Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [43]
As a result of this pastime he found himself, for perhaps the first time in his life, keenly observant of the differences and realities of human personality.
Human personalities as such had not previously interested him very much. He liked or disliked, was amused or bored by, the people who surrounded him or whom he met. He had always been a man of action, and not a man of thought. His imagination, which was considerable, had been exercised in devising various schemes for making money. All these schemes had a sound core; but a complete lack of business ability always resulted in their coming to nothing. People, as such, had up till now only been considered by him as pawns in the game. Now, since his illness cut him off from his former active life, he was forced to take account of what people themselves were like.
It had started in the hospital when the love lives of the nurses, the secret warfare and the petty grievances of hospital life had been forced on his attention since there was nothing else to occupy it. And now it was fast becoming a habit with him. People—really that was all that life held for him now. Just people. People to study, to find out about, to sum up. Decide for himself what made them tick and find out if he was right. Really, it could all be very interesting….
Only this very evening, sitting in the library, he had realized how little he really knew about his wife’s family. What were they really like? What were they like inside, that is, not their outer appearance which he knew well enough.
Odd, how little you knew about people. Even your own wife?
He had looked thoughtfully over at Mary. How much did he really know about Mary?
He had fallen in love with her because he liked her good looks and her calm, serious ways. Also, she had had money and that mattered to him too. He would have thought twice about marrying a penniless girl. It had all been most suitable and he had married her and teased her and called her Polly and had enjoyed the doubtful look she gave him when he made jokes she could not see. But what, really, did he know about her? Of what she thought and felt? He knew, certainly, that she loved him with a deep and passionate devotion. And at the thought of that devotion he stirred a little uneasily, twisting his shoulders as though to ease them of a burden. Devotion was all very well when you could get away from it for nine or ten hours of the day. It was a nice thing to come home to. But now he was lapped round with it; watched over, cared for, cherished. It made one yearn for a little wholesome neglect … One had, in fact, to find ways to escape. Mental ways—since none other were possible. One had to escape to realms of fancy or speculation.
Speculation. As to who was responsible for his mother-in-law’s death, for instance. He had disliked his mother-in-law, and she had disliked him. She had not wanted Mary to marry him (would she have wanted Mary to marry anybody? he wondered), but she had not been able to prevent it. He and Mary had started life happy and independent—and then things had begun to go wrong. First that South American company—and then the Bicycle Accessories Ltd—good ideas both of them—but the financing of them had been badly judged—and then there had been the Argentine railway strike which had completed the disasters. All purely bad luck, but in some way he felt that somehow Mrs. Argyle was responsible. She hadn’t wished him to succeed. Then had come his illness. It had looked as though their only solution was to come and live at Sunny Point where a welcome was assured to them. He wouldn’t have minded particularly. A man who was a cripple, only half a man, what did it matter where he was?—but Mary would have minded.
Oh well, it hadn’t been necessary to live permanently at Sunny Point. Mrs. Argyle had been killed. The Trustees had raised the allowance made to Mary under the Trust and they had set up on their own again.
He hadn’t felt any particular grief over Mrs. Argyle’s death. Pleasanter, of course, if she had died of