Prelude To A Certain Midnight

Tobit Osbert looked at her steadily. His face had been politely serious. Now it changed. One tiny smile altered it as an impalpable corrugation changes a reflection in a mirror.

‘No,’ he said.

‘No?’

With severity in his voice and derision at the corner of his mouth, Tobit Osbert said: ‘My dear madam, I’m afraid you don’t quite realize that you are talking to a gentleman. We had a delightful evening last night, and I’ll always remember it. But I don’t think you can be quite yourself this morning. Do you realize that you have come into my room, more or less accused me of a very horrible murder, and actually offered me money to demonstrate to you whether or no I have committed it? Do you seriously, I ask you in all seriousness, do you seriously, my dear madam, expect me to accept money in such circumstances? For what do you take me? I don’t think I understand you.’

Thea Olivia looked at the shabby rug and the downtrodden linoleum; raised her eyes to the flaky ceiling, and at last looked into the eyes of Tobit Osbert; and she saw that he was laughing at her.

She rose.

‘I do beg your pardon. That tea couldn’t have been any good,’ he said.

‘One last thing, Mr Osbert: will you tell me to whom you sent your suit to be cleaned and pressed?’

‘Since you put it that way, madam, no, I won’t.’

‘Then I can only say Good Day.’

‘I’m sorry you have to go so soon.’

Thea Olivia went back to Asta’s house, full of frustration.

42

The Murderer sat down to write. He had sent his suit to be cleaned by Sam Sabbatani, who gave his dyeing and cleaning to the great Goldberg Dye Works which takes in half the dirty clothes in London every morning at nine o’clock. The firm of Goldberg makes a speciality of what they call ‘mourning orders’ and will dye anything funereally black within twenty-four hours.

Tobit Osbert found a certain refined pleasure in the contemplation of the fact that Sam Sabbatani, still red-eyed and thunderstruck with grief, was washing away evidence which might possibly have convicted the murderer of his daughter for three and sixpence — on the slate, at that.

Tobit Osbert checked himself on the edge of one of his daydreams. No, there must be no daydreaming now, discipline above all things, self-control. He had an article to write for The Theoretician, which would be paid for on delivery. He needed the six guineas, and, as it happened, he really wanted to write the article, which was a critical one on the subject of books for the young. In this, too, there was to be found a certain refined pleasure, a titillation, an indefinable thrill, half intellectual and half voluptuous. So he saved his little daydream for later, and settled down to a survey of the works of Beatrix Potter. In a little while he would make a name for himself. Meanwhile there was enough to do to keep him occupied for three or four days — which was just as well, since his only presentable suit was at the cleaners. But by next week he would be able to buy himself a new suit. There was a tailor near Cambridge Circus who produced an excellent suit for five pounds. Tobit Osbert had his eye on a piece of gentlemanly drab cloth with the faintest, discreetest block check, which he planned to have made up — singlebreasted, perhaps, with two intriguing little slits in the tail of the jacket. Dare he have very narrow trousers, without turn-ups? That might convey an impression of elegant nonchalance. In such a get-up one might lounge about with a gay little scarf around the neck, and introduce oneself to anybody, with a free and easy sportsmanlike looseness in one’s manner of approach.

But enough! Discipline! No daydreams! To work!

All the same, he thought as he dipped his pen into the inkpot, the world is full of pleasures for a man who knows how to appreciate things. He would have gone to Sam Sabbatani for his new suit; but the fact of the matter was that he owed Sam a little money, and was going to owe him three-and-sixpence more in forty-eight hours.

And in this, too, there was refined pleasure.

43

Angry with herself and with all the world, Thea Olivia went back to Asta’s house in Frame Place by the river. She wanted to smash things and to kick people, herself first of all. She was a fool like her sister, she decided. She, Thea Olivia, the only sane girl in the family, had involved herself in something that was none of her business. She walked part of the way because she wanted to get the smell of Osbert’s room out of her nostrils. It was not that the room had a characteristic odour — far from it — but the air of the place, sucked dry by the gas fire, seemed to have got into the back of her nose, so that she was glad to draw deep breaths of the wet and smoky air of the streets. She had no doubt that Osbert had committed that murder. For one mad minute she toyed with the idea of going to the police and telling them what she knew. But then she asked herself: ‘What do I know?’

Everything; she knew everything, but she could prove nothing. Thea Olivia had read many crime stories — she had little to do but read — she realized that there was nothing to say, and shuddered at the thought of an interrogation in a cold greenpainted waiting-room. She could not even mention the affair to Asta. Asta would fly into a fury and rush everywhere in all directions at once, shouting at the top of her voice, raising scandal and making the most appalling scenes. If one gave Asta the merest sniff of suspicion she (so to speak) threw up her trunk and stuck out her ears and charged, screaming, like an elephant. It did not matter to Asta if she was proved to be wrong: she never admitted it and, even if forced to an admission, did not care. As a matter of fact, Asta loved a commotion for its own sake.

But the end of it would be that Thea Olivia would be dragged into this filthy affair; jostled into the witness-box, hauled into the Old Bailey and made to stand up to be cross-examined by sonic such deadly Counsel as Norman Birkett. And for what? A false alarm. It was not for nothing that she read the writings of the best informed authors of detective stories.

Now, if she went and told Asta, the whole world would be turned upside down before lunch-time. Apart from everything else, who knew what Scotland Yard had up its sleeve?

She was surprised to see that she had reached the Embankment. The grubby grey river slid away to the sea. She saw, through the heavy wet air that hung like damp gauze, the spidery outlines of a gas works and of two enormous cranes on the other side. Several sea-gulls, driven inland by the bad weather, were wheeling, screeching, over the dirty water. Thea Olivia decided, suddenly, that she wanted to go away. She wanted to visit Cousin Oxford Thundersley in Hampshire. She wanted to make friends with her grand-niece Olivia, who had been named after her