Prelude to a Certain Midnight

by Gerald Kersh

  “Why do you ask?” said Catchy in an uncertain voice.

  Mothmar Acord replied: “There’s something about you that invites violence.”

  At this, a pleasurable tremor passed from the base of Catchy’s skull to the base of her spine and she felt her heart beating and her toes curling inwards. They exchanged glances. Asta Thundersley, who had approached with a couple of full glasses, heard the end of the conversation and observed the interchange of looks.

  She remembered this later.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirty-Six

  It seemed to Asta that her foolish, futile party had been limping on since the beginning of last week. She began to jeer – not to laugh, but to jeer at herself for having organized it. Sir Storrington approached her and said: “My God, Asta, what the devil have you given us? My dear good lady, these are knock-out-drops. I’d give a good deal to know what you put in it.”

  Instantly Schiff, who appeared to be listening to everything in a dozen places at the same time, popped out with a dishevelled head and said: “This is my Formule. It is I who have invented this. What do you mean by a good deal? I’m always ready, Baronet, to make a deal.”

  At this Sir Storrington Thirst gave him the look that he kept for his creditors; but then, stung by an idea, he took Schiff aside and said that his estate was somewhat embarrassed but the name of Sir Storrington Thirst was a good name – at least it sounded remarkably good – and was available for a consideration, as a name to print on a label. Schiff made a note of this in a note-book with a transparent cover bound with wire. When Sir Storrington said: “That’s a clever sort of idea, that little book of yours,” Schiff told him that he could get them wholesale at 72/- a gross.

  “There’s a lady who has found herself a friend,” he concluded with a wink, pointing in the direction of Cigarette.

  Shocket the Bloodsucker was sitting, half asleep, in a spidery-legged little chair. Near-by, Cigarette and Titch Whitbread were gazing into each other’s eyes.

  Although the Murderer had been involving himself with almost feverish gaiety in conversations to the left and the right of him, he had not let Detective-Inspector Turpin slip out of his range of vision. He was a punctilious man. He liked everything in his life to be carefully timed. He agreed with the preacher – to everything there was a season and a time for every purpose under the heaven. There was a time to save, and a time to cast away. He was on the look-out for an effective moment. Detective-Inspector Turpin was now making distant yet friendly conversation with Cigarette and Muriel. Asta Thundersley was pressing a drink into his hand, and Turpin was refusing. The Murderer watched the detective-inspector’s face. He saw the twinkle of the watchful eyes and the little, quick smile of the pallid, disciplined lips. Turpin was refusing. Asta was insisting. Then, with a brusque gesture, Turpin surrendered. He took the glass. This pleased Asta Thundersley, who drank his health. Turpin raised his glass to his lips, tilted his head backwards, and made his Adam’s apple move up and down. One would have sworn that he was drinking; but the Murderer could see that the level of the orange-coloured liquid in the glass had not sunk. Asta had taken a great gulp; Muriel and Cigarette had emptied their glasses. But Turpin was keeping his wits about him, and that was exactly what the Murderer wanted.

  He rose. There was a queer sensation, reminiscent of warm cotton-wool, under the soles of his feet, and his head felt like a gum into which a dentist, before a difficult drilling, has injected an anaesthetic. He pinched himself under the left eye. His thumb and forefinger might have come together a yard away; he felt nothing; only well-being.

  This was going to be good. This was going to be sensational. Given the right moment – one of those little chasms of silence that inevitably crack open any uproar – he would tell the world in general, and Detective-Inspector Turpin in particular, the whole truth of the matter.

  Muriel was saying: “Oh, Mr Turpin! Cigarette just told me you’re a detective. Are there any women detectives?”

  Turpin said: “I suppose so,” and looked at his watch.

  “How do you get that sort of job, Mr Turpin?” asked Muriel. “I think I’d be good at that sort of job – don’t you, darling?” she said to the Murderer, who had come, swaying, to join them.

  “I should make enquiries if I were you,” said Turpin.

  At this the Murderer, taken by a fit of laughter in the middle of a gulp of drink, was seized with a fit of coughing. It was merely a matter of a mouthful going the wrong way, yet it sounded so awful that two or three people came to bang him on the back, and for two or three seconds conversation stopped while everyone looked towards him.

  He looked around and saw himself as the centre of a little crowd. Thea Olivia was offering him a tumblerful of soda water, and this, somehow, was irresistibly funny. In five seconds this dear little old lady, smelling of lavender and dressed in lavender, would recoil from him as from a decaying corpse in a cellar… in a cellar soiled with coal dust under the basement of a condemned house… a condemned house in a fog…

  Now was the time to say it. Now was the time to say: “Look here, Detective-Inspector Turpin, has it never occurred to you that I – who don’t eat sweets – went to Geogharty’s sweet shop three days before the murder and bought three Pierrot Gourmand lollipops? Has it ever occurred to you, copper, to wonder exactly why I bought those? Did it ever occur to you, my good fool, to wonder why there was one of these in Sonia Sabbatani’s pocket? Do you realize that the other two of the three I bought are in my room? Are you aware, Turpin, that I am offering you a rope with which to hang me? Let us make this perfectly clear – I killed Sonia Sabbatani.”

  He drew a deep breath, moistened his lips, and began: “Listen to me just for a moment! I want to tell you something.”

  “Well?” said Turpin.

  “I want you all to listen,” said the Murderer. “I have something important – most important – ”

  Then there was a disturbance.

  Shocket the Bloodsucker and Mr Schiff came to blows. They had been discussing the relative merits of the Austrians and the English. Schiff had said:

  “The Austrians have, if you will allow me to say so, vivacity.”

  “Listen, I agree with you – or may I be struck down dead this minute,” said Shocket.

  “Yet the English have a certain something, a confidence, a solidness.”

  “I should live so sure, you’ve hit the nail on the head.”

  “Yet, allow me to say so, your Viennese has more life in him than your Londoner.”

  “More life? You should live so sure! What’s the matter with England?”

  “I swear to you, most solemnly, that I was saying not a word against England. Your Englishman, indeed, is a better man than your Viennese.”

  “You should live so sure! What’s the matter with the Viennese? My father, God rest his soul, came from Vienna. What’s the matter with that?”

  “I beg you to be reasonable.”

  “He begs me to be reasonable,” said Shocket, looking at the ceiling with one anguished eye and keeping the other on Schiff.

  “That’s as much as to say that I’m unreasonable.”

  Then Shocket struck Schiff on the shoulder, and Schiff pushed Shocket away. Titch Whitbread bounded forward and separated them, saying: “Break it up, break it up, Bloodsucker. Ladies present! Break it up.”

  Then Asta, throwing an arm about Titch’s shoulders, and calling him a good boy, told Shocket to behave himself. Everybody laughed. The silence was broken.

  Looking again at his watch, Turpin said: “Well, it’s been a very pleasant evening, but – ”

  “Please don’t go yet. There’s something very important I want to say to you,” said the Murderer. Turpin looked at him. He saw a man of indeterminate age and colour, whose average body was wrapped in the kind of clothes to which no witness could satisfactorily swear in a court of law. The man was a little drunk, somewhat exalted. His face had gone loose.


  “Well, go ahead then,” said Turpin.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirty-Seven

  There was a pause.

  “It’s only ten o’clock. You can’t possibly go yet,” said Asta.

  “I’m a married man,” said Turpin. “My good lady’ll be waiting with a rolling-pin.”

  In the six or seven seconds that passed while they exchanged these few words, the Murderer had more visions. He had drawn a deep breath and looked down at his hands, gathering himself. Now the world was to know that these soft-looking, ill-shaped hands were weapons of atrocious murder. He winked back at an asterisk of reflected electric light on his right thumb-nail, and this fascinated him. It appeared to throb like a heart, spin like a catherine-wheel, and finally throw out a great cone of blue-white light like a cinema-projector. On a shaky screen between his eyes and the back of his head, then, there flickered a spasmodically-moving picture in mauve, grey-green, and yellowish-pink. A bell was tolling. He could hear it, and he knew that it was striking eight. There were grey-green tears upon the yellowish-pink cheeks of the priest. But he was smiling. A mauve and yellowish-pink jailer shook his head in grudging admiration… There was the grey-green prison yard… He felt wood under his feet. Something soft was slipped over his head. Everything became grey-mauve. A slippery roughness touched his neck. I won’t hurt you, said a business-like voice – and then the world fell away from beneath him, and there was a stab of light and an abominable jolt.

  The Murderer hiccupped.

  “Go on, go ahead,” said Detective-Inspector Turpin.

  “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,” said the Murderer.

  “And how right you are,” said Turpin. “Well, thank you very much, Miss Thundersley, for a very pleasant evening.”

  “Allow me, at least, to shake you by the hand,” said the Murderer.

  Turpin gripped his hand and let it fall.

  “You think I’m weak in the hands, perhaps?” said the Murderer. “Then wait a minute!”

  “Strong as a lion. Give all I possess for a grip like yours,” said Turpin. “Good night, Miss. Good night all.”

  “Ah-ah-ah! You silly man!” cried Thea Olivia, stooping to pick a burning cigarette-end out of the Murderer’s trouser-cuff. “Do you want to burn your nice suit?”

  “Oh no, no! Dear lady! Not on your knees before me!”

  She had thrown the cigarette-end into an ash-tray, and was making a great to-do over the brushing away of the ashes. Thea Olivia used handkerchiefs of the finest cambric, so exquisite that only she could wash them. In her excitement she had whisked out one of these to dust the Murderer’s trouser-cuff.

  “You need a nurse, you silly man,” she said.

  “I am a baby,” he confessed: and added, with a lowering look – “if you prefer to think of me in that way.”

  Catchy laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t you think – ” she began.

  “It might surprise you to know what I think,” he replied.

  Thea Olivia, looking from face to face in the crowd that surrounded her, was bewildered and a little frightened.

  “You know, I think – ” she said, making a decorous little bow.

  At this the groups began to disintegrate. Asta looked glum and sullen, but said little. She heard Cigarette saying to Moth-mar Acord:

  “Do I go home with you or do you come home with me?”

  Acord seemed to go into a little sleep while he made calculations. Then he pointed a forefinger at Catchy and said:

  “You are coming home with me.”

  Catchy nodded, and they linked arms.

  “Nobody loves me,” said Cigarette, more tragically than she had wanted to sound.

  “Oh, but I do,” said Wensday, stroking her neck. Then he saw that Avril, who had been watching him, was hooking her chin over the shoulder of Tobit Osbert, who was drowsily drunk. “But I’m a respectable married man,” Wensday added, going to the side of his wife and taking her hand in a grip which was meant to appear affectionate and intended to hurt.

  Hate had got into the atmosphere. Everyone wanted to go away and, in quiet quarrels, say unforgivable things to near and dear ones. Mothmar Acord gave Asta a hand like a rubber glove full of cold water. Cigarette insisted on kissing her. Mrs Scripture caught at her hand and then dropped it as if she had picked up somebody else’s soiled handkerchief. Titch Whit-bread, still smiling with pure delight, cautiously squeezed her fingers in his gentle, mighty hand, and swore eternal friendship. Soon everyone was gone but Schiff. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave.

  “Your friend Amy Dory,” he said in a throaty whisper. “So another boy friend! Also Hemmeridge; also Osbert; also Soskin; also Roget; also Milton Catt; also Strindberg; also Mothmar Acord. Ha-ha! No more Tobit Osbert, eh?”

  “Oh, go away!” said Asta Thundersley.

  “A good sedative, take,” said Schiff.

  “Go to hell, Schiff – be a good fellow.”

  “Why not? Good night till now.”

  “Good night, Schiff!”

  “You will be seeing me.”

  He left the house. Asta kicked the sitting-room door shut and turned and looked about her. Everywhere there floated and sank dust and ashes in the dregs of sticky glasses, and the place was disgusting with stale tobacco smoke. Two cigarettes had burnt themselves out on the mantelpiece. Another had been surreptitiously extinguished upon an oval silver frame that surrounded a photograph of Thea Olivia when she was young and pretty. One of the guests had pocketed a leaf-shaped jade ashtray. The ash-tray was worth less than ten shillings, yet Asta was deeply and bitterly hurt. If whoever it was had said: “I like it,” she would have replied: “Do, please, take it.” But, no. People must pilfer – guests, invited in good faith!

  She was sick to death of everybody in the world; sick and tired.

  Asta took hold of a blue-and-white Chinese vase, and raised it high, intending to throw it with a great smash into the fireplace. Two cigarette-ends and a shower of ashes came out of the neck of it and ran into her armpit. At the same time something sizzled behind the sofa. She put down the vase and looked for the source of the noise. Mr Pink was asleep on the floor.

  She looked at him in a white rage, grasped the vase again and, after a little deliberation, angrily put a soft cushion under his head and with a whispered damn-and-blast covered him with a tigerskin rug.

  The rain was pouring down. “God, what am I to do?” said Asta Thundersley.

  But if, at that moment, the Voice of God had answered: “What are you to do about what, my daughter?” she would have found nothing to say in reply – only that she was unhappy because of the badness of men and women, and that her heart was sore at the imperfection of this rough, unfinished world. Thea Olivia came in elegant and decorous in a pink-flowered black dressing-gown that covered her from white throat to rose-embroidered slippers.

  “Good night, my dear,” she began to say; but stopped with a gasp in the middle of the second word, shocked by the spectacle of big red Asta weeping as noisily as a dog drinks, into a little blue handkerchief.

  “Darling! What is it?”

  “Leave me alone, Tot – do leave me alone. I’ve got the miseries…”

  “Let me get you – ”

  “I ask you… leave me alone,” said Asta, crying like a schoolboy.

  Thea Olivia went to her bedroom.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Thirty-Eight

  It was her habit punctiliously to wash her handkerchief before she went to bed, and to hang it up to dry for a meticulous ironing next day, or the day after. She was worried about her handkerchief. What a fool she had been, to give way to impulse and use it as a duster on the turn-up of a trouser-leg! Thea Olivia let warm water run into the hand-basin in her bedroom, and cautiously opened her handkerchief.

  She was horrified and disgusted.

  In the folds of the cambric was a gritty blackness;

&
nbsp; Exploring this grit with her delicate finger-tips, and smelling it with one fine nostril, she recognized it.

  It was coal dust.

  Such stuff was ruin to cambric, destruction to delicate fabric of any kind. What madness had taken possession of her, that she had gone down with only one handkerchief – a Good Handkerchief designed for dabbing, instead of a Bad Handkerchief into which one might blow?

  She bathed, rather than rinsed, that handkerchief. The blackness trickled away. The cambric, held against the light, was un-punctured.

  Thea Olivia was profoundly relieved. She squeezed the handkerchief very tenderly, and hung it to dry on the towel rail. There were not many squares of cambric like that left in this cottony, shoddy world. Thea Olivia loved little, exquisite things, and the more fragile they were the better she loved them. It was impossible for her to go to sleep if she had not first arranged, by the side of her bed, one flower in a precious vase of Chinese porcelain which a hearty sneeze might have blown to fragments. Also, she carried with her an extra-special tea-set. It was over a hundred years old. You would have been reluctant to pick up the saucer: it looked as though it might bruise like the petal of a camellia. It was possible, in the right light and at the right angle, to read a newspaper through the side of the cup. Cup, saucer, diminutive plate, tiny tea-pot, hot-water pot, milk-jug (which you might have fitted into your left ear) and sugar-basin, all stood in order upon a silver tray as thin as paper. Cities had been demolished, great grey stone cathedrals had been cracked like hazel nuts, an empire had fallen, and still Tot’s little tea-set remained, unchipped, uncracked, serenely preserved like her virginity. When she travelled she wrapped it in so many layers of wadding and tissue-paper that – together with her little tortoise-shell tea caddy and miniature silver kettle and spirit lamp – it occupied twelve cubic feet of space.

  Before she could think of composing herself for sleep, everything had to be in its right place.