‘No, no, far too modern. These girls nowadays always seem embarrassed at having to admit to a father or mother at all.’
‘Parents,’ I said, ‘are practically a disgrace.’
He laughed. ‘Oh, well – I don’t suffer that way. I’ve no children, worse luck. Your Judith is a very good-looking wench, but terribly high-brow. I find it rather alarming.’ He picked up the telephone receiver again. ‘Hope you don’t mind, Luttrell, if I start damning your exchange to hell. I’m not a patient man.’
‘Do ’em good,’ said Luttrell.
He led the way upstairs and I followed him. He took me along the left wing of the house to a door at the end, and I realized that Poirot had chosen for me the room I had occupied before.
There were changes here. As I walked along the corridor some of the doors were open and I saw that the old-fashioned large bedrooms had been partitioned off so as to make several smaller ones.
My own room, which had not been large, was unaltered save for the installation of hot and cold water, and part of it had been partitioned off to make a small bathroom. It was furnished in a cheap modern style which rather disappointed me. I should have preferred a style more nearly approximating to the architecture of the house itself.
My luggage was in my room and the Colonel explained that Poirot’s room was exactly opposite. He was about to take me there when a sharp cry of ‘George’ echoed up from the hall below.
Colonel Luttrell started like a nervous horse. His hand went to his lips.
‘I – I – sure you’re all right? Ring for what you want –’
‘George.’
‘Coming, my dear, coming.’
He hurried off down the corridor. I stood for a moment looking after him. Then, with my heart beating slightly faster, I crossed the corridor and rapped on the door of Poirot’s room.
Chapter 2
Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age.
My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feelings by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. But now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!
Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now – yes, undoubtedly – softened with emotion.
‘Ah, mon ami Hastings – mon ami Hastings . . .’
I bent my head and, as was his custom, he embraced me warmly.
‘Mon ami Hastings!’
He leaned back, surveying me with his head a little to one side.
‘Yes, just the same – the straight back, the broad shoulders, the grey of the hair – très distingué. You know, my friend, you have worn well. Les femmes, they still take an interest in you? Yes?’
‘Really, Poirot,’ I protested. ‘Must you –’
‘But I assure you, my friend, it is a test – it is the test. When the very young girls come and talk to you kindly, oh so kindly – it is the end! “The poor old man,” they say, “we must be nice to him. It must be so awful to be like that.” But you, Hastings – vous êtes encore jeune. For you there are still possibilities. That is right, twist your moustache, hunch your shoulders – I see it is as I say – you would not look so self-conscious otherwise.’
I burst out laughing. ‘You really are the limit, Poirot. And how are you yourself ?’
‘Me,’ said Poirot with a grimace. ‘I am a wreck. I am a ruin. I cannot walk. I am crippled and twisted. Mercifully I can still feed myself, but otherwise I have to be attended to like a baby. Put to bed, washed and dressed. Enfin, it is not amusing that. Mercifully, though the outside decays, the core is still sound.’
‘Yes, indeed. The best heart in the world.’
‘The heart? Perhaps. I was not referring to the heart. The brain, mon cher, is what I mean by the core. My brain, it still functions magnificently.’
I could at least perceive clearly that no deterioration of the brain in the direction of modesty had taken place.
‘And you like it here?’ I asked.
Poirot shrugged his shoulders. ‘It suffices. It is not, you comprehend, the Ritz. No, indeed. The room I was in when I first came here was both small and inadequately furnished. I moved to this one with no increase of price. Then, the cooking, it is English at its worst. Those Brussels sprouts so enormous, so hard, that the English like so much. The potatoes boiled and either hard or falling to pieces. The vegetables that taste of water, water, and again water. The complete absence of the salt and pepper in any dish –’ he paused expressively.
‘It sounds terrible,’ I said.
‘I do not complain,’ said Poirot, and proceeded to do so. ‘And there is also the modernization, so called. The bathrooms, the taps everywhere and what comes out of them? Lukewarm water, mon ami, at most hours of the day. And the towels, so thin, so meagre!’
‘There is something to be said for the old days,’ I said thoughtfully. I remembered the clouds of steam which had gushed from the hot tap of the one bathroom Styles had originally possessed, one of those bathrooms in which an immense bath with mahogany sides had reposed proudly in the middle of the bathroom floor. Remembered, too, the immense bath towels, and the frequent shining brass cans of boiling hot water that stood in one’s old-fashioned basin.
‘But one must not complain,’ said Poirot again. ‘I am content to suffer – for a good cause.’
A sudden thought struck me.
‘I say, Poirot, you’re not – er – hard up, are you? I know the war hit investments very badly –’
Poirot reassured me quickly.
‘No, no, my friend. I am in most comfortable circumstances. Indeed, I am rich. It is not the economy that brings me here.’
‘Then that’s all right,’ I said. I went on: ‘I think I can understand your feeling. As one gets on, one tends more and more to revert to the old days. One tries to recapture old emotions. I find it painful to be here, in a way, and yet it brings back to me a hundred old thoughts and emotions that I’d quite forgotten I ever felt. I dare say you feel the same.’
‘Not in the least. I do not feel like that at all.’
‘They were good days,’ I said sadly.
‘You may speak for yourself, Hastings. For me, my arrival at Styles St Mary was a sad and painful time. I was a refugee, wounded, exiled from home and country, existing by charity in a foreign land. No, it was not gay. I did not know then that England would come to be my home and that I should find happiness here.’
‘I had forgotten that,’ I admitted.
‘Precisely. You attribute always to others the sentiments that you yourself experience. Hastings was happy – everybody was happy!’
‘No, no,’ I protested, laughing.
‘And in any case it is not true,’ continued Poirot. ‘You look back, you say, the tears rising in your eyes, “Oh, the happy days. Then I was young.” But indeed, my friend, you