by next Saturday afternoon?' 'I doubt it,' said Agatha, when they were both seated in the living-room. 'Why next Saturday afternoon?'
That's the day of the village band concert. Mrs. Mason is doing the cream teas. Quite an event.'
Agatha gave her a rather pitying smile, thinking that it was a sad life if all you had to look forward to was a concert by the village band.
They talked for a little longer and then Mrs. Bloxby left. Agatha packed a suitcase, carefully putting the pot of strawberry jam in one corner. She lay awake for a long time with the bedroom windows wide open, hoping for a breath of air, but buoyed up by the thought of London and a return from the grave that was Carsely.
Chapter Ten.
London! And how it smelt! Awful, thought Agatha, sitting in the dining-room of Haynes Hotel. She lit a cigarette and stared bleakly out at the traffic grinding past through Mayfair.
The man at the table behind her began to cough and choke and flap his newspaper angrily. Agatha looked at her burning cigarette and sighed.
Then she raised a hand and summoned the waiter. 'Remove that man from the table behind me,' she said, ' find him somewhere else. He's annoying me.'
The waiter looked from the man's angry face to Agatha's pugnacious one and then bent over the man and said soothingly that there was a nice table in the corner away from the smoke. The man protested loudly.
Agatha continued to smoke, ignoring the whole scene, until the angry man capitulated and was led away.
Imagine living in London and complaining about cigarette smoke, marvelled Agatha. One had only to walk down the streets to inhale the equivalent of four packs of cigarettes.
She finished her coffee and cigarette and went up to her room, already suffocatingly hot, and phoned Pedmans and asked for Roy.
At last she was put through to him. 'Aggie,' he cried. 'How are things in the Cotswolds?' 'Hellish,' said Agatha. 'I need to talk to you. What about lunch?'
'Lunch is booked. Dinner?'
'Fine. I'm at Haynes. See you at seven thirty in the bar.'
She put down the phone and looked around. Muslin curtains fluttered at the window, effectively cutting off what oxygen was left in the air.
She should have gone to the Hilton or somewhere American, where they had air-conditioning. Haynes was small and old-fashioned, like a country house trapped in the middle of Mayfair. The service was excellent. But it was a very English hotel and very English hotels never planned on a hot summer.
She decided, for want of anything better to do, to go over to The Quicherie and see Mr. Economides. The traffic was congested as usual and there wasn't a taxi in sight, so she walked from Mayfair along through Knightsbridge to Sloane Street, down Sloane Street to Sloane Square, and so along the King's Road to the World's End.
Mr. Economides gave her a guarded greeting, but Agatha had come to expect friendship and set herself to please in a way that was formerly foreign to her. The shop was quiet and relatively cool. It was the slack part of the day. Soon the lunch-time rush of customers would build up, buying coffee and sandwiches to take back to their offices.
Agatha asked about Mr. Economides's wife and family and he began to relax perceptibly and then asked her to take a seat at one of the little marble-topped tables while he brought her a coffee.
'I really should apologize for having brought all that trouble down on your head,' said Agatha. 'If I hadn't decided to cheat at that village competition by passing one of your delicious quiches off as my own, this would never have happened.'
At that moment, for some reason, the full shock of the attack on her by John Cartwright suddenly hit her and her eyes shone with tears.
'Now, then, Mrs. Raisin,' said Mr. Economides. 'I'll tell you a little secret. I cheat, too.'
Agatha dabbed at her eyes. 'You? How?'
'You see, I have a sign up there saying 'Baked on the Premises', but I often visit my cousin in Devon at the weekends. He has a delicatessen just like mine. Well, you see, sometimes if I'm going to be back late on a Sunday night after visiting him and I don't want to start baking early on Monday, I bring a big box of my cousin's quiches back with me if he has any left over. He does the same if he's visiting me, for his trade, unlike mine, is at the weekends with the tourists, while mine is during the week with the office people. So it was one of my cousin's quiches you bought.' 'Did you tell the police this?' asked Agatha.
The Greek looked horrified. 'I didn't want to put the police on to my cousin.' He looked at Agatha solemnly.
Agatha stared at him in bafflement and then the light dawned. 'Is it the immigration police you're frightened of?'
He nodded. 'My cousin's daughter's france came on a visitor's visa and they married in the Greek Orthodox Church but haven't yet registered with the British authorities and he is working for his father-in-law without a work permit and so ... ' He gave a massive shrug.
Agatha did not know anything about work permits but she did know from her dealings with foreign models in the past that they were paranoid about being deported. 'So it was just as well Mrs. Cummings-Browne didn't sue,' she said.
A shutter came down over his eyes. Two customers walked into the shop and he said a hurried goodbye before scuttling back behind the counter.
Agatha finished her coffee and took a stroll around her old haunts. She had a light lunch at the Stock Pot and then decided an air-conditioned cinema would be the best way to pass the afternoon. A little voice in her head was telling her that if she was determined to move back to London, she should start looking for a flat to live in and business premises to work from, but she shrugged the voice away. There was time enough, and besides, it was too hot. She bought an Evening Standard and discovered that a cinema off Leicester Square was showing a rerun of Disney's Jungle Book. So she went there and enjoyed the film and came out with the pleasurable prospect of seeing Roy, feeling sure that he would galvanize her into starting her new business.
It was hard, she thought, when she descended to the hotel bar at seven thirty, to get used to the new Roy. There he was with a conventional haircut and a sober business suit and an imitation of a Guards regimental tie.
He hailed her affectionately. Agatha bought him a double gin and asked him how his nursery project was going and he said it was coming along nicely and that they had made him a junior executive and had given him a private office and a secretary because they were so impressed by his getting his photo in the Sunday Times. 'Have another gin,' said Agatha, wishing that Roy were still unhappy at Pedmans.
He grinned. 'You forget I've seen the old Aggie in action. Fill ' up with booze and then go in for the kill over coffee. Break the habit, Aggie. Hit me with whatever is on your mind before we get to dinner.' 'All right,' said Agatha. She looked around. The bar was getting crowded. 'Let's take our drinks to that table over there.'
Once they were both settled, she leaned forward and looked at him intently. 'I'll come straight out with it, Roy. I'm coming back to London. I'm going to set up in business again and I want you to be my partner.'
'Why? You're through with the mess. You've got that lovely cottage and that lovely village ... '
'And I'm dying of boredom.'
'You haven't given it time, Aggie. You haven't settled in yet.'
'Well, if you're not interested,' said Agatha sulkily.
'Aggie, Pedmans is big, one of the biggest. You know that. I've got a great future in front of me. I'm taking it seriously now instead of camping about a few pop groups. I want to get out of pop groups. One of them hits the charts and then, two weeks later, no one wants to know. And you know why? The pop business has become all hype and no substance. No tunes. All thump, thump, thump for the discos. Sales are a fraction of what they used to be.
And do you know why I want to stick with Pedmans? I'm on my way up and fast. And I plan to get what you've got a cottage in the Cotswolds.
'Look, Aggie, no one wants to live in cities any more. The new generation is getting Americanized. Get up early enough in the morning and you don't need to live in London. Besides, I'm thinking of getting married.'
