Work Text:
Miss Lemon was not supposed to know. She knew that she wasn’t to know and acted accordingly, of course. It was, however, getting harder to pretend or keep a straight face.
It had started with a telephone conversation she had definitely not overheard when she arrived at Whitehaven Mansions after running some errands for Mister Poirot. She always let herself in quietly so as not to disturb her employer, who sometimes napped in the afternoon when there were no cases. So she had slipped in, and even as she was about to hang up her overcoat, she heard Captain Hastings’ voice coming from the living room:
“… and we need to absolutely keep it a secret, darling,” the man was saying in a voice that carried terribly, “Miss Lemon must never know and if Poirot finds out then I’ll really be in the soup…. Yes, and you of course, but you being in the soup with Poirot is not as dire a circumstance as me being in the soup with him if you know what I mean.”
She gathered from this little fragment that the dear captain was speaking on the phone and that Mister Poirot was not at home. Miss Lemon did the only sensible thing: she quietly went outside again only to let herself in for a second time, loudly this time and announcing her presence clumsily.
As she hung up her coat, Captain Hastings stepped out of the living room, a very pretty flush on his cheeks.
“Oh, hullo Miss Lemon. I’m off to run some errands. If Poirot comes home, don’t tell him where I’m going.”
“But I don’t know where you’re going, Captain Hastings,” she remarked kindly. He smiled distractedly and grabbed his hat and coat.
“Good chap,” he just replied, beaming cheerfully at her, and off he went.
She went into her office, ignored the hideous clock Mister Poirot had given her the week before, and, as she got out a letter she needed to type out a reply to, she emitted low, soothing sounds in the direction of her typewriter. She had found that this actually helped calm the beast down and diminished the malfunctions considerably. Her sister’s friend was a medium and able to see people’s auras. She had once told Miss Lemon that hers was a specifically organic aura that was wonderful and lively but had the tendency to cause malfunctions in non-organic gadgets – watches, typewriters, telephones, the lot.
“It’s not the appliances,” said friend had explained to Miss Lemon, “it’s your magnetism that causes it. It draws men to you but it repels anything artificial.” Miss Lemon had learned to live with it; she was just glad it wasn’t the other way around.
Captain Hastings remained quite secretive for the rest of the day and the next one as well. He dashed in and out furtively, spoke low on the telephone in the living room when Poirot was out and she herself was busy, and twice she found him deeply engrossed in studying her typewriter when he thought she was out.
Yes, keeping a straight face was decidedly becoming a strain on her; secrecy was not something that came naturally to Captain Hastings.
Two days later, when Mister Poirot announced he was meeting a prospective new client and was not to be back until after lunch, Captain Hastings dashed to the phone the moment Poirot had closed the door behind him. Unaware that Miss Lemon could hear almost every word through the little glass pass-through between her office and the living room, he didn’t even whisper but hissed into the receiver that now was the time to act.
Twenty minutes later, the doorbell went. Captain Hastings, who had been lying on the sofa pretending to read the Morning Edition, jumped up hastily.
“I’ll get it, Miss Lemon,” he called out, “Don’t bother!”
Then he opened the door. Miss Lemon duly feigned surprise when Chief Inspector Japp strolled in and grinned at her by way of a greeting. She ignored it when Hastings shut the door to her office with a wink and a murmured, “Don’t let us interrupt you.”
She tried not to listen to the two men arguing in the hallway as to where to put it so nobody would see, and then she tried not to look when she saw the two of them through the glass partition kissing on the sofa after having gotten rid of whatever it was. She was a very patient woman, even if she thought so herself.
A few minutes later there was a knock on her door and Captain Hastings popped his head in.
“Are you quite busy this morning?” he asked innocently.
She gave a non-committal reply.
“Oh good. Well, what do you say we all go to lunch together? I mean, Poirot is out for lunch, and I’m feeling peckish, and so is Chief Inspector Japp. My treat.”
“I am a little behind with my correspondence, Captain Hastings,” she said, which was perhaps a little petty but she just wanted to make him blush a little more.
“Oh. Uhm. Well. I mean…” He ran out of words and she decided to be generous with the poor man.
“But I could do with a spot of lunch, Captain Hastings. Thank you for your kind offer.”
“Splendid!”
He shooed her out of the flat, and she didn’t point out that Chief Inspector Japp was still in it. Instead, when the latter joined them at the restaurant a few minutes after they’d sat down, she pretended not to have noticed anything at all.
They had a pleasant time together, and the food was delicious. She thanked the two men dutifully before she returned to the flat, and then noticed that during her absence someone had swapped out her old, broken typewriter for a new one that looked exactly the same.
She finished Mister Poirot’s correspondence in no time, relishing every moment of it. She had all but forgotten how wonderfully easy it could be to type something when the typewriter in question was working smoothly.
oOo
“How is the correspondence going, Miss Lemon?” Captain Hastings asked a few days later when she arrived in the morning. “Typewriter still giving you trouble?” His voice was languid but his face was flushed and radiated a sort of mischievous mirth. He was on the sofa, hiding behind his newspaper and Mister Poirot was reading something at his desk.
The latter didn’t even look up at the words.
“Oh, it’s simply wonderful, Captain Hastings.” Lying through her teeth (but it was for a good cause) she added, “I don’t know how it happened but suddenly it worked just fine, and it’s not been giving me any trouble at all ever since.”
The good captain beamed happily.
“Good, good,” he replied in an innocent, almost bored tone of voice. “You know sometimes these things fix themselves, don’t you know.”
“Well, I’m certainly very happy, and thank you for asking,” she said, a little over-the-top for her own liking, but it did the trick and brightened Captain Hastings’ features even more.
“You see, Miss Lemon, your personal magnetism it has been at work,” Mister Poirot said amiably. “No, go and make good use of it and type something.”
“Certainly, Mister Poirot,” she replied. When she glanced at him, he winked at her and, because Captain Hastings was completely hidden from his view behind the newspaper, he put a finger to his lips as if to ask Miss Lemon not to tell that they knew.
As if she would!
ooOOoo