Prelude to a Certain Midnight Read online

  So thinks Mrs Sabbatani in her loneliness and her unhappiness. Her heart goes out to Catchy, who also has a sorrow. When Sarah is out of the house, and Catchy is at home, Mrs Sabbatani asks her to come down and have a cup of tea. The cup of tea carries a supplement of fried fish, stuffed fish, or something of the sort; bread-and-butter, cheese-cake, apple strudel – anything there happens to be in the house.

  Mrs Sabbatani’s heart goes out to this wretched Catchy, who drinks too much and does not eat enough. It is a bad thing, for a woman to drink. Still, there must be a reason. Catchy has troubles. Therefore it is a mitzvah – a charitable act – to be kind to her. What Catchy’s troubles are is neither here nor there. One fact remains for ever: when Sam died, Catchy wept; and she thought the world of Sonia. When Mrs Sabbatani and her family were sitting on sawn-off chairs in deep Hebrew mourning, Catchy and her friend Osbert came to offer condolences.

  Catchy was inconsolable, because other people were wretched. Catchy felt only for others, through others.

  Now, therefore, Mrs Sabbatani feeds her secretly, when Sarah is not looking. Your own flesh and blood mourns your bereavement: that is normal. But when strangers weep, it is beautiful. Every tear shed by an outsider is a confirmation of the magnitude of your loss. Whenever Catchy thinks of Sonia and Sam, she cries bitterly.

  Yet what is it to Catchy?

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Eight

  Mrs Sabbatani knows, or should know, that Catchy is ready to weep at any hour of the day or night on the slightest provocation. How many times has she seen her coming home with her mouth twisted into a quivering oblong; bubbling at the nose and dripping at the eyes, sobbing heart-brokenly because she has seen an organ-grinder with one leg, or a dog with a bandaged paw? Yet this good widow cannot bring herself to believe that Catchy hasn’t a special personal feeling for her and her troubles. In any case, Catchy weeps: that in itself is enough. God knows through what steamy, stinking jungles and scummy backwaters a psychiatrist would have to paddle before he found the source of her tears! Mrs Sabbatani is of the opinion that her unprofitable tenant is a victim of misplaced devotion. She is well aware of the meaning of love, yet she cannot pronounce the word except with a certain ironic emphasis and a half-smile; for in her world no one ever talks of Love. You and your husband get over the nonsense of sighing and pouting and billing and cooing early in your married life, and settle down. Love is more than an ‘affair’: it is the bedrock and the prop of life at home. As such it is taken for granted but never discussed. The word Love pertains to romantic stories, dramas, or picture shows. She has read stories and seen films about great tragic loves, and she thinks that she knows what they mean; although they have little enough to do with her. She agreed with Sam when, after having seen Greta Garbo in Wild Orchids, he grunted: “Love! Schmove! They should have a few children to bring up; they should have the cooking to do and a house to keep clean, and look after the shop. Love!”

  (Yet Sabbatani died of grief.) Still, Mrs Sabbatani cannot get it out of her head that Catchy is devoured by a romantic yearning for someone – she suspects Osbert. She always liked that kind, quiet, considerate gentleman. But years have passed since she saw him last. He has grown prosperous, and has a wife and a smart flat in Kensington, now. No one sees him any more.

  Once in a while she asks Catchy for something on account of arrears of rent. On such occasions – she always waits until Sarah has gone to the pictures – she approaches the subject in a roundabout way:

  “A nice cup of tea? And look, I made a nice cheese-cake. Look, it’s still warm; I made it this afternoon. Just a little bit. I made it with pure butter. Come on, you don’t look after yourself enough.”

  Then Catchy crumples and twists herself and drips grey tears like a wrung dish-cloth and wails: “Oh, you’re so sweet, so sweet, so sweet! You’re always looking after me. And I don’t deserve it, Mrs Sabbatani! Oh, darling, darling, I owe you so much, so much!”

  “Well, if you could let me have a little on account…”

  “Oh, Mrs Sabbatani, Mrs Sabbatani! Why don’t you throw me out? Dear, darling Mrs Sabbatani, why don’t you throw me out into the street? It would be good for me. It would make me pull myself together. It would serve me right. I’m bad, bad – I’m no good! Don’t you see, I’m no good?”

  “Sha! Sha!” says Mrs Sabbatani. “You’re a nice girl. Sha, sha, then.”

  Still weeping, Catchy begins to laugh. “A nice girl! You don’t know what Asta Thundersley said about me.”

  “Go and have a nice lay down and I’ll bring you up a cup of tea,” says Mrs Sabbatani, who is afraid that Sarah may come back at any moment and catch her fraternizing with this wet-faced, wild, disreputable woman who smells of gin and stale cigarette smoke. She follows Catchy upstairs with a cup of tea and something to eat on a plate. When she sees the bedroom, her heart contracts with pity and her nostrils with disgust. “A minute,” she says going out; and comes running back with cleaning materials. She brushes up ashes, shakes sheets and blankets into position – although she can hardly bring herself to touch them – wipes up dust, scrubs the dry grey incrustations off the bath-tub, and does all that a human being can do in two minutes to mitigate the offence of the water closet.

  Meanwhile Catchy whimpers: “Don’t do it! Don’t do it! I’m no good. I’m no good. Ask Asta, she’ll tell you. Asta Thundersley will tell you all about me. I’m a bitch, I’m everything – everything that’s wicked. Ask Asta. Throw me out, throw me put – please, please throw me out!”

  Mrs Sabbatani, embarrassed, looks at the filthy mantelpiece, and says: “Asta? What do I know about Asta? Why should I ask Asta? What for Asta?”

  “That lesbian,” says Catchy.

  “Lesbian? What is it in English, Mrs Dory? I’m not an educated woman,” says Mrs Sabbatani, apologetically. “String beans, broad beans, human beens, butter beans, has-beens, less-beens. I get mixed up.”

  Catchy comes up bubbling and spluttering out of a great laugh.

  “Darling, you’re priceless! Has-beens, less-beens, human beens – may I have that? May I use it?”

  But the waiting ear of Mrs. Sabbatani catches the click of the closing street door. Sarah is back from the shadowy embraces of Tyrone Power. “Drink up the nice tea, eat up the nice cake. Excuse me,” she says, and runs downstairs.

  “What is it in English?” says Catchy, laughing in the act of swallowing a mouthful of cheese-cake, and spattering particles like a charge from a sawn-off shot-gun.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Nine

  Asta Thundersley is perhaps the only living creature for whom Catchy professes hate. At the same time, she fears her with a great, paralysing fear so that she would not say what she thinks about her except to people Asta Thundersley is not likely to meet.

  Asta is a dangerous woman to cross. Most people are afraid of her. She has a knack of hammering you into abject submission. Physically she resembles a man, a man to be reckoned with. Imagine a retired middle-weight boxer, turned gentleman farmer, impersonating his aunt; dressed in a coat, and skirt. She must be fifty now, but she looked exactly the same fifteen years ago. Once in a while, when she feels that much may depend upon her personal appearance, she has her grizzled brown hair marcelled into tight waves, and crams her torso into one of those silk dresses that change colour according to the angle of the light. On such occasions she puts on a hat like a pot of geraniums, and a pair of high-heeled shoes. She is a fusspot, a busybody, with a finger in every charitable pie; a maiden lady of diabolical energy. An ill-used child sends her out like a roaring lion. For a pregnant housemaid she will tear down half the town. Secretaries of State hide when they hear that Asta Thundersley is on the warpath, for she has a tongue like a cavalry sabre and knows neither shame nor fear; she hacks and slashes her way, without regard for rules or common decency. Asta is one of those strange creatures that recognize no neutral state between right and wrong. To her, black is black
and white is white; she hates the one, loves the other, and never listens to reason. For the sake of a boy birched by a petulant Justice of the Peace she will start a crusade, dragging in everyone upon whom she can lay her great red hands. If she happens to say: “Mr So-and-So, are you my friend?” Mr So-and-So knows that she is about to ask him, in the name of friendship, to do something for a baby, a convict, an evicted tenant, an old-age pensioner, an expectant mother, or a litter of kittens; and if he hesitates, he loses her friendship. If he loses Asta’s friendship, he becomes her enemy, in which case his life will be made a burden to him, She is a woman of independent fortune, most of which she squanders on leaflets, pamphlets for the prevention of this, that, and the other, and lost causes in general. Asta has no sex. This shiny, red, social reformer is nothing but a pip, a seed of social conscience enclosed in a fleshy envelope; a sort of berry.

  Once she slapped Catchy’s face. If Asta had been a man, Catchy would not have resented the blow; on the contrary, she would have become warmly submissive, saying: “Yes, yes, dominate me – dominate me!”

  She would have derived a certain pleasure from the blow, even from a woman, if it had not been delivered in indignation and accompanied by certain words which it was impossible for her to forget.

  It was what Asta Thundersley said that really hurt: the words that preceded the blow she will never be able to forget or forgive.

  Catchy maintains that Asta, more than anyone else, has been the ruin of the Bar Bacchus.

  Asta used to live in an elegant little house in the neighbourhood, and took to dropping in between 11.30 and noon for a couple of cocktails, and in the Bar Bacchus, as elsewhere, she made her powerful presence felt. She made no secret of her likes and dislikes, and behaved like an autocrat of the old school: “Hey you, boy! Get a bit of rag and wipe this confounded bar! Somebody’s been slopping beer or something all over it. Shaky hand, I suppose, confounded drunkard! Hey you – switch the electric fan on. The place stinks of stale smoke. Why don’t you get yourselves a proper ventilating system? It’s enough to turn one’s stomach. But I suppose the crowd you get in here would die if they saw a bit of daylight or got a breath of fresh air – like clothes-moths. No wonder everything’s going to the dogs. God, what a generation!”

  She looked pointedly at a slender young man who wore a brightly-coloured scarf instead of a tie, and whose manicured hands were adorned with two or three intaglio rings.

  He, goaded by irritation into a state of mad courage, said, in a shaky voice: “If you don’t like the place, what do you keep coming here for?”

  Asta looked him up and down. Her astonished glance travelled from his suede shoes up along his loose corduroy trousers, and from button to button of his white tweed jacket, abruptly stopping at his big brown eyes. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “were you speaking to me, young man? You couldn’t have been speaking to me, surely? You wouldn’t have dared to address me in that tone of voice, I believe?”

  The young man put down his glass and went to the door.

  Before he went out, he turned and said to Gonger: “If you allow your oldest customers to be annoyed like this, I, for one, am not coming back again. Good-bye.”

  Asta began to chuckle. “Don’t you worry,” she said to Gonger, “he’ll be back.”

  “Why don’t you let people alone?” asked Gonger. “They don’t interfere with you. What do you want to interfere with them for?”

  “I don’t like pansies.”

  “I mean to say,” said Gonger, that intrepid man, “you don’t own the place, do you now?”

  “No, thank God. If I owned your stinking place, I’d have to be nice to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. But since I don’t own the place, I can say what I damn well like – and so I shall, young fellow, and if you don’t believe me, just try and stop me, that’s all. Just you try.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of trying, Miss,” said Gonger.

  “I should think not. It would take a better man than you or a dozen like you. Give me another drink. And when I ask for a Tom Collins, I don’t ask for a Tom Collins so that you can get away with a short measure of gin. I ask for a Tom Collins because I want a Tom Collins, and that means to say that it’s got to have the right amount of gin in it. Is that clear?”

  “You don’t think,” said Gonger, “that I’d be crazy enough to try and get away with giving you short measure, do you?”

  “And don’t think that I am the sort of fool who falls for that line of talk, young fellow. Before I fall for that stuff, I’ll fall for the three-card trick. Hurry up, I haven’t got all day.”

  Then Gonger would mix her a Tom Collins, brazenly giving her short measure again. And she would drink it saying: “That’s better.”

  There was something sympathetic about the Battleaxe, as she was called. Many people liked her in spite of her savage tongue and belligerent manner. Like the carcass of Samson’s lion, this muscular busybody was capable of giving out sweetness. Furthermore, she was what is known as a Character, and all the world loves a Character. It was difficult to be dull in her company. She kept you on your toes: she was almost certain to say or do something unpredictable. There was a time when, to the ill-concealed, ineffable joy of Gonger, Asta Thundersley was pursued by an enigmatic young man, whose sole topic of conversation was the fact that he had never had a Mother, not a real Mother, not a proper Mother – not a Mother who was a comrade, not a Mother who was a Mother, not a Mother who guided him; just an ordinary Mother like everybody else’s Mother – not a Mother he could look up to. The ideal Mother, he maintained, was Miss Thundersley – a Mother who drank Tom Collins, smoked all day long, and could tell a good smutty story.

  Asta listened to all this for several days, with a hideous contortion of the face which was her idea of a motherly smile. At last, on a Saturday morning when the bar was crowded, she produced from her handbag a small towel which she folded into a triangle like a baby’s diaper, and approached the young man waving this object in one hand and a safety-pin in the other, shouting:

  “You want me to be a mother to you, you silly little man? Right! Let’s start, from the beginning! I’m going to change your nappy!”

  No one doubted for a moment that if the young man had stayed, something scandalous would have happened; but he fled, and never set foot in the bar again.

  In this manner she antagonized certain people. It was quite clear that she was a little crazy; one of those strong-minded lunatics dangerously compounded of love and anger; contemptuous of the opinions of mankind.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Ten

  She liked to startle people. If she had been born poor, she would no doubt have tried to have her way with the world by walking up and down Whitehall between sandwich boards, or chalking on walls. But she was rich, and a member of an influential family. She had access to great people who could not refuse to see her: they had known her mother, her father, or one of her uncles.

  Some women might have been held back by reticence. Not Asta Thundersley, that uproarious extrovert. For herself she would ask nothing. But for a kicked pup she would drag the Home Secretary himself out of his bath. She overdid things; never knew when to stop. Once, for instance, she interested herself in the case of a woman who, having old-fashioned ideas of child management, beat and starved her stepdaughter. The child, who was six years old, ruined the experiment by dying of ill-treatment: she had always been a difficult child. The stepmother was sentenced to six months in prison. Asta was outraged at the lightness of this sentence and for five years, no matter what anyone said, she managed to introduce ‘six months for torturing a child to death’ into every conversation. If, say, you were talking about the parcel-post, she got away from parcels to the subject of string; from string to rope; from rope to murder, and so to a peroration: “Kill your wife’s lover as a gentleman should, and you’ll swing for it. Torture babies to death and you only get six months in quod!” With her, every issue became a monomania, something fierce
ly personal.

  Even in the old days, when Catchy had such a shape that she could earn her living as an artist’s model, Asta Thundersley was regarded as a species of maniac – an over-energetic woman who ought to have been born a man; in which case she might have become a Cabinet Minister, and then she would have gagged herself with party politics and the consciousness of her own importance.

  She picked up cronies and made friends in the unlikeliest corners, for she had a child-like craving for the indigestible sharp pickles and belly-aching green apples of society. There was, for example, an old ruined heavy-weight boxer, who called himself The Tiger Fitzpatrick, whom she found one evening when she was rescuing fallen women (or something of the sort) near the East India Dock Road. The Tiger Fitzpatrick, drunk but still thirsty, came out of a dark turning, grabbed her wrist and said: “Listen, you!”

  Without changing her expression, Asta Thundersley kicked him scientifically on the shin. Her legs might have belonged to a billiard table, and her kick was something to be remembered. As The Tiger let go and hopped back with a yelp of pain and incredulity, she beat him over the head with a massive umbrella, and said: “Take your hands off me, you dirty bully, you beery ape! Now what is it?”

  The Tiger Fitzpatrick, somewhat sobered, muttered: “I’m broke to the wide.”

  “Serve you right! You smell as if you deserve to be, you drunken sot. How dare you lay your hands on me? I’ve half a mind to give you the hiding of your life.”

  The Tiger cringed and said: “I couldn’t fight a lady, Lady.”

  “Oh no, not you! I know you. Don’t tell me. You couldn’t fight a lady, oh dear no! But you can try your hulking great brute strength on a lady, can’t you? You can bully a lady, can’t you?. – or you think you can, don’t you? What do you want money for? Beer? Eh?”