CHAPTER 2

       Miss Marple Makes Comparisons

      It was very gay that evening at the Golden Palm Hotel.

      Seated at her little corner table, Miss Marple looked round her in an interested fashion. The dining-room was a large room open on three sides to the soft warm scented air of the West Indies. There were small table lamps, all softly coloured. Most of the women were in evening dress: light cotton prints out of which bronzed shoulders and arms emerged. Miss Marple herself had been urged by her nephew’s wife, Joan, in the sweetest way possible, to accept ‘a small cheque’.

      ‘Because, Aunt Jane, it will be rather hot out there, and I don’t expect you have any very thin clothes.’

      Jane Marple had thanked her and had accepted the cheque. She came of the age when it was natural for the old to support and finance the young, but also for the middle-aged to look after the old. She could not, however, force herself to buy anything very thin! At her age she seldom felt more than pleasantly warm even in the hottest weather, and the temperature of St Honoré was not really what is referred to as ‘tropical heat’. This evening she was attired in the best traditions of the provincial gentlewoman of England—grey lace.

      Not that she was the only elderly person present. There were representatives of all ages in the room. There were elderly tycoons with young third or fourth wives. There were middle-aged couples from the North of England. There was a gay family from Caracas complete with children. The various countries of South America were well represented, all chattering loudly in Spanish or Portuguese. There was a solid English background of two clergymen, one doctor and one retired judge. There was even a family of Chinese. The dining-room service was mainly done by women, tall black girls of proud carriage, dressed in crisp white; but there was an experienced Italian head waiter in charge, and a French wine waiter, and there was the attentive eye of Tim Kendal watching over everything, pausing here and there to have a social word with people at their tables. His wife seconded him ably. She was a good-looking girl. Her hair was a natural golden blonde and she had a wide generous mouth that laughed easily. It was very seldom that Molly Kendal was out of temper. Her staff worked for her enthusiastically, and she adapted her manner carefully to suit her different guests. With the elderly men she laughed and flirted; she congratulated the younger women on their clothes.

      ‘Oh, what a smashing dress you’ve got on tonight, Mrs Dyson. I’m so jealous I could tear it off your back.’ But she looked very well in her own dress, or so Miss Marple thought: a white sheath, with a pale green embroidered silk shawl thrown over her shoulders. Lucky was fingering the shawl. ‘Lovely colour! I’d like one like it.’ ‘You can get them at the shop here,’ Molly told her and passed on. She did not pause by Miss Marple’s table. Elderly ladies she usually left to her husband. ‘The old dears like a man much better,’ she used to say.

      Tim Kendal came and bent over Miss Marple.

      ‘Nothing special you want, is there?’ he asked. ‘Because you’ve only got to tell me—and I could get it specially cooked for you. Hotel food, and semi-tropical at that, isn’t quite what you’re used to at home, I expect?’

      Miss Marple smiled and said that that was one of the pleasures of coming abroad.

      ‘That’s all right, then. But if there is anything—’

      ‘Such as?’

      ‘Well—’ Tim Kendal looked a little doubtful—‘Bread and butter pudding?’ he hazarded.

      Miss Marple smiled and said that she thought she could do without bread and butter pudding very nicely for the present.

      She picked up her spoon and began to eat her passion fruit sundae with cheerful appreciation.

      Then the steel band began to play. The steel bands were one of the main attractions of the islands. Truth to tell, Miss Marple could have done very well without them. She considered that they made a hideous noise, unnecessarily loud. The pleasure that everyone else took in them was undeniable, however, and Miss Marple, in the true spirit of her youth, decided that as they had to be, she must manage somehow to learn to like them. She could hardly request Tim Kendal to conjure up from somewhere the muted strains of the ‘Blue Danube’. (So graceful—waltzing.) Most peculiar, the way people danced nowadays. Flinging themselves about, seeming quite contorted. Oh well, young people must enjoy—Her thoughts were arrested. Because, now she came to think of it, very few of these people were young. Dancing, lights, the music of a band (even a steel band), all that surely was for youth. But where was youth? Studying, she supposed, at universities, or doing a job—with a fortnight’s holiday a year. A place like this was too far away and too expensive. This gay and carefree life was all for the thirties and the forties—and the old men who were trying to live up (or down) to their young wives. It seemed, somehow, a pity.

      Miss Marple sighed for youth. There was Mrs Kendal, of course. She wasn’t more than twenty-two or three, probably, and she seemed to be enjoying herself—but even so, it was a job she was doing.

      At a table nearby Canon Prescott and his sister were sitting. They motioned to Miss Marple to join them for coffee and she did so. Miss Prescott was a thin severe-looking woman, the Canon was a round, rubicund man, breathing geniality.

      Coffee was brought, and chairs were pushed a little way away from the tables. Miss Prescott opened a work bag and took out some frankly hideous table mats that she was hemming. She told Miss Marple all about the day’s events. They had visited a new Girls’ School in the morning. After an afternoon’s rest, they had walked through a cane plantation to have tea at a pension where some friends of theirs were staying.

      Since the Prescotts had