The Quiche of Death Read Free Page B

round.
    "No," said Agatha gruffly. "Doesn't suit you. Anyway, why don't you come down and visit me this weekend?"
    Roy looked shifty. "Love to, darling, but got lots and lots to do. Wilson is a slave-driver. Must go."
    He darted off into the building, leaving Agatha standing alone on the pavement.
    She tried to hail a cab but they were all full. She walked along to Bank Station but the tube trains weren't running and someone
     told her there was a transport strike. "How am I going to get across town?" grumbled Agatha.
    "You could try a river boat," he suggested. "Pier at London Bridge."
    Agatha stumped along to London Bridge, her anger fading away to be replaced with a miserable feeling of loss. At the pier
     at London Bridge, she came across a sort of yuppies' Dunkirk. The pier was crammed with anxious young men and women clutching
     briefcases while a small flotilla of pleasure boats took them off.
    She joined the end of the queue, inching forward on the floating pier, feeling slightly seasick by the time she was able to
     board a large old pleasure steamer that had been pressed into action for the day. The bar was open. She clutched a large gin
     and tonic and took it up to the stern and sat down in the sunshine on one of those little gold-and-red plush ballroom chairs
     one find son Thames pleasure boats.
    The boat moved out and slid down the river in the sunshine, seeming to Agatha to be moving past all she had thrown away—life
     and London. Under the bridges cruised the boat, along past the traffic jams on the Embankment and then to Charing Cross Pier,
     where Agatha got off. She no longer felt like lunch or shopping or anything else but to get back to her cottage and lick her
     wounds and think of what to do.
    She walked up to Trafalgar Square and then along the Mall, past Buckingham Palace, up Constitution Hill, down the underpass
     and up into Hyde Park by Deciumus Burton's Gate and the Duke of Wellington's house. She cut across the Park in the direction
     of Bayswater and Paddington.
    Before this one day, she thought, she had always forged ahead, always known what she had wanted. Although she was bright at
     school, her parents made her leave at fifteen, for there were good jobs to be had in the local biscuit factory. At that time,
     Agatha had been a thin, white-faced, sensitive girl. The crudity of the women she worked with in the factory grated on her
     nerves, the drunkenness of her mother and father at home disgusted her, and so she began to work overtime, squirrelling away
     the extra money in a savings account so that her parents might not get their hands on it, until one day she decided she had
     enough and simply took off for London without even saying goodbye, slipping out one night with her suitcase when her mother
     and father had fallen into a drunken stupor.
    In London, she had worked as a waitress seven days a week so that she could afford shorthand and typing lessons. As soon as
     she was qualified, she got a job as a secretary in a public-relations firm. But just when she was beginning to learn the business,
     Agatha had fallen in love with Jimmy Raisin, a charming young man with blue eyes and a mop of black hair. He did not seem
     to have any steady employment but Agatha thought that marriage was all he needed to make him settle down. After a month of
     married life, it was finally borne in on her that she had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. Her husband was a drunk.
     Yet she had stuck by him for two whole years, being the breadwinner, putting up with his increasing bouts of drunken violence
     until, one morning, she had looked down at him lying snoring on the bed, dirty and unshaven, and had pinned a pile of Alcoholics
     Anonymous literature to his chest, packed her things and moved out.
    He knew where she worked. She thought he would come in search of her if only for money, but he never did. She once went back
     to the squalid room in Kil-burn which they had shared, but he had