Towards Zero

by Agatha Christie

‘Why shouldn’t I kill myself if I want to?’ he demanded. She replied to that quite seriously. ‘Because it’s wrong.’ ‘Why is it wrong?’ She looked at him doubtfully. She was not disturbed in her own belief, but she was much too inarticulate to explain her reaction. ‘Well—I mean—it’s wicked to kill yourself. You’ve got to go on living whether you like it or not.’ ‘Why have you?’ ‘Well, there are other people to consider, aren’t there?’ ‘Not in my case. There’s not a soul in the world who’d be the worse for my passing on.’ ‘Haven’t you got any relations? No mother or sisters or anything?’ ‘No. I had a wife once but she left me—quite right too! She saw I was no good.’ ‘But you’ve got friends, surely?’ ‘No, I haven’t. I’m not a friendly sort of man.

He was willing to address himself to the task of living, not with enthusiasm, not even with pleasure, but in a methodical day after day spirit.

You could not, he admitted, take your life in cold blood. There had to be some extra fillip of despair, of grief, of desperation or of passion. You could not commit suicide merely because you felt that life was a dreary round of uninteresting happenings.

‘A little malice,’ agreed Mr Treves, ‘adds a certain savour to life.’

‘It’s extraordinary,’ said Battle, ‘the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often—both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.’

He would rather, a thousand times rather, be out of it all. He still felt that. The only thing he had lost was the necessary impetus.