While the Light Lasts - Agatha Christie [52]
He heard her voice close against his ear–poppy and mandragora.
‘What else is there to live for? Isn’t this enough? Love–happiness–success–love–’
The wall was growing up all round him now–‘the curtain soft as silk’, the curtain wrapping him round, stifling him a little, but so soft, so sweet! Now they were drifting together, at peace, out on the crystal sea. The wall was very high now, shutting out all those other things–those dangerous, disturbing things that hurt–that always hurt. Out on the sea of crystal, the golden apple between their hands.
The light faded from Jane’s picture.
Afterword
Like many of Christie’s early short stories, ‘Within a Wall’, first published in the Royal Magazine in October 1925, is somewhat ambiguous. The concluding remarks about the encircling white walls can be taken as what they appear to be, a description of the arms of Isobel Loring as they wind around Alan Everard, but how else might the phrase be interpreted? There is the obscure closing reference to ‘The golden apple within their hands’–whose hands, and what does the ‘golden apple’ symbolize? Is there perhaps a darker significance to Alan’s earlier misunderstanding of Winnie’s riddle? Is he in fact strangling his wife at the end of the story? Or, given that ‘the light’ is fading from Jane’s picture at the end, is the reader supposed to understand that Alan has forgotten her and forgiven Isobel? And what of his own death? Christie does not explain the circumstances, only noting that it has led to unkind rumours which the narrator of the story is seeking to scotch.
The story is also based around one of the most common motifs in the work of Agatha Christie, the eternal triangle. This features in various works, including the similarly structured Poirot novels Death on the Nile (1937) and Evil Under the Sun (1941) and in short stories like ‘The Bloodstained Pavement’, collected in The Thirteen Problems (1932). In A Talent to Deceive (1980), unquestionably the finest critique of her writing, Robert Barnard describes how Christie uses this and other commonplace themes as one of her ‘strategies of deception’, tricking readers into misdirecting their sympathy (and suspicions) by playing on their expectations. She also adopted similar tactics in her stage plays, most notably in The Mousetrap (1952).
The Mystery of The Baghdad Chest
The words made a catchy headline, and I said as much to my friend, Hercule Poirot. I knew none of the parties. My interest was merely the dispassionate one of the man in the street. Poirot agreed.
‘Yes, it has a flavour of the Oriental, of the mysterious. The chest may very well have been a sham Jacobean one from the Tottenham Court Road; none the less the reporter who thought of naming it the Baghdad Chest was happily inspired. The word “mystery” is also thoughtfully placed in juxtaposition, though I understand there is very little mystery about the case.’
‘Exactly. It is all rather horrible and macabre, but it is not mysterious.’
‘Horrible and macabre,’ repeated Poirot thoughtfully.
‘The whole idea is revolting,’ I said, rising to my feet and pacing up and down the room. ‘The murderer kills this man–his friend–shoves him into the chest, and half an hour later is dancing in that same room with the wife of his victim. Think! If she had imagined for one moment–’
‘True,’ said Poirot thoughtfully. ‘That much-vaunted possession, a woman’s intuition–it does not seem to have been working.’
‘The party seems to have gone off very merrily,’ I said with a slight shiver. ‘And all that time, as they danced and played poker, there was a dead man in the room with them. One could write a play about such an idea.’
‘It has been done,’ said Poirot. ‘But console yourself, Hastings,’ he added kindly. ‘Because a theme has been used once, there is no reason why it should not be used again. Compose your drama.’
I had picked up the paper