The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  She put up her catalogue again, but immediately dropped it as a taxi drew up at the door. At last! She gave a quick glance at her wrist-watch, not in the least crossly, but just to know the time. Then, with a slight start, she looked up in time to see Aubrey lifting his Homburg hat to somebody. The taxi moved away, and Aubrey entered Rumpelmayers’.

  ‘Hallo, Kneller,’ said the young man whose eyes had made the overtures to Helen; and Aubrey gave him a brief nod as he advanced to Helen. He was a bustle of insincere apologies; he, too, looked at his watch.

  ‘So sorry – more than five minutes late – I make it twenty-three minutes to five –’

  ‘I was a little early,’ Helen remarked.

  Nevertheless she was perfectly sure that Aubrey had said four o’clock, and not half-past. ‘Who was that?’ she asked, as they passed into the inner room.

  ‘That chap? Oh, his flat’s on the same landing as mine. I some­times wonder whether my telephone belongs to me or to him. His name’s Upwester. He’s a peer of sorts.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that young man. I meant who were you speaking to in the taxi.’

  ‘Oh!’ Aubrey gave an easy laugh. ‘Oh! Now I’m going to say something that sounds silly. I haven’t the least idea who it was!’

  She thought it sounded particularly silly. But ‘Do you mean some­body was taken ill and you picked them up?’ she asked with concern.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he reassured her. ‘I was shopping. She was in a great hurry. She didn’t ask me. I offered it. A very great hurry, and she looked very tired, and it was the only taxi – you surely don’t mind a casual little thing like that, darling?’

  ‘Of course not!’ The blue eyes under the duckling-yellow brows were wide open. ‘And you look tired yourself, dearest!’

  ‘Yes. That beastly book. Took rather a lot out of me. Anyway it’s finished with now.’

  ‘Here comes your neighbour.’

  Upwester had entered with the lady for whom he had been waiting. A glance at her sufficed to set Aubrey wondering whether she was the ‘Bee’ on the Museum Exchange with whom Upwester communicated so frequently. Had Aubrey been on such merry terms with a lady as Upwester seemed to be with this one, he would have preferred to have a telephone of his own.

  ‘Rather a sad face, don’t you think?’ Helen was saying.

  Sad? Upwester? No, Aubrey couldn’t see that. Judging from things he had heard, Upwester’s flat was no abode of sadness.

  ‘I mean a sort of lost-child expression,’ said Helen.

  ‘I dare say,’ Aubrey answered off-handedly. ‘Upwester’s life and mine run on different lines.’

  It was nearly true. So, hitherto, they had.

  6

  He had just told Helen that his book was off his hands; but as he sat there, with a bright smile on his face, automatically talking, he was conscious of another disquieting little parallel that up to that moment he had not remembered. It was this.

  The Pat of his book – that Sir Patrick Archdale who originally was to have married Rosamond in the last chapter – this preux chevalier had been sent by Aubrey, his master, with a large bunch of roses as a gift to Rosamond. The compliment with which he was to have presented them had cost Aubrey quite a lot of thought. But Pat, the mere creature, had demurred at the words put into his mouth; that is to say, Aubrey had written the elaborate little phrase and had then struck it out again. Pat’s voice had sounded almost audibly in his mind.

  ‘But look here, my dear old tin of fruit,’ Pat had protested, almost contemptuously, ‘nobody talks like that nowadays! Why don’t you give us a chance? Why can’t you let us run our own show?’

  ‘And keep Rosamond waiting?’ Aubrey had taken up his part in this little drama of which the stage was only a few inches wide.

  ‘Heaps of time. I’m not meeting her till four-thirty.’

  ‘What’s that? I told you four o’clock.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve altered that!’ Pat had replied.

  A character after an author’s time-table, carefully worked out with regard to every exigency of the plot!

  ‘You’ve what?’ Aubrey had gasped.

  ‘Changed it. We can look after ourselves. She can have her roses, but I’m damned if I’m going to make that silly speech about them!’

  The next day the sub-plot of the book had thickened even more menacingly. Aubrey, sitting with Helen in Rumpelmayers’, remem­bered a certain alternative draft that had, as authors say, ‘written itself’, almost without his co-operation. He had promptly discarded it, but in the end had had to restore it again. Merely as an ex­peri­ment, he had written something like this:

  Pat. I bought you a bunch of roses, darling, but they dropped with the heat.

  Rosamond. Wouldn’t they have picked up in water, my loved one?

  Pat. Oh, I wouldn’t give you a dud lot like that!

  Rosamond. Ever thinking of me! Ah, that flowers, so fair today, so faded tomorrow, should be the symbol of the love of unchanging hearts!

  Pat. Eh? Oh, rather! Quite! And I say, am I a bit late? I honestly thought it was four-thirty! Sorry and all that. I had to see a man.

  At this point Aubrey Kneller, sitting in Rumpelmayers’ tea-shop, blushed suddenly and violently. He remembered the gesture with which he had crumpled up that tentative draft and thrown it into the wastepaper basket. He remembered how he had once more rubbed (as it were) his magic ring, and the genie of Archdale had once more appeared. He remembered what had next passed.

  ‘Now look here, Archdale, I want to talk to you,’ he had said severely.

  ‘Start her up, old thing.’

  ‘Who’s this man you say made you late for Rosamond?’

  ‘Feller I know.’

  ‘Is he in the book?’

  ‘Do you mean the telephone-book?’

  ‘Is he in my book, Delia Vane?’

  ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Then where did you pick him up?’

  ‘Barged into him one day in the Premier Lounge.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Dover Street, of course.’

  ‘I know the Bath Club in Dover Street, and Browns’ and Batts’ and the Sesame. I never heard of any Premier Lounge.’

  ‘West side, near the bottom. You can get your hair cut there.’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to go straight to Rosamond?’

  ‘They kept me waiting in the flower-shop.’

  ‘Pat, that’s untrue. I don’t believe you bought those flowers.’

  ‘Then go and ask ’em in the shop. They’re down on your account anyway.’

  ‘Then what became of them?’

  Then Pat, with a snort that had startled even his creator, had replied: ‘Well, if you damn-well want to know, I gave ’em to Miss Thompson! She’s the only bit of fun there is in your whole blighted book – haw, haw, haw, haw!’

  Aubrey’s throat was dry. He drank some more of Rumpelmayers’ excellent tea, which went the wrong way, so that he coughed. And all at once he was afraid.

  For what had Pat done that he himself had not been guilty of, and all within an hour and a half? Pat had given Rosamond’s roses to somebody else; but had not Aubrey given another woman Helen’s hat? Pat had shuffled and lied; but what else had he done to Helen? Pat was trying, as he would have expressed it, to ‘shake’ Rosamond; but had not Aubrey for some time past doubted whether Helen was quite the proper mate for a writer of books?

  And worst of all, had there not been that exciting, disgraceful little scene in the taxi hardly half an hour before?

  For he had kissed that little Pountney Place stranger in the black dusty velvet tam. He had kissed her as they turned into Pont Street, and again after that, and again after that. And he had told the driver not to hurry. It was then that the
ingenious idea had occurred to him that he might pretend to Helen that he had thought their appoint­ment to be for half-past four. He had told her how pretty her mouth was when she didn’t do anything to it, and had kissed it again. Her pallid little face had flushed and glowed. They had sat hand in hand, and he had promised to send people to her shop, and had told her that if ever she was in trouble she must come to him. In a word, he had done almost everything that Sir Rupert or Sir Guy would have nobly condemned.

  ‘And now that you’ve got a new hat you can chuck that old thing away,’ he had told her.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t wear the new one all the time!’ she had answered.

  ‘You girls are all alike!’ he had laughed. ‘Give you one thing and you want something else! Well, I suppose we shall have to see what can be done –’

  And he reddened again, with something nearer even than betrayed honour, when he remembered that if he had only had the sense to stop the taxi a few yards up the street Helen need have known nothing at all about it.

  A couple of tables away Upwester and his companion were laugh­ing, with now and then a glance in Aubrey’s direction. A little farther along the wall an electric fan spun, almost invisible in its light cage. It was one of those fans that, besides spinning, moved slowly from side to side. It caught Aubrey’s eye. He found something fascinating in its regular movement – a turn to the right, a pause, and then back again to the left. It was as if a shining face stared mildly, now at Upwester and his friend, now at Aubrey and Helen. Its expression changed too. Now, two glistening sectors would stand for a moment still, point to point; then they would flutter and flow and become a single golden spoke. This, too, would pulse and pale, and then dissolve suddenly into a blank.

  ‘Haw, haw, haw, haw! Haw, haw, haw, haw!’

  Half the heads in the room turned. It was Upwester’s raucous laugh. He was laughing helplessly – ‘Haw, haw, haw, haw!’ – and his companion was trying to quieten him.

  Aubrey had sprung to his feet. That was twice that afternoon the same thing had happened! He shook with excitement. Again a voice, straight out of a book! The other time it had been the girl in the butter-and-eggs frock who had spoken with Delia’s voice; now this was the authentic laugh of Pat Archdale when, in that experimental draft, he had told Aubrey that this new governess creature was the only bit of fun in his whole benighted book!

  ‘Haw, haw, haw, haw!’ roared Upwester again, while the faces of strangers also smiled politely, that somebody should be enjoying himself so. From Upwester to Aubrey turned the fan, from Aubrey to Upwester. It seemed to be beamingly introducing them to one another: ‘Sir Patrick Archdale – Mr Kneller – Sir Patrick Archdale – Mr Kneller –’

  ‘No, no, no!’ Aubrey wanted to cry. ‘His name’s Upwester – Lord Upwester – he’s the flat next to mine, just along the street there – !’

  ‘Miss Marie Somebody – Miss Delia Vane – Miss Marie Somebody – Miss Delia Vane – ’ seemed to come from the unresting fan.

  ‘No, no, no!’ Aubrey inwardly shrieked.

  ‘Miss Rosamond De Vere – Miss Helen Boyd – Miss Rosamond De Vere – Miss Helen Boyd – Upwester – Archdale – Miss Marie Somebody – Miss Delia Vane – ’ the names spun in poor Aubrey’s head.

  Suddenly, with a laugh almost as loud as Upwester’s own, Aubrey, who had been standing up, sat down in his chair again as if he had been poleaxed. Helen was asking him what was the matter. But he only gaped at that fluttering disc of thin brass.

  ‘Not an atom of doubt about it, not an atom of doubt about it, not an atom of doubt about it,’ was all that he could mutter, over and over again.

  7

  Aubrey had planned to get married that autumn. He was in treaty for a house out Rickmansworth way, that should satisfy Helen’s need for air, space and a garden and his own convenient nearness to town. Of course he would have to give up his flat in King Street, and sleep at his club when business happened to keep him late.

  But it would be a wrench to give up the flat. He liked its situation, almost at the corner of St James’s Square. He liked to sit in its wide, many-paned window-bay, to look down on the stately park of cars, and to picture to himself which of them had just set down Sir Ronald at the portals of his club or Sir Ronald at the wide doors of the Embassy. He liked King Street, with its china and cabinets and rare prints and two-hundred-guinea guns. He loved the flat itself – the tiny anteroom where the telephone was, the large airy study adjoining, his bedroom leading from it, his bathroom beyond that again, and the little chamber at the end where Clough, his man, slept. He esteemed and respected Clough, from his plain all-round collar to his silent boots. When Clough brought Aubrey a card on a salver Aubrey was often on the point of placing half-a-crown there instead of picking up the card. And a spot of dust anywhere about the place would have been a spot on Clough’s conscience.

  But as Aubrey sat in his study late that night the flat seemed somehow all wrong. Not that an article was out of place. The porcelain clock was right to a second – five minutes to one. His books had not been touched, his chairs stood in their proper places, only the flowers had been taken out for the night and placed in the bathroom. He knew that if he went to the telephone there would not be a breath on its glass mouth-piece and that not a peerage or guide would be a fraction out of alignment. To open the door of his bedroom would be like opening a box of confectionery straight from the makers.

  Yet something was amiss. It was as if an alteration had taken place in the air, giving things harsher edges than usual. He felt as if he had somebody else’s spectacles on, not quite suited to his eyes. Somehow the place would have been better for a little litter – something half-unpacked, say with tissue-paper lying about. A smell, a feminine smell for preference, of powder or burning incense-paper, would have been a change from its tiresome cleanliness. And he was sick of those two Cox water-colours. He wanted to put up something garish and modern and rather extravagant in their places. And it was depressingly quiet. It wanted voices, voices of a certain timbre. It wanted whatever it was that rooms did take from their occupants. Anyway it wanted something.

  Suddenly he sat up in his chair, listening. Then he sank back again. The gates of the lift-cage had clashed on the landing outside, and Upwester had come home, apparently bringing a number of his friends with him, for there had been sounds of muffled laughter.

  The door of the other flat banged, and Aubrey resumed his reverie.

  No, it wasn’t the room; it was he himself who had changed. He had been changing for months past, imperceptibly and day by day. With each completed chapter of Delia Vane he had changed a little more, and he didn’t think it would make the least bit of difference now if he did send for the manuscript of his book back. He had done his work. He could destroy it, but he could not alter it. Nobody, reading his most famous book, Loved I Not Honour More, would suppose that Delia Vane could possibly have come from the same pen. He knew that he had placed his pro­fessional reputation in the gravest jeopardy, and that the odds were a thousand to one that if Delia had any success at all it would be a succès de scandale.

  Suddenly the door across the corridor opened again. Again the gale of muffled laughter was heard, and through it Upwester’s boist­erous ‘Haw, haw, haw!’ They were gathered outside his own door. He heard Upwester’s words.

  ‘Dig the o’ feller out – all in there by himself – hoi! Kneller! Show a leg! Want you to come to my party! Come into the body o’ the kirk! Come and ’joy yourself!’

  A drumming on Aubrey’s door accompanied the invitation.

  Aubrey had half-risen from his chaír. Often as he had been made aware of Upwester’s nocturnal revels he had never been asked to take part in them before. Had he been asked he would certainly have refused, for he did not approve of this figure who had sometimes shot up the lift-shaft at dawn, with a large metal motor-spirit advertise­ment reverber
ating in his arms as a trophy and a cloakroom-ticket still stuck in the band of his opera-hat. But tonight was different. He was weary to death being alone. It was rather decent of Upwester to have asked him. Why not go in for an hour?

  As he opened his door there was a clap of laughter, at which the very cars parked in the Square might have shied. It took Aubrey a moment to realise what had happened. Then he saw the joke. The peer had been standing on his hands with his feet against the upper panels of the door, and he lurched in full-length, feet first.

  ‘Haw, haw, haw! Haw, haw, haw!’ he laughed as he lay on the ground.

  ‘Sssh – don’t wake my man!’ Aubrey begged, his fingers on his lips.

  The nobleman picked himself up. ‘Bring him in, Bee,’ he cried, hospitably. ‘Let him come to the party – ’snames Kneller – ’snauthor – lets me use his telephone – bring him in – come on, Kneller –’

  He seized Aubrey by the waist and pulled his door to behind him.

  8

  So this was the place where his neighbour turned night into day and broke Aubrey’s rest with the liquid howls of his water-whistle! As a first impression of Upwester’s flat, Aubrey was put in mind of a visit he had once paid to Madame Tussaud’s. There, figures that he had taken for dummies had suddenly moved a hand or a head, but had been dummies after all; and others, that he had taken to be dummies also, had smiled at Aubrey and walked away. So it was here. The room was almost as dim as a photographer’s dark-room, dyed deep by the rosy silk-shaded lights. He hardly knew whether a thing was animate or inanimate till it moved, and even then he might have been mistaken. He couldn’t count them, but he had the feeling that there were quite a lot of people about him. Here and there the sudden glow of a cigarette would momentarily light up a face, which would then go out again. A soft huddle of colour at the end of a divan might have been a heap of cushions, until it stirred and resolved itself into a lady, curled up in the least possible compass, and nursing an unslippered foot in one hand. What looked like a piece of tapestry over the mantelpiece might have been a sheet-iron advertisement of a motor spirit, and standing near a door was a figure that Aubrey supposed to be Upwester’s servant, until a struck match showed it to be a stuffed brown bear holding out a tray. He hadn’t a notion who anybody was. The mingled smell of cigarettes and perfume was subtly exciting. His host was introducing him, genially and at large.