The Moving Finger - Agatha Christie [36]
Joanna is very nice to servants and most of them like her but she has never cut any ice with Partridge.
“It’s no good, my girl,” I said when Partridge had gone and Joanna had joined me outside. “Your sympathy and leniency are not appreciated. The good old overbearing ways for Partridge and things done the way they should be done in a gentleman’s house.”
“I never heard of such tyranny as not allowing them to have their friends to see them,” said Joanna. “It’s all very well, Jerry, but they can’t like being treated like black slaves.”
“Evidently they do,” I said. “At least the Partridges of this world do.”
“I can’t imagine why she doesn’t like me. Most people do.”
“She probably despises you as an inadequate housekeeper. You never draw your hand across a shelf and examine it for traces of dust. You don’t look under the mats. You don’t ask what happened to the remains of the chocolate soufflé, and you never order a nice bread pudding.”
“Ugh!” said Joanna.
She went on sadly. “I’m a failure all round today. Despised by our Aimée for ignorance of the vegetable kingdom. Snubbed by Partridge for being a human being. I shall now go out into the garden and eat worms.”
“Megan’s there already,” I said.
For Megan had wandered away a few minutes previously and was now standing aimlessly in the middle of a patch of lawn looking not unlike a meditative bird waiting for nourishment.
She came back, however, towards us and said abruptly:
“I say, I must go home today.”
“What?” I was dismayed.
She went on, flushing, but speaking with nervous determination.
“It’s been awfully good of you having me and I expect I’ve been a fearful nuisance, but I have enjoyed it awfully, only now I must go back, because after all, well, it’s my home and one can’t stay away for ever, so I think I’ll go this morning.”
Both Joanna and I tried to make her change her mind, but she was quite adamant, and finally Joanna got out the car and Megan went upstairs and came down a few minutes later with her belongings packed up again.
The only person pleased seemed to be Partridge, who had almost a smile on her grim face. She had never liked Megan much.
I was standing in the middle of the lawn when Joanna returned.
She asked me if I thought I was a sundial.
“Why?”
“Standing there like a garden ornament. Only one couldn’t put on you the motto of only marking the sunny hours. You looked like thunder!”
“I’m out of humour. First Aimée Griffith—(“Gracious!” murmured Joanna in parenthesis, “I must speak about those vegetables!”) and then Megan beetling off. I’d thought of taking her for a walk up to Legge Tor.”
“With a collar and lead, I suppose?” said Joanna.
“What?”
Joanna repeated loudly and clearly as she moved off round the corner of the house to the kitchen garden:
“I said, ‘With a collar and lead, I suppose?’ Master’s lost his dog, that’s what’s the matter with you!”
III
I was annoyed, I must confess, at the abrupt way in which Megan had left us. Perhaps she had suddenly got bored with us.
After all, it wasn’t a very amusing life for a girl. At home she’d got the kids and Elsie Holland.
I heard Joanna returning and hastily moved in case she should make more rude remarks about sundials.
Owen Griffith called in his car just before lunchtime, and the gardener was waiting for him with the necessary garden produce.
Whilst old Adams was stowing it in the car I brought Owen indoors for a drink. He wouldn’t stay to lunch.
When I came in with the sherry I found Joanna had begun doing her stuff.
No signs of animosity now. She was curled up in the corner of the sofa and was positively purring, asking Owen questions about his work, if he liked being a G.P., if he wouldn’t rather have specialized? She thought, doctoring was one of the most fascinating things in the world.
Say what you will of her, Joanna is a lovely, a heaven-born listener. And after listening to so many would-be geniuses telling her how they had been unappreciated, listening to Owen Griffith was easy money. By the time we