At Bertram's Hotel

by Agatha Christie

  “Progress,” said Lady Selina vaguely. “Though it often seems to me that it isn’t progress. All these smart plumbing fixtures they have nowadays. Every shade of colour and superb what they call ‘finish’—but do any of them really pull? Or push, when they’re that kind. Every time you go to a friend’s house, you find some kind of a notice in the loo—‘Press sharply and release,’ ‘Pull to the left,’ ‘Release quickly.’ But in the old days, one just pulled up a handle any kind of way, and cataracts of water came at once—There’s the dear Bishop of Medmenham,” Lady Selina broke off to say, as a handsome, elderly cleric passed by. “Practically quite blind, I believe. But such a splendid militant priest.”

  A little clerical talk was indulged in, interspersed by lady Selina’s recognition of various friends and acquaintances, many of whom were not the people she thought they were. She and Miss Marple talked a little of “old days,” though Miss Marple’s upbringing, of course, had been quite different from Lady Selina’s, and their reminiscences were mainly confined to the few years when Lady Selina, a recent widow of severely straitened means, had taken a small house in the village of St. Mary Mead during the time her second son had been stationed at an airfield nearby.

  “Do you always stay here when you come up, Jane? Odd I haven’t seen you here before.”

  “Oh no, indeed. I couldn’t afford to, and anyway, I hardly ever leave home these days. No, it was a very kind niece of mine who thought it would be a treat for me to have a short visit to London. Joan is a very kind girl—at least perhaps hardly a girl.” Miss Marple reflected with a qualm that Joan must now be close on fifty. “She is a painter, you know. Quite a well-known painter. Joan West. She had an exhibition not long ago.”

  Lady Selina had little interest in painters, or indeed in anything artistic. She regarded writers, artists and musicians as a species of clever performing animal; she was prepared to feel indulgent towards them, but to wonder privately why they wanted to do what they did.

  “This modern stuff, I suppose,” she said, her eyes wandering. “There’s Cicely Longhurst—dyed her hair again, I see.”

  “I’m afraid dear Joan is rather modern.”

  Here Miss Marple was quite wrong. Joan West had been modern about twenty years ago, but was now regarded by the young arriviste artists as completely old-fashioned.

  Casting a brief glance at Cicely Longhurst’s hair, Miss Marple relapsed into a pleasant remembrance of how kind Joan had been. Joan had actually said to her husband, “I wish we could do something for poor old Aunt Jane. She never gets away from home. Do you think she’d like to go to Bournemouth for a week or two?”

  “Good idea,” said Raymond West. His last book was doing very well indeed, and he felt in a generous mood.

  “She enjoyed her trip to the West Indies, I think, though it was a pity she had to get mixed-up in a murder case. Quite the wrong thing at her age.”

  “That sort of thing seems to happen to her.”

  Raymond was very fond of his old aunt and was constantly devising treats for her, and sending her books that he thought might interest her. He was surprised when she often politely declined the treats, and though she always said the books were “so interesting” he sometimes suspected that she had not read them. But then, of course, her eyes were failing.

  In this last he was wrong. Miss Marple had remarkable eyesight for her age, and was at this moment taking in everything that was going on round her with keen interest and pleasure.

  To Joan’s proffer of a week or two at one of Bournemouth’s best hotels, she had hesitated, murmured, “It’s very, very kind of you, my dear, but I really don’t think—”

  “But it’s good for you, Aunt Jane. Good to get away from home sometimes. It gives you new ideas, and new things to think about.”

  “Oh yes, you are quite right there, and I would like a little visit somewhere for a change. Not, perhaps, Bournemouth.”

  Joan was slightly surprised. She had thought Bournemouth would have been Aunt Jane’s Mecca.

  “Eastbourne? Or Torquay?”

  “What I would really like—” Miss Marple hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “I dare say you will think it rather silly of me.”

  “No, I’m sure I shan’t.” (Where did the old dear want to go?)

  “I would really like to go to Bertram’s Hotel—in London.”

  “Bertram’s Hotel?” The name was vaguely familiar.

  Words came from Miss Marple in a rush.

  “I stayed there once—when I was fourteen. With my uncle and aunt, Uncle Thomas, that was, he was Canon of Ely. And I’ve never forgotten it. If I could stay there—a week would be quite enough—two weeks might be too expensive.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Of course you shall go. I ought to have thought that you might want to go to London—the shops and everything. We’ll fix it up—if Bertram’s Hotel still exists. So many hotels have vanished, sometimes bombed in the war and sometimes just given up.”

  “No, I happen to know Bertram’s Hotel is still going. I had a letter from there—from my American friend Amy McAllister of Boston. She and her husband were staying there.”

  “Good, then I’ll go ahead and fix it up.” She added gently, “I’m afraid you may find it’s changed a good deal from the days when you knew it. So don’t be disappointed.”

  But Bertram’s Hotel had not changed. It was just as it had always been. Quite miraculously so, in Miss Marple’s opinion. In fact, she wondered….

  It really seemed too good to be true. She knew quite well, with her usual clear-eyed common sense, that what she wanted was simply to refurbish her memories of the past in their old original colours. Much of her life had, perforce, to be spent recalling past pleasures. If you could find someone to remember them with, that was indeed happiness. Nowadays that was not easy to do; she had outlived most of her contemporaries. But she still sat and remembered. In a queer way, it made her come to life again—Jane Marple, that pink and white eager young girl…Such a silly girl in many ways…now who was that very unsuitable young man whose name—oh dear, she couldn’t even remember it now! How wise her mother had been to nip that friendship so firmly in the bud. She had come across him years later—and really he was quite dreadful! At the time she had cried herself to sleep for at least a week!

  Nowadays, of course—she considered nowadays…These poor young things. Some of them had mothers, but never mothers who seemed to be any good—mothers who were quite incapable of protecting their daughters from silly affairs, illegitimate babies, and early and unfortunate marriages. It was all very sad.

  Her friend’s voice interrupted these meditations.

  “Well, I never. It is—yes, it is—Bess Sedgwick over there! Of all the unlikely places—”

  Miss Marple had been listening with only half an ear to Lady Selina’s comments on her surroundings. She and Miss Marple moved in entirely different circles, so that Miss Marple had been unable to exchange scandalous titbits about the various friends or acquaintances that Lady Selina recognized or thought she recognized.

  But Bess Sedgwick was different. Bess Sedgwick was a name that almost everyone in England knew. For over thirty years now, Bess Sedgwick had been reported by the Press as doing this or that outrageous or extraordinary thing. For a good part of the war she had been a member of the French Resistance, and was said to have six notches on her gun representing dead Germans. She had flown solo across the Atlantic years ago, had ridden on horseback across Europe and fetched up at Lake Van. She had driven racing cars, had once saved two children from a burning house, had several marriages to her credit and discredit and was said to be the second best-dressed woman in Europe. It was also said that she had successfully smuggled herself aboard a nuclear submarine on its test voyage.

  It was therefore with the most intense interest that Miss Marple sat up and indulged in a frankly avid stare.

  Whatever she had expected of Bertram’s Hotel, it was not to find Bess S
edgwick there. An expensive night club, or a lorry drivers’ pull up—either of those would be quite in keeping with Bess Sedgwick’s wide range of interests. But this highly respectable and old world hostelry seemed strangely alien.

  Still there she was—no doubt of it. Hardly a month passed without Bess Sedgwick’s face appearing in the fashion magazines or the popular press. Here she was in the flesh, smoking a cigarette in a quick impatient manner and looking in a surprised way at the large tea tray in front of her as though she had never seen one before. She had ordered—Miss Marple screwed up her eyes and peered—it was rather far away—yes, doughnuts. Very interesting.

  As she watched, Bess Sedgwick stubbed out her cigarette in her saucer, lifted a doughnut and took an immense bite. Rich red real strawberry jam gushed out over her chin. Bess threw back her head and laughed, one of the loudest and gayest sounds to have been heard in the lounge of Bertram’s Hotel for some time.

  Henry was immediately beside her, a small delicate napkin proffered. She took it, scrubbed her chin with the vigour of a schoolboy, exclaiming: “That’s what I call a real doughnut. Gorgeous.”

  She dropped the napkin on the tray and stood up. As usual every eye was on her. She was used to that. Perhaps she liked it, perhaps she no longer noticed it. She was worth looking at—a striking woman rather than a beautiful one. The palest of platinum hair fell sleek and smooth to her shoulders. The bones of her head and face were exquisite. Her nose was faintly aquiline, her eyes deep set and a real grey in colour. She had the wide mouth of a natural comedian. Her dress was of such simplicity that it puzzled most men. It looked like the coarsest kind of sacking, had no ornamentation of any kind, and no apparent fastening or seams. But women knew better. Even the provincial old dears in Bertram’s knew, quite certainly, that it had cost the earth!

  Striding across the lounge towards the lift, she passed quite close to Lady Selina and Miss Marple, and she nodded to the former.

  “Hello, Lady Selina. Haven’t seen you since Crufts. How are the Borzois?”

  “What on earth are you doing here, Bess?”

  “Just staying here. I’ve just driven up from Land’s End. Four hours and three-quarters. Not bad.”

  “You’ll kill yourself one of these days. Or someone else.”

  “Oh I hope not.”

  “But why are you staying here?”

  Bess Sedgwick threw a swift glance round. She seemed to see the point and acknowledge it with an ironic smile.

  “Someone told me I ought to try it. I think they’re right. I’ve just had the most marvellous doughnut.”

  “My dear, they have real muffins too.”

  “Muffins,” said Lady Sedgwick thoughtfully. “Yes…” She seemed to concede the point. “Muffins!”

  She nodded and went on towards the lift.

  “Extraordinary girl,” said Lady Selina. To her, like to Miss Marple, every woman under sixty was a girl. “Known her ever since she was a child. Nobody could do anything with her. Ran away with an Irish groom when she was sixteen. They managed to get her back in time—or perhaps not in time. Anyway they bought him off and got her safely married to old Coniston—thirty years older than she was, awful old rip, quite dotty about her. That didn’t last long. She went off with Johnnie Sedgwick. That might have stuck if he hadn’t broken his neck steeplechasing. After that she married Ridgway Becker, the American yacht owner. He divorced her three years ago and I hear she’s taken up with some Racing Motor Driver—a Pole or something. I don’t know whether she’s actually married or not. After the American divorce she went back to calling herself Sedgwick. She goes about with the most extraordinary people. They say she takes drugs…I don’t know, I’m sure.”

  “One wonders if she is happy,” said Miss Marple.

  Lady Selina, who had clearly never wondered anything of the kind, looked rather startled.

  “She’s got packets of money, I suppose,” she said doubtfully. “Alimony and all that. Of course that isn’t everything….”

  “No, indeed.”

  “And she’s usually got a man—or several men—in tow.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of course when some women get to that age, that’s all they want…But somehow—”

  She paused.

  “No,” said Miss Marple. “I don’t think so either.”

  There were people who would have smiled in gentle derision at this pronouncement on the part of an old-fashioned old lady who could hardly be expected to be an authority on nymphomania, and indeed it was not a word that Miss Marple would have used—her own phrase would have been “always too fond of men.” But Lady Selina accepted her opinion as a confirmation of her own.

  “There have been a lot of men in her life,” she pointed out.

  “Oh yes, but I should say, wouldn’t you, that men were an adventure to her, not a need?”

  And would any woman, Miss Marple wondered, come to Bertram’s Hotel for an assignation with a man? Bertram’s was very definitely not that sort of place. But possibly that could be, to someone of Bess Sedgwick’s disposition, the very reason for choosing it.

  She sighed, looked up at the handsome grandfather clock decorously ticking in the corner, and rose with the careful effort of the rheumatic to her feet. She walked slowly towards the lift. Lady Selina cast a glance around her and pounced upon an elderly gentleman of military appearance who was reading the Spectator.

  “How nice to see you again. Er—it is General Arlington, isn’t it?”

  But with great courtesy the old genleman declined being General Arlington. Lady Selina apologized, but was not unduly discomposed. She combined short sight with optimism and since the thing she enjoyed most was meeting old friends and acquaintances, she was always making this kind of mistake. Many other people did the same, since the lights were pleasantly dim and heavily shaded. But nobody ever took offence—usually indeed it seemed to give them pleasure.

  Miss Marple smiled to herself as she waited for the lift to come down. So like Selina! Always convinced that she knew everybody. She herself could not compete. Her solitary achievement in that line had been the handsome and well-gaitered Bishop of Westchester whom she had addressed affectionately as “dear Robbie” and who had responded with equal affection and with memories of himself as a child in a Hampshire vicarage calling out lustily “Be a crocodile now, Aunty Janie. Be a crocodile and eat me.”

  The lift came down, the uniformed middle-aged man threw open the door. Rather to Miss Marple’s surprise the alighting passenger was Bess Sedgwick whom she had seen go up only a minute or two before.

  And then, one foot poised, Bess Sedgwick stopped dead, with a suddenness that surprised Miss Marple and made her own forward step falter. Bess Sedgwick was staring over Miss Marple’s shoulder with such concentration that the old lady turned her own head.

  The commissionaire had just pushed open the two swing doors of the entrance and was holding them to let two women pass through into the lounge. One of them was a fussy looking middle-aged lady wearing a rather unfortunate flowered violet hat, the other was a tall, simply but smartly dressed, girl of perhaps seventeen or eighteen with long straight flaxen hair.

  Bess Sedgwick pulled herself together, wheeled round abruptly and reentered the lift. As Miss Marple followed her in, she turned to her and apologized.

  “I’m so sorry. I nearly ran into you.” She had a warm friendly voice. “I just remembered I’d forgotten something—which sounds nonsense but isn’t really.”

  “Second floor?” said the operator. Miss Marple smiled and nodded in acknowledgment of the apology, got out and walked slowly along to her room, pleasurably turning over sundry little unimportant problems in her mind as was so often her custom.

  For instance what Lady Sedgwick had said wasn’t true. She had only just gone up to her room, and it must have been then that she “remembered she had forgotten something” (if there had been any truth in that statement at all) and had come down to find it. Or had she perhaps co
me down to meet someone or look for someone? But if so, what she had seen as the lift door opened had startled and upset her, and she had immediately swung into the lift again and gone up so as not to meet whoever it was she had seen.

  It must have been the two newcomers. The middle-aged woman and the girl. Mother and daughter? No, Miss Marple thought, not mother and daughter.

  Even at Bertram’s, thought Miss Marple, happily, interesting things could happen….

  Chapter Three

  “Er—is Colonel Luscombe—?”

  The woman in the violet hat was at the desk. Miss Gorringe smiled in a welcoming manner and a page, who had been standing at the ready, was immediately dispatched but had no need to fulfil his errand, as Colonel Luscombe himself entered the lounge at that moment and came quickly across to the desk.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Carpenter.” He shook hands politely, then turned to the girl. “My dear Elvira.” He took both hands affectionately in his. “Well, well, this is nice. Splendid—splendid. Come and let’s sit down.” He led them to chairs, established them. “Well, well,” he repeated, “this is nice.”

  The effort he made was somewhat palpable as was his lack of ease. He could hardly go on saying how nice this was. The two ladies were not very helpful. Elvira smiled very sweetly. Mrs. Carpenter gave a meaningless little laugh, and smoothed her gloves.

  “A good journey, eh?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Elvira.

  “No fog. Nothing like that?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Our flight was five minutes ahead of time,” said Mrs. Carpenter.

  “Yes, yes. Good, very good.” He took a pull upon himself. “I hope this place will be all right for you?”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s very nice,” said Mrs. Carpenter warmly, glancing round her. “Very comfortable.”

  “Rather old-fashioned, I’m afraid,” said the Colonel apologetically. “Rather a lot of old fogies. No—er—dancing, anything like that.”