CHAPTER 2

      ‘And I suppose you’re still living at that dear St Mary Mead?’ Lady Selina was asking. ‘Such a sweet unspoilt village. I often think about it. Just the same as ever, I suppose?’

      ‘Well, not quite.’ Miss Marple reflected on certain aspects of her place of residence. The new Building Estate. The additions to the Village Hall, the altered appearance of the High Street with its up-to-date shop fronts—She sighed. ‘One has to accept change, I suppose.’

      ‘Progress,’ said Lady Selina vaguely. ‘Though it often seems to me that it isn’t progress. All these smart plumbing fixtures they have nowadays. Every shade of colour and superb what they call “finish”—but do any of them really pull? Or push, when they’re that kind. Every time you go to a friend’s house, you find some kind of a notice in the loo—“Press sharply and release,” “Pull to the left,” “Release quickly.” But in the old days, one just pulled up a handle any kind of way, and cataracts of water came at once—There’s the dear Bishop of Medmenham,’ Lady Selina broke off to say, as a handsome, elderly cleric passed by. ‘Practically quite blind, I believe. But such a splendid militant priest.’

      A little clerical talk was indulged in, interspersed by lady Selina’s recognition of various friends and acquaintances, many of whom were not the people she thought they were. She and Miss Marple talked a little of ‘old days’, though Miss Marple’s upbringing, of course, had been quite different from Lady Selina’s, and their reminiscences were mainly confined to the few years when Lady Selina, a recent widow of severely straitened means, had taken a small house in the village of St Mary Mead during the time her second son had been stationed at an airfield nearby.

      ‘Do you always stay here when you come up, Jane? Odd I haven’t seen you here before.’

      ‘Oh no, indeed. I couldn’t afford to, and anyway, I hardly ever leave home these days. No, it was a very kind niece of mine who thought it would be a treat for me to have a short visit to London. Joan is a very kind girl—at least perhaps hardly a girl.’ Miss Marple reflected with a qualm that Joan must now be close on fifty. ‘She is a painter, you know. Quite a well-known painter. Joan West. She had an exhibition not long ago.’

      Lady Selina had little interest in painters, or indeed in anything artistic. She regarded writers, artists and musicians as a species of clever performing animal; she was prepared to feel indulgent towards them, but to wonder privately why they wanted to do what they did.

      ‘This modern stuff, I suppose,’ she said, her eyes wandering. ‘There’s Cicely Longhurst—dyed her hair again, I see.’

      ‘I’m afraid dear Joan is rather modern.’

      Here Miss Marple was quite wrong. Joan West had been modern about twenty years ago, but was now regarded by the young arriviste artists as completely old-fashioned.

      Casting a brief glance at Cicely Longhurst’s hair, Miss Marple relapsed into a pleasant remembrance of how kind Joan had been. Joan had actually said to her husband, ‘I wish we could do something for poor old Aunt Jane. She never gets away from home. Do you think she’d like to go to Bournemouth for a week or two?’

      ‘Good idea,’ said Raymond West. His last book was doing very well indeed, and he felt in a generous mood.

      ‘She enjoyed her trip to the West Indies, I think, though it was a pity she had to get mixed up in a murder case. Quite the wrong thing at her age.’

      ‘That sort of thing seems to happen to her.’

      Raymond was very fond of his old aunt and was constantly devising treats for her, and sending her books that he thought might interest her. He was surprised when she often politely declined the treats, and though she always said the books were ‘so interesting’ he sometimes suspected that she had not read them. But then, of course, her eyes were failing.

      In this last he was wrong. Miss Marple had remarkable eyesight for her age, and was at this moment taking in everything that was going on round her with keen interest and pleasure.

      To Joan’s proffer of a week or two at one of Bournemouth’s best hotels, she had hesitated, murmured, ‘It’s very, very kind of you, my dear, but I really don’t think—’

      ‘But it’s good for you, Aunt Jane. Good to get away from home sometimes. It gives you new ideas, and new things to think about.’

      ‘Oh yes, you are quite right there, and I would like a little visit somewhere for a change. Not, perhaps, Bournemouth.’

      Joan was slightly surprised. She had thought Bournemouth would have been Aunt Jane’s Mecca.

      ‘Eastbourne? Or Torquay?’

      ‘What I would really like—’ Miss Marple hesitated.

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘I dare say you will think it rather silly of me.’

      ‘No, I’m sure I shan’t.’ (Where did the old dear want to go?)

      ‘I would really like to go to Bertram’s Hotel—in London.’

      ‘Bertram’s Hotel?’ The name was vaguely familiar.

      Words came from Miss Marple in a rush.

      ‘I stayed there once—when I was fourteen. With my uncle and aunt, Uncle Thomas, that was, he was Canon of Ely. And I’ve never forgotten it. If I could stay there—a week would be quite enough—two weeks might be too expensive.’

      ‘Oh, that’s all right. Of course you shall go. I ought to have thought that you might want to go to London—the shops and everything. We’ll fix it up—if Bertram’s Hotel still exists. So many hotels have vanished, sometimes bombed in the war and sometimes just given up.’

      ‘No, I happen to know Bertram’s Hotel is still going. I had a letter from there—from my American friend Amy McAllister of Boston. She and her husband were staying there.’

      ‘Good, then I’ll go ahead and fix it up.’ She added gently, ‘I’m afraid you may find it’s changed a good deal from the days when you knew it. So don’t be disappointed.’

      But Bertram’s Hotel had not changed. It was just as it had always been. Quite miraculously so, in Miss Marple’s opinion. In fact, she wondered …

      It really seemed too good to be true. She knew quite well, with her usual clear-eyed common sense, that what she wanted was simply to refurbish her memories of the past in their old original colours. Much of her life had, perforce, to be spent recalling past pleasures. If you could find someone to remember them with, that was indeed happiness. Nowadays that was not easy to do; she had outlived most of her contemporaries. But she still sat and remembered. In a queer way, it made her come to life again—Jane Marple, that pink and white eager young girl … Such a silly girl in many ways … now who was that very unsuitable young man whose name—oh dear, she couldn’t even remember it now! How wise her mother had been to nip that friendship so firmly in the bud. She had come across him years later—and really he was quite dreadful! At the time she had cried herself to sleep for at least a week!

      Nowadays, of course—she considered nowadays … These poor young things. Some of them had