A Daughter's a Daughter by Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott

Author:Agatha Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-05-18T16:00:00+00:00

Book Two

Chapter One

1

Laura Whitstable looked affectionately through the windows of the Airways bus at the familiar streets of London. She had been away from London a long time, serving on a Royal Commission which had entailed an interesting and prolonged tour round the globe. The final sessions in the United States had been strenuous. Dame Laura had lectured and presided and lunched and dined, and had found difficulty in finding time to see her own personal friends.

Well, it was over now. She was home again, with a suitcase filled with notes and statistics and relevant papers, and with the prospect of a good deal more strenuous work ahead of her preparing for publication.

She was a woman of great vitality and enormous physical toughness. The prospect of work was always more alluring to her than the prospect of leisure, but unlike many people, she did not pride herself on the fact, and would sometimes disarmingly admit that the preference might be regarded as a weakness rather than a virtue. For work, she would say, was one of the chief avenues by which one escapes from oneself. And to live with oneself, without subterfuge, and in humility and content, was to attain the only true harmony of life.

Laura Whitstable was a woman who concentrated on one thing at a time. She had never been given to writing long newsy letters to friends. When she was absent, she was absent – in thought as well as in body.

She did conscientiously send highly-coloured picture postcards to her domestic staff, who would have been affronted if she had not done so. But her friends and intimates were aware that the first they would hear of Laura was a deep gruff voice on the telephone announcing that she was back again.

It was good to be home, Laura thought, a little later, as she looked round her comfortable mannish sitting-room and listened with half an ear to Bassett’s melancholy unimpassioned catalogue of small domestic disasters that had occurred in her absence.

She dismissed Bassett with a final ‘Quite right to tell me’ and sank into the large, shabby leather-covered armchair. Letters and periodicals were heaped on a side table, but she did not bother about them. Everything urgent had been dealt with by her efficient secretary.

She lit a cigar and leant back in the chair, her eyes half closed.

This was the end of one period, the beginning of another …

She relaxed, letting the engine of her brain slow down and change over to the new rhythm. Her fellow commissioners – the problems that had arisen – speculations – points of view – American personalities – her American friends … gently, inexorably, they all receded, became shadowy …

London, the people she must see, the bigwigs whom she would bully, the Ministries to which she proposed to make herself a nuisance, the practical measures that she intended to take – the reports she must write … it all came clearly into her mind. The future campaign, the gruelling daily tasks …

But before that there was an interregnum, a settling in again.

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