Sparkling Cyanide - Agatha Christie [64]
Colonel Race said he had heard she had a son abroad.
For the next quarter of an hour, he was regaled with a full account of Victor’s multitudinous activities. Such a spirited boy, willing to turn his hand to anything—here followed a list of Victor’s varied occupations. Never unkind, or bearing malice to anyone. ‘He’s always been unlucky, Colonel Race. He was misjudged by his house-master and I consider the authorities at Oxford behaved quite disgracefully. People don’t seem to understand that a clever boy with a taste for drawing would think it an excellent joke to imitate someone’s handwriting. He did it for the fun of the thing, not for money.’ But he’d always been a good son to his mother, and he never failed to let her know when he was in trouble which showed, didn’t it, that he trusted her? Only it did seem curious, didn’t it, that the jobs people found for him so often seemed to take him out of England. She couldn’t help feeling that if only he could be given a nice job, in the Bank of England say, he would settle down much better. He might perhaps live a little out of London and have a little car.
It was quite twenty minutes before Colonel Race, having heard all Victor’s perfections and misfortunes, was able to switch Lucilla from the subject of sons to that of servants.
Yes, it was very true what he said, the old-fashioned type of servant didn’t exist any longer. Really the trouble people had nowadays! Not that she ought to complain, for really they had been very lucky. Mrs Pound, though she had the misfortune to be slightly deaf, was an excellent woman. Her pastry sometimes a little heavy and a tendency to over-pepper the soup, but really on the whole most reliable—and economical too. She had been there ever since George married and she had made no fuss about going to the country this year, though there had been trouble with the others over that and the parlourmaid had left—but that really was all for the best—an impertinent girl who answered back—besides breaking six of the best wineglasses, not one by one at odd times which might happen to anybody, but all at once which really meant gross carelessness, didn’t Colonel Race think so?
‘Very careless indeed.’
‘That is what I told her. And I said to her that I should be obliged to say so in her reference—for I really feel one has a duty, Colonel Race. I mean, one should not mislead. Faults should be mentioned as well as good qualities. But the girl was—really—well, quite insolent and said that at any rate she hoped that in her next place she wouldn’t be in the kind of house where people got bumped off—a dreadful common expression, acquired at the cinema, I believe, and ludicrously inappropriate since poor dear Rosemary took her own life—though not at the time responsible for her actions as the coroner very rightly pointed out—and that dreadful expression refers, I believe, to gangsters executing each other with tommy-guns. I am so thankful that we have nothing of that kind in England. And so, as I say, I put in her reference that Betty Archdale thoroughly understood her duties as parlourmaid and was sober and honest, but that she was inclined to have too many breakages and was not always respectful in her manner. And personally, if I had been Mrs Rees-Talbot, I should have read between the lines and not engaged her. But people nowadays just jump at anything they can get, and will sometimes take a girl who has only stayed her month in three places running.’
Whilst Mrs Drake paused to take breath, Colonel Race asked quickly whether that was Mrs Richard Rees-Talbot? If so, he had known her, he said, in India.
‘I really couldn’t say. Cadogan Square was the address.’
‘Then it is my friends.’
Lucilla said that the world was such a small place, wasn’t it? And that there were no friends like old friends. Friendship was a wonderful thing. She had always