Certain elements of the world had fallen away. She was writing as she always did, without thought of readers or agents or editors. Agatha wrote to entertain herself, the same way she’d made up stories in her head as a child, spinning her hoop round the monkey puzzle tree at Ashfield and inventing characters. Writing a book was a different world to live in. And she dearly needed a different world.
These past days, she dressed herself from the same collection of men’s clothes she’d taken from the previous house, plus Miss Oliver’s warm and well-worn coat. Vanity, gone. She still wore her pearl necklace, it had belonged to her mother, but her pearl ring she had pushed to the back of an empty drawer in the servants’ room where she was bunking. This morning she had glanced at herself in the mirror, hair unwashed, man’s clothing, and thought she could walk right by nearly any of her acquaintances and only those who knew her best would recognize her. And who were those people who knew her best? She couldn’t come up with a single person, not even Honoria – a paid companion, if she was honest – who understood her as well, or with whom she had such ease, as the Irishman who’d spirited her away.
Even in this house, large as it was, Agatha could hear Finbarr’s nightmares. Every night since they’d run off together, until Nan showed up, she had left her own bed to place her hands on his shoulders. Finbarr, darling, wake up. All at once his eyes would open, taking her in, and breathing in gratitude. Twice he’d put his arms around her and held her close. It was a shock to find herself clasped against him and at the same time it wasn’t. She didn’t believe in reincarnation but if she did, she would have thought they’d known each other, Finbarr and she, in a previous life. An unlikely pair in theory but in practice perfectly likely. It made her realize how large her husband had loomed. He had somehow become to her the face of all men, and the way he looked upon her reflected how she appeared to all men. Finbarr represented an entirely different species, and here she had fallen into this strange but perfectly natural step with him.
Which meant that she could fall in step with another. Her mother wouldn’t have liked the thought of her married to a police inspector. But her mother wasn’t here to object, was she? Agatha found herself laughing – horrifying and such a relief, to laugh so quickly on the heels of remembering her mother’s death.
‘Something funny?’
It was me, standing there in the doorway. Flushed from lovemaking, my hair amiss, my chin raised in near defiance. The sight of me hardly moved her at all. She didn’t envy me, or want to hurt me. She didn’t even find my presence a particular intrusion. Another fugitive. So long as I agreed to keep my silence, I might as well come aboard. She seemed to have forgotten already – the mission for which Finbarr had enjoined her.
‘Hello, Nan,’ she said.
‘Hello, Mrs Christie.’
I didn’t feel as sanguine about her, in this moment, as she did about me. It made me furious somehow. To see her at the servants’ table. She who’d grown up in cavernous houses that had names. Whose idea of financial hardship was a hundred pounds a year for doing nothing. A five-room flat with a butler and a maid. A life of wanting things – a writing career, a husband, a child – and having them delivered to her, as if the wanting naturally equalled the having. For the sake of a woman like her a hundred more always suffered.
‘Come now,’ she said. I couldn’t account for her cheery disposition. ‘Call me Agatha, would you. Surely at this point we can dispense with formality. Both of us on the lam.’
‘I’m not on the lam. I’m on holiday.’
‘It’s rather an unusual holiday. I wonder what Archie would say about it?’ When I didn’t answer she said, ‘There. I knew you didn’t love him.’
I sat down at the table as Agatha stood to get another teacup. ‘I’m afraid there’s no milk,’ she said, pouring for me.
‘I don’t suppose Archie would have any right to say anything about it, would he? Not yet.’