Diana Glass
The Help
Mrs Bantry, Miss Marple and I are playing three-handed Bridge in the library, with its large windows on the northern side of the hotel.
On floor-to-ceiling shelves the emerald and green spines of old books glow richly in the warm light of the fire.
A terrier and a red setter snore beside one another before the hearth, lending the room a faint domesticity, as of an exquisitely furnished private home.
Except for the odd snicker of firewood the sounds are all low and soft: the murmur of voices, the slow turning of pages, the shuffling of cards.
In daylight the library windows look down upon the town far, far below, over the ledge of rock clustered with thick dark pines, but for now all I can make out are the nearest trees, branches briefly silvered by the light of the moon whenever it appears through the clouds.
‘Diana is a genius player,’ Mrs Bantry says.
‘Even a match for you, Jane.’ She smiles at me.
‘Besides all her brilliance at keeping my affairs in order it has been wonderful to have someone to play a rubber with every so often.’ She lowers her voice.
‘And she loses with rather more grace than that fellow. He looks in desperate straits!’ We follow her gaze to the young man in question, hunched over the cards he has strewn on the table.
I watch as he takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, the image of dejection.
‘I think they may have been playing for money,’ Miss Marple says, in a slightly scandalised tone. ‘And if I’m not mistaken that young man has been there most of the afternoon. Oh!’
She glances up because another man – the old English army type we saw on the train – has marched past us to the window and cracked it open. ‘Hot as blazes in here,’ he bellows.
‘He’s right,’ Miss Marple says. ‘One wonders if they really need three roaring fires.’
We continue our game. But then there’s a sound from outside. From above, I think. Voices, seeping down to us through the freezing evening air from the open window.
‘—throwing myself off here several times since I arrived. The S pill. The one they gave us. I still have it.’ Almost a shout. Then the other voice lower, more muffled and then: ‘… every day I wonder if it might be better if I did take it. Take it now, I mean.’
There must be some twenty or so people in this room but any conversation quiets instantly.
I see guests catching one another’s gaze, raised eyebrows.
Muttered conversations begin. Some seem embarrassed to be forced into the position of eavesdroppers.
Others seem rather thrilled. I watch Miss Marple across the table and she sits very still, cards clutched in her hands but with her head tilted at a slight angle and a gleam in her eye that reminds me of a blackbird tracking the progress of a worm.
‘S pill …’ Mrs Bantry says. ‘What is that? Diana, do you know?’
‘I think,’ I say, ‘it means a suicide pill. The sort of thing one heard about in the War. Cyanide.’
Miss Marple shakes her head. ‘Such unpleasantness. And to shout about it so loudly for all to hear. The rest of the conversation was muffled. They must have come onto the balcony, I think, just for that part. But of course, it rather makes one wonder—’
‘What?’ asks Mrs Bantry.
‘Well, whenever someone talks very loudly about something it makes me wonder if, perhaps, they want to be overheard.’
She falls silent and seems to drift into her own thoughts.