The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side. Agatha Christie
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wasn’t, Miss Marple reflected, anything wrong about the Miss Knights other than the fact that they were madly irritating. They were full of kindness, ready to feel affection towards their charges, to humour them, to be bright and cheerful with them and in general to treat them as slightly mentally afflicted children.
‘But I,’ said Miss Marple to herself, ‘although I may be old, am not a mentally afflicted child.’
At this moment, breathing rather heavily, as was her custom, Miss Knight bounced brightly into the room. She was a big, rather flabby woman of fifty-six with yellowing grey hair very elaborately arranged, glasses, a long thin nose, and below it a good-natured mouth and a weak chin.
‘Here we are!’ she exclaimed with a kind of beaming boisterousness, meant to cheer and enliven the sad twilight of the aged. ‘I hope we’ve had our little snooze?’
‘I have been knitting,’ Miss Marple replied, putting some emphasis on the pronoun, ‘and,’ she went on, confessing her weakness with distaste and shame, ‘I’ve dropped a stitch.’
‘Oh dear, dear,’ said Miss Knight. ‘Well, we’ll soon put that right, won’t we?’
‘You will,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I, alas, am unable to do so.’
The slight acerbity of her tone passed quite unnoticed. Miss Knight, as always, was eager to help.
‘There,’ she said after a few moments. ‘There you are, dear. Quite all right now.’
Though Miss Marple was perfectly agreeable to be called ‘dear’ (and even ‘ducks’) by the woman at the greengrocer or the girl at the paper shop, it annoyed her intensely to be called ‘dear’ by Miss Knight. Another of those things that elderly ladies have to bear. She thanked Miss Knight politely.
‘And now I’m just going out for my wee toddle,’ said Miss Knight humorously. ‘Shan’t be long.’
‘Please don’t dream of hurrying back,’ said Miss Marple politely and sincerely.
‘Well, I don’t like to leave you too long on your own, dear, in case you get moped.’
‘I assure you I am quite happy,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I probably shall have’ (she closed her eyes) ‘a little nap.’
‘That’s right, dear. Anything I can get you?’
Miss Marple opened her eyes and considered.
‘You might go into Longdon’s and see if the curtains are ready. And perhaps another skein of the blue wool from Mrs Wisley. And a box of blackcurrant lozenges at the chemist’s. And change my book at the library—but don’t let them give you anything that isn’t on my list. This last one was too terrible. I couldn’t read it.’ She held out The Spring Awakens.
‘Oh dear dear! Didn’t you like it? I thought you’d love it. Such a pretty story.’
‘And if it isn’t too far for you, perhaps you wouldn’t mind going as far as Halletts and see if they have one of those up-and-down egg whisks—not the turn-the-handle kind.’
(She knew very well they had nothing of the kind, but Halletts was the farthest shop possible.)
‘If all this isn’t too much—’ she murmured.
But Miss Knight replied with obvious sincerity.
‘Not at all. I shall be delighted.’
Miss Knight loved shopping. It was the breath of life to her. One met acquaintances, and had the chance of a chat, one gossiped with the assistants, and had the opportunity of examining various articles in the various shops. And one could spend quite a long time engaged in these pleasant occupations without any guilty feeling that it was one’s duty to hurry back.
So Miss Knight started off happily, after a last glance at the frail old lady resting so peacefully by the window.
After waiting a few minutes in case Miss Knight should return for a shopping bag, or her purse, or a handkerchief (she was a great forgetter and returner), and also to recover from the slight mental fatigue induced by thinking of so many unwanted things to ask Miss Knight to get, Miss Marple rose briskly to her feet, cast aside her knitting and strode purposefully across the room and into the hall. She took down her summer coat from its peg, a stick from the hall stand and exchanged her bedroom slippers for a pair of stout walking shoes. Then she left the house by the side door.
‘It will take her at least an hour and a half,’ Miss Marple estimated to herself. ‘Quite that—with all the people from the Development doing their shopping.’
Miss Marple visualized Miss Knight at Longdon’s making abortive inquiries re curtains. Her surmises were remarkably accurate. At this moment Miss Knight was exclaiming, ‘Of course, I felt quite sure in my own mind they wouldn’t be ready yet. But of course I said I’d come along and see when the old lady spoke about it. Poor old dears, they’ve got so little to look forward to. One must humour them. And she’s a sweet old lady. Failing a little now, it’s only to be expected—their faculties get dimmed. Now that’s a pretty material you’ve got there. Do you have it in any other colours?’
A pleasant twenty minutes passed. When Miss Knight had finally departed, the senior assistant remarked with a sniff, ‘Failing, is she? I’ll believe that when I see it for myself. Old Miss Marple has always been as sharp as a needle, and I’d say she still is.’ She then gave her attention to a young woman in tight trousers and a sail-cloth jersey who wanted plastic material with crabs on it for bathroom curtains.
‘Emily Waters, that’s who she reminds me of,’ Miss Marple was saying to herself, with the satisfaction it always gave her to match up a human personality with one known in the past. ‘Just the same bird brain. Let me see, what happened to Emily?’
Nothing much, was her conclusion. She had once nearly got engaged to a curate, but after an understanding of several years the affair had fizzled out. Miss Marple dismissed her nurse attendant from her mind and gave her attention to her surroundings. She had traversed the garden rapidly only observing as it were from the corner of her eye that Laycock had cut down the old-fashioned roses in a way more suitable to hybrid teas, but she did not allow this to distress her, or distract her from the delicious pleasure of having escaped for an outing entirely on her own. She had a happy feeling of adventure. She turned to the right, entered the Vicarage gate, took the path through the Vicarage garden and came out on the right of way. Where the stile had been there was now an iron swing gate giving on to a tarred asphalt path. This led to a neat little bridge over the stream and on the other side of the stream where once there had been meadows with cows, there was the Development.
With the feeling of Columbus setting out to discover a new world, Miss Marple passed over the bridge, continued on to the path and within four minutes was actually in Aubrey Close.
Of course Miss Marple had seen the Development from the Market Basing Road, that is, had seen from afar its Closes and rows of neat well-built houses, with their television masts and their blue and pink and yellow and green painted doors and windows. But until now it had only had the reality of a map, as it were. She had not been in it and of it. But now she was here, observing the brave new world that was springing up, the world that by all accounts was foreign to all she had known. It was like a neat model built with child’s bricks. It hardly seemed real to Miss Marple.
The people, too, looked unreal. The trousered young women, the rather sinister-looking young men and boys, the exuberant bosoms of the fifteen-year-old girls. Miss Marple couldn’t help thinking that it all looked terribly depraved. Nobody noticed her much as she trudged along. She turned out of Aubrey Close and was presently in Darlington Close. She went slowly and as she went she listened avidly to the snippets of conversation between mothers wheeling prams, to the girls addressing young men, to the sinister-looking Teds (she supposed