Brighton Rock

Graham Green

Brighton Rock

(First published in 1938)

"This were a fine reign:

To do ill and not hear of it again."

--THE WITCH OP EDMONTON

NOTE

During the summer season in England certain popular newspapers organise treasure hunts at the seaside. They publish the photograph of a reporter and print his itinerary at the particular town he is visiting. Anyone who, while carrying a copy of the paper, addresses him, usually under some fantastic name, in a set form of words, receives a money prize--he also distributes along his route cards which can be exchanged for smaller prizes. Next day in the paper the reporter describes the chase. Of course, the character of Hale is not drawn from that of any actual newspaperman.

--G. G.

Brighton Rock is a form of stick candy as characteristic of English seaside resorts as salt-water taffy is of the American. The word "Brighton" appears on the ends of the stick at no matter what point it is broken off.

--ED.

PART ONE

HALE knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't belong belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen's Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.

It had seemed quite easy to Hale to be lost in Brighton. Fifty thousand people besides himself were down for the day, and for quite a while he gave himself up to the good day, drinking gins and tonics wherever his programme allowed. For he had to stick closely to a programme: from ten till eleven Queen's Road and Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle Square, and after that he had to make his way all down the parade to West Pier and then to the station by the Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and widely advertised sentry go.

Advertised on every Messenger poster: "Kolley Kibber in Brighton today." In his pocket he had a packet of cards to distribute in hidden places along his route: those who found them would receive ten shillings from the Messenger, but the big prize was reserved for whoever challenged Hale in the proper form of words and with a copy of the Messenger in his hand: "You are Mr. Kolley Kibber. I claim the Daily Messenger prize."

This was Hale's job, to do sentry go, until a challenger released him, in every seaside town in turn: yesterday Southend, today Brighton, tomorrow He drank his gin and tonic hastily as a clock struck eleven, and moved out of Castle Square. Kolley Kibber always played fair, always wore the same kind of hat as in the photograph the Messenger printed, was always on time. Yesterday in Southend he had been unchallenged: the paper liked to save its guineas occasionally--but not too often. It was his duty today to be spotted and it was his inclination too. There were reasons why he didn't feel too safe in Brighton, even in a Whitsun crowd.

He leant against the rail near the Palace Pier and showed his face to the crowd as it uncoiled endlessly past him, like a twisted piece of wire, two by two, each with an air of sober and determined gaiety.

They had stood all the way from Victoria in crowded carriages, they would have to wait in queues for lunch, at midnight half asleep they would rock back in trains an hour late to the cramped streets and the closed pubs and the weary walk home. With immense labour and immense patience they extricated from the long day the grain of pleasure: this sun, this music, the rattle of the miniature cars, the ghost train diving between the grinning skeletons under the Aquarium promenade, the sticks of Brighton rock, the paper sailors-caps.

Nobody paid any attention to Hale; no one seemed to be carrying a Messenger. He deposited one of his cards carefully on the top of a little basket and moved on, with his bitten nails and his inky fingers, alone. He felt his loneliness only after his third gin: until then he despised the crowd, but afterwards he felt his kinship. He had come out of the same streets, but he was condemned by his higher pay to pretend to want other things; and all the time the piers, the peep shows, pulled at his heart. He wanted to get back but all he could do was to carry his sneer along the front, the badge of loneliness. Somewhere out of sight a woman was singing: "When I came up from Brighton by the train": a rich Guinness voice, a voice from a public bar. Hale turned into the private saloon and watched her big blown charms across two bars and through a glass partition.

She wasn't old--somewhere in the late thirties or the early forties--and she was only a little drunk in a friendly accommodating way. You thought of sucking babies when you looked at her, but if she'd borne them she hadn't let them pull her down: she took care of herself. Her lipstick told you that, the confidence of her big body. She was well covered, but she wasn't careless--she kept her lines for those who cared for lines.

Hale did. He was a small man and he watched her with covetous envy over the empty glasses tipped up in the lead trough, over the beer handles, between the shoulders of the two serving in the public bar. "Give me another, Lily," one of them said and she began: "One night in an alley Lord Rothschild said to me." She never got beyond a few lines. She wanted to laugh too much to give her voice a chance, but she had an inexhaustible memory for ballads. Hale had never heard one of them before; with his glass to his lips he watched her with nostalgia; she was off again on a song which must have dated back to the Australian gold rush.

"Fred," a voice said behind him, "Fred."

The gin slopped out of Hale's glass onto the bar. A boy of about seventeen watched him from the door. A shabby smart suit, the cloth too thin from much wear, a face of starved intensity, a kind of hideous and unnatural pride.

"Who are you Freding?" Hale said. "I'm not Fred,"

"It don't make any difference," the boy said. He turned back towards the door, keeping an eye on Hale over his narrow shoulder.

"Where are you going?"

"Got to tell your friends," the boy said.

They were alone in the saloon bar except for an old commissionaire, who slept over a pint glass of old and mild. "Listen," Hale said, "have a drink. Come and sit down over here and have a drink."

"Got to be going," the boy said. "You know I don't drink, Fred. You forget a lot, don't you?"

"It won't make any difference having one drink. A soft drink."

"It'll have to be a quick one," the boy said. He watched Hale all the time, closely and with wonder--you might expect a hunter searching through the jungle for some half-fabulous beast to look like that at the spotted lion or the pygmy elephant before the kill. "A grapefruit squash," he said.

"Go on, Lily," the voices implored in the public bar.

"Give us another, Lily," and the boy took his eyes for the first time from Hale and looked across the partition at the big breasts and the blown charm.

"A double whisky and a grapefruit squash," Hale said. He carried them to a table, but the boy didn't follow. He was watching the woman with an expression of furious distaste. Hale felt as if hatred had been momentarily loosened like handcuffs to be fastened round another's wrists. He tried to joke: "A cheery soul."

"Soul," the boy said. "You've no cause to talk about souls." He turned his hatred back on Hale, drinking down the grapefruit squash in a single draught.

Hale said: "I'm only here for my job. Just for the day. I'm Kolley Kibber."

"You're Fred," the boy said.

"All right," Hale said, "I'm Fred. But I've got a card in my pocket which'll be worth ten bob to you."

"I know all about the cards," the boy said. He had a fair smooth skin, the faintest down, and his grey eyes had an effect of heartlessness like those of an old man in whom human feeling has died. "We were all reading about you," he said, "in the paper this morning," and suddenly he sniggered as if he'd just seen the point of a dirty story.

"You can have one," Hale said. "Look, take this Messenger. Read what it says there. You can have the whole prize. Ten guineas," he said. "You'll only have to send this form to the Messenger."

"Then they don't trust you with the cash," the boy said, and in the other bar Lily began to sing: "We met 'twas in a crowd and I thought he would shun me."

"Christ," the boy said, "won't anybody stop that buer's mouth?"

"I'll give you a fiver," Hale said. "It's all I've got on me. That and my ticket."

"You won't want your ticket," the boy said.

"I wore my bridal robe, and I rivall'd its whiteness."

The boy rose furiously and, giving way to a little vicious spurt of hatred--at the song? at the man?--he dropped his empty glass onto the floor. "The gentleman'll pay," he said to the barman and swung through the door of the private lounge. It was then Hale realized that they meant to murder him.

"A wreath of orange blossoms,

When next we met, she wore;

The expression of her features

Was more thoughtful than before."

The commissionaire slept on and Hale watched Lily from the deserted elegant lounge. Her big breasts pointed through the thin vulgar summer dress, and he thought: I must get away from here, I must get away: sadly and desperately watching her, as if he were gazing at life itself in the public bar. But he couldn't get away: he had his job to do, they were particular on the Messenger--it was a good paper to be on, and a little flare of pride went up in Hale's heart when he thought of the long pilgrimage behind him: selling newspapers at street corners, the reporter's job at thirty bob a week on the little local paper with a circulation of ten thousand, the five years in Sheffield. He was damned, he told himself with the temporary courage of another whisky, if he'd let that mob frighten him into spoiling his job. What could they do while he had people round him? They hadn't the nerve to kill him in broad day before witnesses--he was safe with the fifty thousand visitors.

"Come on over here, lonely heart." He didn't realize at first she was speaking to him, until he saw all the faces in the public bar grinning across at him, and suddenly he thought how easily the mob could get at him with only the sleeping commissionaire to keep him company. There was no need to go outside to reach the other bar, he had only to make a semi-circle through three doors, by way of the saloon bar, the "ladies only."

"What'11 you have?" he said, approaching the big woman with starved gratitude. She could save my life, he thought, if she'd let me stick to her.

"I'll have a port," she said.

"One port," Hale said.

"Aren't you having one?"

"No," Hale said, "I've drunk enough. I mustn't get sleepy."

"Why ever not on a holiday? Have a Bass on me."

"I don't like Bass." He looked at his watch. It was one o'clock. His programme fretted at his mind. He had to leave cards in every section: the paper in that way kept a check on him--they could always tell if he scamped his job. "Come and have a bite," he implored her.

"Hark at him," she called to her friends. Her warm port-winy laugh filled all the bars. "Getting fresh, eh? I wouldn't trust myself."

"Don't you go, Lily," they told her. "He's not safe."

"I wouldn't trust myself," she repeated, closing one soft friendly cow-like eye.

There was a way, Hale knew, to make her come. He had known the way once. On thirty bob a week he would have been at home with her; he would have known the right phrase, the right joke, to cut her out from among her friends, to be friendly at a snack bar.

But he'd lost touch. He had nothing to say; he could only repeat: "Come and have a bite."

"Where shall we go, Sir Horace? To the Old Ship?"

"Yes," Hale said. "If you like. The Old Ship."

"Hear that?" she told them in all the bars, the two old dames in black bonnets in the ladies', the commissionaire who slept on alone in the private, her own half-dozen cronies. "This gentleman's invited me to the Old Ship," she said in a mock-refined voice. "Tomorrow I shall be delighted, but today I have a prior engagement at the Dirty Dog."

Hale turned hopelessly to the door. The boy, he thought, would not have had time to warn the others yet. He would be safe at lunch; it was the hour he had to pass after lunch he dreaded most. The woman said: "Are you sick or something?"

His eyes turned to the big breasts; she was like darkness to him, shelter, knowledge, common-sense; his heart ached at the sight; but, in his little bitten inky cynical framework of bone, pride bobbed up again, taunting him "back to the womb... be a mother to you... no more standing on your own feet."

"No," he said, "I'm not sick. I'm all right."

"You look queer," she said in a friendly concerned way.

"I'm all right," he said. "Hungry. That's all."

"Why not have a bite here?" the woman said. "You could do him a ham sandwich, couldn't you, Bill?" and the barman said, Yes, he could do a ham sandwich.

"No," Hale said, "I've got to be getting on."

Getting on. Down the front, mixing as quickly as possible with the current of the crowd, glancing to right and left of him and over each shoulder in turn.

He could see no familiar face anywhere, but he felt no relief. He thought he could lose himself safely in a crowd, but now the people he was among seemed like a thick forest in which a native could arrange his poisoned ambush. He couldn't see beyond the man in flannels just in front, and when he turned, his vision was blocked by a brilliant scarlet blouse. Three old ladies went driving by in an open horse-drawn carriage: the gentle clatter faded like peace. That was how some people still lived.

Hale crossed the road away from the front. There were fewer people there: he could walk faster and go further. They were drinking cocktails on the terrace of the Grand, a delicate pastiche of a Victorian sunshade twisted its ribbons and flowers in the sun, and a man like a retired statesman, all silver hair and powdered skin and double old-fashioned eyeglass, let life slip naturally, with dignity, away from him, sitting over a sherry. Down the steps of the Cosmopolitan came a couple of expensive women with bright brass hair and ermine coats and heads close together like parrots exchanging metallic confidences. "My dear, I said quite coldly, if you haven't learnt the Del Rey perm, all I can say..." and they flashed their pointed painted nails at each other and cackled. For the first time in five years Kolley Kibber was late in his programme. At the foot of the Cosmopolitan steps, in the shadow the huge bizarre building cast, he remembered that the mob had bought his paper. They hadn't needed to watch the public house for him: they knew where to expect him.

A mounted policeman came up the road: the lovely cared-for chestnut beast stepping delicately on the hot macadam, like an expensive toy a millionaire buys for his children; you admired the finish, the leather as deeply glowing as an old mahogany table top, the bright silver badge; it never occurred to you that the toy was for use. It never occurred to Hale, watching the policeman pass; he couldn't appeal to him. A man stood by the kerb selling objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg and arm and shoulder; and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head aside delicately like a dowager. "Shoelaces," the man said hopelessly to Hale, "matches." Hale didn't hear him. "Razor blades."

Hale went by, the words lodged securely in his brain: the thought of the thin wound and the sharpness of the agony. That was how Kite was killed.

Twenty yards down the road he saw Cubitt. Cubitt was a big man, with red hair cut _en brosse_ and freckles.

He saw Hale, but he made no sign of recognition, leaning carelessly against a pillar box watching Hale.

A postman came to collect and Cubitt shifted. Hale could see him exchanging a joke with the postman and the postman laughed and filled his bag and all the time Cubitt looked away from him down the street waiting for Hale. Hale knew exactly what he'd do; he knew the whole bunch; Cubitt was slow and had a friendly way with him. He'd simply link his arm with Hale's, draw him on where he wanted him to go.

But the old desperate pride persisted, a pride of intellect. He was scared sick, but he told himself: "I'm not going to die." He jested hollowly: "I'm not frontpage stuff." [] this was real: the two women getting into a taxi, the band playing on the Palace Pier, "tablets" fading in white smoke on the pale pure sky; not red-haired Cubitt waiting by the pillar box. Hale turned again and crossed the road, made back towards the West Pier walking fast--he wasn't running away, he had a plan.

He had only, he told himself, to find a girl; there must be hundreds waiting to be picked up on a Whitsun holiday, to be given a drink and taken to dance at Sherry's and presently home, drunk and affectionate, in the corridor carriage. That was the best way: to carry a witness round with him. It would be no good, even if his pride had allowed him, to go to the station now. They would be watching it for certain, and it was always easy to kill a lonely man at a railway station: they had only to gather close round a carriage door or fix you in the crush at the barrier; it was at a station that Colleoni's mob had killed Kite.

All down the front the girls sat in the twopenny deck chairs, waiting to be picked, all who had not brought their boys with them: clerks, shop girls, hairdressers--you could pick out the hairdressers by their new and daring perms, by their beautifully manicured nails: they had all waited late at their shops the night before, preparing each other till midnight. Now they were sleepy and sleek in the sun.

In front of the chairs the men strolled in twos and threes, wearing their summer suits for the first time, knifeedged silver-grey trousers and elegant shirts--they didn't look as if they cared a damn whether they got a girl or not, and among them Hale went in his seedy suit and his string tie and his striped shirt and his inkstains, ten years older, and desperate for a girl.

He offered them cigarettes and they stared at him like duchesses with large cold eyes and said: "I don't smoke, thenk you," and twenty yards behind him he knew, without turning his head, that Cubitt strolled.

It made Hale's manner strange. He couldn't help showing his desperation. He could hear the girls laughing at him after he'd gone, at his clothes and the way he talked. There was a deep humility in Hale--his pride was only in his profession: he disliked himself before the glass, the bony legs and the pigeon breast, and he dressed shabbily and carelessly as a sign, a sign that he didn't expect any woman to be interested. Now he gave up the pretty ones, the smart ones, and looked despairingly down the chairs for someone plain enough to be glad of his attentions.

Surely, he thought, this girl, smiling with hungry hope at a fat spotty creature in pink whose feet hardly touched the ground. He sat down in an empty chair beside her and gazed at the remote and neglected sea coiling round the piles of the West Pier.

"Cigarette?" he said presently.

"I don't mind if I do," the girl said. The words were sweet, like a reprieve.

"It's nice here," the fat girl said.

"Down from town?"

"Yes."

"Well," Hale said, "you aren't going to sit here alone all day, are you?"

"Oh, I don't know," the girl said.

"I thought of going to have something to eat, and then we might--"

"We" the girl said; "you're a fresh one."

"Well, you aren't going to sit here alone all day, are you?"

"Who said I was?" the fat girl said. "Doesn't mean I'm going with you."

"Come and have a drink anyway and talk about it."

"I wouldn't mind," the girl said, opening a compact and covering her spots deeper.

"Come along then," Hale said.

"Got a friend?" the girl said.

"I'm all alone," Hale said.

"Oh, then, I couldn't," the girl said. "Not possibly. I couldn't leave my friend all alone," and for the first time Hale observed in the chair beyond her a pale bloodless creature waiting avidly for his reply.

"But you'd like to come?" Hale implored.

"Oh, yes, but I couldn't possibly."

"Your friend won't mind. She'll find someone."

"Oh, no. I couldn't leave her alone." She stared pastily and impassively at the sea.

"You wouldn't mind, would you?" Hale leant forward and begged the bloodless image, and it screeched with embarrassed laughter back at him.

"She doesn't know anyone," the fat girl said.

"She'll find somebody."

"Would you, Delia?" The pasty girl leant her head close to her friend's and they consulted together; every now and then Delia squealed.

"That's all right then," Hale said, "you'll come?"

"Couldn't you find a friend?"

"I don't know anyone here," Hale said. "Come along. I'll take you anywhere you like for lunch. All I want", he grinned miserably, "is for you to stick close."

"No," the fat girl said. "I couldn't possibly, not without my friend."

"Well, both of you come along then," Hale said.

"It wouldn't be much fun for Delia," the fat girl said.

A boy's voice interrupted them. "So there you arey Fred," it said, and Hale looked up at the grey inhuman seventeen-year-old eyes.

"Why," the fat girl squealed, "he said he hadn't got a friend."

"You can't believe what Fred says," the voice said.

"Now we can make a proper party," the fat girl said. "This is my friend Delia. I'm Molly."

"Pleased to meet you," the boy said. "Where are we going, Fred?"

"I'm hungry," the fat girl said. "I bet you're hungry too, Delia?" and Delia wriggled and squealed.

"I know a good place," the boy said.

"Do they have sundaes?"

"The best sundaes," he reassured her in his serious dead voice.

"That's what I want, a sundae. Delia likes splits best."

"We'll be going, Fred," the boy said.

Hale rose. His hands were shaking. This was real now: the boy, the razor cut, life going out with the blood in pain--not the deck chairs and the permanent waves, the miniature cars tearing round the curve on the Palace Pier. The ground moved under his feet, and only the thought of where they might take him while he was unconscious saved him from fainting.

But even then common pride, the instinct not to make a scene, remained overpoweringly strong; embarrassment had more force than terror, it prevented his crying his fear aloud, it even urged him to go quietly.

If the boy had not spoken again, he might have gone.

"We'd better get moving, Fred," the boy said.

"No," Hale said. "I'm not coming. I don't know him. My name's not Fred. I've never seen him before. He's just getting fresh," and he walked rapidly away, with his head down, hopeless now: there wasn't time; only anxious to keep moving, to keep out in the clear sun... until from far down the front he heard the woman's winy voice singing, singing of brides and bouquets, of lilies and mourning shrouds, a Victorian ballad, and he moved towards it as someone who has been lost a long while in a desert makes for the glow of a fire.

"Why," she said, "if it isn't lonely heart," and to his astonishment she was all by herself in a desert of chairs. "They've gone to the Gents'," she said.

"Can I sit down?" Hale said. His voice broke with relief.

"If you've got twopence," she said. "I haven't."

She began to laugh, the great breasts pushing at her dress. "Someone pinched my bag," she said. "Every penny I've got." He watched her with astonishment.

"Oh," she said, "that's not the funny part. It's the letters. He'll have had all Tom's letters to read. Were they passionate! Tom'll be crazy when he hears."

"You'll be wanting some money," Hale said.

"Oh," she said, "I'm not worrying. Some nice feller will lend me ten bob when they come out of the Gents'."

"They your friends?" Hale said.

"I met 'em in the pub," she said.

"You think", Hale said, "they'll come back from the Gents'?"

"My," she said, "you don't think?" She gazed up the parade, then looked at Hale and began to laugh again. "You win," she said. "They've pulled my leg properly. But there was only ten bob and Tom's letters."

"Will you have lunch with me now?" Hale said.

"I had a snack in the pub," she said. "They treated me to that, so I got something out of my ten bob."

"Have a little more."

"No, I don't fancy any more," she said, and leaning far back in the deck chair with her skirt pulled up to her knees exposing her fine legs, with an air of ribald luxury she added: "What a day!" sparkling back at the bright sea. "All the same," she said, "they'll wish they'd never been born. I'm a sticker where right's concerned."

"Your name's Lily?" Hale asked. He couldn't see the boy any more: he'd gone; Cubitt had gone. There was nobody he could recognise as far as he could see.

"That's what they called me," she said. "My real name's Ida." The old and vulgarised Grecian name recovered a little dignity. She said: "You look poorly. You ought to go off and eat somewhere."

"Not if you won't come," Hale said. "I only want to stay here with you."

"Why, that's a nice speech," she said. "I wish Tom could hear you--he writes passionate, but when it comes to talking..."

"Does he want to marry you?" Hale said; she smelt of soap and wine, comfort and peace and a slow sleepy physical enjoyment, a touch of the nursery and the mother stole from the big tipsy mouth, the magnificent breasts and legs, and reached Hale's withered and frightened brain.

"He was married to me once," Ida said. "But he didn't know when he was lucky. Now he wants to come back. You should see his letters. I'd show them you if they hadn't been stolen. He ought to be ashamed," she said, laughing with pleasure, "writing such things. You'd never think. And he was such a quiet fellow too. Well, I always say it's fun to be alive."

"Will you take him back?" Hale said, peering out from the valley of the shadow with sourness and envy.

"I should think not," Ida said. "I know all about him. There'd be no thrill. If I wanted a man, I could do better than that now." She wasn't boastful: only a little drunk and happy. "I could marry money if I chose."

"And how do you live now?" Hale said.

"From hand to mouth," she said and winked at him and made the motion of tipping a glass. "What's your name?"

"Fred." He said it automatically: it was the name he always gave to chance acquaintances; from some obscure motive of secrecy he shielded his own name, Charles; from childhood he had loved secrecy, a hiding place, the dark; but it was in the dark he had met Kite, the boy, Cubitt, the whole mob.

"And how do you live?" she asked cheerfully. Men always liked to tell, and she liked to hear. She had an immense store of masculine experiences.

"Betting," he said promptly, putting up his barrier of evasion.

"I like a flutter myself. Could you give me a tip, I wonder, for Brighton on Saturday?"

"Black Boy," Hale said, "in the four o'clock."

"He's twenty to one."

Hale looked at her with respect. "Take it or leave it."

"Oh, I'll take it," Ida said. "I always take a tip."

"Whoever gives it you?"

"That's my system. Will you be there?"

"No," Hale said. "I can't make it." He put his hand on her wrist. He wasn't going to run any more risks. He'd tell the news editor he was taken ill; he'd resign; he'd do anything. Life was here beside him, he wasn't going to play around with death. "Come to the station with me," he said. "Come back to town with me."

"On a day like this?" Ida said. "Not me. You've had too much town. You look stuffed up. A blow along the front'll do you good. Besides there's lots of things I want to see. I want to see the Aquarium and Black Rock and I haven't been on the Palace Pier yet today. There's always something new on the Palace Pier. I'm out for a bit of fun."

"We'll do those and then--"

"When I make a day of it," Ida said, "I like to make a real day of it. I told you I'm a sticker."

"I don't mind," Hale said, "if you'll stay with me."

"Well, you can't steal my bag," Ida said. "But I warn you I like to spend. I'm not satisfied with a ring here and a shot there: I want all the shows."

"It's a long walk," Hale said, "to the Palace Pier in this sun. We better take a taxi."

But he made no immediate pass at Ida in the taxi, sitting there bonily crouched with his eyes on the parade: no sign of the boy or Cubitt in the bright broad day sweeping by.

He turned reluctantly back, and with the sense of her great open friendly breasts, fastened his mouth on hers and received the taste of port wine on his tongue, and saw in the driver's mirror the old 1925 Morris following behind, with its split and flapping top, its bent fender and cracked and discoloured windscreen.

He watched it with his mouth on hers, shaking against her as the taxi ground slowly along beside the parade.

"Give me breath," she said at last, pushing him off and straightening her hat. "You believe in hard work," she said. "It's you little fellows..." She could feel his nerves jumping under her hand, and she shouted quickly through the tube at the driver: "Don't stop. Go on back and round again." He was like a man with fever.

"You're sick," she said. "You oughtn't to be alone. What's the matter with you?"

He couldn't keep it in. "I'm going to die, I'm scared."

"Have you seen a doctor?"

"They are no good. They can't do anything."

"You oughtn't to be out alone," Ida said. "Did they tell you that--the doctors, I mean?"

"Yes," he said and put his mouth on hers again because when he kissed her he could watch in the mirror the old Morris vibrating after them down the parade.

She pushed him off again, but kept her arms round him. "They're crazy. You aren't that sick. You can't tell me I wouldn't know if you were that sick," she said. "I don't like to see a fellow throw up the sponge that way. It's a good world if you don't weaken."

"It's all right," he said, "long as you are here."

"That's better," she said, "be yourself," and letting down the window with a rush for the air to come in, she pushed her arm through his and said in a frightened gentle way: "You were just kidding, weren't you, when you said that about the doctors? It wasn't true, was it?"

"No," Hale said wearily, "it wasn't true."

"That's a boy," Ida said. "You nearly had me scared for a moment. Nice thing it would have been for me if you'd passed out in this taxi. Something for Tom to read about in the paper, I'd say. But men are funny with me that way. Always trying to make out there's something wrong, money or the wife or the heart. You aren't the first who said he was dying. Never anything infectious though. Want to make the most of their last hours and all the rest of it. It comes of me being so big, I suppose. They think I'll mother them. I'm not saying I didn't fall for it the first time. 'The doctors only give me a month,' he said to me--that was five years ago. I see him regular now in Henneky's. 'Hullo, you old ghost,' I always say to him, and he stands me oysters and a Guinness."

"No, I'm not sick," Hale said. "You needn't be scared." He wasn't going to let his pride down as much as that again, even in return for the peaceful and natural embrace. The Grand went by, the old statesman dozing out the day, the Metropolitan. "Here we are," Hale said. "You'll stay with me, won't you, even if I'm not sick?"

"Of course I will," Ida said, hiccuping gently as she stepped out. "I like you, Fred. I liked you the moment I saw you. You're a good sport, Fred. What's that crowd, there?" she asked with joyful curiosity, pointing to the gathering of neat and natty trousers, of bright blouses and bare arms and bleached and perfumed hair.

"With every watch I sell," a man was shouting in the middle of it all, "I give a free gift worth twenty times the value of the watch. Only a shilling, ladies and gents, it's only a shilling. With every watch I sell..."

"Get me a watch, Fred," Ida said, pushing him gently, "and give me threepence before you go. I want to get a wash." They stood on the pavement at the entrance to the Palace Pier; the crowd was thick around them, passing in and out of the turnstiles, watching the pedlar; there was no sign anywhere of the Morris car.

"You don't want a wash, Ida," Hale implored her. "You're fine."

"I've got to get a wash," she said, "I'm sweating all over. You just wait here. I'll only be two minutes."

"You won't get a good wash here," Hale said. "Come to a hotel and have a drink."

"I can't wait, Fred. Really I can't. Be a sport."

Hale said: "That ten shillings. You'd better have that too while I remember it."

"It's real good of you, Fred. Can you spare it?"

"Be quick, Ida," Hale said. "I'll be here. Just here. By this turnstile. You won't be long, will you? I'll be here," he repeated, putting his hand on a rail of the turnstile.

"Why," Ida said, "anyone'd think you were in love," and she carried the image of him quite tenderly in her mind down the steps to the Ladies' Lavatory: the small rather battered man with the nails bitten close (she missed nothing) and the inkstains and the hand clutching the rail. He's a good geezer, she said to herself, I liked the way he looked in that bar even if I did laugh at him, and she began to sing again, softly this time, in her warm winy voice: "One night in an alley Lord Rothschild said to me..." It was a long time since she'd hurried herself so for a man, and it wasn't more than four minutes before, cool and powdered and serene, she mounted into the bright Whitsun afternoon, to find him gone. He wasn't by the turnstile, he wasn't in the crowd by the pedlar; she forced herself into that to make sure and found herself facing the flushed, permanently irritated salesman. "What? Not give a shilling for a watch, and a free gift worth exactly twenty times the watch? I'm not saying the watch is worth much more than a shilling, though it's worth that for the looks alone, but with it a free gift twenty times--" She held out the ten-shilling note and got her small package and the change, thinking: 'he's probably gone to the Gents; he'll be back', and taking up her place by the turnstile, she opened the little envelope which wrapped the watch round. "Black Boy," she read, "in the four o'clock at Brighton," and thought tenderly and proudly: "That was his tip. He's a fellow who knows things," and prepared patiently and happily to wait for his return. She was a sticker. A clock away in the town struck half past one.

The Boy paid his threepence and went through the turnstile. He moved rigidly past the rows of deck chairs four deep where people were waiting for the orchestra to play. From behind he looked younger than he was, in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips--but when you met him face to face he looked older--the slaty eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went. The orchestra began to play; he felt the music as a movement in his belly: the violins wailed in his guts. He looked neither right nor left but went on.

In the Palace of Pleasure he made his way past the peep shows, the slot machines, and the quoits to a shooting booth. The shelves of dolls stared down with glassy innocence, like Virgins in a church repository.

The Boy looked up: chestnut ringlets, blue orbs, and painted cheeks; he thought Hail Mary... in the hour of our death. "I'll have six shots," he said.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" the stall-holder said, eyeing him with uneasy distaste.

"Yes, it's me," the Boy said. "Have you got the time on you, Bill?"

"What do you mean the time? There's a clock up there in the hall, isn't there?"

"It says nearly a quarter to two. I didn't think it was that late."

"That clock's always right," the man said. He came down to the end of the booth, pistol in hand. "It's always right, see?" he said. "It doesn't stand for any phony alibis. Never again," he said. "A quarter to two, that's the time."

"That's all right, Bill," the Boy said. "A quarter to two. I just wanted to know. Give me that pistol." He raised it; the young bony hand was steady as a rock: he put six shots inside the bull. "That's worth a prize," he said.

"You can take your bloody prize," Bill said, "and hop it. What do you want? Chocolates?"

"I don't eat chocolates," the Boy said.

"Packet of Players?"

"I don't smoke."

"You'll have to have a doll then or a glass vase.'*

"The doll'll do," the Boy said. "I'll have that one the one up there with the brown hair."

"You getting a family?" the man said, but the Boy didn't answer, walking rigidly away past the other booths, with the smell of gunpowder on his fingers, holding the Mother of God by the hair. The water washed round the piles at the end of the pier, dark poison-bottle green, mottled with seaweed, and the salt wind smarted on his lips. He climbed the ladder onto the tea terrace and looked around; nearly every table was full. He went inside the glass shelter and round into the long narrow tea room which faced west, perched fifty feet above the slow withdrawing tide. A table was free and he sat down where he could see all the room and across the water to the pale parade.

"I'll wait," he said to the girl who came for his order. "I've got friends coming." The window was open and he could hear the low waves beating at the pier and the music of the orchestra faint and sad, borne away on the wind towards the shore. He said: "They are late. What time is it?" His fingers pulled absent-mindedly at the doll's hair, detaching the brown wool.

"It's nearly ten to two," the girl said.

"All the clocks on this pier are fast," he said.

"Oh, no," the girl said. "It's reel London time."

"Take the doll," the Boy said. "It's no good to me.

I just won it in one of those shooting booths. It's no good to me."

"Can I reely?" the girl said.

"Go on. Take it. Stick it up in your room and pray." He tossed it at her, watching the door impatiently. His body was stiffly controlled. The only sign of nervousness he showed was a slight tic in his cheek, through the soft chicken down, where you might have expected a dimple. It beat more impatiently when Cubitt appeared, and with him Dallow, a stout muscular man with a broken nose and an expression of brutal simplicity.

"Well?" the Boy said.

"It's all right," Cubitt said.

"Where's Spicer?"

"He's coming," Dallow said. "He's just gone into the Gents' to have a wash."

"He ought to have come straight," the Boy said.

"You're late. I said a quarter to two sharp."

"Don't take on so," Cubitt said. "All you'd got to do was come straight across."

"I had to tidy up," the Boy said. He beckoned to the waitress. "Four fish and chips and a pot of tea.

There's another coming."

"Spicer won't want fish and chips," Dallow said.

"He's not got any appetite."

"He'd better have an appetite," the Boy said and, leaning his face on his hands, he watched Spicer's pale-faced progress up the tea room and felt anger grinding at his guts like the tide at the piles below.

"It's five to two," he said. "That's right, isn't it? It's five to two?" he called to the waitress.

"It took longer than we thought," Spicer said, dropping into the chair, dark and pallid and spotty. He looked with nausea at the brown crackling slab of fish the girl set before him. "I'm not hungry," he said. "I can't eat this. What do you think I am?" and they all three left their fish untasted as they stared at the Boy like children before his ageless eyes.

The Boy poured anchovy sauce out over his chips.

"Eat," he said. "Go on. Eat." Dallow suddenly grinned. "He ain't got no appetite," he said and stuffed his mouth with fish. They all talked low, their words lost to those around in the hubbub of plates and voices and the steady surge of the sea. Cubitt followed suit, picking at his fish; only Spicer wouldn't eat. He sat stubbornly there, grey-haired and sea-sick.

"Give me a drink, Pinkie," he said. "I can't swallow this stuff."

"You aren't going to have a drink, not today," the Boy said. "Go on. Eat."

Spicer put some fish to his mouth. "I'll be sick," he said, "if I eat."

"Spew then," the Boy said. "Spew if you like. You haven't any guts to spew." He said to Dallow: "Did it go all right?"

"It was perfect," Dallow said. "Me and Cubitt planted him. We gave the cards to Spicer."

"You put 'em out all right?" the Boy said.

"Of course I put 'em out," Spicer said.

"All along the parade?"

"Of course I put 'em out. I don't see why you get so fussed about the cards."

"You don't see much," the Boy said. "They're an alibi, aren't they?" He dropped his voice and whispered it over the fish. "They prove he kept to programme. They show he died after two." He raised his voice again. "Listen. Do you hear that?"

Faintly in the town a clock chimed and struck twice.

"Suppose they found him already?" Spicer said.

"Then that's just too bad for us," the Boy said.

"What about that polony he was with?"

"She don't matter," the Boy said. "She's just a buer he gave her a half. I saw him hand it out."

"You take account of most things," Dallow said with admiration. He poured himself a cup of black tea and helped himself to five lumps of sugar.

"I take account of what I do myself," the Boy said.

"Where did you put the cards?" he said to Spicer.

"I put one of 'em in Snow's," Spicer said.

"What do you mean? Snow's?"

"He had to eat, hadn't he?" Spicer said. "The paper said so. You said I was to follow the paper. It'd look odd, wouldn't it, if he didn't eat? And he always puts one where he eats."

"It'd look odder," the Boy said, "if the waitress spotted your face wasn't right and she found it soon as you left. Where did you put it in Snow's?"

"Under the tablecloth," Spicer said. "That's what he always does. There'll have been plenty at that table since me. She won't know it wasn't him. I don't suppose she'll find it before night, when she takes off the cloth. Maybe it'll even be another girl."

"You go back," the Boy said, "and bring that card here. I'm not taking chances."

"I'll not go back," Spicer's voice broke above a whisper, and once again they all three stared at the Boy in silence.

"You go, Cubitt," the Boy said. "Maybe it had better not be him again. "

"Not me," Cubitt said. "Suppose they'd found the card and saw me looking. Better take a chance and leave it alone," he urged in a whisper.

"Talk natural," the Boy said, "talk natural," as the waitress came back to the table.

"Do you boys want any more?" she said.

"Yes," the Boy said, "we'll have ice-cream."

"Stow it, Pinkie," Dallow protested when the girl had left them, "we don't want ice-cream. We ain't a lot of tarts, Pinkie."

"If you don't want ice-cream, Dallow," the Boy said, "you go to Snow's and get that card. You've got guts, haven't you?"

"I thought we was done with it all," Dallow said.

"I've done enough. I've got guts, you know that, but I was scared stiff.... Why, if they've found him before time, it'd be crazy to go into Snow's."

"Don't talk so loud," the Boy said. "If nobody else '11 go," he said, "I'll go. I'm not scared. Only I get tired sometimes of working with a mob like you. Sometimes I think I'd be better alone." Afternoon moved across the water. He said: "Kite was all right, but Kite's dead. Which was your table?" he asked Spicer.

"Just inside. On the right of the door. A table for one. It's got flowers on it."

"What flowers?"

"I don't know what flowers," Spicer said. "Yellow flowers."

"Don't go, Pinkie," Dallow said, "better leave it alone. You can't tell what'll happen," but the Boy was already on his feet, moving stiffly down the long narrow room above the sea. You couldn't tell if he was scared--his young ancient poker-face told nothing.

In Snow's the rush was over and the table free. The wireless droned a programme of dreary music, broadcast by a cinema organist a great vox humana trembled across the crumby stained desert of used cloths: the world's wet mouth lamenting over life. The waitress whipped the cloths off as soon as the tables were free and laid tea things. Nobody paid any attention to the Boy--they turned their backs when he looked at them. He slipped his hand under the cloth and found nothing there. Suddenly the little spurt of vicious anger rose again in the Boy's brain and he smashed a salt sprinkler down on the table so hard that the base cracked. A waitress detached herself from a gossiping group and came towards him, cold-eyed, acquisitive, ash-blonde. "Well?" she said, taking in the shabby suit, the too young face.

"I want service," the Boy said.

"You're late for the lunch."

"I don't want lunch," the Boy said. "I want a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits."

"Will you go to one of the tables laid for tea, please?"

"No," the Boy said. "This table suits me."

She sailed away again, superior and disapproving, and he called after her: "Will you take that order?"

"The waitress serving your table will be here in a minute," she said, and moved away to the gossips by the service door. The Boy shifted his chair, the nerve in his cheek twitched, again he put his hand under the cloth: it was a tiny action, but it might hang him if he was observed. Still he could feel nothing, and he thought with fury of Spicer: he'll muddle once too often, we'd be better without him.

"Was it tea you wanted, sir?" He looked sharply up with his hand under the cloth: one of those girls who creep about, he thought, as if they were afraid of their own footsteps: a pale thin girl younger than himself.

He said: "I gave the order once."

She apologised abjectly: "There's been such a rush.

And it's my first day. This was the only breathing spell. Have you lost something?"

He withdrew his hand, watching her with dangerous and unfeeling eyes; his cheek twitched again; it was the little things which tripped you up; he could think of no reason at all for having his hand under the table. She went on helpfully: "I'll have to change the cloth again for tea, so if you've lost " In no time she had cleared the table of pepper and salt and mustard, the cutlery and the O. K. sauce, the yellow flowers, had nipped together the corners of the cloth and lifted it in one movement from the table, crumbs and all.

"There's nothing there, sir," she said. He looked at the bare table top and said: "I hadn't lost anything."

She began to lay a fresh cloth for tea. She seemed to find something agreeable about him which made her talk, something in common perhaps youth and shabbiness and a kind of ignorance in the dapper caU.

Already she had apparently forgotten his exploring hand. But would she remember, he wondered, if later people asked her questions? He despised her quiet, her pallor, her desire to please; did she also observe, remember...? "You wouldn't guess," she said, "what I found here only ten minutes ago. When I changed the cloth."

"Do you always change the cloth?" the Boy said.

"Oh, no," she said, putting out the tea things, "but a customer upset his drink and when I changed it, there was one of Kolley Kibber's cards, worth ten shillings. It was quite a shock," she said, lingering gratefully with the tray, "and the others don't like it. You see, it's only my second day here. They say I was a fool not to challenge him and get the prize."

"Why didn't you challenge him?"

"Because I never thought. He wasn't a bit like the photograph."

"Maybe the card had been there all the morning."

"Oh, no," she said, "it couldn't have been. He was the first man at this table."

"Well," the Boy said, "it don't make any odds.

You've got the card."

"Oh, yes, I've got it. Only it don't seem quite fair you see what I mean him being so different. I might have got the prize. I can tell you I ran to the door when I saw the card; I didn't wait."

"And did you see him?"

She shook her head.

"I suppose," the Boy said, "you hadn't looked at him close. Else you'd have known."

"I always look at you close," the girl said, "the customer, I mean. You see, I'm new. I get a bit scared.

I don't want to do anything to offend. Oh," she said aghast, "like standing here talking when you want a cup of tea."

"That's all right," the Boy said. He smiled at her stiffly; he couldn't use those muscles with any naturalness. "You're the kind of girl I like " The words were the wrong ones; he saw it at once and altered them. "I mean," he said, "I like a girl who's friendly.

Some of these here they freeze you."

"They freeze me."

"You're sensitive, that's what it is," the Boy said, "like me." He said abruptly: "I suppose you wouldn't recognise that newspaper man again? I mean, he may be still about."

"Oh, yes," she said, "I'd know him. I've got a memory for faces."

The Boy's cheek twitched. He said: "I see you and I've got a bit in common. We ought to get together one evening. What's your name?"

"Rose."

He put a coin on the table and got up. "But your tea?" she said.

"Here we been talking, and I had an appointment at two sharp."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Rose said. "You should've stopped me."

"That's all right," the Boy said. "I liked it. It's only ten past anyway by your clock. When do you get off of an evening?"

"We don't close till half past ten except on Sundays."

"I'll be seeing you," the Boy said. "You an' me have things in common."

Ida Arnold broke her way across the Strand} she couldn't be bothered to wait for the signals, and she didn't trust the Belisha beacons. She made her own way under the radiators of the buses; the drivers ground their brakes and glared at her, and she grinned back at them. She was always a little flushed as the clock struck eleven and she reached Henneky's, as if she had emerged from some adventure which had given her a better opinion of herself. But she wasn't the first in Henneky's. "Hullo, you old ghost," she said, and the sombre thin man in black with a bowler hat sitting beside a wine barrel said: "Oh, forget it, Ida. Forget it."

"You in mourning for yourself?" Ida said, cocking her hat at a better angle in a mirror which advertised White Horse; she didn't look a day over thirtyfive.

"My wife's dead. Have a Guinness, Ida?"

"Yes. I'll have a Guinness. I didn't even know you had a wife."

"We don't know much about each other, that's what it is, Ida," he said. "Why, I don't even know how you live or how many husbands you've had."

"Oh, there's only been one Tom," Ida said.

"There's been more than Tom in your life."

"You ought to know," Ida said.

"Give me a glass of Ruby," the sombre man said.

"I was just thinking when you came in, Ida, why shouldn't we two come together again?"

"You and Tom always want to start again," Ida said. "Why don't you keep tight hold when you've got a girl?"

"What with my little bit of money and yours "

"I like to start something fresh," Ida said. "Not off with the new and on with the old."

"But you've a kind heart, Ida."

"That's what you call it," Ida said, and in the dark depth of her Guinness kindness winked up at her, a bit sly, a bit earthy, having a good time. "Do you ever have a bit on the horses?" she said.

"I don't believe in betting. It's a mug's game."

"That's it," Ida said. "A mug's game. You never know whether you'll be up or down. I like it," she said with passion', looking across the wine barrel at the thin pale man, her face more flushed than ever, more young, more kind. "Black Boy," she said softly.

"Eh, what's that?" the ghost said sharply, snatching a glance at his face in the White Horse mirror.

"It's the name of a horse," she said, "that's all. A fellow gave it me at Brighton. I was wondering if maybe I'd see him at the races. He got lost somehow.

I liked him. You didn't know whatever he'd be saying next. I owe him money too."

"You saw about this Kolley Kibber at Brighton the other day?"

"Found him dead, didn't they? I saw a poster."

"They've had the inquest."

"Did he kill himself?"

"Oh, no. Just his heart. The heat knocked him over. But the paper's paid the prize to the man who found him. Ten guineas," the ghost said, "for finding a corpse." He laid the paper bitterly down on the wine barrel. "Give me another Ruby."

"Why!" Ida said. "Is that picture the man who found him? The little rat. That's where he went to.

No wonder he didn't need his money back."

"No, no, that's not him" the ghost said. "That's Kolley Kibber." He took a little wooden pick out of a paper packet and began to scrape his teeth.

"Oh," Ida said. It was like a blow. "Then he wasn't trying it on," she said. "He was sick." She remembered how his hand had shaken in the taxi and how he had implored her not to leave him, just as if he had known he was going to die before she came back. But he hadn't made a scene. "He was a gentleman," she said gently. He must have fallen there by the turnstile as soon as she had turned her back, and she had gone on down without knowing into the Ladies'. A sense of tears came to her now in Henneky's; she measured those polished white steps down to the wash basins as if they were the slow stages of a tragedy.

"Ah, well," the ghost said gloomily, "we've all got to die."

"Yes," Ida said, "but he wouldn't've wanted to die any more than I want to die." She began to read and exclaimed almost at once: "What made him walk all that way in that heat?" For he hadn't dropped at the turnstile: he'd gone back all the way they'd come, sat in a shelter....

"He'd got his job to do."

"He didn't say anything to me about a job. He said: Til be here. Just here. By this turnstile,' He said: *Be quick, Ida. I'll be here/ " and as she repeated what she could remember of his words she had a feeling that later, in an hour or two, when things got straightened out, she would want to cry a bit for the death of that scared passionate bag of bones who called himself "Why," she said, "whatever do they mean? Read here."

"What about it?" the man said.

"The bitches!" Ida said. "What would they go and tell a lie like that for?"

"What lie? Have another Guinness. You don't want to fuss about that."

"I don't mind if I do," Ida said, but when she had taken a long draught she returned to the paper. She had instincts; and now her instincts told her there was something odd, something which didn't smell right.

"These girls," she said, "he tried to pick up, they say a man came along who called him 'Fred,' and he said he wasn't Fred and he didn't know the man."

"What about it? Listen, Ida, let's go to the pictures."

"But he was Fred. He told me he was Fred."

"He was Charles. You can read it there. Charles Hale."

"That don't signify," Ida said. "A man always has a different name for strangers. You aren't telling me your real name's Clarence. And a man don't have a different name for every girl. He'd get confused. You know you always stick to Clarence. You can't tell me much about men I don't know."

"It don't mean anything. You can read how it was.

They just happened to mention it. Nobody took any notice of that."

She said sadly: "Nobody's taken any notice of anything. You can read it here. He hadn't got any folks to make a fuss. 'The Coroner asked if any relations of the deceased were present, and the police witness stated that they could trace no relations other than a second cousin in Middlesbrough.' It sounds kind of lonely," she said. "Nobody there to ask questions."

"I know what loneliness is, Ida," the sombre man said. "I've been alone a month now."

She took no notice of him: she was back at Brighton on Whit Monday; thinking how while she waited there, he must have been dying, walking along the front to Hove, dying, and the cheap drama and pathos of the thought weakened her heart towards him. She was of the people, she cried in cinemas at David Copperfield, when she was drunk all the old ballads her mother had known came easily to her lips, her homely heart was touched by the word "tragedy."

"The second cousin in Middlesbrough he was represented by counsel," she said. "What does that mean?"

"I suppose if this Kolley Kibber hasn't left a will, he gets any money there is. He wouldn't want any talk of suicide because of the life assurance."

"He didn't ask any questions."

"There wasn't any need. No one made out he'd killed himself."

"Perhaps he did all the same," Ida said. "There was something queer about him. I'd like to 'ave asked some questions." *

"What about? It's plain enough."

A man in plus fours and a striped tie came to the bar. "Hullo, Ida," he called.

"Hullo, Harry," she said sadly, staring at the paper.

"Have a drink."

"Fve got a drink, thank you."

"Swallow it down and have another."

"No, I don't want any more, thank you," she said.

"If Yd been there 77 "What'd have been the good?" the sombre man said.

"I could've asked questions."

"Questions, questions," he said irritably. "You keep on saying questions. What about, beats me."

"Why he said he wasn't Fred."

"He wasn't Fred. He was Charles."

"It's not natural." The more she thought about it the more she wished she had been there: it was like a pain in the heart, the thought that no one at the inquest was interested, the second cousin stayed in Middlesbrough, his counsel asked no questions, and Fred's own paper gave him only half a column. On the front page was another photograph: the new Kolley Kibber; he was going to be at Bournemouth tomorrow. They might have waited, she thought, a week. It would have shown respect.

"I'd like to have asked them why he left me like that, to go scampering down the front in that sun."

"He had his job to do. He had to leave those cards."

"Why did he tell me he'd wait?"

"Ah," the sombre man said, "you'd have to ask him that," and at the words it was almost as if he was trying to answer her, answer her in his own kind of hieroglyphics, in the obscure pain, speaking in her nerves as a ghost would have to speak. Ida believed in ghosts.

"There's a lot he'd say if he could," she said. She took up the paper again and read slowly. "He did his job to the end," she said tenderly; she liked men who did their jobs: there was a kind of vitality about it.

He'd dropped his cards all the way down the front; they'd come back to the office: from under a boat, from a litter basket, a child's pail. He had only a few left when "Mr. Alfred Jefferson, described as a chief clerk, of Clapham," found him. "If he did kill himself," she said (she was the only counsel to represent the dead), "he did his job first."

"But he didn't kill himself," Clarence said. "You've only got to read. They cut him up and they say he died natural."

"That's queer," Ida said. "He went and left one in a restaurant. I knew he was hungry. He kept on wanting to eat, but whatever made him slip away like that all by himself and leave me waiting? It sounds crazy."

"I suppose he changed his mind about you, Ida."

"I don't like it," Ida said. "It sounds strange to me.

I wish I'd been there. I'd have asked 'em a few questions."

"What about you and me going across to the flickers, Ida?"

"I'm not in the mood," Ida said. "It's not every day you lose a friend. And you oughtn't to be in the mood, either, with your wife just dead."

"She's been gone a month now," Clarence said; "you can't expect anyone to go on mourning for ever."

"A month's not so long," Ida said sadly, brooding over the paper. A day, she thought, that's all he's been gone, and I dare say there's not another soul but me thinking about him: just someone he picked up for a drink and a cuddle, and again the easy pathos touched her friendly and popular heart. She wouldn't have given it all another thought if there had been other relations besides the second cousin in Middlesbrough, if he hadn't been so alone as well as dead. But there was something fishy to her nose, though there was nothing she could put her finger on except that "Fred" and everyone would say the same: "He wasn't Fred.

You've only to read. Charles Hale."

"You oughtn't to fuss about that, Ida. It's none of your business."

"I know," she said, "it's none of mine." But it's none of anybody's, her heart repeated to her--that was the trouble: no one but her to ask questions. She knew a woman once who'd seen her husband, after he was dead, standing by the wireless set trying to twiddle the knob: she twiddled the way he wanted and he disappeared and immediately she heard an announcer say on Midland Regional: "Gale warning in the Channel." She had been thinking of taking one of the Sunday day trips to Calais, that was the point. It just showed: you couldn't laugh at the idea of ghosts. And if Fred, she thought, wanted to tell someone something, it wouldn't be to his second cousin in Middlesbrough that he'd go; why shouldn't he come to me?

He had left her waiting there; she had waited nearly half an hour: perhaps he wanted to tell her why. "He was a gentleman," she said aloud, and with bolder resolution she cocked her hat and smoothed her hair and rose from the wine barrel. "I've got to be going," she said. "So long, Clarence."

"Where to? I've never known you in such a hurry, Ida," he complained bitterly.

Ida put her finger on the paper. "Someone ought to be there" she said, "even if second cousins aren't."

"He won't care who's putting him in the ground."

"You never know," Ida said, remembering the ghost by the radio set. "It shows respect. Besides I like a funeral."

But he wasn't exactly being put in the ground in the bright new flowery suburb where he had lodged.

There were no unhygienic buryings in that place.

Two stately brick towers, like those of a Scandinavian town hall, cloisters with little plaques along the walls like war memorials, a bare cold secular chapel which could be adapted quietly and conveniently to any creed: no cemetery, wax flowers, impoverished jampots of wilting wild flowers. Ida was late. Hesitating a moment outside the door for fear the place might be full of Fred's friends, she thought someone had turned on the National Programme. She knew that cultured inexpressive heartless voice, but when she opened the door, a man, not a machine, stood up in a black cassock, saying: "Heaven." There was nobody there but someone like a landlady, a servant who had parked her pram outside, two men impatiently whispering.

"Our belief in heaven," the clergyman went on, "is not qualified by our disbelief in the old mediaeval hell.

We believe," he said, glancing swiftly along the smooth polished slipway towards the New Art doors through which the coffin would be launched into the flames, "we believe that this our brother is already at one with the One." He stamped his words, like little pats of butter, with his personal mark. "He has attained unity. We do not know what that One is with whom (or with which) he is now at one. We do not retain the old mediaeval beliefs in glassy seas and golden crowns. Truth is beauty and there is more beauty for us, a truth-loving generation, in the certainty that our brother is at this moment reabsorbed in the universal spirit." He touched a little buzzer, the New Art doors opened, the flames flapped, and the coffin slid smoothly down into the fiery sea. The doors closed, the nurse rose and made for the door, the clergyman smiled gently from behind the slipway, like a conjurer who has produced his nine hundred and fortieth rabbit without a hitch.

It was all over. Ida squeezed out with difficulty a last tear into a handkerchief scented with Californian Poppy. She liked a funeral but it was with horror as other people like a ghost story. Death shocked her, life was so important. She wasn't religious. She didn't believe in heaven or hell, only in ghosts, ouija boards, tables that rapped and little inept voices speaking plaintively of flowers. Let Papists treat death with flippancy: life wasn't so important perhaps to them as what came after--but to her death was the end of everything. At one with the One, it didn't mean a thing beside a glass of Guinness on a sunny day. She believed in ghosts, but you couldn't call that thin transparent existence life eternal: the squeak of a board, a piece of ectoplasm in a glass cupboard at the psychical research headquarters, a voice she'd heard once at a seance saying: "Everything is very beautiful on the upper plane. There are flowers everywhere."

Flowers, Ida thought scornfully--that wasn't life.

Life was sunlight on brass bedposts, ruby port, the leap of the heart when the outsider you have backed passes the post and the colours go bobbing up. Life was poor Fred's mouth pressed down on her in the taxi, vibrating with the engine along the parade. What was the sense of dying if it made you babble of flowers?

Fred didn't want flowers, he wanted and the enjoyable distress she had felt in Henneky's returned. She took life with a deadly seriousness: she was prepared to cause any amount of unhappiness to anyone in order to defend the only thing she believed in. To lose your lover "broken hearts," she would say, "always mend" to be maimed or blinded "lucky," she'd tell you, "to be alive at all." There was something dangerous and remorseless in her optimism, whether she was laughing in Henneky's or weeping at a funeral or a marriage.

She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens.

People passing up the flowery suburban road looked up and noted the smoke; it had been a busy day at the furnaces. Fred dropped in indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.

But while she wept a determination grew: it grew all the way to the tram lines which would lead her back to her familiar territory, to the bars and the electrie signs and the variety theatres. Man is made by the places in which he lives, and Ida's mind worked with the simplicity and the regularity of a sky sign: the ever-tipping glass, the ever-revolving wheel, the plain question flashing on and off: "Do You Use Forhan's for the Gums?" I'd do as much for Tom, she thought, for Clarence, that old deceitful ghost in Henneky's, for Harry. It's the least you can do for anyone ask questions, questions at inquests, questions at stances. Somebody had made Fred unhappy, and somebody was going to be made unhappy in turn.

An eye for an eye. If you believed in God, you might leave vengeance to Him, but you couldn't trust the One, the universal spirit. Vengeance was Ida's, just as much as reward was Ida's, the soft gluey mouth affixed in taxis, the warm handclasp in cinemas, the only reward there was. And vengeance and reward they both were fun.

The tram tingled and sparked down the Embankment. If it was a woman who had made Fred unhappy, she'd tell her what she thought. If Fred had killed himself, she'd find it out, the papers would print the news, someone would suffer. Ida was going to begin at the beginning and work right on. She was a sticker.

The first stage (she had held the paper in her hand all through the service) was Molly Pink, "described as a private secretary," employed by Messrs. Carter & Galloway.

Ida came up from Charing Cross Station into the hot and windy light in the Strand flickering on the carburetors--in an upper room of Stanley Gibbons's a man with a long grey Edwardian moustache sat in a [ 49 ] P A IV T O N E window examining a postage stamp through a magnifying glass--a great dray laden with barrels stamped by, and the fountains played in Trafalgar Square, a cool translucent flower blooming and dropping into the drab sooty basins. It'll cost money, Ida repeated to herself, it always costs money if you want to know the truth, and she w r alked slowly up St. Martin's Lane, calculating, while all the time beneath the melancholy and the resolution, her heart beat faster to the refrain: it's exciting, it's fun, it's living. In Seven Dials the Negroes were hanging round the Royal Oak doors in tight natty suitings and old school ties, and Ida recognized one of them and passed the time of day. "How's business, Joe?" The great white teeth went on like a row of lights in the darkness above the bright striped shirt. "Fine, Ida, fine."

"And the hay fever?"

"Tur'ble, Ida, tur'ble."

"So long, Joe."

"So long, Ida."

It was a quarter of an hour's walk to Messrs. Carter & Galloway's, who were at the very top of a tall building on the outskirts of Gray's Inn. She had to economize now: she wouldn't even take a bus--and when she got to the dusty antiquated building, there wasn't a lift. The long flights of stone stairs wearied Ida. She'd had a long day and nothing to eat but a bun at the station. She sat down on a window sill and took off her shoes. Her feet were hot, she wiggled her toes. An old gentleman came down. He had a long moustache and a sidelong raffish look. He wore a check coat, a yellow waistcoat, and a grey bowler. He took off his bowler.

"In distress, madam?" he said, peering down at Ida with little bleary eyes. "Be of assistance?' 7 "I don't allow anyone else to scratch my toes," Ida said.

"Ha, ha," the old gentleman said, "a card. After my own heart. Up or down?"

"Up. All the way to the top."

"Carter & Galloway. Good firm. Tell 'em I sent you."

"What's your name?"

"Moyne. Charlie Moyne. Seen you here before."

"Never."

"Some place else. Never forget fine figure of a woman. Tell 'em Mpyne sent you. Give you special terms."

"Why don't they have a lift in this place?"

"Old-fashioned people. Old-fashioned myself. Seen you at Epsom."

"You might have."

"Always tell a sporting woman. Ask you round the corner to split a bottle of fizz if those beggars hadn't taken the last fiver I came out with. Wanted to go and lay a couple. Have to go home first. Odds'll go down while I'm doing it. You'll see. You couldn't oblige me, I suppose? Two quid, Charlie Moyne." The bloodshot eyes watched her without hope, a little aloof and careless; the buttons on the yellow waistcoat stirred as the old heart hammered.

"Here," Ida said, "you can have a quid--now run along."

"Awfully kind of you. Give me your card. Post you a cheque tonight."

"I haven't got a card," Ida said.

"Came out without mine too. Never mind. Charlie Moyne. Care of Carter & Galloway. All know me here."

"That's all right," Ida said. "I'll see you again. I've got to be going on up."

"Take my arm." He helped her up. "Tell 'em Moyne sent you. Special terms." She looked back at the turn of the stairs. He vas tucking the pound note away in his waistcoat, smoothing the moustache which was still golden at the tips, like a cigarette smoker's fingers, setting his bowler at an angle. Poor old geezer > Ida thought, he never expected to get that, watching him go off down the stairs in his jaunty and ancient despair.

There were only two doors on the top landing. She opened one marked "Enquiries," and there without a doubt was Molly Pink. In a little room hardly larger than a broom cupboard she sat beside a gas ring sucking a sweet. A kettle hissed at Ida as she entered. A swollen spotty face glared back at her without a word.

"Excuse me," Ida said.

"The partners is out."

"I came to see you."

The mouth fell a little open, a lump of toffee stirred on the tongue, the kettle whistled.

"Me?"

"Yes," Ida said. "You'd better look out. The kettle'll boil over. You are Molly Pink?"

"You want a cup?" The room was lined from floor to ceiling with files. A little window disclosed through the undisturbed dust of many years another block of buildings with the same arrangement of windows staring dustily back like a reflection. A dead fly hung in a broken web.

"I don't like tea," Ida said.

"That's lucky. There's only one cup," Molly said, filling a thick brown teapot with a chipped spout.

"A friend of mine called Moyne..." Ida began.

"Oh, him!" Molly said. "We just turned him out of house and home." A copy of Woman and Beauty was propped open on her typewriter, and her eyes slid continually back to it.

"Out of house and home?"

"House and home. He came to see the partners. He tried to blarney."

"Did he see them?"

"The partners is out. Have a toffee?"

"It's bad for the figure," Ida said.

"I make up for it. I don't eat breakfast."

Over Molly's head Ida could see the labels on the files: "Rents of 1-6 Mud Lane."

"Rents of Wainage Estate, Balham."

"Rents of..." They were surrounded by the pride of ownership, property....

"I came here," Ida said, "because you met a friend of mine."

"Sit down," Molly said. "That's the clients' chair.

I has to entertain 'em. Mr. Moyne's not a friend."

"Not Moyne. Someone called Hale."

"I don't want any more to do with that business.

You ought to 'ave seen the partners. They was furious.

I had to have a day off for the inquest. They kept me hours late next day."

"I just want to hear what happened."

"What happened? The partners is awful when roused."

"I mean about Fred Hale."

"I didn't exactly know him."

"That man you said at the inquest came up "

"He wasn't a man. He was just a kid. He knew Mr.

Hale."

"But in the paper it said "

"Oh, Mr. Hale said he didn't know him. I didn't tell them different. They didn't ask me. Except was there anything odd in his manner. Well, there wasn't anything you'd call odd. He was just scared, that's all. We get lots like that in here."

"But you didn't tell them that?"

"That's nothing uncommon. I knew what it was at once. He owed the kid money. We get lots like that.

Like Charlie Moyne."

"He was scared, was he? Poor old Fred."

" Tin not Fred,' " he said, "sharp as you please.

But I could tell all right. So could my girl friend."

"What was the kid like?"

"Oh, just a kid."

"Tall?"

"Not particularly."

"Fair?"

"I couldn't say that."

"How old was he?"

" 'Bout my age, I dessay."

"What's that?"

"Eighteen," Molly said, staring defiantly across the typewriter and the steaming kettle, sucking a toffee.

"Did he ask for money?"

"He didn't have time to ask for money."

"You didn't notice anything else?"

"He was awful anxious for me to go along with him. But I couldn't, not with my girl friend there."

"Thanks," Ida said, "it's something learnt."

"You a woman detective?" Molly asked.

"Oh, no, I'm just a friend of his."

There was something fishy: she was convinced of it now. She remembered again how scared he'd been in the taxi, and going down Holborn towards her digs behind Russell Square, in the late afternoon sun, she thought again of the way in which he had handed her the ten shillings before she went down into the Ladies'.

He was a real gentleman; perhaps it was the last few shillings he had; and those people that boy dunning him for money. Perhaps he was another one ruined like Charlie Moyne, and now that her memory of his face was getting a bit dim, she couldn't help lending him a few of Charlie Moyne's features, the bloodshot eyes if nothing else. Sporting gentlemen, freehanded gentlemen, real gentlemen. The commercials drooped their dewlaps in the hall of the Imperial, the sun lay flat across the plane trees, and a bell rang and rang for tea in a boarding house in Coram Street.

I'll try the Board, Ida thought, and then I'll know.

When she got in, there was a card on the hall table, a card of Brighton Pier; if I was superstitious, she thought, if I was superstitious. She turned it over. It was only from Phil Corkery, asking her to come down.

She had the same every year from Eastbourne, Hastings, and once from Aberystwyth. But she never went.

He wasn't someone she liked to encourage. Too quiet.

Not what she called a man.

She went to the basement stairs and called Old Crowe. She needed two sets of fingers for the board and she knew it would give the old man pleasure. "Old Crowe," she called, peering down the stone stairs.

"Old Crowe."

"What is it, Ida?"

"I'm going to have a turn at the Board."

She didn't wait for him, but went on up to her bedsitting-room to make ready. The room faced east and the sun had gone. It was cold and dusk. Ida turned on the gas fire and drew the old scarlet velvet curtains to shut out the grey skies and the chimney pots. Then she patted the divan bed into shape and drew two chairs to the table. In a glass-fronted cupboard her life stared back at her, a good life: pieces of china bought at the seaside, a photograph of Tom, an Edgar Wallace, a Netta Syrett from a second-hand stall, some sheets of music, The Good Companions, her mother's picture, more china, a few jointed animals made of wood and elastic, trinkets given her by this, that, and the other, Sorrell and Son, the board.

She took the board gently down and locked the cupboard. A flat oval piece of polished wood on tiny wheels, it looked like something that had crept out of a drawer in a basement kitchen. But in fact it was Old Crowe who had done that, knocking gently on the door, sidling in, white hair, grey face, short-sighted pit-pony eyes, blinking at the bare globe in Ida's reading lamp. Ida tossed a pink netty scarf over the light and dimmed it for him.

"You got something to ask it, Ida?" Old Crowe said.

He shivered a little, frightened and fascinated. Ida sharpened a pencil and inserted it in the prow of the little board.

"Sit down, Old Crowe. What you been doing all day?"

"They had a funeral at twenty-seven. One of those Indian students."

"I been to a funeral too. Was yours a good one?"

"There aren't any good funerals these days. Not with plumes."

Ida gave the little board a push. It slid sideways across the polished table more than ever like a beetle.

"The pencil's too-long," Old Crowe said. He sat, hugging his hands between his knees, bent forward watching the board. Ida screwed the pencil a little higher.

"Past or future?" Old Crowe said, panting a little.

"I want to get into touch today," Ida said.

"Dead or alive?" Old Crowe said.

"Dead. I seen him burnt this afternoon. Cremated.

Come on, Old Crowe, put your fingers on."

"Better take off your rings," Old Crowe said. "Gold confuses it."

Ida unclothed her fingers, laid the tips on the board, which squeaked away from her across the sheet of foolscap. "Come on, Old Crowe," she said.

Old Crowe giggled. He said: "It's naughty," and placed his bony digits on the very rim, where they throbbed a tiny nervous tattoo. "What you going to ask it, Ida?"

"Are you there, Fred?"

The board squeaked away under their fingers, drawing long lines across the paper this way and that. "It's got a will of its own," Ida said.

"Hush," said Old Crowe.

The board bucked a little with its hind wheel and came to a stop. "We might look now," Ida said. She pushed the board to one side, and they stared together at the network of pencilling.

"You might make out a Y there," Ida said.

"Or it might be an N."

"Anyway something's there. We'll try again." She put her fingers firmly on the board. "What happened to you, Fred?" and immediately the board was off and away. All her indomitable will worked through her fingers: she wasn't going to have any nonsense this time, and across the board the grey face of Old Crowe frowned with concentration.

"It's writing real letters," Ida said with triumph, and as her own fingers momentarily loosened their grip she could feel the board slide firmly away as if on another's errand.

"Hush," said Old Crowe, but it bucked and stopped.

They pushed the board away, and there, unmistakably, in large thin letters was a word, but not a word they knew: "SUKILL."

"It looks like a name," Old Crowe said.

"It must mean something," Ida said. "The Board always means something. We'll try again," and again the little wooden beetle scampered off, drawing its tortuous trail. The globe burnt red under the scarf, and Old Crowe whistled between his teeth. "Now," Ida said and lifted the board. A long ragged word ran diagonally across the paper: "FRESUICILLEYE."

"Well," Old Crowe said, "that's a mouthful. You can't make anything out of that, Ida."

"Can't I though?" Ida said. "Why, it's clear as clear. Fre is short for Fred and Suici for Suicide and Eye--that's what I always say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

"What about those two L's?"

"I don't know yet, but I'll bear them in mind." She leant back in her chair with a sense of power and triumph. "I'm not superstitious," she said, "but you can't get over that. The Board knows."

"She knows," Old Crowe said, sucking his teeth.

"One more try?" The board slid and squeaked and abruptly stopped. Clear as clear the name stared up at her: "PHIL."

"Well," Ida said, "well." She blushed a little. "Like a sugar biscuit?"

"Thank you, Ida, thank you."

Ida took a tin out of the cupboard drawer and pushed it over to Old Crowe. "They drove him to death," Ida said happily. "I knew there was something fishy. See that Eye. That as good as tells me what to do." Her eye lingered on Phil. "I'm going to make those people sorry they was ever born." She drew in her breath luxuriously and stretched her monumental legs. "Right and wrong," she said, "I believe in right and wrong," and delving a little deeper, with a sigh of happy satiety, she said: "It's going to be exciting, it's going to be fun, it's going to be a bit of life, Old Crowe," giving the highest praise she could give to anything, while the old man sucked his tooth and the pink light wavered on the Warwick Deeping.

PART TWO

THE Boy stood with his back to Spicer staring out across the dark wash of sea. They had the end of the pier to themselves--everyone else at that hour and in that weather was in the concert hall. The lightning went on and off above the horizon and the rain dripped. "Where Ve you been?" the Boy said.

"Walking around," Spicer said.

"You been There?"

"I wanted to see it was all safe, that there wasn't anything you'd forgotten."

The Boy said slowly, leaning out across the rail into the doubtful rain: "When people do one murder, I've read they sometimes have to do another to tidy up."

The word "murder" conveyed no more to him than the words "box,"

"collar,"

"giraffe." He said: "Spicer, you keep away from there."

The imagination hadn't awakened. That was his strength. He couldn't see through other people's eyes, or feel with their nerves. Only the music made him uneasy, the cat-gut vibrating in the heart; it was like nerves losing, their freshness, it was like age coming on, other people's experience battering on the brain.

"Where are the rest of the mob?" he said.

"In Sam's, drinking."

"Why aren't you drinking too?"

"I'm not thirsty, Pinkie. I wanted some fresh air.

This thunder makes you feel queer."

"Why don't they stop that bloody noise in there?" the Boy said.

"You not going to Sam's?"

"I've got a job of work to do," the Boy said.

"It's all right, Pinkie, ain't it? After that verdict it's all right? Nobody asked questions."

"I just want to be sure," the Boy said.

"The mob won't stand for any more killing."

"Who said there was going to be any killing?" The lightning flared up and showed his tight shabby jacket, the bunch of soft hair at the nape. "I've got a date, that's all. You be careful what you say, Spicer. You aren't milky, are you?"

"I'm not milky. You got me wrong, Pinkie. I just don't want another killing. That verdict sort of shook us all. What did they mean by it? We did kill him, Pinkie?"

"We got to go on being careful, that's all."

"What did they mean by it though? I don't trust the doctors. A break like that's too good."

"We got to be careful."

"What's that in your pocket, Pinkie?"

"I don't carry a gun," the Boy said. "You're fancying things." In the town a clock struck eleven--three strokes were lost in the thunder coming down across the Channel. "You better be off," the Boy said. "She's late already."

"You've got a razor there, Pinkie."

"I don't need a razor with a polony. If you want to know what it is, it's a bottle."

"You don't drink, Pinkie."

"Nobody would want to drink this."

"What is it, Pinkie?"

"Vitriol," the Boy said. "It scares a polony more than a knife." He turned impatiently away from the sea and complained again: "That music"--it moaned in his head in the hot electric light, it was the nearest he knew to sorrow, just as a faint secret sensual pleasure he felt, touching the bottle of vitriol with his fingers as Rose came hurrying by the concert hall, was his nearest approach to passion. "Get out," he said to Spicer. "She's here."

"Oh," Rose said, "I'm late. I've run all the way," she said. "I thought you might have thought "

"I'd have waited," the Boy said.

"It was an awful night in the cafe," the girl said.

"Everything went wrong. I broke two plates. And the cream was sour." It all came out in a breath. "Who was your friend?" she asked, peering into the darkness.

"He don't matter," the Boy said.

"I thought somehow I couldn't see properly "

"He don't matter," the Boy repeated.

"What are we going to do?"

"Why, I thought we'd talk a little here first," the Boy said, "and then go on somewhere Sherry's? I don't care."

"I'd love Sherry's," Rose said.

"You got your money yet for that card?"

"Yes. I got it this morning."

"Nobody came and asked you questions?"

"Oh, no. But wasn't it dreadful, his being dead like that?"

"You saw his photograph?"

Rose came close to the rail and peered palely up at the Boy. "But it wasn't him. That's what I don't understand."

"People look different in photographs."

"I've got a memory for faces. It wasn't him. They must have cheated. You can't trust the newspapers."

"Come here," the Boy said. He drew her round the corner until they were a little further from the music, more alone with the lightning on the horizon and the thunder coming closer. "I like you," the Boy said, an unconvincing smile forking his mouth, "and I want to warn you. This fellow Hale, I've heard a lot about him. He got himself mixed up with things."

"What sort of things?" Rose whispered.

"Never mind what things," the Boy said. "Only I'd warn you for your own good you've got the money if I was you I'd forget it, forget all about that fellow who left the card. He's dead, see? You've got the money. That's all that matters."

"Anything you say," Rose said.

"You can call me Pinkie if you like. That's what my friends call me."

"Pinkie," Rose repeated, trying it out shyly as the thunder cracked overhead.

"You read about Peggy Baron, didn't you?"

"No, Pinkie."

"It was in all the papers."

"I didn't see any papers till I got this job. We couldn't afford papers at home."

"She got mixed up with a mob," the Boy said, "and people came asking her questions. It's not safe."

"I wouldn't get mixed up with a mob like that,"

Rose said.

"You can't always help it. It kind of comes that way."

"What happened to her?" Rose said.

"They spoilt her looks. She lost one eye. They splashed vitriol on her face."

Rose whispered. "Vitriol? What's vitriol?" and the lightning showed a strut of tarred wood, a wave breaking, and her pale bony terrified face.

"You never seen vitriol?" the Boy said, grinning through the dark. He showed her the little bottle.

"That's vitriol." He took the cork out and spilled a littie on the wooden plank of the pier; it hissed like steam. "It burns," the Boy said. "Smell it," and he thrust the bottle under her nose.

She gasped at him. "Pinkie, you wouldn't " and "I was pulling your leg," he smoothly lied to her.

"That's not vitriol, that's just spirit. I wanted to warn you, that's all. You and me's going to be friends. I don't want a friend with her skin burned off. You tell me if anyone asks questions. Anyone, mind. Get me on the blower at Billy's straight off. Three sixes. You can remember that." He took her arm and propelled her away from the lonely pier end, back by the lit concert hall, the music drifting landwards, grief in the guts.

"Pinkie," she said, "I wouldn't want to interfere. I don't interfere in anyone's business. I've never been nosy. Cross my heart."

"You're a good kid," he said.

"You know an awful lot about things, Pinkie," she said with horror and admiration, and suddenly at the stale romantic tune the orchestra was playing "lovely to look at, beautiful to hold, and heaven itself" a little venom of anger and hatred came out on the Boy's lips. "You've got to know a lot," he said, "if you get around. Come on, we'll go to Sherry's."

Once off the pier they had to run for it; taxis splashed them with water; the strings of coloured bulbs down the Hove parade gleamed like pools of petrol through the rain. They shook themselves like dogs on the floor of Sherry's and Rose saw the queue waiting all the way upstairs for the gallery. "It's full," she said with disappointment.

"We'll go on the floor," the Boy said, paying his three shillings as carelessly as if he always went there, and walked out among the little tables where the dancing partners sat with bright metallic hair and little black bags, while the coloured lights flashed green and pink and blue. Rose said: "It's lovely here. It reminds me," and all the way to their table she counted over aloud all the things of which it reminded her, the lights, the tune the band was playing, the crowd on the floor trying to rumba. She had an immense store of trivial memories and when she wasn't living in the future she was living in the past. As for the present she got through that as quickly as she could, running away from things, running towards things, so that her voice was always a little breathless, her heart pounding at an escape or an expectation. "I whipped the plate under the apron and she said: 'Rose, what are you hiding there?' " and a moment later she was turning wide unfledged eyes back to the Boy with a look of the deepest admiration, the most respectful hope.

"What'll you drink?" the Boy said.

She didn't even know the name of a drink. In Nelson Place, from which she had emerged like a mole into the daylight of Snow's restaurant and the Palace Pier, she had never known a boy with enough money to offer her a drink. She would have said "beer" but she had had no opportunity of discovering whether she liked beer. A twopenny ice from an Everest tricycle was the whole extent of her knowledge of luxury. She goggled hopelessly at the Boy. He asked her sharply: "What d'you like? / don't know what you like."

"An ice," she said with disappointment, but she couldn't keep him waiting.

"What kind of an ice?"

"Just an ordinary ice," she said. Everest hadn't in all the slum years offered her much choice.

"Vanilla?" the waiter said. She nodded--she supposed that that was what she had always had, and so it proved, only a size larger--otherwise she might just as well have been sucking it between wafers by a tricycle.

"You're a soft sort of kid," the Boy said. "How old are you?"

"I'm seventeen," she said defiantly; there was a law which said a man couldn't go with you before you were seventeen.

"I'm seventeen too," the Boy said, and the eyes which had never been young stared with grey contempt into the eyes which had only just begun to learn a thing or two. He said: "Do you dance?" and she replied humbly: "I haven't danced much."

"It don't matter," the Boy said. "I'm not one for dancing." He eyed the slow movement of the twobacked beasts: pleasure, he thought, they call it pleasure: he was shaken by a sense of loneliness, an awful lack of understanding. The floor was cleared for the last cabaret of the evening. A spotlight picked out a patch of floor, a crooner in a dinner jacket, a microphone on a long black movable stand. He held it tenderly as if it were a woman, swinging it gently this way and that, wooing it with his lips while from the loudspeaker under the gallery his whisper reverberated hoarsely over the hall, like a dictator announcing victory, like the official news following a long censorship.

"It gets you," the Boy said, "it gets you," surrendering himself to the huge brazen suggestion: "Music talks, talks of our love.

The starling on our walks talks, talks of our love, The taxis tooting, The last owl hooting, The tube train rumbling, Busy bee bumbling, Talk of our love.

"Music talks, talks of our love, The west wind on our walks talks, talks of our love, The nightingale singing, The postman ringing, Electric drill groaning, Office telephoning, Talk of our love."

The Boy stared at the spotlight; music, love, nightingale, postman: the words stirred in his brain like poetry; one hand caressed the vitriol bottle in his pocket, the other touched Rose's wrist. The inhuman voice whistled round the gallery and the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned; life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks. It spoke to him in the music, and when he protested that he for one would never get mixed up, the music had his own retort at hand: "You can't always help it. It kind of comes that way."

"The watchdog on our walks talks, talks of our love."

The crowd stood at attention six deep behind the tables (there wasn't enough room on the floor for so many). They were dead quiet. It was like the anthem on Armistice Day when the King has deposited his wreath, the hats off, and the troops turned to stone. It was love of a kind, music of a kind, truth of a kind they listened to.

"Oracle Fields funning, The gangsters gunning, Talk of our love."

The music pealed on under the Chinese lanterns and the pink spotlight featured the crooner with the microphone close to his starched shirt. "You been in love?" the Boy asked sharply and uneasily.

"Oh, yes," Rose said.

The Boy retorted with sudden venom: "You would have been. You're green. You don't know what people do." The music came to an end and in the silence he laughed aloud. "You're innocent." People turned in their chairs and looked at them; a girl giggled. His fingers pinched her wrist. "You're green," he said again.

He was working himself into a little sensual rage, as he had done with the soft kids at the council school.

"You don't know anything," he said, with contempt in his nails.

"Oh, no," she protested. "I know a lot."

The Boy grinned at her. "Not a thing" pinching the skin of her wrist until his nails nearly met. "You'd like me for your boy, eh? We'll keep company?"

"Oh," she said, "I'd love it." Tears of pride and pain pricked behind her lids. "If you like doing that," she said, "go on."

The Boy let go. "Don't be soft," he said. "Why should I like it? You think you know too much," he complained. He sat there, anger like a live coal in his belly, as the music came on again; all the good times he'd had in the old days with nails and splinters, the tricks he'd learnt later with a razor blade: what would be the fun if people didn't squeal? He said furiously: "We'll be going. I can't stand this place," and obediently Rose began to pack her handbag, putting back her Woolworth compact and her handkerchief. "What's that?" the Boy said when something clinked in her bag; she showed him the end of a string of beads.

"You a Catholic?" the Boy said.

"Yes," Rose said.

"I'm one too," the Boy said. He gripped her arm and pushed her out into the dark dripping street. He turned up the collar of his jacket and ran as the lightning flapped and the thunder filled the air. They ran from doorway to doorway until they were back on the parade in one of the empty glass shelters. They had it to themselves in the noisy stifling night. "Why, I was in a choir once," the Boy confided, and suddenly he began to sing softly in his spoilt boy's voice: "Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem." In his voice a whole lost world moved--the lighted corner below the organ, the smell of incense and laundered surplices, and the music. Music, it didn't matter what music "Agnus dei,"

"lovely to look at, beautiful to hold,"

"the starling on our walks,"

"credo in unum Dominum" any music moved him, speaking of things he didn't understand.

"Do you go to Mass?" he said.

"Sometimes," Rose said. "It depends on work. Most weeks I wouldn't get much sleep if I went to Mass."

"I don't care what you do," the Boy said sharply. "I don't go to Mass."

"But you believe, don't you," Rose implored him, "you think it's true?"

"Of course it's true," the Boy said. "What else could there be?" he went scornfully on. "Why," he said, "it's the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don't know nothing. Of course there's Hell. Flames and damnation," he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, "torments."

"And Heaven too," Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.

"Oh, maybe," the Boy said, "maybe."

Wet to the skin, the trousers sticking to his thin legs, the Boy went up the long unmatted flight to his bedroom at Billy's. The bannister shook under his hand, and when he opened the door and found the mob there, sitting on his brass bedstead smoking, he said furiously: "When's that bannister going to be mended? It's not safe. Someone'll take a fall one day." The curtain wasn't drawn, the window was open, and the last lightning flapped across the grey roofs stretching to the sea. The Boy went to his bed and swept off the crumbs of Cubitt's sausage roll. "What's this," he said, "a meeting?"

"There's trouble about the subscriptions, Pinkie,"

Cubitt said. "There's two not come in. Brewer and Tate. They say now Kite's dead "

"Do we carve 'em up, Pinkie?" Dallow said. Spicer stood at the window watching the storm. He said nothing, staring out at the flames and chasms of the sky.

"Ask Spicer," the Boy said. "He's been doing a lot of thinking lately." They all turned and watched Spicer.

Spicer said: "Maybe we ought to lay off awhile. You know a lot of the boys cleared out when Kite got killed."

"Go on," the Boy said. "Listen to him. He's what they call a philosopher."

"Well," Spicer said angrily, "there's free speech in this mob, ain't there? Those that cleared out, they didn't see how a kid could run this show."

The Boy sat on the bed watching him with his hands in his damp pockets. He shivered once.

"I was always against murder," Spicer said. "I don't care who knows it. What good's revenge? It's sentiment."

"Sour and milky," the Boy said.

Spicer came into the middle of the room. "Listen, Pinkie," he said. "Be reasonable." He appealed to them all: "Be reasonable."

"There's things in what he says," Cubitt suddenly put in. "We had a lucky break. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves. We'd better let Brewer and Tate be for a while."

The Boy got up. A few crumbs stuck to his wet suit.

"You ready, Dallow?" he said.

"What you say, Pinkie," Dallow said, grinning like a large friendly dog.

"Where you going, Pinkie?" Spicer said.

"I'm going to see Brewer."

Cubitt said: "You act as if it was last year we killed Hale, not last week. We got to be cautious."

"That's over and done," the Boy said. "You heard the verdict. Natural causes," he said, looking out at the dying storm.

"You forget that girl in Snow's. She could hang us."

"I'm looking after the girl. She won't talk."

"You're marrying her, aren't you?" Cubitt said.

Dallow laughed.

The Boy's hands came out of his pockets, the knuckles clenched white. He said: "Who told you I was marrying her?"

"Spicer," Cubitt said.

Spicer backed away from the Boy. He said: "Listen, Pinkie. I only said as it would make her safe. A wife can't give evidence...."

"I don't need to marry a squirt to make her safe.

How do we make you safe, Spicer?" His tongue came out between his teeth, licking the edges of his dry cracked lips. "If carving'd do it..."

"It was just a joke," Cubitt said. "You don't need to take it so solemn. You want a sense of humour, Pinkie."

"You think that was funny, eh?" the Boy said.

"Me marrying that cheap polony." He croaked: "Ha, ha," at them. "I'll learn. Come on, Dallow."

"Wait till morning," Cubitt said. "Wait till some of the other boys come in."

"You milky too?"

"You don't believe that, Pinkie. But we got to go slow."

"You with me, Dallow?" the Boy said.

"I'm with you, Pinkie."

"Then we'll be going," the Boy said. He went across to the washstand and opened the little door where the jerry stood. He felt at the back behind the jerry and pulled out a tiny blade, like the blades women shave with but blunt along one edge and mounted with sticking plaster. He stuck it under his long thumb nail, the only nail not bitten close, and drew on his glove. He said: "We'll be back with the sub in half an hour," and led the way bang straight down Billy's stairs. The cold of his drenching had got under his skin: he came out onto the front a pace ahead of Dallow, his face contorted with ague, a shiver twisting the narrow shoulders. He said over his shoulder to Dallow: "We'll go to Brewer's. One lesson'll be enough."

"What you say, Pinkie," Dallow said, plodding after. The rain had stopped; it was low tide and the shallow edge of the sea scraped far out at the rim of the sand. A clock struck midnight. Dallow suddenly began to laugh.

"What's got you, Dallow?"

"I was just thinking," Dallow said. "You're a grand little geezer, Pinkie. Kite was right to take you on.

You go straight for things, Pinkie."

"You're all right," the Boy said, staring ahead, the ague wringing his face. They passed the Cosmopolitan, the lights on here and there up the huge front to the turrets against the clouded moving sky. In Snow's when they passed a single light went out. They turned up the Old Steyne. Brewer had a house near the tram lines on the Lewes road almost under the railway viaduct.

"He's gone to bed," Dallow said. Pinkie rang the bell, holding his finger on the switch. Low shuttered shops ran off on either hand; a tram went by with nobody in it, labelled Depot only, ringing and swinging down the empty road, the conductor drowsing on a seat inside, the roof gleaming from the storm. Pinkie kept his finger on the bell.

4 'What made Spicer say that about me marrying?" the Boy said.

"He just thought it'd close her clapper," Dallow said.

"She's not what keeps me awake," the Boy said, pressing on the bell. A light went on upstairs, a window creaked up, and a voice called: "Who's that?"

"It's me," the Boy said. "Pinkie."

"What dp you want? Why don't you come around in the morning?"

"I want to talk to you, Brewer."

"I've got nothing to talk about, Pinkie, that can't wait."

"You'd better open up, Brewer. You don't want the mob along here."

"The old woman's awful sick, Pinkie. I don't want any trouble. She's asleep. She hasn't slept for three nights."

"This'll wake her," the Boy said with his finger on the bell. A slow goods train went by across the viaduct, shaking smoke down into the Lewes Road.

"Leave off, Pinkie, and I'll open up."

Pinkie shivered as he waited, his gloved hand deep in his damp pocket. Brewer opened the door, a stout elderly man in soiled white pyjamas. The bottom button was missing and the coat swung from the bulging belly and the deep navel. "Come in, Pinkie," he said, "and walk quiet. The old woman's bad. I've been worrying my head off."

"That why you haven't paid your subscription.

Brewer?" the Boy said. He looked with contempt down the narrow hall the shell case converted into an umbrella stand, the moth-eaten stag's head bearing on one horn a bowler hat, a steel helmet used for ferns. Kite ought to have got them into better money than this.

Brewer had only just graduated from the street-corner, saloon-bar betting. A welsher. It was no good trying to draw more than ten per cent of his bets.

Brewer said: "Come in here and be snug. It's warm in here. What a cold night!" He had a hollow cheery manner even in pyjamas. He was like a legend on a racing card: The Old Firm You Can Trust Bill Brewer. He lit the gas fire, turned on a stand lamp in a red silk shade with a bobble fringe. The light glowed on a silver-plated biscuit box, a framed wedding group.

"Have a spot of Scotch?" Brewer invited them.

"You know I don't drink," the Boy said.

"Ted will," Brewer said.

"I don't mind a spot," Dallow said. He grinned and said: "Here's how."

"We've called for that subscription, Brewer," the Boy said.

The man in white pyjamas hissed soda into his glass.

His back turned, he watched Pinkie in the glass above the sideboard until he caught the other's eye. He said: "I been worried, Pinkie. Ever since Kite was croaked."

"Well?" the Boy said.

"It's like this. I said to myself if Kite's mob can't even protect " He stopped suddenly and listened.

"Was that the old woman?" Very faintly from the room above came the sound of coughing. Brewer said: "She's woke up. I got to go and see her."

"You stay here," the Boy said, "and talk."

"She'll want turning."

"When we've finished you can go."

Cough, cough, cough: it was like a machine trying to start and failing. Brewer said desperately: "Be human. She won't know where I've got to. I'll only be a minute."

"You don't need to be longer than a minute here," the Boy said. "All we want's what's due to us. Twenty pounds."

"I haven't got it in the house. Honest I haven't."

"That's too bad for you." The Boy drew off his right glove.

"It's like this, Pinkie. I paid it all out yesterday. To Colleoni."

"What in Jesus' name," the Boy said, "has Colleoni to do with it?"

Brewer went rapidly and desperately on, listening to the cough, cough, cough upstairs. "Be reasonable, Pinkie. I can't pay both of you. I'd have been carved if I hadn't paid Colleoni."

"Is he in Brighton?"

"He's stopping at the Cosmopolitan,"

"And Tate Tate's paid Colleoni too?"

"That's right, Pinkie. He's running the business in a big way." A big way it was like an accusation, a reminder of the brass bedstead at Billy's, the crumbs on the mattress.

"You think I'm finished?" the Boy said.

"Take my advice, Pinkie, and go in with Colleoni."

The Boy suddenly drew his hand back and slashed with his razored nail at Brewer's cheek. He struck blood out along the cheekbone. "Don't," Brewer said, "don't," backing against the sideboard, upsetting the biscuit box. He said: "I've got protection. You be careful. I've got protection."

Dallow refilled his glass with Brewer's whisky. The Boy said: "Look at him. He's got protection." Dallow took a splash of soda.

"You want any more?" the Boy said. "That was just to show you who's protecting you."

"I can't pay both, Pinkie. God's sake, keep back."

"Twenty pounds is what we've come for, Brewer."

"Colleoni'll have my blood, Pinkie."

"You needn't worry. We'll protect you."

Cough, cough, cough, went the woman upstairs, and then a faint cry like a sleeping child's. "She's calling me," Brewer said.

"Twenty pounds."

"I don't keep my money in here. Let me fetch it."

"You go with him, Dallow," the Boy said. "I'll wait here," and he sat down on a straight carved diningroom chair and stared out at the mean street, the dustbins along the pavement, the vast shadow of the viaduct. He sat perfectly still with his grey ancient eyes giving nothing away.

A big way Colleoni come into it in a big way he knew there wasn't a soul in the mob he could trust except perhaps Dallow. That didn't matter. You couldn't make mistakes when you trusted nobody. / cat coasted cautiously round a bin on the pavement stopped suddenly, crouched back, and in the semi-dark its agate eyes stared up at the Boy. Boy and cat, they didn't stir, watching each other, until Dallow returned.

"I've got the money, Pinkie," Dallow said. The Boy turned his head and grinned at Dallow; suddenly his face was convulsed: he sneezed twice, violently. Overhead the coughing died away. "He won't forget this visit," Dallow said. He added anxiously: "You ought to have a spot of whisky, Pinkie. You've caught cold."

"I'm all right," the Boy said. He got up. "We won't stop and say good-bye."

The Boy led the way down the middle of the empty road, between the tram lines. He said suddenly: "Do you think I'm finished, Dallow?"

"You?" Dallow said. "Why, you haven't even begun." They walked for a while in silence, the water from the gutters dripped on the pavement. Then Dallow spoke: "You worrying about Colleoni?"

"I'm not worrying."

Dallow said suddenly: "You're worth a dozen Colleonis. The Cosmopolitan!" he exclaimed and spat.

"Kite thought he'd go in for the automatic machines. He learned different. Now Colleoni thinks the coast's clear. He's branching out."

"He ought to have learned from Hale."

"Hale died natural."

Dallow laughed. "Tell that to Spicer." They turned the corner by the Royal Albion and the sea was with them again the tide had turned a movement, a splashing, a darkness. The Boy looked suddenly sideways and up at Dallow he could trust Dallow receiving from the ugly and broken face a sense of triumph and companionship and superiority. He felt as a physically weak but cunning schoolboy feels who has attached to himself in an undiscriminating fidelity the strongest boy in the school. "You mug," he said and pinched Dallow's arm. It was almost like affection.

A light still burned in Billy's, and Spicer was waiting in the hall. "Anything happened?" he asked anxiously. His pale face had come out in spots round the mouth and nose.

"What do you think?" the Boy said, going upstairs.

"We brought the subscription."

Spicer followed him into his bedroom. "There was a call for you just after you'd gone."

"Who from?"

"A girl called Rose."

The Boy sat on the bed undoing his shoe. "What did she want?" he said.

"She said while she was out with you, somebody had been in asking for her."

The Boy sat still with the shoe in his hand. "Pinkie,"

Spicer said, "was it the girl? The girl from Snow's?"

"Of course it was."

"I answered the phone, Pinkie."

"Did she know your voice?"

"How do I know, Pinkie?"

"Who was asking for her?"

"She didn't know. She said tell you because you wanted to hear. Pinkie, suppose the bogies have got that far?"

"The bogies aren't as smart as that," Pinkie said.

"Maybe it's one of Colleoni's men, poking around after their pal Fred." He took off his other shoe. "You don't need to turn milky, Spicer."

"It was a woman, Pinkie."

"I'm not troubling. Fred died natural. That's the verdict. You can forget it. There's other things to think of now." He put his shoes side by side under the bed, took off his coat, hung it on a bed ball, took off his trousers, lay back in his underpants and shirt on top of the bed. "I'm thinking, Spicer, you oughter take a holiday. You look all in. I wouldn't want anyone seeing you like that." He closed his eyes. "You be off, Spicer, and take things easy."

"If that girl 'ever knew who put the card..."

"She'll never know. Turn out the light and get."

The light went out and the moon went on like a lamp outside, slanting across the roofs, laying the shadow of clouds across the downs, illuminating the white empty stands of the racecourse above Whitehawk Bottom like the monoliths of Stonehenge, shining across the tide which drove up from Boulogne and washed against the piles of the Palace Pier. It lit the washstand, the open door where the jerry stood, the brass balls at the bed end.

The Boy lay on the bed. A cup of coffee went cold on the washstand, and the bed was sprinkled with flakes of pastry. The Boy licked an indelible pencil, his mouth was stained purple at the corners, he wrote: * 'Refer you to my previous letter" and concluded it at last: "P. Brown, Secretary, the Bookmakers' Protection..." The envelope addressed "Mr. J. Tate" lay on the washstand, the corner soiled with coffee. When he had finished writing, he put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He fell asleep at once: it was like the falling of a shutter, the pressure of the bulb which ends a time exposure. He had no dreams.

His sleep was functional. When Dallow opened the door he woke at once. "Well?" he said, lying there without moving, fully dressed among the pastry crumbs.

"There's a letter for you, Pinkie. Judy brought it up."

The Boy took the letter. Dallow said: "It's an elegant letter, Pinkie. Smell it."

The Boy held the mauve envelope to his nose. It smelt like a cachou for bad breath. He said: "Can't you keep off that bitch? If Billy knew..."

"Who'd be writing an elegant letter like that, Pinkie?"

"Colleoni. He wants me to call in for a talk at the Cosmopolitan."

"The Cosmopolitan," Dallow repeated with disgust. "You won't go, will you?"

"Of course I'll go."

"It's not the sort of place where you'd feel at home."

"Elegant," the Boy said, "like his notepaper. Costs a lot of money. He thinks he can scare me."

"Perhaps we'd better lay off Tate."

"Take that jacket down to Billy. Tell him to sponge it quick and put an iron over it. Give these shoes a brush." He kicked them out from under the bed and sat up. "He thinks he'll have the laugh on us." In the tipped mirror on the washstand he could see himself, but his eyes shifted quickly from the image of smooth, never shaven cheek, soft hair, old eyes: he wasn't interested. He had too much pride to worry about appearances.

So that later he was quite at ease waiting in the great lounge under the domed lights for Colleoni; young men kept on arriving in huge motoring coats accompanied by small tinted creatures, who rang like expensive glass when they were touched but who conveyed an impression of being as sharp and as tough as tin. They looked at nobody, sweeping through the lounge as they liad swept in racing models down the Brighton Road, ending on high stools in the American Bar. A stout woman in a white fox fur came out of a lift and stared at the Boy, then she got back into the lift again and moved weightily upwards. A little Jewess sniffed at him bitchily and then talked him over with another little Jewess on a settee. Mr. Colleoni came across an acre of deep carpet from the Louis Seize Writing Room, walking on tiptoe in glac shoes.

He was a small Jew with a neat round belly--he wore a grey double-breasted waistcoat, and his eyes gleamed like raisins. His hair was thin and grey. The little bitches on the settee stopped talking as he passed and concentrated. He clinked very gently as he moved--it was the only sound.

"You were asking for me?" he said.

"You asked for me," the Boy said. "I got your letter."

"Surely," Mr. Colleoni said, making a little bewildered motion with his hands, "you are not Mr. P.

Brown?" He explained: "I expected someone a good deal older."

"You asked for me," the Boy said.

The little raisin eyes took him in: the sponged suit and the narrow shoulders, the cheap black shoes. "I thought Mr. Kite..."

"Kite's dead," the Boy said. "You know that."

"I missed it," Mr. Colleoni said. "Of course that makes a difference."

"You can talk to me," the Boy said, "instead of Kite."

Mr. Colleoni smiled. "I don't think it's necessary," he said.

"You'd better," the Boy said. Little chimes of laughter came from the American Bar and the chink, chink, chink of ice. A page came out of the Louis Seize Writing Room, called: "Sir Joseph Montagu, Sir Joseph Montagu," and passed into the Pompadour Boudoir.

The spot of damp, where Billy's iron had failed to pass, above the Boy's breast pocket was slowly fading out in the hot Cosmopolitan air.

Mr. Colleoni put out a hand and gave him a quick pat, pat, pat on the arm. "Come with me," he said. He led the way, walking on glace tiptoe past the settee, where the Jewesses whispered, past a little table where a man was saying: "I told him ten thousand's my limit" to an old man who sat with closed eyes above his chilling tea. Mr. Colleoni looked over his shoulder and said gently: "The service here is not what it used to be."

He looked into the Louis Seize Writing Room. A woman in mauve with an untimely tiara was writing a letter in a vast jumble of chinoiserie. Mr. Colleoni withdrew. "We'll go where we can talk in peace," he said and tiptoed back across the lounge. The old man had opened his eyes and was testing his tea with his finger. Mr. Colleoni led the way to the gilt grille of the lift. "Number fifteen," he said. They rose angelically towards peace. "Cigar?" Mr. Colleoni asked.

"I don't smoke," the Boy said. A last squeal of gaiety came from below, from the American Bar, the last syllable of the page boy returning from the Pompadour Boudoir: "Gu," before the gates slid back and they were in the padded sound-proof passage. Mr. Colleoni paused and lit his cigar.

"Let's have a look at that lighter," the Boy said.

Mr. Colleoni's small shrewd eyes shone blankly under the concealed pervasive electric glow. He held it out. The Boy turned it over and looked at the hall mark. "Real gold," he said.

"I like things good," Mr. Colleoni said, unlocking a door. "Take a chair." The armchairs, stately red velvet couches stamped with crowns in gold and silver thread, faced the wide seaward windows, and the wrought-iron balconies. "Have a drink."

"I don't drink," the Boy said.

"Now," Mr. Colleoni said, "who sent you?"

"No one sent me."

"I mean who's running your mob if Kite's dead."

"I'm running it," the Boy said.

Mr. Colleoni politely checked a smile, tapping his thumb nail with the gold lighter.

"What happened to Kite?"

"You know that story," the Boy said. He gazed across at the Napoleonic crowns, the silver thread.

"You won't want to hear the details. It wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been crossed. A journalist thought he could put over one on us."

"What journalist's that?"

"You ought to read the inquests," the Boy said, staring out through the window at the pale arch of sky against which a few light clouds blew up.

Mr. Colleoni looked at the ash on his cigar; it was half an inch long; he sat deep down in his armchair, and crossed his little plump thighs contentedly.

"I'm not saying anything about Kite," the Boy said.

"He trespassed."

"You mean," Mr. Colleoni said, "you aren't interested in automatic machines?"

"I mean," the Boy said, "that trespassing's not healthy."

A little wave of musk came over the room from the handkerchief in Mr. Colleoni 's breast pocket.

"It'd be you who'd need protection," the Boy said.

"IVe got all the protection I need," Mr. Colleoni said. He shut his eyes; he was snug; the huge moneyed hotel lapped him round; he was at home. The Boy sat on the edge of his chair because he didn't believe in relaxing during business hours; it was he who looked like an alien in this room, not Mr. Colleoni.

"You are wasting your time, my child," Mr. Colleoni said. "You can't do me any harm." He laughed gently. "If you want a job though, come to me. I like push. I dare say I could find room for you. The world needs young people with energy." The hand with the cigar moved expansively, mapping out the world as Mr. Colleoni visualised it: lots of little electric clocks controlled by Greenwich, buttons on a desk, a good suite on the first floor, accounts audited, reports from agents, silver, cutlery, glass.

"I'll be seeing you on the course," the Boy said.

"You'll hardly do that," Mr. Colleoni said. "I haven't been to a racecourse, let me see, it must be twenty years." There wasn't a point, he seemed to be indicating, fingering his gold lighter, at which their worlds touched: the week-end at the Cosmopolitan, the portable dictaphone beside the desk, had not the smallest connexion with Kite slashed quickly with razors on a railway platform, the grubby hand against the skyline signalling to the bookie from the stand, the heat, the dust fuming up over the half-crown enclosure, the smell of bottled beer.

"I'm just a business man," Mr. Colleoni softly explained. "I don't need to see a race. And nothing you might try to do to my men could affect me. I've got two in hospital now. It doesn't matter. They have the best attention. Flowers, grapes... I can afford it. I don't have to worry. I'm a business man," Mr. Colleoni went expansively and good-humour edly on. "I like you. You're a promising youngster. That's why I'm talking to you like a father. You can't damage a business like mine."

"I could damage you," the Boy said.

"It wouldn't pay. There wouldn't be any faked alibis for you. It would be your witnesses who'd be scared. I'm a business man." The raisin eyes blinked as the sun slanted in across a bowl of flowers and fell on the deep carpet. "Napoleon the Third used to have this room," Mr. Colleoni said, "and Eug&iie."

"Who was she?"

"Oh," Mr. Colleoni said vaguely, "one of those foreign polonies." He plucked a flower and stuck it in his buttonhole, and something a little doggish peeped out of the black buttony eyes, a hint of the seraglio.

"I'll be going," the Boy said. He rose and moved to the door.

"You do understand me, don't you?" Mr. Colleoni said without moving--holding his hand very still he kept the cigar ash, quite a long ash now, suspended.

"Brewer's been complaining. You don't do that again.

And Tate... you mustn't try tricks with Tate." His old Semitic face showed few emotions but a mild amusement, a mild friendliness; but suddenly sitting there in the rich Victorian room, with the gold lighter in his pocket and the cigar case on his lap, he looked as a man might look who owned the whole world, the whole visible world, that is: the cash registers and policemen and prostitutes, Parliament and the laws which say "this is Right and this is Wrong."

"I understand all right," the Boy said. "You think our mob's too small for you."

"I employ a great many people," Mr. Colleoni said.

The Boy closed the door; a loose shoelace tapped all the way down the passage; the huge lounge was almost empty: a man in plus fours waited for a girl. The visible world was all Mr. Colleoni's. The spot where the iron hadn't passed was still a little damp over the Boy's breast.

A hand touched the Boy's arm. He looked round and recognised the man in a bowler hat. He nodded guardedly. " Morning."

"They told me at Billy's," the man said, "you'd come here."

The Boy's heart missed a beat: for almost the first time it occurred to him that the law could hang him, take him out in a yard, drop him in a pit, bury him in lime, put an end to the great future....

"You want me?"

"That's right."

He thought: Rose, the girl, someone asking questions. His memory flashed back: he remembered how she caught him with his hand under the table, feeling for something. He grinned dully and said: "Well, they haven't sent the Big Four anyway."

"Mind coming round to the station?"

"Got a warrant?"

"It's only Brewer been complaining you hit him.

You left your scar all right."

The Boy began to laugh. "Brewer? Me? I wouldn't touch him."

"Come round and see the inspector?"

"Of course I will."

They came out onto the parade. A pavement photographer saw them coming and lifted the cap from his camera. The Boy put his hands in front of his face and went by. "You ought to put a stop to those things," he said. "Fine thing it'd be to have a picture postcard stuck up on the pier, you and me walking to the station."

"They caught a murderer once in town with one of those snaps."

"I read about it," the Boy said and fell silent. This is Colleoni's doing, he thought, he's showing off: he put Brewer up to this.

"Brewer's wife's pretty bad, they say," the detectiTe remarked softly.

"Is she?" the Boy said. "I wouldn't know."

"Got your alibi ready, I suppose?"

"How do I know? I don't know when he said I hit him. A geezer can't have an alibi for every minute of the day."

"You're a wide kid," the detective said, "but you needn't get fussed about this. The inspector wants to have a friendly chat, that's all."

He led the way through the charge room. A man with a tired ageing face sat behind a desk. "Sit down, Brown," he said. He opened a cigarette box and pushed it across.

"I don't smoke," the Boy said. He sat down and watched the inspector alertly. "Aren't you going to charge me?"

"There's no charge," the inspector said. "Brewer thought better of it." He paused. He looked more tired than ever. He said: "I want to talk straight for once.

We know more about each other than we admit. I don't interfere with you and Brewer: I've got more important things to do than prevent you and Brewer arguing. But you know just as well as I do that Brewer wouldn't come here to complain if he hadn't been put up to it."

"You've certainly got ideas," the Boy said.

"Put up to it by someone who's not afraid of your mob."

"There's not much escapes the bogies," the Boy said, grimacing derisively.

"The races start next week, and I don't want to have any big-scale mob fighting in Brighton. I don't mind you carving each other up in a quiet way, I don't give a penny for your worthless skins, but when two mobs start scrapping, people who matter may get hurt."

"Meaning who?" the Boy said.

"Meaning decent innocent people. Poor people out to put a shilling on the tote. Clerks, charwomen, navvies. People who wouldn't be seen dead talking to you or to Colleoni."

"What are you getting at?" the Boy said.

"I'm getting at-this. You aren't big enough for your job, Brown. You can't stand against Colleoni. If there's any fighting I shall come down like a ton of bricks on both of you but it will be Colleoni who'll have the alibis. No one's going to fake you an alibi against Colleoni. You take my advice. Clear out of Brighton."

"Fine," the Boy said. "A bogy doing Colleoni's job for him."

"This is private and unofficial," the inspector said.

"I'm being human for once. I don't care if you get carved or Colleoni gets carved, but I'm not going to have innocent people hurt if I can help it."

"You think I'm finished?" the Boy said. He grinned uneasily, looking away, looking at the walls plastered with notices. Dog Licences. Gun Licences. Found Drowned. A dead face met his eye staring from the wall, unnaturally pasty. Unbrushed hair. A scar by the mouth. "You think Colleoni'll keep the peace better?" He could read the writing: "One nickel watch, waistcoat and trousers of grey cloth, blue striped shirt, aertex drawers."

"Well?"

"It's valuable advice," the Boy said, grinning down at the polished desk, the box of Players, a crystal paperweight. "I'll have to think it over. I'm young to retire."

"You're too young to run a racket if you ask me."

"So Brewer's not bringing a charge?"

"He's not afraid to. I talked him out of it. I wanted to have a chance to speak to you straight."

"Well," the Boy said, standing up, "maybe I'll be seeing you, maybe not." He grinned again, passing through the charge room, but a bright spot of colour stood out on each cheekbone. There was poison in his veins, though he grinned and bore it. He had been insulted. He was going to show the world. They thought because he was only seventeen... he jerked his narrow shoulders back at the memory that he'd killed his man, and these bogies who thought they were clever weren't clever enough to discover that. He trailed the clouds of his own glory after him: hell lay about him in his infancy. He was ready for more deaths.

PART THREE

IDA ARNOLD sat up in the boarding-house bed.

For a moment she didn't know where she was.

Her head ached with the thick night at Sherry's.

It came slowly back to her as she stared at the heavy ewer on the floor, the basin of grey water in which she had perfunctorily washed, the bright pink roses on the wallpaper, a wedding group Phil Corkery dithering outside the front door, pecking at her lips, swaying off down the parade as if that was all he could expect, while the tide receded. She looked round the room: it didn't look so good in the morning light as when she had booked it, but "it's homely," she thought with satisfaction, "it's what I like."

The sun was shining. Brighton was at its best. The passage outside her room was gritty with sand--she felt it under her shoes all the way downstairs; and in the hall there were a pail, two spades, and a long piece of seaweed hanging by the door as a barometer. There were a lot of sandshoes lying about, and from the dining room came a child's querulous voice repeating over and over: "I 'don't want to dig. I want to go to the pictures. I don't want to dig."

At one she was meeting Phil Corkery at Snow's.

Before that there were things to do; she had to go easy on the money, not put away too much in the way of Guinness. It wasn't cheap living down at Brighton, and she wasn't going to take cash from Corkery she had a conscience, she had a code, and if she took cash she gave something in return. Black Boy was the answer: she had to see about it first thing before the odds shortened: sinews of war; and she made her way towards Kemp Town to the only bookie she knew: old Jim Tate, "Honest Jim" of the half-crown enclosure.

He bellowed at her as soon as she got inside his office: "Here's Ida. Sit down, Mrs. Turner," getting her name wrong. He pushed a box of Gold Flake across to her. "Inhale a cheroot." He was a little more than life size. His voice, after the race meetings of twenty years, could hit no tone which wasn't loud and hoarse. He was a man you needed to look at through the wrong end of a telescope if you were to believe him the fine healthy fellow he made himself out to be.

When you were close to him, you saw the thick blue veins on the left forehead, the red money-spider's web across the eyeballs. "Well, Mrs. Turner Ida, what is it you fancy?"

"Black Boy," Ida said.

"Black Boy," Jim Tate repeated. "That's ten to one."

"Twelve to one."

"The odds have shortened. There's been a packet laid on Black Boy this week. You wouldn't get ten to one from anyone but your old friend."

"All right," Ida said. "Put me on twenty-five pounds. And my name's not Turner. It's Arnold."

"Twentyfive nicker. That's a fat bet for you, Mrs.

Whatever you are." He licked his thumb and began to comb the notes. Half-way through he paused, sat still like a large toad over his desk, listening. A lot of noise came in through the open window, feet on stone, voices, distant music, bells ringing, the continuous whisper of the Channel. He sat quite still with half the notes in his hand. He looked uneasy. The telephone rang. He let it ring for two seconds, his veined eyes on Ida; then he lifted the receiver. "Hullo. Hullo.

This is Jim Tate." It was an old-fashioned telephone.

He screwed the receiver close in to his ear and sat still while a low voice buzzed like a bee.

One hand holding the receiver to his ear Jim Tate shuffled the notes together, wrote out a slip. He said hoarsely: "That's all right, Mr. Colleoni. Ill do that, Mr. Colleoni," and planked the receiver down.

"You've written Black Dog," Ida said.

He looked across at her. It took him a moment to understand. "Black Dog," he said, and then laughed, hoarse and hollow. "What was I thinking of? Black Dog indeed."

"That means Care," Ida said. "The Popes used to find them under the bed."

"Well," he barked with unconvincing geniality, "we've always something to worry about." The telephone rang again. Jim Tate looked as if it might sting him.

"You're busy/ 1 Ida said. "I'll be going."

When she went out into the street she looked this way and that to see if she could find any cause for Jim Tate's uneasiness; but there was nothing visible: just Brighton about its own business on a beautiful day.

Ida went into a pub and had a glass of Douro port.

It went down sweet and warm and heavy. She had another. "Who's Mr. Colleoni?" she said to the barman.

"You don't know who Colleoni is?"

"I never heard of him till just now."

The barman said: "He's taking over from Kite."

"Who's Kite?"

"Who was Kite? You saw how he got croaked at St.

Pancras?"

"No."

"I don't suppose they meant to do it," the barman said. "They just meant to carve him up, but a razor slipped."

"Have a drink."

"Thanks. I'll have a gin."

"Cheerio."

"Cheerio."

"I hadn't heard all this," Ida said. She looked over his shoulder at the clock: nothing to do till one: she night as well have another and gossip awhile. "Give me another port. When did all this happen?"

"Oh, before Whitsun." The word Whitsun always caught her ear now: it eant a lot of things, a grubby cm-shilling note, the white steps down to the Ladies', Tragedy in capital letters. "And what about Kite's Friends?" she said.

"They don't stand a chance now Kite's dead. The mob's got no leader. Why, they tag round after a kid Df seventeen. What's a kid like that going to do against Colleoni?" He bent across the bar and whispered: "He cut up Brewer last night."

"Who? Colleoni?"

"No, the kid."

"I dunno who Brewer is," Ida said, "but things seem lively."

"You wait till the races start," the man said.

"They'll be lively all right then. Colleoni's out for a monopoly. Quick, look through the window there and you'll see him."

Ida went to the window and looked out, and again she saw only the Brighton she knew; she hadn't seen anything different even the day Fred died: two girls in beach pyjamas arm in arm, the buses going by to Rottingdean, a man selling papers, a woman with a shopping basket, a boy in a shabby suit, an excursion steamer edging off from the pier, which lay long, luminous, and transparent, like a shrimp in the sunlight. She said: "I don't see anyone."

"He's gone now."

"Who? Colleoni?"

"No, the kid."

"Oh," Ida said, "that boy," coming back to the bar, drinking up her port.

"I bet he's worried plenty."

"A kid like that oughtn't to be mixed up with things," Ida said. "If he was mine I'd just larrup it out of him." With those words she was about to dismiss him, to turn her attention away from him, moving her mind on its axis like a great steel dredger, when she remembered: a face in a bar seen over Fred's shoulder, the sound of a glass breaking, "The gentleman will pay" she had a royal memory. "You ever come across this Kolley Kibber?" she asked.

"No such luck," the barman said.

"It seemed odd his dying like that. Must have made a bit of gossip."

"None I heard of," the barman said. "He wasn't a Brighton man. No one knew him round these parts.

He was a stranger."

A stranger; the word meant nothing to her: there was no place in the world where she felt a stranger.

She circulated the dregs of the cheap port in her glass and remarked to no one in particular: "It's a good life." There was nothing with which she didn't claim kinship: the advertising mirror behind the barman's back flashed her own image at her; the beach girls went giggling across the parade; the gong beat on the steamer for Boulogne it was a good life. Only the darkness in which the Boy walked, going from Billy's, going back to Billy's, was alien to her: she had no pity for something she didn't understand. She said: "I'll be getting on."

It wasn't one yet, but there were questions she wanted to ask before Mr. Corkery arrived. She said to the first waitress she saw: "Are you the lucky one?"

"Not that I know of," the waitress said coldly.

"I mean the one who found the card the Kolley Kibber card."

"Oh, that was her" the waitress said contemptuously, nodding a pointed powdered chin.

Ida changed her table. She said: "I've got a friend coming. I'll have to wait for him, but I'll try to pick.

Is the shepherd's pie good?"

"It looks lovely."

"Nice and brown on top?"

"It's a picture."

"What's your name, dear?"

"Rose."

"Why, I do believe," Ida said, u you were the lucky one who found a card?"

"Did they tell you that?" Rose said. "They haven't forgiven me. They think I didn't ought to be lucky like that my second day."

"Your second day? That was a bit of luck. You won't forget that day in a hurry."

"No," Rose said, "I'll remember that always."

"I mustn't keep you here talking."

"If you only would. If you'd sort of look as if you was ordering things. There's no one else wants to be attended to and I'm ready to drop with these trays."

"You don't like the job?"

"Oh," Rose said quickly. "I didn't say that. It's a good job. I wouldn't have anything different for the world. I wouldn't be in a hotel, or in Chessman's, not if they paid me twice as much. It's elegant here,"

Rose said, gazing over the waste of green-painted tables, the daffodils, the paper napkins, the sauce bottles.

"Are you a local?"

"I've always lived here all my life," Rose said, "in Nelson Place. This is a fine situation for me because they have us sleep in. There's only three of us in my room, and we have two looking glasses."

"How old are you?"

Rose leant gratefully across the table. "Sixteen," she said. "I don't tell them that. I say seventeen.

They'd say I wasn't old enough if they knew. They'd send me" she hesitated a long while at the grim word "home."

"You must have been glad," Ida said, "when you found that card."

"Oh, I was."

"Do you think I could have a glass of stout, dear?"

"We have to send out," Rose said. "If you give me the money "

Ida opened her purse. "I don't suppose you'll ever forget the little fellow."

"Oh, he wasn't so..." Rose began and suddenly stopped, staring out through Snow's window across the parade to the pier.

"He wasn't what?" Ida said. "What was it you were going to say?"

"I don't remember," Rose said.

"I just asked if you'd ever forget the little fellow."

"It's gone out of my head," Rose said. "I'll get your drink. Does it cost all that a glass of stout?" she asked, picking up the two shilling pieces.

"One of them's for you, dear," Ida said. "I'm inquisitive. I can't help it. I'm made that way. Tell me how he looked?"

"I don't know. I can't remember. I haven't got any memory for faces."

"You can't have, can you, dear, or you'd have challenged him. You must have seen his picture in the papers."

"I know. I'm silly that way." She stood there, pale and determined and out of breath and guilty.

"And then it would have been ten pounds not ten shillings."

"I'll get your drink."

"Perhaps 111 wait after all. The gentleman who's giving me lunch, he can pay." Ida picked up the shillings again, and Rose's eyes followed her hand back to her bag. "Waste not, want not," Ida said gently, taking in the details of the bony face, the large mouth, the eyes too far apart, the pallor, the immature body, and then suddenly she was loud and cheerful again, calling out: "Phil Corkery, Phil Corkery," waving her hand.

Mr. Corkery wore a blazer with a badge and a stiff collar underneath. He looked as if he needed feeding up, as if he was wasted with passions he had never had the courage to pursue far enough.

"Cheer up, Phil. What are you having?"

"Steak and kidney," Mr. Corkery said gloomily.

"Waitress, we want a drink."

"We have to send out,"

"Well, in that case make it two large bottles of Guinness," Mr. Corkery said.

When Rose came back Ida introduced her to Mr.

Corkery: "This is the lucky girl who found a card."

Rose backed away, but Ida detained her, grasping firmly her black cotton sleeve. "Did he eat much?" she said.

"I don't remember a thing," Rose said, "really I don't." Their faces, flushed a little with the warm summer sun, were like posters announcing danger.

"Did he look," Ida said, "as if he was going to die?"

"How can I tell?" Rose said.

"I suppose you talked to him?"

"I didn't talk to him. I was rushed. I just fetched him a Bass and a sausage roll, and I never saw him again." She snatched her sleeve from Ida's hand and was gone.

"You can't get much from her," Mr. Corkery said.

"Oh, yes, I can," Ida Said, "more than I bargained for."

"Why, whatever's wrong?"

"It's what that girl said."

"She didn't say much."

"She said enough. I always had a feeling it was fishy. You see, he told me in the taxi he was dying and I believed him for a moment: it gave me quite a turn till he told me he was just spinning a tale."

"Well, he was dying."

"He didn't mean it that way. I have my instincts."

"Anyway," Mr. Corkery said, "there's the evidence, he died natural. I don't see as there's anything to worry about. It's a fine day, Ida. Let's go on the Brighton Belle and talk it over there. No closing hours at sea. After all if he did kill himself, it's his business."

"If he killed himself," Ida said, "he was driven to it. I heard what the girl said, and I know this it wasn't him that left the ticket here."

"Good God!" Mr. Corkery said. "What do you mean? You oughtn't to talk like that. It's dangerous."

He swallowed nervously and the Adam's apple bobbed up and down under the skin of his scrawny neck.

"It's dangerous all right," Ida said, watching the thin sixteen-year-old body shrink by in its black cotton dress, hearing the clink, clink, clink of a glass on a tray carried by an unsteady hand, "but who to's another matter."

"Let's go out in the sun," Mr. Corkery said. "It's not so warm here." He hadn't got an undershirt on, or a tie; he shivered a little in his cricket shirt and blazer.

"I've got to think," Ida repeated.

"I shouldn't get mixed up in anything, Ida. He wasn't anything to you."

"He wasn't anything to anyone, that's the trouble,"

Ida said. She dug down into her deepest mind, the plane of memories, instincts, hopes, and brought up from them the only philosophy she lived by. "I like fair play," she said. She felt better when she'd said that and added with terrible lightheartedness: "An eye for an eye, Phil. Will you stick by me?"

The Adam's apple bobbed. A draught from which all the sun had been sifted swung through the revolving door and Mr. Corkery felt it on his bony breast.

He said: "I don't know what's given you the idea, Ida, but I'm for law and order. I'll stick by you." His daring went to his head. He put a hand on her knee.

"I'd do anything for you, Ida."

"There's only one thing to do after what she told me," Ida said.

"What's that?"

"The police."

Ida blew in to the police station with a laugh to this man and a wave of the hand to that. She didn't know them from Adam. She was cheerful and determined, and she carried Phil along in her wake.

"I want to see the inspector," she told the sergeant at the desk.

"He's busy, ma'am, what was it you wanted to see him about?"

"I can wait," Ida said, sitting down between the police capes. "Sit down, Phil." She grinned at them all with brassy assurance. "Pubs don't open till six," she said. "Phil and I haven't anything to do till then."

"What was it you wanted to see him about, ma'am?"

"Suicide," Ida said, "right under your noses and you call it natural death."

The sergeant stared at her, and Ida stared back.

Her large clear eyes (a spot of drink now and then didn't affect them) told nothing, gave away no secrets.

Camaraderie, good nature, cheeriness, fell like shutters before a plate-glass window. You could only guess at the goods behind: sound old-fashioned hall-marked goods, justice, an eye for an eye, law and order, capital punishment, a bit of fun now and then, nothing nasty, nothing shady, nothing you'd be ashamed to own, nothing mysterious.

"You aren't pulling my leg, are you?" the sergeant said.

"Not this time, Sarge."

He passed through a door and shut it behind him, and Ida settled herself more firmly on the bench, made herself at home. "Bit stuffy in here, boys," she said.

"What about opening another window?" and obediently they opened one.

The sergeant called to her from the door. "You can go in," he said.

"Come on, Phil," Ida said, and bore him with her into the tiny cramped official room, which smelt of French polish and fish glue.

"And so," the inspector said, "you wanted to tell me about a suicide, Mrs....?" He had tried to hide a tin of fruit drops behind a telephone and a manuscript book.

"Arnold, Ida Arnold. I thought it might be your line, Inspector," she said with heavy sarcasm.

"This your husband?"

"Oh, no, a friend. I wanted a witness, that's all."

"And who is it you're concerned about, Mrs.

Arnold?"

"Hale's the name, Fred Hale. I beg your pardon.

Charles Hale."

"We know all about Hale, Mrs. Arnold. He died quite naturally."

"Oh, no," Ida said, "you don't know all. You don't know he was with me, two hours before he was found."

"You weren't at the inquest?"

"I didn't know it was him till I saw his picture."

"And why do you think there's anything wrong?"

"Listen," Ida said. "He was with me and he was scared about something. We were at the Palace Pier.

I had to have a wash and brush up, but he didn't want me to leave him. I was only away five minutes and he'd gone. Where'd he gone to? You say he went and had lunch at Snow's and then went on down the pier to the shelter in Hove. You think he just gave me the slip, but it wasn't Fred I mean Hale who had lunch at Snow's and left that card. I've just seen the waitress. Hale didn't like Bass he wouldn't drink Bass but the man at Snow's sent out for a bottle."

"That's nothing," the inspector said. "It was a hot day. He was feeling bad too. He got tired of doing all the things he'd got to do. I wouldn't be surprised if he cheated and got someone else to go into Snow's."

"The girl won't say a thing about him. She knows but she won't say."

"I can think of an explanation easily enough, Mrs.

Arnold. The man may have left a card on condition she didn't say anything."

"It's not that. She's scared. Someone's scared her.

Maybe the same person who drove Fred... And there are other things."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Arnold. It's just a waste of time getting fussed like this. You see, there was a postmortem. The medical evidence shows without any doubt that he died naturally. He had a bad heart. The medical name for it is myocarditis. I'd call it just heat and crowds and exertion and a weak heart."

"Could I see the report?"

"It wouldn't be usual."

"I was a friend of his, you see," Ida said softly.

"I'd like to be satisfied."

"Well, to put your mind at rest, I'll stretch a point.

It's here now on my desk."

Ida read it carefully. "This doctor," she said, "he knows his stuff?"

"He's a first-class doctor."

"It seems clear, doesn't it?" Ida said. She began to read it all over again. "They do go into details, don't they? Why, I wouldn't know more about him if I'd married him. Appendix scar, supernumerary nipples, whatever they are, suffered from wind I do that myself on a bank holiday. It's almost disrespectful, isn't it? He wouldn't have liked this." She brooded over the report with easy kindliness. "Varicose veins.

Poor old Fred. What's this mean about the liver?"

"Drank too much, that's all."

"I wouldn't be surprised. Poor Fred. So he had ingrowing toe nails. It doesn't seem right to know that."

"You were a great friend of his?"

"Well, we only knew each other that day. But I liked him. He was a real gentleman. If I hadn't been a bit lit this wouldn't have happened." She blew out her bust. "He wouldn't have come to any harm with me."

"Have you quite finished with the report, Mrs.

Arnold?"

"He does mention everything, this doctor of yours, doesn't he? Bruises, superficial, whatever that means, on the arms. What do you think of that, Inspector?"

"Nothing at all. Bank holiday crowds, that's all.

Pushed here and there."

"Oh, come off it," Ida said, "come off it." Her tongue flared up. "Be human. Were you out on bank holiday? Where do you find a crowd like that?

Brighton's big enough, isn't it? It's not a tube lift. I was here. I know."

The inspector said stubbornly: "You've got fancies, Mrs. Arnold,"

"So the police won't do a thing? You won't question that girl in Snow's?"

"The case is closed, Mrs. Arnold, And even if it had been suicide, why open old wounds?"

"Someone drove him... maybe it wasn't suicide at all... maybe..."

"I've told you, Mrs. Arnold, the case is closed."

"That's what you think," Ida said. She rose to her feet j she summoned Phil with a jerk of the chin. "Not half, it isn't," she said. "I'll be seeing you." She looked back from the door at the elderly man behind the desk and threatened him with her ruthless vitality. "Or maybe not," she said. "I can manage this my own way. I don't need your police." (The constables in the outer room stirred uneasily--somebody laughed--somebody dropped a tin of boot polish.) "I've got my friends."

Her friends they were everywhere under the bright glittering Brighton air. They followed their wives obediently into fishmongers', they carried the children's buckets to the beach, they lingered round the bars waiting for opening time, they took a penny peep on the pier at "A Night of Love." She had only to appeal to any of them, for Ida Arnold was on the right side. She was cheery, she was healthy, she could get a bit lit with the best of them. She liked a good time, her big breasts bore their carnality frankly down the Old Steyne, but you had only to look at her to know that you could rely on her. She wouldn't tell tales to your wife, she wouldn't remind you next morning of what you wanted to forget, she was honest, she was kindly, she belonged to the great middle lawabiding class, her amusements were their amusements, her superstitions their superstitions (the planchette scratching the French polish on the occasional table, and the salt over the shoulder), she had no more love for anyone than they had.

"Expenses mounting up," Ida said. "Never mind.

Everything will be all right after the races .1 '

"You got a tip?" Mr. Corkery asked.

"Straight from the horse's mouth. I shouldn't say that. Poor Fred."

"Tell a pal," Mr. Corkery implored.

"All in good time," Ida said. "Be a good boy and you don't know what mayn't happen."

"You don't still think, do you?" Mr. Corkery sounded her. "Not after what the doctor wrote?"

"I've never paid any attention to doctors."

"But why?"

"We've got to find out."

"And how?"

"Give me time. I haven't started yet."

The sea stretched like a piece of gay common washing in a tenement square across the end of the street.

"The colour of your eyes," Mr. Corkery interjected thoughtfully and with a touch of nostalgia. He said: "Couldn't we now just go for a while on the pier, Ida?"

"Yes," Ida said. "The pier. We'll go to the Palace Pier, Phil," but when they got there she wouldn't go through the turnstile, but took up her stand like a huckster facing the Aquarium, the Ladies' Lavatory.

"This is where I start from," she said. "He waited for me here, Phil," and she stared out over the red and green lights, the heavy traffic of her battlefield, laying her plans, marshalling her cannon fodder, while five yards away Spicer stood, too, waiting for an enemy to appear. Only a slight doubt troubled her optimism.

"That horse has got to win, Phil," she said. "I can't hold out else."

Spicer was restless these days. There was nothing for him to do. When the races began again he wouldn't feel so bad, he wouldn't think so much about Hale. It was the medical evidence that upset him: "Death from natural causes," when with his own eyes he'd seen the Boy... It was fishy, it wasn't straight.

He told himself that he could face a police enquiry, but he couldn't stand this not knowing, the false security of the verdict. There was a catch in it somewhere, and all through the long summer sunlight Spicer wandered uneasily, watching out for trouble: the police station, the Place where It had been done, even Snow's came into his promenade. He wanted to be satisfied that the cops were doing nothing (he knew every plainclothes man in the Brighton force), that no one was asking questions or loitering where they had no reason to loiter. He knew it was just nerves. "I'll be all right when the races start," he told himself, like a man with a poisoned body who believes that all will be well when a single tooth is drawn.

He came up the parade cautiously, from the Hove end, from the glass shelter where Hale's body had been set, pale, with bloodshot eyes and nicotined finger ends. Spicer had a corn on his left foot and limped a little, dragging after him a bright orange-brown shoe.

He had come out in spots too round his mouth, and that also was caused by Hale's death. Fear upset his bowels, and the spots came: it was always that way.

He limped cautiously across the road when he was close to Snow's: that was another vulnerable place.

The sun caught the great panes of plate glass and flashed back at him like headlamps. He sweated a little passing by. A voice said: "Well, if it isn't Spicey!"

He had had his eyes on Snow's across the road, he hadn't noticed who was beside him on the parade, leaning on the green railing above the shingle. He turned his damp face sharply. "What are you doing here, Crab?"

"It's good to be back," said Crab, a young man in a mauve suit, with shoulders like coat hangers and a small waist.

"We ran you out once, Crab. I thought you'd stay out. You've altered." His hair was carroty, except at the roots, and his nose was straightened and scarred.

He had been a Jew once, but a hairdresser and a surgeon had altered that. "Afraid we'd lamp you if you didn't change your mug?"

"Why, Spicey, me afraid of your lot? You'll be saying 'sir' to me one of these days. I'm Colleoni's right-hand man."

"I always heard as how he was left-handed," Spicer said. "Wait till Pinkie knows you're back."

Crab laughed. "Pinkie's at the police station," he said.

The police station: Spicer's chin went down, he was off, his orange shoe sliding on the paving, his corn shooting. He heard Crab laugh behind him, the smell of dead fish was in his nostrils, he was a sick man. The police station j the police station: it was like an abscess jetting its poison through the nerves. When he got to Billy's there was no one there. He creaked his tortured way up the stairs, past the rotten bannister, to Pinkie's room: the door stood open, vacancy stared in the swing mirror; no message, crumbs on the floor--it looked as a room would look if someone had been called suddenly away.

Spicer stood at the chest of drawers (the walnut stain splashed unevenly): no scrap of written reassurance in a drawer, no warning. He looked up and down, the corn shooting through his whole body to the brain, and suddenly there was his own face in the glass: the coarse black hair greying at the roots, the small eruptions on the face, the bloodshot eyeballs, and it occurred to him, as if he were looking at a close-up on a screen, that that was the kind of face a nark might have, a man who grassed to the bogies.

He moved away: flakes of pastry ground under his foot; he told himself he wasn't a man to grass: Pinkie, Cubitt, and Dallow, they were his pals. He wouldn't let them down even though it wasn't he who'd done the killing. He'd been against it from the first--he'd only laid the cards; he only knew. He stood at the head of the stairs looking down past the shaky bannister. He would rather kill himself than squeal, he told the empty landirig in a whisper, but he knew really that he hadn't got that courage. Better run for it; and he thought with nostalgia of Nottingham and a pub he knew, a pub he had once hoped to buy when he had made his pile. It was a good spot, Nottingham, the air was good, none of this salt smart on the dry mouth, and the girls were kind. If he could get away but the others would never let him go: he knew too much about too many things. He was in the mob for life now; he looked down the drop of the staircase to the tiny hall, the strip of linoleum, the old-fashioned telephone on a bracket by the door.

As he watched, it began to ring. He stared down at it with fear and suspicion. He couldn't stand any more bad news. Where had everybody gone to? Had they run and left him without a warning? Even Billy wasn't in the basement. There was a smell of scorching as if he'd left his iron burning. The bell rang on and on. Let them ring, he thought. They'll tire of it in time; why should I do all the work of this bloody gaff?

On and on and on. Whoever it was didn't tire easily.

He came to the head of the stairs and scowled down at the vulcanite spitting noise through the quiet house.

"The trouble is," he said aloud, as if he were rehearsing a speech to Pinkie and the others, "I'm getting too old for this game. I got to retire. Look at my hair. I'm grey, ain't I? I got to retire." But the only answer was the regular ring, ring, ring.

"Why can't someone answer the bloody blower?" he shouted down the well of the stairs. "I got to do all the work, have I?" and he saw himself dropping a ticket into the child's bucket, slipping a ticket under an upturned boat, tickets which could have hanged him. He suddenly ran down the stairs in a kind of simulated fury and lifted the receiver* "Well," he bellowed, "well, who the hell's there?"

"Is that Billy's?" a voice said. He knew the voice now. It was the girl in Snow's. He lowered the receiver in a panic and waited, and a thin doll's voice came out at him from the orifice: "Please, I've got to speak to Pinkie." It was almost as if listening betrayed him.

He listened again and the voice repeated with desperate anxiety: "Is that Billy's?"

Keeping his mouth away from the phone, curling his tongue in an odd way, mouthing hoarsely and crookedly, Spicer in disguise replied: "Pinkie's out.

What do you want?"

"I've got to speak to him."

"He's out, I tell you."

"Who's that?" the girl suddenly said in a scared voice.

"That's what I want to know. Who are you?"

"I'm a friend of Pinkie's. I got to find him. It's urgent."

"I can't help you."

"Please. You've got to find Pinkie. He told me I was to tell him if ever " The voice died away.

Spicer shouted down the phone. "Hullo. Where you gone? If ever what?" There was no reply. He listened, with the receiver pressed against his ear, to silence buzzing up the wires. He began to jerk at the hook, "Exchange. Hullo. Hullo. Exchange," and then suddenly the voice came on again as if somebody had dropped a needle into place on a record. "Are you there? Please, are you there?"

"Of course I'm here. What did Pinkie tell you?"

"You got to find Pinkie. He said he wanted to know.

It's a woman. She was in here with a man."

"What do you mean a woman?"

"Asking questions," the voice said. Spicer put down the receiver; whatever else the girl had to say was strangled on the wire. Find Pinkie? What was the good of finding Pinkie? It was the others who had done the finding. And Cubitt and Dallow: they'd slipped away without even warning him. If he did squeal it would be only returning them their own coin. But he wasn't going to squeal. He wasn't a nark.

They thought he was yellow. They'd think he'd squeal. He wouldn't even get the credit... a few tears of self-pity came pricking out of the dry ageing ducts.

I got to think, he repeated to himself, I got to think.

He opened the street door and went out. He didn't even wait to fetch his hat. His hair was thin on top, dry and brittle over the dandruff. He walked rapidly, going nowhere in particular, but every road in Brighton ended on the front. I'm too old for the game, I got to get out, Nottingham--he wanted to be alone, he went down the stone steps to the level of the beach--it was early closing and the small shops facing the sea under the promenade were shut. He walked on the edge of the asphalt, scuffling in the shingle. I wouldn't grass, he remarked dumbly to the tide as it lifted and withdrew, but it wasn't my doing, I never wanted to kill Fred. He passed into shadow under the pier, and a cheap photographer with a box camera snapped him as the shadow fell and pressed a paper into his hand.

Spicer didn't notice. The iron pillars stretched down across the wet dimmed shingle holding up above his head the motor-track, the shooting booths and peep machines, mechanical models, "the Robot Man will tell your fortune." A seagull flew straight towards him between the pillars like a scared bird caught in a cathedral, then swerved out into the sunlight from the dark iron nave. I wouldn't grass, Spicer said, unless I had to.... He stumbled on an old boot and put his hand on the stones to save himself: they had all the cold of the sea and had never been warmed by sun under these pillars.

He thought: that woman how does she know anything what's she doing asking questions? I didn't want to have Hale killed--it wouldn't be fair if I took the drop with the others; I told 'em not to do it. He came out into the sunlight and climbed back onto the parade. It'll be this way the bogies will come, he thought, if they know anything; they always reconstruct the crime. He took up his stand between the turnstile of the pier and the Ladies' Lavatory. There weren't many people about: he could spot the bogies easily enough if they came. Over there was the Royal Albion; he could see all the way up the Grand Parade to Old Steyne; the pale green domes of the Pavilion floated above the dusty trees; he could see anyone in the hot empty midweek afternoon who went down below the Aquarium, the white deck ready for dancing, to the little covered arcade where the cheap shops stood between the sea and the stone wall, selling Brighton rock.

The poison twisted in the Boy's veins. He had been insulted. He had to show someone he was a man.

He went scowling into Snow's, young, shabby, and untrustworthy, and the waitresses with one accord turned their backs. He stood there looking for a table (the place was full), and no one attended to him. It was as if they doubted whether he had the money to pay for his meal. He thought of Colleoni padding through the enormous rooms, the embroidered crowns on the chair-backs. He suddenly shouted aloud: "I want service!" and the pulse beat in his cheek. All the faces round him shivered into motion, and then were still again like water. Everyone looked away. He was ignored. Suddenly a sense of weariness overtook him.

He felt as if he had travelled a great many miles to be ignored like this.

A voice said: "There isn't a table." They were still such strangers that he didn't recognise the voice, until it added: "Pinkie." He looked round and there was Rose, dressed to go out in a shabby black straw which made her face look as it would look in twenty years' time, after the work and the child-bearing.

"They got to serve me," the Boy said. "Who do they think they are?"

"There isn't a table."

Everyone was watching them now with disapproval.

"Come outside, Pinkie."

"What are you all dressed up for?"

"It's my afternoon off. Come outside."

He followed her out and suddenly taking her wrist he brought the poison onto his lips: "I could break your arm."

"What have I done, Pinkie?"

"No table. They don't like serving me in there, I'm not class. They'll see one day "

"What?"

But his mind staggered before the extent of his ambitions. He said: "Never mind they'll learn "

"Did you get the message, Pinkie?"

"What message?"

"I phoned you at Billy's. I told him to tell you."

"Told who?"

"I don't know." She added casually: "I think it was the man who left the ticket."

He gripped her wrist again. He said: "The man who left the ticket's dead. You read it all." But she showed no sign of fear this time. He'd been too friendly. She ignored his reminder.

"Did he find you?" she asked, and he thought to himself: she's got to be scared again.

"No one found me," he said. He pushed her roughly forward. "Come on. We'll walk. Ill take you out.'*

"I was going home."

"You won't go home. You'll come with me. I want exercise," he said, looking down at his pointed shoes, which had never walked further than the length of the parade.

"Where'll we go, Pinkie?"

"Somewhere," Pinkie said, "out in the country.

That's where people go on a day like this." He tried to think for a moment of where the country was: the racecourse, that was country; and then a bus came by marked Peacehaven, and he waved his hand to it.

"There you are," he said, "that's country. We can talk there. There's things we got to get straight."

"I thought we were going to walk."

"This is walking," he said roughly, pushing her up the steps. "You're green. You don't know a thing.

You don't think that people really walk? Why it's miles."

"When people say: Come for a walk, they mean a bus?"

"Or a car. I'd have taken you in the car, but the mob are out in it."

"You got a car?"

"I couldn't get on without a car," the Boy said, as the bus climbed up behind Rottingdean: red brick buildings behind a wall, a great stretch of parkland, one girl with a hockey stick staring at something in the sky, with cropped expensive turf all round her.

The poison drained back into its proper glands: he was admired, no one insulted him, but when he looked at the girl who admired him, the poison oozed out again. He said: "Take off that hat. You look awful."

She obeyed him: her mousy hair lay flat on the small scalp; he watched her with distaste. That was what they'd joked about him marrying: that. He watched her with his soured virginity, as one might watch a draught of medicine offered that one would never, never take; one would die first or let others die. The chalky dust blew up round the windows.

"You told me to ring up," Rose said, "so when "

"Not here," the Boy said. "Wait till we're alone."

The driver's head rose slowly against a waste of sky: a few white feathers blown backward into the blue; they were on top of the downs and turned eastwards.

The Boy sat with his pointed shoes side by side, his hands in his pockets, feeling the throb of the engine come up through the thin soles.

"It's lovely," Rose said, "being out here in the country with you." Little tarred bungalows with tin roofs paraded backwards, gardens scratched in the chalk, dry flower beds like Saxon emblems carved on the downs. Notices said: "Pull in Here,"

"Mazawattee Tea,"

"Genuine Antiques"; and, hundreds of feet below, the pale green sea washed into the scarred and shabby side of England. Peacehaven itself dwindled out against the downs: half-made streets turned into grass tracks. They walked down between the bungalows to the cliff edge; there was nobody about; one of the bungalows had broken windows, in another the blinds were down for a death. "It makes me giddy,"

Rose said, "looking down." It was early closing, and the store was shut; closing time and no drinks obtainable at the hotel--a vista of To Let boards running back along the chalky ruts of unfinished roads. The Boy could see over her shoulder the rough drop to the shingle. "It makes me feel I'll fall," Rose said, turning from the sea. He let her turn; no need to act prematurely; the draught might never be offered.

"Tell me," he said, "now who rang up who and why?"

"I rang up yo u, but you weren't in. He answered."

"He?" the Boy repeated.

"The one who left the ticket that day you came in.

You remember you were looking for something."

He remembered all right the hand under the cloth, the stupid innocent face he had expected would so easily forget. "You remember a lot," he said, frowning at the thought.

"I wouldn't forget that day," she said abruptly and stopped.

"You forget a lot too. I just told you that wasn't the man you heard speak. That man's dead."

"It doesn't matter anyway," she said. "What matters is someone was in asking questions."

"About the ticket?"

"Yes."

"A man?"

"A woman. A big one with a laugh. You should have heard the laugh. Just as if she'd never had a care. I didn't trust her. She wasn't our kind."

"Our kind"; he frowned again towards the shallow wrinkled tide at the suggestion that they had something in common and spoke sharply: "What did she want?"

"She wanted to know everything. What the man who left the card looked like."

"What did you tell her?"

"I didn't tell her a thing, Pinkie."

The Boy dug with his pointed shoe into the thin dry turf and sent an empty corn-beef tin rattling down the ruts. "It's only you I'm thinking of," he said. "It don't matter to me. I'm not concerned. But I wouldn't want you getting mixed up in things that might be dangerous." He looked quickly up at her, sideways.

"You don't seem scared. It's serious what I'm telling you."

"I wouldn't be scared, Pinkie not with you about."

He dug his nails into his hands with vexation. She remembered everything she ought to forget, and forgot all that she should remember the vitriol bottle.

He'd scared her all right then he'd been too friendly since: she really believed that he was fond of her.

Why, this, he supposed, was "walking out," and he thought again of Spicer's joke. He looked at the mousy skull, the bony body, and the shabby dress, and shuddered involuntarily, a goose flying across the final bed. "Saturday," he thought, "today's Saturday," remembering the room at home, the frightening weekly exercise of his parents which he watched from his single bed. That was what they expected of you, every polony you met had her eye on the bed; his virginity straightened in him like sex. That was how they judged you; not by whether you had the guts to kill a man, to run a mob, to conquer Colleoni. He said: "We don't want to stay round here. We'll be getting back."

"We've only just come," the girl said. "Let's stay a bit, Pinkie. I like the country," she said.

"You've had a look," he said. "You can't do anything with the country. The pub's closed."

"We could just sit. We've got to wait for the bus anyway. You're funny. You aren't scared of anything, are you?"

He laughed queerly, sitting awkwardly down in front of the bungalow with the shattered glass. "Me scared? That's funny." He lay back against the bank, his waistcoat undone, his thin frayed tie bright and striped against the chalk.

"This is better than going home," Rose said.

Where's home?"

"Nelson Place. Do you know it?"

"Oh, I've passed through," he said airily, but he could have drawn its plan on the turf as accurately as a surveyor: the barred and battlemented Salvation Army gaff at the corner, his own home beyond in Paradise Piece, the houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up.

They lay on the chalk bank side by side with a common geography, and a little hate mixed with his contempt. He thought he had made his escape, and here his home was: back beside him, making claims.

Rose said suddenly: "She's never lived there."

"Who?"

"That woman asking questions. Never a care."

"Well," he said, "we can't all 'ave been born in Nelson Place."

"You weren't born there or somewhere round?"

"Me. Of course not. What do you think?"

"I thought maybe you were. You're a Roman too. We were all Romans in Nelson Place. You believe in things. Like Hell. But you can see she doesn't believe a thing." She said bitterly: "You can tell the world's all dandy with her."

He defended himself from any connexion with Nelson Place: "I don't take any stock in religion.

Hell it's just there. You don't need to think of it not before you die."

"You might die sudden."

He closed his eyes under the bright empty arch, and a memory floated up imperfectly into speech.

"You know what they say 'Between the stirrup and the ground, he something sought and something found.' "

"Mercy."

"That's right: Mercy."

"It would be awful though," she said slowly, "if they didn't give you time." She turned her cheek onto the chalk towards him and added, as if he could help her: "That's what I always pray. That I don't die sudden. What do you pray?"

"I don't," he said, but he was praying even while he spoke to someone or something: that he wouldn't need to carry on any further with her, get mixed up again with that drab dynamited plot of ground they both called home.

"You angry about anything?" Rose asked.

"A man wants to be quiet sometimes," he said, lying rigidly against the chalk bank, giving nothing away. In the silence a shutter flapped and the tide lisped--two people walking out: that's what they were, and the memory of Colleoni's luxury, the crowned chairs at the Cosmopolitan, came back to taunt him.

He said: "Talk, can't you? Say something."

"You wanted to be quiet," she retorted with a sudden anger which took him by surprise. He hadn't thought her capable of that. "If I don't suit you," she said, "you can leave me alone. I didn't ask to come out." She sat up with her hands round her knees and her cheeks burned on the tip of the bone: anger was as good as rouge on her thin face. "If I'm not grand enough your car and all "

"Who said?"

"Oh," she said, "I'm not that dumb. I've seen you looking at me. My hat..."

It occurred to him suddenly that she might even get up and leave him, go back to Snow's with her secret for the first comer who questioned her kindly; he had to conciliate her, they were walking out, he'd got to do the things expected of him. He put out his hand with repulsion; it lay like a cold paddock on her knee. "You took me up wrong," he said, "you're a sweet girl. I've been worried, that's all. Business worries. You and me" he swallowed painfully "we suit each other down to the ground." He saw the colour go, the face turn to him with a blind willingness to be deceived, saw the lips waiting. He drew her hand up quickly and put his mouth against her fingers; anything was better than the lips; the fingers were rough on his skin and tasted a little of soap. She said: "Pinkie, I'm sorry. You're sweet to me."

He laughed nervously: "You and me," and heard the hoot of a bus with the joy of a besieged man listening to the bugles of the relieving force. "There," he said, "the bus. Let's be going. I'm not much of a one for the country. A city bird. You too." She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape anywhere for anyone? It was worth murdering a world.

"It's beautiful here all the same," she said, staring up the chalky ruts between the To Let boards, and the Boy laughed again at the fine words people gave to a dirty act: love, beauty... all his pride coiled like a watch spring round the thought that he wasn't deceived, that he wasn't going to give himself up to marriage and the birth of children, he was going to be where Colleoni now was and higher... he knew everything, he had watched every detail of the act of sex, you couldn't deceive him with lovely words, there was nothing to be excited about, no gain to recompense you for what you lost, but when Rose turned to him again, with the expectation of a kiss, he was aware all the same of a horrifying ignorance. His mouth missed hers and recoiled. He'd never yet kissed a girl.

She said: "I'm sorry. I'm stupid. I've never had " and suddenly broke off to watch a gull rise from one of the little parched gardens and drop over the cliff towards the sea.

He didn't speak to her in the bus, sullen and ill at ease, sitting with his hands in his pockets, his feet close together, not knowing why he'd come this far out with her, only to go back again with nothing settled--the secret, the memory, still lodged securely in her skull. The country unwound the other way: Mazawattee tea, antique dealers, pull-ins, the thin grass petering out on the first asphalt.

From the pier the Brighton anglers flung their floats. A little music ground mournfully out into the windy sunlight. They walked on the sunny side past "A Night of Love,"

"For Men Only,"

"The Fan Dancer." Rose said: "Is business bad?"

"There's always worries," the Boy said.

"I wish I could help, be of use."

He said nothing, walking on. She put out a hand towards the thin rigid figure, seeing the smooth cheek, the fluff of fair hair at the nape. "You're so young, Pinkie, to get worries." She put her hand through his arm. "We're both young, Pinkie," and felt his body stonily withdrawn.

A photographer said: "Snap you together against the sea," raising the cap from his camera, and the Boy flung up his hands before his face and went on.

"Don't you like being snapped, Pinkie? We might have had our pictures stuck up for people to see. It wouldn't have cost anything."

"I don't mind what things cost," the Boy said, rattling his pockets, showing how much cash he had.

"We might 'ave been stuck up there," Rose said, halting at the photographer's kiosk, at the pictures of the bathing belles and the famous comedians and the anonymous couples, "next " and exclaimed with surprise: "Why there he is!"

The Boy was staring over the side where the green tide sucked and slid like a wet mouth round the piles.

He turned unwillingly to look and there was Spicer fixed in the photographer's window for the world to gaze at, striding out of the sunlight into the shadow under the pier, worried and hunted and in haste, a comic figure at which strangers could laugh and say: "He's worried right enough. They caught him una wares."

"The one who left the card," Rose said. "The one you said was dead. He's not dead. Though it almost looks" she laughed with amusement at the blurred black and white haste "that he's afraid he will be if he doesn't hurry."

"An old picture," the Boy said.

"Oh, no, it's not. This is where today's pictures go.

For you to buy."

"You know a lot."

"You can't miss it, can you?" Rose said. "It's comic.

Striding along. All fussed up. Not even seeing the camera."

"Stay here," the Boy said. Inside the kiosk it was dark after the sun. A man with a thin moustache and steel-rimmed spectacles sorted piles of prints.

"I want a picture that's up outside," the Boy said.

"Slip please," the man said and put out yellow fingers which smelt faintly of hypo.

"I haven't got a slip."

"You can't have the picture without the slip," the man said and held a negative up to the electric globe.

"What right have you," the Boy said, "to stick up pictures without a by-your-leave? You let me have that picture," but the steel rims glittered back at him, without interest a fractious boy. "You bring that slip," the man said, "and you can have the picture.

Now run along. I'm busy." Behind his head were framed snapshots of King Edward VII Prince of Wales in a yachting cap and a background of peep machines, going yellow from inferior chemicals and age; Vesta Tilley signing autographs; Henry Irving muffled against the Channel winds a nation's history. Lily Langtry wore ostrich feathers, Mrs. Pankhurst hobble skirts, the English Beauty Queen of 1 923 a bathing dress. It was little comfort to know that Spicer was among the immortals.

"Spicer," the Boy called, "Spicer!" He climbed up from Billy's small dark hall towards the landing, leaving a smear of country, of the downs, white on the linoleum. "Spicer!" He felt the broken bannister tremble under his hand. He opened the door of Spicer's room and there he was upon the bed, asleep face down.

The window was closed, an insect buzzed through the stale air, and there was a smell of whisky from the bed. Pinkie stood looking down on the greying hair; he felt no pity at all--he wasn't old enough for pity.

He pulled Spicer round; the skin round his mouth was in eruption. "Spicer."

Spicer opened his eyes. He saw nothing for a while in the dim room.

"I want a word with you, Spicer."

Spicer sat up. "My God, Pinkie, I'm glad to see you."

"Always glad to see a pal, eh, Spicer?"

"I saw Crab. He said you were at the police station."

"Crab?"

"You weren't at the station then?"

"I was having a friendly talk about Brewer."

"Not about?"

"About Brewer." The Boy suddenly put his hand on Spicer's wrist. "Your nerves are all wrong, Spicer.

You want a holiday." He sniffed with contempt the tainted air. "You drink too much." He went to the window and threw it open on the vista of grey wall.

A leatherjacket buzzed up the pane and the Boy caught it in his hand. It vibrated like a tiny watch spring in his palm. He began to pull off the legs and wings one by one. "She loves me," he said, "she loves me not. I've been out with my girl, Spicer."

"The one from Snow's?"

The Boy turned the denuded body over on his palm and puffed it away over Spicer's bed. "You know who I mean," he said. "You had a message for me, Spicer.

Why didn't you bring it?"

"I couldn't find you, Pinkie. Honest I couldn't.

And anyway it wasn't that important. Some old busybody asking questions."

"It scared you all the same," the Boy said. He sat down on the hard deal chair before the mirror, his hands on his knees watching Spicer. The pulse beat in his cheek.

"Oh, it didn't scare me," Spicer said.

"You went walking blind straight to There."

"What do you mean there?"

"There's only one There to you, Spicer. You think about it and you dream about it. You're too old for this life."

"This life?" Spicer said, glaring back at him from the bed.

"This racket, of course, I mean. You get nervous and then you get rash. First there was that card in Snow's and now you let your picture be stuck up on the pier for anyone to see. For Rose to see."

"Honest to God, Pinkie, I never knew that."

"You forget to walk on your toes."

"She's safe. She's stuck on you, Pinkie."

"I don't know anything about women. I leave that to you and Cubitt and the rest. I only know what you tell me. You've told me time and again there never was a safe polony yet."

"That's just talk."

"You mean I'm a kid and you tell me good-night stories. But I've got so I believe them, Spicer. It don't seem safe to me that you and Rose are in the same town. Apart from this other buer asking questions.

You'll have to disappear, Spicer."

"What do you mean," Spicer said, "disappear?"

He fumbled inside his jacket and the Boy watched him, his hands flat on his knees. "You wouldn't do anything," he said, fumbling in his pocket.

"Why," the Boy said, "what do you think I mean?

I mean take a holiday, go away somewhere for a while."

Spicer's hand came out of his pocket. He held out a silver watch towards the Boy. "You can trust me, Pinkie. Look there, what the boys gave me. Read the inscription: 'Ten Years a Pal. From the Boys at the Stadium.' I don't let people down. That was fifteen years ago, Pinkie. Twenty-five years on the tracks.

You weren't born when I started."

"You need a holiday," the Boy said. "That's all I said."

"I'd be glad to take a holiday," Spicer said, "but I wouldn't want you to think I'm milky. I'll go at once.

I'll pack a bag and clear out tonight. Why, I'd be glad to be gone."

"No," the Boy said, staring down at his shoes.

"There's not all that hurry." He lifted a foot. The sole was worn through in a piece the size of a shilling.

He thought again of the crowns on Colleoni's chairs at the Cosmopolitan. "I'll need you at the races." He smiled across the room at Spicer. "A pal I can trust."

"You can trust me, Pinkie." Spicer's fingers smoothed the silver watch. "What are you smiling at?

Have I got a smut or something?"

"I was just thinking of the races," the Boy said.

"They mean a lot to me." He got up and stood with his back to the greying light, the tenement wall, the smutsmeared pane, looking down at Spicer with a kind of curiosity. "And where will you go, Spicer?" he said.

His mind was quite made up, and for the second time in a few weeks he looked at a dying man. He couldn't help feeling inquisitive. Why, it was even possible that old Spicer was not set for the flames, he'd been a loyal old geezer, he hadn't done as much harm as the next man, he might slip through the gates into but the Boy couldn't picture any eternity except in terms of pain. He frowned a little in the effort: a glassy sea, a golden crown, old Spicer.

"Nottingham," Spicer said. "A pal of mine keeps the Blue Anchor in Union Street. A free house. High class. Lunches served. He's often said to me: 'Spicer, why don't you come into partnership? We'd make the old place into a hotel with a few more nickers in the till.' If it wasn't for you and the boys," Spicer said, "I wouldn't want to come back. I wouldn't mind staying away for keeps."

"Well," the Boy said, "I'll be off. We know where we are now anyway." Spicer lay back on the pillow and put up the foot with the shooting corn. There was a hole in his woollen sock, and a big toe showed through, hard skin calcined with middle age. "Sleep well," the Boy said.

He went downstairs; the front door faced east, and the hall was dark. He switched on a light by the telephone and then switched it out again, he didn't know why. Then he rang up the Cosmopolitan. When the hotel exchange answered he could hear the dance music in the distance, all the way from the Palm House (th6s dansants, three shillings) behind the Louis Seize Writing Room. "I want Mr. Colleoni." The nightingale singing, the postman ringing the tune was abruptly cut off, and a low Semitic voice purred up the line.

"That Mr. Colleoni?"

He could hear a glass chink and ice move in a shaker. He said: "This is Mr. P. Brown. I've been thinking things over, Mr. Colleoni." Outside the little dark linoleumed hall a bus slid by, the lights faint in the grey end of the day. The Boy put his mouth close to the mouth of the telephone and said: "He won't listen to reason, Mr. Colleoni." The voice purred happily back at him. The Boy explained slowly and carefully: "I'll wish him good luck and pat him on the back." He stopped and said sharply: "What's that you say, Mr.

Colleoni? No. I just thought you laughed. Hullo.

Hullo." He banged the receiver down and turned with a sense of uneasiness towards the stairs. The gold cigar lighter, the grey double-breasted waistcoat, the feeling of a racket luxuriously successful for a moment dominated him: the brass bedstead upstairs, the little pot of violet ink on the washstand, the flakes of sausage roll.

His board school cunning wilted for a while; then he turned on the light, he was at home. He climbed the stairs, humming softly: "The nightingale singing, the postman ringing," but as his thoughts circled closer to the dark, dangerous, and deathly centre the tune changed: "Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi..."; he walked stiffly, the jacket sagging across his immature shoulders, but when he opened the door of his room "Dona nobis pacem" his pallid face peered dimly back at him full of pride from the mirror over the ewer, the soap dish, the basin of stale water.

PART FOUR

IT WAS a fine day for the races. People poured into Brighton by the first train; it was like bank holiday all over again, except that these people didn't spend their money--they harboured it. They stood packed deep on the tops of the trams rocking down to the Aquarium, they surged like some natural and irrational migration of insects up and down the front. By eleven o'clock it was impossible to get a seat on the [142] BRIGHTON HOCK buses going out to the course. A Negro wearing a bright striped tie sat on a bench in the Pavilion garden and smoked a cigar. Some children played touch wood from seat to seat, and he called out to them hilariously, holding his cigar at arm's length with an air of pride and caution, his great teeth gleaming like an advertisement. They stopped playing and stared at him, backing slowly. He called out to them again in their own tongue, the words hollow and unformed and childish like theirs, and they eyed him uneasily and backed further away. He put his cigar patiently back between the cushiony lips and went on smoking. A band came up the pavement through Old Steyne, a blind band playing drums and trumpets, walking in the gutter, feeling the kerb with the edge of their shoes, in Indian file. You heard the music a long way off, persisting through the rumble of the crowd, the shots of exhaust pipes, and the grinding of the buses starting uphill for the racecourse. It rang out with spirit, marched like a regiment, and you raised your eyes in expectation of the tiger skin and the twirling drumsticks and saw the pale blind eyes, like those of pit ponies, going by along the gutter.