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Twenty-eight
Midge, lying dry-eyed and awake in the darkness, turned restlessly on her pillows. She heard a
door unlatch, a footstep in the corridor outside passing her door. It was Edward’s door and
Edward’s step. She switched on the lamp by her bed and looked at the clock that stood by the
lamp on the table. It was ten minutes to three.
Edward passing her door and going down the stairs at this hour in the morning. It was odd.
They had all gone to bed early, at half past ten. She herself had not slept, had lain there with
burning eyelids and with a dry, aching misery racking her feverishly.
She had heard the clock strike downstairs—had heard owls hoot outside her bedroom window.
Had felt that depression that reaches its nadir at 2 a.m. Had thought to herself: “I can’t bear it—I
can’t bear it. Tomorrow coming—another day. Day after day to be got through.”
Banished by her own act from Ainswick—from all the loveliness and dearness of Ainswick
which might have been her very own possession.
But better banishment, better loneliness, better a drab and uninteresting life, than life with
Edward and Henrietta’s ghost. Until that day in the wood she had not known her own capacity for
bitter jealousy.
And after all, Edward had never told her that he loved her. Affection, kindliness, he had never
pretended to more than that. She had accepted the limitation, and not until she had realized what it
would mean to live at close quarters with an Edward whose mind and heart had Henrietta as a
permanent guest, did she know that for her Edward’s affection was not enough.
Edward walking past her door, down the front stairs. It was odd—very odd. Where was he
going?
Uneasiness grew upon her. It was all part and parcel of the uneasiness that The Hollow gave her
nowadays. What was Edward doing downstairs in the small hours of the morning? Had he gone
out?
Inactivity at last became too much for her. She got up, slipped on her dressing gown, and,
taking a torch, she opened her door and came out into the passage.
It was quite dark, no light had been switched on. Midge turned to the left and came to the head
of the staircase. Below all was dark too. She ran down the stairs and after a moment’s hesitation
switched on the light in the hall. Everything was silent. The front door was closed and locked. She
tried the side door but that, too, was locked.
Edward, then, had not gone out. Where could he be?
And suddenly she raised her head and sniffed.
A whiff, a very faint whiff of gas.
The baize door to the kitchen quarters was just ajar. She went through it—a faint light was
shining from the open kitchen door. The smell of gas was much stronger.
Midge ran along the passage and into the kitchen. Edward was lying on the floor with his head
inside the gas oven, which was turned full on.
Midge was a quick, practical girl. Her first act was to swing open the shutters. She could not
unlatch the window, and, winding a glass cloth round her arm, she smashed it. Then, holding her
breath, she stooped down and tugged and pulled Edward out of the gas oven and switched off the
taps.
He was unconscious and breathing queerly, but she knew that he could not have been
unconscious long. He could only just have gone under. The wind sweeping through from the
window to the open door was fast dispelling the gas fumes. Midge dragged Edward to a spot near
the window where the air would have full play. She sat down and gathered him into her strong
young arms.
She said his name, first softly, then with increasing desperation. “Edward, Edward, Edward….”
He stirred, groaned, opened his eyes and looked up at her. He said very faintly: “Gas oven,” and
his eyes went round to the gas stove.
“I know, darling, but why—why?”
He was shivering now, his hands were cold and lifeless. He said: “Midge?” There was a kind of
wondering surprise and pleasure in his voice.
She said: “I heard you pass my door. I didn’t know…I came down.”
He sighed, a very long sigh as though from very far away. “Best way out,” he said. And then,
inexplicably until she remembered Lucy’s conversation on the night of the tragedy, “News of the
World.”
“But, Edward, why, why?”
He looked up at her, and the blank, cold darkness of his stare frightened her.
“Because I know I’ve never been any good. Always a failure. Always ineffectual. It’s men like
Christow who do things. They get there and women admire them. I’m nothing—I’m not even
quite alive. I inherited Ainswick and I’ve enough to live on—otherwise I’d have gone under. No
good at a career—never much good as a writer. Henrietta didn’t want me. No one wanted me.
That day—at the Berkeley—I thought—but it was the same story. You couldn’t care either,
Midge. Even for Ainswick you couldn’t put up with me. So I thought better get out altogether.”
Her words came with a rush. “Darling, darling, you don’t understand. It was because of
Henrietta—because I thought you still loved Henrietta so much.”
“Henrietta?” He murmured it vaguely, as though speaking of someone infinitely remote. “Yes, I
loved her very much.”
And from even farther away she heard him murmur:
“It’s so cold.”
“Edward—my darling.”
Her arms closed round him firmly. He smiled at her, murmuring:
“You’re so warm, Midge—you’re so warm.”
Yes, she thought, that was what despair was. A cold thing—a thing of infinite coldness and
loneliness. She’d never understood until now that despair was a cold thing. She had thought of it
as something hot and passionate, something violent, a hot-blooded desperation. But that was not
so. This was despair—this utter outer darkness of coldness and loneliness. And the sin of despair,
that priests talked of, was a cold sin, the sin of cutting oneself off from all warm and living human
contacts.
Edward said again: “You’re so warm, Midge.” And suddenly with a glad, proud confidence she
thought: “But that’s what he wants — that’s what I can give him!” They were all cold, the
Angkatells. Even Henrietta had something in her of the will-o’-the-wisp, of the elusive fairy
coldness in the Angkatell blood. Let Edward love Henrietta as an intangible and unpossessable
dream. It was warmth, permanence, stability that was his real need. It was daily companionship
and love and laughter at Ainswick.
She thought: “What Edward needs is someone to light a fire on his heart—and I am the person
to do that.”
Edward looked up. He saw Midge’s face bending over him, the warm colouring of the skin, the
generous mouth, the steady eyes and the dark hair that lay back from her forehead like two wings.
He saw Henrietta always as a projection from the past. In the grown woman he sought and
wanted only to see the seventeen-year-old girl he had first loved. But now, looking up at Midge,
he had a queer sense of seeing a continuous Midge. He saw the school-girl with her winged hair
springing back into two pigtails, he saw its dark waves framing her face now, and he saw exactly
how those wings would look when the hair was not dark any longer but grey.
“Midge,” he thought, “is real. The only real thing I have ever known…” He felt the warmth of
her, and the strength—dark, positive, alive, real! “Midge,” he thought, “is the rock on which I can
build my life.”
He said: “Darling Midge, I love you so, never leave me again.”
She bent down to him and he felt the warmth of her lips on his, felt her love enveloping him,
shielding him, and happiness flowered in that cold desert where he had lived alone so long.
Suddenly Midge said with a shaky laugh:
“Look, Edward, a blackbeetle has come out to look at us. Isn’t he a nice blackbeetle? I never
thought I could like a blackbeetle so much!”
She added dreamily: “How odd life is. Here we are sitting on the floor in a kitchen that still
smells of gas all amongst the black-beetles, and feeling that it’s heaven.”
He murmured dreamily: “I could stay here forever.”
“We’d better go and get some sleep. It’s four o’clock. How on earth are we to explain that
broken window to Lucy?” Fortunately, Midge reflected, Lucy was an extraordinarily easy person
to explain things to!
Taking a leaf out of Lucy’s own book, Midge went into her room at six o’clock. She made a
bald statement of fact.
“Edward went down and put his head in the gas oven in the night,” she said. “Fortunately I
heard him, and went down after him. I broke the window because I couldn’t get it open quickly.”
Lucy, Midge had to admit, was wonderful.
She smiled sweetly with no sign of surprise.
“Dear Midge,” she said, “you are always so practical. I’m sure you will always be the greatest
comfort to Edward.”
After Midge had gone, Lady Angkatell lay thinking. Then she got up and went into her
husband’s room, which for once was unlocked.
“Henry.”
“My dear Lucy! It’s not cockcrow yet.”
“No, but listen, Henry, this is really important. We must have electricity installed to cook by
and get rid of that gas stove.”
“Why, it’s quite satisfactory, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, dear. But it’s the sort of thing that gives people ideas, and everybody mightn’t be as
practical as dear Midge.”
She flitted elusively away. Sir Henry turned over with a grunt. Presently he awoke with a start
just as he was dozing off. “Did I dream it,” he murmured, “or did Lucy come in and start talking
about gas stoves?”
Outside in the passage, Lady Angkatell went into the bathroom and put a kettle on the gas ring.
Sometimes, she knew, people liked an early cup of tea. Fired with self-approval, she returned to
bed and lay back on her pillows, pleased with life and with herself.
Edward and Midge at Ainswick—the inquest over. She would go and talk to M. Poirot again. A
nice little man….
Suddenly another idea flashed into her head. She sat upright in bed. “I wonder now,” she
speculated, “if she has thought of that.”
She got out of bed and drifted along the passage to Henrietta’s room, beginning her remarks as
usual long before she was within earshot.
“—and it suddenly came to me, dear, that you might have overlooked that.”
Henrietta murmured sleepily: “For heaven’s sake, Lucy, the birds aren’t up yet!”
“Oh, I know, dear, it is rather early, but it seems to have been a very disturbed night—Edward
and the gas stove and Midge and the kitchen window—and thinking of what to say to M. Poirot
and everything—”
“I’m sorry, Lucy, but everything you say sounds like complete gibberish. Can’t it wait?”
“It was only the holster, dear. I thought, you know, that you might not have thought about the
holster.”
“Holster?” Henrietta sat up in bed. She was suddenly wide awake. “What’s this about a
holster?”
“That revolver of Henry’s was in a holster, you know. And the holster hasn’t been found. And
of course nobody may think of it—but on the other hand somebody might—”
Henrietta swung herself out of bed. She said:
“One always forgets something—that’s what they say! And it’s true!”
Lady Angkatell went back to her room.
She got into bed and quickly went fast asleep.
The kettle on the gas ring boiled and went on boiling.
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