While the Light Lasts Read online

  She stopped dead and checked the words on her lips. Eyeing him warily, she went over to the divan and sat down. She had every appearance of calm.

  Alan took the cheque book from his pocket.

  ‘I’ve been going through Jane’s papers.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He tried to imitate her calm, to keep his voice from shaking.

  ‘For the last four years she’s been supplying you with money.’

  ‘Yes. For Winnie.’

  ‘No, not for Winnie,’ shouted Everard. ‘You pretended, both of you, that it was for Winnie, but you both knew that that wasn’t so. Do you realize that Jane has been selling her securities, living from hand to mouth, to supply you with clothes–clothes that you didn’t really need?’

  Isobel never took her eyes from his face. She settled her body more comfortably on the cushions as a white Persian cat might do.

  ‘I can’t help it if Jane denuded herself more than she should have done,’ she said. ‘I supposed she could afford the money. She was always crazy about you–I could see that, of course. Some wives would have kicked up a fuss about the way you were always rushing off to see her, and spending hours there. I didn’t.’

  ‘No,’ said Alan, very white in the face. ‘You made her pay instead.’

  ‘You are saying very offensive things, Alan. Be careful.’

  ‘Aren’t they true? Why did you find it so easy to get money out of Jane?’

  ‘Not for love of me, certainly. It must have been for love of you.’

  ‘That’s just what it was,’ said Alan simply. ‘She paid for my freedom–freedom to work in my own way. So long as you had a sufficiency of money, you’d leave me alone–not badger me to paint a crowd of awful women.’

  Isobel said nothing.

  ‘Well?’ cried Alan angrily.

  Her quiescence infuriated him.

  Isobel was looking at the floor. Presently she raised her head and said quietly:

  ‘Come here, Alan.’

  She touched the divan at her side. Uneasily, unwillingly, he came and sat there, not looking at her. But he knew that he was afraid.

  ‘Alan,’ said Isobel presently.

  ‘Well?’

  He was irritable, nervous.

  ‘All that you say may be true. It doesn’t matter. I’m like that. I want things–clothes, money, you. Jane’s dead, Alan.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Jane’s dead. You belong to me altogether now. You never did before–not quite.’

  He looked at her–saw the light in her eyes, acquisitive, possessive–was revolted, yet fascinated.

  ‘Now you shall be all mine.’

  He understood Isobel then as he had never understood her before.

  ‘You want me as a slave? I’m to paint what you tell me to paint, live as you tell me to live, be dragged at your chariot wheels.’

  ‘Put it like that if you please. What are words?’

  He felt her arms round his neck, white, smooth, firm as a wall. Words danced through his brain. ‘A wall as white as milk.’ Already he was inside the wall. Could he still escape? Did he want to escape?

  He heard her voice close against his ear–poppy and mandragora.

  ‘What else is there to live for? Isn’t this enough? Love–happiness–success–love–’

  The wall was growing up all round him now–‘the curtain soft as silk’, the curtain wrapping him round, stifling him a little, but so soft, so sweet! Now they were drifting together, at peace, out on the crystal sea. The wall was very high now, shutting out all those other things–those dangerous, disturbing things that hurt–that always hurt. Out on the sea of crystal, the golden apple between their hands.

  The light faded from Jane’s picture.

  Afterword

  Like many of Christie’s early short stories, ‘Within a Wall’, first published in the Royal Magazine in October 1925, is somewhat ambiguous. The concluding remarks about the encircling white walls can be taken as what they appear to be, a description of the arms of Isobel Loring as they wind around Alan Everard, but how else might the phrase be interpreted? There is the obscure closing reference to ‘The golden apple within their hands’–whose hands, and what does the ‘golden apple’ symbolize? Is there perhaps a darker significance to Alan’s earlier misunderstanding of Winnie’s riddle? Is he in fact strangling his wife at the end of the story? Or, given that ‘the light’ is fading from Jane’s picture at the end, is the reader supposed to understand that Alan has forgotten her and forgiven Isobel? And what of his own death? Christie does not explain the circumstances, only noting that it has led to unkind rumours which the narrator of the story is seeking to scotch.

  The story is also based around one of the most common motifs in the work of Agatha Christie, the eternal triangle. This features in various works, including the similarly structured Poirot novels Death on the Nile (1937) and Evil Under the Sun (1941) and in short stories like ‘The Bloodstained Pavement’, collected in The Thirteen Problems (1932). In A Talent to Deceive (1980), unquestionably the finest critique of her writing, Robert Barnard describes how Christie uses this and other commonplace themes as one of her ‘strategies of deception’, tricking readers into misdirecting their sympathy (and suspicions) by playing on their expectations. She also adopted similar tactics in her stage plays, most notably in The Mousetrap (1952).

  The Mystery of The Baghdad Chest

  The words made a catchy headline, and I said as much to my friend, Hercule Poirot. I knew none of the parties. My interest was merely the dispassionate one of the man in the street. Poirot agreed.

  ‘Yes, it has a flavour of the Oriental, of the mysterious. The chest may very well have been a sham Jacobean one from the Tottenham Court Road; none the less the reporter who thought of naming it the Baghdad Chest was happily inspired. The word “mystery” is also thoughtfully placed in juxtaposition, though I understand there is very little mystery about the case.’

  ‘Exactly. It is all rather horrible and macabre, but it is not mysterious.’

  ‘Horrible and macabre,’ repeated Poirot thoughtfully.

  ‘The whole idea is revolting,’ I said, rising to my feet and pacing up and down the room. ‘The murderer kills this man–his friend–shoves him into the chest, and half an hour later is dancing in that same room with the wife of his victim. Think! If she had imagined for one moment–’

  ‘True,’ said Poirot thoughtfully. ‘That much-vaunted possession, a woman’s intuition–it does not seem to have been working.’

  ‘The party seems to have gone off very merrily,’ I said with a slight shiver. ‘And all that time, as they danced and played poker, there was a dead man in the room with them. One could write a play about such an idea.’

  ‘It has been done,’ said Poirot. ‘But console yourself, Hastings,’ he added kindly. ‘Because a theme has been used once, there is no reason why it should not be used again. Compose your drama.’

  I had picked up the paper and was studying the rather blurred reproduction of a photograph.

  ‘She must be a beautiful woman,’ I said slowly. ‘Even from this, one gets an idea.’

  Below the picture ran the inscription:

  A recent portrait of Mrs Clayton,

  the wife of the murdered man

  Poirot took the paper from me.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She is beautiful. Doubtless she is of those born to trouble the souls of men.’

  He handed the paper back to me with a sigh.

  ‘Dieu merci, I am not of an ardent temperament. It has saved me from many embarrassments. I am duly thankful.’

  I do not remember that we discussed the case further. Poirot displayed no special interest in it at the time. The facts were so clear, and there was so little ambiguity about them, that discussion seemed merely futile.

  Mr and Mrs Clayton and Major Rich were friends of fairly long-standing. On the day in question, the tenth of March, the Claytons had accepted an invitation to spend
the evening with Major Rich. At about seven-thirty, however, Clayton explained to another friend, a Major Curtiss, with whom he was having a drink, that he had been unexpectedly called to Scotland and was leaving by the eight o’clock train.

  ‘I’ll just have time to drop in and explain to old Jack,’ went on Clayton. ‘Marguerita is going, of course. I’m sorry about it, but Jack will understand how it is.’

  Mr Clayton was as good as his word. He arrived at Major Rich’s rooms about twenty to eight. The major was out at the time, but his manservant, who knew Mr Clayton well, suggested that he come in and wait. Mr Clayton said that he had no time, but that he would come in and write a note. He added that he was on his way to catch a train.

  The valet accordingly showed him into the sitting-room.

  About five minutes later Major Rich, who must have let himself in without the valet hearing him, opened the door of the sitting-room, called his man and told him to go out and get some cigarettes. On his return the man brought them to his master, who was then alone in the sitting-room. The man naturally concluded that Mr Clayton had left.

  The guests arrived shortly afterwards. They comprised Mrs Clayton, Major Curtiss and a Mr and Mrs Spence. The evening was spent dancing to the phonograph and playing poker. The guests left shortly after midnight.

  The following morning, on coming to do the sitting-room, the valet was startled to find a deep stain discolouring the carpet below and in front of a piece of furniture which Major Rich had brought from the East and which was called the Baghdad Chest.

  Instinctively the valet lifted the lid of the chest and was horrified to find inside the doubled-up body of a man who had been stabbed to the heart.

  Terrified, the man ran out of the flat and fetched the nearest policeman. The dead man proved to be Mr Clayton. The arrest of Major Rich followed very shortly afterward. The major’s defence, it was understood, consisted of a sturdy denial of everything. He had not seen Mr Clayton the preceding evening and the first he had heard of his going to Scotland had been from Mrs Clayton.

  Such were the bald facts of the case. Innuendoes and suggestions naturally abounded. The close friendship and intimacy of Major Rich and Mrs Clayton were so stressed that only a fool could fail to read between the lines. The motive for the crime was plainly indicated.

  Long experience has taught me to make allowance for baseless calumny. The motive suggested might, for all the evidence, be entirely non-existent. Some quite other reason might have precipitated the issue. But one thing did stand out clearly–that Rich was the murderer.

  As I say, the matter might have rested there, had it not happened that Poirot and I were due at a party given by Lady Chatterton that night.

  Poirot, whilst bemoaning social engagements and declaring a passion for solitude, really enjoyed these affairs enormously. To be made a fuss of and treated as a lion suited him down to the ground.

  On occasions he positively purred! I have seen him blandly receiving the most outrageous compliments as no more than his due, and uttering the most blatantly conceited remarks, such as I can hardly bear to set down.

  Sometimes he would argue with me on the subject.

  ‘But, my friend, I am not an Anglo-Saxon. Why should I play the hypocrite? Si, si, that is what you do, all of you. The airman who has made a difficult flight, the tennis champion–they look down their noses, they mutter inaudibly that “it is nothing”. But do they really think that themselves? Not for a moment. They would admire the exploit in someone else. So, being reasonable men, they admire it in themselves. But their training prevents them from saying so. Me, I am not like that. The talents that I possess–I would salute them in another. As it happens, in my own particular line, there is no one to touch me. C’est dommage! As it is, I admit freely and without hypocrisy that I am a great man. I have the order, the method and the psychology in an unusual degree. I am, in fact, Hercule Poirot! Why should I turn red and stammer and mutter into my chin that really I am very stupid? It would not be true.’

  ‘There is certainly only one Hercule Poirot,’ I agreed–not without a spice of malice of which, fortunately, Poirot remained quite oblivious.

  Lady Chatterton was one of Poirot’s most ardent admirers. Starting from the mysterious conduct of a Pekingese, he had unravelled a chain which led to a noted burglar and housebreaker. Lady Chatterton had been loud in his praises ever since.

  To see Poirot at a party was a great sight. His faultless evening clothes, the exquisite set of his white tie, the exact symmetry of his hair parting, the sheen of pomade on his hair, and the tortured splendour of his famous moustaches–all combined to paint the perfect picture of an inveterate dandy. It was hard, at these moments, to take the little man seriously.

  It was about half-past eleven when Lady Chatterton, bearing down upon us, whisked Poirot neatly out of an admiring group, and carried him off–I need hardly say, with myself in tow.

  ‘I want you to go into my little room upstairs,’ said Lady Chatterton rather breathlessly as soon as she was out of earshot of her other guests. ‘You know where it is, M. Poirot. You’ll find someone there who needs your help very badly–and you will help her, I know. She’s one of my dearest friends–so don’t say no.’

  Energetically leading the way as she talked, Lady Chatterton flung open a door, exclaiming as she did so, ‘I’ve got him, Marguerita darling. And he’ll do anything you want. You will help Mrs Clayton, won’t you, M. Poirot?’

  And taking the answer for granted, she withdrew with the same energy that characterized all her movements.

  Mrs Clayton had been sitting in a chair by the window. She rose now and came toward us. Dressed in deep mourning, the dull black showed up her fair colouring. She was a singularly lovely woman, and there was about her a simple childlike candour which made her charm quite irresistible.

  ‘Alice Chatterton is so kind,’ she said. ‘She arranged this. She said you would help me, M. Poirot. Of course I don’t know whether you will or not–but I hope you will.’

  She had held out her hand and Poirot had taken it. He held it now for a moment or two while he stood scrutinizing her closely. There was nothing ill-bred in his manner of doing it. It was more the kind but searching look that a famous consultant gives a new patient as the latter is ushered into his presence.

  ‘Are you sure, madame,’ he said at last, ‘that I can help you?’

  ‘Alice says so.’

  ‘Yes, but I am asking you, madame.’

  A little flush rose to her cheeks.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘What is it, madame, that you want me to do?’

  ‘You–you–know who I am?’ she asked.

  ‘Assuredly.’

  ‘Then you can guess what it is I am asking you to do, M. Poirot–Captain Hastings’–I was gratified that she realized my identity–‘Major Rich did not kill my husband.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Poirot smiled at her slight discomfiture.

  ‘I said, “Why not?”’ he repeated.

  ‘I’m not sure that I understand.’

  ‘Yet it is very simple. The police–the lawyers–they will all ask the same question: Why did Major Rich kill M. Clayton? I ask the opposite. I ask you, madame, why did Major Rich not kill Mr Clayton.’

  ‘You mean–why I’m so sure? Well, but I know. I know Major Rich so well.’

  ‘You know Major Rich so well,’ repeated Poirot tonelessly.

  The colour flamed into her cheeks.

  ‘Yes, that’s what they’ll say–what they’ll think! Oh, I know!’

  ‘C’est vrai. That is what they will ask you about–how well you knew Major Rich. Perhaps you will speak the truth, perhaps you will lie. It is very necessary for a woman to lie, it is a good weapon. But there are three people, madame, to whom a woman should speak the truth. To her Father Confessor, to her hairdresser and to her private detective–if she trusts him. Do you trust me, madame?’
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  Marguerita Clayton drew a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. I must,’ she added rather childishly.

  ‘Then, how well do you know Major Rich?’

  She looked at him for a moment in silence, then she raised her chin defiantly.

  ‘I will answer your question. I loved Jack from the first moment I saw him–two years ago. Lately I think–I believe–he has come to love me. But he has never said so.’

  ‘E´patant!’ said Poirot. ‘You have saved me a good quarter of an hour by coming to the point without beating the bush. You have the good sense. Now your husband–did he suspect your feelings?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Marguerita slowly. ‘I thought–lately–that he might. His manner has been different…But that may have been merely my fancy.’

  ‘Nobody else knew?’

  ‘I do not think so.’

  ‘And–pardon me, madame–you did not love your husband?’

  There were, I think, very few women who would have answered that question as simply as this woman did. They would have tried to explain their feelings.

  Marguerita Clayton said quite simply: ‘No.’

  ‘Bien. Now we know where we are. According to you, madame, Major Rich did not kill your husband, but you realize that all the evidence points to his having done so. Are you aware, privately, of any flaw in that evidence?’

  ‘No. I know nothing.’

  ‘When did your husband first inform you of his visit to Scotland?’

  ‘Just after lunch. He said it was a bore, but he’d have to go. Something to do with land values, he said it was.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘He went out–to his club, I think. I–I didn’t see him again.’

  ‘Now as to Major Rich–what was his manner that evening? Just as usual?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘You are not sure?’

  Marguerita wrinkled her brows.

  ‘He was–a little constrained. With me–not with the others. But I thought I knew why that was. You understand? I am sure the constraint or–or–absentmindedness perhaps describes it better–had nothing to do with Edward. He was surprised to hear that Edward had gone to Scotland, but not unduly so.’