Read Online Absent in the Spring by Agatha writing as Mary Westmacott Christie - Free Book Online Page A

Memsahib.’
    â€˜I know.’ She controlled her impatience. ‘But that doesn’t take you all your time?’
    â€˜I give them breakfast, lunch, tea.’
    â€˜No, no, I don’t mean that. You have helpers?’
    â€˜Arab boy – very stupid, very lazy, very dirty – I see to everything myself, not trust boy. He bring bath water – throw away bath water – he help cook.’
    â€˜There are three of you, then, you, the cook, the boy? You must have a lot of time when you aren’t working. Do you read?’
    â€˜Read? Read what?’
    â€˜Books.’
    â€˜I not read.’
    â€˜Then what do you do when you’re not working?’
    â€˜I wait till time do more work.’
    It’s no good, thought Joan. You can’t talk to them. They don’t know what you mean. This man, he’s here always, month after month. Sometimes, I suppose, he gets a holiday, and goes to a town and gets drunk and sees friends. But for weeks on end he’s here. Of course he’s got the cook and the boy … The boy lies in the sun and sleeps when he isn’t working. Life’s as simple as that for him. They’re no good to me, not any of them. All the English this man knows is eating and drinking and ‘Nice weather.’
    The Indian went out. Joan strolled restlessly about the room.
    â€˜I mustn’t be foolish. I must make some kind of plan. Arrange a course of – of thinking for myself. I really must not allow myself to get – well – rattled.’
    The truth was, she reflected, that she had always led such a full and occupied life. So much interest in it. It was a civilized life. And if you had all that balance and proportion in your life, it certainly left you rather at a loss when you were faced with the barren uselessness of doing nothing at all. The more useful and cultured a woman you were, the more difficult it made it.
    There were some people, of course, even at home, who often sat about for hours doing nothing. Presumably they would take to this kind of life quite happily.
    Even Mrs Sherston, though as a rule she was active and energetic enough for two, had occasionally sat about doing nothing. Usually when she was out for walks. She would walk with terrific energy and then drop down suddenly on a log of wood, or a patch of heather and just sit there staring into space.
    Like that day when she, Joan, had thought it was the Randolph girl …
    She blushed slightly as she remembered her own actions.
    It had, really, been rather like spying. The sort of thing that made her just a little ashamed. Because she wasn’t, really, that kind of woman.
    Still, with a girl like Myrna Randolph …
    A girl who didn’t seem to have any moral sense …
    Joan tried to remember how it had all come about.
    She had been taking some flowers to old Mrs Garnett and had just come out of the cottage door when she had heard Rodney’s voice in the road outside the hedge. His voice and a woman’s voice answering him.
    She had said goodbye to Mrs Garnett quickly and come out into the road. She was just able to catch sight of Rodney and, she felt sure, the Randolph girl, swinging round the corner of the track that led up to Asheldown.
    No, she wasn’t very proud of what she had done then. But she had felt, at the time, that she had to know. It wasn’t exactly Rodney’s fault – everyone knew what Myrna Randolph was.
    Joan had taken the path that went up through Haling Wood and had come out that way on to the bare shoulder of Asheldown and at once she had caught sight of them – two figures sitting there motionless staring down over the pale, shining countryside below.
    The relief when she had seen that it wasn’t Myrna Randolph at all, but Mrs Sherston! They weren’t even sitting close together. There were four feet at least between them. Really, a quite ridiculous distance – hardly friendly! But then