Elephants Can Remember - Agatha Christie [30]
Chapter 7
Back to the Nursery
Mrs Oliver looked rather doubtfully at the three steps and the front door of a small, rather dilapidated-looking cottage in the side street. Below the windows some bulbs were growing, mainly tulips.
Mrs Oliver paused, opened the little address book in her hand, verified that she was in the place she thought she was, and rapped gently with the knocker after having tried to press a bell-push of possible electrical significance but which did not seem to yield any satisfactory bell ringing inside, or anything of that kind. Presently, not getting any response, she knocked again. This time there were sounds from inside. A shuffling sound of feet, some asthmatic breathing and hands apparently trying to manage the opening of the door. With this noise there came a few vague echoes in the letter-box.
‘Oh, drat it. Drat it. Stuck again, you brute, you.’
Finally, success met these inward industries, and the door, making a creaky and rather doubtful noise, was slowly pulled open. A very old woman with a wrinkled face, humped shoulders and a general arthritic appearance, looked at her visitor. Her face was unwelcoming. It held no sign of fear, merely of distaste for those who came and knocked at the home of an Englishwoman’s castle. She might have been seventy or eighty, but she was still a valiant defender of her home.
‘I dunno what you’ve come about and I –’ she stopped. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘it’s Miss Ariadne. Well I never now! It’s Miss Ariadne.’
‘I think you’re wonderful to know me,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘How are you, Mrs Matcham?’
‘Miss Ariadne! Just think of that now.’
It was, Mrs Ariadne Oliver thought, a long time ago since she had been addressed as Miss Ariadne, but the intonation of the voice, cracked with age though it was, rang a familiar note.
‘Come in, m’dear,’ said the old dame, ‘come in now. You’re lookin’ well, you are. I dunno how many years it is since I’ve seen you. Fifteen at least.’
It was a good deal more than fifteen but Mrs Oliver made no corrections. She came in. Mrs Matcham was shaking hands, her hands were rather unwilling to obey their owner’s orders. She managed to shut the door and, shuffling her feet and limping, entered a small room which was obviously one that was kept for the reception of any likely or unlikely visitors whom Mrs Matcham was prepared to admit to her home. There were large numbers of photographs, some of babies, some of adults. Some in nice leather frames which were slowly drooping but had not quite fallen to pieces yet. One in a silver frame by now rather tarnished, representing a young woman in presentation Court Dress with feathers rising up on her head. Two naval officers, two military gentlemen, some photographs of naked babies sprawling on rugs. There was a sofa and two chairs. As bidden, Mrs Oliver sat in a chair. Mrs Matcham pressed herself down on the sofa and pulled a cushion into the hollow of her back with some difficulty.
‘Well, my dear, fancy seeing you. And you’re still writing your pretty stories, are you?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver, assenting to this though with a slight doubt as to how far detective stories and stories of crime and general criminal behaviour could be called ‘pretty stories’. But that, she thought, was very much a habit of Mrs Matcham’s.
‘I’m all alone now,’ said Mrs Matcham. ‘You remember Gracie, my sister? She died last autumn, she did. Cancer it was. They operated but it was too late.’
‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry,’ said Mrs Oliver.
Conversation proceeded for the next ten minutes on the subject of the demise, one by one, of Mrs Matcham’s last remaining relatives.
‘And you’re all right, are you? Doing all right? Got a husband now? Oh now, I remember, he’s dead years ago, isn’t he? And what brings you here, to Little Saltern Minor?’
‘I just happened to be in the neighbourhood,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘and as I’ve got your address in my little address book with