The Hollow - Agatha Christie [50]
‘Were you going to ring up someone?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Lady Angkatell shook her head vaguely and put the receiver back on its stand very gingerly.
She looked from Edward to Midge.
‘I don’t think, Edward, that you ought to upset Midge. Midge minds sudden deaths more than we do.’
‘My dear Lucy,’ exclaimed Edward. ‘I was only worrying about this place where Midge works. It sounds all wrong to me.’
‘Edward thinks I ought to have a delightful sympathetic employer who would appreciate me,’ said Midge dryly.
‘Dear Edward,’ said Lucy with complete appreciation.
She smiled at Midge and went out again.
‘Seriously, Midge,’ said Edward, ‘I am worried.’
She interrupted him:
‘The damned woman pays me four pounds a week. That’s all that matters.’
She brushed past him and went out into the garden.
Sir Henry was sitting in his usual place on the low wall, but Midge turned away and walked up towards the flower walk.
Her relations were charming, but she had no use for their charm this morning.
David Angkatell was sitting on the seat at the top of the path.
There was no overdone charm about David, and Midge made straight for him and sat down by him, nothing with malicious pleasure his look of dismay.
How extraordinarily difficult it was, thought David, to get away from people.
He had been driven from his bedroom by the brisk incursion of housemaids, purposeful with mops and dusters.
The library (and the Encyclopædia Britannica) had not been the sanctuary he had hoped optimistically it might be. Twice Lady Angkatell had drifted in and out, addressing him kindly with remarks to which there seemed no possible intelligent reply.
He had come out here to brood upon his position. The mere weekend to which he had unwillingly committed himself had now lengthened out owing to the exigencies connected with sudden and violent death.
David, who preferred the contemplation of an Academic past or the earnest discussion of a Left Wing future, had no aptitude for dealing with a violent and realistic present. As he had told Lady Angkatell, he did not read the News of the World. But now the News of the World seemed to have come to The Hollow.
Murder! David shuddered distastefully. What would his friends think? How did one, so to speak, take murder? What was one’s attitude? Bored? Disgusted? Lightly amused?
Trying to settle these problems in his mind, he was by no means pleased to be disturbed by Midge. He looked at her uneasily as she sat beside him.
He was rather startled by the defiant stare with which she returned his look. A disagreeable girl of no intellectual value.
She said, ‘How do you like your relations?’
David shrugged his shoulders. He said:
‘Does one really think about relations?’
Midge said:
‘Does one really think about anything?’
Doubtless, David thought, she didn’t. He said almost graciously:
‘I was analysing my reactions to murder.’
‘It is certainly odd,’ said Midge, ‘to be in one.’
David sighed and said:
‘Wearisome.’ That was quite the best attitude. ‘All the clichés that one thought only existed in the pages of detective fiction!’
‘You must be sorry you came,’ said Midge.
David sighed.
‘Yes, I might have been staying with a friend of mine in London.’ He added, ‘He keeps a Left Wing bookshop.’
‘I expect it’s more comfortable here,’ said Midge.
‘Does one really care about being comfortable?’ David asked scornfully.
‘There are times,’ said Midge, ‘when I feel I don’t care about anything else.’
‘The pampered attitude to life,’ said David. ‘If you were a worker–’
Midge interrupted him.
‘I am a worker. That’s just why being comfortable is so attractive. Box beds, down pillows–early-morning tea softly deposited beside the bed–a porcelain bath with lashings of hot water–and delicious bath salts. The kind of easy-chair you really sink into…’
Midge paused in her catalogue.
‘The workers,’ said David, ‘should have all these things.’
But he was a little doubtful about the softly deposited early-morning tea, which sounded impossibly sybaritic for an earnestly organized world.