‘A nice cup of tea? And look, I made a nice cheese-cake. Look, it’s still warm; I made it this afternoon. Just a little bit. I made it with pure butter. Come on, you don’t look after yourself enough.’
Then Catchy crumples and twists herself and drips grey tears like a wrung dish-cloth and wails: ‘Oh, you’re so sweet, so sweet, so sweet! You’re always looking after me. And I don’t deserve it, Mrs Sabbatani! Oh, darling, darling, I owe you so much, so much!’
‘Well, if you could let me have a little on account…’
‘Oh, Mrs Sabbatani, Mrs Sabbatani! Why don’t you throw me out? Dear, darling Mrs Sabbatani, why don’t you throw me out into the street? It would be good for me. It would make me pull myself together. It would serve me right. I’m bad, bad — I’m no good! Don’t you see, I’m no good?’
‘Sha! Sha!’ says Mrs Sabbatani. ‘You’re a nice girl. Sha, sha, then.’
Still weeping, Catchy begins to laugh. ‘A nice girl! You don’t know what Asta Thundersley said about me.’
‘Go and have a nice lay down and I’ll bring you up a cup of tea,’ says Mrs Sabbatani, who is afraid that Sarah may come back at any moment and catch her fraternizing with this wet-faced, wild, disreputable woman who smells of gin and stale cigarette smoke. She follows Catchy upstairs with a cup of tea and something to eat on a plate. When she sees the bedroom, her heart contracts with pity and her nostrils with disgust. ‘A minute,’ she says going out; and comes running back with cleaning materials. She brushes up ashes, shakes sheets and blankets into position — although she can hardly bring herself to touch them — wipes up dust, scrubs the dry grey incrustations off the bath-tub, and does all that a human being can do in two minutes to mitigate the offence of the water closet.
Meanwhile Catchy whimpers: ‘Don’t do it! Don’t do it! I’m no good. I’m no good. Ask Asta, she’ll tell you. Asta Thundersley will tell you all about me. I’m a bitch, I’m everything — everything that’s wicked. Ask Asta. Throw me out, throw me out — please, please throw me out!’
Mrs Sabbatani, embarrassed, looks at the filthy mantelpiece, and says: ‘Asta? What do I know about Asta? Why should 1 ask Asta? What for Asta?’
‘That lesbian,’ says Catchy.
‘Lesbian? What is it in English, Mrs Dory? I’m not an educated woman,’ says Mrs Sabbatani, apologetically. ‘String beans, broad beans, human beens, butter beans, has-beens, less-beens. I get mixed up.’
Catchy comes up bubbling and spluttering out of a great laugh.
‘Darling, you’re priceless! Has-beens, less-beens, human beens — may I have that? May I use it?”
But the waiting ear of Mrs. Sabbatani catches the click of the closing street door. Sarah is back from the shadowy embraces of Tyrone Power. ‘Drink up the nice tea, eat up the nice cake. Excuse me,’ she says, and runs downstairs.
‘_What is it in English?_’ says Catchy, laughing in the act of swallowing a mouthful of cheese-cake, and spattering particles like a charge from a sawn-off shot-gun.
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 schooclass="underline" ‘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 you — switch the electric fan on. The place stinks of stale smoke. \Vhy don’t you get yourselves a proper ventilating system? It’s enough to turn one’s stomach. But I suppose the crowd you get in here would die if they saw a bit of daylight or got a breath of fresh air — like clothes-moths. No wonder everything’s going to the dogs. God, what a generation!’
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.’