“I’m not worrying now we know about the charades. Funny! You said there might be an explanation, but we never thought of charades, did we?”

“No,” Allcyn said, “we didn’t, did we?” and suddenly kissed her. “Now, I suppose I’ll have to wash again,” he added.

Raoul came down the passage with Baradi’s servant. They were carrying the improvised stretcher and were dressed in white overalls.

Raoul said: “Madame!” to Troy, and to Alleyn, “It appears, Monsieur, that M. le Docteur orders Mademoiselle to be taken to the operating room. Is that convenient for Monsieur?”

“Of course. We are under Dr. Baradi’s orders.”

“Authority,” Raoul observed, “comes to roost on strange perches, Monsieur.”

“That,” Alleyn said, “will do.”

Raoul grinned and opened the door. They took the stretcher in and laid it on the floor by the bed. When they lifted her down to it, Miss Truebody opened her eyes and said distinctly: “But I would prefer to stay in bed.” Raoul deftly tucked blankets under her. She began to wail dismally.

Troy said: “It’s all right, dear. You’ll be all right,” and thought: “But I never call people dear!”

They carried Miss Truebody into the room across the passage and put her on the table by the window. Troy went with them, holding her hand. The window coverings had been removed and a hard glare beat down on the table. The room still reeked of disinfectant. There was a second table on which a number of objects were now laid out. Troy, after one glance, did not look at them again. She held Miss Truebody’s hand and stood between her and the instrument table. A door in the wall facing her opened and Baradi appeared against a background of bathroom. He wore his gown and a white cap. Their austerity of design emphasized the opulence of his nose and eyes and teeth. He had a hypodermic syringe in his left hand.

“So, after all, you are to assist me?” he murmured to Troy. But it was obvious that he didn’t entertain any such notion.

Still holding the flaccid hand, she said: “I thought perhaps I should stay with her until…”

“But of course! Please remain a little longer.” He began to give instructions to Alleyn and the two men. He spoke in French presumably, Troy thought, to spare Miss Truebody’s feelings. “I am left-handed,” he said. “If I should ask for anything to be handed to me you will please remember that. Now, Mr. Allen, we will show you your equipment, isn’t it? Milano!” Raoul brought a china dish from the instrument table. It had a bottle and a hand towel on it. Alleyn looked at it and nodded. “Parfaitement,” he said.

Baradi took Miss Truebody’s other hand and pushed up the long sleeve of her nightgown. She stared at him and her mouth worked soundlessly.

Troy saw the needle slide in. The hand she held flickered momentarily and relaxed.

“It is fortunate,” Baradi said as he withdrew the needle, “that this little Dr. Claudel had Pentothal. A happy coincidence.”

He raised Miss Truebody’s eyelid. The pupil was out of sight. “Admirable,” he said. “Now, Mr. Allen, we will, in a moment or two, induce a more profound anaesthesia which you will continue. I shall scrub up and in a few minutes more we begin operations.” He smiled at Troy, who was already on the way to the door. “One of our party will join you presently on the roof-garden. Miss Locke; the Honourable Grizel Locke. I believe she has a vogue in England. Quite mad, but utterly charming.”

Troy’s last impression of the room, a vivid one, was of Baradi, enormous in his white gown and cap, of Alleyn standing near the table and smiling at her, of Raoul and the Egyptian servant waiting near the instruments, and of Miss Truebody’s wide-open mouth and of the sound of her breathing. Then the door shut off the picture as abruptly as the tunnel had shut off her earlier glimpse into a room in the Chèvre d’Argent.

“Only that time—” Troy told herself, as she made her way back to the roof-garden —“it was only a charade.”

Chapter III

Morning with Mr. Oberon

i

The sun shone full on the roof-garden now, but Ricky was shielded from it by the canopy of his swinging couch. He was, as he himself might have said, lavishly asleep. Troy knew he would stay so for a long time.

The breakfast-table had been cleared and moved to one side and several more seats like Ricky’s had been set out. Troy took the one nearest to his. When she lifted her feet it swayed gently. Her head sank back into a heap of cushions. She had slept very little in the train.

It was quiet on the roof-garden. A few cicadas chittered far below and once, somewhere a long way away, a car hooted. The sky, as she looked into it, intensified itself in blueness and bemused her drowsy senses. Her eyes closed and she felt again the movement of the train. The sound of the cicadas became a dismal chattering from Miss Truebody and soared up into nothingness. Presently, Troy, too, was fast asleep.

When she awoke, it was to see a strange lady perched, like some fantastic fowl, on the balustrade near Ricky’s seat. Her legs, clad in scarlet pedal-pushers, were drawn up to her chin which was sunk between her knees. Her hands, jewelled and claw-like, with vermillion talons, clasped her shins, and her toes protruded from her sandals like branched corals. A scarf was wound around her skull and her eyes were hidden by sun-glasses in an enormous frame below which a formidable nose jutted over a mouth whose natural shape could only be conjectured. When she saw Troy was awake and on her feet she unfolded herself, dropped to the floor, and advanced with a hand extended. She was six feet tall and about forty-five to fifty years old.

“How do you do?” she whispered. “I’m Grizel Locke. I like to be called Sati, though. The Queen of Heaven, you will remember. Please call me Sati. Had a good nap, I hope? I’ve been looking at your son and wondering if I’d like to have one for myself.”

“How do you do?” Troy said without whispering and greatly taken aback. “Do you think you would?”

“Won’t he awake? I’ve got such a voice as you can hear when I speak up.” Her voice was indeed deep and uncertain like an adolescent boy’s. “It’s hard to say,” she went on. “One might go all possessive and peculiar and, on the other hand, one might get bored and off-load him on repressed governesses. I was offloaded as a child which, I am told, accounts for almost everything. Do lie down again. You must feel like a boiled owl. So do I. Would you like a drink?”

“No, thank you,” Troy said, running her fingers through her short hair.

“Nor would I. What a poor way to begin your holiday. Do you know anyone here?”

“Not really. I’ve got a distant relation somewhere in the offing but we’ve never met.”

“Perhaps we know them. What name?”

“Garbel. Something to do with a rather rarefied kind of chemistry. I don’t suppose you—”

“I’m afraid not,” she said quickly. “Has Baradi started on your friend?”

“She’s not a friend or even an acquaintance. She’s a fellow-traveller.”

“How sickening for you,” said the lady earnestly.

“I mean, literally,” Troy explained. She was indeed feeling like a boiled owl and longed for nothing as much as a bath and solitude.

“Lie down,” the lady urged. “Put your boots up. Go to sleep again if you like. I was just going to push ahead with my tanning, only your son distracted my attention.”

Troy sat down and as her companion was so insistent she did put her feet up.

“That’s right,” the lady observed. “I’ll blow up my li-low. The servants, alas, have lost the puffer.”

She dragged forward a flat rubber mattress. Sitting on the floor she applied her painted mouth to the valve and began to blow. “Uphill work,” she gasped a little later, “still, it’s an exercise in itself and I daresay will count as such.”