The Burden

by Agatha Christie, writing as Mary Westmacott

  Sipping his little glass of coloured liqueur, looking at the people, the lights, the harbour, he thought that this would be a good place to find out all that. It was not the solitude of a desert he wanted, he wanted his fellow kind. He was not by nature a recluse or an ascetic. He had no vocation for the monastic life. All he needed was to find out who and what was Llewellyn Knox. Once he knew that, he could go ahead and take up life once more.

  It all came back, perhaps, to Kant’s three questions:

  What do I know?

  What can I hope?

  What ought I to do?

  Of these questions, he could answer only one, the second.

  The waiter came back and stood by his table.

  ‘They are good magazines?’ he asked happily.

  Llewellyn smiled.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They were not very new, I am afraid.’

  ‘That does not matter.’

  ‘No. What is good a year ago is good now.’

  He spoke with calm certainty.

  Then he added:

  ‘You have come from the ship? The Santa Margherita? Out there?’

  He jerked his head towards the jetty.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She goes out again tomorrow at twelve, that is right?’

  ‘Perhaps. I do not know. I am staying here.’

  ‘Ah, you have come for a visit? It is beautiful here, so the visitors say. You will stay until the next ship comes in? On Thursday?’

  ‘Perhaps longer. I may stay here some time.’

  ‘Ah, you have business here!’

  ‘No, I have no business.’

  ‘People do not usually stay long here, unless they have business. They say the hotels are not good enough, and there is nothing to do.’

  ‘Surely there is as much to do here as anywhere else?’

  ‘For us who live here, yes. We have our lives and our work. But for strangers, no. Although we have foreigners who have come here to live. There is Sir Wilding, an Englishman. He has a big estate here – it came to him from his grandfather. He lives here altogether now, and writes books. He is a very celebrated señor, and much respected.’

  ‘You mean Sir Richard Wilding?’

  The waiter nodded.

  ‘Yes, that is his name. We have known him here many, many years. In the war he could not come, but afterwards he came back. He also paints pictures. There are many painters here. There is a Frenchman who lives in a cottage up at Santa Dolmea. And there is an Englishman and his wife over on the other side of the island. They are very poor, and the pictures he paints are very odd. She carves figures out of stone as well –’

  He broke off and darted suddenly forward to a table in the corner at which a chair had been turned up, to indicate that it was reserved. Now he seized the chair and drew it back a little, bowing a welcome at the woman who came to occupy it.

  She smiled her thanks at him as she sat down. She did not appear to give him an order, but he went away at once. The woman put her elbows on the table and stared out over the harbour.

  Llewellyn watched her with a stirring of surprise.

  She wore an embroidered Spanish scarf of flowers on an emerald green background, like many of the women walking up and down the street, but she was, he was almost sure, either American or English. Her blonde fairness stood out amongst the other occupants of the café. The table at which she was sitting was half obliterated by a great hanging mass of coral-coloured bougainvillaea. To anyone sitting at it, it must have given the feeling of looking out from a cave smothered in vegetation on to the world, and more particularly over the lights of the ships, and their reflections in the harbour.

  The girl, for she was little more, sat quite still, in an attitude of passive waiting. Presently the waiter brought her her drink. She smiled her thanks without speaking. Then, her hands cupped round the glass, she continued to stare out over the harbour, occasionally sipping her drink.

  Llewellyn noticed the rings on her fingers, a solitaire emerald on one hand, and a cluster of diamonds on the other. Under the exotic shawl she was wearing a plain high-necked black dress.

  She neither looked at, nor paid any attention to, the people sitting round her, and none of them did more than glance at her, and even so without any particular attention. It was clear that she was a well-known figure in the café.

  Llewellyn wondered who she was. It struck him as a little unusual that a young woman of her class should be sitting there alone, without any companion. Yet she was obviously perfectly at ease and had the air of someone performing a well-known routine. Perhaps a companion would shortly come and join her.

  But the time went on, and the girl still sat alone at her table. Occasionally she made a slight gesture with her head, and the waiter brought her another drink.

  It was almost an hour later when Llewellyn signalled for his check and prepared to leave. As he passed near her chair, he looked at her.

  She seemed oblivious both of him and of her immediate surroundings. She stared now into her glass, now out to sea, and her expression did not change. It was the expression of someone who is very far away.

  As Llewellyn left the café and started up the narrow street that led back to his hotel, he had a sudden impulse to go back, to speak to her, to warn her. Now why had that word ‘warn’ come into his head? Why did he have the idea that she was in danger?

  He shook his head. There was nothing he could do about it at the moment, but he was quite sure that he was right.

  2

  Two weeks later found Llewellyn Knox still on the island. His days had fallen into a pattern. He walked, rested, read, walked again, slept. In the evenings after dinner he went down to the harbour and sat in one of the cafés. Soon he cut reading out of his daily routine. He had nothing more to read.

  He was living now with himself only, and that, he knew, was what it should be. But he was not alone. He was in the midst of others of his kind, he was at one with them, even if he never spoke to them. He neither sought nor avoided contact. He had conversations with many people, but none of them meant anything more than the courtesies of fellow human beings. They wished him well, he wished them well, but neither of them wanted to intrude into the other’s life.

  Yet to this aloof and satisfying friendship there was an exception. He wondered constantly about the girl who came to the café and sat at the table under the bougainvillaea. Though he patronized several different establishments on the harbour front, he came most often to the first one of his choice. Here, on several occasions, he saw the English girl. She arrived always late in the evening and sat at the same table, and he had discovered that she stayed there until almost everyone else had left. Though she was a mystery to him, it was clear to him that she was a mystery to no one else.

  One day he spoke of her to the waiter.

  ‘The señora who sits there, she is English?’

  ‘Yes, she is English.’

  ‘She lives in the island?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She does not come here every evening?’

  The waiter said gravely:

  ‘She comes when she can.’

  It was a curious answer, and Llewellyn thought about it afterwards.

  He did not ask her name. If the waiter had wanted him to know her name, he would have told it to him. The boy would have said: ‘She is the señora so-and-so, and she lives at such-and-such a place.’ Since he did not say that, Llewellyn deduced that there was a reason why her name should not be given to a stranger.

  Instead he asked:

  ‘What does she drink?’

  The boy replied briefly: ‘Brandy,’ and went away.

  Llewellyn paid for his drink and said good night. He threaded his way through the tables and stood for a moment on the pavement before joining the evening throng of walkers.

  Then, suddenly, he wheeled round and marched with the firm decisive tread of his nationality to the table by the coral bougainvillaea.

  ‘Do you mind
,’ he said, ‘if I sit down and talk to you for a moment or two?’

  Chapter Two

  1

  Her gaze came back very slowly from the harbour lights to his face. For a moment or two her eyes remained wide and unfocused. He could sense the effort she made. She had been, he saw, very far away.

  He saw, too, with a sudden quick pity, how very young she was. Not only young in years (she was, he judged, about twenty-three or four), but young in the sense of immaturity. It was as though a normally maturing rosebud had had its growth arrested by frost – it still presented the appearance of normality, but actually it would progress no further. It would not visibly wither. It would just, in the course of time, drop to the ground, unopened. She looked, he thought, like a lost child. He appreciated, too, her loveliness. She was very lovely. Men would always find her lovely, always yearn to help her, to protect her, to cherish her. The dice, one would have said, were loaded in her favour. And yet she was sitting here, staring into unfathomable distance, and somewhere on her easy, assured happy path through life she had got lost.

  Her eyes, wide now and deeply blue, assessed him.

  She said, a little uncertainly: ‘Oh –?’

  He waited.

  Then she smiled.

  ‘Please do.’

  He drew up a chair and sat.

  She asked: ‘You are American?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you come off the ship?’

  Her eyes went momentarily to the harbour again. There was a ship alongside the quay. There was nearly always a ship.

  ‘I did come on a ship, but not that ship. I’ve been here a week or two.’

  ‘Most people,’ she said, ‘don’t stay as long as that.’

  It was a statement, not a question.

  Llewellyn gestured to a waiter who came.

  He ordered a Curaçao.

  ‘May I order you something?’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. And added: ‘He knows.’

  The boy bowed his head in assent and went away.

  They sat for a moment or two in silence.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said at last, ‘you were lonely? There aren’t many Americans or English here.’

  She was, he saw, settling the question of why he had spoken to her.

  ‘No,’ he said at once. ‘I wasn’t lonely. I find I’m – glad to be alone.’

  ‘Oh, one is, isn’t one?’

  The fervour with which she spoke surprised him.

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘That’s why you come here?’

  She nodded.

  ‘To be alone. And now I’ve come and spoilt it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t matter. You’re a stranger, you see.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘No. I’d rather you didn’t tell me. I won’t tell you my name, either.’

  She added doubtfully:

  ‘But perhaps you’ve been told that already. Everyone in the café knows me, of course.’

  ‘No, they haven’t mentioned it. They understand, I think, that you would not want it told.’

  ‘They do understand. They have, all of them, such wonderful good manners. Not taught good manners – the natural thing. I could never have believed till I came here that natural courtesy could be such a wonderful – such a positive thing.’

  The waiter came back with their two drinks. Llewellyn paid him.

  He looked over to the glass the girl held cupped in her two hands.

  ‘Brandy?’

  ‘Yes. Brandy helps a lot.’

  ‘It helps you to feel alone? Is that it?’

  ‘Yes. It helps me to feel – free.’

  ‘And you’re not free?’

  ‘Is anybody free?’

  He considered. She had not said the words bitterly – as they are usually spoken. She had been asking a simple question.

  ‘The fate of every man is bound about his neck – is that what you feel?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Not quite. I can understand feeling rather like that, that your course was charted out like a ship’s, and that you must follow it, again rather like a ship, and that so long as you do, you are all right. But I feel more like a ship that has, quite suddenly, gone off its proper course. And then, you see, you’re lost. You don’t know where you are, and you’re at the mercy of the wind and sea, and you’re not free, you’re caught in the grip of something you don’t understand – tangled up in it all.’ She added: ‘What nonsense I’m talking. I suppose it’s the brandy.’

  He agreed.

  ‘It’s partly the brandy, no doubt. Where does it take you?’

  ‘Oh, away… that’s all – away …’

  ‘What is it, really, that you have to get away from?’

  ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s the really – well, wicked part of it. I’m one of the fortunate ones. I’ve got everything.’ She repeated sombrely: ‘Everything … Oh, I don’t mean I’ve not had sorrows, losses, but it’s not that. I don’t hanker and grieve over the past. I don’t resurrect it and live it over again. I don’t want to go back, or even forward. I just want to go away somewhere. I sit here drinking brandy and presently I’m out there, beyond the harbour, and going farther and farther – into some kind of unreal place that doesn’t really exist. It’s rather like the dreams of flying you have as a child – no weight – so light – floating.’

  The wide unfocused stare was coming back to her eyes. Llewellyn sat watching her.

  Presently she came to herself with a little start.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t come back. I’m going now.’ He rose. ‘May I, now and then, come and sit here and talk to you? If you’d rather not, just say so. I shall understand.’

  ‘No, I should like you to come. Good night. I shan’t go just yet. You see, it’s not always that I can get away.’

  2

  It was about a week later when they talked together again. She said as soon as he sat down: ‘I’m glad you haven’t gone away yet. I was afraid you might have gone.’

  ‘I shan’t go away just yet. It’s not time yet.’

  ‘Where will you go when you leave here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You mean – you’re waiting for orders?’

  ‘You might put it like that, yes.’

  She said slowly:

  ‘Last time, when we talked, it was all about me. We didn’t talk about you at all. Why did you come here – to the island? Had you a reason?’

  ‘Perhaps it was for the same reason as you drink brandy – to get away, in my case from people.’

  ‘People in general, or do you mean special people?’

  ‘Not people in general. I meant really people who know me – or knew me – as I was.’

  ‘Did something – happen?’

  ‘Yes, something happened.’

  She leaned forward.

  ‘Are you like me? Did something happen that put you off course?’

  He shook his head with something that was almost vehemence.

  ‘No, not at all. What happened to me was an intrinsic part of the pattern of my life. It had significance and intention.’

  ‘But what you said about people –’

  ‘They don’t understand, you see. They are sorry for me, and they want to drag me back – to something that’s finished.’

  She wrinkled a puzzled brow.

  ‘I don’t quite –’

  ‘I had a job,’ he said smiling. ‘Now – I’ve lost it.’

  ‘An important job?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He was thoughtful. ‘I thought it was. But one can’t really know, you see, what is important. One has to learn not to trust one’s own values. Values are always relative.’

  ‘So you gave up your job?’

  ‘No.’ His smile flashed out again. ‘I was sacked.’

  ‘Oh.’ She was taken aback. ‘Did you – mind?�
��

  ‘Oh yes, I minded. Anyone would have. But that’s all over now.’

  She frowned at her empty glass. As she turned her head, the boy who had been waiting replaced the empty glass with a full one.

  She took a couple of sips, then she said:

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Do you think happiness is very important?’

  He considered.

  ‘That’s a very difficult question to answer. If I were to say that happiness is vitally important, and that at the same time it doesn’t matter at all, you’d think I was crazy.’

  ‘Can’t you be a little clearer?’

  ‘Well, it’s rather like sex. Sex is vitally important, and yet doesn’t matter. You’re married?’

  He had noticed the slim gold ring on her finger.

  ‘I’ve been married twice.’

  ‘Did you love your husband?’

  He left it in the singular, and she answered without quibbling.

  ‘I loved him more than anything in the world.’

  ‘When you look back on your life with him, what are the things that come first to your mind, the moments that you will always remember? Are they of the first time you slept together – or are they of something else?’

  Laughter came to her suddenly, and a quick enchanting gaiety.

  ‘His hat,’ she said.

  ‘Hat?’

  ‘Yes. On our honeymoon. It blew away and he bought a native one, a ridiculous straw thing, and I said it would be more suitable for me. So I put it on, and then he put on mine – one of those silly bits of nonsense women wear, and we looked at each other and laughed. All trippers change hats, he said, and then he said: “Good Lord, I do love you …” ’ Her voice caught. ‘I’ll never forget.’

  ‘You see?’ said Llewellyn. ‘Those are the magical moments – the moments of belonging – of everlasting sweetness – not sex. And yet if sex goes wrong, a marriage is completely ruined. So, in the same way, food is important – without it you cannot live, and yet, so long as you are fed, it occupies very little of your thoughts. Happiness is one of the foods of life, it encourages growth, it is a great teacher, but it is not the purpose of life, and is, in itself, not ultimately satisfying.’