Elephants Can Remember

If anything, you feel as anyone can do anything. And anyway, there's that nice couple, the General and his wife, out for a nice walk in the evening, and there they were, both shot through the head." "Was it through the head?" "Well, I don't remember exactly now and of course I never saw anything myself. But anyway, just went for a walk as they often did." "And they'd not been on bad terms with each other?" "Well, they had words now and again, but who doesn't?" "No boy friend or girl friend?" "Well, if you can use that term of people of that age, oh, I mean there was a bit of talk here and there, but it was all nonsense. Nothing to it at all. People always want to say something of that kind." "Perhaps one of them was-ill." "Well, Lady Ravenscroft had been up to London once or twice consulting a doctor about something and I rather think she was going into hospital, or planning to go into hospital for an operation of some kind, though she never told me exactly what it was. But I think they managed to put her right-she was in this hospital for a short time. No operation, I think.

And when she came back, she looked very much younger.

Altogether, she'd had a lot of face treatment and you know, she looked so pretty in these wigs with curls on them. Rather as though she'd got a new lease of life." "And General Ravenscroft?" "He was a very nice gentleman and I never heard or knew of any scandal about him and I don't think there was any.

People say things, but then they want to say something when there's been a tragedy of any kind. It seems to me perhaps as he might have had a blow on the head in India or something like that, I had an uncle or a great-uncle, you know, who fell off his horse there once. Hit it on a cannon or something and he was very queer afterwards. All right for about six months and then they had to put him into an asylum because he wanted to take his wife's life the whole time. He said she was persecuting him and following him and that she was a spy for another nation. Ah, there's no saying what things happen or can happen in families." "Anyway, you don't think there was any truth in some of the stories about them that I have happened to hear of, bad feeling between them so that one of them shot the other and then shot himself or herself?" "Oh, no, I don't." "Were her children at home at the time?" "No. Miss-er-oh, what was her name now, Rosie? No.