Смерть на Ниле / Death on the Nile

‘And a very good thing too! Nowadays young people seem to think they can just go about doing anything they choose.’

Tim smiled.

‘They don’t only think it. They do it. Vide Linnet Ridgeway!’

‘Well, I think it’s horrid!’

Tim twinkled at her.

‘Cheer up, you old die-hard! Perhaps I agree with you. Anyway, I haven’t helped myself to anyone’s wife or fiancеe yet.’

‘I’m sure you’d never do such a thing,’ said Mrs Allerton. She added with spirit, ‘I’ve brought you up properly.’

‘So the credit is yours, not mine.

He smiled teasingly at her as he folded the letter and put it away again. Mrs Allerton let the thought just flash across her mind: ‘Most letters he shows to me. He only reads me snippets from Joanna’s.’

But she put the unworthy thought away from her, and decided, as ever, to behave like a gentlewoman.

‘Is Joanna enjoying life?’ she asked.

‘So so. Says she thinks of opening a delicatessen shop in Mayfair.’

‘She always talks about being hard up,’ said Mrs Allerton with a tinge of spite, ‘but she goes about everywhere and her clothes must cost her a lot.

‘Ah, well,’ said Tim, ‘she probably doesn’t pay for them. No, mother, I don’t mean what your Edwardian mind suggests to you. I just mean quite literally that she leaves her bills unpaid.’

Mrs Allerton sighed.

‘I never know how people manage to do that.’

‘It’s a kind of special gift,’ said Tim. ‘If only you have sufficiently extravagant tastes, and absolutely no sense of money values, people will give you any amount of credit.

‘Yes, but you come to the Bankruptcy Court in the end like poor Sir George Wode.’

‘You have a soft spot for that old horse coper – probably because he called you a rosebud in 1879 at a dance.’

‘I wasn’t born in 1879,’ Mrs Allerton retorted with spirit. ‘Sir George has charming manners, and I won’t have you calling him a horse coper.

‘I’ve heard funny stories about him from people that know.’

‘You and Joanna don’t mind what you say about people; anything will do so long as it’s sufficiently illnatured.’

Tim raised his eyebrows.

‘My dear, you’re quite heated. I didn’t know old Wode was such a favourite of yours.’

‘You don’t realize how hard it was for him, having to sell Wode Hall. He cared terribly about that place.’

Tim suppressed the easy retort.