Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage

life.’
    ‘Is that what she tried to make you think?’
    ‘I am not influenced by what anyone says to me,’ said Agatha defiantly.
    ‘And yet you have appeared quite contented with all us rustics up till now.’
    ‘Perhaps it’s the cold in this hall and the weather, and that was a truly dreadful concert,’ said Agatha.
    ‘Yes, it was awful, wasn’t it? But then the Ancombe ladies’ concert was pretty dire as well.’
    ‘Why do they do it to each other?’
    ‘Everyone likes their moment on stage. There’s a bit of the failed actor in all of us. At these village affairs, everyone gets a chance to perform, no matter how bad they are. People applaud and are kind, because all of them want their time in the limelight as well.’
    The old steam radiators against the wall gave a preliminary rattle.
    ‘There you are,’ said Mrs Bloxby, ‘the heating has come on. And look, the Ancombe ladies have brought a case of apple brandy, so we can all have a drink during the speeches. The atmosphere will soon lighten.’
    The combination of heat and apple brandy did appear to work wonders. Agatha began to relax. Instead of standing outside looking in, she began to feel part of it again. The chairwoman of the Ancombe Ladies’ Society made a speech and told several jokes which were received with gales of laughter.
    Stuff London and Mrs Hardy, thought Agatha. I’m happy here.
    James and Agatha went out for dinner that evening. James appeared to have recovered his good humour and he wanted to discuss ‘our murder case’. Agatha was too content to have regained her feeling of being at home in the country to crave a more personal conversation, but James did start by asking her to remember all she could about her late husband. ‘How did you meet him, for example?’
    Agatha had quite forgotten that, through snobbery, she had hidden her low beginnings from James, always implying without actually saying so that she had come from a middle-class background and had been to a private school.
    ‘How did I meet Jimmy?’ Agatha sighed and put down her knife and fork and looked back down the long years.
    ‘Let me see. I’d just escaped from home.’
    ‘Home being Birmingham?’
    ‘Yes, one of those blocks of flats in what they now call the inner city but what they used to call a slum.’ She was so intent on her memories that she did not notice the flicker of surprise in James’s blue eyes.
    ‘Ma and Dad always seemed to be drunk. They wouldn’t let me stay at school after I was fifteen, even though the teachers begged them to let me complete my education. They put me to work in a biscuit factory. God, the women seemed coarse, brutal. I was a skinny, sensitive little wimp then.
    ‘I saved as much as I could and took off for London one night when my parents were both drunk. I was determined to be a secretary. The secretaries I had seen up in the offices of the biscuit factory looked fabulous creatures to me, compared to what I was working with on the shop floor. So I got a job as a waitress and went to a secretarial college in the evenings to learn shorthand and typing. I worked seven days a week, and my ambition was so great, I don’t think my feet ached once. It wasn’t a very classy restaurant. Classy restaurants only employed waiters in those days. It was a bit like one of the Lyon’s Corner Houses. Good food but not French, if you know what I mean.’
    Her eyes grew dreamy. ‘Jimmy came in one night. He was with a rather tarty blonde, a bit older than he was. They seemed to be quarrelling. Then he started to flirt with me and that made her even angrier. I didn’t think he was interested in me. I thought he was only doing it to get back at his girlfriend for something or other.
    ‘But when I left by the back door that night after work, he was waiting for me. He said he would see me home. I had been working the evening shifts as well as the day ones while the secretarial college was closed for the summer vacation. He was very . . . merry. Very light-hearted. I’d never met anyone quite like Jimmy before.
    ‘We got to my place, which was a bed-sit in Kilburn. I asked him where he lived and he said he had nowhere, because he had just been thrown out of his digs. I asked him where his stuff was and he said it was in the left luggage in Victoria station. All he had in the world was one suitcase.
    ‘I said he could sleep on the sofa just for one night. He did that. But the next day was a rare day off and we went to