities. Poirot murmured that before now he had been able to use discreet influence to avoid certain sensational passages in a book of memoirs. Meredith Blake flushed angrily. His hand shook a little as he filled a pipe. He said, a slight stammer in his voice, “It’s - it’s g-ghoulish the way they dig these things up. S-Sixteen years ago. Why can’t they let it be?”
Poirot shrugged his shoulders. “I agree with you,” he said. “But what will you? There is a demand for such things. And anyone is at liberty to reconstruct a proved crime and to comment on it.”
“Seems disgraceful to me.”
Poirot murmured, “Alas, we do not live in a delicate age. You would be surprised, Mr Blake, if you knew the unpleasant publications I have succeeded in - shall we say - softening? I am anxious to do all I can to save Miss Crale’s feeling in the matter.”
Blake murmured, “Little Carla! That child! A grownup woman. One can hardly believe it.”
“I know. Time flies swiftly, does it not?”
Meredith Blake sighed. He said, “Too quickly.”
Poirot said, “As you will have seen in the letter I handed you from Miss Crale, she is very anxious to know everything possible about the sad events of the past.”
“Why?” Meredith Blake said with a touch of irritation. “Why rake up everything again? How much better to let it all be forgotten.”
“You say that, Mr Blake, because you know all the past too well. Miss Crale, remember, knows nothing. That is to say, she knows only the story as she has learned it from official accounts.”
Meredith Blake winced. He said, “Yes, I forgot. Poor child! What a detestable position for her. The shock of learning the truth. And then - those soulless, callous reports of the trial.”
“The truth,” said Hercule Poirot, “can never be done justice to in a mere legal recital. It is the things that are left out that are the things that matter. The emotions, the feelings, the characters of the actors in the drama, the extenuating circumstances -”
He paused, and the other man spoke eagerly, like an actor who had received his cue.
“Extenuating circumstances! That’s just it. If ever there were extenuating circumstances, there were in this case. Amyas Crale was an old friend - his family and mine had been friends for generations, but one has to admit that his conduct was, frankly, outrageous. He was an artist, of course, and presumably that explains it. But there it is – he allowed a most extraordinary set of affairs to arise. The position was one that no ordinary decent man could have contemplated for a moment.”
Hercule Poirot said, “I am interested that you should say that. It had puzzled me - that situation. Not so does a well-bred man, a man of the world, go about his affairs.”
Blake’s thin, hesitating face had lit up with animation. He said: “Yes, but the whole point is that Amyas never was an ordinary man! He was a painter, you see, and with him painting came first - really, sometimes, in the most extraordinary way! I don’t understand these so-called artistic people myself - never have. I understood Crale a little because, of course, I’d known him all my life. His people were the same sort as my people. And in many ways Crale ran true to type – it was only where art came in that he didn’t conform to the usual standards. He wasn’t, you see, an amateur in any way. He was first class - really first class. “Some people say he was a genius. They may be right. But, as a result, he was always what I should describe as unbalanced. When he was painting a picture, nothing else mattered, nothing could be allowed to get in the way. He was like a man in a dream - completely obsessed by what he was doing. Not till the canvas was finished did he come out of this absorption and start to pick up the threads of ordinary life again.”
He looked questioningly at Poirot and the latter nodded.
“You understand, I see. Well, that explains, I think, why this particular situation arose. He was in love with this girl. He wanted to marry her. He was prepared to leave his wife and child for her. But he’d started painting her down here, and he wanted to finish that picture. Nothing else mattered to him. He didn’t see anything else. And the fact that the situation was a perfectly impossible one for the two women concerned didn’t seem to have occurred to him.”
“Did either of them understand his point of view?”
“Oh, yes - in a way. Elsa did, I suppose. She was terrifically enthusiastic about his painting. But it was a difficult position for her - naturally. And as for Caroline -”
He stopped. Poirot said, “For Caroline - yes?”
Chapter 4
Meredith Blake said, speaking with a little difficulty, “Caroline - I had always - well, I had always been very fond of Caroline. There was a time when - when I hoped to marry her. But that was soon nipped in the bud. Still, I remained, if I may say so, devoted to - to her service.”
Poirot nodded thoughtfully. That slightly old-fashioned phrase expressed, he felt, the man before him very typically. Meredith Blake was the kind of man who would devote himself readily to a romantic and honourable devotion. He would serve his lady faithfully and without hope of reward. Yes, it was all very much in character. He said, carefully weighing the words, “You must have resented this - attitude - on her behalf?”
“I did. Oh, I did. I - I actually remonstrated with Crale on the subject.”
“When was this?”
“Actually the day before - before it all happened. They came over to tea here, you know. I got Crale aside and put it to him. I even said, I remember, that it wasn’t fair to either of them.”
“Ah, you said that?”
“Yes. I didn’t think, you see, that he realized.”
“Possibly not.”
“I said to him that it was putting Caroline in a perfectly unendurable position. If he meant to marry this girl, he ought not to have her staying in the house and - well - more or less flaunt her in Caroline’s face. It was, I said, an unendurable insult.”
“What did he answer?” Poirot asked curiously.
Meredith Blake replied with distaste, “He said, ‘Caroline must lump it.’”
Hercule Poirot’s eyebrows rose. “Not,” he said, “a very sympathetic reply.”
“I thought it abominable. I lost my temper. I said that no doubt, not caring for his wife, he didn’t mind how much he made her suffer, but what, I said, about the girl? Hadn’t be realized it was a pretty rotten position for her? His reply to that was that Elsa must lump it, too! “Then he went on: ‘You don’t seem to understand, Meredith, that this thing I’m painting is the best thing I’ve done. It’s good, I tell you. And a couple of jealous, quarrelling women aren’t going to upset it - no, by hell, they’re not.’
“It was hopeless talking to him. I said he seemed to have taken leave of all ordinary decency. Painting, I said, wasn’t everything. He interrupted there. He said, ‘Ah, but it is to me.’ “I was still very angry. I said it was perfectly disgraceful the way he had always treated Caroline. She had had a miserable life with him. He said he knew that and he was sorry about it. Sorry! He said, ‘I know, Merry, you don’t believe that - but it’s the truth. I’ve given Caroline the hell of a life and she’s been a saint about it. But she did know, I think, what she might be letting herself in for. I told her candidly the sort of damnable, egotistical, loose-living kind of chap I was.’
“I put it to him then ve
ry strongly that he ought not to break up his married life. There was the child to be considered, and everything. I said that I could understand that a girl like Elsa could bowl a man over, but that even for her sake he ought to break off the whole thing. She was very young. She was going into this bald-headed, but she might regret it bitterly afterward. I said couldn’t he pull himself together, make a clean break, and go back to his wife?”
“And what did he say?”
Blake said, “He just looked - embarrassed. He patted me on the
shoulder and said, ‘You’re a good chap, Merry. But you’re too sentimental. You wait till the picture’s finished and you’ll admit that I was right.’
“I said, ‘Damn. your picture.’ And he grinned, and said all the neurotic women in England couldn’t do that. Then I said that it would have been more decent to have kept the whole thing from Caroline until after the picture was finished. He said that that wasn’t his fault. It was Elsa who had insisted on spilling the beans. I said, ‘Why?’ And he said that she had had some idea that it wasn’t straight otherwise. She wanted everything to be clear and above-board. Well, of course, in a way, one could understand that and respect the girl for it. However badly she was behaving, she did at least want to be honest.”
“A lot of additional pain and grief is caused by honesty,” remarked Hercule Poirot. Meredith Blake looked at him doubtfully. He did not quite like the sentiment. He sighed. “It was a - a most unhappy time for us all.”
“The only person who does not seem to have been affected by it was Amyas Crale,” said Poirot.
“And why? Because he was a rank egoist. I remember him now. Grinning at me as he went off saying, ‘Don’t worry, Merry. Everything’s going to pan out all right!’”
“The incurable optimist, murmured Poirot.
“He was the kind of man who didn’t take women seriously,” Meredith Blake said.
“I could have told him that Caroline was desperate.”
“Did she tell you so?”
“Not in so many words. But I shall always see her face as it was that afternoon - white and strained with a kind of desperate gaiety. She talked and laughed a lot. But her eyes - there was a kind of anguished grief in them that was the most moving thing I have ever known. Such a gentle creature, too.”
Hercule Poirot looked at him for a minute or two without speaking. Clearly the man in front of him felt no incongruity in speaking thus of a woman who, on the day after, had deliberately killed her husband. Meredith Blake went on. He had by now quite overcome his first suspicious hostility. Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening. To men such as Meredith Blake the reliving of the past has a definite attraction. He spoke now almost more to himself than to his famous guest. “I ought to have suspected something, I suppose. It was Caroline who turned the conversation to - to my little hobby. It was, I must confess, an enthusiasm of mine. The old English herbalists, you know, are a very interesting study. There are so many plants that were formerly used in medicine and which have now disappeared from the official pharmacopoeia. And it’s astonishing, really, how a simple decoction of something or other will really work wonders. No need for doctors half the time. The French understand these things - some of their tisanes are first-rate.”
He was well away now on his hobby. “Dandelion tea, for instance, marvellous stuff. And a decoction of hips - I saw the other day somewhere that that’s coming into fashion with the medical profession again. Oh, yes, I must confess, I got a lot of pleasure out of my brews. Gathering the plants at the right time, drying them, macerating them all the rest of it. I’ve even dropped to superstition sometimes and gathered my roots at the full of the moon or whatever it was the ancients advised. On that day I gave my guests, I remember, a special disquisition on the spotted hemlock. It flowers biennially. You gather the fruits when they’re ripening, just before they turn yellow. Coniine, you know, is a drug that’s dropped right out - I don’t believe there’s any official preparation of it in the last pharmacopoeia - but I’ve proved the usefulness of it in whooping cough, and in asthma, too, for that matter-”
“You talked of all this in your laboratory?”
“Yes, I showed them around, explained the various drugs to them - valerian and the way it attracts cats - one sniff at that was enough for them! Then they asked about deadly nightshade, and I told them about belladonna and atropine. They were very much interested.”
“They? What is comprised in that word?”
Meredith Blake looked faintly surprised as though he had forgotten that his listener had no first-hand knowledge of the scene.
“Oh, the whole party. Let me see - Phillip was there, and Amyas, and Caroline, of course. Angela. And Elsa Greer.”
“That was all?”
“Yes! I think so. Yes, I am sure of it.” Blake looked at him curiously.
“Who else should there be?”
“I thought perhaps the governess -”
“Oh, I see. No, she wasn’t there that afternoon. I believe I’ve forgotten her name now. Nice woman. Took her duties very seriously. Angela worried her a good deal, I think.”
“Why was that?”
“Well, she was a nice kid, but she was inclined to run wild. Always up to something or other. Put a slug or something down Amyas’s back one day when he was hard at work painting. He went up in smoke. Cursed her up and down dale. It was after that that he insisted on this school idea.”
“Sending her to school?”
“Yes. I don’t mean he wasn’t fond of her, but he found her a bit of a nuisance sometimes. And I think - I’ve always thought -”
“Yes?”
“That he was a bit jealous. Caroline, you see, was a slave to Angela. In a way, perhaps, Angela came first with her - and Amyas didn’t like that. There was a reason for it, of course. I won’t go into that, but -”
Poirot interrupted. “The reason being that Caroline Crale reproached herself for an action that had disfigured the girl.”
Blake exclaimed, “Oh, you know that? I wasn’t going to mention it. All over and done with. But, yes, that was the cause of her attitude, I think. She always seemed to feel that there was nothing too much she could do - to make up, as it were.”
Poirot nodded thoughtfully. “And Angela?” he asked. “Did she bear a grudge against her half-sister?”
“Oh, no; don’t run away with that idea. Angela was devoted to
Caroline. She never gave that old business a thought, I’m sure. It was just Caroline who couldn’t forgive herself.”
“Did Angela take kindly to the idea of boarding school?”
“No, she didn’t. She was furious with Amyas. Caroline took her side, but Amyas had absolutely made his mind up about it. In spite of a hot temper, Amyas was an easy man in most respects, but when he really got his back up everyone had to give in. Both Caroline and Angela knuckled under.”
“She was to go to school - when?”
“The autumn term - they were getting her kit together I remember. I suppose, if it hadn’t been for the tragedy she would have gone off a few days later. There was some talk of her packing on the morning of that day.”
“And the governess?”
Poirot asked. “What do you mean - the governess?”
“How did she like the idea? It deprived her of a job did it not?”
“Yes - well, I suppose it did in a way. Little Carla used to do a few lessons, but of course she was only - what? Six or thereabouts. She had a nurse. They wouldn’t have kept Miss Williams on for her. Yes, that’s the name - Williams. Funny how things come back to you when you talk them over.”
“Yes, indeed. You are back now - are you not? - in this past. You relive the scenes - the words that people said their gestures, the expressions on their faces?”
Meredith Blake said slowly: “In a way - yes, but there are gaps, you know - great chunks missed out. I remember for instance, the shock it was to me when I first learned that Amyas was going to leave Caroline, but I can’t rememb
er whether it was he who told me or Elsa. I do remember arguing with Elsa on the subject - trying to show her, I mean, that it was a pretty rotten thing to do. And she only laughed at me in that cool way of hers and said I was old-fashioned. Well, I dare say I am old-fashioned, but I still think I was right. Amyas had a wife and child - he ought to have stuck to them.”
“But Miss Greer thought that point of view out of date?”
“Yes. Mind you, sixteen years ago, divorce wasn’t looked on quite so much as a matter of course as it is now. But Elsa was the kind of girl who went in for being modern. Her point of view was that when two people weren’t happy together it was better to make a break. She said that Amyas and Caroline never stopped having rows and that it was far better for the child that she shouldn’t be brought up in an atmosphere of disharmony.”
“And her argument did not impress you?” asked Poirot.
“I felt, all the time,” Meredith Blake said slowly, “that she didn’t really know what she was talking about. She was rattling these things off - things she’d read in books or heard from her friends - it was like a parrot. She was - it’s a queer thing to say - pathetic, somehow. So young and so self-confident.” He paused. “There is something about youth, M. Poirot, that is - that can be - terribly moving.”
Hercule Poirot said, looking at him with some interest, “I know what you mean.”
Blake went on, speaking more to himself than to Poirot. “That’s partly, I think, why I tackled Crale. He was nearly twenty years older than the girl. It didn't seem fair.”
“Alas, how seldom one makes any effect,” Poirot murmured. “When a person has determined on a certain course - especially when there is a woman concerned - it is not easy to turn them from it.”
Meredith Blake said, “That is true enough.” His tone was a shade bitter. “I certainly did no good by my interference. But, then, I am not a very convincing person. I never have been.”
Poirot threw him a quick glance. He read into that slight acerbity of tone the dissatisfaction of a sensitive man with his own lack of personality. And he acknowledged to himself the truth of what Blake had just said. Meredith Blake was not the man to persuade anyone into or out of any course. His well-meaning attempts would always be set aside - indulgently usually, without anger, but definitely set aside. They would not carry weight. He was essentially an ineffective man. Poirot said, with an appearance of changing a painful subject, “You still have your laboratory of medicines ad cordials, yes?”