Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [46]
He must have known then, in spite of her affectionate farewell. She didn’t really care … Gin, he thought, that was all she cared for, gin and the Uncles….
And he’d been here, captured, a prisoner, eating tasteless, unfamiliar meals; going to bed, incredibly, at six o’clock, after a silly supper of milk and biscuits (milk and biscuits!), lying awake, crying, his head pushed down under the blankets, crying for Mom and home.
It was that woman! She’d got him and she wouldn’t let him go. A lot of sloppy talk. Always making him play silly games. Wanting something from him. Something that he was determined not to give. Never mind. He’d wait. He’d be patient! And one day—one glorious day, he’d go home. Home to the streets, and the boys, and the glorious red buses and the Tube, and fish and chips, and the traffic and the area cats—his mind went longingly over the catalogue of delights. He must wait. The war couldn’t go on for ever. Here he was stuck in this silly place with bombs falling all over London and half London on fire—coo! What a blaze it must make, and people being killed and houses crashing down.
He saw it in his mind all in glorious technicolour.
Never mind. When the war was over he’d go back to Mom. She’d be surprised to see how he’d grown.
IV
In the darkness Micky Argyle expelled his breath in a long hiss.
The war was over. They’d licked Hitler and Musso … Some of the children were going back. Soon, now … And then She had come back from London and had said that he was going to stay at Sunny Point and be her own little boy….
He had said: “Where’s my Mom? Did a bomb get her?”
If she had been killed by a bomb—well, that would be not too bad. It happened to boys’ mothers.
But Mrs. Argyle said “No,” she hadn’t been killed. But she had some rather difficult work to do and couldn’t look after a child very well—that sort of thing, anyway soft soap, meaning nothing … His Mom didn’t love him, didn’t want him back—he’d got to stay here, for ever….
He’d sneaked round after that, trying to overhear conversations, and at last he did hear something, just a fragment between Mrs. Argyle and her husband. “Only too pleased to get rid of him—absolutely indifferent”—and something about a hundred pounds. So then he knew—his mother had sold him for a hundred pounds….
The humiliation—the pain—he’d never got over it … And She had bought him! He saw her, vaguely, as embodied Power, someone against whom he, in his puny strength, was helpless. But he’d grow up, he’d be strong one day, a man. And then he’d kill her….
He felt better once he’d made that resolution.
Later, when he went away to school, things were not so bad. But he hated the holidays—because of Her. Arranging everything, planning, giving him all sorts of presents. Looking puzzled, because he was so undemonstrative. He hated being kissed by her … And later still, he’d taken a pleasure in thwarting her silly plans for him. Going into a bank! An oil company. Not he. He’d go and find work for himself.
It was when he was at the university that he’d tried to trace his mother. She’d been dead for some years, he discovered—in a car crash with a man who’d been driving roaring drunk….
So why not forget it all? Why not just have a good time and get on with life? He didn’t know why not.
And now—what was going to happen now? She was dead, wasn’t she? Thinking she’d bought him for a miserable hundred pounds. Thinking she could buy anything—houses and cars—and children, since she hadn’t any of her own. Thinking she was God Almighty!
Well, she wasn’t. Just a crack on the head with a poker and she was a corpse like any other corpse! (like the golden-haired corpse in a car smash on the Great North Road….)
She was dead, wasn’t she? Why worry?
What was the matter with him? Was it—that he couldn’t hate her any more because she was dead?
So that was Death….
He felt lost without his hatred—lost and afraid.
Twelve
I
In her spotlessly kept bedroom, Kirsten Lindstrom plaited her grizzled blonde hair into