The Hollow - Agatha Christie [78]
It was the rough similitude of a horse. The clay had been slapped on in great irregular lumps. It was the kind of horse that would have given the colonel of a cavalry regiment apoplexy, so unlike was it to any flesh and blood horse that had ever been foaled. It would also have distressed Henrietta’s Irish hunting forebears. Nevertheless it was a horse–a horse conceived in the abstract.
Henrietta wondered what Inspector Grange would think of it if he ever saw it, and her mouth widened a little in amusement as she pictured his face.
Chapter 24
Edward Angkatell stood hesitantly in the swirl of foot traffic in Shaftesbury Avenue. He was nerving himself to enter the establishment which bore the gold-lettered sign: ‘Madame Alfrege’.
Some obscure instinct had prevented him from merely ringing up and asking Midge to come out and lunch. That fragment of telephone conversation at The Hollow had disturbed him–more, had shocked him. There had been in Midge’s voice a submission, a subservience that had outraged all his feelings.
For Midge, the free, the cheerful, the outspoken, to have to adopt that attitude. To have to submit, as she clearly was submitting, to rudeness and insolence on the other end of the wire. It was all wrong–the whole thing was wrong! And then, when he had shown his concern, she had met him point-blank with the unpalatable truth that one had to keep one’s job, that jobs weren’t easy to get, and that the holding down of jobs entailed more unpleasantness than the mere performing of a stipulated task.
Up till then Edward had vaguely accepted the fact that a great many young women had ‘jobs’ nowadays. If he had thought about it at all, he had thought that on the whole they had jobs because they liked jobs–that it flattered their sense of independence and gave them an interest of their own in life.
The fact that a working day of nine to six, with an hour off for lunch, cut a girl off from most of the pleasures and relaxations of a leisured class had simply not occurred to Edward. That Midge, unless she sacrificed her lunch hour, could not drop into a picture gallery, that she could not go to an afternoon concert, drive out of town on a fine summer’s day, lunch in a leisurely way at a distant restaurant, but had instead to relegate her excursions into the country to Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and to snatch her lunch in a crowded Lyons or a snack bar, was a new and unwelcome discovery. He was very fond of Midge. Little Midge–that was how he thought of her. Arriving shy and wide-eyed at Ainswick for the holidays, tongue-tied at first, then opening up into enthusiasm and affection.
Edward’s tendency to live exclusively in the past, and to accept the present dubiously as something yet untested, had delayed his recognition of Midge as a wage-earning adult.
It was on that evening at The Hollow when he had come in cold and shivering from that strange, upsetting clash with Henrietta, and when Midge had knelt to build up the fire, that he had been first aware of a Midge who was not an affectionate child but a woman. It had been an upsetting vision–he had felt for a moment that he had lost something–something that was a precious part of Ainswick. And he had said impulsively, speaking out of that suddenly aroused feeling, ‘I wish I saw more of you, little Midge…’
Standing outside in the moonlight, speaking to a Henrietta who was no longer startlingly the familiar Henrietta he had loved for so long–he had known sudden panic. And he had come in to a further disturbance of the set pattern which was his life. Little Midge was also a part of Ainswick–and this was no longer little Midge, but a courageous and sad-eyed adult whom he did not know.
Ever since then he had been troubled in his mind, and had indulged in a good deal of self-reproach for the unthinking way in which he had never bothered about Midge’s happiness or comfort. The idea of her uncongenial job at Madame Alfrege’s had worried him more and more, and he had