Elephants Can Remember. Agatha Christie
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tries to eat, and if you’ve got some sort of false teeth—well, you can’t do it very well. You know, you’ve got to know what you can eat and what you can’t.’
‘Ah!’ said Poirot, with a deep sigh. ‘Yes, yes. The dentists, they can do much for you, but not everything.’
‘Quite so. And then I thought of—you know—our teeth being only bone and so not awfully good, and how nice it would be to be a dog, who has real ivory teeth. And then I thought of anyone else who has ivory teeth, and I thought about walruses and—oh, other things like that. And I thought about elephants. Of course when you think of ivory you do think of elephants, don’t you? Great big elephant tusks.’
‘That is very true,’ said Poirot, still not seeing the point of what Mrs Oliver was saying.
‘So I thought that what we’ve really got to do is to get at the people who are like elephants. Because elephants, so they say, don’t forget.’
‘I have heard the phrase, yes,’ said Poirot.
‘Elephants don’t forget,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘You know, a story children get brought up on? How someone, an Indian tailor, stuck a needle or something in an elephant’s tusk. No. Not a tusk, his trunk, of course, an elephant’s trunk. And the next time the elephant came past he had a great mouthful of water and he splashed it out all over the tailor though he hadn’t seen him for several years. He hadn’t forgotten. He remembered. That’s the point, you see. Elephants remember. What I’ve got to do is—I’ve got to get in touch with some elephants.’
‘I do not know yet if I quite see what you mean,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘Who are you classifying as elephants? You sound as though you were going for information to the Zoo.’
‘Well, it’s not exactly like that,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Not elephants, as elephants, but the way people up to a point would resemble elephants. There are some people who do remember. In fact, one does remember queer things, I mean there are a lot of things that I remember very well. They happened—I remember a birthday party I had when I was five, and a pink cake—a lovely pink cake. It had a sugar bird on it. And I remember the day my canary flew away and I cried. And I remember another day when I went into a field and there was a bull there and somebody said it would gore me, and I was terrified and wanted to run out of the field. Well, I remember that quite well. It was a Tuesday too. I don’t know why I should remember it was a Tuesday, but it was a Tuesday. And I remember a wonderful picnic with blackberries. I remember getting pricked terribly, but getting more blackberries than anyone else. It was wonderful! By that time I was nine, I think. But one needn’t go back as far as that. I mean, I’ve been to hundreds of weddings in my life, but when I look back on a wedding there are only two that I remember particularly. One where I was a bridesmaid. It took place in the New Forest, I remember, and I can’t remember who was there actually. I think it was a cousin of mine getting married. I didn’t know her very well but she wanted a good many bridesmaids and, well, I came in handy, I suppose. But I know another wedding. That was a friend of mine in the Navy. He was nearly drowned in a submarine, and then he was saved, and then the girl he was engaged to, her people didn’t want her to marry him but then he did marry her after that and I was one of her bridesmaids at the marriage. Well, I mean, there’s always things you do remember.’
‘I see your point,’ said Poirot. ‘I find it interesting. So you will go à la recherche des éléphants?’
‘That’s right. I’d have to get the date right.’ ‘There,’ said Poirot, ‘I hope I may be able to help you.’
‘And then I’ll think of people I knew about at that time, people that I may have known who also knew the same friends that I did, who probably knew General What-not. People who may have known them abroad, but whom I also knew although I mayn’t have seen them for a good many years. You can look up people, you know, that you haven’t seen for a long time. Because people are always quite pleased to see someone coming up out of the past, even if they can’t remember very much about you. And then you naturally will talk about the things that were happening at that date, that you remember about.’
‘Very interesting,’ said Poirot. ‘I think you are very well equipped for what you propose to do. People who knew the Ravenscrofts either well or not very well; people who lived in the same part of the world where the thing happened or who might have been staying there. More difficult, but I think one could get at it. And so, somehow or other one would try different things. Start a little talk going about what happened, what they think happened, what anyone else has ever told you about what might have happened. About any love-affairs the husband or wife had, about any money that somebody might have inherited. I think you could scratch up a lot of things.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I’m afraid really I’m just a nosey-parker.’
‘You’ve been given an assignment,’ said Poirot, ‘not by someone you like, not by someone you wish to oblige, but someone you entirely dislike. That does not matter. You are still on a quest, a quest of knowledge. You take your own path. It is the path of the elephants. The elephants may remember. Bon voyage,’ said Poirot.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Mrs Oliver.
‘I’m sending you forth on your voyage of discovery,’ said Poirot. ‘A la recherche des éléphants.’
‘I expect I’m mad,’ said Mrs Oliver sadly. She brushed her hands through her hair again so that she looked like the old picture books of Struwelpeter. ‘I was just thinking of starting a story about a Golden Retriever. But it wasn’t going well. I couldn’t get started, if you know what I mean.’
‘All right, abandon the Golden Retriever. Concern yourself only with elephants.’
Great Aunt Alice’s Guide to Knowledge
‘Can you find my address book for me, Miss Livingstone?’
‘It’s on your desk, Mrs Oliver. In the left-hand corner.’
‘I don’t mean that one,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘That’s the one I’m using now. I mean my last one. The one I had last year, or perhaps the one before that again.’
‘Has it been thrown away, perhaps?’ suggested Miss Livingstone.
‘No, I don’t throw away address books and things like that because so often you want one. I mean some address that you haven’t copied into the new one. I expect it may be in one of the drawers of the tallboys.’
Miss Livingstone was a fairly new arrival, replacing Miss Sedgwick. Ariadne Oliver missed Miss Sedgwick. Sedgwick knew so many things. She knew the places where Mrs Oliver sometimes put things, the kind of places Mrs Oliver kept things in. She remembered the names of people Mrs Oliver had written nice letters to, and the names of people that Mrs Oliver, goaded beyond endurance, had written rather rude things to. She was invaluable, or rather, had been invaluable. ‘She was like—what was the book called?’ Mrs Oliver said, casting her mind back. ‘Oh yes, I know—a big brown book. All Victorians had it. Enquire Within Upon Everything. And you could too! How to take iron mark stains off linen, how to deal with curdled mayonnaise, how to start a chatty letter to a bishop. Many, many things. It was all there in Enquire Within Upon Everything.’ Great Aunt Alice’s great standby.
Miss Sedgwick had been just as good as Aunt Alice’s book. Miss Livingstone was not at all the same thing. Miss Livingstone stood there always, very long-faced with a sallow skin, looking purposefully efficient. Every line of her face said ‘I am very efficient.’ But she wasn’t really, Mrs Oliver thought. She only