Elephants Can Remember

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.