Elephants Can Remember

She took a particularly sweet and rather bilious-looking one and champed it with energy.
"Sweet things," she said, "really give you a lot of vitality, I always think. Well, now, I've got the following suggestions.
These things have usually been said to me starting by: 'Oh, yes, of course!' 'How sad it was, that whole story!' 'Of course, I think everyone knows really what happened.' That's the sort of thing." "Yes." "These people thought they knew what happened. But there weren't really any very good reasons. It was just something someone had told them, or they'd heard either from friends or servants or relations or things like that. The suggestions, of course, are all the kind that you might think they were. A.
That General Ravenscroft was writing his memoirs of his Indian days and that he had a young woman who acted as his secretary and took dictation and typed things for him and was helping him, that she was a nice-looking girl and no doubt there was something there. The result being-well, there seemed to be two schools of thought. One school of thought was that he shot his wife because he hoped to marry the girl, and then when he had shot her, immediately was horror-stricken at what he'd done and shot himself…" "Exactly," said Poirot. "A romantic explanation." "The other idea was that there had been a tutor who came to give lessons to the son who had been ill and away from his prep school for six months or so-a good-looking young man." "Ah, yes. And the wife had fallen in love with the young man. Perhaps had an affair with him?" "That was the idea," said Mrs. Oliver. "No kind of evidence.
Just romantic suggestion again." "And therefore?" "Therefore I think the idea was that the General probably shot his wife and then in a fit of remorse shot himself. There was another story that the General had had an affair, and his wife found out about it, that she shot him and then herself.
It's always been slightly different every time. But nobody really knew anything. I mean, it's always just a likely story every time. I mean, the General may have had an affair with a girl or lots of girls or just another married woman, or it might have been the wife who had an affair with someone.
It's been a different someone in each story I've been told.
There was nothing definite about it or any evidence for it. It's just the gossip that went around about twelve or thirteen years ago, which people have rather forgotten about now. But they remember enough about it to tell one a few names and get things only moderately wrong about what happened. There was an angry gardener who happened to live on the place, there was a nice elderly cook-housekeeper who was rather blind and rather deaf, but nobody seems to suspect that she had anything to do with it. And so on. I've got all the names and possibilities written down. The names of some of them wrong and some of them right. It's all very difficult. His wife had been ill, I gather, for some short time. I think it was some kind of fever that she had. A lot of her hair must have fallen out because she bought four wigs. There were at least four new wigs found among her things." "Yes. I, too, heard that," said Poirot.
"Who did you hear it from?" "A friend of mine in the police. He went back over the accounts of the inquest and the various things in the house.
Four wigs! I would like to have your opinion on that, madame.
Do you think that four wigs seems somewhat excessive?" "Well, I do really," said Mrs. Oliver. "I had an aunt who had a wig, and she had an extra wig, but she sent one back to be redressed and wore the second one. I never heard of anyone who had four wigs." Mrs. Oliver extracted a small notebook from her bag, ruffled the pages of it, searching for extracts.
"Mrs. Carstairs, she's seventy-seven and rather gaga. Quote from her: 'I do remember the Ravenscrofts quite well. Yes, yes, a very nice couple. It's very sad, I think. Yes. Cancer it was!' I asked then which of them had cancer," said Mrs. Oliver, "but Mrs. Carstairs had rather forgotten about that.
She said she thought the wife came to London and consulted a doctor and had an operation and then came home and was very miserable, and her husband was very upset about her. So of course he shot her and himself." "Was that her theory or did she have any exact knowledge?" "I think it was entirely theory. As far as I can see and hear in the course of my investigations," said Mrs. Oliver, making rather a point of this last word, "when anybody has heard that any of their friends whom they don't happen to know very well have sudden illnesses or consult doctors, they always think it's cancer. And so do the people themselves, I think. Somebody else-I can't read her name here, I've forgotten, I think it began with T-she said that it was the husband who had cancer. He was very unhappy, and so was his wife. And they talked it over together and they couldn't bear the thought of it all, so they decided to commit suicide." "Sad and romantic," said Poirot.
"Yes, and I don't think really true," said Mrs. Oliver. "It is worrying, isn't it? I mean, the people remembering so much and that they really mostly seem to have made it up themselves." "They have made up the solution of something they knew about," said Poirot. "That is to say, they know that somebody comes to London, say, to consult a doctor,*or that somebody has been in hospital for two or three months. That is a fact that they know." "Yes," said Mrs. Oliver, "and then when they come to talk about it a long time afterwards, they've got the solution for it which they've made up themselves. That isn't awfully helpful, is it?" "It is helpful," said Poirot. "You are quite right, you know, in what you said to me." "About elephants?" said Mrs. Oliver rather doubtfully.
"About elephants," said Poirot. "It is important to know certain facts which have lingered in people's memories although they may not know exactly what the fact was, why it happened or what led to it. But they might easily know something that we do not know and that we have no means of learning. So there have been memories leading to theories- theories of infidelity, of illness, of suicide pacts, of jealousy.
All these things have been suggested to you. Further search could be made as to points if they seem in any way probable." "People like talking about the past," said Mrs. Oliver. "They like talking about the past really much more than they like talking about what's happening now, or what happened last year. It brings things back to them. They tell you, of course, first about a lot of other people that you don't want to hear about and then you hear what the other people that they've remembered knew about somebody else that they didn't know but they heard about. You know, so that the General and Lady Ravenscroft you hear about is at once removed, as it were.
It's like family relationships," she said. "You know, first cousin once removed, second cousin twice removed, all the rest of it. I don't think I've been really very helpful, though." "You must not think that," said Poirot. "I am pretty sure that you will find that some of these things in your agreeable little purple-colored notebook will have something to do with the past tragedy. I can tell you from my own inquiries into the official accounts of these two deaths that they have remained a mystery. That is, from the police point of view.
They were an affectionate couple, there was no gossip or hearsay much about them of any sex trouble, there was no illness discovered such as would have caused anyone to take their own lives. I talk now only of the time, you understand, immediately preceding the tragedy. But there was a time before that, further back." "I know what you mean," said Mrs. Oliver, "and I've got something about that from an old Nanny. An old Nanny who is now-I don't know, she might be a hundred, but I think she's only about eighty. I remember her from my childhood days. She wasn't very young then. She used to tell me stories about people in the Services abroad-India, Egypt, Siam and Hong Kong and the rest." "Anything that interested you?" "Yes," said Mrs. Oliver, "there was some tragedy that she talked about. She seemed a bit uncertain about what it was.