‘No, darling — please — good night.’
‘God bless you, my sweet.’
‘God bless, Tot.’
24
Asta went to her room in one of her highly infrequent moods of black depression and rare doubt, feeling — for the third time in her life — feeble and lost, defenceless and lonely.
The first time she had felt like this had been at the turn of the century: as an ugly, noisy, boisterous, irrepressible girl in her ninth year she had fallen in love with a handsome cavalry officer twenty years older — a straight-backed, dignified man with a great moustache. This love was more than she could contain. She had to tell someone about it and chose for her confidante her young and pretty Aunt Clara, who listened to her with all the gravity in the world, uttering occasional sympathetic interjections as one woman to another — and when the whole story had come out threw her head back in an uncontrollable gust of laughter. This cruel yet melodious mockery came back into Asta’s memory as she stood in the elegant old bedroom and watched the firelight winking on the polished walnut posts of the bed upon which she had been born. She told herself that it was stupid to remember such foolish things. Yet how could she help remembering? It was soon after this humiliation that she had decided to be a missionary — strong yet gentle, fearless yet kind, bold as a dashing cavalry officer, yet full of understanding — plunging through stinking, steamy jungles, laughing at nothing but danger, bringing the Peace of God into the hearts of fierce, cruel black people. But all this was so long ago, so terribly long ago! She had wanted desperately to give herself to all the defenceless and lonely people of this sad and bewildering world in which so many cry in vain for comfort, and where tender hearts like peaches carelessly thrown into a basket get bruised and go bad. She wanted to interpose herself between the cruelty and the vulnerability of mankind. But she realized, even at that tender age, that Good must be militant; that it is not for nothing that Evil is symbolized by the subtle snake, that twists and turns and fascinates, and must be struck quick and hard, and can never really be charmed into harmlessness. She was by nature an extravert; she became thunderous, unmanageable, had to throw her weight about, make her presence felt.
The second occasion of Asta Thundersley’s descent into the shadows occurred — what nonsense one thinks of, alone at night! — twenty years later. She had owned a white terrier bitch which, in some inexplicable way, had grown to resemble her. The bitch, Jinny, had the same sort of tenacious goodwill under the same kind of forbidding exterior, and a half-fierce, half-humorous expression that had caused her to be called ‘Asta Thundersley’s Twin Sister’. Between Asta and this animal there was an affection, a tacit understanding. One day Jinny was run over by a taxi. Her hindquarters were smashed. The vet told Asta that there was nothing to be done: Jinny had to die, and it would be better if she died immediately. Asta loved Jinny better than any other individual in the world.
That was an atrocious hour.
‘What will you do?’ asked Asta, shedding tears for the first time in twenty years — not counting the times she had wept alone.
‘My method is to give them a strong sleeping tablet in a spoonful of milk and when they’re asleep, put them into the lethal chamber. She won’t feel a thing. She won’t know. You can stay with her and stroke her if you like, until she’s quiet. Upon my word of honour, it’s the only kind thing to do.’
Asta looked into the vet’s eyes for several seconds, and then, standing like a condemned man when the safety catches of the firing-squad click open, said: ‘_Do it_.’
And Jinny was only a dog.
Now this was Asta’s third descent into hell.
She could not drive from her mind the appallingly vivid recollection of the grief, the hopeless grief, of the Sabbatanis. She could see them, as the firelight flickered, rocking to and fro as on a see-saw of which the point of balance was the limit of endurance — in and out, in and out, in and out of the frontier of utter despair.
She remembered the coal dust on her shoes, the squalor, the melancholy and the rottenness of that vile empty house; that abandoned evil place with its deep wet cellar. She could see it all. She could see the red-brick school in the yellow fog.
The child comes out. Somewhere, not far from the gate under the sign that says GIRLS, someone is waiting. Who? As yet nobody knows. There is the fog, and a Figure with blurred outlines. No doubt his coat-collar is turned up. He is quiet, persuasive, soft-spoken. The odds are that the child knows him. He says: Do let me see you safely home in all this nasty fog: your Father sent me to see you safely home…. And then leads her, chatting very pleasantly, perhaps telling her an amusing story, down the dark, dirty street to that condemned house; and there he tells her that he has got something there for her. A live teddy bear, it may be, or — most likely — nothing at all, just a mystery. I bet you a penny I can show you something you’ve never seen before.
He makes a mystery, a secret; and they go down, down that dreadful passage, down those rotten stairs, past that dark washhouse, into that grave — that stinking grave — that vault, that coal-cellar —
— And then, when the little girl says: ‘Well?’
(Asta Thundersley could not bear to think of what happened then.)
Again she trembled with desire to do something about it, and cursed herself for her incapacity to do anything at all. Almost deliriously she wished that Evil were in fact a great serpent and that she was a horned antelope: she would cast herself into the jaws of the serpent and perish — and in swallowing her the serpent would swallow that which must destroy him. Suffocating in his coiled maw, hers would be the last laugh, because with her last breath she could gasp: My horns will pierce you — I have let in the daylight — writhe and die!
Having draped her ungainly body in a linen nightdress and put herself to bed, Asta forced herself to be calm.
Out of the emotional chaos of the past twenty minutes there came an idea — one of the ideas for which she could give no reason and for which, nevertheless, she was prepared to fight to the death.
It was somebody who knew the Sabbatanis that raped and murdered the little girl.
After that, sleep was impossible. She was thinking, in her disorganized way, of the people she proposed to invite to her party.
Could it have been Dr Schiff? No, because whatever Schiff might have in mind, above everything he had in mind the safety of his person. Schiff (thought Asta) could even run away to save himself. As she saw things with her peculiarly-focused eyes, this was unthinkable. It was permissible to beg, borrow or steal for another; but not for oneself. One might sacrifice one’s selfrespect by running away for the sake of some other living creature. But no proper person ever ran away to save his own skin. She discounted Schiff. Yet anything was possible.
But what of Sir Storrington Thirst? He was a man of good family. Yet there must be, surely, something extraordinary in Sir Storrington. How could a man who called himself a man — not that she liked men — be so shameless? If he wanted a drink he would steal the price of it out of a blind beggar’s tin cup, or sponge on a woman. He would dash his title into your face, slap his pockets, put on an expression of astonishment that would not deceive a little girl of nine years old … and forget his wallet three days running. For the sake of a free drink Sir Storrington would invent slanders against his own mother. He kept his address secret — came and went, here to-day and gone to-morrow. Yet, as she knew — he had made a funny story about it — he had been one of Sam Sabbatani’s customers. He had borrowed a dinner-suit from a younger brother, sewn into it a label off one of his old suits, and sold it (with Sir Storrington Thirst, Savile Row clearly marked upon it) for two or three pounds more than it was worth. He had a habit of laying his hands upon you.