Snow’s was nearly empty. He sat down at the table where once Spicer had sat, but he was not served by Rose. A strange girl came to take his order. He said awkwardly, ‘Isn’t Rose here?’
‘She’s busy.’
‘Could I see her?’
‘She’s talking to someone up in her room. You can’t go there. You’ll have to wait.’
The Boy put half a crown on the table. ‘Where is it?’
The girl hesitated. ‘The manageress would bawl Hell.’
‘Where’s the manageress?’
‘She’s out.’
The Boy put another half-crown on the table.
‘Through the service door,’ the girl said, ‘and straight up the stairs. There’s a woman with her though—’
He heard the woman’s voice before he reached the top of the stairs. She was saying, ‘I only want to speak to you for your own good,’ but he had to strain to catch Rose’s reply.
‘Let me be, why don’t you let me be?’
‘It’s the business of anyone who thinks right.’
The Boy could see into the room now from the head of the stairs, though the broad back, the large loose dress, the square hips of the woman nearly blocked his view of Rose who stood back against the wall in an attitude of sullen defiance. Small and bony in the black cotton dress and the white apron, her eyes stained but tearless, startled and determined, she carried her courage with a kind of comic inadequacy, like the little man in the bowler put up by the management to challenge the strong man at a fair. She said, ‘You’d better let me be.’
It was Nelson Place and Manor Street which stood there in the servant’s bedroom, and for a moment he felt no antagonism but a faint nostalgia. He was aware that she belonged to his life, like a room or a chair: she was something which completed him. He thought: She’s got more guts than Spicer. What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn’t get along without goodness. He said softly, ‘What are you worrying my girl about?’ and the claim he made was curiously sweet to his ears, like a refinement of cruelty. After all, though he had aimed higher than Rose, he had this comfort: she couldn’t have gone lower than himself. He stood there, with a smirk on his face, when the woman turned. ‘Between the stirrup and the ground’—he had learnt the fallacy of that comfort: if he had attached to himself some bright brassy skirt, like the ones he’d seen at the Cosmopolitan, his triumph after all wouldn’t have been so great. He smirked at the pair of them, nostalgia driven out by a surge of sad sensuality. She was good, he’d discovered that, and he was damned: they were made for each other.
‘You leave her alone,’ the woman said. ‘I know all about you.’ It was as if she were in a strange country: the typical Englishwoman abroad. She hadn’t even got a phrase book. She was as far from either of them as she was from Hell—or Heaven. Good or evil lived in the same country, spoke the same language, came together like old friends, feeling the same completion, touching hands beside the iron bedstead. ‘You want to do what’s Right, Rose?’ she implored.
Rose whispered again, ‘You let us be.’
‘You’re a Good Girl, Rose. You don’t want anything to do with him.’
‘You don’t know a thing.’
There was nothing she could do at the moment but threaten from the door. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet. I’ve got friends.’
The Boy watched her go with amazement. He said, ‘Who the hell is she?’
‘I don’t know,’ Rose said.
‘I never seen her before.’ A memory pricked him and passed: it would return. ‘What did she want?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re a good girl, Rose,’ the Boy said, pressing his fingers round the sharp wrist.
She shook her head. ‘I’m bad.’ She implored him, ‘I want to be bad if she’s good and you—’
‘You’ll never be anything but good,’ the Boy said. ‘There’s some wouldn’t like you for that, but I don’t care.’
‘I’ll do anything for you. Tell me what to do. I don’t want to be like her.’
‘It’s not what you do,’ the Boy said, ‘it’s what you think.’ He boasted. ‘It’s in the blood. Perhaps when they christened me, the holy water didn’t take. I never howled the devil out.’
‘Is she good?’
‘She?’ The Boy laughed. ‘She’s just nothing.’
‘We can’t stay here,’ Rose said. ‘I wish we could.’ She looked round her at a badly foxed steel engraving of Van Tromp’s victory, the three black bedsteads, the two mirrors, the single chest of drawers, the pale mauve knots of flowers on the wallpaper, as if she were safer here than she could ever be in the squally summer night outside. ‘It’s a nice room.’ She wanted to share it with him until it became a home for both of them.
‘How’d you like to leave this place?’
‘Snow’s. Oh no, it’s a good place. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than Snow’s.’
‘I mean marry me?’
‘We aren’t old enough.’
‘It could be managed. There are ways.’ He dropped her wrist and put on a careless air. ‘If you wanted. I don’t mind.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I want it. But they’ll never let us.’
He explained airily, ‘It couldn’t be in church, not at first. There’d be difficulties. Are you afraid?’
‘I’m not afraid,’ she said. ‘But will they let us?’
‘My lawyer’ll manage somehow.’
‘You got a lawyer?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘It sounds somehow—grand—and old.’
‘A man can’t get along without a lawyer.’
She said, ‘It’s not where I always thought it would be.’
‘Where what would be?’
‘Someone asking me to marry him. I thought—in the pictures or maybe at night on the front. But this is best,’ she said, looking from Van Tromp’s victory to the two looking-glasses. She came away from the wall and lifted her face to him. He knew what was expected of him; he regarded her unmade-up mouth with faint nausea. Saturday night, eleven o’clock, the primeval exercise. He pressed his hard puritanical mouth on hers and tasted again the sweetish smell of the human skin. He would have preferred the taste of Coty powder or Kissproof Lipstick or any chemical compound. He shut his eyes and when he opened them again it was to see her waiting like a blind girl, for further alms. It shocked him that she had been unable to detect his repulsion. She said, ‘You know what that means?’
‘What means?’
‘It means I’ll never let you down, never, never, never.’
She belonged to him like a room or a chair: the Boy fetched up a smile for the blind lost face, uneasily, with obscure shame.
PART FIVE
1
Everything went well: the inquest never even got on to the newspaper posters: no questions asked. The Boy walked back with Dallow, he should have felt triumphant. He said, ‘I wouldn’t trust Cubitt if Cubitt knew.’
‘Cubitt won’t know. Prewitt is scared to say a thing—and you know I don’t talk, Pinkie.’
‘I’ve got a feeling we’re being followed, Dallow.’
Dallow looked behind. ‘No one. I know every bogy in Brighton.’
‘No woman?’
‘No. Who are you thinking of?’
‘I don’t know.’
The blind band came up the kerb, scraping the sides of their shoes along the edge, feeling their way in the brilliant light, sweating a little. The Boy walked up the side of the road to meet them. The music they played was plaintive, pitying, something out of a hymn book about burdens: it was like a voice prophesying sorrow at the moment of victory. The Boy met the leader and pushed him out of the way, swearing at him softly, and the whole band hearing their leader move shifted uneasily a foot into the roadway and stood there stranded till the Boy was safely by, like barques becalmed on a huge and landless Atlantic. Then they edged back feeling for the landfall of the pavement.
‘What’s up w
ith you, Pinkie?’ Dallow said. ‘They’re blind.’
‘Why should I get out of my way for a beggar?’ but he hadn’t realized they were blind, he was shocked by his own action. It was as if he were being driven too far down a road he only wanted to travel a certain distance. He stood and leant on the rail of the front while the mid-week crowd passed and the hard sun flattened.
‘What’s on your mind, Pinkie?’
‘To think of all this trouble over Hale. He deserved what he got, but if I’d known how it would go maybe I’d have let him live. Maybe he wasn’t worth killing. A dirty little journalist who played in with Colleoni and got Kite killed. Why should anyone bother about him?’ He looked suddenly over his shoulder. ‘Have I seen that geezer before?’
‘He’s only a visitor.’
‘I thought I’d seen his tie.’
‘Hundreds in the shops. If you were a drinking man I’d say what you needed was a pick-up. Why, Pinkie, everything’s going fine. No questions asked.’
‘There were only two people could hang us, Spicer and the girl. I’ve killed Spicer and I’m marrying the girl. Seems to me I’m doing everything.’
‘Well, we’ll be safe now.’
‘Oh yes, you’ll be safe. It’s me who runs all the risk. You know I killed Spicer. Prewitt knows. It only wants Cubitt and I’ll need a massacre to put me right this time.’
‘You oughtn’t to talk that way to me, Pinkie. You’ve been all bottled up since Kite died. What you want’s a bit of fun.’
‘I liked Kite,’ the Boy said. He stared straight out towards France, an unknown land. At his back beyond the Cosmopolitan, Old Steyne, the Lewes Road, stood the downs, villages, cattle round the dewponds, another unknown land. This was his territory, the populous foreshore, a few thousand acres of houses, a narrow peninsula of electrified track running to London, two or three railway stations with their buffets and buns. It had been Kite’s territory, it had been good enough for Kite, and when Kite had died in the waiting-room at St Pancras, it had been as if a father had died, leaving him an inheritance it was his duty never to leave for strange acres. He had inherited even the mannerisms, the bitten thumb nail, the soft drinks. The sun slid off the sea and like a cuttle fish shot into the sky the stain of agonies and endurances.
‘Break out, Pinkie. Relax. Give yourself a chance. Come out with me and Cubitt to the Queen of Hearts and celebrate.’
‘You know I never touch a drink.’
‘You’ll have to on your wedding day. Whoever heard of a dry wedding?’
An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half-vulture and half-dove. In the end one always had to learn.
‘All right. I’ll come,’ the Boy said.
‘It’s the best road-house this side of London,’ Dallow encouraged him.
They drove out in the old Morris into the country. ‘I like a blow in the country,’ Dallow said. It was between lighting-up time and the real dark when the lamps of cars burn in the grey visibility as faintly and unnecessarily as the night lights in nurseries. The advertisements trailed along the arterial road: bungalows and a broken farm, short chalky grass where a hoarding had been pulled down, a windmill offering tea and lemonade, the great ruined sails gaping.
‘Poor old Spicer would have liked this ride,’ Cubitt said. The Boy sat beside Dallow who drove and Cubitt sat in the dicky. The Boy could see him in the driving mirror bouncing gently up and down on the defective springs.
The Queen of Hearts was floodlit behind the petrol pumps: a Tudor barn converted, a vestige of a farmyard left in the arrangement of the restaurant and bars: a swimming pool where the paddock had been. ‘We ought to ’ave brought some girls with us,’ Dallow said. ‘You can’t pick ’em up in this gaff. It’s real class.’
‘Come in the bar,’ Cubitt said and led the way. He stopped on the threshold and nodded towards the girl who sat and drank alone at the long steel bar under the old rafters. ‘We better say something, Pinkie. You know the kind of thing—he was a real good old pal, we sympathize with what you feel.’
‘What are you clapping about?’
‘That’s Spicer’s girl,’ Cubitt said.
The Boy stood in the doorway and took her reluctantly in: hair fair as silver, wide vacuous brow, trim little buttocks shaped by the high seat, alone with her glass and her grief.
‘How’s things, Sylvie?’ Cubitt said.
‘Awful.’
‘Terrible, wasn’t it? He was a good pal. One of the best.’
‘You were there, weren’t you?’ she said to Dallow.
‘Frank ought to ’ave mended that stair,’ Dallow said. ‘Meet Pinkie, Sylvie, the best one in our mob.’
‘Were you there, too?’
‘He wasn’t there,’ Dallow said.
‘Have another drink?’ the Boy said.
Sylvie drained her glass. ‘I don’t mind if I do. A Sidecar.’
‘Two Scotch, a Sidecar, a grape-fruit squash.’
‘Why,’ Sylvie said, ‘don’t you drink?’
‘No.’
‘I bet you don’t go with girls either.’
‘You got him, Sylvie,’ Cubitt said, ‘first shot.’
‘I admire a man like that,’ Sylvie said. ‘I think it’s wonderful to be fit. Spicie always said you’d break out one day—and then—oh gosh, how wonderful.’ She put down her glass, miscalculated, upset the cocktail. She said, ‘I’m not drunk. I’m upset about poor Spicie.’
‘Go on, Pinkie,’ Dallow said, ‘have a drink. It’ll jerk you up.’ He explained to Sylvie, ‘He’s upset too.’ In the dance hall the band was playing, ‘Love me tonight, And forget in daylight, All our delight. . . ’
‘Have a drink,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’ve been awful upset. You can see I’ve been crying. Aren’t my eyes awful. . . Why, I hardly dared show myself. I can see why people go into monasteries.’ The music beat on the Boy’s resistance: he watched with a kind of horror and curiosity Spicer’s girl friend; she knew the game. He shook his head, speechless in his scared pride. He knew what he was good at: he was the top: there was no limit to his ambition: nothing must lay him open to the mockery of people more experienced than he. To be compared with Spicer and found wanting. . . his eyes shifted miserably and the music wailed its tidings—‘Forget in daylight’—about the game of which they all knew so much more than he did.
‘Spicie said he didn’t think you’d ever had a girl,’ Sylvie said.
‘There was plenty Spicer didn’t know.’
‘You’re awful young to be so famous.’
‘You and me had better go away,” Cubitt said to Dallow. ‘Seems we’re not wanted. Come an’ lamp the bathing belles.’ They moved heavily out of sight. ‘Dallie just knows when I like a boy,’ Sylvie said.
‘Who’s Dallie?’
‘Your friend, Mr Dallow, silly. Do you dance—why, I don’t even know your proper name?’ He watched her with scared lust. She had belonged to Spicer: her voice had wailed up the telephone wires making assignations: he had received letters in mauve envelopes, addressed to him: even Spicer had had something to be proud of, to show to friends—‘my girl’. He remembered some flowers which had come to Frank’s labelled ‘Broken-hearted’. He was fascinated by her infidelity. She belonged to nobody—unlike a table or a chair. He said slowly, putting his arm round her to take her glass and pressing her breast clumsily, ‘I’m going to be married in a day or two.’ It was as if he were staking a claim to his share of infidelity: he wasn’t to be beaten by experience. He lifted her glass and drank it. The sweetness dripped down his throat, his first alcohol touched the palate like a bad smell: this was what people called pleasure—this and the game. He put his h
and on her thigh with a kind of horror: Rose and he: forty-eight hours after Prewitt had arranged things: alone in God knows what apartment—what then, what then? He knew the traditional actions as a man may know the principles of gunnery in chalk on a blackboard, but to translate the knowledge to action, to the smashed village and the ravaged woman, one needed help from the nerves. His own were frozen with repulsion: to be touched, to give oneself away, to lay oneself open—he had held intimacy back as long as he could at the end of a razor blade.
He said, ‘Come on. Let’s dance.’
They circulated slowly in the dance hall. To be beaten by experience was bad enough, but to be beaten by greenness and innocence, by a girl who carried plates at Snow’s, by a little bitch of sixteen years. . .
‘Spicie thought a lot of you,’ Sylvie said.
‘Come out to the cars,’ the Boy said.
‘I couldn’t, not with Spicie dead only yesterday.’
They stood and clapped and then the dance began again. The shaker clacked in the bar, and the leaves of one small tree were pressed against the window beyond the big drum and the saxophone.
‘I like the country. It makes me feel romantic. Do you like the country?’
‘No.’
‘This is real country. I saw a hen just now. They use their own eggs in the gin slings.’
‘Come out to the cars.’
‘I feel that way, too. O gosh, wouldn’t it be fine? But I can’t, not with poor Spicie. . . ’
‘You sent flowers, didn’t you, you been crying. . . ’
‘My eyes are awful.’
‘What more can you do?’
‘It broke my heart. Poor Spicie going off like that.’
‘I know. I saw your wreath.’
‘It does seem awful, doesn’t it? Dancing with you like this and him. . . ’
‘Come to the cars.’
‘Poor Spicie,’ but she led the way, and he noticed with uneasiness how she ran—literally ran—across the lit corner of what had once been a farmyard towards the dark car-park and the game. He thought with sickness, ‘In three minutes I shall know.’
‘Which is your car?’ Sylvie asked.
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