The Hollow by Agatha Christie Read Free Book Online Page A

vacantly at what was said to her.
    Until, suddenly, she had reached the point where she had found a way out. Almost accidentally, really, she found her weapon of defence.
    She had grown slower still, her puzzled stare had become even blanker. But now, when they said impatiently: “Oh, Gerda, how stupid you are, don’t you understand that? ” she had been able, behind her blank expression, to hug herself a little in her secret knowledge…For she wasn’t as stupid as they thought. Often, when she pretended not to understand, she did understand. And often, deliberately, she slowed down in her task of whatever it was, smiling to herself when someone’s impatient fingers snatched it away from her.
    For, warm and delightful, was a secret knowledge of superiority. She began to be, quite often, a little amused. Yes, it was amusing to know more than they thought you knew. To be able to do a thing, but not let anybody know that you could do it.
    And it had the advantage, suddenly discovered, that people often did things for you. That, of course, saved you a lot of trouble. And, in the end, if people got into the habit of doing things for you, you didn’t have to do them at all, and then people didn’t know that you did them badly. And so, slowly, you came round again almost to where you started. To feeling that you could hold your own on equal terms with the world at large.
    (But that wouldn’t, Gerda feared, hold good with the Angkatells; the Angkatells were always so far ahead that you didn’t feel even in the same street with them. How she hated the Angkatells! It was good for John—John liked it there. He came home less tired—and sometimes less irritable.)
    Dear John, she thought. John was wonderful. Everyone thought so. Such a clever doctor, so terribly kind to his patients. Wearing himself out—and the interest he took in his hospital patients—all that side of his work that didn’t pay at all. John was so disinterested —so truly noble.
    She had always known, from the very first, that John was brilliant and was going to get to the top of the tree. And he had chosen her, when he might have married somebody far more brilliant. He had not minded her being slow and rather stupid and not very pretty. “I’ll look after you,” he had said. Nicely, rather masterfully. “Don’t worry about things, Gerda, I’ll take care of you….”
    Just what a man ought to be. Wonderful to think John should have chosen her.
    He had said with that sudden, very attractive, half-pleading smile of his: “I like my own way, you know, Gerda.”
    Well, that was all right. She had always tried to give in to him in everything. Even lately when he had been so difficult and nervy—when nothing seemed to please him. When, somehow, nothing she did was right. One couldn’t blame him. He was so busy, so unselfish—
    Oh, dear, that mutton! She ought to have sent it back. Still no sign of John. Why couldn’t she, sometimes, decide right? Again those dark waves of misery swept over her. The mutton! This awful weekend with the Angkatells. She felt a sharp pain through bothtemples. Oh, dear, now she was going to have one of her headaches. And it did so annoy John when she had headaches. He never would give her anything for them, when surely it would be so easy, being a doctor. Instead he always said: “Don’t think about it. No use poisoning yourself with drugs. Take a brisk walk.”
    The mutton! Staring at it, Gerda felt the words repeating themselves in her aching head, “The mutton, the MUTTON, THE MUTTON ….”
    Tears of self-pity sprang to her eyes. “Why,” she thought, “does nothing ever go right for me?”
    Terence looked across at the table at his mother and then at the joint. He thought: “Why can’t we have our dinner? How stupid grown-up people are. They haven’t any sense!”
    Aloud he said