‘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-mache’, 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.
Tobit Osbert, on close inspection — now that her suspicions were aroused — was like that picture. He appeared to Thea Olivia as sick, a product of corruption. She thought that his eyes were twisted so that they made her look in two directions at once: they were eyes into which she found it impossible to look while she talked to him; and she hated that. Also, she saw, or thought that she saw, a certain loathsome wetness in his smile; and the smile itself was creepy, mean, and cunning, yet at the same time odiously confident and detestably familiar. Somewhere she had seen it all before.
To-day Mr Osbert was working. He was wearing a pair of seedy flannel trousers, slippers, and a short-sleeved shirt which left uncovered his white, wiry arms. He begged pardon for this and, while the gas roared under the kettle, put on an exhausted old blue blazer, upon the breast pocket of which a shieldshaped patch of darker blue marked the place where a badge had once been sewn. She could not stop looking at his hands. They were, of course, hands like any other hands; only something behind them had made them kill, and take pleasure in killing, the child named Sonia Sabbatani.
He said: ‘My dear Miss Thundersley, I wonder what in the world makes you think I have anything to do with that horrible business!’
‘I didn’t say you had, Mr Osbert. I only said that after I had dusted the turnedup parts of your … your trousers,’ said Thea Olivia, blushing, ‘I found some coal dust. And I wanted to ask you where you had got it.’
‘And what if I tell you that I might have got it putting coal on the fire?’ said Tobit Osbert playfully.
‘What fire? You have a gas fire,’ said Thea Olivia, wko felt her heart bouncing like a punch-ball in an echoing gymnasium.
