Elephants Can Remember

‘It’s on your desk, Mrs Oliver. In the left-hand corner.’

‘I don’t mean that one,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘That’s the one I’m using now. I mean my last one. The one I had last year, or perhaps the one before that again.’

‘Has it been thrown away, perhaps?’ suggested Miss Livingstone.

‘No, I don’t throw away address books and things like that because so often you want one. I mean some address that you haven’t copied into the new one. I expect it may be in one of the drawers of the tallboys.’

Miss Livingstone was a fairly new arrival, replacing Miss Sedgwick. Ariadne Oliver missed Miss Sedgwick. Sedgwick knew so many things. She knew the places where Mrs Oliver sometimes put things, the kind of places Mrs Oliver kept things in. She remembered the names of people Mrs Oliver had written nice letters to, and the names of people that Mrs Oliver, goaded beyond endurance, had written rather rude things to. She was invaluable, or rather, had been invaluable. ‘She was like—what was the book called?’ Mrs Oliver said, casting her mind back. ‘Oh yes, I know—a big brown book. All Victorians had it. Enquire Within Upon Everything. And you could too! How to take iron mark stains off linen, how to deal with curdled mayonnaise, how to start a chatty letter to a bishop. Many, many things. It was all there in Enquire Within Upon Everything.’ Great Aunt Alice’s great standby.

Miss Sedgwick had been just as good as Aunt Alice’s book. Miss Livingstone was not at all the same thing. Miss Livingstone stood there always, very long-faced with a sallow skin, looking purposefully efficient. Every line of her face said ‘I am very efficient.’ But she wasn’t really, Mrs Oliver thought. She only knew all the places where former literary employers of hers had kept things and where she clearly considered Mrs Oliver ought to keep them.

‘What I want,’ said Mrs Oliver, with firmness and the determination of a spoilt child, ‘is my 1970 address book. And I think 1969 as well. Please look for it as quick as you can, will you?’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Miss Livingstone.

She looked round her with the rather vacant expression of someone who is looking for something she has never heard of before but which efficiency may be able to produce by some unexpected turn of luck.

If I don’t get Sedgwick back, I shall go mad, thought Mrs Oliver to herself. I can’t deal with this thing if I don’t have Sedgwick.

Miss Livingstone started pulling open various drawers in the furniture in Mrs Oliver’s so-called study and writing-room.

‘Here is last year’s,’ said Miss Livingstone happily. ‘That will be much more up-to-date, won’t it? 1971.’

‘I don’t want 1971,’ said Mrs Oliver.

Vague thoughts and memories came to her.

‘Look in that tea-caddy table,’ she said.

Miss Livingstone looked round, looking worried.

‘That table,’ said Mrs Oliver, pointing.

‘A desk book wouldn’t be likely to be in a tea-caddy,’ said Miss Livingstone, pointing out to her employer the general facts of life.

‘Yes, it could,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I seem to remember.’

Edging Miss Livingstone aside, she went to the tea-caddy table, raised the lid, looked at the attractive inlaid work inside. ‘And it is here,’ said Mrs Oliver, raising the lid of a papier-mâché round canister, devised to contain Lapsang Souchong as opposed to Indian tea, and taking out a curled-up small brown notebook.

‘Here it is,’ she said.

‘That’s only 1968, Mrs Oliver. Four years ago.’

‘That’s about right,’ said Mrs Oliver, seizing it and taking it back to the desk. ‘That’s all for the present, Miss Livingstone, but you might see if you can find my birthday book somewhere.’

‘I didn’t know …’

‘I don’t use it now,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘but I used to have one once. Quite a big one, you know. Started when I was a child. Goes on for years. I expect it’ll be in the attic upstairs. You know, the one we use as a spare room sometimes when it’s only boys coming for holidays, or people who don’t mind. The sort of chest or bureau thing next to the bed.’

‘Oh. Shall I look and see?’

‘That’s the idea,’ said Mrs Oliver.

She cheered up a little as Miss Livingstone went out of the room. Mrs Oliver shut the door firmly behind her, went back to the desk and started looking down the addresses written in faded ink and smelling of tea.

‘Ravenscroft. Celia Ravenscroft. Yes. 14 Fishacre Mews, S. W.3. That’s the Chelsea address. She was living there then. But there was another one after that. Somewhere like Strand-on-the-Green near Kew Bridge.’

She turned a few more pages. ‘Oh yes, this seems to be a later one. Mardyke Grove. That’s off Fulham Road, I think. Somewhere like that. Has she got a telephone number? It’s very rubbed out, but I think—yes, I think that’s right—Flaxman … Anyway, I’ll try it.’

She went across to the telephone. The door opened and Miss Livingstone looked in.

‘Do you think that perhaps—’

‘I found the address I want,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Go on looking for that birthday book. It’s important.’

‘Do you think you could have left it when you were in Sealy House?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Go on looking.’ She murmured, as the door closed, ‘Be as long as you like about it.’

She dialled the telephone and waited, opening the door to call up the stairs: ‘You might try that Spanish chest. You know, the one that’s bound with brass. I’ve forgotten where it is now. Under the table in the hall, I think.’

Mrs Oliver’s first dialling was not successful. She appeared to have connected herself to a Mrs Smith Potter, who seemed both annoyed and unhelpful and had no idea what the present telephone number might be of anyone who had lived in that particular flat before.

Mrs Oliver applied herself to an examination of the address book once more. She discovered two more addresses which were hastily scrawled over other numbers and did not seem wildly helpful. However, at the third attempt a somewhat illegible Ravenscroft seemed to emerge from the crossings out and initials and addresses.

A voice admitted to knowing Celia. ‘Oh dear, yes. But she hasn’t lived here for years. I think she was in Newcastle when I last heard from her.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got that address.’

‘No, I haven’t got it either,’ said the kindly girl. ‘I think she went to be secretary to a veterinary surgeon.’

It did not sound very hopeful. Mrs Oliver tried once or twice more. The addresses in the latest of her two address books were no use, so she went back a bit further. She struck oil, as you might put it, when she came to the last one, which was for the year 1967.

‘Oh, you mean Celia,’ said a voice. ‘Celia Ravenscroft, wasn’t it? Or was it Finchwell?’

Mrs Oliver just prevented herself in time from saying, ‘No, and it wasn’t redbreast either.’

‘A very competent girl,’ said the voice. ‘She worked for me for over a year and a half. Oh yes, very competent. I would have been quite happy if she had stayed longer. I think she went from here to somewhere in Harley Street, but I think I’ve got her address somewhere. Now let me see.’ There was a long pause while Mrs X—name unknown—was seeing. ‘I’ve got one address here. It seems to be in Islington somewhere. Do you think that’s possible?’

Mrs Oliver said that anything was possible and thanked Mrs X very much and wrote it down.

‘So difficult, isn’t it, trying to find people’s addresses. They do send them to you usually. You know, a sort of postcard or something of that kind. Personally I always seem to lose it.’

Mrs Oliver said that she herself also suffered in this respect. She tried the Islington number. A heavy, foreign voice replied to her.

‘You want, yes—you tell me what? Yes, who live here?’

‘Miss Celia Ravenscroft?’ ‘Oh yes, that is very true. Yes, yes she lives here. She has a room on the second floor. She is out now and she not come home.’