The Christie Affair(15)

Hope. She could crank up her beloved Morris Cowley and follow Archie to London. She could march into his office and grab him by the lapel and insist he see the necessity of working things out. She could shake his love for her back into him. He would remember she was flesh of his flesh. He would not go away for the weekend with his mistress but end things with her, and return home where he belonged.

All of that would involve a scene. Agatha had not been raised to cause scenes, or to display emotions in public. She was raised to keep busy, so she bundled up in her fur coat and accompanied Honoria and Teddy on their walk to school. ‘Here,’ she said to Teddy, handing the little girl her hoop and stick. ‘You can spin this along the way.’

Teddy obliged till the end of the drive, then tossed the hoop on the grass to skip ahead. Peter followed her. He was a wonderfully companionable dog; there was never any question of a leash. Agatha reclaimed the hoop and rolled it herself as they walked along the dirt road.

‘My mother didn’t believe in schooling for a girl,’ Agatha said to Honoria. ‘She thought it was best to let my mind develop naturally.’

Honoria knew this perfectly well but listened attentively as if hearing it for the first time. A person in despair likes to visit the past. Agatha’s past had included her beloved Nursie, and a governess here and there. She’d spent occasional months in proper schools in Torquay, and overseas when she was older. And she’d gone to finishing school; one couldn’t do without that. Honoria nodded, as if finishing school would have been an option for her.

‘But mostly I ran wild in Torquay, all over the grounds at Ashfield.’ She stared after Teddy, a pretty child whose brown hair seemed to grow richer and darker by the day. Agatha’s eyes glazed over with the past, as she remembered how she used to roll her hoop in the gardens at home, through the dark ilex, past the elms, around the big beech tree, making up imaginary friends to keep her company. Did Teddy have the same goings-on in her private thoughts? Did she entertain herself with endless stories and invented companions? Or was she only concerned with the tangible world, the real friends that would preclude a need for pretending?

‘Oh, Honoria,’ Agatha said. The hoop calmed her but slowed them down. It was child-size and she had to stoop to make it work. Teddy ran ahead down the road, in sight but out of earshot. Agatha gave up, tossing it to the side to collect on their way home.

‘You’ll have to face it, Agatha.’ Honoria was weary of the way Agatha believed the game was still on, when so clearly it had already been won by someone else. ‘I know it’s hard but face it you must. He’s gone for good.’

‘I simply can’t believe that.’ Agatha would never speak of intimate things between herself and her husband so she didn’t tell Honoria about the night before. Instead she rattled off a list of examples, friends she knew whose husbands had had a lark with some other woman but then got over it and returned home. She thought again of waiting out her contract with Bodley Head so that she could settle handsomely at William Collins. The strategy had worked with her career and now it would work with her marriage. All one needed to get through these things was patience and a plan.

Honoria listened but it sounded to her like desperation. She could tell by the way Agatha wrung her hands, she knew it was desperation too. Sometimes hard truths needed to be stated plainly.

‘Colonel Christie won’t get over it,’ Honoria insisted. ‘I’m sorry to say so, but it’s no use painting the lily. I see it in his face. And why would you want to stay married to a man who prefers that little tart? Better to face facts. He’s gone from you.’

‘Gone from me,’ Agatha echoed. Her cheeks stung from the chilly air.

Her mother had warned her only last summer – the summer that turned out to be her last – not to spend too much time in Torquay, away from her husband. ‘If a woman spends too much time away from her husband, she loses him,’ her mother had said. ‘Especially a husband like Archie.’

And indeed at that time Archie was already deeply embroiled with me, and somewhere inside her Agatha knew it, and all the same she refused to know it – refused to see she could lose her mother and her husband in so brief a span of time. So she had squeezed her mother’s frail hand and ignored the death rattle in her voice, and promised, ‘There’s no man more loyal that Archie. He’s faithful to his core. You can bet your life on that.’

Perhaps her mother had bet her life on it. And lost.

By this time Teddy, always bold and impatient, had gained a considerable distance ahead of Agatha and Honoria. Sunningdale, in Berkshire abutting Surrey, was an easy distance to London by train. The houses were far apart from each other and private, with lovely gardens. The roads weren’t paved, and dust flew up when the occasional carriage or bicycle or automobile went by. The two women were not hoverers by nature and were happy to let Teddy meander ahead. They didn’t worry when she crested the hill and disappeared.

As Honoria and Agatha caught sight of her again, a good way down the road, they could also make out the figure of a man, kneeling on the ground, talking to her.

‘Do you know him?’ Agatha asked Honoria. For all she knew this was someone they ran into regularly, part of their daily routine.

‘No. I don’t believe I do.’

Both women shielded their eyes from the sun with their hands. Strangers always seemed to take to Teddy. Once on the beach at Torquay a woman had scooped her up and hugged her.