Agatha Christie by Laura Thompson

Author:Laura Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books

‘Don’t think you’ll get married, my dear, because you won’t,’ says an old lady friend, before Katherine leaves for the Riviera. ‘You’re not the kind to attract the men. And, besides, you’re getting on. How old are you now?’

‘Thirty-three,’ Katherine told her.

‘Well,’ remarked Miss Viner doubtfully, ‘that’s not so very bad. You’ve lost your first freshness, of course.’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Katherine, much entertained.

On the Blue Train Katherine dines with a fellow traveller, Ruth Kettering, who is coming to the end of a bad marriage (‘You may have a hankering after the fellow still. Cut it out,’ her father says to her, urging divorce as the only possible solution. ‘I might find ways of whistling Derek back to you, but it would all come to the same in the end.’) Ruth intends to meet a lover in Nice, and asks Katherine whether she should go ahead. ‘It seems to me an awfully silly thing that you are going to do,’ is the unarguable reply. ‘I think you realise that yourself.’

Throughout much of this book Agatha is talking to herself, reassuring herself about the divorce, allowing the integrity of her heroine to console her. Katherine might have hankered after Archie still, but her instinctive sense of self would have come to her rescue, and she would not have longed for what could not be. She would have faced facts.

Hercule Poirot, too, admires Katherine Grey; and by allowing a friendship to develop between the two, Agatha gave a new quality to her detective, hitherto a mere charismatic assemblage of moustaches and bombast. On the Blue Train Poirot is wise as well as clever, his eyes penetrate emotion as well as facts. He has, in his way, a tendresse for Katherine;13 and this, too, was oddly comforting to his tired and sad creator. “Well, Mademoiselle, how goes it?” She looked at his twinkling eyes, and was confirmed in her first impression that there was something very attractive about M. Hercule Poirot.’

Later Poirot is talking to the daughter of one of his contacts. They are standing beside a bridge, and the girl says to him that it is a favourite spot for suicides. ‘So it is said. Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money – or because the heart aches. L’amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?’

This was the attitude that Agatha yearned for: again, there was consolation in writing it into life.

But perhaps the greatest solace of all was the Blue Train itself. Murder scene it may have been, yet it bloomed in Agatha’s mind as a symbol of order and escape. She had always wanted to travel. However much she had loved Archie she had known, in her heart, that they were very different people; that while he moved with apparent contentment between Sunningdale and Waterloo and the City, day in day out, she craved the sight of the unknown (‘.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.