9
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 illused 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 Thunderslcy 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-andSo, 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
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. Goodbye.’
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,
‘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
