Cards on the Table - Agatha Christie [44]
‘Well, she can’t eat me,’ thought Rhoda, and plunged boldly into the building.
Mrs Oliver’s flat was on the top floor. A uniformed attendant whisked her up in a lift and decanted her on a smart new mat outside a bright green door.
‘This is awful,’ thought Rhoda. ‘Worse than dentists. I must go through with it now, though.’
Pink with embarrassment, she pushed the bell.
The door was opened by an elderly maid.
‘Is—could I—is Mrs Oliver at home?’ asked Rhoda.
The maid drew back, Rhoda entered, she was shown into a very untidy drawing-room. The maid said:
‘What name shall I say, please?’
‘Oh—eh—Miss Dawes—Miss Rhoda Dawes.’
The maid withdrew. After what seemed to Rhoda about a hundred years, but was really exactly a minute and forty-five seconds, the maid returned.
‘Will you step this way, Miss?’
Pinker than ever, Rhoda followed her. Along a passage, round a corner, a door was opened. Nervously she entered into what seemed at first to her startled eyes to be an African forest!
Birds—masses of birds, parrots, macaws, birds unknown to ornithology, twined themselves in and out of what seemed to be a primeval forest. In the middle of this riot of bird and vegetable life, Rhoda perceived a battered kitchen-table with a typewriter on it, masses of typescript littered all over the floor and Mrs Oliver, her hair in wild confusion, rising from a somewhat rickety-looking chair.
‘My dear, how nice to see you,’ said Mrs Oliver, holding out a carbon-stained hand and trying with her other hand to smooth her hair, a quite impossible proceeding.
A paper bag, touched by her elbow, fell from the desk, and apples rolled energetically all over the floor.
‘Never mind, my dear, don’t bother, someone will pick them up some time.’
Rather breathless, Rhoda rose from a stooping position with five apples in her grasp.
‘Oh, thank you—no, I shouldn’t put them back in the bag. I think it’s got a hole in it. Put them on the mantelpiece. That’s right. Now, then, sit down and let’s talk.’
Rhoda accepted a second battered chair and focussed her eyes on her hostess.
‘I say, I’m terribly sorry. Am I interrupting, or anything?’ she asked breathlessly.
‘Well, you are and you aren’t,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I am working, as you see. But that dreadful Finn of mine has got himself terribly tangled up. He did some awfully clever deduction with a dish of French beans, and now he’s just detected deadly poison in the sage-and-onion stuffing of the Michaelmas goose, and I’ve just remembered that French beans are over by Michaelmas.’
Thrilled by this peep into the inner world of creative detective fiction, Rhoda said breathlessly, ‘They might be tinned.’
‘They might, of course,’ said Mrs Oliver doubtfully. ‘But it would rather spoil the point. I’m always getting tangled up in horticulture and things like that. People write to me and say I’ve got the wrong flowers all out together. As though it mattered—and anyway, they are all out together in a London shop.’
‘Of course it doesn’t matter,’ said Rhoda loyally. ‘Oh, Mrs Oliver, it must be marvellous to write.’
Mrs Oliver rubbed her forehead with a carbonny finger and said:
‘Why?’
‘Oh,’ said Rhoda, a little taken aback. ‘Because it must. It must be wonderful just to sit down and write off a whole book.’
‘It doesn’t happen exactly like that,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘One actually has to think, you know. And thinking is always a bore. And you have to plan things. And then one gets stuck every now and then, and you feel you’ll never get out of the mess—but you do! Writing’s not particularly enjoyable. It’s hard work like everything else.’
‘It doesn’t seem like work,’ said Rhoda.
‘Not to you,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘because you don’t have to do it! It feels very like work to me. Some days I can only keep going by repeating over and over to myself the amount of money I might get for my next serial rights. That spurs you on, you know. So does your bankbook