Prelude to a Certain Midnight Read online

  Now, if she went and told Asta, the whole world would be turned upside down before lunch-time. Apart from everything else, who knew what Scotland Yard had up its sleeve?

  She was surprised to see that she had reached the Embankment. The grubby grey river slid away to the sea. She saw, through the heavy wet air that hung like damp gauze, the spidery outlines of a gas works and of two enormous cranes on the other side. Several sea-gulls, driven inland by the bad weather, were wheeling, screeching, over the dirty water. Thea Olivia decided, suddenly, that she wanted to go away. She wanted to visit Cousin Oxford Thundersley in Hampshire. She wanted to make friends with her grand-niece Olivia, who had been named after her because somebody had an eye on her money, and invite the girl to come with her on a long holiday, preferably to the south of France.

  Thea Olivia hurried back to Asta’s house, and found that her sister had gone out. She asked Mrs Kipling to help her with her packing; gave The Tiger Fitzpatrick a pound note and told him to bring her luggage downstairs.

  Then she picked up the cambric handkerchief, carried it at arm’s length to the fireplace and dropped it into the fire. It was still damp so it hissed like a snake; then writhed, shrivelled, caught fire, and in a second or two burnt away to a flake of ash which the draft whisked up the chimney and out into the heavy, threatening air of the sad, dripping city.

  Then she sat at one of the little tables and wrote a note. In this note she said that she did not feel very well, because the unexpectedly damp weather was bringing on an attack of bronchitis, and so she was going away. No doubt it seemed strange to leave so abruptly, but Asta would, she was sure, understand and sympathize. She was leaving because she did not want to impose herself on Asta as a sick woman – Asta had so many demands on her already. With a couple of blessings and many expressions of affection Thea Olivia signed her name with a couple of x’s for kisses, put the note in an envelope and, in a taxi loaded with luggage, went off to Waterloo Station.

  Asta came home at about four o’clock, read her sister’s note, and fell into what was, for her, a state of abstraction – she kicked a little table across the room, poked the fire until a great lump of blazing coal fell out, which she picked up with a pair of tongs that were too short, so that she burnt her fingers and threw the tongs across the room. She felt uneasy. She was convinced that Thea Olivia had been offended by the unconventional nature of the cocktail party of the previous evening. “If you don’t like it, lump it! If it doesn’t suit you, you can go to the dickens!” she shouted in the empty room, and sat down to write an acrimonious letter which began:

  My dearest Tot,

  I quite understand that I am not good enough for you and that my way of living is offensive to your very refined tastes, so-called. But –

  “Oh, to hell with it,” she said, tore the sheet of paper into little pieces, squeezed the pieces into a ball and threw it into the fire.

  After that, irritated and depressed, she went to the Bar Bacchus to have a drink and a chat, and there she met Osbert’s girl friend, Catchy, who was slouching at the bar looking tired and defiant – which meant that she was ashamed of herself.

  At the end of the bar, by the wall, the stool next to the one on which Catchy was sitting was vacant. Asta Thundersley, squeezing past, laid a hand between the shoulders of Catchy, who started away with a cry of pain and a sickly smile and said: “Oh-oh! No touchy!”

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” asked Asta.

  Obviously it hurt Catchy to move her shoulders, so she shrugged one side of her face – hitched up her right cheek and let it drop – and said: “Oh, he-men, he-men…”

  Gonger the barman had mixed Asta’s usual Tom Collins. She swallowed a mouthful of it and then what Catchy had said seemed to tick in her head like a time-bomb. She remembered all that Detective-Inspector Turpin had said to her one morning: “Somebody who gets a thrill out of suffering: it might be a woman, it might be a man. Up comes the willing victim, which is all that this shy torturer, as you might call him, this murderer who is afraid to commit his murder – this willing victim is all that he needs to mahe him feel powerful.”

  And then Asta knew that the submissive Catchy, who said that she only wanted to make men happy, made happy only those men that needed victims, willing victims. She gave strength and confidence and comfort only to Evil. She was a back to be beaten, a backside to be lashed, a pair of wrists and a pair of ankles to be tied up – she was a training depot for murderers.

  Asta Thundersley’s big red face grew larger and redder. She got off her stool, drew herself up, and shouted: “Damn you! Take that!” – and, bringing up her right hand, slapped Catchy’s face, adding: “You destroy the world! You arc filth! You are the devil! I hate you!”

  Then Asta walked out of the Bar Bacchus.

  It was regarded as really extraordinary that, for the first time in living memory, Asta Thundersley had left a drink unfinished.

  Catchy went into hysterics.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Forty-Four

  And so it comes to pass that Asta Thundersley is the one human being in the whole world of whom Catchy speaks with acrimony, even after all these years – all these dreary and terrible years, during which so many good men have died, so many strong men have got tired, so many soft hearts have hardened, and so many beloved ones have been blown to dust.

  Catchy could easily have forgotten that slap in the face, in spite of the fact that a slap in the face from Asta was something not easily forgotten. But, somehow, the words that had gone before the blow stuck in her mind. They touched a spring in her head, and somewhere a little door opened. Between Catchy and her pleasures, thereafter, there intruded nasty little visions of dead children.

  All the same, she has not fundamentally changed. Not fundamentally. Now, if and when she is required to assist in the reinforcement of someone’s dirty self-esteem, she collaborates willingly. But she cries afterwards.

  There is, she feels, a great deal to cry for. She feels, especially in the dim hours before half-past eleven in the morning, that nobody loves her, everybody hates her, and life is not what it used to be in the good old gay days when the Bar Bacchus was full of life and everyone was sweet and kind to her.

  From time to time she says, with a look of wild incredulity, that she simply cannot believe that so many people can have changed so much in such a little time. It is true that tilings have happened. The Sonia Sabbatani affair became a bore. Franco jostled it away into the lower right-hand corners of the newspapers when he began to poke his Moorish spear-head into the guts of Spain. Hitler, to whose name we still prefixed a polite Hen, was getting ready to take Czechoslovakia. Things were happening in the world, and things – very terrible things – have happened, compared with which the murder of the Sabbatani girl is nothing but a flea bite.

  Yet, as Mr Pink never tires of reiterating: “It is all the same sort of thing. Maidanek, Belsen, Auschwitz, Sonia Sabbatani – the difference is only a matter of scale and legality.”

  He is still around. God knows what has happened to most of the rest. Gonger has retired. Mrs Sabbatani, living in misery with her sister-in-law Sarah, is drifting to bankruptcy. Sam is dead, and is prayed for every year on the anniversary of his death. The Tiger Fitzpatrick and Mrs Kipling are going downhill as fast as they can possibly go; Turpin has become chief inspector; Schiff has made money by marketing a mixture of cheap gin and horse-radish which is called Ish; Shocket the Bloodsucker fell dead of a stroke, and nobody mourns him;

  Titch Whitbread, having lost the sight of one eye, makes a good living whistling for taxis outside a West End restaurant; Hemmeridge, to everyone’s astonishment, died like a proper man in the Western Desert; Goggs the butcher went to jail for black market operations and then seemed to evaporate. All the others have simply gone away, and no one even thinks of them. Thea Olivia continues to visit members of her family. Generally, she is received with hypocritical shrieks of false delight: she has
fifty thousand pounds to leave when she dies. Her patchwork quilt is six feet long and five feet wide, and still unfinished; she wants to add and add and add to it – she will see to it that the work lasts as long as her eyesight. She is an exquisite needlewoman and her quilt keeps her happy. God knows what she thinks of as the fine, gold-eyed needle goes in and out. She has washed Tobit Osbert out of her mind.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Forty-Five

  He has got into Public Relations and is doing tolerably well.

  There is no doubt about it – the man has charm. He still takes his nieces to the circus, and the joke still holds good – that he does not take the children, but they take him. Now, as ever, he gasps at the whip-crack and laughs until he cries at the clowns, the Joeys and the Alphonses as they tumble in.

  It was always the same with Uncle Toby. He always sucked in an anxious breath while the lion-tamers cowed the tawny, snarling big cats. When the wire-walker who pretended to be drunk climbed up the pylon to the high wire and, reeling and stumbling, seemed about to fall, he half-rose with sweat on his face. The little girls laughed at their silly uncle. Did he not realize that it was all an act? Didn’t he know that in a circus such things were done every day, year in and year out? Silly uncle, nice uncle! Simple-minded uncle!

  The children could not be expected to know that he went to the circus, as he went to musical reviews, half hoping that something unexpected might happen.

  The Equestrienne might fall off the great white horse. The leopard that watched, crouching, lashing its tail, might spring and rend. There was one chance in a million that the intoxicated-looking man on the high wire might just for that once really be drunk, and fall; and oh, the soft wicked thud of the body in the sawdust!

  There was the Woman who hung by the chin on the edge of a sabre; and there were the Fying Foxes, three men and a girl. One of them always pretended, on the high trapeze, to miss his cue. There was a moment of frightful tension. Say, just say, that he had been up a little too late the night before and for one split second lost confidence? The Murderer knew how easily, in a split second, a man can lose confidence. Or say that the girl, who fascinated and terrified the whole world with her triple somersaults, under-estimated or over-estimated her take-off by the merest mote of time, so that the big man missed? He could see the madly clutching fingers grasping nothing; hear the screams of the spectators… The big man swung himself back to his platform, but before he reached it the girl was bouncing on the sawdust, while everyone stood up, stretched taut with horror.

  Meanwhile, to the left and the right of him, his nieces squealed with delight.

  Then there were the side-shows. There were midgets, bearded ladies, living skeletons, ‘The Ugliest Woman in the World’, and the ‘Limbless Wonder’. This last-named freak had a beautiful head, and an indeterminate torso without arms or legs. She painted in water-colour, holding the brush between her teeth. He could watch her for hours.

  Also he liked the Midgets that lived in dolls’ houses – men and women of mature age; the biggest was no taller than a four-year-old child. How nice to be with such people, the strongest of whom he could pick up with one hand!

  After these exhibitions, there were always things to do. One spieler invited him to ‘smash up the happy home’. At the end of a brightly-lit blind-alley stood a representation of a peaceful kitchen – a table set with plates, cups, and dishes; and a dresser full of plates and cups and saucers. You bought the right to smash everything – seven balls cost a shilling. You took careful aim and threw. A teacup flew to fragments; a dinner plate dropped to shards. Crash! – and a soup plate tinkled down. Respectable husbands of wives and fathers of families slapped down their shillings and hurled their wooden balls at ‘The Happy Home’.

  And the Shooting Galleries, too, had clay figures of men and animals which, when hit with a little lead bullet, burst asunder like Judas Iscariot. Or there was a tired-looking little old man in a high silk hat. You could see him in his entirety, but he was protected up to the crown of his head by a wire fence. Only the hat was vulnerable and you knocked that off – with wooden balls again. The nieces shrieked with glee and congratulated their uncle on his skill.

  There was a softer side to this idealist; he loved to amuse the children.

  Above everything – the crack of little rifles, the spank of wooden balls against skittles, the smash of broken crockery, and the twang of the wire fence that guarded the man in the silk hat – there was the gay scream of the calliope and the shrieks of the young ladies coming out of the ‘Haunted House’. Here, passing down dark passages made comically horrible by dancing skeletons and uncertain floors, you arrived at a chute. It let you down with a rush. Scores of young men jostled one another at the bottom of the chute. As the girls slid down, kicking and shrieking, the watchful spectators could rely upon a glimpse of underwear, and sometimes that which it was supposed to conceal.

  Having taken his nieces home, he generally went back to the fun fair alone.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Forty-Six

  Asta, as I write, is being talked into militancy on the side of August Lang Fowler, who claims to have recorded the thin, high, agonized cry of cut flowers.

  Only Catchy goes regularly to the Bar Bacchus nowadays – and about her there clings, always, an atmosphere of guilt, of maudlin grief, stale liquor, and decay that makes you long for a good high wind to blow her and her kind from the face of the earth, the fly-blown face of the exhausted earth.

  EOF

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