N Or M? Part 1

N Or M?

by Agatha Christie.

Chapter 1.

Tommy Beresford removed his overcoat in the hall of the flat. He hung it up with some care, taking time over it. His hat went carefully on the next peg.

He squared his shoulders, affixed a resolute smile to his face and walked into the sitting room where his wife sat knitting a Balaclava helmet in khaki wool.

It was the spring of 1940.

Mrs Beresford gave him a quick glance and then busied herself by knitting at a furious rate. She said after a minute or two: "Any news in the evening paper?"

Tommy said: "The Blitzkrieg is coming, hurray, hurray! Things look bad in France."

Tuppence said: "It's a depressing world at the moment."

There was a pause and then Tommy said: "Well, why don't you ask? No need to be so d.a.m.ned tactful."

"I know," admitted Tuppence. "There is something about conscious tact that is very irritating. But then it irritates you if I do ask. And anyway I don't need to ask. It's written all over you."

"I wasn't conscious of looking a Dismal Desmond."

"No, darling," said Tuppence. "You had a kind of nailed to the mast smile which was one of the most heart-rending I have ever seen."

Tommy said with a grin: "No, was it really as bad as all that?"

"And more! Oh, come on, out with it. Nothing doing?"

"Nothing doing They don't want me in any capacity. I tell you, Tuppence, it's pretty thick when a man of forty-six is made to feel like a doddering grandfather. Army, Navy, Air Force, Foreign Office, all say the same thing - I'm too old. I may be required later."

Tuppence said: "Well, it's the same for me. They don't want people of my age for nursing - no, thank you. Nor for anything else. They'd rather have a fluffy chit who's never seen a wound or sterilized a dressing than they would have me who worked for three years, 1915 to 1918, in various capacities, nurse in the surgical ward operating theatre, driver to a trade delivery van and later of a General. This, that and the other - all, I a.s.sert firmly, with conspicuous success. And now I'm a poor, pus.h.i.+ng, tiresome, middle-aged woman who won't sit at home quietly and knit as she ought to do."

Tommy said gloomily: "This war is h.e.l.l."

"It's bad enough having a war," said Tuppence, "but not been allowed to do anything in it just puts the lid on."

Tommy said consolingly: "Well, at any rate Deborah has got a job."

Deborah's mother said: "Oh, she's all right. I expect she's good at it, too. But I still think, Tommy, that I could hold my own with Deborah."

Tommy grinned: "She wouldn't think so."

Tuppence said: "Daughters can be very trying. Especially when they will be so kind to you."

Tommy murmured: "The way young Derek makes allowances for me is sometimes rather hard to bear. That 'poor old Dad' look in his eye."

"In fact," said Tuppence, "our children, although quite adorable, are also quite maddening."

But at the mention of the twins, Derek and Deborah, her eyes were very tender.

"I suppose," said Tommy thoughtfully, "that it's always hard for people themselves to realize that they're getting middle-aged and past doing things."

Tuppence gave a snort of rage, tossed her glossy dark head, and sent her ball of khaki wool spinning from her lap.

"Are we past doing things? Are we? Or is it only that everyone keeps insinuating that we are? Sometimes I feel that we never were any use."

"Quite likely," said Tommy.

"Perhaps so. But at any rate we did once feel important. And now I'm beginning to feel that all that never really happened. Did it happen, Tommy? Is it true that you were once crashed on the head and kidnapped by German agents? Is it true that we once tracked down a dangerous criminal - and got him? Is it true that we rescued a girl and got hold of important secret papers, and were practically thanked by a grateful country? Us! You and me! Despised, unwanted Mr and Mrs Beresford."

"Now, dry up, darling. All this does no good."

"All the same," said Tuppence, blinking back a tear, "I'm disappointed in our Mr Carter."

"He wrote us a very nice letter."

"He didn't do anything - he didn't even hold out any hope."

"Well, he's out of it all nowadays. Like us. He's quite old. Lives in Scotland and fishes."

Tuppence said wistfully: "They might have have let us do something in the Intelligence."

"Perhaps we couldn't," said Tommy. "Perhaps, nowadays, we wouldn't have the nerve."

"I wonder," said Tuppence. "One feels just the same. But perhaps, as you say, when it came to the point -"

She sighed. She said: "I wish we could find a job of some kind. It's so rotten when one has so much time to think."

Her eyes rested just for a minute on the photograph of the very young man in the Air Force uniform, with the wide grinning smile so like Tommy's.

Tommy said: "It's worse for a man. Women can still knit, after all - and do up parcels and help at canteens."

Tuppence said: "I can do all that in twenty years from now. I'm not old enough to be content with that. I'm neither one thing nor another."

The front door bell rang. Tuppence got up. The flat was a small service one.

She opened the door to a find a broad-shouldered man with a big fair moustache and a cheerful red face, standing on the mat.

His glance, a quick one, took her in as he asked in a pleasant voice: "Are you Mrs Beresford?"

"Yes."

"My name's Grant. I'm a friend of Lord Easthampton's. He suggested I should look you and your husband up."

"Oh, how nice, do come in."

She preceded him into the sitting-room.

"My husband, er - Captain -"

"Mr"

"Mr Grant. He's a friend of Mr Car- of Lord Easthampton's."

The old nom de guerre of the former Chief of the Intelligence, "Mr Carter," always came more easily to her lips than their old friend's proper t.i.tle.

For a few minutes the three talked happily together. Grant was an attractive person with an easy manner.

Presently Tuppence left the room. She returned a few minutes later with the sherry and some gla.s.ses.

After a few minutes, when a pause came, Mr Grant said to Tommy: "I hear you're looking for a job, Beresford?"

An eager light came into Tommy's eye.

"Yes, indeed. You don't mean -"

Grant laughed, and shook his head.

"Oh, nothing of that kind. No, I'm afraid that has to be left to the young active men - or to those who've been at it for years. The only things I can suggest are rather stodgy, I'm afraid. Office work. Filing papers. Tying them up in red tape and pigeon-holing them. That sort of thing."

Tommy's face fell.

"Oh, I see!"

Grant said encouragingly: "Oh, well, it's better than nothing. Anyway, come and see me at my office one day. Ministry of Requirements. Room 22. We'll fix you up with something."

The telephone rang. Tuppence picked up the receiver.

"Hallo - yes - what?" A squeaky voice spoke agitatedly from the other end. Tuppence's face changed. "When? - Oh, my dear - of course - I'll come over right away..."

She put back the receiver.

She said to Tommy: "That was Maureen."

"I thought so - I recognized her voice from here."

Tuppence explained breathlessly: "I'm so sorry, Mr Grant. But I must go round to this friend of mine. She's fallen and twisted her ankle and there's no one with her but her little girl, so I must go round and fix up things for her and get hold of someone to come in and look after her. Do forgive me."

"Of course, Mrs Beresford, I quite understand."

Tuppence smiled at him, picked up a coat which had been lying over the sofa, slipped her arms into it and hurried out. The flat door banged.

Tommy poured out another gla.s.s of sherry for his guest.

"Don't go yet," he said.

"Thank you." The other accepted the gla.s.s. He sipped it for a moment in silence. Then he said: "In a way, you know, your wife's being called away is a fortunate occurrence. It will save time."

Tommy stared.

"I don't understand."

Grant said deliberately: "You see, Beresford, if you had come to see me at the Ministry, I was empowered to put a certain proposition before you."

The colour came slowly up in Tommy's freckled face. He said: "You don't mean -"

Grant nodded.

"Easthampton suggested you," he said. "He told us you were the man for the job."

Tommy gave a deep sigh.

"Tell me," he said.

"This is strictly confidential, of course."

Tommy nodded.

"Not even your wife must know. You understand?"

"Very well - if you say so. But we worked together before."

"Yes, I know. But this proposition is solely for you."

"I see. All right."

"Ostensibly you will be offered work - as I said just now - office work - in a branch of the Ministry functioning in Scotland - in a prohibited area where your wife cannot accompany you. Actually you will be somewhere very different."

Tommy merely waited.

Grant said: "You've read in the newspapers of the Fifth Column? You know, roughly at any rate, just what that term implies."

Tommy murmured: "The enemy within."

"Exactly. This war, Beresford, started in an optimistic spirit. Oh, I don't mean the people who really knew - we've known all along what we were up against - the efficiency of the enemy, his aerial strength, his deadly determination, and the co-ordination of his well-planned war machine. I mean the people as a whole. The good-hearted, muddle-headed democratic fellow who believes what he wants to believe - that Germany will crack up, that she's on the verge of revolution, that her weapons of war are made of tin and that her men are so underfed that they'll fall down if they try to march - all that sort of stuff. Wishful thinking, as the saying goes.

"Well, the war didn't go that way. It started badly and it went on worse. The men were all right - the men on the battles.h.i.+ps and in the planes and in the dug-outs. But there was mismanagement and unpreparedness - the defects, perhaps, of our qualities. We don't want war, haven't considered it seriously, weren't good at preparing for it.

"The worst of that is over. We've corrected our mistakes, we're slowly getting the right men in the right place. We're beginning to run the war as it should be run - and we can win the war - make no mistake about that - but only if we don't lose if first. And the danger of losing it comes, not from outside - not from the might of Germany's bombers, not from her seizure of neutral countries and fresh vantage points from which to attack - but from within. Our danger is the danger of Troy - the wooden horse within our walls. Call it the Fifth Column if you like. It is here, among us. Men and women, some of them highly placed, some of them obscure, but all believing genuinely in the n.a.z.i aims and the n.a.z.i creed and desiring to subst.i.tute that sternly efficient creed for the muddled easy-going liberty of our democratic inst.i.tutions."

Grant leant forward. He said, still in that same pleasant unemotional voice: "And we don't know who they are..."