Passenger to Frankfurt - Agatha Christie [23]
Sir Stafford Nye laughed. His eyes were wandering round the room.
‘What are you looking at?’ said Lady Matilda.
‘Your pictures.’
‘You don’t want me to sell them, do you? Everyone seems to be selling their pictures nowadays. Old Lord Grampion, you know. He sold his Turners and he sold some of his ancestors as well. And Geoffrey Gouldman. All those lovely horses of his. By Stubbs, weren’t they? Something like that. Really, the prices one gets!
‘But I don’t want to sell my pictures. I like them. Most of them in this room have a real interest because they’re ancestors. I know nobody wants ancestors nowadays but then I’m old-fashioned. I like ancestors. My own ancestors, I mean. What are you looking at? Pamela?’
‘Yes, I was. I was thinking about her the other day.’
‘Astonishing how alike you two are. I mean, it’s not even as though you were twins, though they say that different sex twins, even if they are twins, can’t be identical, if you know what I mean.’
‘So Shakespeare must have made rather a mistake over Viola and Sebastian.’
‘Well, ordinary brothers and sisters can be alike, can’t they? You and Pamela were always very alike–to look at, I mean.’
‘Not in any other way? Don’t you think we were alike in character?’
‘No, not in the least. That’s the funny part of it. But of course you and Pamela have what I call the family face. Not a Nye face. I mean the Baldwen-White face.’
Sir Stafford Nye had never quite been able to compete when it came down to talking on a question of genealogy with his great-aunt.
‘I’ve always thought that you and Pamela both took after Alexa,’ she went on.
‘Which was Alexa?’
‘Your great-great–I think one more great–grandmother. Hungarian. A Hungarian countess or baroness or something. Your great-great-grandfather fell in love with her when he was at Vienna in the Embassy. Yes. Hungarian. That’s what she was. Very sporting too. They are sporting, you know, Hungarians. She rode to hounds, rode magnificently.’
‘Is she in the picture gallery?’
‘She’s on the first landing. Just over the head of the stairs, a little to the right.’
‘I must go and look at her when I go to bed.’
‘Why don’t you go and look at her now and then you can come back and talk about her.’
‘I will if you like.’ He smiled at her.
He ran out of the room and up the staircase. Yes, she had a sharp eye, old Matilda. That was the face. That was the face that he had seen and remembered. Remembered not for its likeness to himself, not even for its likeness to Pamela, but for a closer resemblance still to this picture here. A handsome girl brought home by his Ambassador great-great-great-grandfather if that was enough greats. Aunt Matilda was never satisfied with only a few. About twenty she had been. She had come here and been high-spirited and rode a horse magnificently and danced divinely and men had fallen in love with her. But she had been faithful, so it was always said, to great-great-great-grandfather, a very steady and sober member of the Diplomatic Service. She had gone with him to foreign Embassies and returned here and had had children–three or four children, he believed. Through one of those children the inheritance of her face, her nose, the turn of her neck had been passed down to him and to his sister, Pamela. He wondered if the young woman who had doped his beer and forced him to lend her his cloak and who had depicted herself as being in danger of death unless he did what she asked, had been possibly related as a fifth or sixth cousin removed, a descendant of the woman pictured on the wall at which he looked. Well, it could be. They had been of the same nationality, perhaps. Anyway their faces had resembled each other a good deal. How upright she’d sat at the opera, how straight that profile, the thin, slightly arched aquiline nose. And the atmosphere that hung about her.
II
‘Find it?’ asked Lady Matilda, when her nephew returned to the white drawing-room, as her sitting-room was usually called. ‘Interesting face, isn’t it?