Unfinished Portrait. Агата Кристи

      It was six months after Nannie had departed that Mummy told Celia a very exciting piece of news. They were going abroad—to France.

      ‘Me too?’

      ‘Yes, darling, you too.’

      ‘And Cyril?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘And Susan and Rouncy?’

      ‘No. Daddy and I and Cyril and you. Daddy hasn’t been well, and the doctor wants him to go abroad for the winter to somewhere warm.’

      ‘Is France warm?’

      ‘The south is.’

      ‘What is it like, Mummy?’

      ‘Well, there are mountains there. Mountains with snow on them.’

      ‘Why have they got snow on them?’

      ‘Because they are so high.’

      ‘How high?’

      And her mother would try to explain just how high mountains were—but Celia found it very hard to imagine.

      She knew Woodbury Beacon. It took you half an hour to walk to the top of that. But Woodbury Beacon hardly counted as a mountain at all.

      It was all very exciting—particularly the travelling bag. A real travelling bag of her very own in dark green leather, and inside it had bottles, and a place for a brush and comb and clothes brush, and there was a little travelling clock and even a little travelling inkpot!

      It was, Celia felt, the loveliest possession she had ever had.

      The journey was very exciting. There was crossing the Channel, to begin with. Her mother went to lie down, and Celia stayed on deck with her father, which made her feel very grown up and important.

      France, when they actually saw it, was a little disappointing. It looked like any other place. But the blue-uniformed porters talking French were rather thrilling, and so was the funny high train they got into. They were to sleep in it, which seemed to Celia another thrilling thing.

      She and her mother were to have one compartment, and her father and Cyril the one next door.

      Cyril was, of course, very lordly about it all. Cyril was sixteen, and he made it a point of honour not to be excited about anything. He asked questions in a would-be indolent fashion, but even he could hardly conceal his passion and curiosity for the great French engine.

      Celia said to her mother:

      ‘Will there really be mountains, Mummy?’

      ‘Yes, darling.’

      ‘Very, very, very high?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Higher than Woodbury Beacon?’

      ‘Much, much higher. So high that there’s snow on top of them.’

      Celia shut her eyes and tried to imagine. Mountains. Great hills going up, up, up—so high that perhaps you couldn’t see the tops of them. Celia’s neck went back, back—in imagination she was looking up the steep sides of the mountains.

      ‘What is it, darling? Have you got a crick in your neck?’ Celia shook her head emphatically.

      ‘I’m thinking of big mountains,’ she said.

      ‘Silly little kid,’ said Cyril with good-humoured scorn.

      Presently there was the excitement of going to bed. In the morning, when they woke up, they would be in the South of France.

      It was ten o’clock on the following morning when they arrived at Pau. There was a great fuss about collecting the luggage, of which there was a lot—no less than thirteen great round-topped trunks and innumerable leather valises.

      At last, however, they were out of the station and driving to the hotel. Celia peered out in every direction.

      ‘Where are the mountains, Mummy?’

      ‘Over there, darling. Do you see that line of snow peaks?’

      Those! Against the skyline was a zigzag of white, looking as though it were cut out of paper. A low line. Where were those great towering monuments rising up into the sky—far, far up above Celia’s head?

      ‘Oh!’ said Celia.

      A bitter pang of disappointment swept through her. Mountains indeed!

      After she had got over her disappointment about the mountains, Celia enjoyed her life in Pau very much. The meals were exciting. Called for some strange reason Tabbeldote, you had lunch at a long table of all sorts of strange and exciting dishes. There were two other children in the hotel, twin sisters a year older than Celia. She and Bar and Beatrice went about everywhere together. Celia discovered, for the first time in her eight solemn years, the joys of mischief. The three children would eat oranges on their balcony and throw over the pips on to passing soldiers gay in blue and red uniforms. When the soldiers looked up angrily, the children would have dived back and become invisible. They put little heaps of salt and pepper on all the plates laid for Tabbeldote and annoyed Victor, the old waiter, very much indeed. They concealed themselves in a niche under the stairs and tickled the legs of all the visitors descending to dinner with a long peacock’s feather. Their final feat came on a day when they had worried the fierce chambermaid of the upper floor to the point of distraction. They had followed her into a little sanctum of mops and pails and scrubbing brushes. Turning on them angrily and pouring forth a torrent of that incomprehensible language—French—she swept out, banging the door on them and locking it. The three children were prisoners.

      ‘She’s done us,’ said Bar bitterly.

      ‘I wonder how long it’ll be before she lets us out?’

      They looked at each other sombrely. Bar’s eyes flashed rebelliously.

      ‘I can’t bear to let her crow over us. We must do something.’

      Bar was always the ringleader. Her eyes went to a microscopic slit of a window which was all the room possessed.

      ‘I wonder if we could squeeze through that. We’re none of us very fat. What’s outside, Celia, anything at all?’

      Celia reported that there was a gutter.

      ‘It’s big enough to walk along,’ she said:

      ‘Good, we’ll do Suzanne yet. Won’t she have a fit when we come jumping out on her?’

      They got the window open with difficulty, and one by one they squeezed themselves through. The gutter was a ledge about a foot wide with an edge perhaps two inches high. Below it was a sheer drop of five storeys.

      The Belgian lady in No. 33 sent a polite note to the English lady in No. 54. Was Madame aware of the fact that her little girl and the little girls of Madame Owen were walking round the parapet on the fifth storey?

      The fuss that followed was to Celia quite extraordinary and rather unjust. She had never been told not to walk on parapets.

      ‘You might have fallen and been killed.’

      ‘Oh! No, Mummy, there was lots of room—even to put both feet together.’

      The incident remained one of those inexplicable ones where grown-ups fuss about nothing at all.

      Celia would, of course, have to learn French. Cyril had a young Frenchman who came every day. For Celia a young lady was engaged to take her for walks every day and talk French. The lady was actually English, the daughter of the proprietor of the English bookshop, but she had lived her whole life in Pau and spoke French as easily as English.

      Miss Leadbetter was a young lady of extreme refinement. Her English was mincing and clipped. She spoke slowly, with condescending kindness.

      ‘See, Celia, that is a shop where they bake bread. A boulangerie.’