Miss Marple chatted about the incidents of the tour in so far as she had been on it. As this, however, had only been three days, there was not very much to say.
'Mr Rafiel, I suppose, was an old friend of yours?' said the eldest Miss Bradbury-Scott.
'Not really,' said Miss Marple. 'I met him first when I was on a cruise to the West Indies. He was out there for his health, I imagine.'
'Yes, he had been very crippled for some years,' said Anthea.
'Very sad,' said Miss Marple. 'Very sad indeed. I really admired his fortitude. He seemed to manage to do so much work. Every day, you know, he dictated to his secretary and was continually sending off cables. He did not seem to give in at all kindly to being an invalid.'
'Oh no, he wouldn't,' said Anthea.
'We have not seen much of him of late years,' said Mrs Glynne. 'He was a busy man, of course. He always remembered us at Christmas very kindly.'
'Do you live in London, Miss Marple?' asked Anthea.
'Oh no,' said Miss Marple. 'I live in the country. A very small place half way between Loomouth and Market Basing. About twenty-five miles from London. It used to be a very pretty old-world village but of course like everything else, it is becoming what they call developed nowadays.'
She added, 'Mr Rafiel, I suppose, lived in London? At least I noticed that in the St Honore register his address was somewhere in Eaton Square, I think, or was it Belgrave Square?'
'He had a country house in Kent,' said Clotilde. 'He used to entertain there, I think, sometimes. Business friends, mostly you know, or people from abroad. I don't think any of us ever visited him there. He nearly always entertained us in London on the rare occasions when we happened to meet.'
'It was very kind of him,' said Miss Marple, 'to suggest to you that you should invite me here during the course of this tour. Very thoughtful. One wouldn't really have expected a busy man such as he must have been to have had such kindly thoughts.'
'We have invited before friends of his, who have been on these tours. On the whole they are very considerate the way they arrange these things… It is impossible, of course, to suit everybody's taste. The young ones naturally wish to walk, to make long excursions, to ascend hills for a view, and all that sort of thing. And the older ones who are not up to it, remain in the hotels, but hotels round here are not really at all luxurious. I am sure you would have found today's trip and the one to St Bonaventure tomorrow also, very fatiguing. Tomorrow, I believe, there is a visit to an island, you know, in a boat and sometimes it can be very rough.'
'Even going round houses can be very tiring,' said Mrs Glynne.
'Oh, I know,' said Miss Marple. 'So much walking and standing about. One's feet get very tired. I suppose really I ought not to take these expeditions, but it is such a temptation to see beautiful buildings and fine rooms and furniture. All these things. And of course some splendid pictures.'
'And the gardens,' said Anthea. 'You like gardens, don't you?'
'Oh yes,' said Miss Marple, 'specially the gardens. From the description in the prospect, I am really looking forward very much to seeing some of the really finely kept gardens of the historic houses we have still to visit.' She beamed round the table.
It was all very pleasant, very natural, and yet she wondered why for some reason she had a feeling of strain. A feeling that there was something unnatural here. But, what did she mean by unnatural? The conversation was ordinary enough consisting mainly of platitudes. She herself was making conventional remarks and so were the three sisters.
The Three Sisters, thought Miss Marple once again considering that phrase. Why did anything thought of in threes somehow seem to suggest a sinister atmosphere?
The Three Sisters. The Three Witches of Macbeth. Well, one could hardly compare these three sisters to the three witches. Although Miss Marple had always thought at the back of her mind that the theatrical producers made a mistake in the way in which they produced the three witches. One production which she had seen, indeed, seemed to her quite absurd. The witches had looked more like pantomime creatures with flapping wings and ridiculously spectacular steeple hats. They had danced and slithered about. Miss Marple remembered saying to her nephew, who was standing her this Shakespearean treat, 'You know, Raymond, my dear, if I were ever producing this splendid play I would make the three witches quite different. I would have them three ordinary, normal old women. Old Scottish women. They wouldn't dance or caper. They would look at each other rather slyly and you would feel a sort of menace just behind the ordinariness of them.'
Miss Marple helped herself to the last mouthful of plum tart and looked across the table at Anthea. Ordinary, untidy, very vague-looking, a bit scatty. Why should she feel that Anthea was sinister?
'I am imagining things,' said Miss Marple to herself. 'I mustn't do that.'
After luncheon she was taken on a tour of the garden. It was Anthea who was deputed to accompany her. It was, Miss Marple thought, rather a sad progress.
Here, there had once been a well kept, though certainly not in any way an outstanding or remarkable, garden. It had had the elements of an ordinary Victorian garden. A shrubbery, a drive of speckled laurels, no doubt there had once been a well kept lawn and paths, a kitchen garden of about an acre and a half, too big evidently for the three sisters who lived here now.
Part of it was unplanted and had gone largely to weeds. Ground elder had taken over most of the flower beds and Miss Marple's hands could hardly restrain themselves from pulling up the vagrant bind-weed asserting its superiority.
Miss Anthea's long hair flapped in the wind, shedding from time to time a vague hairpin on the path or the grass. She talked rather jerkily.
'You have a very nice garden, I expect,' she said.
'Oh, it's a very small one,' said Miss Marple.
They had come along a grass path and were pausing in front of a kind of hillock that rested against the wall at the end of it.
'Our greenhouse,' said Miss Anthea, mournfully.
'Oh yes, where you had such a delightful grapevine.'
'Three vines,' said Anthea. 'A Black Hamburg and one of those small white grapes, very sweet, you know. And a third one of beautiful muscats.'
'And a heliotrope, you said.'
'Cherry Pie,' said Anthea.
'Ah yes, Cherry Pie. Such a lovely smell. Was there any bomb trouble round here? Did that – er – knock the greenhouse down?'
'Oh no, we never suffered from anything of that kind. This neighbourhood was quite free of bombs. No, I'm afraid it just fell down from decay. We hadn't been here so very long and we had no money to repair it, or to build it up again. And in fact, it wouldn't have been worth it really because we couldn't have kept it up even if we did. I'm afraid we just let it fall down. There was nothing else we could do. And now you see, it's all grown over.'
'Ah that, completely covered by – what is that flowering creeper just coming into bloom?'
'Oh yes. It's quite a common one,' said Anthea. 'It begins with a P. Now what is the name of it,' she said doubtfully.
'Poly something, something like that.'
'Oh yes. I think I do know the name. Polygonum Baldshuanicum. Very quick growing, I think, isn't it? Very useful really if one wants to hide any tumbledown building or anything ugly of that kind.'
The mound in front of her was certainly thickly covered with the all-enveloping green and white flowering plant. It was, as Miss Marple well knew, a kind of menace to anything else that wanted to grow.
Polygonum covered everything, and covered it in a remarkably short time.
'The greenhouse must have been quite a big one,' she said.
'Oh yes, we had peaches in it, too – and nectarines.' Anthea looked miserable.
'It looks really very pretty now,' said Miss Marple in a consoling tone. 'Very pretty little white flowers, aren't they?'
'We have a very nice magnolia tree down this path to the left,' said Anthea. 'Once I believe there used to be a very fine border here – a herbaceous border. But that again one cannot keep up. It is too difficult. Everything is too difficult. Nothing is like it used to be – it's all spoilt – everywhere.'
