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.’
‘So have I, my friend,’ said Tom Beano, unshakable.
‘Faith in what? Faith in God, Mr Beano?’
‘Faith in the non-existence of God, Mr Pink.’
‘Then you’re a blind fool, Mr Beano, if you don’t mind my saying so.’
‘And you are a blithering idiot, Mr Pink.’
‘Thank you, Mr Beano,’ said Pink, with irony.
‘Thank you, Mr Pink,’ said Beano, through curled lips
Asta picks such people up as the whim moves her, and seldom drops them. She always feels personally responsible for the welfare of her wistful, watchful hangers-on, who sit hungrily about her big red presence like stray dogs about a butcher’s shop. Yet she has made several true friends who love and understand her. Curiously enough, most of her real friendships developed out of enmity: Asta’s best friends are people whom she originally attacked.
Once you persuaded her that she had done you an injustice, Asta would take off her skin to make a waistcoat for you: she was yours for life. Now, for example, Chief Inspector Turpin might be her brother: he is one of the few men she really admires. Yet at the time of the murder of Sonia Sabbatani, when Turpin was only a detective-inspector, she was ready to tear him to pieces.
Turpin was a big man with a tucked-in chin and a spirallywrinkled neck that resembled a gigantic screw by means of which his small head was fixed to his thick shoulders. His fists were freckled and his face was pale. When Turpin talked he barked, kept his white-grey eyes on you as if he was waiting for a sudden, belligerent move.
Now his hair is white: his scalp resembles one of those wire brushes with which suede shoes are cleaned. When the Sabbatani case was in the newspapers, Turpin’s hair was almost red; he is thinner now, so that his face hangs in folds. The watery sepia ghosts of freckles still speckle the backs of his hands, but he is not the lean, tense man he used to be, although his eyes are more arrogant and his voice more brusque.
13
Asta met him first in the Bar Bacchus: he was pointed out to her by Gonger. ‘Detective-Inspector Turpin of the Yard,’ he said, in a graveyard whisper.
‘Ho!’ cried Asta Thundersley, loosening her shoulders with a series of angry shrugs, like a boxer before a fight. ‘Ho! … H, you!’
‘Mom?’ said Turpin.
‘Where’s the beast that murdered Sonia Sabbatani?’
‘Couldn’t say, Mom, I’m afraid.’
‘He couldn’t say!’ said Asta. ‘He couldn’t say! Why can’t you say? A friend, a customer of her own father, did it. Rottenest, dirtiest case in the world, and he can’t say! What do I pay taxes for?’
‘Ha!’ said Turpin, finishing his lager beer.