The Hollow - Agatha Christie [49]
She had no particular illusions about working. She disliked the shop, she disliked Madame Alfrege, she disliked the eternal subservience to ill-tempered and impolite customers, but she doubted very much whether she could obtain any other job which she would like better since she had none of the necessary qualifications.
Edward’s assumption that a wide range of choice was open to her was simply unbearably irritating this morning. What right had Edward to live in a world so divorced from reality?
They were Angkatells, all of them. And she–was only half an Angkatell! And sometimes, like this morning, she did not feel like an Angkatell at all! She was all her father’s daughter.
She thought of her father with the usual pang of love and compunction, a grey-haired, middle-aged man with a tired face. A man who had struggled for years running a small family business that was bound, for all his care and efforts, to go slowly down the hill. It was not incapacity on his part–it was the march of progress.
Strangely enough, it was not to her brilliant Angkatell mother but to her quiet, tired father that Midge’s devotion had always been given. Each time, when she came back from those visits to Ainswick, which were the wild delight of her life, she would answer the faint deprecating questions in her father’s tired face by flinging her arms round his neck and saying: ‘I’m glad to be home–I’m glad to be home.’
Her mother had died when Midge was thirteen. Sometimes Midge realized that she knew very little about her mother. She had been vague, charming, gay. Had she regretted her marriage, the marriage that had taken her outside the circle of the Angkatell clan? Midge had no idea. Her father had grown greyer and quieter after his wife’s death. His struggles against the extinction of his business had grown more unavailing. He had died quietly and inconspicuously when Midge was eighteen.
Midge had stayed with various Angkatell relations, had accepted presents from the Angkatells, had had good times with the Angkatells, but she had refused to be financially dependent on their goodwill. And much as she loved them, there were times, such as these, when she felt suddenly and violently divergent from them.
She thought with rancour: ‘They don’t know anything!’
Edward, sensitive as always, was looking at her with a puzzled face. He asked gently:
‘I’ve upset you? Why?’
Lucy drifted into the room. She was in the middle of one of her conversations.
‘–you see, one doesn’t really know whether she’d prefer the White Hart to us or not?’
Midge looked at her blankly–then at Edward.
‘It’s no use looking at Edward,’ said Lady Angkatell. ‘Edward simply wouldn’t know; you, Midge, are always so practical.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Lucy.’
Lucy looked surprised.
‘The inquest, darling. Gerda has to come down for it. Should she stay here? Or go to the White Hart? The associations here are painful, of course–but then at the White Hart there will be people who will stare and quantities of reporters. Wednesday, you know, at eleven, or is it eleven-thirty?’ A smile lit up Lady Angkatell’s face. ‘I have never been to an inquest! I thought my grey–and a hat, of course, like church–but not gloves.
‘You know,’ went on Lady Angkatell, crossing the room and picking up the telephone receiver and gazing down at it earnestly, ‘I don’t believe I’ve got any gloves except gardening gloves nowadays! And of course lots of long evening ones put away from the Government House days. Gloves are rather stupid, don’t you think so?’
‘The only use is to avoid fingerprints in crimes,’ said Edward, smiling.
‘Now, it’s very interesting that you should say that, Edward–very interesting. What am I doing with this thing?’ Lady Angkatell looked at the telephone