They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [85]
As she looked at that beautiful evil face, all her silly adolescent calf love faded away, and she knew that what she felt for Edward had never been love. It had been the same feeling that she had experienced some hours earlier for Humphrey Bogart, and later for the Duke of Edinburgh. It had been glamour. And Edward had never loved her. He had exerted his charm and his glamour deliberately. He had picked her up that day, using his charm so easily, so naturally, that she had fallen for it with out a struggle. She had been a sucker.
It was extraordinary how much could flash through your mind in just a few seconds. You didn’t have to think it out. It just came. Full and instant knowledge. Perhaps because really, underneath, you had known it all along…
And at the same time some instinct of self-preservation, quick as all Victoria’s mental processes were quick, kept her face in an expression of foolish unthinking wonder. For she knew, instinctively, that she was in great danger. There was only one thing that could save her, only one card she could play. She made haste to play it.
‘You knew all along!’ she said. ‘You knew I was coming out here. You must have arranged it. Oh Edward, you are wonderful!’
Her face, that plastic impressionable face, showed one emotion – an almost cloying adoration. And she saw the response – the faintly scornful smile, the relief. She could almost feel Edward saying to himself, ‘The little fool! She’ll swallow anything! I can do what I like with her.’
‘But how did you arrange it?’ she said. ‘You must be very powerful. You must be quite different from what you pretend to be. You’re – it’s like you said the other day – you’re a King of Babylon.’
She saw the pride that lit up his face. She saw the power and strength and beauty and cruelty that had been disguised behind a fac¸ade of a modest likeable young man.
‘And I’m only a Christian Slave,’ thought Victoria. She said quickly and anxiously, as a final artistic touch (and what its cost was to her pride no one will ever know), ‘But you do love me, don’t you?’
His scorn was hardly to be hidden now. This little fool – all these fools of women! So easy to make them think you loved them and that was all they cared about! They had no conception of greatness of construction, of a new world, they just whined for love! They were slaves and you used them as slaves to further your ends.
‘Of course I love you,’ he said.
‘But what is it all about? Tell me, Edward? Make me understand.’
‘It’s a new world, Victoria. A new world that will rise out of the muck and ashes of the old.’
‘Tell me.’
He told her and in spite of herself she was almost carried away, carried into the dream. The old bad things must destroy each other. The fat old men grasping at their profits, impeding progress. The bigoted stupid Communists, trying to establish their Marxian heaven. There must be total war – total destruction. And then – the new Heaven and the new Earth. The small chosen band of higher beings, the scientists, the agricultural experts, the administrators– the young men like Edward – the young Siegfrieds of the New World. All young, all believing in their destiny as Supermen. When destruction had run its course, they would step in and take over.
It was madness – but it was constructive madness. It was the sort of thing that in a world, shattered and disintegrating, could happen.
‘But think,’ said Victoria, ‘of all the people who will be killed first.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Edward. ‘That doesn’t matter.’
It doesn’t matter – that was Edward’s creed. And suddenly for no reason, a remembrance of that three thousand years old coarse pottery bowl mended with bitumen flashed across Victoria’s mind. Surely those were the things that mattered – the little everyday things, the family to be cooked for, the four walls that enclosed the home, the one or two cherished possessions. All the thousands of ordinary people on the earth, minding their own business,