Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [1]
‘Now what can I do next?’ she asked, and added, ‘What lovely apples!’
Someone had just brought a large bowl of apples into the room. Mrs Oliver was partial to apples.
‘Lovely red ones,’ she added.
‘They’re not really very good,’ said Rowena Drake.
‘But they look nice and partified. That’s for bobbing for apples. They’re rather soft apples, so people will be able to get their teeth into them better. Take them into the library, will you, Beatrice? Bobbing for apples always makes a mess with the water slopping over, but that doesn’t matter with the library carpet, it’s so old. Oh! Thank you, Joyce.’
Joyce, a sturdy thirteen-year-old, seized the bowl of apples. Two rolled off it and stopped, as though arrested by a witch’s wand, at Mrs Oliver’s feet.
‘You like apples, don’t you,’ said Joyce. ‘I read you did, or perhaps I heard it on the telly. You’re the one who writes murder stories, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘We ought to have made you do something connected with murders. Have a murder at the party tonight and make people solve it.’
‘No, thank you,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Never again.’
‘What do you mean, never again?’
‘Well, I did once, and it didn’t turn out much of a success,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘But you’ve written lots of books,’ said Joyce, ‘you make a lot of money out of them, don’t you?’
‘In a way,’ said Mrs Oliver, her thoughts flying to the Inland Revenue.
‘And you’ve got a detective who’s a Finn.’
Mrs Oliver admitted the fact. A small stolid boy not yet, Mrs Oliver would have thought, arrived at the seniority of the eleven-plus, said sternly, ‘Why a Finn?’
‘I’ve often wondered,’ said Mrs Oliver truthfully.
Mrs Hargreaves, the organist’s wife, came into the room breathing heavily, and bearing a large green plastic pail.
‘What about this,’ she said, ‘for the apple bobbing? Kind of gay, I thought.’
Miss Lee, the doctor’s dispenser, said, ‘Galvanized bucket’s better. Won’t tip over so easily. Where are you going to have it, Mrs Drake?’
‘I thought the bobbing for apples had better be in the library. The carpet’s old there and a lot of water always gets spilt, anyway.’
‘All right. We’ll take them along. Rowena, here’s another basket of apples.’
‘Let me help,’ said Mrs Oliver.
She picked up the two apples at her feet. Almost without noticing what she was doing, she sank her teeth into one of them and began to crunch it. Mrs Drake abstracted the second apple from her firmly and restored it to the basket. A buzz of conversation broke out.
‘Yes, but where are we going to have the Snapdragon?’
‘You ought to have the Snapdragon in the library, it’s much the darkest room.’
‘No, we’re going to have that in the dining-room.’
‘We’ll have to put something on the table first.’
‘There’s a green baize to put on that and then the rubber sheet over it.’
‘What about the looking-glasses? Shall we really see our husbands in them?’
Surreptitiously removing her shoes and still quietly champing at her apple, Mrs Oliver lowered herself once more on to the settee and surveyed the room full of people critically. She was thinking in her authoress’s mind: ‘Now, if I was going to make a book about all these people, how should I do it? They’re nice people, I should think, on the whole, but who knows?’
In a way, she felt, it was rather fascinating not to know anything about them. They all lived in Woodleigh Common, some of them had faint tags attached to them in her memory because of what Judith had told her. Miss Johnson—something to do with the church, not the vicar’s sister. Oh no, it was the organist’s sister, of course. Rowena Drake, who seemed to run things in Woodleigh Common. The puffing woman who had brought in the pail, a particularly hideous plastic pail. But then Mrs Oliver had never been fond of plastic things. And then the children, the teenage girls and boys.
So far they were really only names to Mrs Oliver. There was a Nan and a Beatrice and a Cathie, a Diana and a Joyce, who was boastful