Unfinished Portrait. Агата Кристи
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seen the sea. The idea of going on a boat from France to England frightened her very much.
‘Je me figure,’ said Jeanne, ‘que j’aurais horriblement peur. N’en parlons pas! Parlez-moi de votre petit oiseau.’
One day, as Celia was walking with her father, a voice hailed them from a small table outside one of the hotels.
‘John! I declare it’s old John!’
‘Bernard!’
A big jolly-looking man had jumped up and was wringing her father warmly by the hand.
This, it seemed, was a Mr Grant, who was one of her father’s oldest friends. They had not seen each other for some years, and neither of them had had the least idea that the other was in Pau. The Grants were staying in a different hotel, but the two families used to foregather after déjeuner and drink coffee.
Mrs Grant was, Celia thought, the loveliest thing she had ever seen. She had silver-grey hair, exquisitely arranged, and wonderful dark-blue eyes, clear-cut features, and a very clear incisive voice. Celia immediately invented a new character, called Queen Marise. Queen Marise had all the personal attributes of Mrs Grant and was adored by her devoted subjects. She was three times the victim of attempted assassination, but was rescued by a devoted young man called Colin, whom she at once knighted. Her coronation robes were of emerald green velvet and she had a silver crown set with diamonds.
Mr Grant was not made a king. Celia thought he was nice, but that his face was too fat and too red—not nearly so nice as her own father with his brown beard and his habit of throwing it up in the air when he laughed. Her own father, Celia thought, was just what a father should be—full of nice jokes that didn’t make you feel silly like Mr Grant’s sometimes did.
With the Grants was their son Jim, a pleasant freckle-faced schoolboy. He was always good-tempered and smiling, and had very round blue eyes that gave him rather a surprised look. He adored his mother.
He and Cyril eyed each other like strange dogs. Jim was very respectful to Cyril, because Cyril was two years older and at a public school. Neither of them took any notice of Celia because, of course, Celia was only a kid.
The Grants went home to England after about three weeks. Celia overheard Mr Grant say to her mother:
‘It gave me a shock to see old John, but he tells me he is ever so much fitter since being here.’
Celia said to her mother afterwards:
‘Mummy, is Daddy ill?’
Her mother looked a little queer as she answered:
‘No. No, of course not. He’s perfectly well now. It was just the damp and the rain in England.’
Celia was glad her father wasn’t ill. Not, she thought, that he could be—he never went to bed or sneezed or had a bilious attack. He coughed sometimes, but that was because he smoked so much. Celia knew that, because her father told her so.
But she wondered why her mother had looked—well, queer …
When May came they left Pau and went first to Argelès at the foot of the Pyrenees and after that to Cauterets up in the mountains.
At Argelès Celia fell in love. The object of her passion was the lift boy—Auguste. Not Henri, the little fair lift boy who played tricks sometimes with her and Bar and Beatrice (they also had come to Argelès), but Auguste. Auguste was eighteen, tall, dark, sallow, and very gloomy in appearance.
He took no interest in the passengers he propelled up and down. Celia never gathered courage to speak to him. No one, not even Jeanne, knew of her romantic passion. In bed at night Celia would envisage scenes in which she saved Auguste’s life by catching the bridle of his furiously galloping horse—a shipwreck in which she and Auguste alone survived, she saving his life by swimming ashore and holding his head above water. Sometimes Auguste saved her life in a fire, but this was somehow not quite so satisfactory. The climax she preferred was when Auguste, with tears in his eyes, said: ‘Mademoiselle, I owe you my life. How can I ever thank you?’
It was a brief but violent passion. A month later they went to Cauterets, and Celia fell in love with Janet Patterson instead.
Janet was fifteen. She was a nice pleasant girl with brown hair and kindly blue eyes. She was not beautiful or striking in any way. She was kind to younger children and not bored by playing with them.
To Celia the only joy in life was some day to grow up to be like her idol. Some day she too would wear a striped blouse and collar and tie, and would wear her hair in a plait tied with a black bow. She would have, too, that mysterious thing—a figure. Janet had a figure—a very apparent one sticking out each side of the striped blouse. Celia—a very thin child (described indeed by her brother Cyril when he wanted to annoy as a Scrawny Chicken—a term which never failed to reduce her to tears)—was passionately enamoured of plumpness. Some day, some glorious day, she would be grown up and sticking out and going in in all the proper places.
‘Mummy,’ she said one day, ‘when shall I have a chest that sticks out?’
Her mother looked at her and said:
‘Why, do you want one so badly?’
‘Oh, yes,’ breathed Celia anxiously.
‘When you’re about fourteen or fifteen—Janet’s age.’
‘Can I have a striped blouse then?’
‘Perhaps, but I don’t think they’re very pretty.’
Celia looked at her reproachfully.
‘I think they’re lovely. Oh, Mummy, do say I can have one when I’m fifteen.’
‘You can have one—if you still want it.’
Of course she would want it.
She went off to look for her idol. To her great annoyance Janet was walking with her French friend Yvonne Barbier. Celia hated Yvonne Barbier with a jealous hatred. Yvonne was very pretty, very elegant, very sophisticated. Although only fifteen, she looked more like eighteen. Her arm linked through Janet’s, she was talking to her in a cooing voice.
‘Naturellement, je n’ai rien dit à Maman. Je lui ai répondu—’
‘Run away, darling,’ said Janet kindly. ‘Yvonne and I are busy just now.’
Celia withdrew sadly. How she hated that horrible Yvonne Barbier.
Alas, two weeks later, Janet and her parents left Cauterets. Her image faded quickly from Celia’s mind, but her ecstatic anticipation of the day when she would have ‘a figure’ remained.
Cauterets was great fun. You were right under the mountains here. Not that even now they looked at all as Celia had pictured them. To the end of her life she could never really admire mountain scenery. A sense of being cheated remained at the back of her mind. The delights of Cauterets were varied. There was the hot walk in the morning to La Raillière where her mother and father drank glasses of nasty tasting water. After the water drinking there was the purchase of sticks of sucre d’orge. They were twirly sticks of different colours and flavours. Celia usually had ananas—her mother liked a green one—aniseed. Her father, strangely enough, liked none of them. He seemed buoyant and happier since he came to Cauterets.
‘This place suits me, Miriam,’ he said. ‘I can feel myself getting a new man here.’
His wife answered:
‘We’ll stay here as long as we can.’
She too seemed gayer—she laughed more. The anxious pucker between her brows smoothed itself away. She saw very little of Celia. Satisfied with the child being in Jeanne’s keeping, she devoted herself heart and soul to her husband.
After the morning excursion Celia would come home with Jeanne through the woods, going up and down zigzag paths, occasionally tobogganing down steep slopes with disastrous results to the seats of her drawers.