Prelude to a Certain Midnight Page 10

“A Spaniard?”

  “A Zionist. He doesn’t believe in the Arab Problem.”

  “A Jew?”

  “I don’t know: he eats ham. And there’s Ayesha Babbington – the sculptress – and her boy friend, Bubbsie Dark. They have all the vices. There’s Johnnie Corduroy, in films: and Hemmeridge – ”

  “What does he do, for goodness’ sake?”

  “He… he isn’t absolutely normal, Tot, my dear. In point of actual fact, he’s a… Never mind. Then there will be Soskin – a dentist, a refugee, you never met him – and Goggs, a pork-butcher.”

  “Goggs, a pork-butcher. Yes?”

  “What are you looking at me like that for?”

  “I think you’ve gone out of your mind, Asta. Who else?”

  “Tony Mungo,” said Asta, with a defiant growl, “a bookseller, etcetera.”

  “What kind of etcetera?”

  “He sells other things you wouldn’t understand. Never mind. And there’s Mr Roget, James Geezle, and Alan Shakespeare.”

  “They do what?”

  “Geezle is a tattooist. Roget takes care of his mother, and Alan Shakespeare has money of his own. If I think of anybody else I’ll let you know. You don’t have to come down unless you want to, Tot, my love.”

  “But, Asta, my dear heart, I do want to.”

  “Behave yourself, then.”

  “If you think I don’t know how to conduct myself in order not to disgrace you in the presence of your friends – ”

  Asta Thundersley suddenly felt tired and discouraged. Between a yawn and a sigh she said: “I’d be grateful for any help you could give me, Tot, my sweet. I know I seem crazy. I don’t care about that. The only thing is that I feel helpless.”

  Asta’s angry, glaring eyes flickered and became wet.

  “There, my dear – there, there, there,” said Thea Olivia, stroking the back of her sister’s head. “You mustn’t wear yourself out.”

  “Yes, I must,” said Asta, shaking herself like a wet spaniel and gritting her teeth. But then she started to weep, somewhat in the manner of a boy whose feelings have been hurt – sniffing, swallowing, holding back, bursting out, and pausing to blow her nose while Thea Olivia tried to comfort her.

  “Oh, go to the devil!” said Asta at last, throwing a salty wet handkerchief into the fireplace and striding out of the room. “I will, if you want me to.”

  “No, darling – please – good night.”

  “God bless you, my sweet.”

  “God bless, Tot.”

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Twenty-Four

  Asta went to her room in one of her highly infrequent moods of black depression and rare doubt, feeling – for the third time in her life – feeble and lost, defenceless and lonely.

  The first time she had felt like this had been at the turn of the century: as an ugly, noisy, boisterous, irrepressible girl in her ninth year she had fallen in love with a handsome cavalry officer twenty years older – a straight-backed, dignified man with a great moustache. This love was more than she could contain. She had to tell someone about it and chose for her confidante her young and pretty Aunt Clara, who listened to her with all the gravity in the world, uttering occasional sympathetic interjections as one woman to another – and when the whole story had come out threw her head back in an uncontrollable gust of laughter. This cruel yet melodious mockery came back into Asta’s memory as she stood in the elegant old bedroom and watched the firelight winking on the polished walnut posts of the bed upon which she had been born. She told herself that it was stupid to remember such foolish things. Yet how could she help remembering? It was soon after this humiliation that she had decided to be a missionary – strong yet gentle, fearless yet kind, bold as a dashing cavalry officer, yet full of understanding – plunging through stinking, steamy jungles, laughing at nothing but danger, bringing the Peace of God into the hearts of fierce, cruel black people. But all this was so long ago, so terribly long ago! She had wanted desperately to give herself to all the defenceless and lonely people of this sad and bewildering world in which so many cry in vain for comfort, and where tender hearts like peaches carelessly thrown into a basket get bruised and go bad. She wanted to interpose herself between the cruelty and the vulnerability of mankind. But she realized, even at that tender age, that Good must be militant; that it is not for nothing that Evil is symbolized by the subtle snake, that twists and turns and fascinates, and must be struck quick and hard, and can never really be charmed into harmlessness. She was by nature an extravert; she became thunderous, unmanageable, had to throw her weight about, make her presence felt.

  The second occasion of Asta Thundersley’s descent into the shadows occurred – what nonsense one thinks of, alone at night! – twenty years later. She had owned a white terrier bitch which, in some inexplicable way, had grown to resemble her. The bitch, Jinny, had the same sort of tenacious goodwill under the same kind of forbidding exterior, and a half-fierce, half-humorous expression that had caused her to be called ‘Asta Thundersley’s Twin Sister’. Between Asta and this animal there was an affection, a tacit understanding. One day Jinny was run over by a taxi. Her hindquarters were smashed. The vet told Asta that there was nothing to be done: Jinny had to die, and it would be better if she died immediately. Asta loved Jinny better than any other individual in the world.

  That was an atrocious hour.

  “What will you do?” asked Asta, shedding tears for the first time in twenty years – not counting the times she had wept alone.

  “My method is to give them a strong sleeping tablet in a spoonful of milk and when they’re asleep, put them into the lethal chamber. She won’t feel a thing. She won’t know. You can stay with her and stroke her if you like, until she’s quiet. Upon my word of honour, it’s the only kind thing to do.”

  Asta looked into the vet’s eyes for several seconds, and then, standing like a condemned man when the safety catches of the firing-squad click open, said: “Do it.”

  And Jinny was only a dog.

  Now this was Asta’s third descent into hell.

  She could not drive from her mind the appallingly vivid recollection of the grief, the hopeless grief, of the Sabbatanis. She could see them, as the firelight flickered, rocking to and fro as on a see-saw of which the point of balance was the limit of endurance – in and out, in and out, in and out of the frontier of utter despair.

  She remembered the coal dust on her shoes, the squalor, the melancholy and the rottenness of that vile empty house; that abandoned evil place with its deep wet cellar. She could see it all. She could see the red-brick school in the yellow fog.

  The child comes out. Somewhere, not far from the gate under the sign that says GIRLS, someone is waiting. Who? As yet nobody knows. There is the fog, and a Figure with blurred outlines. No doubt his coat-collar is turned up. He is quiet, persuasive, soft-spoken. The odds are that the child knows him. He says: Do let me see you safely home in all this nasty fog: your Father sent me to see you safely home… And then leads her, chatting very pleasantly, perhaps telling her an amusing story, down the dark, dirty street to that condemned house; and there he tells her that he has got something there for her. A live teddy bear, it may be, or – most likely – nothing at all, just a mystery. I bet you a penny I can show you something you’ve never seen before.

  He makes a mystery, a secret; and they go down, down that dreadful passage, down those rotten stairs, past that dark wash-house, into that grave – that stinking grave – that vault, that coal-cellar –

  —And then, when the little girl says: “Well?”

  (Asta Thundersley could not bear to think of what happened then.)

  Again she trembled with desire to do something about it, and cursed herself for her incapacity to do anything at all. Almost deliriously she wished that Evil were in fact a great serpent and that she was a horned antelope: she would cast herself into the jaws of the serpent and perish – and in swallowing her the serpent would swallow that wh
ich must destroy him. Suffocating in his coiled maw, hers would be the last laugh, because with her last breath she could gasp: My horns will pierce you – I have let in the daylight – writhe and die!

  Having draped her ungainly body in a linen nightdress and put herself to bed, Asta forced herself to be calm.

  Out of the emotional chaos of the past twenty minutes there came an idea – one of the ideas for which she could give no reason and for which, nevertheless, she was prepared to fight to the death.

  It was somebody who knew the Sabbatanis that raped and murdered the little girl.

  After that, sleep was impossible. She was thinking, in her disorganized way, of the people she proposed to invite to her party.

  Could it have been Dr Schiff? No, because whatever Schiff might have in mind, above everything he had in mind the safety of his person. Schiff (thought Asta) could even run away to save himself. As she saw things with her peculiarly-focused eyes, this was unthinkable. It was permissible to beg, borrow or steal for another; but not for oneself. One might sacrifice one’s self-respect by running away for the sake of some other living creature. But no proper person ever ran away to save his own skin. She discounted Schiff. Yet anything was possible.

  But what of Sir Storrington Thirst? He was a man of good family. Yet there must be, surely, something extraordinary in Sir Storrington. How could a man who called himself a man – not that she liked men – be so shameless? If he wanted a drink he would steal the price of it out of a blind beggar’s tin cup, or sponge on a woman. He would dash his title into your face, slap his pockets, put on an expression of astonishment that would not deceive a little girl of nine years old… and forget his wallet three days running. For the sake of a free drink Sir Storrington would invent slanders against his own mother. He kept his address secret – came and went, here to-day and gone to-morrow. Yet, as she knew – he had made a funny story about it – he had been one of Sam Sabbatani’s customers. He had borrowed a dinner-suit from a younger brother, sewn into it a label off one of his old suits, and sold it (with Sir Storrington Thirst, Savile Row clearly marked upon it) for two or three pounds more than it was worth. He had a habit of laying his hands upon you.

  Surely, such a man might be capable of anything?

  It was so hard to decide. What of Tobit Osbert? Asta knew nothing to his detriment, yet the man was, so to speak, a little too mealy-mouthed to be a proper man. You could see, simply by looking at him, that Osbert was keeping secrets. But then again, what if he were? Thea Olivia was keeping secrets – secrets with which she had been entrusted – so that you never knew which way to take her. What to make of Osbert, and how to define what lay at the back of his soul?

  As for the girl, Cigarette, she couldn’t possibly have done anything in this connexion. But she associated with the sort of set that might easily give birth to the murderer of Sonia Sabbatani. Certainly not that poor burglar, Chicken Eyes Emerald – he was nothing but an honest burglar – a reclaimable man, Asta decided. Shocket the Bloodsucker? No. It was impossible to doubt that he was bloodsucker by name and bloodsucker by nature, because of the formidable percentages he extracted from the unhappy boxers for whom he arranged matches. He was a bloodsucker, but not a sucker of blood.

  Titch Whitbread? No. Whitbread was, as the posters persistently insisted, a killer. But he was a killer only in the way of sport. She had talked to Titch Whitbread and remembered the conversation:

  “I saw you fight and congratulate you. It was a good clean fight and you deserved to win. But that poor boy – what’s his name? Kid Carpet – how is he?”

  “I saw him while, we was dressing, lady, and he didn’t look too bad. I mean to say he didn’t look much cut about.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Did he have anything to say?”

  “Well, he sort of said, kind of, that he was saved by the bell in the seventh round – if you get what I mean, kind of style.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Well, I said to him, I said: ‘I dare say you’re right, kid.’ He said: ‘But if you hadn’t slipped sort of on to my right, kind of style, I don’t know how it might have finished up.’ And I said: ‘It was a nice fight.’ And then he said: ‘Thanks very much. I never had a nicer set-to in all my life.’ And so we shook hands once again and that was that.”

  “There was no ill feeling?”

  “Ill feeling? Why should there be ill feeling?”

  Yet who knew? Boxers are beaten about the head. The Tiger Fitzpatrick, for example, was not what you might describe as sane. People like Ovid Moffitt, George Cheese, Beeps Wilking or Bubbsie Dark might do anything; let alone the man that was not quite a man – the one called Hemmeridge. God only knew.

  Consider Soskin, the dentist. What kind of a man became a dentist? Dentists worked backwards, in reverse. Dentists approached things in a mirror – like actors. Of all the men that held absolute power for their brief moment, dentists were supreme. Asta remembered one afternoon when, while Soskin was drilling a hole in one of her teeth, she rolled up her eyes and saw him looking down at her with what seemed to be an abominable smile. It was true, she realized, that she had been looking at his face upside down. Still, how was one to know? How was it possible for a man deliberately to choose to be a dentist?

  And Tony Mungo? There again was a man who, if one watched him carefully, might be suspected of any secret excess. He liked to play tricks with people. She detested Tony Mungo. He knew a great deal about natural history, and on Saturday afternoons loitered about the Museum in South Kensington. Sooner or later, someone would try to tell him something: then Mungo would seem ignorant, wait until the other man had finished and then let loose such a flood of factual information as swept the informant away in shameful disorder.

  Geezle, again, was a tattooist. What kind of a man was this that could live by pricking out patterns upon the bodies of his fellow men? Concerning Roget, who took care of his mother – he was waiting for her to die, and dared not to get himself a wife for fear of offending her. In such a man, surely, a thousand things were bottled up – bad things, dirty things.

  Again, there was Alan Shakespeare, with money of his own; completely idle, useless; a bored man. Could there be anything like boredom for breeding viciousness?

  Take the case of Goggs, the pork-butcher, the charcutier, or sausage-maker. There, potentially, was something evil. Why should he choose the business of killing pigs and grinding them up into mincemeat and stuffing their muscles into their own entrails? Why should he do it? And why should this squat, thickset man with hacked hands put on a gentleman’s clothes before and after work, and hang about the Bar Bacchus?

  Also, there was something sinister about Irish John Smith, the one that called himself Sean Mac Gabhann. What was he after? Why was he hiding himself? Why the pseudonym? Surely he was a man who pretended – and all the world knew that he was a liar – to have killed his man in the Troubles. Such a man was playing a deep and violent game. If he wanted to seem violent, he wanted to be violent. If he wanted to be violent, why wasn’t he? Because he didn’t dare to be. Such a man surely might pick on a child in a jog?

  Any man might pick on a child In a fog…

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Twenty-Five

  Here they were – the secretive Baronet Thirst; the literary slasher Osbert; Shocket the General of face punchers; Titch Whitbread the defeater and at the same time the defeated. There was the persecuted-by-vocation, Monty Bar-Kochba; the hater and the hated.

  The man Soskin chose to pull out teeth for a living. Goggs pretended to be proud of being a professional butcher, yet tried to look like something else when he wasn’t slitting pigs’ throats. Mungo? When all is said and done, a man who finds pleasure in other people’s discomfiture is a cruel man, a man animated by a mean little lust for power at the expense of another.

  There was Geezle getting his living out of degenerates – for apart from old soldiers and sailors, no one but a degenerate goes and get
s his skin pricked out with dragons and snakes and butterflies.

  Roget? Anyone who is waiting eagerly for another person to die is murdering that person in his heart – he has the makings of a killer somewhere inside his timid watchful self.

  Mr Shakespeare? He would do anything for a new sensation, perhaps even murder. When a man dulls his sensibilities with excess, the time always comes when he feels the need, for blood, for violence.

  For the love of God, how was one to know?

  Detective-Inspector Turpin was above suspicion, of course.

  Yet why of course? Strategically, who could be better placed for murder than a policeman? The police constable on the beat could have done it. Who would a little girl trust more completely than a policeman?

  The fire was dying, and it seemed to Asta that the bedroom was dark and cold as interplanetary space. The headlights of a passing car shot a streak of white light in at the window. She was alone, alone and helpless, a fat, foolish, obstinate, ageing woman; and everybody laughed at her as soon as her back was turned. They called her the Battleaxe, she remembered. Until this moment she had been rather proud of the nickname. It suggested the Crusader – Godfrey, Richard, Raymond; Bohemund roaring at the head of that last mad charge. That suicidal hopeless charge nevertheless smashed the gathered might of the Infidel.

  Such thoughts as this had stirred her blood. But tonight it seemed that the darkness was full of sly little voices shyly sniggering. “God, be kind to a foolish, fat woman who doesn’t know what to do. Tell me what to do, please, Lord God!” she said aloud.

  No answer came out of the dark. There was only the tired tinkle of the dead embers under the dying fire.

  She willed herself to relax, ordered herself to pull herself together, and commanded herself to count slowly up to a hundred and go to sleep.

  1…2…3…4…5…6…7…

  —It could be Milton Catt!

  No, none of mat!… 11… 12… 13… 14… 15… 16… 17… 18… 19…