Agatha Christie - Postern of Fate

'Never mind,' said Tommy. 'Go and clean the dust of bygone years off you. Is Isaac any good at gardening?'

'He considers he is,' said Tuppence. 'We might experiment with him -'

'Unfortunately we don't know much about gardening ourselves. Yet another problem.'

'Six impossible things before breakfast indeed,' said Tuppence as she drained a cup of coffee and considered a fried egg remaining in the dish on the sideboard, flanked by two appetizing-looking kidneys. 'Breakfast is more worthwhile than thinking of impossible things. Tommy is the one who has gone after impossible things. Research indeed. I wonder if he'll get anything out of it all.'

She applied herself to a fried egg and kidneys.

'How nice,' said Tuppence, 'to have a different kind of breakfast.'

For a long time she had managed to regale herself in the morning with a cup of coffee and either orange juice or grapefruit. Although satisfactory so long as any weight problems were thereby solved, the pleasures of this kind of breakfast were not much appreciated. From the force of contrasts, hot dishes on the sideboard animated the digestive juices.

'I expect,' said Tuppence, 'it's what the Parkinsons used to have for breakfast here. Fried eggs or poached eggs and bacon and perhaps -' she threw her mind a good long way back to remembrances of old novels – 'perhaps yes, perhaps cold grouse on the sideboard, delicious! Oh yes, I remember, delicious it sounded. Of course, I suppose children were so unimportant that they only let them have the legs. Legs of game are very good because you can nibble at them.' She paused with the last piece of kidney in her mouth.

Very strange noises seemed to be coming through the doorway.

'I wonder,' said Tuppence. 'It sounds like a concert gone wrong somewhere.'

She paused again, a piece of toast in her hand, and looked up as Albert entered the room.

'What is going on, Albert?' demanded Tuppence. 'Don't tell me that's our workmen playing something? A harmonium or something like that?'

'It's the gentleman what's come to do the piano,' said Albert.

'Come to do what to the piano?'

'To tune it. You said I'd have to get a piano tuner.'

'Good gracious,' said Tuppence, 'you've done it already? How wonderful you are, Albert.'

Albert looked pleased, though at the same time conscious of the fact that he was very wonderful in the speed with which he could usually supply the extraordinary demands made upon him sometimes by Tuppence and sometimes by Tommy.

'He says it needs it very bad,' he said.

'I expect it does,' said Tuppence.

She drank half a cup of coffee, went out of the room and into the drawing-room. A young man was at work at the grand piano, which was revealing to the world large quantities of its inside.

'Good morning, madam,' said the young man.

'Good morning,' said Tuppence. 'I'm so glad you've managed to come.'

'Ah, it needs tuning, it does.'

'Yes,' said Tuppence, 'I know. You see, we've only just moved in and it's not very good for pianos, being moved into houses and things. And it hasn't been tuned for a long time.'

'No, I can soon tell that,' said the young man.

He pressed three different chords in turn, two cheerful ones in a major key, two very melancholy ones in A Minor.

'A beautiful instrument, madam, if I may say so.'

'Yes,' said Tuppence. 'It's an Erard.'

'And a piano you wouldn't get so easily nowadays.'

'It's been through a few troubles,' said Tuppence. 'It's been through bombing in London. Our house there was hit. Luckily we were away, but it was mostly outside that was damaged.'

'Yes. Yes, the works are good. They don't need so very much doing to them.'

Conversation continued pleasantly. The young man played the opening bars of a Chopin Prelude and passed from that to a rendering of 'The Blue Danube'. Presently he announced that his ministrations had finished.

'I shouldn't leave it too long,' he warned her. 'I'd like the chance to come and try it again before too much time has gone by because you don't know quite when it might not – well, I don't know how I should put it – relapse a bit. You know, some little thing that you haven't noticed or haven't been able to get at.'

They parted with mutually appreciative remarks on music in general and on piano music in particular, and with the polite salutations of two people who agreed very largely in their ideas as to the joys that music generally played in life.

'Needs a lot doing to it, I expect, this house,' he said, looking round him.

'Well, I think it had been empty some time when we came into it.'

'Oh yes. It's changed hands a lot, you know.'

'Got quite a history, hasn't it,' said Tuppence. 'I mean, the people who lived in it in the past and the sort of queer things that happened.'

'Ah well, I expect you're talking of that time long ago. I don't know if it was the last war or the one before.'

'Something to do with naval secrets or something,' said Tuppence hopefully.

'Could be, I expect. There was a lot of talk, so they tell me, but of course I don't know anything about it myself.'

'Well before your time,' said Tuppence, looking appreciatively at his youthful countenance.

When he had gone, she sat down at the piano.

'I'll play "The Rain on the Roof",' said Tuppence, who had had this Chopin memory revived in her by the piano tuner's execution of one of the other preludes. Then she dropped into some chords and began playing the accompaniment to a song, humming it first and then murmuring the words as well.

Where has my true love gone a-roaming?

Where has my true love gone from me?

High in the woods the birds are calling.

When will my true love come back to me?

'I'm playing it in the wrong key, I believe,' said Tuppence. 'but at any rate, the piano's all right again now. Oh, it is great fun to be able to play the piano again. "Where has my true love gone a-roaming?'" she murmured. '"When will my true love" – Truelove,' said Tuppence thoughtfully. 'True love? Yes, I'm thinking of that perhaps as a sign. Perhaps I'd better go out and do something with Truelove.'

She put on her thick shoes and a pullover, and went out into the garden. Truelove had been pushed, not back into his former home in KK, but into the empty stable. Tuppence took him out, pulled him to the top of the grass slope, gave him a sharp flick with the duster she had brought out with her to remove the worst of the cobwebs which still adhered in many places, got into Truelove, placed her feet on the pedals and induced Truelove to display his paces as well as he could in his condition of general age and wear.

'Now, my true love,' she said, 'down the hill with you and not too fast.'

She removed her feet from the pedals and placed them in a position where she could brake with them when necessary.

Truelove was not inclined to go very fast in spite of the advantage to him of having only to go by weight down the hill. However, the slope increased in steepness suddenly. Truelove increased his pace, Tuppence applied her feet as brakes rather more sharply and she and Truelove arrived together at a rather more uncomfortable portion than usual of the monkey puzzle at the bottom of the hill.

'Most painful,' said Tuppence, excavating herself.

Having extricated herself from the pricking of various portions of the monkey puzzle, Tuppence brushed herself down and looked around her. She had come to a thick bit of shrubbery leading up the hill in the opposite direction. There were rhododendron bushes here and hydrangeas. It would look, Tuppence thought, very lovely later in the year. At the moment, there was no particular beauty about it, it was a mere thicket. However, she did seem to notice that there had once been a pathway leading up between the various flower bushes and shrubs. Everything was much grown together now but you could trace the direction of the path. Tuppence broke off a branch or two, pressed her way through the first bushes and managed to follow the hill. The path went winding up. It was clear that nobody had ever cleared it or walked down it for years.