агата кристи Gabriel, according to Teresa, was a man attractive to women. Presumably Isabella had found him attractive – but if so his male attractiveness was a bald fact to her – it was not disguised by a veneer of spurious understanding. It was as a stranger, an alien, that he came. But did she really find him attractive? Was it possibly his lovemaking that she found attractive and not the man himself?
These, I perceived, were all speculations. And Isabella did not speculate. Whatever her feelings towards Gabriel, she would not analyse them. She would accept them – accept them as a woven part of Life’s tapestry, and go on to the next portion of the design.
And it was that, I suddenly realized, that had aroused Gabriel’s almost maniacal rage. For a split second I felt a stirring of sympathy for him.
Then Isabella spoke.
She asked me in her serious voice why I thought it was that red roses never lasted in water.
We discussed the question. I asked her what her favourite flowers were.
She said red roses and very dark brown wallflowers and what she called thick-looking pale mauve stocks.
It seemed to me rather an odd selection. I asked her why she liked those particular flowers. She said she didn’t know.
‘You’ve got a lazy mind, Isabella,’ I said. ‘You know perfectly well if only you’d take the trouble to think.’
‘Would I? Very well, then, I will think.’
She sat there, upright and serious, thinking …
(And that, when I remember Isabella, is how I see her and always shall see her to the end of time. Sitting in the sunlight on the upright carved stone seat, her head proud and erect, her long narrow hands folded peacefully on her lap and her face serious, thinking of flowers.)
She said at last, ‘I think it is because they all look as though they would be lovely to touch – rich – like velvet … And because they have a lovely smell. Roses don’t look right growing – they grow in an ugly way. A rose wants to be by itself, in a glass – then it’s beautiful – but only for a very short time – then it droops and dies. Aspirin and burning the stems and all those things don’t do any good – not to red roses – they’re all right for the others. But nothing keeps big dark red roses long – I wish they didn’t die.’