Prelude To A Certain Midnight

‘Mr Pink. That’s the little gentleman who keeps talking about God, isn’t it? Well, I don’t think he’s just a common drunk. I think he’s a good sort of man, don’t you?’

‘Look here, Tot, I insist on your having at least an egg. Come now, a lightly-boiled egg in a cup. Then you can put little bits of bread into it like you used to.’

‘I couldn’t face an egg,’ said Thea Olivia, almost in agony. ‘I only want … I’ll have some toast, some toast and some marmalade; some of that dark brown marmalade. On the whole, Asta, I think it was a very good party.’

‘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?’