The Christie Affair(89)
‘What happens next, then?’ Finbarr asked.
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to tell the Yorkshire police what I know,’ Chilton said. ‘About who the Marstons are. And what Nan and her friend are guilty of. I’m afraid the inquest will take it from there.’
‘Not today,’ Finbarr said. Agatha heard the rasp of mustard gas strangling his voice, worse than usual.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Not today.’
‘But Agatha.’ Chilton turned to her as if Finbarr couldn’t hear. ‘That will give him the time he needs to escape with her.’
‘Would that be so bad?’ Agatha said. ‘Sometimes an escape is precisely what’s needed.’
Chilton looked dubious. How many of his duties would he let float away before all this was over? What if Agatha wanted Nan to escape to form a road back to her husband? Though surely my arrest would net the same result. Archie would not have stood by me through a murder trial. He might not have stood by me if he heard me speak with the working-class accent I’d so carefully expunged.
‘One more day,’ Agatha said, softy, delightfully aware of the romantic power she had over Chilton. ‘Perhaps two.’
One more day undiscovered. Perhaps two. One more day exempt from time and repercussion. One more day dispensing with propriety and responsibilities. One more day as if her mother had never died, and her husband had never left her – indeed, as if both of them had never existed at all, to cause her joy or pain. Why not two more days? Why not a thousand?
‘One more day,’ she said again. ‘Just one. We’ll decide tomorrow. We’ll make a plan?’ The question mark was a brilliant stroke. Implying he was in a position to argue.
‘Come with me,’ Finbarr said, as if they’d all reached an agreement. He picked up the tray and left the kitchen, moving his head ever so slightly, indicating that Chilton should collect the wine.
Upstairs the great room was nearly empty of furniture except for a settee covered by a dust sheet and a cluster of large pillows thrown to the floor (as if we had not been the first squatters the Timeless Manor had seen and someone else had sojourned here, and made free with what could be found). On the floor beside the settee sat a Victrola – of the gramophone variety, old fashioned even for the time, with a great mahogany horn.
‘I found it in the butler’s pantry,’ Finbarr said. He wound it up and placed the needle on its record, and scratchy big band music filled the cavernous room.
To join the party, I had but to follow the music. Finbarr lounged on the floor against one of the big pillows, a goblet filled with wine in one hand. Chilton and Agatha were dancing, her face aglow from the firelight and the day in the baths, looking as lovely in her trousers and jumper as she ever had wearing any gown in any ballroom.
Three faces turned towards me, fondly, withholding the devastating information. Tomorrow. It could all be saved until tomorrow. For now we would let our disappearance extend a little longer. It would continue into the night and small hours of the morning. One thing we’d learned since discovering this place: there was nothing in the world that couldn’t wait.
‘Oh, Nan,’ Agatha said, as Chilton dipped her, her head thrown back, her tone joyful, as if I were her best friend in all the world. ‘Come and have some wine and cheese, come and have a dance. For who knows what tomorrow will bring?’
Remarkably, my ears did not hear this as ominous. It sounded like an invitation. If I had been a different sort of person, raised in a different time and country, I might have told her I loved her. And she might have said it back. Instead, the two of us smiled at each other. Not rivals but landsmen. A shared sorrow can create unexpected warmth, even as it illuminates all the ways our world is ruined.
The Disappearance
Days Nine and Ten
Sunday, 12 December and Monday, 13 December 1926
THE MACHINERY OF the world had already started grinding against our remaining undiscovered. The Harrogate librarian, Miss Barnard, picked up newspapers with increasing fervour, looking at every new photograph and thinking that she knew – she absolutely knew – the woman she’d seen was the missing mystery writer. Finally, she telephoned the police department in Leeds. The officer who answered, hearing the emotional certainty in her voice, utterly dismissed her concerns. But still. A seed had been planted.
Inside the Timeless Manor, though, everything was beautiful.
That night we stayed up past dawn, the records singing, the wine flowing, the four of us twirling and laughing and dancing. Agatha felt young again. Truly young – once again the girl who had slid off her horse when her hair flew off into the wind, to collect it with gales of laughter. All the house parties she’d attended as a girl, jumping from one to the next – sometimes out of necessity, because the money had run out and Ashfield was let. Without society Agatha would have had nowhere to go. But when she was a guest, everything was taken care of, everything was bright and gay and fun. But never so much fun as this. Nobody, ever, like Finbarr. Nobody like Chilton, certainly, with his hand at her waist, travelling at will. A strange, gorgeous echo of her old life but with the oddest most unlikely people, and no rules at all.
What would her mother say? Liberating to have that question melt into the air, unanswered, unimportant. How it used to hover over her every move. How she had watched herself, even in her youth. Never too much to drink, if anything at all. Don’t say this. Don’t say that. Don’t wander upstairs into a bedroom with a man not your husband to do whatever the two of you please. Now her mother was gone but life did go on in new ways. Humane ways. That was the thing. To be sensible and to be humane. Even if it appeared at the moment she wasn’t particularly sensible anymore. For what seemed the first time in her life – and only for this short window – Agatha owned her own virtue, and thereby her own fate.