Pocket Full of Rye - Agatha Christie [61]
Chapter Twenty-Two
It was growing dark. Miss Marple had taken her knitting over to the window in the library. Looking out of the glass pane she saw Pat Fortescue walking up and down the terrace outside. Miss Marple unlatched the window and called through it.
“Come in, my dear. Do come in. I’m sure it’s much too cold and damp for you to be out there without a coat on.”
Pat obeyed the summons. She came in and shut the window and turned on two of the lamps.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s not a very nice afternoon.” She sat down on the sofa by Miss Marple. “What are you knitting?”
“Oh, just a little matinée coat, dear. For a baby, you know. I always say young mothers can’t have too many matinée coats for their babies. It’s the second size. I always knit the second size. Babies so soon grow out of the first size.”
Pat stretched out long legs towards the fire.
“It’s nice in here today,” she said. “With the fire and the lamps and you knitting things for babies. It all seems cosy and homely and like England ought to be.”
“It’s like England is,” said Miss Marple. “There are not so many Yewtree Lodges, my dear.”
“I think that’s a good thing,” said Pat. “I don’t believe this was ever a happy house. I don’t believe anybody was ever happy in it, in spite of all the money they spent and the things they had.”
“No,” Miss Marple agreed. “I shouldn’t say it had been a happy house.”
“I suppose Adele may have been happy,” said Pat. “I never met her, of course, so I don’t know, but Jennifer is pretty miserable and Elaine’s been eating her heart out over a young man whom she probably knows in her heart of hearts doesn’t care for her. Oh, how I want to get away from here!” She looked at Miss Marple and smiled suddenly. “D’you know,” she said, “that Lance told me to stick as close to you as I could. He seemed to think I should be safe that way.”
“Your husband’s no fool,” said Miss Marple.
“No. Lance isn’t a fool. At least, he is in someways. But I wish he’d tell me exactly what he’s afraid of. One thing seems clear enough. Somebody in this house is mad, and madness is always frightening because you don’t know how mad people’s minds will work. You don’t know what they’ll do next.”
“My poor child,” said Miss Marple.
“Oh, I’m all right, really. I ought to be tough enough by now.”
Miss Marple said gently:
“You’ve had a good deal of unhappiness, haven’t you, my dear?”
“Oh, I’ve had some very good times, too. I had a lovely childhood in Ireland, riding, hunting, and a great big, bare, draughty house with lots and lots of sun in it. If you’ve had a happy childhood, nobody can take that away from you, can they? It was afterwards—when I grew up—that things seemed always to go wrong. To begin with, I suppose, it was the war.”
“Your husband was a fighter pilot, wasn’t he?”
“Yes. We’d only been married about a month when Don was shot down.” She stared ahead of her into the fire. “I thought at first I wanted to die too. It seemed so unfair, so cruel. And yet—in the end—I almost began to see that it had been the best thing. Don was wonderful in the war. Brave and reckless and gay. He had all the qualities that are needed, wanted in a war. But I don’t believe, somehow, peace would have suited him. He had a kind of—oh, how shall I put it?—arrogant insubordination. He wouldn’t have fitted in or settled down. He’d have fought against things. He was—well, antisocial in a way. No, he wouldn’t have fitted in.”
“It’s wise of you to see that, my dear.” Miss Marple bent over her knitting, picked up a stitch, counted under her breath, “Three plain, two purl, slip one, knit two together,” and then said aloud: “And your second husband, my dear?”
“Freddy? Freddy shot himself.”
“Oh dear. How very sad. What a tragedy.”
“We were very happy together,” said Pat. “I began to realize, about two years after we were married, that Freddy wasn’t—well, wasn’t always straight. I began to find out the sort