Hallowe'en Party

Below it he had looked down into what struck him at once as something entirely magical. Something as it might have been if elemental beings such as he believed were common in Irish poetry, had come out of their hollow hills and had created there, not so much by toil and hard labour as by waving a magic wand, a garden. You looked down into the garden.

Its beauty, the flowers and bushes, the artificial water below in the fountain, the path round it, enchanted, beautiful and entirely unexpected.

He wondered how it had been originally. It seemed too symmetrical to have been a quarry. A deep hollow here in the raised ground of the island, but beyond it you could see the waters of the Bay and the hills rising the other side, their misty tops an enchanting scene. He thought perhaps that it might have been that particular garden which had stirred Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe to possess such a garden of her own, to have the pleasure of taking an unkempt quarry set in this smug, tidy, elementary and essentially conventional countryside of that part of England.

And so she had looked about for the proper kind of well-paid slave to do her bidding. And she had found the professionally qualified young man called Michael Garfield and had brought him here and had paid him no doubt a large fee, and had in due course built a house for him. Michael Garfield, thought Poirot, looking round him, had not failed her.

He went and sat down on a bench, a bench which had been strategically placed.

He pictured to himself what the sunken quarry would look like in the spring.

There were young beech trees and birches with their white shivering barks. Bushes of thorn and white rose, little xxjuniper trees. But now it was autumn, and autumn had been catered for also. The gold and red of acers, a parrot ia or two, a path that led along a winding way to fresh delights.

There were flowering bushes of gorse or Spanish broom-Poirot was not famous for knowing the names of either flowers or shrubs-only roses and tulips could he approve and recognise.

But everything that grew here had the appearance of having grown by its own will. It had not been arranged or forced into submission. And yet, thought Poirot, that is not really so. All has been arranged, all has been planned to this tiny little plant that grows here and to that large towering bush that rises up so fiercely with its golden and red leaves. Oh yes. All has been planned here and arranged. What is more, I would say that it had obeyed.

He wondered then whom it had obeyed.

Mrs. Llewellyn-Smy the or Mr. Michael Garfield? It makes a difference, said Poirot to himself, yes, it makes a difference. Mrs.

Llewellyn-Smythe was knowledgeable, he felt sure. She had gardened for many years, she was no doubt a- Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, she went to shows, she consulted catalogues, she visited gardens. She took journeys abroad, no doubt, for botanical reasons.

She would know what she wanted, she would say what she wanted. Was that enough? Poirot thought it was not quite enough. She could have given orders to gardeners and made sure her orders were carried out.

But did she know really know see in her mind's eye exactly what her orders would look like when they had beAn carried out?

Not in the first year of their planting, not even the second, but things that she would see two years later, three years later, perhaps, even six or seven years later.

Michael Garfield, thought Poirot, Michael Garfield knows what she wants because she has told him what she wants, and he knows how to make this bare quarry of stone and rock blossom as a desert can blossom. He planned and he brought it about; he had no doubt the intense pleasure that comes to an artist who is commissioned by a client with plenty of money. Here was his conception of a fairy-land tucked away in a conventional and rather dull hillside, and here it would grow up.

Expensive shrubs for which large cheques would have to be written, and rare plants that perhaps would only be obtainable through the goodwill of a friend, and here, too, the humble things that were needed and which cost next to nothing at all. In spring on the bank just to his left there would be primroses, their modest green leaves all bunched together up the side of it told him that.

"In England," said Poirot, "people show you their herbaceous borders and they take you to see their roses and they talk at inordinate length about their iris gardens, and to show they appreciate one of the great beauties of England, they take you on a day when the sun shines and the beech trees are in leaf, and underneath them are all the bluebells.