Murder Is Easy - Agatha Christie [36]
“No, I haven’t been the same man since.”
“You must miss her,” said Luke awkwardly.
Major Horton shook his head darkly.
“Fellow needs a wife to keep him up to scratch,” he said. “Otherwise he gets slack—yes, slack. He lets himself go.”
“But surely—”
“My boy, I know what I’m talking about. Mind you, I’m not saying marriage doesn’t come hard on a fellow at first. It does. Fellow says to himself, damn it all, he says, I can’t call my soul my own! But he gets broken in. It’s all discipline.”
Luke thought that Major Horton’s married life must have been more like a military campaign than an idyll of domestic bliss.
“Women,” soliloquized the major, “are a rum lot. It seems sometimes that there’s no pleasing them. But by Jove, they keep a man up to the mark.”
Luke preserved a respectful silence.
“You married?” inquired the major.
“No.”
“Ah, well, you’ll come to it. And mind you, my boy, there’s nothing like it.”
“It’s always cheering,” said Luke, “to hear someone speak well of the marriage state. Especially in these days of easy divorce.”
“Pah!” said the major. “Young people make me sick. No stamina—no endurance. They can’t stand anything. No fortitude!”
Luke itched to ask why such exceptional fortitude should be needed, but he controlled himself.
“Mind you,” said the major, “Lydia was a woman in a thousand—in a thousand! Everyone here respected and looked up to her.”
“Yes?”
“She wouldn’t stand any nonsense. She’d got a way of fixing a person with her eye—and the person wilted—just wilted. Some of these half-baked girls who call themselves servants nowadays. They think you’ll put up with any insolence. Lydia soon showed them! Do you know we had fifteen cooks and house-parlourmaids in one year. Fifteen!”
Luke felt that this was hardly a tribute to Mrs. Horton’s domestic management, but since it seemed to strike his host differently he merely murmured some vague remark.
“Turned ’em out neck and crop, she did, if they didn’t suit.”
“Was it always that way about?” asked Luke.
“Well, of course a lot of them walked out on us. A good riddance—that’s what Lydia used to say!”
“A fine spirit,” said Luke, “but wasn’t it sometimes rather awkward?”
“Oh! I didn’t mind turning to and putting my hand to things,” said Horton. “I’m a pretty fair cook and I can lay a fire with anyone. I’ve never cared for washing up but of course it’s got to be done—you can’t get away from that.”
Luke agreed that you couldn’t. He asked whether Mrs. Horton had been good at domestic work.
“I’m not the sort of fellow to let his wife wait on him,” said Major Horton. “And anyway Lydia was far too delicate to do any housework.”
“She wasn’t strong then?”
Major Horton shook his head.
“She had wonderful spirit. She wouldn’t give in. But what that woman suffered! And no sympathy from the doctors either. Doctors are callous brutes. They only understand downright physical pain. Anything out of the ordinary is beyond most of them. Humbleby, for instance, everyone seemed to think he was a good doctor.”
“You don’t agree.”
“The man was an absolute ignoramus. Knew nothing of modern discoveries. Doubt if he’d ever heard of a neurosis! He understood measles and mumps and broken bones all right, I suppose. But nothing else. Had a row with him in the end. He didn’t understand Lydia’s case at all. I gave it him straight from the shoulder and he didn’t like it. Got huffed and backed right out. Said I could send for any other doctor I chose. After that, we had Thomas.”
“You liked him better?”
“Altogether a much cleverer man. If anyone could have pulled her through her last illness Thomas would have done it. As a matter of fact she was getting better, but she had a sudden relapse.”
“Was it painful?”
“H’m, yes. Gastritis. Acute pain—sickness—all the rest of it. How that poor woman suffered! She was a martyr if there ever was one. And a couple of hospital nurses in the house who were about as sympathetic as a brace of grandfather clocks! ‘The patient this’ and ‘the patient that.’” The major shook