Postern of Fate (Tommy and Tuppence Series) - Agatha Christie [30]
‘Yes. Yes, the works are good. They don’t need so very much doing to them.’
Conversation continued pleasantly. The young man played the opening bars of a Chopin Prelude and passed from that to a rendering of ‘The Blue Danube’. Presently he announced that his ministrations had finished.
‘I shouldn’t leave it too long,’ he warned her. ‘I’d like the chance to come and try it again before too much time has gone by because you don’t know quite when it might not–well, I don’t know how I should put it–relapse a bit. You know, some little thing that you haven’t noticed or haven’t been able to get at.’
They parted with mutually appreciative remarks on music in general and on piano music in particular, and with the polite salutations of two people who agreed very largely in their ideas as to the joys that music generally played in life.
‘Needs a lot doing to it, I expect, this house,’ he said, looking round him.
‘Well, I think it had been empty some time when we came into it.’
‘Oh yes. It’s changed hands a lot, you know.’
‘Got quite a history, hasn’t it,’ said Tuppence. ‘I mean, the people who lived in it in the past and the sort of queer things that happened.’
‘Ah well, I expect you’re talking of that time long ago. I don’t know if it was the last war or the one before.’
‘Something to do with naval secrets or something,’ said Tuppence hopefully.
‘Could be, I expect. There was a lot of talk, so they tell me, but of course I don’t know anything about it myself.’
‘Well before your time,’ said Tuppence, looking appreciatively at his youthful countenance.
When he had gone, she sat down at the piano.
‘I’ll play “The Rain on the Roof”,’ said Tuppence, who had had this Chopin memory revived in her by the piano tuner’s execution of one of the other preludes. Then she dropped into some chords and began playing the accompaniment to a song, humming it first and then murmuring the words as well.
Where has my true love gone a-roaming?
Where has my true love gone from me?
High in the woods the birds are calling.
When will my true love come back to me?
‘I’m playing it in the wrong key, I believe,’ said Tuppence, ‘but at any rate, the piano’s all right again now. Oh, it is great fun to be able to play the piano again. “Where has my true love gone a-roaming?”’ she murmured. ‘“When will my true love”–Truelove,’ said Tuppence thoughtfully. ‘True love? Yes, I’m thinking of that perhaps as a sign. Perhaps I’d better go out and do something with Truelove.’
She put on her thick shoes and a pullover, and went out into the garden. Truelove had been pushed, not back into his former home in KK, but into the empty stable. Tuppence took him out, pulled him to the top of the grass slope, gave him a sharp flick with the duster she had brought out with her to remove the worst of the cobwebs which still adhered in many places, got into Truelove, placed her feet on the pedals and induced Truelove to display his paces as well as he could in his condition of general age and wear.
‘Now, my true love,’ she said, ‘down the hill with you and not too fast.’
She removed her feet from the pedals and placed them in a position where she could brake with them when necessary.
Truelove was not inclined to go very fast in spite of the advantage to him of having only to go by weight down the hill. However, the slope increased in steepness suddenly. Truelove increased his pace, Tuppence applied her feet as brakes rather more sharply and she and Truelove arrived together at a rather more uncomfortable portion than usual of the monkey puzzle at the bottom of the hill.
‘Most painful,’ said Tuppence, excavating herself.
Having extricated herself from the pricking of various portions of the monkey puzzle, Tuppence brushed herself down and looked around her. She had come to a thick bit of shrubbery leading up the hill in the opposite direction. There were rhododendron bushes here and hydrangeas. It would