Taken at the Flood - Agatha Christie [34]
So, feeling disgruntled and out of temper, she set out to walk her black mood off.
Her temper was not improved by a meeting with Aunt Kathie outside the post office. Aunt Kathie was in good spirits.
‘I think, Lynn dear, that we shall soon have good news.’
‘What on earth do you mean, Aunt Kathie?’
Mrs Cloade nodded and smiled and looked wise.
‘I’ve had the most astonishing communications — really astonishing. A simple happy end to all our troubles. I had one setback, but since then I’ve got the message to Try try try again. If at first you don’t succeed, etc…I’m not going to betray any secrets, Lynn dear, and the last thing I should want to do would be to raise false hopes prematurely, but I have the strongest belief that things will very soon be quite all right. And quite time, too. I am really very worried about your uncle. He worked far too hard during the war. He really needs to retire and devote himself to his specialized studies — but of course he can’t do that without an adequate income. And sometimes he has such queer nervous fits, I am really very worried about him. He is really quite odd.’
Lynn nodded thoughtfully. The change in Lionel Cloade had not escaped her notice, nor his curious alternation of moods. She suspected that he occasionally had recourse to drugs to stimulate himself, and she wondered whether he were not to a certain extent an addict. It would account for his extreme nervous irritability. She wondered how much Aunt Kathie knew or guessed. Aunt Kathie, thought Lynn, was not such a fool as she looked.
Going down the High Street, she caught a glimpse of her Uncle Jeremy letting himself into his front door. He looked, Lynn thought, very much older just in these last three weeks.
She quickened her pace. She wanted to get out of Warmsley Vale, up on to the hills and open spaces. Setting out at a brisk pace she soon felt better. She would go for a good tramp of six or seven miles — and really think things out. Always, all her life, she had been a resolute clear-headed person. She had known what she wanted and what she didn’t want. Never, until now, had she been content just to drift along…
Yes, that was just what it was! Drifting along! An aimless, formless method of living. Ever since she had come out of the Service. A wave of nostalgia swept over her for those war days. Days when duties were clearly defined, when life was planned and orderly — when the weight of individual decisions had been lifted from her. But even as she formulated the idea, she was horrified at herself. Was that really and truly what people were secretly feeling everywhere? Was that what, ultimately, war did to you? It was not the physical dangers — the mines at sea, the bombs from the air, the crisp ping of a rifle bullet as you drove over a desert track. No, it was the spiritual danger of learning how much easier life was if you ceased to think…She, Lynn Marchmont, was no longer the clear-headed resolute intelligent girl who had joined up. Her intelligence had been specialized, directed in well-defined channels. Now mistress of herself and her life once more, she was appalled at the disinclination of her mind to seize and grapple with her own personal problems.
With a sudden wry smile, Lynn thought to herself: Odd if it’s really that newspaper character ‘the housewife’ who has come into her own through war conditions. The women who, hindered by innumerable ‘shall nots’, were not helped by any definite ‘shalls’. Women who had to plan and think and improvise, who had to use every inch of the ingenuity they had been given, and to develop an ingenuity that they didn’t know they had got! They alone, thought Lynn now, could stand upright without a crutch, responsible for themselves and others. And she, Lynn Marchmont, well educated, clever, having done a job that needed brains and close application, was now rudderless, devoid of resolution — yes, hateful word: drifting…
The people who had stayed at home; Rowley, for instance.
But at once Lynn’s mind dropped from vague generalities to the immediate personal. Herself and Rowley.