The Hollow. Агата Кристи
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thing! His judgment had been absolutely right! He’d been madly in love with Veronica but it wouldn’t have done. Veronica would have swallowed him body and soul. She was the complete egoist and she had made no bones about admitting it! Veronica had grabbed most things that she wanted, but she hadn’t been able to grab him! He’d escaped. He had, he supposed, treated her badly from the conventional point of view. In plain words, he had jilted her! But the truth was that he intended to live his own life, and that was a thing that Veronica would not have allowed him to do. She intended to live her life and carry John along as an extra.
She had been astonished when he had refused to come with her to Hollywood.
She had said disdainfully:
‘If you really want to be a doctor you can take a degree over there, I suppose, but it’s quite unnecessary. You’ve got enough to live on, and I shall be making heaps of money.’
And he had replied vehemently:
‘But I’m keen on my profession. I’m going to work with Radley.’
His voice—a young enthusiastic voice—was quite awed.
Veronica sniffed.
‘That funny snuffy old man?’
‘That funny snuffy old man,’ John had said angrily, ‘has done some of the most valuable research work on Pratt’s Disease—’
She had interrupted: Who cared for Pratt’s Disease? California, she said, was an enchanting climate. And it was fun to see the world. She added: ‘I shall hate it without you. I want you, John—I need you.’
And then he had put forward the, to Veronica, amazing suggestion that she should turn down the Hollywood offer and marry him and settle down in London.
She was amused and quite firm. She was going to Hollywood, and she loved John, and John must marry her and come too. She had had no doubts of her beauty and of her power.
He had seen that there was only one thing to be done and he had done it. He had written to her breaking off the engagement.
He had suffered a good deal, but he had had no doubts as to the wisdom of the course he had taken. He’d come back to London and started work with Radley, and a year later he had married Gerda, who was as unlike Veronica in every way as it was possible to be…
The door opened and his secretary, Beryl Collins, came in.
‘You’ve still got Mrs Forrester to see.’
He said shortly, ‘I know.’
‘I thought you might have forgotten.’
She crossed the room and went out at the farther door. Christow’s eyes followed her calm withdrawal. A plain girl, Beryl, but damned efficient. He’d had her six years. She never made a mistake, she was never flurried or worried or hurried. She had black hair and a muddy complexion and a determined chin. Through strong glasses, her clear grey eyes surveyed him and the rest of the universe with the same dispassionate attention.
He had wanted a plain secretary with no nonsense about her, and he had got a plain secretary with no nonsense about her, but sometimes, illogically, John Christow felt aggrieved! By all the rules of stage and fiction, Beryl should have been hopelessly devoted to her employer. But he had always known that he cut no ice with Beryl. There was no devotion, no self-abnegation—Beryl regarded him as a definitely fallible human being. She remained unimpressed by his personality, uninfluenced by his charm. He doubted sometimes whether she even liked him.
He had heard her once speaking to a friend on the telephone.
‘No,’ she had been saying, ‘I don’t really think he is much more selfish than he was. Perhaps rather more thoughtless and inconsiderate.’
He had known that she was speaking of him, and for quite twenty-four hours he had been annoyed about it.
Although Gerda’s indiscriminate enthusiasm irritated him, Beryl’s cool appraisal irritated him too. In fact, he thought, nearly everything irritates me…
Something wrong there. Overwork? Perhaps. No, that was the excuse. This growing impatience, this irritable tiredness, it had some deeper significance. He thought: ‘This won’t do. I can’t go on this way. What’s the matter with me? If I could get away…’
There it was again—the blind idea rushing up to meet the formulated idea of escape.
I want to go home…
Damn it all, 404 Harley Street was his home!
And Mrs Forrester was sitting in the waiting-room. A tiresome woman, a woman with too much money and too much spare time to think about her ailments.
Someone had once said to him: ‘You must get very tired of these rich patients always fancying themselves ill. It must be so satisfactory to get to the poor, who only come when there is something really the matter with them!’ He had grinned. Funny the things people believed about the Poor with a capital P. They should have seen old Mrs Pearstock, on five different clinics, up every week, taking away bottles of medicine, liniments for her back, linctus for her cough, aperients, digestive mixtures. ‘Fourteen years I’ve ’ad the brown medicine, Doctor, and it’s the only thing does me any good. That young doctor last week writes me down a white medicine. No good at all! It stands to reason, doesn’t it, Doctor? I mean, I’ve ’ad me brown medicine for fourteen years, and if I don’t ’ave me liquid paraffin and them brown pills…’
He could hear the whining voice now—excellent physique, sound as a bell—even all the physic she took couldn’t really do her any harm!
They were the same, sisters under the skin, Mrs Pearstock from Tottenham and Mrs Forrester of Park Lane Court. You listened and you wrote scratches with your pen on a piece of stiff expensive notepaper, or on a hospital card as the case might be…
God, he was tired of the whole business…
Blue sea, the faint sweet smell of mimosa, hot dust…
Fifteen years ago. All that was over and done with—yes, done with, thank heaven. He’d had the courage to break off the whole business.
Courage? said a little imp somewhere. Is that what you call it?
Well, he’d done the sensible thing, hadn’t he? It had been a wrench. Damn it all, it had hurt like hell! But he’d gone through with it, cut loose, come home, and married Gerda.
He’d got a plain secretary and he’d married a plain wife. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He’d had enough of beauty, hadn’t he? He’d seen what someone like Veronica could do with her beauty—seen the effect it had on every male within range. After Veronica, he’d wanted safety. Safety and peace and devotion and the quiet, enduring things of life. He’d wanted, in fact, Gerda! He’d wanted someone who’d take her ideas of life from him, who would accept his decisions and who wouldn’t have, for one moment, any ideas of her own…
Who was it who had said that the real tragedy of life was that you got what you wanted?
Angrily he pressed the buzzer on his desk.
He’d deal with Mrs Forrester.
It took him a quarter of an hour to deal with Mrs Forrester. Once again it was easy money. Once again he listened, asked questions, reassured, sympathized, infused something of his own healing energy. Once more he wrote out a prescription for an expensive proprietary.
The sickly neurotic woman who had trailed into the room left it with a firmer step, with colour in her cheeks, with a feeling that life might possibly after all be worth while.
John Christow leant back in his chair. He was free now—free to go upstairs to join Gerda and the children—free from the preoccupations of illness and suffering for a whole weekend.
But he felt still that strange