Destination Unknown - Agatha Christie [51]
‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I will show you around the place. You are not a scientist, no?’
‘I’m afraid,’ said Hilary, ‘that I have had no scientific training.’ She added, ‘I worked as a secretary before my marriage.’
‘Bianca has had legal training,’ said her husband. ‘She has studied economics and commercial law. Sometimes she gives lectures here but it is difficult to find enough to do to occupy one’s time.’
Bianca shrugged her shoulders.
‘I shall manage,’ she said. ‘After all, Simon, I came here to be with you and I think that there is much here that could be better organized. I am studying conditions. Perhaps Mrs Betterton, since she will not be engaged on scientific work, can help me with these things.’
Hilary hastened to agree to this plan. Andy Peters made them all laugh by saying ruefully:
‘I guess I feel rather like a homesick little boy who’s just gone to boarding-school. I’ll be glad to get down to doing some work.’
‘It’s a wonderful place for working,’ said Simon Murchison with enthusiasm. ‘No interruptions and all the apparatus you want.’
‘What’s your line?’ asked Andy Peters.
Presently the three men were talking a jargon of their own which Hilary found difficult to follow. She turned to Ericsson who was leaning back in his chair, his eyes abstracted.
‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Do you feel like a homesick little boy, too?’
He looked at her as though from a long way away.
‘I do not need a home,’ he said. ‘All these things; home, ties of affection, parents, children; all these are a great hindrance. To work one should be quite free.’
‘And you feel that you will be free here?’
‘One cannot tell yet. One hopes so.’
Bianca spoke to Hilary.
‘After dinner,’ she said, ‘there is a choice of many things to do. There is a card room and you can play bridge; or there is a cinema, or three nights a week theatrical performances are given and occasionally there is dancing.’
Ericsson frowned disapprovingly.
‘All these things are unnecessary,’ he said. ‘They dissipate energy.’
‘Not for us women,’ said Bianca. ‘For us women they are necessary.’
He looked at her with an almost cold and impersonal dislike.
Hilary thought: ‘To him women are unnecessary, too.’
‘I shall go to bed early,’ said Hilary. She yawned deliberately. ‘I don’t think I want to see a film or play bridge this evening.’
‘No, dear,’ said Tom Betterton hastily. ‘Much better to go to bed really early and have a good night’s rest. You’ve had a very tiring journey, remember.’
As they rose from table, Betterton said:
‘The air here is wonderful at night. We usually take a turn or two on the roof garden after dinner, before dispersing to recreations or study. We’ll go up there for a little and then you’d better go to bed.’
They went up in a lift manned by a magnificent-looking native in white robes. The attendants were darker-skinned and of a more massive build than the slight, fair Berbers–a desert type, Hilary thought. Hilary was startled by the unexpected beauty of the roof garden, and also by the lavish expenditure that must have gone to create it. Tons of earth must have been brought and carried up here. The result was like an Arabian Nights fairy tale. There was the splash of water, tall palms, the tropical leaves of bananas and other plants and paths of beautiful coloured tiles with designs of Persian flowers.
‘It’s unbelievable,’ said Hilary. ‘Here in the middle of the desert.’ She spoke out what she had felt: ‘It’s an Arabian Nights fairy tale.’
‘I agree with you, Mrs Betterton,’ said Murchison. ‘It looks exactly as though it has come into being by conjuring up a djinn! Ah well–I suppose even in the desert there’s nothing you can’t do, given water and money–plenty of both of them.’
‘Where does the water come from?’
‘Spring tapped deep in the mountain. That’s the raison