Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie [2]
Mrs Oliver was fond of her creature comforts. She had enjoyed the luncheon very much. She had enjoyed the company, too. The luncheon, which had been given to celebrated female writers, had fortunately not been confined to female writers only. There had been other writers, and critics, and those who read books as well as those who wrote them. Mrs Oliver had sat between two very charming members of the male sex. Edwin Aubyn, whose poetry she always enjoyed, an extremely entertaining person who had had various entertaining experiences in his tours abroad, and various literary and personal adventures. Also he was interested in restaurants and food and they had talked very happily about food, and left the subject of literature aside.
Sir Wesley Kent, on her other side, had also been an agreeable luncheon companion. He had said very nice things about her books, and had had the tact to say things that did not make her feel embarrassed, which many people could do almost without trying. He had mentioned one or two reasons why he had liked one or other of her books, and they had been the right reasons, and therefore Mrs Oliver had thought favourably of him for that reason. Praise from men, Mrs Oliver thought to herself, is always acceptable. It was women who gushed. Some of the things that women wrote to her! Really! Not always women, of course. Sometimes emotional young men from very far away countries. Only last week she had received a fan letter beginning ‘Reading your book, I feel what a noble woman you must be.’ After reading The Second Goldfish he had then gone off into an intense kind of literary ecstasy which was, Mrs Oliver felt, completely unfitting. She was not unduly modest. She thought the detective stories she wrote were quite good of their kind. Some were not so good and some were much better than others. But there was no reason, so far as she could see, to make anyone think that she was a noble woman. She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read. Wonderful luck that was, Mrs Oliver thought to herself.
Well, all things considered, she had got through this ordeal very well. She had quite enjoyed herself, talked to some nice people. Now they were moving to where coffee was being handed round and where you could change partners and chat with other people. This was the moment of danger, as Mrs Oliver knew well. This was now where other women would come and attack her. Attack her with fulsome praise, and where she always felt lamentably inefficient at giving the right answers because there weren’t really any right answers that you could give. It went really rather like a travel book for going abroad with the right phrases.
Question: ‘I must tell you how very fond I am of reading your books and how wonderful I think they are.’
Answer from flustered author, ‘Well, that’s very kind. I am so glad.’
‘You must understand that I’ve been waiting to meet you for months. It really is wonderful.’
‘Oh, it’s very nice of you. Very nice indeed.’
It went on very much like that. Neither of you seemed to be able to talk about anything of outside interest. It had to be all about your books, or the other woman’s books if you knew what her books were. You were in the literary web and you weren’t good at this sort of stuff. Some people could do it, but Mrs Oliver was bitterly aware of not having the proper capacity. A foreign friend of hers had once put her, when she was staying at an embassy abroad, through a kind of course.
‘I listen to you,’ Albertina had said in her charming, low, foreign voice, ‘I have listened to what you say to that young man who came from the newspaper to interview you. You have not got – no! you have not got the pride you should have in your work. You should say “Yes, I write well. I write better than anyone else who writes detective stories.”’
‘But I don’t,’ Mrs Oliver had said at that moment. ‘I’m not bad, but –’
‘Ah, do not say “I don’t” like that. You must say you do; even if you do not think you do, you ought to say you do.’
‘I wish, Albertina,