way she had gone on. She had changed. She had invested the money from the sale of her business very well. She would not need to work if she returned to London.
The concert mercifully drew to a close with the cast singing 'That's Entertainment'.
Then there was a general movement as chairs were drawn back and tables were set out for the lunch in honour of the Ancombe ladies. Agatha shivered. The hall was cold. Lunch turned out to be the inevitable quiche and salad. There was not even any home-made wine to wash it down, as there usually was at these functions, only rather dusty tea.
Conversation was desultory. Agatha looked around. What have I done? she wondered. How could I ever have thought I would fit in here? I don't really belong. I wasn't born in a village, I was born in a Birmingham slum, where trees and flowers were things you ripped out of the earth as soon as they dared to show a leaf. There was a lot to be said after all for anonymous London. Perhaps Bill Wong would come up and visit her from time to time. Well, maybe Mrs. Bloxby, too. As for James...well, she, Agatha Raisin, was worth better than James Lacey. She wanted a man with red blood in his veins, a man capable of intimacy, warmth, and affection.
'Dark thoughts?'
The woman who had been sitting at one of the long tables next to Agatha had left. Mrs. Bloxby had slid into her place.
'I don't really belong here,' said Agatha, waving a hand about the room. 'And do you know, I'm worth better than James. I want someone capable of intimacy. I don't mean sex. I mean warmth and affection.'
Mrs. Bloxby looked at her doubtfully. 'I have thought that perhaps the attraction James Lacey holds for you is because he lacks those things. By the very absence of them, the relationship lacks proper commitment. It did cross my mind recently that you were more like two bachelors living together than man and woman. And I wonder how you would cope with a man who demanded intimacy and love and affection from you, Mrs. Raisin.'
'Agatha.'
'Yes of course, Agatha.'
'I should think myself in seventh heaven.'
'Why this sudden disgust at Carsely and all who sail in her?'
Agatha bit her lip. She was too proud to admit she had been influenced by Mrs. Hardy.
'I just thought of it,' she said.
The vicar's wife studied her averted face for a moment and then said, 'I saw you leave the hall shortly after Mrs. Hardy disappeared. Did you find her?'
'Yes, she was heading home.'
'Did she give any reason for humiliating Fred Griggs in that way?'
Agatha still did not want to repeat any of Mrs. Hardy's remarks about the village and villagers.
'I think Mrs. Hardy considered Fred had already humiliated himself and wanted to leave and saw a convenient way to do it.'
'Ah,' said Mrs. Bloxby, 'perhaps my first impression of her was right.'
'That being?'
'That she was an unkind and unhappy woman.'
'Oh, no, I think she's a bit like me, used to a faster pace of life.'
'Is that what she tried to make you think?'
'I am not influenced by what anyone says to me,' said Agatha defiantly.
'And yet you have appeared quite contented with all us rustics up till now.'
'Perhaps it's the cold in this hall and the weather, and that was a truly dreadful concert,' said Agatha.
'Yes, it was awful, wasn't it? But then the Ancombe ladies' concert was pretty dire as well.'
'Why do they do it to each other?'
'Everyone likes their moment on stage. There's a bit of the failed actor in all of us. At these village affairs, everyone gets a chance to perform, no matter how bad they are. People applaud and are kind, because all of them want their time in the limelight as well.'
The old steam radiators against the wall gave a preliminary rattle.
'There you are,' said Mrs. Bloxby, 'the heating has come on. And look, the Ancombe ladies have brought a case of apple brandy, so we can all have a drink during the speeches. The atmosphere will soon lighten.'
The combination of heat and apple brandy did appear to work wonders. Agatha began to relax. Instead of standing outside looking in, she began to feel part of it again. The chairwoman of the Ancombe Ladies' Society made a speech and told several jokes which were received with gales of laugh-ter.
Stuff London and Mrs. Hardy, thought Agatha. I'm happy here.
James and Agatha went out for dinner that evening. James appeared to have recovered his good humour and he wanted to discuss 'our murder case'. Agatha was too content to have regained her feeling at being at home in the country to crave a more personal conversation, but James did start by asking her to remember all she could about her late husband. 'How did you meet him, for example?'
Agatha had quite forgotten that, through snobbery, she had hidden her low beginnings from James, always implying without actually saying so that she had come from a middle-class background and had been to a private school.
'How did I meet Jimmy?' Agatha sighed and put down her knife and fork and looked back down the long years.
'Let me see. I'd just escaped from home.'
'Home being Birmingham?'
'Yes, one of those blocks of flats in what they now call the inner city but what they used to call a slum.' She was so intent on her memories that she did not notice the flicker of surprise in James's blue eyes.
'Ma and Dad always seemed to be drunk. They wouldn't let me stay at school after I was fifteen, even though the teachers begged them to let me complete my education. They put me to work in a biscuit factory. God, the women seemed coarse, brutal. I was a skinny, sensitive little wimp then.
'I saved as much as I could and took off for London one night when my parents were both drunk. I was determined to be a secretary. The secretaries I had seen up in the offices of the biscuit factory looked fabulous creatures to me, compared to what I was working with on the shop floor. So I got a job as a waitress and went to a secretarial college in the evenings to learn shorthand and typing. I worked seven days a week, and my ambition was so great, I don't think my feet ached once. It wasn't a very classy restaurant. Classy restaurants only employed waiters in those days. It was a bit like one of the Lyon's Corner Houses. Good food but not French, if you know what I mean.'
Her eyes grew dreamy. 'Jimmy came in one night. He was with a rather tarty blonde, a bit older than he was. They seemed to be quarrelling. Then he started to flirt with me and that made her even angrier. I didn't think he was interested in me. I thought he was only doing it to get back at his girl-friend for something or other.
'But when I left by the back door that night after work, he was waiting for me. He said he would see me home. I had been working the evening shifts as well as the day ones while the secretarial college was closed for the summer vacation. He was very...merry. Very light-hearted. I'd never met anyone quite like Jimmy before.
'We got to my place, which was a bed-sit in Kilburn. I asked him where he lived and he said he had nowhere, because he had just been thrown out of his digs. I asked him where his stuff was and he said it was in the left luggage in Victoria Station. All he had in the world was one suitcase.
'I said he could sleep on the sofa just for one night. He did that. But the next day was a rare day off and we went to the zoo. Funny. I never liked zoos and I still don't, but I had been so very lonely and here I was with a handsome fellow of my own and it all seemed marvelous. Somehow it was agreed, I don't remember how, that he would move in with me. Of course he wanted to sleep with me, but the pill hadn't really got going in those days, and I was terrified of getting pregnant. He just laughed and said we'd get married. And so we did. We went to Blackpool on our honeymoon.'
Agatha suddenly looked at James and realized that she had finally betrayed all the truth of her background. Then she gave a little shrug and went on.
'He got a job loading newspapers down in Fleet Street. I was still working as a waitress and going to the college. It took me a month of marriage to realize I had jumped right out of the frying-pan into the fire, that is, I had jumped from a drunken home life into marriage to a drunken husband.
