Within a Wall by Agatha Christie

Author:Agatha Christie [Christie, Agatha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Witness Impulse
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

A month later Jane died.

It was influenza, followed by pneumonia. She made Alan Everard her executor and left all she had to Winnie. But it wasn’t very much.

It was Alan’s task to go through Jane’s papers. She left a record there that was clear to follow—numerous evidences of acts of kindness, begging letters, grateful letters.

And lastly, he found her diary. With it was a scrap of paper:

“To be read after my death by Alan Everard. He has often reproached me with not speaking the truth. The truth is all here.”

So he came to know at last, finding the one place where Jane had dared to be honest. It was a record, very simple and unforced, of her love for him.

There was very little sentiment about it—no fine language. But there was no blinking of facts.

“I know you are often irritated by me,” she had written. “Everything I do or say seems to make you angry sometimes. I do not know why this should be, for I try so hard to please you; but I do believe, all the same, that I mean something real to you. One isn’t angry with the people who don’t count.”

It was not Jane’s fault that Alan found other matters. Jane was loyal—but she was also untidy; she filled her drawers too full. She had, shortly before her death, burnt carefully all Isobel’s letters. The one Alan found was wedged behind a drawer. When he had read it, the meaning of certain cabalistic signs on the counterfoils of Jane’s chequebook became clear to him. In this particular letter Isobel had hardly troubled to keep up the pretence of the money being required for Winnie.

Alan sat in front of the desk staring with unseeing eyes out of the window for a long time. Finally he slipped the chequebook into his pocket and left the flat. He walked back to Chelsea, conscious of an anger that grew rapidly stronger.

Isobel was out when he got back, and he was sorry. He had so clearly in his mind what he wanted to say. Instead, he went up to the studio and pulled out the unfinished portrait of Jane. He set it on an easel near the portrait of Isobel in pink satin.

The Lemprière woman had been right; there was life in Jane’s portrait. He looked at her, the eager eyes, the beauty that he had tried so unsuccessfully to deny her. That was Jane—the aliveness, more than anything else, was Jane. She was, he thought, the most alive person he had ever met, so much so, that even now he could not think of her as dead.

And he thought of his other pictures—Colour, Romance, Sir Rufus Herschman. They had all, in a way, been pictures of Jane. She had kindled the spark for each one of them—had sent him away fuming and fretting—to show her! And now? Jane was dead. Would he ever paint a picture—a real picture—again? He looked again at the eager face on the canvas. Perhaps. Jane wasn’t very far away.

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