‘Well. go ahead then,’ said Turpin.
37
There was a pause.
‘It’s only ten o’clock. You can’t possibly go yet,’ said Asta.
‘I’m a married man,’ said Turpin. ‘My good lady’ll be waiting with a rolling-pin.’
In the six or seven seconds that passed while they exchanged these few words, the Murderer had more visions. He had drawn a deep breath and looked down at his hands, gathering himself. Now the world was to know that these soft-looking, ill-shaped hands were weapons of atrocious murder. He winked back at an asterisk of reflected electric light on his right thumb-nail, and this fascinated him. It appeared to throb like a heart, spin like a catherine-wheel, and finally throw out a great cone of bluewhite light like a cinema-projector. On a shaky screen between his eyes and the back of his head, then, there flickered a spasmodically-moving picture in mauve, grey-green, and yellowishpink. A bell was tolling. He could hear it, and he knew that it was striking eight. There were grey-green tears upon the yellowishpink cheeks of the priest. But he was smiling. A mauve and yellowishpink jailer shook his head in grudging admiration…. There was the grey-green prison yard… . He felt wood under his feet. Something soft was slipped over his head. Everything became grey-mauve. A slippery roughness touched his neck. I won’t hurt you, said a business-like voice — and then the world fell away from beneath him, and there was a stab of light and an abominable jolt.
The Murderer hiccupped.
‘Go on, go ahead,’ said Detective-Inspector Turpin.
‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,’ said the Murderer.
‘And how right you are,’ said Turpin. ‘Well, thank you very much, Miss Thundersley, for a very pleasant evening.’
‘Allow me, at least, to shake you by the hand,’ said the Murderer.
Turpin gripped his hand and let it fall.
‘You think I’m weak in the hands, perhaps?’ said the Murderer. ‘Then wait a minute!’
‘Strong as a lion. Give all I possess for a grip like yours,’ said Turpin. ‘Good night, Miss. Good night all.’
‘Ah-ah-ah! You silly man!’ cried Thea Olivia, stooping to pick a burning cigarette-end out of the Murderer’s trousercuff. ‘Do you want to burn your nice suit?’
‘Oh no, no! Dear lady! Not on your knees before me!’
She had thrown the cigarette-end into an ashtray, and was making a great to-do over the brushing away of the ashes. Thea Olivia used handkerchiefs of the finest cambric, so exquisite that only she could wash them. In her excitement she had whisked out one of these to dust the Murderer’s trousercuff.
‘You need a nurse, you silly man,’ she said.
‘I am a baby,’ he confessed: and added, with a lowering look: ‘if you prefer to think of me in that way.’
Catchy laid a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t you think —’ she began.
‘It might surprise you to know what I think,’ he replied.
Thea Olivia, looking from face to face in the crowd that surrounded her, was bewildered and a little frightened.
‘You know, I think —’ she said, making a decorous little bow.
At this the groups began to disintegrate. Asta looked glum and sullen, but said little. She heard Cigarette saying to Mothmar Acord:
‘Do I go home with you or do you come home with me?’
Acord seemed to go into a little sieep while he made calculations. Then he pointed a forefinger at Catchy and said:
‘_You_ are coming home with me.’
Catchy nodded, and they linked arms.
‘Nobody loves me,’ said Cigarette, more tragically than she had wanted to sound.
‘Oh, but I do,’ said Wensday, stroking her neck. Then he saw that Avril, who had been watching him, was hooking her chin over the shoulder of Tobit Osbert, who was drowsily drunk. ‘But I’m a respectable married man,’ Wensday added, going to the side of his wife and taking her hand in a grip which was nieant to appear affectionate and intended to hurt.
Hate had got into the atmosphere. Everyone wanted to go away and, in quiet quarrels, say unforgivable things to near and dear ones. Mothmar Acord gave Asta a hand like a rubber glove full of cold water. Cigarette insisted on kissing her. Mrs Scripture caught at her hand and then dropped it as if she had picked up somebody else’s soiled handkerchief. Titch Whitbread, still smiling with pure delight, cautiously squeezed her fingers in his gentle, mighty hand, and swore eternal friendship. Soon everyone was gone but Schiff. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave.
‘Your friend Amy Dory,’ he said in a throaty whisper. ‘So another boy friend! Also Hemmeridge; also Osbert; also Soskin; also Roget; also Milton Catt; also Strindberg; also Mothmar Acord. Ha-ha! No more Tobit Osbert, eh?’
‘Oh, go away!’ said Asta Thundersley.
‘A good sedative, take,’ said Schiff.
‘Go to hell, Schiff — be a good fellow.’
‘Why not? Good night till now.’
‘Good night, Schiff!’
‘You will be seeing me.’
He left the house. Asta kicked the sittingroom door shut and turned and looked about her. Everywhere there floated and sank dust and ashes in the dregs of sticky glasses, and the place was disgusting with stale tobacco smoke. Two cigarettes had burnt themselves out on the mantelpiece. Another had been surreptitiously extinguished upon an oval silver frame that surrounded a photograph of Thea Olivia when she was young and pretty. One of the guests had pocketed a leaf-shaped jade ashtray. The ashtray was worth less than ten shillings, yet Asta was deeply and bitterly hurt. If whoever it was had said: ‘I like it,’ she would have replied: ‘Do, please, take it.’ But, no. People must pilfer — guests, invited in good faith!
She was sick to death of everybody in the world; sick and tired.
Asta took hold of a blue-and-white Chinese vase, and raised it high, intending to throw it with a great smash into the fireplace. Two cigarette-ends and a shower of ashes came out of the neck of it and ran into her armpit. At the same time something sizzled behind the sofa. She put down the vase and looked for the source of the noise. Mr Pink was asleep on the floor.
She looked at him in a white rage, grasped the vase again and, after a little deliberation, angrily put a soft cushion under his head and with a whispered damn-and-blast covered him with a tigerskin rug.
The rain was pouring down. ‘God, what am I to do?’ said Asta Thundersley.
But if, at that moment, the Voice of God had answered: ‘_What are you to do about what, my daughter?_’ she would have found nothing to say in reply — only that she was unhappy because of the badness of men and women, and that her heart was sore at the imperfection of this rough, unfinished world.
Thea Olivia came in elegant and decorous in a pink-flowered black dressinggown that covered her from white throat to roseembroidered slippers.
‘_Good_ night, my dear,’ she began to say; but stopped with a gasp in the middle of the second word, shocked by the spectacle of big red Asta weeping as noisily as a dog drinks, into a little blue handkerchief.
‘Darling! What is it?’
‘Leave me alone, Tot — do leave me alone. I’ve got the miseries …’
‘Let me get you —’
‘I ask you … leave me alone,’ said Asta, crying like a schoolboy.
Thea Olivia went to her bedroom.
38
It was her habit punctiliously to wash her handkerchief before she went to bed, and to hang it up to dry for a meticulous ironing next day, or the day after. She was worried about her handkerchief. What a fool she had been, to give way to impulse and use it as a duster on the turn-up of a trouser-leg! Thea Olivia let warm water run into the hand-basin in her bedroom, and cautiously opened her handkerchief.