The Blitz is the restaurant setting for a crucial test of Tommy and Tuppence’s disguise: posing as a blind man and his keeper, they turn a public lunch into a demonstration of how convincingly Tommy can pass as Mr. Theodore Blunt. The Gold Room gives their experiment a practical audience, and the attention it attracts carries them from comic improvisation toward a consequential encounter with the Duke himself.

Setting and the Experiment

Tommy proposes going to The Blitz at lunchtime because he expects the restaurant to offer useful opportunities to practise. He frames the outing as a blind man accompanied by his keeper, promising that by the end of lunch he will startle Tuppence. Though she warns that they may get into trouble, he insists he will behave like a gentleman. Their destination is therefore both an ordinary place to eat and a deliberately chosen testing ground for the assumed identity.

A quarter of an hour later, the pair are seated at a corner table in the Gold Room. The restaurant is presented through practical particulars rather than general description: Tommy explores the menu with his fingers, orders lobster pilaff and grilled chicken, and waits for the waiter to leave before attempting a more ambitious piece of supposed blind perception. The lunch setting supplies a stream of people and movement for his performance to exploit.

Performance and Its Limits

Tommy announces that a young woman entering in a short skirt has beautiful legs. When Tuppence asks how he could know, he offers an explanation that briefly turns the cane into a quasi-magical instrument: he claims that beautiful legs create a vibration in the floor, received by his hollow cane. He then admits the actual basis of the guess. In a large restaurant, he says, a girl looking for friends is often standing in the doorway, and short skirts make the observation easier. His success is thus a mixture of theatrical confidence and commonplace probability, not supernatural insight.

The scene makes the cane central to the act while exposing how little the performance depends on it. Tommy’s explanation first invites belief in a finely tuned device, then replaces that account with a plausible guess about restaurant habits. Elsewhere in the same performance, Tuppence’s wedding ring has betrayed the couple’s invented method of reading people: she shrieks that the supposed “keyboard of silence” was really based on her ring, which she had put on Albert’s finger. The restaurant visit follows these imperfect experiments. Its promise lies not in a flawless system but in Tommy’s willingness to keep improvising after mistakes.

Recognition in the Gold Room

The Gold Room’s diners are not merely background. Two men seated nearby have been watching the young pair with keen interest. They rise and approach the corner table, where the elder—a tall, well-dressed man with an eyeglass and a small grey moustache—says Tommy has been pointed out to him as Mr. Theodore Blunt and asks whether that identification is correct. The question changes the stakes of the lunch: the disguise has attracted notice from people who may treat the assumed identity as real.

Tommy hesitates, feeling at a disadvantage, then bows his head and confirms that he is Mr. Blunt. This response is a decisive step beyond practising in front of Tuppence. At The Blitz, the performance meets an audience capable of acting on what it believes, and Tommy accepts the identity rather than retreating from it.

The Exit and the Restaurant’s Role

The cane remains necessary as the pair leave. Tuppence gives directions: one step to the right, eighteen straight ahead, and a waiter serving a table on the left about the fifth step. Tommy sets off swinging the cane jauntily, while Tuppence stays close and tries to steer him unobtrusively. Their careful coordination succeeds until a hurried entrant collides with Tommy near the doorway, forcing explanations and apologies. The moment exposes the bodily risk behind the performance: a convincing act of blindness makes ordinary movement through a crowded threshold precarious.

Outside, a smart landaulette is waiting at the door. The Duke himself helps Mr. Blunt into it and asks over his shoulder whether Harker’s car is there, learning that it is just round the corner. The restaurant has consequently served as more than a backdrop for lunch or a proving ground for Tommy’s act. It is where the borrowed identity is recognized, confirmed, and carried into the next stage of the encounter, as the corner table gives way to the doorway and then to the waiting car.