by Gerald Kersh
Gerald Kersh
Prelude to a Certain Midnight
A collection of stories
1947, EN
In London under the fog of war, a 10-year-old Jewish girl is murdered. The police have no clues and little interest, so crusader Asta Thundesley takes up the challenge, sifting through clues and gathering up suspects for a dinner party where…nothing is learned. Detective Turpin goes by the book, and finds himself with a stunning set…of dead ends. Fascinating example of life’s perils by author Kersh (Night and the City), who reminds for every winner, there can be a ton of losers.
Table of contents
BOOK ONE
1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · 11 · 12 · 13 · 14
BOOK TWO
15 · 16 · 17 · 18 · 19 · 20 · 21 · 22 · 23 · 24 · 25 · 26 · 27 · 28 · 29 · 30 · 31 · 32
BOOK THREE
33 · 34 · 35 · 36 · 37 · 38 · 39 · 40 · 41 · 42 · 43 · 44 · 45 · 46
∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧
BOOK ONE
∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧
One
Hardly any of the old crowd go to the Bar Bacchus now, yet for twenty-five years it was one of the three most popular meeting-places in London. Suddenly nobody wanted to go there any more. The old customers developed a distaste for the bar at which they had for so many years intoxicated themselves with mixtures of alcohol and intimate conversation, where they had cashed cheques, Borrowed money, made eyes at one another’s husbands and wives, and uttered strong words about deep matters.
People said that the ‘atmosphere’ of the Bar Bacchus had changed. But they could never tell you how it had changed, or what had changed it. It is difficult – I believe that it is impossible – to explain a change of atmosphere. The atmosphere of a place is the soul of that place, and when it departs the place dies. One may make equations: A New Manager, plus the New Manager’s Friends, minus certain Old Familiar Faces, plus a Strange Barman, plus the Tension that goes with Unfamiliar Voices, minus Intimacy, equals a Change of Atmosphere. But this is not satisfactory. One might as well describe an oppressive quiet in terms of decibels, or explain a grief in cubic centimetres of salt tears. One might as well expect an oceanographer to draw up the loneliness and the darkness of the Mindanao Deep on a plumb-line.
The Bar Bacchus died. The virtue went out of it. Its soul drifted away, so that now, although nothing about the place has visibly changed, it is nothing but a shell that once enclosed a character and an individual heart-beat.
Of all the old habitues, only Amy Dory goes there regularly, generally in the evening. She is better known by her nickname Catchy. More years ago than she cares to remember, when she was only twenty-eight years old and still beautiful, a certain novelist who never got around to writing his novel and whose very appearance no one remembers was sitting at the bar ten minutes after opening time. His name is Ember, and he is one of the few men that ever burned with unrequited passion for Amy Dory. After the manner of such men, he had to talk about it. Since none of his friends would arrive for at least five minutes, he talked to the barman, Gonger.
He said: “She gets hold of you, that woman. Do you understand what I mean? She gets hold of you. I mean, she goes with everybody. Let’s face it, she’s as common as a drain, Gonger. But I mean, common – common, like one of those catchy bits of sentimental music that everybody gets hold of. In everybody’s mouth. You find yourself singing ‘Amy Dory, Amy Dory, Amy Dory’ until she sort of interferes with your sleep. I mean, you can’t get her out of your head. A catchy tune. She has to have her run. There’s nothing you can do about her, do you see what I mean? She’s catchy.”
Gonger, the barman, gave him a warning look as the door opened and Amy Dory came in. Ember turned, changing colour, but said in a hearty voice, “Hello, Catchy!”
One of his friends who was coming behind her asked: “Why Catchy?”
“Because she’s catchy,” said Ember.
From that day her name was Catchy. After many years it still sticks. It is a fact that she was extremely attractive in those days, although her beauty was of the commonplace sort. She had regular features, an excellent figure – she called it a ‘good bod” – and a fine head of hair, remarkable in its luxuriance and colour. It was gleaming red-brown. Her eyes were of the same colour; they were large and clear, candid yet submissive – motherly yet dog-like when she looked at men. Catchy’s face had something of the shape, the warm colour and the texture of an apricot. She used to be much beloved. There was no doubt that her heart was big and warm – she couldn’t bear to see anyone suffering. And she was good company: she made you feel powerful. “Whatever you say’, was her slogan. The weaker you were, the more submissive she became. The more foolish and indecisive you were, the more she looked up to you.
She was by instinct neat, orderly, and tasteful in her dressing. Yet, if by virtue of your helplessness you won her heart, she never made you feel that your unwashed teeth, dirty socks, filthy linen, or stained bed were in any way offensive to her. She wanted, as she said, to be ‘good for you’. There isn’t the slightest doubt that Catchy had a kind heart, the sweetest of natures. There was (as someone said to her at that time) something of the saint about her; she gave everything, took nothing, and forgave those who ill-treated her – or rather, she convinced those who ill-treated her, when they begged pardon, that there was nothing to forgive. Thus Catchy made many men happy; generally neurotic, misunderstood men who needed her most. The majority of her friends were writers, actors – artists of one sort or another who lived to tell her all about themselves and explain their disabilities to her. She learned a great deal about people, and came to be regarded as a Mother Confessor to all the world.
Not only did she absolve, she excused. Having excused, she justified. She knew how to make people happy when she was beautiful, and when the Bar Bacchus was a place with an atmosphere.
∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧
Two
But the Bar Bacchus lost its soul and Catchy lost her body. If you had known her then and could see her now you would see what I mean when I say that she has gone through the years like a woman dragged backwards through a thickset hedge. Time has made a sad mess of her – time and trouble. She has had trouble, she will tell you a few minutes after meeting you. Those bright brown eyes that used to be so steady and candid against the baby-blue whites may now be likened to a couple of cockroaches desperately swimming in two saucers of boiled rhubarb.
Her magnificent hair has acquired a coarse texture. There is something Bohemian about it: it will not lie down; it resists the comb: it is hair in revolt. She is too tired, now, to fight against it.
A few months ago she made her last effort and went blonde. This merely made matters worse. The mixture of hydrogen peroxide and ammonia with which she bleached it made it even coarser than it had been when, with angry determination, she first stirred up the chemicals with a toothbrush. When the mixture was dry she washed her hair in the hand-basin, looked at herself in the grimy, freckled mirror, and wept. The same evening she attempted to commit suicide.
She tied her head up in a kind of turban, went to the Bar Bacchus, and told a friend whom she happened to meet that at last she proposed to end it all. After she had spent all her money, she went home and swallowed twenty aspirin tablets. Nothing happened. Catchy is still alive. Everyone knows that Catchy has gone through the motions of suicide at least half a dozen times. She has scraped at the tendons of her wrists with a blunt razor-blade, drunk hair lotion, swallowed a sixpenny bottle of iodine, taken aspirins, and turned on the gas fire without lighting it. But it has always happened that somebody has been near her
to rescue her in case she needed saving.
Catchy, I repeat, is the last of the old school at the Bar Bacchus, and she is far from being the woman she used to be. Her cheeks are at once puffy and shrivelled, and her skin is of the colour and texture of dusty curds. She still takes a certain pride in her appearance: her nails are meticulously varnished dark red, but she seldom remembers to wash her hands. The fact that she cannot bring herself to wash off the remains of yesterday’s powder, cream, and rouge is neither here nor there – she remakes her face scrupulously every morning, laying a fresh coat of paint upon the cracked, stratified remains of the old. Catchy’s teeth too are in a precarious condition. After the birth of her child – she was married once – two or three of her side teeth fell out and were replaced with a bridge. Years later the bridge fell out. By then she had lost the will to do anything about anything, and so she put the fallen bridge into a cold-cream pot. For the past five years she has been intending to go to a dentist. But she never has time. Meanwhile some of her real teeth have gone, and others are going, so that she has acquired a tight-lipped, enigmatic smile, like the Empress Josephine.
As for Catchy’s fine physique, it is a thing of the past. Her torso is blown up round and taut. Yet her arms and legs remain elegant in shape, and her hands would still be beautiful if only she could find time to wash them. Still she retains her old taste in dress. She used to be a well-dressed woman with a flair for style and colour. Now, shuddering away from the clutching hand of Time, she dresses as if the years had not passed, in short skirts and low waists. In general, however, her manner has not changed. She is still kind, sympathetic, anxious to talk things over and listen to your troubles, willing to have something to forgive you for, eager to be good for you, ready to combine the functions of a mistress and a mother. But this is out of the question. People do not like to be seen talking to her in the street. It is not that she is uglier, older, or wilder-looking than other women of the Bohemian half-world; there is about her an indescribable air of neglect and decay that causes passers-by to turn and look at her. Catchy rushes past in the manner of a demented woman who is looking for something very important and cannot remember what. She is conspicuous for her expression of crazy tragedy, especially when she has been crying. Then her face swells until it resembles a painted toy balloon, the colours of which have run in the rain. She cries at least once every day. She drinks as much as she can because there is something she wants to forget.
The first few drinks really do cheer Catchy up, and then she can be a lively companion, well worth listening to; humorous in her turn of phrase, vivid in her narratives and anecdotes of people she has known. For she has a keen eye, a good ear, and an excellent memory – all too excellent. Usually when she is at her most hilarious and scandalous, she will encounter a little stale crumb of something that brings back that which she has been working so hard to forget. It chokes her. She falls silent; gulps, coughs, sobs, and at last weeps in a hoarse, loud, howling voice. At this point she ceases to become good company and becomes very bad company indeed. Catchy throws out her hands like grappling hooks, holds you fast, and tries to tell you something which does not make sense, something hopelessly incoherent. It is distressing to hear her uncontrolled sobbing and moaning. There is something weighing upon this unfortunate woman’s heart, but no one has any idea of the nature of it. When she stops talking suddenly and you hear in her throat a noise like a tight corset bursting all its hooks, you excuse yourself, if you are wise – you duck away as you used to do when you heard a V-1 bomb cut off overhead. You know what is coming and hope that it will miss you. They all have their sorrows, their incommunicable sorrows, these broken people who belong to the Mad Twenties and seem to nourish themselves mainly on other people’s liquor and wash themselves only in their own maudlin tears – these pumping-stations on the shores of a Dead Sea. Best not to listen to them: it will probably end by your having to see them home in a taxi. More likely than not they will fall down and cut their heads, or be sick on your feet. It is best not to involve yourself in the unprecedented sorrows of Mercedes – who once loved a man who didn’t love her. Wisest to keep beyond the range of the flame-thrower that is the anguish of Fifi, who was divorced by the husband she loved because he could not see eye-to-enlightened-eye with her passion for a female book-reviewer. The voice of Catchy when she starts on the story of her great sorrow is not unlike the voice of a cat in the night – that cry that drags you back from the frontiers of sleep because your foggy consciousness tells you that something human is emptying its heart of sorrow too deep for words, trying to tell you something. You sit up and there is only the howl of a beast in the dark. So you fall asleep again.
And so when Catchy begins to cry out, you start for an instant into an anxious alertness, if you do not know her. But you do know her. Nothing she says can possibly mean anything to you:
“Oh, why, why, why? Tell me, darling – darling, dear darling; for God’s sake don’t desert me, but tell me why! You understand, you do understand – don’t you? Yes, you do! Then tell me, for God’s sake tell me, what did I ever do? Oh dear God, if you knew – if you knew how unhappy I am, how miserable! Do something for me! I haven’t the courage. Kill me! Do this for me, kill me, kill me and I won’t cry out. Darling: I am brave, so much braver than you think! Kill me! What right have I got to live? Do something to me! Do something horrible to me! Burn me with a red-hot iron…You think I’m afraid, ha ha ha! Me, afraid?”
At this point, she stubs out a lighted cigarette in the palm of her hand and leans forward flickering her wild brown eyes at you.
“I’m not afraid. Do you see, do you see that? And that? Afraid! You’re afraid, not me! You’re a coward, a dirty cheap coward! I’m not afraid. So what have you got to be afraid of? I’m only a woman. Well, then, kill me! Just kill me. Darling! Put your hands around my throat and strangle me. Or strangle me with a stocking. Yes? Will you – ”
She starts to take off one of her stockings. You say: “No, no!”
She says, with something between a smile and a whimper: “Oh, I see, you’re afraid. You’re a coward. You’re a dirty, cheap, common, rotten, lousy, stinking, bloody coward – That’s what you are. Oh, darling, darling, darling, I could so admire and adore you if you weren’t a coward. I’d do anything for you, I’d lie down and let you walk on me. I’d be your slave. I’d look up to you like a king on a throne. I’d wash your feet and drink the water. Don’t you see, I want to worship you! You’re so strong, so ruthless, so powerful! You’re so real, so hard… but no, I was mistaken. You’re all alike, you – liars, cowards! And I did so look up to you! I thought you were God, God Almighty. I said my prayers to you. I wanted you to strike me dead. And now I don’t believe in you any more… Oh, please, please, my God, my beautiful God, don’t take away my faith! Strike me dead! Dead at your feet, your beautiful, beautiful feet! You must! I want to confess, confess, confess and confess and confess, to you – to you, my king, my God!”
If you’re still there thirty seconds later, you’ll hear her say: “I didn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t do anything! But punish me, kill me – strike me down dead. Strike me dead! Strike me…”
But if you are a sensible man, you’re on your way elsewhere. Christopher, the doorman of the Bar Bacchus, will see her to the street. Then Catchy will make a recovery. She will draw herself up, take a firm grip on her handbag – her poor old greasy alligator-skin handbag which looks as if it contained fifteen pounds of walnuts, into which no one has ever dared to peep – and lurch off home.
∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧
Three
She can always rely upon her feet to take her home. She has been living in the same place for many years. It is a little flat on the top floor of a second-hand clothes shop. The lettering on the fascia reads:
S. SABBATANI
MISFITS WARDROBES
The shop has an air of dilapidation. As you walk by, you wonder how the devil anyone can possibly make a living out
of it. It was last painted ten years ago, and then with a cheap brown-red paint. The shop window is of a sort of plate-glass that is no longer made nowadays. Slightly corrugated and flawed with bubbles, it is strangely framed in four pieces of wood like Greek columns. Here you may see displayed a bundle of garments like Eton jackets made of coarse white cotton; a green and blue striped suit labelled ‘Savile Row’; some bundles of gloves marked ‘Assorted sizes. West-End make’; two or three pairs of second-hand or third-hand shoes carefully polished and mounted on trees; and an assortment of dusty dress shirts. There is also a bundle of whangee, rattan, and malacca walking-sticks such as no man has carried since 1903; and an overcoat or two ticketed ‘West-End make. Property of a Lord’. In addition to these things, there are sidelines: boot polish, collars, saddle soap, and one or two massive old battered dressing-cases fitted with strange bottles and seven-day sets of cut-throat razors, with the initials of unknown bankrupts stamped all over them in blackened gold.
Catchy lives on the top floor. She goes in by the poor old blistered side door, climbs resolutely, keeping in touch with the hand-rail of the banisters, which are painted the same colour as the outside of the shop. She tries to walk quietly because she is afraid of her landlady, Mrs Sabbatani. On the top landing she pauses for breath, by the little gas stove outside her door, fumbles for her key – still snivelling a little – and finds it. She works it into the keyhole like a soldier threading a darning needle, gets inside, switches on the light, and throws herself into a shiny grey-black rickety old easy chair by the gas fire, looking around the room, as if she expected to find someone waiting for her. She sees most of what she put into the room a dozen years ago; and a dozen years of wear and tear, neglect and decay. The furniture is her own. It cost something once upon a time; but now, even as prices are at present, she would have to pay a man to take it away. From where she sits she can see springs coming out of the bottom of the divan like entrails of a disembowelled horse. The bedclothes are neither here nor there; you might imagine that the patchwork quilt has gone mad and engaged a gay plaid travelling-rug and a filthy Witney blanket in mortal combat – from which the sheets have recoiled in terror to the foot of the bed, where they are trying to dig themselves in. The pillow is grey with eye-black, tears and dirt. The electric light has a beaded shade; the upper edges of the walls are in a striated half-shadow. She can see, if she strains her eyes, the oblong of pink wallpaper in its frame of dust where her picture, in the nude, by Schuster, used to hang until she sold it for the wherewithal to drown her sorrows eighteen months ago. There is another picture, too: a concatenation of triangles. She wept when she took it to the dealer and offered it for sale, because it was painted by Toon, whom she loved. She wept when the dealer said he would not have it as a gift. Now, whenever she sees it she wants to weep again.
