Endless Night. Агата Кристи
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and handyman way. It was always on the cards that Mr Constantine would have a heart attack or a stroke.
‘You have not done as I said,’ he half screamed. ‘You have spent too much money. Much too much money. It is not as we agreed. It is going to cost me more than I thought.’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ said Santonix. ‘But the money’s got to be spent.’
‘It shall not be spent! It shall not be spent. You have got to keep within the limits I laid down. You understand?’
‘Then you won’t get the kind of house you want,’ said Santonix. ‘I know what you want. The house I build you will be the house you want. I’m quite sure of that and you’re quite sure of it, too. Don’t give me any of your pettifogging middle-class economies. You want a house of quality and you’re going to get it, and you’ll boast about it to your friends and they’ll envy you. I don’t build a house for anyone, I’ve told you that. There’s more to it than money. This house isn’t going to be like other people’s houses!’
‘It is going to be terrible. Terrible.’
‘Oh no it isn’t. The trouble with you is that you don’t know what you want. Or at least so anyone might think. But you do know what you want really, only you can’t bring it out into your mind. You can’t see it clearly. But I know. That’s the one thing I always know. What people are after and what they want. There’s a feeling in you for quality. I’m going to give you quality.’
He used to say things like that. And I’d stand by and listen. Somehow or other I could see for myself that this house that was being built there amongst pine trees looking over the sea, wasn’t going to be the usual house. Half of it didn’t look out towards the sea in a conventional way. It looked inland, up to a certain curve of mountains, up to a glimpse of sky between hills. It was odd and unusual and very exciting.
Santonix used to talk to me sometimes when I was off duty. He said:
‘I only build houses for people I want to build for.’
‘Rich people, you mean?’
‘They have to be rich or they couldn’t pay for the houses. But it’s not the money I’m going to make out of it I care about. My clients have to be rich because I want to make the kind of houses that cost money. The house only isn’t enough, you see. It has to have the setting. That’s just as important. It’s like a ruby or an emerald. A beautiful stone is only a beautiful stone. It doesn’t lead you anywhere further. It doesn’t mean anything, it has no form or significance until it has its setting. And the setting has to have a beautiful jewel to be worthy of it. I take the setting, you see, out of the landscape, where it exists only in its own right. It has no meaning until there is my house sitting proudly like a jewel within its grasp.’ He looked at me and laughed. ‘You don’t understand?’
‘I suppose not,’ I said slowly, ‘and yet—in a way—I think I do …’
‘That may be.’ He looked at me curiously.
We came down to the Riviera again later. By then the house was nearly finished. I won’t describe it because I couldn’t do it properly, but it was—well—something special—and it was beautiful. I could see that. It was a house you’d be proud of, proud to show to people, proud to look at yourself, proud to be in with the right person perhaps. And then suddenly one day Santonix said to me:
‘I could build a house for you, you know. I’d know the kind of house you’d want.’
I shook my head.
‘I shouldn’t know myself,’ I said, honestly.
‘Perhaps you wouldn’t. I’d know for you.’ Then he added, ‘It’s a thousand pities you haven’t got the money.’
‘And never shall have,’ I said.
‘You can’t say that,’ said Santonix. ‘Born poor doesn’t mean you’ve got to stay poor. Money’s queer. It goes where it’s wanted.’
‘I’m not sharp enough,’ I said.
‘You’re not ambitious enough. Ambition hasn’t woken up in you, but it’s there, you know.’
‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘some day when I’ve woken up ambition and I’ve made money, then I’ll come to you and say “build me a house”.’
He sighed then. He said:
‘I can’t wait … No, I can’t afford to wait. I’ve only a short time to go now. One house—two houses more. Not more than that. One doesn’t want to die young … Sometimes one has to … It doesn’t really matter, I suppose.’
‘I’ll have to wake up my ambition quick.’
‘No,’ said Santonix. ‘You’re healthy, you’re having fun, don’t change your way of life.’
I said: ‘I couldn’t if I tried.’
I thought that was true then. I liked my way of life and I was having fun and there was never anything wrong with my health. I’ve driven a lot of people who’ve made money, who’ve worked hard and who’ve got ulcers and coronary thrombosis and many other things as a result of working hard. I didn’t want to work hard. I could do a job as well as another but that was all there was to it. And I hadn’t got ambition, or I didn’t think I had ambition. Santonix had had ambition, I suppose. I could see that designing houses and building them, the planning of the drawing and something else that I couldn’t quite get hold of, all that had taken it out of him. He hadn’t been a strong man to begin with. I had a fanciful idea sometimes that he was killing himself before his time by the work he had put out to drive his ambition. I didn’t want to work. It was as simple as that. I distrusted work, disliked it. I thought it was a very bad thing, that the human race had unfortunately invented for itself.
I thought about Santonix quite often. He intrigued me almost more than anyone I knew. One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose. Something in one must choose. Santonix and his house were one of the things and the picture in Bond Street and visiting that ruined house, The Towers, and hearing the story of Gipsy’s Acre, all those were the things that I’d chosen to remember! Sometimes girls that I met, and journeys to the foreign places in the course of driving clients about. The clients were all the same. Dull. They always stayed at the same kind of hotels and ate the same kind of unimaginative food.
I still had that queer feeling in me of waiting for something, waiting for something to be offered to me, or to happen to me, I don’t quite know which way describes it best. I suppose really I was looking for a girl, the right sort of girl—by which I don’t mean a nice, suitable girl to settle down with, which is what my mother would have meant or my Uncle Joshua or some of my friends. I didn’t know at that time anything about love. All I knew about was sex. That was all anybody of my generation seemed to know about. We talked about it too much, I think, and heard too much about it and took it too seriously. We didn’t know—any of my friends or myself—what it was really going to be when it happened. Love I mean. We were young and virile and we looked the girls over we met and we appreciated their curves and their legs and the kind of eye they gave you, and you thought to yourself: ‘Will they or won’t they? Should I be wasting my time?’ And the more girls you made the more you boasted and the finer fellow you were thought to be, and the finer fellow you thought yourself.
I’d no real idea that that wasn’t all there was to it. I suppose it happens to everyone sooner or later and it happens suddenly. You don’t think as you imagine you’re going to think: ‘This might be the girl for me … This is the girl who is going to be mine.’ At least, I didn’t feel it that way. I didn’t know that when it happened it would happen quite suddenly. That I would say: ‘That’s the girl I belong to. I’m hers. I belong to her, utterly, for always.’ No. I never dreamed it would be like that. Didn’t one of the old comedians say once—wasn’t it one of his stock jokes? ‘I’ve