Prelude to a Certain Midnight Read online

  “Yes, lady,” said The Tiger Fitzpatrick, with humility.

  She looked at this shattered Hercules as he stood, hanging his head in the feeble light of a bracketed street-lamp in the rain, and observed that his head was like a head of moist clay half hammered back to utter blankness – all but the ears, which resembled old boxing-gloves. Yet there was something pathetic in the twitching and flickering of it. She thought of God’s breath breathed into the wet red earth in Eden. “Why don’t you get yourself a job?” she asked.

  He answered: “They won’t give me no job.”

  “Because you don’t deserve one, I suppose? Because they know you’ll get drunk and make a beast of yourself, like you are now – is that it?”

  “Lady,” he said with dignity, “don’t you know who I am? I’m The Tiger Fitzpatrick.” He paused, waiting for an exclamation.

  “Who’s he?”

  “I was nearly in the running for a fight with Johnny MacTurk. Lady, where have you been all your life? Didn’t anybody ever tell you anything? Didn’t you ever hear about how I went seventeen rounds with Tully Burnett? And there you are, talking like an educated lady! Four more fights and I’d of had a chance at Bob Fitzsimmons. But I was robbed of the verdict when I fought Ernie Tombs. God Almighty,” said The Tiger, with pain in his voice, “you must have heard what Tombs did to me? I’d got him going in the sixth. I could have knocked him out stone cold in the eighth and he knew it – I knew it. I said I’d let him go up to the tenth, but in the seventh – see? – I’m jabbing to the body with my left hand – and he knows, he knows, he knows what’s coming! And the next time I let him have it with the left, Tombs sees it coming and jumps clear off the canvas and takes the punch right in the groin. Honest to God, it wouldn’t have hurt a new-born baby; but Tombs rolls on the canvas, rolls and rolls and grabs himself down here and shouts – ‘foul, foul, foul’, like a dying man… and there it is. See? Some feller wrote a bit about it in the Liverpool Echo… look, I got it here.”

  He fumbled in a pocket, got out two pieces of strawboard fastened with elastic bands, separated them, and, like a librarian handling an ancient and priceless document, lifted into the light six column-inches of newsprint transparent with wear and tear.

  Asta said: “I see what you mean. You’re a boxer, I take it.”

  “All I want is a chance at this so-called Braddock,” said The Tiger Fitzpatrick, trembling with cold, drink, and advancing age under the rain.

  “Where do you live?”

  He shrugged an embarrassed shoulder.

  “Where are you sleeping to-night?”

  “Well, lady, I haven’t made up my mind yet, if you see what I mean, lady.”

  Asta gave him three half-crowns and her card, and said: “Look here, you, whatever you call yourself – take this and go and get yourself something to eat and a bed. You know where to get a bed?”

  “Yes, lady.”

  “Get a good night’s sleep, do you hear? Have a good breakfast. Get a shave. Is that clear? Wash your filthy hands. Do you understand? Then come along to this address, and I’ll give you a job. 9.30 to-morrow morning. I know you, you drunkards; the moment I turn my back, you’ll rush into the ‘White Horse’ and drink yourself silly.”

  “Oh no, I won’t, lady.”

  “I know you, you sots, better than you know yourselves. Go away!”

  She left The Tiger in the dim lamplight, looking from the three half-crowns to the card she had given him.

  Next morning at 9.15 he knocked at her door. Even Asta realized that she could not reasonably ask any of her friends to give such a man a job. Besides, he needed a strong influence. At any moment, he might run off the rails, get drunk, go crazy, try and rob people in the streets. Having thought the matter over for thirty or forty seconds, she took him into her own service.

  The Tiger Fitzpatrick became her butler.

  He fraternized with her housekeeper, Mrs Kipling, who had, in her day, danced suggestive dances and sung lewd songs in East End music-halls, but who now (as visitors said) was like something out of the Book of Revelation. She had been plump; now she was thin, but her flesh had shrunk faster than her skin, which hung in peculiar folds. Her hair had been red, but it had gone white and she had made it red again – fantastically red – carmine tinged with blue. Her health had gone with her youth: her stomach made noises. Every morning Mrs Kipling rouged herself, blowing out her lank cheeks and drawing under each cheek-bone a cyclamen-coloured disc. She lived, now, in invisible limelight. Everything that she did, said, and wore was intended to strike a target twenty feet away, and the perfume she used clung in the air for a long time. She was careless about the house, concealed dust under rugs, scratched what she was employed to polish, stole what she was expected to protect, and burnt everything she was asked to cook. From time to time she had what she called ‘attacks’ and then she would go weeping and groaning into her room – which was hung from ceiling to floor with theatrical photographs – and came out an hour later singing ‘Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay’ under her breath, which smelt strongly of whisky. Mrs Kipling got on well with The Tiger Fitzpatrick. She spoke of her triumphs, and he spoke of his. The Tiger had, at least, got his name into the papers: she knew his press-cutting by heart. There was, indeed, something compelling about the wide-eyed gesticulatory enthusiasm of The Tiger Fitzpatrick, when he spoke of boxing and devoted himself to prophesying the results of the big fights.

  It is a fact that in fifteen years he has never managed to forecast a winner. Yet he still has half-pitying, half-mocking friends in the profession who give him tickets. Shortly after he put on a black coat and a striped waistcoat in the service of Asta Thundersley, he was presented with two ringside seats for the Leppard-Coffin bout, and asked his employer if she would like to come. He was anxious, he said, to do her a good turn. No man in his right senses could possibly doubt that Coffin would win in four rounds – probably in the third. He, The Tiger, owed Asta much – would she give him a chance to repay her by putting her shirt on Coffin? She put £10 on Coffin and went with The Tiger Fitzpatrick to the Albert Hall, where she shouted down several thousand people, brandishing her big red fists in the air and stamping her feet until Coffin, having run away for two rounds, was knocked unconscious in the third and booed out of the ring. The Tiger explained, with violent blows at the ambient air, that Coffin had been robbed. Asta lost her ten pounds, but developed a taste for the Ring.

  Since then she has been conspicuous in the crowd at every notable prize-fight. Sometimes The Tiger Fitzpatrick accompanies her, whispering dark secrets in a voice that can be heard four rows away. If she had laid her bets in direct opposition to his forecasts, she would never have lost. But she has faith in her butler. He has not been drunk more than thirty times in fifteen years – that is to say, not so drunk as to be incapable of walking. She feels that he is a demonstration of the power of militant humanitarianism, and would not lose him for all the money in the world. For his part, The Tiger glumly worships the ground upon which Asta treads. Once, in the ‘Black Swan’, the body-servant of a gentleman who lived two doors away made Miss Thundersley the subject of a ribald remark, whereupon The Tiger, looming over him, said: “Put your hands up, you bastard, and fight like a man!” – meanwhile throwing across what he believed to be a punch like a thunderbolt. The punch landed with deadly accuracy exactly where the other man’s chin would have been if he had still been there; but he had finished his drink and left a quarter of a minute ago. The Tiger Fitzpatrick no longer needs to hit anyone: a look at his face is enough. This perhaps is just as well.

  Once in a while, he helps Asta in her garden. With a spade The Tiger is more trouble than he is worth; the essential pressure of the foot reminds him how Kornblum trod on his instep, once upon a time, in Birmingham, and this makes him so angry that he cuts everything to pieces. If he is given a hedge to trim, he does very well indeed for the first twenty minutes; but soon the snapping of the shears reminds him of the quick left-right with which R
oland Gogarty knocked him cold in Sheffield. And so he fights the battle over again to the detriment of the defenceless hedge. It is dangerous to let him weed. As the hoe comes down there comes back to his memory a vivid recollection of how Pancho Quixote held him for one operative moment with a chin hooked over his shoulder while he butted with his head and hammered his kidneys with his right hand; then God help the geraniums!

  Asta Thundersley, however, who is violent as a cow-buffalo, has a light hand with growing things. She loves children and vegetables. Holding out a handful of seeds like little knots of coarse brown string, she will say to The Tiger Fitzpatrick: “Look! Onions. Each of these is an onion, millions of onions. And what a nice thing an onion is! Layer on layer, what a miraculous thing an onion is!”

  The Tiger usually replies: “With sausages.”

  Once, picking up a windfall apple under one of the two soot-intoxicated trees in her garden, Asta tore the fruit apart and said: “Six, seven, eight pips… Isn’t it odd, Tiger? You can count the pips inside an apple, but not the apples inside a pip?”

  “Just spit them out,” said The Tiger Fitzpatrick, “you get appendicitis through swallowing pips.”

  Asta Thundersley called him a punch-drunk idiot and hurled the jagged halves of the apple at his head. Later, he picked them up, cut away the bruised parts and ate them.

  Next day, Mrs Kipling cooked him an apple pie. She was jealous: she loved him; but The Tiger was not interested in her or any other woman, as a woman. He had got out of the habit of that sort of thing many years before, although he was – and still is – something of a ladies’ man; a Casanova, all talk and reminiscence.

  If anything was needed to make The Tiger’s aspect thoroughly nightmarish, that thing was a bowler hat. He has taken to wearing a bowler hat. A woman, of course, was responsible for this – some painted scarecrow or expiring balloon who told him that in 1912 she knew a gentleman who worked in an office, and this gentleman wore a bowler hat day and night, and was a nice gentleman.

  Mrs Kipling has made no secret of her intention to tear this woman’s eyes out.

  “Take it easy,” says The Tiger Fitzpatrick, who has got very heavy in the past few years. “Take it easy…”

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Eleven

  Another of Asta’s unpredictable friends was a demented theologian who was working on a crack-brained scheme: he proposed to modernize and dramatize the whole of the Bible and so bring the modern world to God. You may still see Mr Pink, as he is called, in the Bohemian pubs. He sees no harm in a glass of beer, and cracks little jokes of a slightly clerical flavour. “Our Lord turned the water into wine, Mr Landlord; you appear to have worked the miracle in reverse” – that sort of thing. He is a quaint, not unattractive figure, in spite of a badly scarred chin. While elucidating a point of doctrine one evening, gesticulating with a cigarette, he set his celluloid collar alight and burnt off his little silky beard, of which he used to be inordinately proud. He has always taken a finical pride in his appearance, and gets himself up like a parson on holiday at the seaside, in a prim but natty grey alpaca coat, black trousers, a high stiff collar and a narrow tie. In all weathers he wears a straw boater, much too small for him, into which he screws his big round head. He laughingly refers to this hat as his ‘little crown of thorns’; it leaves a vivid red ring around his bald scalp. Mr Pink is never to be seen without an old-fashioned umbrella with a silver handle, and an armful of papers. There never was such a man for carrying papers. All day long, he sheds sheets of notes as a dying chrysanthemum sheds its petals. If you are in a hurry, you will be well advised not to help him pick up his dropped papers, for if you do he will engage you in conversation, and it is impossible to resist his shy, childish eagerness and the trusting look of his clear blue eyes. In no time at all, he will tell you all about himself – that is to say, the work to which he has devoted himself:

  “… the modern trend, my dear sir, is to the staccato, the crisp, biting, slangy phrase. I have not the slightest doubt that our Lord in his lifetime talked so as to appeal to the great mass of the people – simply, dramatically, colloquially. Twenty years ago, struck with this idea, I determined to translate the Gospels into the sort of language the younger generation prefer to read and talk in this day and age – to retell it all as if it were a story. Perhaps I don’t make myself clear, sir? – ”

  Out comes a quire of paper closely covered with illegible scribbling. He flips over the sheets, muttering to himself: “Judas, Judas, Judas… Judas and the Priests… that awful scene of the betrayal of Jesus… Judas, Judas, Judas, where’s Judas? Aha! Here he is. Allow me to read it. Or no, perhaps it is a little long. I see you’re in a hurry. Here, sir, is a shorter passage, the tremendous drama of Peter when the cock crows. I have put it into modern dialogue. I should greatly prize your opinion…”

  In an incongruous, high-pitched, academic voice Mr Pink reads:

  —Say, aren’t you one of Jesus’ mob?

  —Who me?

  —Yeah, youl

  —You’re nuts, I never saw de guy in my life. (A cock crows. Enter Servant Girl)

  —Listen, boss!

  —What is it, honey?

  —This bastard with the beard was with that God-damn Radical agitator.

  —Who, me? Honest to God de dame’s screwy! I was not!

  —Why, you lying son of a bitch, you were so!

  —Who, me? One of that mob, well whadda ya know about that? Ha, ha, ha! I wouldn’t touch dat guy Jesus with a disinfected barge pole.

  —Guess you made a mistake, honey.

  —Well, maybe I did at that, Moe.

  —What do you say we go nibble a drink?

  —Okay by me.

  (Exeunt. A cock crows again.)

  —Holy Jesus, holy Jesus! What a rat I turned out to be!

  “… Do you see? Does it strike you as clear? Does it hammer home the lesson? If you had time I should have liked to read you some of my notes on the modernization of The Lamentations – quite forceful. Or perhaps Joseph in Egypt and Potiphar’s wife:

  —Joe, I feel terrible; I got a terrible pain, Joe.

  —I am sorry to hear that, Madam.

  —I got a lump coming up here – just here – I think I got a cancer, Joe.

  —Let us hope not, Madam.

  —Put your hand here, Joe; no, not there – here. Yes, right here. A bit lower. I guess I got cancer of the womb or something. Oh Joe, Joe, Joel

  —But Madam, please!

  —God, Joe, you don’t know what it is to be starved for affection. Potiphar doesn’t understand me.”

  At this point, perceiving that Mr Pink is likely to go on all day, you excuse yourself and make a getaway. But Asta Thundersley can listen to him for hours. His life-work should be finished in another nine years. According to his schedule he has only the Books of Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi left to dramatize. Among other things he is a Christian Socialist, and every May Day, without fail, he puts on a tired old red tie which looks like a boiled geranium. He is punctilious in acknowledging his debts, and has given Asta his I.O.U. for £392 7s. 2½d. The tuppence-halfpenny represents a stamp he borrowed.

  There is something saintly about Mr Pink. He never disliked anyone in his life, except a girl nicknamed ‘Peewee’. This is short for Pauline. When she was a baby she could not say Pauline and had to pronounce her name as best she could. Now she is a rawboned woman of forty with dark grey eyes as cold and unsteady as windblown puddles, whose face is always fixed in a maddening expression compounded of hate and resignation. Peewee was supposed to be a medium. She professed to have a Control named Tiny Wing, the spirit of a Red Indian. Peewee could fall into a trance at a moment’s notice, and then, in the accent of a cockney imitating Maurice Chevalier, she would speak with the tongue of Paul the Apostle. On one occasion she had a seance at Asta’s house. Mr Pink quivering with rage at question-time asked Paul the Apostle
to translate the cry of Jesus at the Nindi Hour: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” – where upon Peewee came out of her trance with a hollow groan and said that she could not go on because there was a Doubter present. Asta lost faith in her at the time of the murder of the second-hand clothes dealer’s little girl, Sonia Sabbatani. Peewee said that she knew who had committed this crime. She saw, she said, a dark thickset man with a heavy lower lip and a blue jaw – a man who had the habit of glancing from left to right out of the corners of his eyes, and dressed in clothes that might have been either blue, brown, or grey.

  Asta was sure that this was not the case, because, as it happened, she was convinced that she knew who had raped and murdered the child.

  Asta made no secret of her conviction in this matter. But she discredited herself by her own fierce impetuosity. She saw criminality in the most unlikely people, just as she saw virtue in outcasts. It was not in her nature to gather evidence and present it: she had to rush out of her corner with her head down and her fists flailing, looking for a face to punch. When Peewee, in a trance, started to tell her patroness what she saw, Asta leapt out of her chair with a bellow, shook her, and said: “Now, you bitch, I know you’re lying! And you know you’re lying! I know you know it! Don’t tell me!”

  Peewee pretended to have a nervous crisis; Asta poured a jug, of ice-water over her and kicked her out of the house, to the inexpressible delight of Mr Pink and The Tiger Fitzpatrick. Mrs Kipling wept, because she had had faith in Peewee – she who had wasted whatever change was left over on the morning after the night before in the booths of soothsayers and fortunetellers. Mr Pink made reference to the Witch of Endor, with a sort of Talmudic chuckle. But at that point he looked up, saw Asta scowling at him, coughed, gurgled and became silent suddenly, as if a knife had been drawn across his throat.