Joan? Everybody is always Joan. Anne is the same. Susan? I’ve had a Susan. Lucia? Lucia? Lucia? I believe I can see a Lucia. Red-haired. Polo-necked jumper … Black tights? Black stockings, anyway.’
This momentary gleam of good cheer was eclipsed by the memory of the cockatoo problem, and Mrs Oliver resumed her unhappy prowling, picking up things off tables unseeingly and putting them down again somewhere else. She fitted with some care her spectacle case into a lacquered box which already contained a Chinese fan and then gave a deep sigh and said:
‘I’m glad it’s you.’
‘That’s very nice of you.’
‘It might have been anybody. Some silly woman who wanted me to open a bazaar, or the man about Milly’s insurance card which Milly absolutely refuses to have—or the plumber (but that would be too much good fortune, wouldn’t it?). Or, it might be someone wanting an interview—asking me all those embarrassing questions which are always the same every time. What made you first think of taking up writing? How many books have you written? How much money do you make? Etc. etc. I never know the answers to any of them and it makes me look such a fool. Not that any of that matters because I think I am going mad, over this cockatoo business.’
‘Something that won’t jell?’ I said sympathetically. ‘Perhaps I’d better go away.’
‘No, don’t. At any rate you’re a distraction.’
I accepted this doubtful compliment.
‘Do you want a cigarette?’ Mrs Oliver asked with vague hospitality. ‘There are some somewhere. Look in the typewriter lid.’
‘I’ve got my own, thanks. Have one. Oh no, you don’t smoke.’
‘Or drink,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘I wish I did. Like those American detectives that always have pints of rye conveniently in their collar drawers. It seems to solve all their problems. You know, Mark, I really can’t think how anyone ever gets away with a murder in real life. It seems to me that the moment you’ve done a murder the whole thing is so terribly obvious.’
‘Nonsense. You’ve done lots of them.’
‘Fifty-five at least,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘The murder part is quite easy and simple. It’s the covering up that’s so difficult. I mean, why should it be anyone else but you? You stick out a mile.’
‘Not in the finished article,’ I said.
‘Ah, but what it costs me,’ said Mrs Oliver darkly. ‘Say what you like, it’s not natural for five or six people to be on the spot when B is murdered and all have a motive for killing B—unless, that is, B is absolutely madly unpleasant and in that case nobody will mind whether he’s been killed or not, and doesn’t care in the least who’s done it.’
‘I see your problem,’ I said. ‘But if you’ve dealt with it successfully fifty-five times, you will manage to deal with it once again.’
‘That’s what I tell myself,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘over and over again, but every single time I can’t believe it, and so I’m in agony.’
She seized her hair again and tugged it violently.
‘Don’t,’ I cried. ‘You’ll have it out by the roots.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Hair’s tough. Though when I had measles at fourteen with a very high temperature, it did come out—all round the front. Most shaming. And it was six whole months before it grew properly again. Awful for a girl—girls mind so. I thought of it yesterday when I was visiting Mary Delafontaine in that nursing home. Her hair was coming out just like mine did. She said she’d have to get a false front when she was better. If you’re sixty it doesn’t always grow again, I believe.’
‘I saw a girl pull out another girl’s hair by the roots the other night,’ I said. I was conscious of a slight note of pride in my voice as one who has seen life.
‘What extraordinary places have you been going to?’ asked Mrs Oliver.
‘This was in a coffee bar in Chelsea.’
‘Oh Chelsea!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Everything happens there, I believe. Beatniks and sputniks and squares and the beat generation. I don’t write about them much because I’m so afraid of getting the terms wrong. It’s safer, I think, to stick to what you know.’
‘Such as?’
‘People on cruises, and in hotels, and what goes on in hospitals, and on parish councils—and sales of work—and music festivals, and girls in shops, and committees and daily women, and young men and girls who hike round the world in the interests of science, and shop assistants—’
She paused, out of breath.
‘That seems fairly comprehensive to be getting on with,’ I said.
‘All the same, you might take me out to a coffee bar in Chelsea some time—just to widen my experience,’ said Mrs Oliver wistfully.
‘Any time you say. Tonight?’
‘Not tonight. I’m too busy writing or rather worrying because I can’t write. That’s really the most tiresome thing about writing—though everything is tiresome really, except the one moment when you get what you think is going to be a wonderful idea, and can hardly wait to begin. Tell me, Mark, do you think it is possible to kill someone by remote control?’
‘What do you mean by remote control? Press a button and set off a radioactive death ray?’
‘No, no, not science fiction. I suppose,’ she paused doubtfully, ‘I really mean black magic.’
‘Wax figures and pins in them?’
‘Oh, wax figures are right out,’ said Mrs Oliver scornfully. ‘But queer things do happen—in Africa or the West Indies. People are always telling you so. How natives just curl up and die. Voodoo—or ju-ju … Anyway, you know what I mean.’
I said that much of that was attributed nowadays to the power of suggestion. Word is always conveyed to the victim that his death has been decreed by the medicine-man—and his subconscious does the rest.
Mrs Oliver snorted.
‘If anyone hinted to me that I had been doomed to lie down and die, I’d take a pleasure in thwarting their expectations!’
I laughed.
‘You’ve got centuries of good Occidental sceptical blood in your veins. No predispositions.’
‘Then you think it can happen?’
‘I don’t know enough about the subject to judge. What put it into your head? Is your new masterpiece to be Murder by Suggestion?’
‘No, indeed. Good old-fashioned rat poison or arsenic is good enough for me. Or the reliable blunt instrument. Not firearms if possible. Firearms are so tricky. But you didn’t come here to talk to me about my books.’
‘Frankly no—The fact is that my cousin Rhoda Despard has got a church fête and—’
