The Hollow

by Agatha Christie

  Yet he sat there motionless. He was so tired—so very tired.

  It had been growing on him lately, this tiredness. It was at the root of the constantly increasing irritability which he was aware of but could not check. Poor Gerda, he thought, she has a lot to put up with. If only she was not so submissive—so ready to admit herself in the wrong when, half the time, it was he who was to blame! There were days when everything that Gerda said or did conspired to irritate him, and mainly, he thought ruefully, it was her virtues that irritated him. It was her patience, her unselfishness, her subordination of her wishes to his, that aroused his ill-humour. And she never resented his quick bursts of temper, never stuck to her own opinion in preference to his, never attempted to strike out a line of her own.

  (Well, he thought, that’s why you married her, isn’t it? What are you complaining about? After that summer at San Miguel…)

  Curious, when you came to think of it, that the very qualities that irritated him in Gerda were the qualities he wanted so badly to find in Henrietta. What irritated him in Henrietta (no, that was the wrong word—it was anger, not irritation, that she inspired)—what angered him there was Henrietta’s unswerving rectitude where he was concerned. It was so at variance to her attitude to the world in general. He had said to her once:

  “I think you are the greatest liar I know.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You are always willing to say anything to people if only it pleases them.”

  “That always seems to me more important.”

  “More important than speaking the truth?”

  “Much more.”

  “Then why in God’s name can’t you lie a little more to me?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, John, but I can’t.”

  “You must know so often what I want you to say.”

  Come now, he mustn’t start thinking of Henrietta. He’d be seeing her this very afternoon. The thing to do now was to get on with things! Ring the bell and see this last damned woman. Another sickly creature! One-tenth genuine ailment and nine-tenths hypochondria! Well, why shouldn’t she enjoy ill health if she cared to pay for it? It balanced the Mrs. Crabtrees of this world.

  But still he sat there motionless.

  He was tired—he was so very tired. It seemed to him that he had been tired for a very long time. There was something he wanted—wanted badly.

  And there shot into his mind the thought: “I want to go home.”

  It astonished him. Where had that thought come from? And what did it mean? Home? He had never had a home. His parents had been Anglo-Indians, he had been brought up, bandied about from aunt to uncle, one set of holidays with each. The first permanent home he had had, he supposed, was this house in Harley Street.

  Did he think of this house as home? He shook his head. He knew that he didn’t.

  But his medical curiosity was aroused. What had he meant by that phrase that had flashed out suddenly in his mind?

  I want to go home.

  There must be something—some image.

  He half-closed his eyes—there must be some background.

  And very clearly, before his mind’s eye, he saw the deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea, the palms, the cactus and the prickly pear; he smelt the hot summer dust, and remembered the cool feeling of the water after lying on the beach in the sun. San Miguel!

  He was startled—a little disturbed. He hadn’t thought of San Miguel for years. He certainly didn’t want to go back there. All that belonged to a past chapter in his life.

  That was twelve—fourteen—fifteen years ago. And he’d done the right thing! His judgment had been absolutely right! He’d been madly in love with Veronica but it wouldn’t have done. Veronica would have swallowed him body and soul. She was the complete egoist and she had made no bones about admitting it! Veronica had grabbed most things that she wanted, but she hadn’t been able to grab him! He’d escaped. He had, he supposed, treated her badly from the conventional point of view. In plain words, he had jilted her! But the truth was that he intended to live his own life, and that was a thing that Veronica would not have allowed him to do. She intended to live her life and carry John along as an extra.

  She had been astonished when he had refused to come with her to Hollywood.

  She had said disdainfully:

  “If you really want to be a doctor you can take a degree over there, I suppose, but it’s quite unnecessary. You’ve got enough to live on, and I shall be making heaps of money.”

  And he had replied vehemently:

  “But I’m keen on my profession. I’m going to work with Radley.”

  His voice—a young enthusiastic voice—was quite awed.

  Veronica sniffed.

  “That funny snuffy old man?”

  “That funny snuffy old man,” John had said angrily, “has done some of the most valuable research work on Pratt’s Disease—”

  She had interrupted: Who cared for Pratt’s Disease? California, she said, was an enchanting climate. And it was fun to see the world. She added: “I shall hate it without you. I want you, John—I need you.”

  And then he had put forward the, to Veronica, amazing suggestion that she should turn down the Hollywood offer and marry him and settle down in London.

  She was amused and quite firm. She was going to Hollywood, and she loved John, and John must marry her and come too. She had had no doubts of her beauty and of her power.

  He had seen that there was only one thing to be done and he had done it. He had written to her breaking off the engagement.

  He had suffered a good deal, but he had had no doubts as to the wisdom of the course he had taken. He’d come back to London and started work with Radley, and a year later he had married Gerda, who was as unlike Veronica in every way as it was possible to be….

  The door opened and his secretary, Beryl Collins, came in.

  “You’ve still got Mrs. Forrester to see.”

  He said shortly: “I know.”

  “I thought you might have forgotten.”

  She crossed the room and went out at the farther door. Christow’s eyes followed her calm withdrawal. A plain girl, Beryl, but damned efficient. He’d had her six years. She never made a mistake, she was never flurried or worried or hurried. She had black hair and a muddy complexion and a determined chin. Through strong glasses, her clear grey eyes surveyed him and the rest of the universe with the same dispassionate attention.

  He had wanted a plain secretary with no nonsense about her, and he had got a plain secretary with no nonsense about her, but sometimes, illogically, John Christow felt aggrieved! By all the rules of stage and fiction, Beryl should have been hopelessly devoted to her employer. But he had always known that he cut no ice with Beryl. There was no devotion, no self-abnegation—Beryl regarded him as a definitely fallible human being. She remained unimpressed by his personality, uninfluenced by his charm. He doubted sometimes whether she even liked him.

  He had heard her once speaking to a friend on the telephone.

  “No,” she had been saying, “I don’t really think he is much more selfish than he was. Perhaps rather more thoughtless and inconsiderate.”

  He had known that she was speaking of him, and for quite twenty-four hours he had been annoyed about it.

  Although Gerda’s indiscriminate enthusiasm irritated him, Beryl’s cool appraisal irritated him too. In fact, he thought, nearly everything irritates me….

  Something wrong there. Overwork? Perhaps. No, that was the excuse. This growing impatience, this irritable tiredness, it had some deeper significance. He thought: “This won’t do. I can’t go on this way. What’s the matter with me? If I could get away….”

  There it was again—the blind idea rushing up to meet the formulated idea of escape.

  I want to go home….

  Damn it all, 404 Harley Street was his home!

  And Mrs. Forrester was sitting in the waiting room. A tireso
me woman, a woman with too much money and too much spare time to think about her ailments.

  Someone had once said to him: “You must get very tired of these rich patients always fancying themselves ill. It must be so satisfactory to get to the poor, who only come when there is something really the matter with them!” He had grinned. Funny the things people believed about the Poor with a capital P. They should have seen old Mrs. Pearstock, on five different clinics, up every week, taking away bottles of medicine, liniments for her back, linctus for her cough, aperients, digestive mixtures. “Fourteen years I’ve ’ad the brown medicine, Doctor, and it’s the only thing does me any good. That young doctor last week writes me down a white medicine. No good at all! It stands to reason, doesn’t it, Doctor? I mean, I’ve ’ad me brown medicine for fourteen years, and if I don’t ’ave me liquid paraffin and them brown pills….”

  He could hear the whining voice now—excellent physique, sound as a bell—even all the physic she took couldn’t really do her any harm!

  They were the same, sisters under the skin, Mrs. Pearstock from Tottenham and Mrs. Forrester of Park Lane Court. You listened and you wrote scratches with your pen on a piece of stiff expensive notepaper, or on a hospital card as the case might be….

  God, he was tired of the whole business….

  Blue sea, the faint sweet smell of mimosa, hot dust….

  Fifteen years ago. All that was over and done with—yes, done with, thank heaven. He’d had the courage to break off the whole business.

  Courage? said a little imp somewhere. Is that what you call it?

  Well, he’d done the sensible thing, hadn’t he? It had been a wrench. Damn it all, it had hurt like hell! But he’d gone through with it, cut loose, come home, and married Gerda.

  He’d got a plain secretary and he’d married a plain wife. That was what he wanted, wasn’t it? He’d had enough of beauty, hadn’t he? He’d seen what someone like Veronica could do with her beauty—seen the effect it had on every male within range. After Veronica, he’d wanted safety. Safety and peace and devotion and the quiet, enduring things of life. He’d wanted, in fact, Gerda! He’d wanted someone who’d take her ideas of life from him, who would accept his decisions and who wouldn’t have, for one moment, any ideas of her own….

  Who was it who had said that the real tragedy of life was that you got what you wanted?

  Angrily he pressed the buzzer on his desk.

  He’d deal with Mrs. Forrester.

  It took him a quarter of an hour to deal with Mrs. Forrester. Once again it was easy money. Once again he listened, asked questions, reassured, sympathized, infused something of his own healing energy. Once more he wrote out a prescription for an expensive proprietary.

  The sickly neurotic woman who had trailed into the room left it with a firmer step, with colour in her cheeks, with a feeling that life might possibly after all be worthwhile.

  John Christow leant back in his chair. He was free now—free to go upstairs to join Gerda and the children—free from the preoccupations of illness and suffering for a whole weekend.

  But he felt still that strange disinclination to move, that new queer lassitude of the will.

  He was tired—tired—tired.

  Four

  In the dining room of the flat above the consulting room Gerda Christow was staring at a joint of mutton.

  Should she or should she not send it back to the kitchen to be kept warm?

  If John was going to be much longer it would be cold—congealed, and that would be dreadful.

  But on the other hand the last patient had gone, John would be up in a moment, if she sent it back there would be delay—John was so impatient. “But surely you knew I was just coming…” There would be that tone of suppressed exasperation in his voice that she knew and dreaded. Besides, it would get overcooked, dried up—John hated overcooked meat.

  But on the other hand he disliked cold food very much indeed.

  At any rate the dish was nice and hot.

  Her mind oscillated to and fro, and her sense of misery and anxiety deepened.

  The whole world had shrunk to a leg of mutton getting cold on a dish.

  On the other side of the table her son Terence, aged twelve, said:

  “Boracic salts burn with a green flame, sodium salts are yellow.”

  Gerda looked distractedly across the table at his square, freckled face. She had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Did you know that, Mother?”

  “Know what, dear?”

  “About salts.”

  Gerda’s eye flew distractedly to the salt cellar. Yes, salt and pepper were on the table. That was all right. Last week Lewis had forgotten them and that had annoyed John. There was always something….

  “It’s one of the chemical tests,” said Terence in a dreamy voice. “Jolly interesting. I think.”

  Zena, aged nine, with a pretty, vacuous face, whimpered:

  “I want my dinner. Can’t we start, Mother?”

  “In a minute, dear, we must wait for Father.”

  “We could start,” said Terence. “Father wouldn’t mind. You know how fast he eats.”

  Gerda shook her head.

  Carve the mutton? But she never could remember which was the right side to plunge the knife in. Of course, perhaps Lewis had put it the right way on the dish—but sometimes she didn’t—and John was always annoyed if it was done the wrong way. And, Gerda reflected desperately, it always was the wrong way when she did it. Oh, dear, how cold the gravy was getting—a skin was forming on the top of it—and surely he would be coming now.

  Her mind went round and round unhappily…like a trapped animal.

  Sitting back in his consulting room chair, tapping with one hand on the table in front of him, conscious that upstairs lunch must be ready, John Christow was nevertheless unable to force himself to get up.

  San Miguel…blue sea…smell of mimosa…a scarlet tritoma upright against green leaves…the hot sun…the dust…that desperation of love and suffering….

  He thought: “Oh, God, not that. Never that again! That’s over….”

  He wished suddenly that he had never known Veronica, never married Gerda, never met Henrietta….

  Mrs. Crabtree, he thought, was worth the lot of them. That had been a bad afternoon last week. He’d been so pleased with the reactions. She could stand .005 by now. And then had come that alarming rise in toxicity and the DL reaction had been negative instead of positive.

  The old bean had lain there, blue, gasping for breath—peering up at him with malicious, indomitable eyes.

  “Making a bit of a guinea pig out of me, ain’t you, dearie? Experimenting—that kinder thing.”

  “We want to get you well,” he had said, smiling down at her.

  “Up to your tricks, yer mean!” She had grinned suddenly. “I don’t mind, bless yer. You carry on, Doctor! Someone’s got to be first, that’s it, ain’t it? ’Ad me ’air permed, I did, when I was a kid. It wasn’t ’alf a difficult business then. Looked like a nigger, I did. Couldn’t get a comb through it. But there—I enjoyed the fun. You can ’ave yer fun with me. I can stand it.”

  “Feel pretty bad, don’t you?” His hand was on her pulse. Vitality passed from him to the panting old woman on the bed.

  “Orful, I feel. You’re about right! ’Asn’t gone according to plan—that’s it, isn’t it? Never you mind. Don’t you lose ’eart. I can stand a lot, I can!”

  John Christow said appreciatively:

  “You’re fine. I wish all my patients were like you.”

  “I wanter get well—that’s why! I wanter get well. Mum, she lived to be eighty-eight—and old Grandma was ninety when she popped off. We’re long-livers in our family, we are.”

  He had come away miserable, racked with doubt and uncertainty. He’d been so sure he was on the right track. Where had he gone wrong? How diminish the toxicity and keep up the hormone content and at the same time neutralize the pantratin?….

&nb
sp; He’d been too cocksure—he’d taken it for granted that he’d circumvented all the snags.

  And it was then, on the steps of St. Christopher’s, that a sudden desperate weariness had overcome him—a hatred of all this long, slow, wearisome clinical work, and he’d thought of Henrietta, thought of her suddenly not as herself, but of her beauty and her freshness, her health and her radiant vitality—and the faint smell of primroses that clung about her hair.

  And he had gone to Henrietta straight away, sending a curt telephone message home about being called away. He had strode into the studio and taken Henrietta in his arms, holding her to him with a fierceness that was new in their relationship.

  There had been a quick, startled wonder in her eyes. She had freed herself from his arms and had made him coffee. And as she moved about the studio she had thrown out desultory questions. Had he come, she asked, straight from the hospital?

  He didn’t want to talk about the hospital. He wanted to make love to Henrietta and forget that the hospital and Mrs. Crabtree and Ridgeway’s Disease and all the rest of the caboodle existed.

  But, at first unwillingly, then more fluently, he answered her questions. And presently he was striding up and down, pouring out a spate of technical explanations and surmises. Once or twice he paused, trying to simplify—to explain:

  “You see, you have to get a reaction—”

  Henrietta said quickly:

  “Yes, yes, the DL reaction has to be positive. I understand that. Go on.”

  He said sharply, “How do you know about the DL reaction?”

  “I got a book—”

  “What book? Whose?”

  She motioned towards the small book table. He snorted.

  “Scobell? Scobell’s no good. He’s fundamentally unsound. Look here, if you want to read—don’t—”

  She interrupted him.

  “I only want to understand some of the terms you use—enough so as to understand you without making you stop to explain everything the whole time. Go on. I’m following you all right.”