Curtain - Agatha Christie [47]
Nurse Craven said to me: ‘He knows, of course, she’s just playing up.’
‘You don’t really think there’s anything much the matter?’
‘Her temperature is normal, and her pulse is perfectly good. Just fuss, if you ask me.’
She was annoyed and spoke out more imprudently than usual.
‘She likes to interfere with anyone else enjoying themselves. She’d like her husband all worked up, and me running round after her, and even Sir William has got to be made to feel like a brute because he “overtired her yesterday”. She’s one of that kind.’
Nurse Craven was clearly finding her patient almost impossible today. I gathered that Mrs Franklin had been really extremely rude to her. She was the kind of woman whom nurses and servants instinctively disliked, not only because of the trouble she gave, but because of her manner of doing so.
So, as I say, none of us took her indisposition seriously.
The only exception was Boyd Carrington, who wandered round looking rather pathetically like a small boy who has been scolded.
How many times since then have I not gone over and over the events of that day, trying to remember something so far unheeded – some tiny forgotten incident, striving to remember exactly the manner of everybody. How far they were normal, or showed excitement.
Let me, once more, put down exactly what I remember of everybody.
Boyd Carrington, as I have said, looked uncomfortable and rather guilty. He seemed to think that he had been rather over-exuberant the day before and had been selfish in not thinking more of the frail health of his companion. He had been up once or twice to enquire about Barbara Franklin, and Nurse Craven, herself not in the best of tempers, had been tart and snappish with him. He had even been to the village and purchased a box of chocolates. This had been sent down. ‘Mrs Franklin couldn’t bear chocolates.’
Rather disconsolately, he opened the box in the smoking-room and Norton and I and he all solemnly helped ourselves.
Norton, I now think, had definitely something on his mind that morning. He was abstracted, once or twice his brows drew together as though he were puzzling over something.
He was fond of chocolates, and ate a good many in an abstracted fashion.
Outside, the weather had broken. Since ten o’clock the rain had been pouring down.
It had not the melancholy that sometimes accompanies a wet day. Actually it was a relief to us all.
Poirot had been brought down by Curtiss about midday and ensconced in the drawing-room. Here Elizabeth Cole had joined him and was playing the piano to him. She had a pleasant touch, and played Bach and Mozart, both favourite composers of my friend’s.
Franklin and Judith came up from the garden about a quarter to one. Judith looked white and strained. She was very silent, looked vaguely about her as though lost in a dream and then went away. Franklin sat down with us. He, too, looked tired and absorbed, and he had, too, the air of a man very much on edge.
I said, I remember, something about the rain being a relief, and he said quickly: ‘Yes. There are times when something’s got to break . . .’
And somehow I got the impression that it was not merely of the weather that he spoke. Awkward as always in his movements, he jerked against the table and upset half the chocolates. With his usual startled air, he apologized – apparently to the box.
‘Oh, sorry.’
It ought to have been funny, but somehow it wasn’t. He bent quickly and picked up the spilt chocolates.
Norton asked him if he had had a tiring morning. His smile flashed out then – eager, boyish, very much alive.
‘No – no – just realized, suddenly, I’ve been on the wrong track. Much simpler process altogether is what’s needed. Can take a short cut now.’
He stood swaying slightly to and fro on his feet, his eyes absent yet resolved.
‘Yes, short cut. Much the best way.’
III
If we were all nervy and aimless in the morning, the afternoon was unexpectedly pleasant. The sun came out, the temperature