Prelude to a Certain Midnight

by Gerald Kersh

  It went on. Even Asta Thundersley was shocked to silence by the frightful vehemence of the man:

  “… And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night and shalt have no assurance of thy life! In the morning thou shalt say, would God it were even! And at even thou shalt say, would God it were morning! For the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see…”

  The old man in the round hat, and another old man with a rabbinical grey beard and a skull cap, forced Sabbatani back into his chair, while a woman thrust into his trembling hand a glass of tea with a slice of lemon floating in it, and an aged man with a clipped silver beard told him: “It is a sin to curse like that. You don’t repeat that curse. Sha, then!”

  Asta was glad that none of her friends or enemies were present, because the time had come when she, of all God’s creatures, was struck dumb. She had understood the intonation and the gestures but not the words; Sabbatani had been speaking Hebrew with a Rumanian accent, the old man in the round hat had been speaking Yiddish with a Polish accent, and the old man with the bristly beard had been speaking something that sounded like a mixture of Aramaic and Lithuanian – which everybody else appeared to understand, since, when he had finished speaking, there had been some nodding of heads and clicking of tongues. Asta withdrew to the back of the room, edging towards the door, and there she almost collided with Catchy, with whom she had exchanged a few civil words from time to time in the Bar Bacchus. Catchy’s eyes were shiny and purple with weeping; they opened and closed slowly, like squeezed antirrhinums.

  “Have you ever heard anything more terrible in your life? No, but have you? That poor child! These poor people! And someone did it who knew them! Oh, darling, what is one to do? Look at him! Look at poor Sam! He used to be fat, fat as a pig – and shaved, shaved like a billiard ball. And now look. Oh God, dear God, is it possible to imagine? And look at Mrs Sabbatani. Those eyes! That hair! When she heard the news she tore a handful out – but by the roots, the roots – and her poor dear blood ran down! Oh, Miss Thundersley, Miss Thundersley, what can one do, what can one do?”

  This question recalled Asta Thundersley to herself. She said: “Do, Catchy? Do? I don’t know what I’m going to do, but you mark my words – something is going to be done. Something or other, as I’m a living sinner! You wait and see!”

  A belated condoler, saying as he came in: “I wish you long life,” trod on her foot, for the room was crowded.

  She brushed him aside; looked towards Mrs Sabbatani and saw a densely-packed mass of muttering people; postponed her intention of rushing over and going into details; turned and rattled away down the stairs on her hard flat heels. Asta went out purposefully, as she had come in. But in the wet, dreary street a puff of wind, like a derisive sudden laugh, sprayed her with ice-cold rain. She turned up her collar. A hundred yards away a policeman in a blue greatcoat stamped through a puddle of rain in a disc of lamplight. The wind whistled and the rain came down, striking the shop window and making a noise that sounded like a sort of signal: What to do? What to do, what to do, what to do? To do what? To do what, to do what?

  Full of impotent anger, Asta Thundersley went home.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Sixteen

  But it was not in her nature to do nothing. Next day she was up at six o’clock; fed, bathed, dressed and out of her house within the hour, and on her way to the scene of the crime.

  What did she propose to do, having got there? She had no idea. She knew only that she had to do something, anything, with all the vigour God had given her. She went, first of all, to the shop of Sam Sabbatani and there asked a policeman the way to the Ingersoll Road School. He said: “Ingersoll Road School. Take the first on your right, go straight on, bear left, take the first on your right and the second on your left and then you’ll find it, just round the first corner at your left, mum.”

  Asta said: “Is that the best way to get to it?”

  “You know, mum, there is no use going there before nine o’clock, don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you mind your own confounded business? What do you take me for? A school-teacher looking for a job? A new girl, or something? I am asking you a civil question. Give me a civil answer. Is there any other quicker way? God Almighty, man, give me a straight yes or a straight no, can’t you?”

  The policeman looked her up and down; but having let his glance travel from Asta’s knees to her face he bit off and swallowed a little retort that he had been rolling on his tongue and said:

  “Well, no, mum. The way I told you is, actually, the best way to get to the Ingersoll Road School. I mean to say, the best way for the present. Leadbetter Street is still up. I dare say Lead-better Street will be up for about another four or five days. When Leadbetter Street’s open again, then the quickest way is to take the first on your right, second on your right, bear right, and there it is on your left.”

  “Then why don’t you keep a civil tongue in your head?”

  “I try to, mum, but why don’t you try walking, up and down all night on a night like last night?”

  “Officer, I sympathize with you. I’m not a school-teacher, you know.”

  “Aren’t you, mum? You know what? There was something about you that made me think perhaps you might have been.”

  “Exactly what?”

  “I can’t say exactly, but just for the moment I thought you might be a new school-teacher. Not long ago some girl came down from the north to take a job in a school around here, and she looked – ”

  “ – She looked what?”

  “Nothing. I forget. No,” said the policeman, “that is your best way to the Ingersoll Road School, but it won’t be open until nine.”

  “And how long did you say this other road of yours had been closed?”

  The policeman said: “I didn’t say, mum. But if you want to know, Casement Street, the first on the right, has been closed half-way along ever since the gas mains blew up three weeks ago. Why do you ask?”

  “I ask, policeman, simply because I want to know. Is that clear? All right, then. Good morning to you.”

  Asta Thundersley walked away. She took the first turning on the right and went straight ahead into a street of soot-soaked brick; by-passed a great hole in the road and found herself in an alley the left-hand side of which was the frontage of a brand-new slum, the windows of which looked out upon an ancient red wall. After that she had to make her way around the periphery of half of a crescent; could not decide whether at this point she ought to turn left or right or walk straight on, and was lost. She had an idea at the back of her head that she had been told to turn left; she turned left and found herself by the railings of a square full of rotting grass and dogs’ dung, surrounded by houses that looked all alike and overshadowed by a church spire like an ice-cream cone. The streets were empty. It seemed reasonable to Asta Thundersley that by this time someone, anyone, should be approaching the doors of the church. She waited. Nobody came. As she calculated it the nearest main road was to be found by turning to the right, the left, and the right again. She walked, turned right, and left, and right, and found herself in a street that seemed to have no beginning, no middle, and no end. So she walked. After fifteen minutes she arrived at a turning, turned and found another street. This street appeared to go on without perspective to the end of the world. Asta walked on. She turned left, she turned right; she turned right, and then she turned right again and walked straight on.

  Soon people appeared in the streets; girls on their way to work, pale with a bluish pallor under their face-powder, and men whose pockets bulged with packets of sandwiches, filling the first pipe or lighting the first cigarette of the day. Asta asked first one and then another the way to Ingersoll Road School; nobody knew. One man said: “First right, second left,” but said it as if he was, so to speak, picking it out with a pin. Another said: “Are you sure you don’t mean the Pross Crescent Kindergar
ten?” The third, with the quiet smile of the man who knows that he is irrevocably in the right, said: “Ingersoll Road School, mum? Easy. First right, second right, bear left, straight on as far as you can go, turn right at the traffic lights, straight on till you come to a red-brick building, and there you are… Not at all, it’s a pleasure. Good morning to you. Not at all, glad to have been of some assistance.”

  In the end she found herself near the river, where she saw a policeman admiring the sunrise. In a thoroughly bad temper, Asta approached him and shouted: “I suppose if I was some poor down-and-out without a roof to my head, you’d be on my tail already. But if I was a murderer trying to give himself up, I’d have to fill in a form or something before you put in an appearance. Don’t talk to me, I’d fed up with you, fed up with the whole lot of you!”

  “What’s all this about, mum?”

  “I’m looking for Ingersoll Road School. Be so good as to direct me to it, will you? I warn you, I’m a friend of the Superintendent.”

  The policeman put his ringer in his mouth and sucked it, took it out and looked at it; inserted the fourth finger of his left hand into his right ear; blushed, said: “Just a minute,” unbuttoned a pocket and pulled out a reference book, and said: “Ingersoll Road School, let me see.”

  At that moment a taxi passed, and Asta Thundersley cried Hey! in a tone that stopped it like an invisible brick wall. As she ran towards the taxi she shouted over her shoulder: “And a fat lot of use you are, you parasite! You drain on the public money! You bloated creature! You wait! I’ll show you! Don’t talk to me!” When she told the taxi-driver to go to Ingersoll Road School he said that it was a matter of a few yards up the road.

  “I wasn’t asking you what it was a matter of. I told you to take me there, didn’t I?”

  “O.K.”

  He drove her two hundred yards and stopped in front of a building that stood in the middle of a black rectangle of asphalt surrounded by a red-brick wall, and said: “See?”

  Asta gave him half a crown and went in at the entrance under the sign that said GIRLS.

  She was aware, first of all, of a smell of chalk. One of the teachers had arrived – a light-haired woman who looked older than her years and had no eyebrows. Asta Thundersley got hold of her and said:

  “Are you the headmistress?”

  “I am Miss Leaf. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Give me the headmistress.”

  Miss Leaf said: “I don’t think she’ll be in for a few minutes. But if there is anything I can do for you – ”

  “My name is Asta Thundersley.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “I want to speak to the headmistress. Who is the headmistress?”

  “Miss Handle. If there’s anything I can do… what did you want to speak to her about, if I may ask? I only want to help, you understand…”

  Asta Thundersley had followed her into the class-room, hung with maps, educational pictures, and pinned-up pastel drawings of leaves, horse-chestnuts, and bananas. There was desk space for thirty-odd children. At the back of the room there was a big glass-fronted cabinet which contained a peculiar octagonal wheel used for unwinding the cocoons of silk-worms; several birds’ eggs, a walrus’s tusk, some specimens of raw cotton, several lumps of mineral ore, a stuffed sparrow, and a celluloid doll confiscated from a naughty girl who had been caught in the act of nursing it in the course of Long Division.

  Asta looked about her. The blackboard was going grey. On the window-ledges there stood pots that sprouted leaves which, to Asta Thundersley, were completely uninteresting. There was also a little tank full of newts and a number of jam-jars containing tadpoles. She had been educated at a private school, a special sort of school, to which parents used to send their more ferocious and unmanageable children. She had never been to a school like this. The first thing she looked for was a safety exit, because her most recent mania had been concerned with exits in case of fire.

  “Say the place catches fire? What happens?” asked Asta. “What’s the first thing you do?”

  Miss Leaf said: “Save the Register.”

  “Save the Register! I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my life. What about the children?”

  “Oh, they have Fire Drill.”

  “What I wanted to ask you was this: what about Sonia Sabbatani?”

  “She was in my class. The poor little girl!”

  “Was she a good girl?”

  “Oh yes, a very good girl. A little high-spirited. Something of the tomboy. But a good girl, quite definitely a good girl.”

  A door slammed. “That’ll be Miss Handle,” said Miss Leaf in a hushed voice. Heavy heels thudded in the passage. Miss Handle came in. Looking at her, Asta observed that after all these years she had come face to face with her match.

  “Yes, madam?”

  “I am making certain enquiries relative to the death of Sonia Sabbatani,” said Asta. “My name is Thundersley.”

  “Well, Miss Thundersley?”

  “Well,” said Asta, “I’ll tell you. I am determined, madam, to get to the bottom of it.”

  “I think the police are best qualified to do that. I realize that individual effort can occasionally attain its ends, but I really do believe that this sort of thing is best approached through the proper channels. I am a very busy woman, Miss Thundersley,” said Miss Handle, who had seen, in Asta, an adversary of her own calibre.

  Asta mentioned the names of three or four well-endowed and influential charitable societies for the prevention of things, of which she was a representative, and said: “I’m determined to help dig out the man who killed Sonia Sabbatani. I know that the police are doing whatever police can do, God help ‘em. But you don’t understand how I feel about this.”

  “I think I understand only too well,” said Miss Handle. “But what can you possibly do about it? Have you asked yourself that?”

  “I don’t know,” said Asta. “There’s always a chance in a million that I might just happen to pick up something everyone else has overlooked. It’s been known to happen. Is there nothing you have in mind – you know, something so trivial that it didn’t seem worth mentioning – anything at all about the child or anyone connected with her? The police,” Asta added, grimly, “have to go to work according to their proper procedure, or whatever they call it; but I haven’t got any proper procedure, I can assure you! I’ve only got improper procedure. So – ”

  “Miss Thundersley, I believe it to be a fact that outside interference hinders rather than helps the police in such cases.”

  “How could I hinder the police? There’s nothing to hinder them about. They’re up a blind-alley – a blind-alley in a thick fog at that. There’s nothing to work on.”

  “Miss Thundersley, I fancy that the detectives at Scotland Yard are not in the habit of making public every shred of evidence upon which they happen to be working.”

  This was unarguable. The headmistress continued: “And I have already answered more questions than I believed possible. A charming man, the chief inspector: although not quite like the detective of fiction.”

  “What questions did they ask you?”

  “That is not a proper question to ask, and I don’t think it would be proper to reply to it, Miss Thundersley.”

  “Did they talk to the little girl, Sonia’s friend, who was told by poor Sonia that a friend of her father’s was going to…” the words stuck in Asta’s throat. “… going to Show Her A Secret?”

  “Yes, they did talk to Violet Almack. I was there at the time. The chief inspector was most tactful and charming – he put the child quite at her ease at once. She could only repeat what Sonia had said to her: that a friend of her daddy… etcetera, etcetera. Nothing more. And in case you propose to ask Violet about it, I want to say in advance that I strongly disapprove.”

  “No, I don’t propose anything of the sort. Poor little things! Let them have a little bit of innocence while the going’s good! No, no – not for the world. But t
ell me one thing, Miss Handle. Which way would Sonia have gone home so as to pass by the place where that coal-cellar is?”

  “Well, Miss Thundersley, she might have gone by any of four or five different ways. She might have started in a wrong direction in order to make a game of skill of getting home. You know what high-spirited girls are, I dare say?”

  “I was one myself. But tell me – which way would Sonia have gone if she had been going directly home?”

  “In that case she would have side-tracked the excavated street and gone the longer way – as it is until they get the road mended. Especially in that fog.”

  “Thank you, Miss Handle. You may, and will, call me the damnedest old fool in the world. But I tell you, I’ll hang someone for this if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Miss Handle said, with an intonation of sarcasm: “I wish you luck, I am sure.”

  “Thank you for your good wishes. I am much obliged to you. And I can assure you that I generally achieve what I set out to do.”

  “I haven’t the slightest doubt of it, Miss Thundersley.”

  “Thank you, Miss Handle.”

  “Good morning, Miss Thundersley.”

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Seventeen