Prelude To A Certain Midnight

— 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 L392 7s. 2?d. 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 Ninth 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! 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.

Still another of Asta’s friends was an artist who painted large canvases, one Johnny Nation, who had been trained to be a doctor like his father before him. He drew nothing but dried-up livers, kidneys preserved in formaldehyde, tangles of tortured nerves and guts.

Nation drew with remarkable skill and accuracy. Asta hoped to wean him from his bad habits. Meanwhile, to give the young man a chance to live, she bought his pictures. Now her house was full of them, panels of bowels and bladders and dropsies; tumours wearing spectacles, wombs in aspic, ulcers in floral hats and carneous moles like human faces. She hung them up between Indian water-colours, caricatures by Sem, and bits of framed embroidery of the time of Queen Anne. Her house, in fact, was like a madhouse. Asta kept a cook and cooked for herself, employed a butler and presented her own guests to herself. She had a secretary who could not efficiently read or write, Mrs Fowl, a reduced gentlewoman, who sometimes helped with the sewing. What with her household and her charitable works, Asta Thundersley found little time to eat or sleep. And still she got fat!

12

Her increasing weight used to worry her. What was the use of a Crusade against hunger and oppression, led by a woman who looked as if she had been stuffed with chickens, peaches and cream? She tried — not whole- heartedly — to get thin, but God had seen fit to enclose her hungry soul in a hundred and seventy pounds of meat: there was nothing Asta could do about it. So she became more vehement in her outcries, and by this very vehemence she discredited herself. Asta might be in the right seven times out of ten, but she had a way of hanging the capand-bells on Reason and lending the aspect of lunacy to a trivial error.

Nobody who was present is ever likely to forget the Bishop of Suchester’s tea-party, to which Asta Thundersley brought another of her friends, Tom Beano, the leader of a group of militant Freethinkers.

‘So,’ said Beano, feeling the Bishop’s stomach, ‘this is how you sell all you have and give to the poor, is it, you swollen prelate?’ Then he made a speech denying God: there was a scene.

Beano loved scenes: he was responsible for the Buttick Street Riot. On that occasion Beano tried to overthrow the Salvation Army in one desperate coup d’etat. After the band had played, a melancholy, blue-lipped man in uniform told the audience that he had once been a drunkard, a liar, a fornicator, a thief, a profane swearer, a coppers’ nark, a teller of filthy stories, and in general a dirty dog — but now, now (_Hallelujah!_) he was saved, saved, saved — now, now, now he was washed in the Blood of the Lamb (_Praise the Lord! Oh Praise, Praise, Praise the Lord!_).

Beano had arranged that his supporters should be ready for a certain signal. Everything had been rehearsed. As the saved Salvationist made a dramatic pause, Beano roared:

‘_Sister Hannah! YOU shall carry the banner!_’

In a squeaky falsetto chorus his supporters responded:

‘_But I carried it last time!_’

‘_You’ll carry it this time and like it!_’

‘_But I’m in the family way!_’

‘_You’re in everybody’s bloody way! — January, FEBRUARY, MA-A-A-ACHQ … Left-right, left-right, left, left, left, left_ …’

Then the fight started, and that is how Beano lost his front teeth and the job he used to have in a shipping office. Beano and Mr Pink used to have some interesting discussions concerning the existence of the Deity. Mr Pink always ended by saying, with maddening calm:

‘I have Faith, my friend.’