AGATHA DROVE AWAY from Styles just past midnight, hardly caring if she ever saw it again. The house was unlucky, she’d felt it from the first day she’d set foot inside. Archie had been the one who’d wanted to buy it, so he could be nearer to his golf club. Damn golf. Damn Archie. Clearly there was no reasoning with him. Perhaps she’d have better luck with me.
She had left the house earlier at 9.45 p.m. for a short while. The reports were correct on that account. Agatha headed out, driving for a while to clear her mind, then she turned round and came home, letting herself inside while the household slept. The house felt dark and quiet and empty. Bad luck clung to the ceilings like billows of smoke. Her skin was too small to contain the rage and sorrow and anxiety, she wanted to claw at herself to escape it. She wanted to burst, splattering herself and all her misery over the walls. She yanked off her wedding ring and threw it as hard as she could at the wall, so that it dinged the paint and then fell to the floor, spinning several times before wobbling to rest. Let it be swept up with the dust tomorrow.
It wouldn’t do. It couldn’t be borne. If she were a drinker, she would have polished off a bottle of something, but she wasn’t, so she gathered up her typewriter and some things to carry her over for a few days. She would go to Ashfield to get her mind straight. But once she had loaded her things into the car and climbed behind the wheel, she changed her mind. She would not politely allow that monstrous little hussy to upend her life entirely. Not without a fight. Instead of slinking away to her childhood home to brood she would drive directly to Godalming and march into the Owens’ cottage and cause an unbearable scene. So what if it was past midnight? So what if she woke every last person in the house? It wouldn’t endear her to Archie but what did that matter? She’d already thrown herself on his mercy and found he had none. But his mistress might be a different story.
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.