The Christie Affair(42)
Agatha regretted the genteel approach she’d taken with me on the pavement in front of Simpson’s. Now she imagined grabbing me by the shoulders, perhaps with a measured shake, and demanding I give up her husband. If that didn’t work, she’d fall to her knees and beg. She’d let all the anguish pour out, visible and audible. ‘Angoisse,’ her mother would have said; she’d liked to use French when discussing emotion, on the rare occasions she determined emotion must be discussed. But Agatha would not allow any mollifying translation. Imagining it, she thought, Nan might take pity. The girl was a slut, not a monster.
It was difficult to see beyond the windscreen, between the darkness and her eyes, puffed to slits from crying. Otherwise she might have seen him earlier, the man who walked down the middle of the road, trying to flag her down, his long arms waving in and out over his head in an ‘X’ formation. As it was, she nearly ran him down to his death. It felt to her like the last moment, when she swerved to miss him, realizing – again at the last moment – that if she didn’t put on the brakes, she’d fly headlong into the chalk pit.
Not something she longed for, death. Not one bit. The sort of thing you realize, in the instance after an accident almost kills you. And after all, she knew a good bit about poison, between her stint in the dispensary during the war and research for her novels. If she’d wanted to be dead, she already would be.
There was a knock on the driver’s side window. The man she’d swerved to avoid killing leaned down, staring at her with unnerving calm, as if all this were perfectly normal. Perhaps now he’d kill her, but she rolled down the window anyway. Black hair fell into his eyes, and his breath gusted in the cold air. From his coat and jumper she recognized him as the same fellow who’d given Teddy the whittled dog.
‘Are you quite all right?’ He had a raspy Irish brogue and soulful blue eyes.
‘I believe I am.’
‘I’m sorry if I startled you.’
‘Startled me? My dear, you ran me quite off the road.’
He opened the door to her car, so she could get out. She felt it again, the awareness that perhaps she ought to be afraid of him. The car wobbled precariously, and she saw its front wheels were hanging over the pit. It struck her again with the force of averted tragedy, how very much she wanted to be alive.
‘I’ve come to talk to you about Nan O’Dea,’ the young man said.
Oh, the impudence. The way the world was unfolding before her. An awful dream. Wake up, she commanded herself. Wake up, wake up. She closed her eyes, determined to open them and find herself home in bed with her own husband. Even as the cold air insisted she was out on the road in the dead of night, confronted by a stranger wanting to discuss the most intimate horror of her life.
‘Mrs Christie,’ the Irishman said. ‘I think we might be able to help each other. You and I.’ He had a nice face. Très sympathique, her mother would have said. A handsome young man with an aura of kindness about him, if sadly lacking any humour. She raised her hands and placed them over her face.
‘There now,’ the Irishman said. She removed her hands and, gently, he touched her cheek just below her eye, where a tear would have fallen. ‘We’ll have time for tears later, won’t we? It’s cold and there’s some travelling to do.’
‘I don’t know if my car will start.’ As if this were the reason not to go with him. Not even considering that she’d be travelling with this stranger. Not even worrying that she must have gone mad not to at least try to back up and drive away, fast as possible.
‘We’ll leave it,’ the Irishman said. ‘That’ll give them something to worry about, won’t it? As luck would have it, we’re both up and about after dark. And I’ve recently come upon a vehicle nobody seems to be using.’
‘Stolen?’
‘Abandoned not far from here, on the grass by the road. I’ve borrowed it.’
‘So you’ll be returning it, then?’ Her voice was sceptical and pointed.
‘If I can.’
There was a melancholy to his voice that pinched Agatha’s already vulnerable heart. ‘How lucky,’ she said, suddenly wanting to be forgiving. ‘The luck of the Irish, I suppose.’
A rasping sound, the sad echo of a laugh that never was. ‘I’m afraid to say I’ve not found much truth in that expression.’
Ah, she thought, the light dawning. This was Nan’s young man. She’d scarcely paid attention to what the girl had said about her past the other day at Simpson’s. Now she narrowed her eyes, unsure of what to do. The last thing she needed was another man in love with Nan O’Dea.
Still, she stepped out of the car and placed her hand in his. He nodded, as if proud of her for making the right decision, and she decided to let herself be convinced and give herself over to his care. The scene she’d planned in Godalming would be of no use. But this fellow could be.
‘You gather what you need,’ he said, ‘and I’ll bring the other car round.’
Dazed enough to forget her hastily packed suitcase, Agatha transferred the most immediate necessities – her sponge bag, her typewriter – into a roomy Bentley. Before getting into it she stopped a moment, and stared longingly at her own car. You must understand how she adored that vehicle. How proud she was of buying it herself, with money earned from her writing. Perhaps, right now, someone was sitting in front of a fire, unable to sleep, turning the pages of her latest novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The embodiment of that, to her, was the wonderful little car, now teetering on the brink of destruction, just like her life.