Ordeal by Innocence - Agatha Christie [66]
“Where it juts out over the river? Yes, one would be dashed on the rocks below!”
“The trouble with you, Hester, is that you’re so melodramatic in your imaginings. Most people are quite satisfied with arranging themselves tidily in the gas oven or measuring themselves out an enormous number of sleeping pills.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Hester unexpectedly. “You don’t mind talking about things, do you?”
“Well, actually, I haven’t much else to do nowadays,” said Philip. “Come into my room and we’ll do some more talking.” As she hesitated, he went on: “Mary’s downstairs, gone to prepare me some delicious little morning mess with her own fair hands.”
“Mary wouldn’t understand,” said Hester.
“No,” Philip agreed, “Mary wouldn’t understand in the least.”
Philip propelled himself along and Hester walked beside him. She opened the door of the sitting room and he wheeled himself in. Hester followed.
“But you understand,” said Hester. “Why?”
“Well, there’s a time, you know, when one thinks about such things … When this business first happened to me, for instance, and I knew that I might be a cripple for life….”
“Yes,” said Hester, “that must have been terrible. Terrible. And you were a pilot, too, weren’t you? You flew.”
“Up above the world so high, like a tea-tray in the sky,” agreed Philip.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Hester. “I am really. I ought to have thought about it more, and been more sympathetic!”
“Thank God you weren’t,” said Philip. “But anyway, that phase is over now. One gets used to anything, you know. That’s something, Hester, that you don’t appreciate at the moment. But you’ll come to it. Unless you do something very rash and very silly first. Now come on, tell me all about it. What’s the trouble? I suppose you’ve had a row with your boy friend, the solemn young doctor. Is that it?”
“It wasn’t a row,” said Hester. “It was much worse than a row.”
“It will come right,” said Philip.
“No, it won’t,” said Hester. “It can’t—ever.”
“You’re so extravagant in your terms. Everything’s black and white to you, isn’t it, Hester? No halftones.”
“I can’t help being like that,” said Hester. “I’ve always been like it. Everything I thought I could do or wanted to do has always gone wrong. I wanted to have a life of my own, to be someone, to do something. It was all no good. I was no good at anything. I’ve often thought of killing myself. Ever since I was fourteen.”
Philip watched her with interest. He said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice:
“Of course people do kill themselves a good deal, between fourteen and nineteen. It’s an age in life when things are very much out of proportion. Schoolboys kill themselves because they don’t think they can pass examinations and girls kill themselves because their mothers won’t let them go to the pictures with unsuitable boy friends. It’s a kind of period where everything appears to be in glorious technicolour. Joy or despair. Gloom or unparalleled happiness. One snaps out of it. The trouble with you is, Hester, it’s taken you longer to snap out of it than most people.”
“Mother was always right,” said Hester. “All the things she wouldn’t let me do and I wanted to do. She was right about them and I was wrong. I couldn’t bear it, I simply couldn’t bear it! So I thought I’d got to be brave. I’d got to go off on my own. I’d got to test myself. And it all went wrong. I wasn’t any good at acting.”
“Of course you weren’t,” said Philip. “You’ve got no discipline. You can’t, as they say in theatrical circles, take production. You’re too busy dramatizing yourself, my girl. You’re doing it now.”
“And then I thought I’d have a proper love affair,” said Hester. “Not a silly, girlish thing. An older man. He was married, and he’d had a very unhappy life.”
“Stock situation,” said Philip, “and he exploited it, no doubt.”
“I thought it would be a—oh, a grand passion. You’re not laughing at me?” She stopped, looking at Philip suspiciously.
“No, I’m not laughing at you, Hester,” said Philip gently. “I can see quite well that it must have been hell for