‘You seemed to make quite a hit.’
‘No, you don’t really mean that? I didn’t do a thing. I just kept still. Who were all those young men that kept talking to me?’
‘Why, Tot darling, everybody was talking to you all the time. Which young men do you mean? There was young Hemmeridge, and there was Mothmar Acord. There was —’
‘That young man in the grey suit.’
‘Oh, you mean Tobit Osbert.’
‘The one that got so drunk.’
‘They were all drunk, Tot my sweet. And lots of them were wearing grey suits. You mean Tobit Osbert, do you? Why, I do believe you’ve fallen in love with him. Now what on earth for? You’re old enough to be his mother.’
‘Oh dear Asta, my dear Asta — can’t I just make ordinary conversation without your assuming all kinds of things? Tobit Osbert, that’s the man. He promised to get in touch with me about … a book I wanted to borrow. There’s a book he has, and he said he’d lend it to me.’
‘What sort of book?’
‘A book about the Crusaders.’
‘I’ve got his address somewhere in my little black book,’ said Asta, referring to her address book. ‘I’ll get it for you later. Or do you want it now?’
‘Oh no, not now. Any time will do.’
After breakfast Asta remembered that she had an appointment with a certain Mr Partridge, who was telling her something about a scandal concerning the adoption of illegitimate children. She went out at nine o’clock. As soon as the door had slammed behind Asta, and the sound of her big, heavy-heeled feet had ceased to ring and snap between the front door and the end of the street, Thea Olivia went to the long, old-fashioned, untidy walnut desk in the room described as ‘the study’, and looked for a black book. She found several. One of them was like a digest of Who’s Who; another resembled the note-book of somebody who has had to study Whitaker’s Almanack. A third contained some queer record of letters that had been sent to a Secretary of State. The fourth was full of addresses and telephone numbers. The numbers were written down, together with the exchanges, tolerably clearly. But the names were represented generally by initial letters, so that Thea Olivia had to apologize to Theodore Oxford, Ted Oliver, Timothy Ogden, Timothy O’Brien, and Tudor Owen, before she got an ‘I’ll see if he’s in’ from a woman who sounded like a landlady. Then she heard feet coming down creaking stairs, and her heart thumped as a gentle voice said:
‘Tobit Osbert speaking. Who is that, please?’
‘This is Miss Thea Olivia Thundersley. I hope you will excuse me for disturbing you so early, but I wanted — if it’s perfectly convenient — to have a word with you. It’s rather urgent. I’d be so glad if we could meet fairly soon. Can we?’
‘Why, whenever you like, of course. Where shall we meet? At the — I was going to say at the Savoy, but it’s always so full of a certain sort of… you know what I mean? Shall I come along to your place?’
‘No, I think it might be better if I came to yours. May I?’
‘Why, yes, of course it would. Only I feel I ought to warn you. I live in a bedsitting-room. It isn’t much of a place.’
‘Can I come along now?’
‘By all means, if you like. But I ought to tell you that I have an appointment in about three-quarters of an hour from now — if that’s all right.’
‘I’m coming now.’
‘Righty-ho.’
41
Osbert lived in a square, not far from Mornington Crescent. His landlady was a thin, scowling woman with terocious eyebrows and terrified eyes. She told Thea Olivia where to go, and so she found herself in a bedsitting-room — remarkably neat considering that it was occupied by a man — overlooking a sodden and neglected garden, behind which was visible part of a zinc roof, sooty, striated with rain.
She said: ‘Mr Osbert. Last night I washed my hankie.’
She paused, gulping back her heart, which had crept up into the back of her throat.
‘Could I offer you a cup of tea?’
‘No, I don’t want a cup of tea. I mean, thank you so much. But I really couldn’t. I’ve already had - . . Mr Osbert. I don’t know if you remember last night. We were all very happy and merry and bright together, and… I don’t know if you remember… You dropped a lighted cigarette. Do you remember? Do tell me, do you remember?’
Osbert looked at her steadily for a moment, and then said: ‘Why no, I can’t say that I do.’
‘Mr Osbert,’ said Thea Olivia, breathing with a hissing noise, ‘you were on the point of saying something — I don’t know what — and then you let your cigarette fall, and it fell into the turnedup part of your trousers, and I took it out and brushed the place where it had fallen. Or don’t you remember that?’
‘My dear good lady, how could I possibly remember? The drinks Asta gave us last night were so tremendous — how could anyone remember anything?’
‘I was saying, I took the cigarette-end out of your trousers and wiped the ash and all that away with my handkerchief.’
‘Are you quite sure I can’t get you a cup of tea? Or else there’s some milk…’
Almost suffocated with emotion Thea Olivia went on: ‘I was going to tell you about my hankie. I have — at least I used to have — three or four dozen cambric handkerchiefs, very old ones; very fine ones. And you know — at least any woman knows — you know you use them only for dabbing, just once. I suppose you know?’
‘Of course I know.’
‘I used one of my handkerchiefs on the turn-up of your trousers last night. I’m in the habit of rinsing my cambric handkerchiefs every night before I go to bed. I did so last night. And what do you think I found in it?’
‘Should I know?’
‘Coal dust.’
She watched Tobit Osbert’s face, but he only smiled and said: ‘And so?’
Thea Olivia paused again, not knowing what to say, and felt a sense of impending defeat: ‘You didn’t talk like that last night,’ she said.
‘Didn’t I?’
‘I want you to tell me where you got that coal dust.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose you know that the poor little girl everybody’s so sorry for was killed in a place where there was coal dust?’
‘Was she?’
‘Yes, she was. I know somebody who was there.’
‘Perhaps your somebody did it.’
Thea Olivia looked from the gas fire to the table covered with papers, and thence to the face — the calm, confident, firm yet dreamy face of TobitOsbert, and she felt that nothing she could say might ever make a point.
‘Do please let me offer you just one little cup of tea,’ said Osbert.
Feeling that she needed to play for time, Thea Olivia said: ‘Thank you very much. I think I’d like a cup of tea.’
The gas ring gasped and roared as the little tin kettle clanked down. Looking at his expressionless, fixed face, she detected the beginning of a sidelong look and a suppressed smile.
‘Or perhaps you’d rather come out with me to some place or other, Miss Thundersley?’
‘No, dank you very much. I’d rather… chat with you here, if I may, Mr Osbert.’
His smile stopped trying to suppress itself and spread. The corners of his eyes wrinkled. Last night he had appeared to be a gentle, amiable young man; even a desirable young man. But now he appeared to Thea Olivia as sly, mocking, and indefinably repulsive. He reminded her of a painting she had seen in an exhibition: it depicted a man in a black suit and, from a distance of about three yards, looked almost like a tinted photograph. The man in the picture was, at this distance, altogether nonclescript. He was standing in a self-conscious attitude against a vaguely familiar background of trees and fields, such as photographers used to hang in their studios; and one of his hands was awkwardly poised on the tip of a sawn-off tree-trunk flagrantly made of papier-mâche’, while the other held a bowler hat. But when Thea Olivia took two little ladylike steps forward, this seemingly inoffensive picture became so horrible that she actually let out a little genteel shriek. In the folds of the respectable jacket, waistcoat, and trousers, there were things that should have been elsewhere — small pale worms which had passed at first as highlights upon a shabby but presentable surface. The five teeth exposed by the prim smile were toe-nails. Queer little things with wicked black eyes were coming out of his scalp and peeping through the parting in his hair; one of the buttons of his shirt was a gorged and bloated bug, and in place of eyes he had purplish blue bruise-coloured fingerprints. She had been told that this was Super Realism, and that it represented a Suburb. She was astonished, later, to hear than an American had bought this picture for a large sum of money: it would have given her nightmares — and did, for several nights until she got it out of her mind.