Mysterious Mr. Quin - Agatha Christie [66]
The girl’s face brightened.
‘Oh, that would be very kind of you. Are you sure it’s not too much bother?’
‘Not in the least.’
She thanked him again and gave him her telephone number, adding with a touch of shyness: ‘My name is Gillian West.’
As he was driven through the night, bound on his errand, a curious smile came to Mr Satterthwaite’s lips.
He thought: ‘So that is all it is…“The shape of a face, the curve of a jaw!”’
But he fulfilled his promise.
II
The following Sunday afternoon Mr Satterthwaite went to Kew Gardens to admire the rhododendrons. Very long ago (incredibly long ago, it seemed to Mr Satterthwaite) he had driven down to Kew Gardens with a certain young lady to see the bluebells. Mr Satterthwaite had arranged very carefully beforehand in his own mind exactly what he was going to say, and the precise words he would use in asking the young lady for her hand in marriage. He was just conning them over in his mind, and responding to her raptures about the bluebells a little absent-mindedly, when the shock came. The young lady stopped exclaiming at the bluebells and suddenly confided in Mr Satterthwaite (as a true friend) her love for another. Mr Satterthwaite put away the little set speech he had prepared, and hastily rummaged for sympathy and friendship in the bottom drawer of his mind.
Such was Mr Satterthwaite’s romance–a rather tepid early Victorian one, but it had left him with a romantic attachment to Kew Gardens, and he would often go there to see the bluebells, or, if he had been abroad later than usual, the rhododendrons, and would sigh to himself, and feel rather sentimental, and really enjoy himself very much indeed in an old-fashioned, romantic way.
This particular afternoon he was strolling back past the tea houses when he recognized a couple sitting at one of the small tables on the grass. They were Gillian West and the fair young man, and at that same moment they recognized him. He saw the girl flush and speak eagerly to her companion. In another minute he was shaking hands with them both in his correct, rather prim fashion, and had accepted the shy invitation proffered him to have tea with them.
‘I can’t tell you, sir,’ said Mr Burns, ‘how grateful I am to you for looking after Gillian the other night. She told me all about it.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said the girl. ‘It was ever so kind of you.’
Mr Satterthwaite felt pleased and interested in the pair. Their naïveté and sincerity touched him. Also, it was to him a peep into a world with which he was not well acquainted. These people were of a class unknown to him.
In his little dried-up way, Mr Satterthwaite could be very sympathetic. Very soon he was hearing all about his new friends. He noted that Mr Burns had become Charlie, and he was not unprepared for the statement that the two were engaged.
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Mr Burns with refreshing candour, ‘it just happened this afternoon, didn’t it, Gil?’
Burns was a clerk in a shipping firm. He was making a fair salary, had a little money of his own, and the two proposed to be married quite soon.
Mr Satterthwaite listened, and nodded, and congratulated.
‘An ordinary young man,’ he thought to himself, ‘a very ordinary young man. Nice, straightforward young chap, plenty to say for himself, good opinion of himself without being conceited, nice-looking without being unduly handsome. Nothing remarkable about him and will never set the Thames on fire. And the girl loves him…’
Aloud he said: ‘And Mr Eastney–’
He purposely broke off, but he had said enough to produce an effect for which he was not unprepared. Charlie Burns’s face darkened, and Gillian looked troubled. More than troubled, he thought. She looked afraid.
‘I don’t like it,’ she said in a low voice. Her words were addressed to Mr Satterthwaite, as though she knew by instinct that he would understand a feeling incomprehensible to her lover. ‘You see–he’s done a lot for me. He’s encouraged me to take up singing, and–and helped me with it. But I’ve known all the time that my voice wasn