Five Little Pigs   ::   Christie Agatha

I can’t remember the events of that afternoon clearly at all. It’s all blurred. I remember old Merry coming out to meet us. I think we walked round the garden first. I remember having a long discussion with Angela about the training of terriers for ratting. She ate an incredible lot of apples, and tried to persuade me to do so too.

When we got back to the house, tea was going on under the big cedar tree. Merry, I remember, was looking very upset. I suppose either Caroline or Amyas had told him something. He was looking doubtfully at Caroline, and then he stared at Elsa. The old boy looked thoroughly worried. Of course Caroline liked to have Meredith on a string more or less, the devoted, platonic friend who would never, never go too far. She was that kind of woman.

After tea Meredith had a hurried word with me. He said:

‘Look here, Phil, Amyascan’t do this thing!’

I said:

‘Make no mistake, he’s going to do it.’

‘He can’t leave his wife and child and go off with this girl. He’s years older than she is. She can’t be more than eighteen.’

I said to him that Miss Greer was a fully sophisticated twenty.

He said: ‘Anyway, that’s under age. She can’t know what she’s doing.’

Poor old Meredith. Always the chivalrous pukka sahib. I said:

‘Don’t worry, old boy.She knows what she’s doing,and she likes it!’

That’s all we had the chance of saying. I thought to myself that probably Merry felt disturbed at the thought of Caroline being a deserted wife. Once the divorce was through she might expect her faithful Dobbin to marry her. I had an idea that hopeless devotion was really far more in his line. I must confess that that side of it amused me.

Curiously enough I remember very little about our visit to Meredith’s stink room. He enjoyed showing people his hobby. Personally I always found it very boring. I suppose I was in there with the rest of them when he gave a dissertation on the efficacy of coniine, but I don’t remember it. And I didn’t see Caroline pinch the stuff. As I’ve said, she was a very adroit woman. I do remember Meredith reading aloud the passage from Plato describing Socrates’ death. Very boring I thought it. Classics always did bore me.

There’s nothing much more I can remember about that day. Amyas and Angela had a first-class row, I know, and the rest of us rather welcomed it. It avoided other difficulties. Angela rushed off to bed with a final vituperative outburst. She said A, she’d pay him out. B, she wished he were dead.