By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [48]
Tommy looked at him with great interest. At his double chins, his bald head, his bushy eyebrows and his enormous paunch. He thought of Aunt Ada, of her incipient moustache, her grim smile, her iron-grey hair, her malicious glance. Time, he thought. What Time does to one! He tried to visualize a handsome young subaltern and a pretty girl in the moonlight. He failed.
‘Romantic,’ said Sir Josiah Penn with a deep sigh. ‘Ah yes, romantic. I would have liked to propose to her that night, but you couldn’t propose if you were a subaltern. Not on your pay. We’d have had to wait five years before we could be married. That was too long an engagement to ask any girl to agree to. Ah well! you know how things happen. I went out to India and it was a long time before I came home on leave. We wrote to one another for a bit, then things slacked off. As it usually happens. I never saw her again. And yet, you know, I never quite forgot her. Often thought of her. I remember I nearly wrote to her once, years later. I’d heard she was in the neighbourhood where I was staying with some people. I thought I’d go and see her, ask if I could call. Then I thought to myself “Don’t be a damn’ fool. She probably looks quite different by now.”
‘I heard a chap mention her some years later. Said she was one of the ugliest women he’d ever seen. I could hardly believe it when I heard him say that, but I think now perhaps I was lucky I never did see her again. What’s she doing now? Alive still?’
‘No. She died about two or three weeks ago, as a matter of fact,’ said Tommy.
‘Did she really, did she really? Yes, I suppose she’d be–what now, she’d be seventy-five or seventy-six? Bit older than that perhaps.’
‘She was eighty,’ said Tommy.
‘Fancy now. Dark-haired lively Ada. Where did she die? Was she in a nursing home or did she live with a companion or–she never married, did she?’
‘No,’ said Tommy, ‘she never married. She was in an old ladies’ home. Rather a nice one, as a matter of fact. Sunny Ridge, it’s called.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard of that. Sunny Ridge. Someone my sister knew was there, I believe. A Mrs–now what was the name–a Mrs Carstairs? D’you ever come across her?’
‘No. I didn’t come across anyone much there. One just used to go and visit one’s own particular relative.’
‘Difficult business, too, I think. I mean, one never knows what to say to them.’
‘Aunt Ada was particularly difficult,’ said Tommy. ‘She was a tartar, you know.’
‘She would be.’ The General chuckled. ‘She could be a regular little devil when she liked when she was a girl.’
He sighed.
‘Devilish business, getting old. One of my sister’s friends used to get fancies, poor old thing. Used to say she’d killed somebody.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Tommy. ‘Had she?’
‘Oh, I don’t suppose so. Nobody seems to think she had. I suppose,’ said the General, considering the idea thoughtfully, ‘I suppose she might have, you know. If you go about saying things like that quite cheerfully, nobody would believe you, would they? Entertaining thought that, isn’t it?’
‘Who did she think she’d killed?’
‘Blessed if I know. Husband perhaps? Don’t know who he was or what he was like. She was a widow when we first came to know her. Well,’ he added with a sigh, ‘sorry to hear about Ada. Didn’t see it in the paper. If I had I’d have sent flowers or something. Bunch of rosebuds or something of that kind. That’s what girls used to wear on their evening dresses. A bunch of rosebuds on the shoulder of an evening dress. Very pretty it was. I remember Ada had an evening dress–sort of hydrangea colour, mauvy. Mauvy-blue and she had pink rosebuds on it. She gave me one once. They weren’t real, of course. Artificial. I kept it for a long time–years. I know,’ he added, catching Tommy’s eye, ‘makes you laugh to think of it, doesn’t it. I tell you, my boy, when you get really old and gaga like