Prelude to a Certain Midnight

by Gerald Kersh

  “Scribble, scribble, scribble…” The tears in his eyes pushed themselves forward and came out.

  “I didn’t mean to upset you, Pink,” said Beano.

  “You didn’t upset me, bless you, Tom.”

  “Then what the hell are you crying for?”

  “Beano! Does some crazy conceit make you believe that anything you could say might get a tear out of my eye? God forgive you 1”

  “Ah! God forgive me, eh? Now listen to reason. Is God all-powerful: yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you ask God to forgive me. Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now listen…”

  “Oh, please!” said Tobit Osbert. “Do stop it!”

  Sir Storrington slapped every back within reach and stammered: “Kiss and be friends, what?” Thea Olivia, in her satisfied way, glanced from face to face. Hemmeridge, who was annoyed, looked away, Shocket the Bloodsucker was leering at her. The word had already got around that Thea Olivia was very wealthy and had, as people said, ‘Ideas’.

  She knew that everyone believed that she wanted a husband; and smiled inside herself. She wanted someone with a bronze head and a chiselled mouth, a few inches taller than herself; diffident, with a suggestion of passion; impecunious yet proud – a terrible but sensitive man, intellectually isolated, envied by men and adored by women; a man into whose reluctant hand it would be necessary to press (with conspiracies and blandishments) the occasional five-pound note when the waiter was not looking.

  He would be honourable: his sufferings would know no bounds. From time to time he would try to commit suicide – but she would be there in the nick of time, to’divert the pistol or catch his ankles as he dived over the edge of the sixth-storey penthouse roof. (He was not the sort of sneak that crawls into a gas oven or opens a vein in a hot bath.) He would need looking after. There would be important papers… documents… perhaps somewhere or other an importunate wife.

  She would alter all that.

  Gently, coolly, caressingly – cheek to bronze cheek, hand to fevered forehead – Thea Olivia would coax out folly like a blackhead and cream the pitted surface of his soul.

  One day he would leave her. But she would wait. He’d come back – sheepish, stinking of Chanel Number Five, red-eyed, gulping, repentant – and she would receive him quietly, yet with something like ecstasy, everything having been forgiven. Later, looking down at his handsome, exhausted face, she would say to herself: “Poor wretch. All men are alike…” After all he was only a man… will-less, maculate, hungry for forgiveness.

  Thea Olivia could have made do with Sir Storrington, Tobit Osbert, Hemmeridge, or Tom Beano: there was plenty in them to occupy her great capacity for forgiveness and Sean Mac Gabhann might have done at a pinch; or Graham Strindberg. It would, in fact, be rather pleasant to give Mac Gabhann money. She would know what he was after when he became sweet, attentive, and full of charm, when his fascinating Irish brogue cooed and purred at double pressure. She would see through it, and, knowing that she was going to give in in any case, pretend to be adamant. No, not another shilling, you naughty, improvident man! Then he would turn his charm up like a gas jet: he would glow with charm as he set himself the task of wooing the cheque-book out of her little papier-mâché and mother-of-pearl desk. In the end, when he thought that he had failed and was on the verge of an attack of the sulks, she would hand him an envelope and tell him with a little silvery laugh that she had written him the cheque the night before.

  It would be fun, too, with Graham Strindberg. He was so tolerant; they could spend their days being tolerant together. As for Sir Storrington, he was a naughty boy also. He drank. She would try to cure him of that, to wheedle him out of his bad habits; be a mother to him; wean him from the black bottle. In that case she would be Lady Thirst; which would sound very pleasant indeed.

  Or she could take Tom Beano in hand, reason with him, and bring him to God. To Tobit Osbert she would be a kind, clever, beloved mama – a guiding star. She would pull that loose-knit personality together, and make something of him; and then how grateful he would be!

  Of course, there would be no sex in it; Thea Olivia had never thought much about that kind of thing. She was pure in her dreams of marriage. In point of fact, she would not have married the best man in the world to save his life. She had her dreams; they were enough for her. She was taking no chances.

  If anything happened to break those dreams, what would be left? The dirty realities of a sordid world. It was better to dream. She looked again at the animated face of Sean Mac Gabhann and smiled at him, in her immaculate, maternal way. But he was in conversation with Monty Bar-Kochba. It was an uneasy conversation. The Zionist and the Irish Nationalist found themselves in complete accord. This had never happened before, and the novelty of the situation struck them both tongue-tied.

  Monty Bar-Kochba looked at Mac Gabhann with suspicion. But then, he looked at everybody with suspicion. His soul was a fine filter that could separate from the current of any conversation a little muddy residue of unsuspected insults. You have, no doubt, blown a mouthful of cigarette smoke through a stretched handkerchief in order to demonstrate to your friends the sticky, tarry muck that comes and goes with a whiff of soothing, innocent tobacco. Bar-Kochba was that handkerchief, stretched taut and breathed.

  He had said: “I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. A lunatic here, in this city, has raped and murdered a girl. One little girl, one little Jewish girl is raped and murdered. And there you are, all of you horrified, up in arms! Yet is it not a fact that in Germany Hitler has been in power for over two years, and has raped and murdered thousands and thousands and thousands of Jewish girls? And there you are up in arms? No! You recognize Hitler, you honour Hitler, you send ambassadors to Hitler! One Jewish girl is raped and murdered on your own doorstep. Oh yes, that makes you indignant because it might be your own daughter! But ten thousand Jewish girls raped and murdered in Germany mean nothing to you. Hypocrisy! Smuggery, humbuggery!”

  Mr Pink who was ambling from group to group on uncertain feet, said: “Just so friend. It’s all the same thing.”

  “How do you mean – same thing?”

  Sean Mac Gabhann, witri something of a sneer, said: “Will you be after telling me if any of you horrified people were half as horrified by what the Black and Tans did to us in Ireland?”

  “It’s exactly the same thing,” said Mr Pink, and slurring some of his words, “zactlythesamething. People like to be on the safe side. People want to go on living. Yes? Well. People wait for murder to become leg-leg-legitimatized. When murder is leg – made legal – everything’s all right for murderers. People can serve the Devil in the name of God. They can find, as the Americans say, new angles. Convince themselves that in torturing and raping and killing they are working for the good of the Race. False! False! Mark my words, lots of people everywhere would do what that man did to Sonia Sabbatani, if only a few hundred people were doing the same sort of thing at the same time. Look at lynch mobs in the Southern States of America. All of a sudden, up jumps a führer, and shouts Let’s lynch this nigger! And all sorts and conditions of men throw down their tools, and rush together, and make a mad, murderous mob that wants to break places open and tear poor human beings out, and march by torch-light, and hang unhappy wretches on trees. All of a sudden, in a small town, up jump two thousand red-handed murderers. They are everywhere all the time, friend, everywhere! In every man there lurks a hungry beast. Mr Whatever-you-call-yourself, there isn’t any difference at all between that poor little girl who was murdered the other day and the tens of thousands you were telling us of. Given the opportunity, Catholics murder Protestants, Protestants murder Catholics, Catholics murder Jews and Jews slay Amalekites. Given a Mullah, the Moslems murder the Christians. In everyone there is a little egg full of murder waiting to be hatched. Crack it! Crack it and throw it out! Individual regeneration is everything. Christian girl, Jew girl – ”

  Bar-Koc
hba said, in a dangerous voice: “You’d better mind your language.”

  “My language? How has my language offended you, sir?”

  “I didn’t quite like the way you said that. What do you mean by Jew girl? You mean Jewish girl, don’t you?”

  “I mean exactly what I say, sir, and I’ll thank you not to grip me by the arm.”

  “You’re all the same,” said Bar-Kochba, and he went into one of his silences – one of those grey silences in which he seemed to lose all colour and become one with his clothes. He talked to people without looking at them.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirty-Five

  The Murderer, who appeared to be half asleep, was looking for Turpin, who had side-stepped and slipped away when Cigarette had begun to hiccup herself into hysterics. When, at last, Tur-pin’s face appeared again, between the beefy red face of Asta Thundersley and the tightly-waved head of Mrs Scripture, the Murderer found it impossible to look away from the man. The thick, cloudy, ice-cold, orange-coloured drink was creeping around in his head. He felt happy and reckless. He believed that if he had a pen and some paper he could, at this moment, write formidable prose. He would describe Detective-Inspector Turpin as a man made of mysterious grey squares, whose eyes alone were conspicuous – pale, bright, white-grey eyes, so similar in colour to the flame of burning sulphur that one expected them to give out a choking stench. No detail escaped him: he noted the narrow soft collar held, under the knot of the three-and-sixpenny tie, by a fourpenny gilt pin; the severe grey suit; the old-fashioned gold watch-chain (obviously a legacy from his father) that hung between the lower pockets of his waistcoat. The pallid, puffy face of Turpin indicated that he needed sleep. Murderer found it impossible to look away from the man. The suit, he calculated, could not have cost more than four pounds. Yes, the suit had been bought for about four pounds; the shoes were procurable at nineteen shillings, the shirt – with two collars thrown in – could be got for about six-and-sixpence in the City. The Murderer smiled inwardly. Here he sat, ten feet away from a Scotland Yard man, a full-blown detective-inspector, who, if he only knew what was what, could put out a hand and, simply by grasping his shoulder, hurry himself towards a chief inspectorship.

  He took another drink. In the five seconds that passed between the swallow and the gentle clink of the carefully-put-down glass, the Murderer found himself in the clutch of an irresistible yearning to get up, walk over to Turpin, and give himself up.

  He drank again and, as the stuff that tasted like orange juice went down, determined to make an end of the matter before Turpin left the house.

  He slid everyday prudence into the pigeon-hole of another day-dream. Now he saw himself as a nonchalant man of ice and fire, making as great a sensation as any man had ever made in that locality, by means of a gesture.

  He would save this gesture for its proper moment. When that moment came he would approach Detective-Inspector Turpin, touch him on the shoulder in the manner of a policeman making an arrest and say:

  “Look here, my dear sir. I really am getting a little sick of all this conjecture touching the murder of that little girl Sonia Sabbatani. As a topic of conversation it’s becoming a bore. Anything rather than a bore, don’t you think? Let’s face it. I did it.”

  Taking a fresh glass from one of the waiters, he swallowed two or three more mouthfuls, turning the matter over in his mind.

  Might it not be better simply, apropos of nothing, taking advantage of a blank space in the conversation, to say in a world-weary way: ‘Oh, look here, I’m the man who killed Sonia Sabbatani’?

  Again, it might be better to wait until the talk, inevitably, got around to the murder, and then say:

  “Oh, that? I did that.”

  It needed working out. His head was swimming.

  While his eyes were open it seemed actually to be swimming – striking out clumsily to keep itself above a sort of sticky, turbid pool in which he felt that he was immersed. As soon as he closed his eyes they seemed to roll up and backward, until they looked into the dome of his skull. Then he saw something indescribable – a kaleidoscope seen through something like an opal. Wretched little pieces of tinfoil, broken glass, crockery, metal, and paper spun between mirrors and came to rest in queer and beautiful patterns – and as soon as the Murderer settled down to admire these patterns there was a whirr and a buzz, and everything dispersed. It twirled away, and came to rest in a fresh pattern.

  Someone said: “You’re dreaming.”

  He replied: “Yes, yes… I’m afraid I am…”

  Then he opened his eyes and saw the elegant, old-fashioned room, full of cigarette smoke, at the edge of which Asta Thundersley, red and damp as an autumnal dawn, was bullying the barman:

  “Mix, you idle man, mix! What did I hire you for? To get drunk?”

  The barman began to laugh like a man who is being tickled under the arms. His eyes were unnaturally bright, and his face had become mottled.

  Meanwhile Sinclair Wensday was flirting conspicuously with Catchy, occasionally darting venomous glances in the direction of his wife Avril, who, looking at him with the eyes of an angry cat, deliberately rested her head on the shoulder of the young man called Roget. Five or six glasses had reduced him to the self-revelatory stage of intoxication.

  “You know,” he was saying, “I’m good for nothing. I’m good for nothing at all. Some people, I mean, find happiness. Not me. I don’t know what it feels like to be happy. I’m not a man, I’m a slave. A slave,” he repeated, while two maudlin tears trickled down his vacant face. “Yes, that’s all I am, a slave, a slave to pity.”

  “You poor dear!”

  “You understand me. Pity, that’s what it is, pity! I’m too soft. I hate to hurt people’s feelings. I’d rather kill a man than hurt his feelings – do you know that? And it’s all my mother’s fault. I hate my mother. I suppose you think that’s a terrible thing to say, don’t you?”

  “I see you have the courage of your convictions,” said Avril.

  “No, I haven’t. I haven’t got the courage of anything. I haven’t got the courage… of… of… a daffodil. A daffodil fights for its bit of hold in the soil. But could I fight for anything? No. And it’s all my mother’s fault. Did she ever treat me as a human being? I tell you, dear sweet Avril, she always treated me like a dog, a dog!”

  “There, there, don’t cry.”

  “How can I help crying if my mother treats me like a dog? How can I help it? If I had had a father things might have been different, but I never had a father. He died in the War, at Ypres. There was an explosion and he was missing. The next time we meet, you kind, sweet, beautiful woman, I’ll bring you his photograph. He sits on that little chair like a man on a throne. Why did he have to die? Tell me, why did he have to leave me all alone with my horrible mother? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She was afraid of losing me,” said Roget, weeping. “She lost him and she didn’t want to lose me. She wouldn’t let me play football in case I got kicked, and she wouldn’t let me play cricket in case somebody hit me with a bat. And she wouldn’t let me let off fireworks on Guy Fawkes day in case I burnt my fingers, and she wouldn’t let me go and play with other boys in case one of them knocked me down and I fractured my skull on the pavement, and she wouldn’t let me cross the road and she wouldn’t let me climb trees. She wouldn’t let me do anything. She kept me on a lead, she turned me into a dog, a dog, a dog! She wouldn’t let me talk to any girls in case they led me astray or gave me diseases. You don’t know what I’ve had to go through! Everybody else had a pony. Not me, oh no, not little me. I might have fallen off, or it might have bitten me, or kicked me. She reads all the filthy newspapers, damn her, and she keeps a big book full of little bits she cuts out all about little boys who’ve had horrible accidents. Little boys and little girls. Sometimes they’ve been to a circus and they go home and try and do a trapeze act, and hang their bloody little selves. Or sometimes they blow up a toy ba
lloon, and it goes the wrong way and they choke themselves. So she never let me go to a circus, 50 she never let me have a toy balloon, so she filleted every bit of fish because once in some paper or other she saw something about some nauseating brat who swallowed a bone in a bit of fried cod. She never let me do anything. I wanted to be a writer, but she read somewhere, in some idiotic book, that writers are all womanizers and drunkards, and she didn’t want me to go into business because she read somewhere in a paper about a business man who defaulted and blew his brains out. And here I am, here I am!”

  “Then why don’t you simply put on your hat and walk out?”

  Roget cried like a child, wrinkling up his face, and said: “It’s pity! Pity is the ruin of me. She’d be so broken-hearted if I went away. She’d die. She told me so. I’m all she has and you don’t know – you’ll never know – you couldn’t possibly know – how that woman has suffered. Oh my God, how I hate that woman! But she’s sick, very sick. Or at least, she pretends she is, and one of these days…”

  “ – One of these days you’ll come into her money and go on the loose, I suppose?”

  “You’ve said it exactly. How well you understand me! One of these days… Listen, I’m going to tell you something.”

  He paused. Avril said: “Well?”

  But Roget apparently had thought better of it. He looked as if he was going to be sick; but Avril’s eyes were elsewhere. Her husband had moved from Catchy to Oonagh Scripture, and Mothmar Acord had taken his place. That leering, sinister man approached Catchy with frank, open lustfulness, putting a hand on the back of her neck, which in those days was cool and round and fine of texture; a famous neck, solid-looking as ivory. He said: “You’re a very good-looking girl, aren’t you?”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I do. You can see I do. I want you to tell me something.”

  “What would you like me to tell you?”

  “Are you a masochist, by any chance?”