Brighton Rock

In the great public-school grounds above the sea the girls trooped solemnly out to hockey: stout goalkeepers padded like armadillos; captains discussing tactics with their lieutenants; junior girls running amuck in the bright day. Beyond the aristocratic turf, through the wrought-iron main gates they could see the plebeian procession, those whom the buses wouldn't hold, plodding up the down, kicking up the dust, eating buns out of paper bags. The buses took the long way round through Kemp Town, but up the steep hill came the crammed taxicabs a seat for anyone at ninepence a time a Packard for the members' enclosure, old Morrises, strange high cars with family parties, keeping the road after twenty years. It was as if the whole road moved upwards like an Underground staircase in the dusty sunlight, a creaking, shouting, jostling crowd of cars moving with it. The junior girls took to their heels like ponies racing on the turf, feeling the excitement going on outside, as if this were a day on which life for many people reached a kind of climax. The odds on Black Boy had shortened, nothing could ever make life quite the same after that rash bet of a fiver on Merry Monarch. A scarlet racing model, a tiny rakish car which carried about it the atmosphere of innumerable roadhouses, of totsies gathered round swimming pools, of furtive encounters in by-lanes off the Great North Road, wormed through the traffic with incredible dexterity. The sun caught it: it winked as far as the dining-hall windows of the girls' school. It was crammed tight: a woman sat on a man's knee, and another man clung on the running board as it swayed and hooted and cut in and out uphill towards the downs. The woman was singing, her voice faint and disjointed through the horns, something traditional about brides and bouquets, something which went with stout and oysters, and the old Leicester Lounge, something out of place in the little bright racing car. Upon the top of the down the words blew back along the dusty road to meet an ancient Morris rocking and receding in their wake at forty miles an hour, with flapping top, bent fender, and discoloured windscreen.

The words came through the flap, flap, flap of the old top to the Boy's ears. He sat beside Spicer, who drove the car. Brides and bouquets: and he thought of Rose with sullen disgust. He couldn't get the suggestion of Spicer out of his mind: it was like an invisible power working against him: Spicer 's stupidity, the photograph on the pier, that woman who the hell was she? asking questions... If he married her, of course, it wouldn't be for long: only as a last resort to close her mouth and give him time. He didn't want that relationship with anyone: the double bed, the intimacy, it sickened him like the idea of age. He crouched in the corner away from where the ticking pierced the seat, vibrating up and down in bitter virginity. To marry it was like ordure on the hands.

"Where's Dallow and Cubitt?" Spicer asked.

"I didn't want them here today," the Boy said.

"We've got something to do today the mob are better out of." Like a cruel child who hides the dividers behind him, he put his hand with spurious affection on Spicer's arm. "I don't mind telling you. I'm going to make it up with Colleoni. I wouldn't trust them. They are violent. You and I, we'll handle it properly between us."

"I'm all for peace," Spicer said. "I always have been."

The Boy grinned through the cracked windscreen at the long disorder of cars. "That's what I'm going to arrange," he said.

"A peace that lasts," Spicer said.

"No one's going to break this peace," the Boy said.

The faint singing died in the dust and the bright sun: a final bride, a final bouquet, a word which sounded like "wreath."

"How do you set about getting married?" the Boy unwillingly asked. "If you've got to in a hurry?"

"Not so easy for you," Spicer said. "There's your age." He ground the old gears as they climbed a final spur towards the white enclosure on the chalky soil, the gipsy vans. "I'd have to think about it."

"Think quick," the Boy said. "You don't forget you're clearing out tonight."

"That's right," Spicer said. Departure made him a little sentimental. "The eight-ten. You ought to see that pub. You'd be welcome. Nottingham's a fine town. It'll be good to rest up there awhile. The air's fine, and you couldn't ask for a better bitter than you get at the Blue Anchor." He grinned. "I forgot you didn't drink."

"Have a good time," the Boy said.

"You'll be always welcome, Pinkie."

They rolled the old car up into the park and got out.

The Boy passed his arm through Spicer's. Life was good walking outside the white sun-drenched wall past the loudspeaker vans, the man who believed in a second coming, towards the finest of all sensations, the infliction of pain. "You're a fine fellow, Spicer," the Boy said, squeezing his arm, and Spicer began to tell him in a low friendly confiding way all about the Blue Anchor. "It's not a tied house," he said; "they've a reputation. I've always thought when I'd made enough money I'd go in with my friend. He still wants me to.

I nearly went when they killed Kite."

"You get scared easy, don't you?" the Boy said. The loudspeakers on the vans advised them whom to put their money with, and gipsy children chased a rabbit with cries across the trampled chalk. They went down into the tunnel under the course and came up into the light and the short grey grass sloping down by the bungalow houses to the sea. Old race cards rotted into the chalk: "Barker Will Bet You," a smug smiling nonconformist face printed in yellow; "Don't Worry, I Pay," and old tote tickets among the stunted plantains. They went through the wire fence into the halfcrown enclosure. "Have a glass of beer, Spicer," the Boy said, pressing him on.

"Why, that's good of you, Pinkie. I wouldn't mind a glass," and while he drank it by the wooden trestles, the Boy looked down the line of bookies. There were Barker and Macpherson and George Beale ("The Old Firm") and Bob Tavell of Clapton, all the familiar faces, full of blarney and fake good-humour. The first two races had been run; there were long queues at the tote windows. The sun lit the white Tattersall stand across the course, and a few horses galloped by to the start. "There goes General Burgoyne," a man said, "he's restless," starting off to Bob Tavell's stand to cover his bet. The bookies rubbed out and altered the odds as the horses went by, their hoofs padding like boxing gloves on the turf.

"You going to take a plunge?" Spicer asked, finishing his Bass, blowing a little gaseous malted breath towards the bookies.

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

"It's the last chance for me," Spicer said, "in good old Brighton. I wouldn't mind risking a couple of nicker. Not more. I'm saving my cash for Nottingham."

"Go on," the Boy said, "have a good time while you can."

They walked down the row of bookies towards Brewer's standj there were a lot of men about. "He's doing good business," Spicer said. "Did you see the Merry Monarch? He's going up," and while he spoke, all down the line the bookies rubbed out the old sixteento-one odds. "Ten to one," Spicer said.

"Have a good time while you're here," the Boy said.

"Might as well patronise the old firm," Spicer said, detaching his arm and walking across to Tate's stand.

The Boy smiled. It was as easy as shelling peas. " Memento Mori," Spicer said, coming away card in hand.

"That's a funny name to give a horse. Five to one, for a place. What does Memento Mori mean?"

"It's foreign," the Boy said. "Black Boy's shortening."

"I wish I'd covered myself with Black Boy," Spicer said. "There was a woman down there saying she'd put a pony on Black Boy. It sounds crazy to me. But think if he wins," Spicer said. "My God, what wouldn't I do with two hundred and fifty pounds? I'd take a share in the Blue Anchor straight away. You wouldn't see me back here," he said, staring round at the brilliant sky, the dust over the course, the torn betting cards and the short grass towards the slow dark sea beneath the down.

"Black Boy won't win," the Boy said. "Who was it put the pony on?"

"Some polony or other. She was over there at the bar. Why don't you have a fiver on Black Boy? Have a bet for once to celebrate?"

"Celebrate what?" the Boy said quickly.

"I forgot," Spicer said. "This holiday's perked me up, so's I think everyone's got something to celebrate."

"If I did want to celebrate," the Boy said, "it wouldn't be with Black Boy. Why, that used to be Fred's favourite. Said he'd be a Derby winner yet. I wouldn't call that a lucky horse," but he couldn't help watching him canter up by the rails: a little too young, a little too restless. A man on top of the half-crown stand signalled with his hand to Bob Tavell of Clapton and a tiny man who was studying the ten-shilling enclosure through binoculars suddenly began to saw the air, to attract the attention of the Old Firm. "There," the Boy said, "what did I tell you? Black Boy's going down again."

"Twelve to one Black Boy, twelve to one," George Beale's representative called, and "They're off," somebody said. People pressed out from the refreshment booth towards the rails carrying glasses of Bass and currant buns. Barker, Macpherson, Bob Tavell, all wiped the odds from their boards, but the Old Firm remained game to the last: "Fifteen to one on Black Boy"; while the little man made masonic passes from the top of the stand. The horses came by in a bunch, with a sharp sound like splintering wood, and were gone. "General Burgoyne," somebody said, and somebody said: "Merry Monarch." The beer drinkers went back to the trestle boards and had another glass, and the bookies put up the runners in the four o'clock and began to chalk a few odds.

"There," the Boy said, "what did I tell you? Fred never knew a good horse from a bad one. That crazy polony's dropped a pony. It's not her lucky day.

Why " but the silence, the inaction after a race is run and before the results go up, had a daunting quality. The queues waited outside the totes: everything on the course was suddenly still, waiting for a signal to begin again; in the silence you could hear a horse whinny all the way across from the weighing-in. A sense of uneasiness gripped the Boy in the quiet and the brightness. The soured false age, the concentrated and limited experience of the Brighton slum, drained out of him. He wished he had Cubitt there and Dailow. There was too much to tackle by himself at seventeen. It wasn't only Spicer. He had started something on Whit Monday which had no end. Death wasn't an end--the censer swung and the priest raised the Host, and the loudspeaker intoned the winners: "Black Boy.

Memento Mori. General Burgoyne."

"By God," Spicer said, "I've won! Memento Mori for a place," and remembering what the Boy had said, he added: "And she's won too. A pony. What a break!

Now what about Black Boy?" Pinkie was silent. He told himself: Fred's horse. If I was one of those crazy geezers who touch wood, throw salt, won't go under ladders, I might be scared to Spicer plucked at him. "I've won, Pinkie. A tenner.

What do you know about that?"

To go on with what he'd pianned with care.

Somewhere from further down the enclosure he heard a laugh, a female laugh, mellow and confident, perhaps the polony who'd put a pony on Fred's horse. He turned on Spicer with secret venom, cruelty straightening his body like lust.

"Yes," he said, putting his arm round Spacer's shoulder, "you'd better collect now."

They moved together towards Tate's stand. A young man with oiled hair stood on a wooden step paying out money. Tate himself was away in the ten-shilling enclosure, but they both knew Samuel. Spicer called out to him quite jovially as he advanced: "Well, Sammy, now the pay-off."

Samuel watched them, Spicer and the Boy, come across the shallow threadbare turf, arm in arm like very old friends. Half a dozen men collected and stood round, waiting; the last creditor slipped away; they waited in silence; a little man holding an account book put out a tip of tongue and licked a sore lip.

"You're in luck, Spicer," the Boy said, squeezing his arm. "Have a good time with your tenner."

"You aren't saying good-bye yet, are you?" Spicer said.

"I'm not waiting for the four-thirty. I won't be seeing you again."

"What about Colleoni?" Spicer said. "Aren't you and I...?" The horses cantered by for another start; the odds were going up; the crowd moved in towards the tote and left them a clear lane. At the end of the lane the little group waited.

"I've changed my mind," the Boy said. "I'll see Colleoni at his hotel. You get your money." A hatless tout delayed them: "A tip for the next race. Only a shilling. I've tipped two winners today." His toes showed through his shoes. "Tip yourself off," the Boy said. Spicer didn't like good-byes: he was a sentimental soul} he shifted on his corn-sore feet. "Why," he said, looking down the lane to the fence, "Tate's lot haven't written up the odds yet."

"Tate always was slow. Slow in paying out too. Better get your money." He urged him nearer, his hand on Spicer's elbow.

"There's not anything wrong, is there?" Spicer said.

He looked at the waiting men; they stared through him.

"Well, this is good-bye," the Boy said.

"You remember the address," Spicer said ."The Blue Anchor, you remember, Union Street. Send me any news. I don't suppose there'll be any for me to send."

The Boy put his hand up as if to pat Spicer on the back and let it fall again: the group of men stood in a bunch waiting. " Maybe " the Boy said; he looked round: there wasn't any end to what he had begun. A passion of cruelty stirred in his belly. He put up his hand again and patted Spicer on the back .4< Good luck to you," he said in a high broken adolescent voice, and patted him again.

The men with one accord came round them. He heard Spicer scream: " Pinkie!" and saw him fall; a boot with heavy nails was lifted, and then he felt pain run like blood down his own neck.

The surprise at first was far worse than the pain (a nettle could sting as badly) ."You fools," he said, "it's not me, it's him you want," and turned and saw Semitic faces ringing him all round. They grinned back at him: every man had his razor out; and he remembered for the first time Colleoni laughing up the telephone wire. The crowd had scattered at the first sign of trouble; he heard Spicer call out: "Pinkie. For Christ's sake"; an obscure struggle reached its climax out of his sight. He had other things to watch: the long cut-throat razors which the sun caught slanting low down over the downs from Shoreham. He put his hand to his pocket to get his blade, and the man immediately facing him leant across and slashed his knuckles. Pain happened to him; and he was filled with horror and astonishment as if one of the bullied brats at school had stabbed first with the dividers.

They made no attempt to come in and finish him.

He sobbed at them: "I'll get Colleoni for this." He shouted "Spicer" twice before he remembered that Spicer couldn't answer. The mob were enjoying themselves, just as he had always enjoyed himself. One of them leant forward to cut his cheek and when he put up his hand to shield himself they slashed his knuckles again. He began to weep, as the four-thirty went by in a drumbeat of hoofs beyond the rail.

Then somebody from the stand shouted: "Bogies," and they all moved together, coming quickly at him in a bunch. Somebody kicked him on the thigh, he clutched a razor in his hand and was cut to the bone.

Then they scattered as the police ran up the edge of the course, slow in their heavy boots, and he broke through them. A few followed him, out of the wire gate and straight down the side of the down towards the houses and the sea. He wept as he ran, lame in one leg, from the kick; he even tried to pray. You could be saved between the stirrup and the ground, but you couldn't be saved if you didn't repent, and he hadn't time, scrambling down the chalk down, to feel the least remorse. He ran awkwardly, tripping, bleeding down his face and from both hands.

Only two men followed him now, and they followed him for the fun of it, shooing him as they might shoo a cat. He reached the first houses in the bottom, but there was no one about. The races had emptied every house: nothing but crazy paving and little lawns, stained-glass doors and a lawn mower abandoned on a gravel path. He didn't dare to take refuge in a house while he rang and waited they would reach him. He had his razor blade out now, but he had never yet used it on an armed enemy. He had to hide, but he left a track of blood along the road.

The two men were out of breath: they had wasted it on laughter, and he had young lungs. He gained on them; he wrapped his hand in a handkerchief and held his head back so that the blood ran down his clothes; he turned a corner and was into an empty garage before they had reached it. There he stood, in the dusky interior, with his razor out, trying to repent. He thought: "Spicer,"

"Fred," but his thoughts would carry him no further than the corner where his pursuers might reappear; he discovered that he hadn't the energy to repent.

And when a long while later the danger seemed to be over, and there was a long dusk on his hands, it wasn't eternity he thought about but his own humiliation. He had wept, begged, run: Dallow and Cubitt would hear of it. What would happen to Kite's mob now? He tried to think of Spicer, but the world held [154] BRIGHTON HOCK him. He couldn't order his thoughts. He stood with weak knees against the concrete wall with the blade advanced and watched the corner. A few people passed,, the faintest sound of music from the Palace Pier bit, like an abscess, into his brain, the lights came out in the neat barren bourgeois road.

The garage had never been used for a garage; it had become a kind of potting shed; little green shoots crept, like caterpillars, out of shallow boxes of earth--a spade, a rusty lawn mower, and all the junk the owner had no room for in the tiny house: an old rocking horse, a pram which had been converted into a wheelbarrow, a pile of ancient records: "Alexander's Rag Time Band,"

"Pack Up Your Troubles,"

"If You Were the Only Girl"; they lay with the trowels, what was left of the crazy paving, a doll with one glass eye and a dress soiled with mould. He took it all in with quick glances, his razor blade ready, the blood clotting on his neck, dripping from his hand, where the handkerchief had slipped. Whatever jackdaw owned this house would have that much added to his possessions: the little drying stain on the concrete floor.

Whoever the owner was, he had come a long way to land up here. The pram-wheelbarrow was covered with labels the marks of innumerable train journeys: Doncaster, Lichfield, Clacton (that must have been a summer holiday), Ipswich, Northampton roughly torn off for the next journey they left, in the litter which remained, an unmistakable trail. And this, the small villa under the racecourse, was the best finish he could manage. You couldn't have any doubt that this was the end, the mortgaged home in the bottom j like the untidy tidemark on a beach, the junk was piled up here and would never go further.

And the Boy hated him. He was nameless, faceless, but the Boy hated him. The doll, the pram, the broken rocking horse. The small pricked-out plants irritated him like ignorance. He felt hungry and faint and shaken. He had known pain and fear.

Now, of course, was the time, while darkness drained into the bottom, for him to make his peace. Between the stirrup and the ground there wasn't time: you couldn't break in a moment the habit of thought: habit held you closely while you died, and he remembered Kite, after they'd got him at St. Pancras, passing out in the waiting room, while a porter poured coal dust on the dead grate, talking all the time about someone's tits.

But "Spicer," the Boy's thoughts came inevitably back with a sense of relief. "They've got Spicer." It was impossible to repent of something which made him safe. The nosy woman hadn't got a witness now, except for Rose, and he could deal with Rose j and then when he was thoroughly secure, he could begin to think of making peace, of going home, and his heart weakened with a faint nostalgia for the tiny dark confessional box, the priest's voice, and the people waiting under the statue, before the bright lights burning down in the pink glasses, to be made safe from eternal pain. Eternal pain had not meant much to him; now it meant the clash of razor blades infinitely prolonged.

He sidled out of the garage. The new raw street cut in the chalk was empty except for a couple pressed against each other out of the lamplight by a wooden fence. The sight pricked him with nausea and cruelty.

He limped by them, his cut hand close on the blade, with his cruel virginity, which demanded some satisfaction different from theirs, habitual, brutish, and short.

He knew where he was going. He wasn't going to return to Billy's like this with the cobwebs from the garage on his clothes, defeat cut in his face and hand.

They were dancing in the open air on the white stone deck above the Aquarium, and he got down onto the beach where he was more alone, the dry seaweed left by last winter's gales cracking under his shoes. He could hear the music, "The One I Love."

"Wrap it up in cellophane," he thought, "put it in silver paper." A moth wounded against one of the lamps crawled across a piece of driftwood and he crushed it out of existence under his chalky shoe. One day, one day he limped along the sand with his bleeding hand hidden, a young dictator. He was head of Kite's gang; this was a temporary defeat. One confession when he was safe to wipe out everything. The yellow moon slanted up over Hove, the exact mathematical Regency Square, and he day-dreamed, limping in the dry unwashed sand, by the closed bathing huts: I'll give a statue.

He climbed up from the sand just past the Palace Pier and made his painful way across the parade.

Snow's Restaurant was all lit up. A radio was playing.

He stood on the pavement outside until he saw Rose serve a table close to the window, then went and pressed his face to it. She saw him at once--his attention rang in her brain as quickly as if he had dialled her on an automatic phone. He took his hand from his pocket, but his wounded face was anxiety enough to her.

She tried to tell him something through the glass--he couldn't understand her: it was as if he were listening to a foreign language. She had to repeat it three times: "Go to the back," before he could read her lips. The pain in his leg was worse--he trailed round the building, and as he turned, a car went by, a Lancia, a uniformed chauffeur, and Mr. Colleoni, Mr. Colleoni in a dinner jacket with a white waistcoat, who leant back and smiled Qnd smiled in the face of an old lady in purple silk. Or perhaps it was not Mr. Colleoni at all, they went so smoothly and swiftly past, but any rich middle-aged Jew returning to the Cosmopolitan after a concert in the Pavilion.

He bent and looked through the letterbox of the back door; Rose came down the passage towards him with her hands clenched and a look of anger on her face. He lost some of his confidence: she's noticed, he thought, how done in... he'd always known a girl looked at your shoes and coat. If she sends me away, he thought, I'll crack this vitriol bottle... but when she opened the door she was as dumb and devoted as ever she'd been. "Who's done it?" she whispered. "If I could get at them."

"Never mind," the Boy said and boasted experimentally: "You can leave them to me."

"Your poor face." He remembered with disgust that they were always said to like a scar, that they took it as a mark of manhood, of potency.

"Is there somewhere," he said, "where I can wash up?"

She whispered: "Come quietly. Through here's the [158] BRIGHTON ROC* cellar," and she led the way into a little closet, through which the hot pipes ran, where a few bottles lay on a small bin.

"Won't they be coming here?" he asked.

"No one here orders wine," she said. "We haven't got a licence. It's what was left when we took over.

The manageress drinks it for her health." Every time she mentioned Snow's she said "we" with faint selfconsciousness. "Sit down," she said. "I'll fetch some water. I'll have to put the light out or someone might see." But the moon lit the room enough for him to look around; he could even read the labels on the bottles: Empire wines, Australian hocks, and harvest burgundies.

She was gone only a little while but immediately she returned she began humbly to apologise: "Someone wanted a bill and Cook was watching." She had a white pudding basin of hot water and three handkerchiefs. "They're all I've got," she said, tearing them up, "the laundry's not back," and added firmly, as she dabbed the long shallow cut, like a line drawn with a pin down his neck: "If I could get at them..."

"Don't talk so much," he said and held out his slashed hand. The blood was beginning to clot; she tied it unskilfully.

"Has anyone been around again talking, asking questions?"

"That man the woman was with."

"A bogy?"

"I don't think so. He said his name was Phil."

"You seem to have done the asking."

"They all tell you things."

"I don't understand it," the Boy said. "What do they want if they aren't bogies?" He put out his unwounded hand and pinched her arm. "You don't tell them a thing?"

"Not a thing," she said and watched him with devotion through the dark. "Were you afraid?"

"They can't put anything on me."

"I mean," she said, "when they did this," touching his hand.

"Afraid?" he lied. "Of course I wasn't afraid."

"Why did they do it?"

"I told you not to ask questions." He got up, unsteady on his bruised leg. "Brush my coat. I can't go out like this. I've got to be respectable." He leant against the harvest burgundy while she brushed him down with the flat of her hand. The moonlight shadowed the room, the small bin, the bottles, the narrow shoulders, the smooth scared adolescent face.

He was aware of an unwillingness to go out again into the street, back to Billy's and the unending calculations with Cubitt and Dallow of the next move. Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the alinements at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll.

Your clothes continually needed ironing, Cubitt and Dallow quarrelled, or else Dallow went after Billy's wife, the old box telephone under the stairs rang and rang, and the extras were always being brought in and thrown on the bed by Judy, who smoked too much and wanted a tip a tip a tip. How could you think out a larger strategy under those conditions? He had a sudden nostalgia for the small dark cupboard room, the silence, the pale light on the harvest burgundy. To be alone awhile...

But he wasn't alone. Rose put her hand on his and asked him with fear: "They aren't waiting for you, are they, out there?"

He shrank away and boasted. "They aren't waiting anywhere. They got more than they gave. They didn't reckon on me, only on poor Spicer."

"Poor Spicer?"

"Poor Spacer's dead," and just as he spoke a loud laugh came down the passage from the restaurant, a woman's laugh, full of beer and good fellowship and no regrets. "She's back," the Boy said.

"It's her all right." One had heard that laugh in a hundred places: dry-eyed, uncaring, looking on the bright side, when boats drew out and other people wept; saluting the bawdy joke in music halls--beside sick beds and in crowded Southern Railway compartments; when the wrong horse won, a good sportswoman's laugh. "She scares me," Rose whispered. "I don't know what she wants."

The Boy pulled her up to him; tactics, tactics: there was never any time for strategy; and in the grey night light he could see her face lifted for a kiss. He hesitated, with repulsion; but tactics. He wanted to strike her, to make her scream, but he kissed her inexpertly, missing her lips. He took his crinkling mouth away, and said: "Listen."

She said: "You haven't had many girls, have you?"

"Of course I have," he said, "but listen..."

"You're my first," she said. "I'm glad." When she said that, he began again to hate her. She wouldn't even be something to boast of: her first--he'd robbed nobody, he had no rival, no one else would look at her, Cubitt and Dallow wouldn't give her a glance her indeterminate natural hair, her simpleness, the cheap clothes he could feel under his hand. He hated her as he had hated Spicer and it made him circumspect; he pressed her breasts awkwardly under his palms, with a grim opportunist pretence of another's man's passion, and thought: it wouldn't be so bad if she was more dolled up, a bit of paint and henna, but this the cheapest, youngest, least experienced skirt in all Brighton to have me in her power.

"Oh, God," she said, "you're sweet to me, Pinkie. I love you."

"You wouldn't give me away to her?"

Somebody in the passage shouted: "Rose"; a door slammed.

"I'll have to go," she said. "What do you mean give you away?"

"What I said. Talk. Tell her who left that ticket.

That it wasn't you know who."

"I won't tell her." A bus went by in West Street; the lights came through a little barred window straight onto her white determined face: she was like a child who crosses her fingers and swears her private oath.

She said gently: "I don't care what you've done," as she might have denied interest in a broken window pane or a smutty word chalked on someone else's door.

He was speechless; and some knowledge of the astuteness of her simplicity, the long experience of her sixteen years, the possible depths of her fidelity, touched him like cheap music as the light shifted from cheekbone to cheekbone and across the wall as the gears ground outside.

He said: "What do you mean? I've done nothing/*

"I don't know," she said. "I don't care."

"Rose," a voice cried, "Rose."

"It's Her," she said, "I'm sure it's Her. Asking questions. Soft as butter. What does she know about us?" She came closer. She said: "I did something once too. A mortal sin. When I was twelve. But she she doesn't know what a mortal sin is."

"Rose. Where are you? Rose."

The shadow of her sixteen-year-old face shifted in the moonlight on the wall. "Right and wrong. That's what she talks about. I've heard her at the table. Right and wrong. As if she knew." She whispered with contempt: "Oh, she won't burn. She couldn't burn if she tried." She might have been discussing a damp Catherine wheel. "Molly Carthew burnt. She was lovely.

She killed herself. Despair. That's mortal sin. It's unforgivable. Unless what is it you said about the stirrup?"

He told her unwillingly: "The stirrup and the ground. That doesn't work."

"What you did," she persisted, "did you confess it?"

He said evasively, a dark stubborn figure resting his bandaged hand on the Australian hock: "I haven't been to Mass for years."

"I don't care," she repeated. "I'd rather burn with you than be like Her." Her immature voice stumbled on the word: "She's ignorant."

"Rose." The door opened on their hiding place. A manageress in a sage-green uniform, glasses hanging from a button on her breast, brought in with her the light, the voices, the radio, the laugh, dispelled the dark theology between them. "Child," she said, "what are you doing here? And who's the other child?" she added peering at the thin figure in the shadows, but when he moved into the light she corrected herself: "This boy." Her eye ran along the bottles, counting them. "You can't have followers here."

"I'm going," the Boy said.

She watched him with suspicion and distaste: the cobwebs had not all gone. "If you weren't so young," she said, "I'd call the police."

He said with the only flash of humour he ever showed: "I'd have an alibi."

"And as for you" the manageress turned on Rose "we'll talk about you later." She watched the Boy out of the room and said with disgust: "You're both too young for this sort of thing."

Too young that was the difficulty. Spicer hadn't solved that difficulty before he died. Too young to close her mouth with marriage, too young to stop the police putting her in the witness box, if it ever came to that.

To give evidence that why, to say that Hale had never left the card, that Spicer had left it, that he himself had come and felt for it under the cloth. She remembered even that detail. Spicer's death would add suspicion. He'd got to close her mouth one way or another: he had to have peace.

He slowly climbed the stairs to the bed sitting room at Billy's. He had the sense that he was losing grip, the telephone rang and rang, and as he lost grip he began to realise all the things he hadn't years enough to know. Cubitt came out of a downstairs room, his cheek was stuffed with apple, he had a broken penknife in his hand. "No," he said, "Spicer's not here. He's not back yet."

The Boy called down from the first landing. "Who wants Spicer?"

"She's rung off."

"Who was she?"

"I don't know. Some skirt of his. He's soft on a girl he sees at the Queen of Hearts. Where is Spicer, Pinkie?"

"He's dead. Colleoni's men killed him."

"God," Cubitt said. He shut the knife and spat the apple out. "I said we ought to lay off Brewer. What are we going to do?"

"Come up here," the Boy said. " Where's Dallow?"

"He's out."

The Boy led the way into the bed sitting room and turned on the single globe. He thought of Colleoni's room in the Cosmopolitan. But you had to begin somewhere. He said: "You've been eating on my bed again."

"It wasn't me, Pinkie. It was Dallow. Why, Pinkie, they've cut you up."

Again the Boy lied. "I gave them as good." But lying was a weakness. He wasn't used to lying. He said: "We needn't get worked up about Spicer. He was milky. It's a good thing he's dead. The girl at Snow's saw him leave the ticket. Well, when he's buried, no one's going to identify him. We might even have him cremated."

"You don't think the bogies?"

"I'm not afraid of the bogies. It's others who are nosing round."

"They can't get over what the doctors said."

"You know we killed him and the doctors knew he died natural. Work it out for yourself, I can't." He sat down on the bed and swept off Dallow's crumbs. u We're safer without Spicer."

"Maybe you know best, Pinkie. But what made Colleoni?"

"He was scared, I suppose, that we'd let Tate have it on the course. I want Mr. Drewitt fetched. I want him to fix me something. He's the only lawyer we can trust round here if we can trust him."

"What's the trouble, Pinkie? Anything serious?"

The Boy leant his head back against the brass bedpost. "Maybe I'll have to get married after all."

Cubitt suddenly bellowed with laughter, his large mouth wide, his teeth carious. Behind his head the blind was half drawn down, shutting out the night sky; leaving the chimney pots, black and phallic, palely smoking up into the moonlit air. The Boy was silent, watching Cubitt, listening to his laughter as if it were the world's contempt.

When Cubitt stopped he said: "Go on. Ring Mr.

Drewitt up. He's got to come round here," staring past Cubitt at the acorn gently tapping on the pane at the end of the blind cord, at the chimneys and the early summer night.

"He won't come here."

"He's got to come. I can't go out like this.' 9 He touched the marks on his neck where the razors had cut him. "I've got to get things fixed."

"You dog you," Cubitt said. "You're a young one at the game." The game: and the Boy's mind turned with curiosity and loathing to the small cheap readyfor-anyone face, the bottles catching the moonlight on the bin, and the word "burn,"

"burn," repeated. What did people mean by "the game"? He knew everything in theory, nothing in practice; he was only old with the knowledge of other people's lusts, those of strangers who wrote their desires on the walls in public lavatories. He knew the moves, he'd never played the game. "Maybe," he said, "it won't come to that. But fetch Mr. Drewitt. He knows."

Mr. Drewitt knew. You were certain of that at the first sight of him. He was a stranger to no wangle, twist, contradictory clause, ambiguous word. His yellow shaven middle-aged face was deeply lined with legal decisions. He carried a little brown leather portfolio and wore striped trousers which seemed a little too new for the rest of him. He came into the room with hollow joviality, a dockside manner; he had long pointed polished shoes which caught the light. Everything about him, from his breeziness to his morning coat, was brand-new, except himself and that had aged in many law courts, with many victories more damaging than defeats. He had acquired the habit of not listening: innumerable rebukes from the bench had taught him that. He was deprecating, discreet, sympathetic, and as tough as leather.

The Boy nodded to him without getting up, sitting on the bed. "Evening, Mr. Drewitt," and Mr. Drewitt smiled sympathetically, put his portfolio on the floor, and sat down on the hard chair by the dressing table.

"It's a lovely night," he said. "Oh, dear, oh, dear, you've been in the wars." The sympathy didn't belong; it could be peeled off his eyes like an auction ticket from an ancient flint instrument.

"It's not that I want to see you about," the Boy said.

"You needn't be scared. I just want information."

"No trouble, I hope?" Mr. Drewitt said.

"I want to avoid trouble. If I wanted to get married what'd I do?"

"Wait a few years," Mr. Drewitt said promptly, as if he were calling a hand in cards.

"Next week maybe," the Boy said.

"The trouble is," Mr. Drewitt thoughtfully remarked, "you're under age."

"That's why I've called you in."

"There are cases," Mr. Drewitt said, "of people who give their ages wrong. I'm not suggesting it, mind you. What age is the girl?"

"Sixteen."

"You're sure of that? Because if she was under sixteen you could be married in Canterbury Cathedral by the Archbishop himself, and it wouldn't be legal."

"That's all right," the Boy said. "But if we give our ages wrong, are we married all right legally?"

"Hard and fast."

"The police wouldn't be able to call the girl?"

"In evidence against you? Not without her consent.

Of course you'd have committed a misdemeanour. You could be sent to prison. And then there are other difficulties." Mr. Drewitt leant back against the washstand, his grey neat legal hair brushing the ewer and eyed the Boy.

"You know I pay," the Boy said.

"First," Mr. Drewitt said, "you've got to remember it takes time."

"It mustn't take long."

"Do you want to be married in a church?"

"Of course I don't," the Boy said. "This won't be a real marriage."

"Real enough."

"Not real like when the priest says it."

"Your religious feelings do you credit," Mr. Drewitt said. "This, I take it then, will be a civil marriage.

You could get a licence fifteen days' residence you qualify for that and one day's notice. As far as that's concerned you could be married the day after tomorrow in your own district. Then comes the next difficulty. A marriage of a minor's not easy."

"Go on. I'll pay."

"It's no good you just saying you're twenty-one. No one would believe you. But if you said you were eighteen you could be married provided you had your parents' or your guardian's consent. Are your parents alive?"

"No."

"Who's your guardian?"

"I don't know what you mean."

Mr. Drewitt said thoughtfully: "We might arrange a guardian. It's risky though. It might be better if you'd lost touch. He'd gone to South Africa and left you. We might make quite a good thing out of that,"

Mr. Drewitt added softly. "Flung on the world at an early age you've bravely made your own way." His eyes shifted from bedball to bedball. "We'd ask for the discretion of the registrar."

"I never knew it was all that difficult," the Boy said.

"Maybe I can manage some way else."

"Given time," Mr. Drewitt said, "anything can be managed." He showed his tartar-coated teeth in a fatherly smile. "Give the word, my boy, and I'll see you married. Trust me." He stood up, his striped trousers were like a wedding guest's, hired for the day at Moss's; when he crossed the room, yellowly smiling, he might have been about to kiss the bride. "If you'll let me have a guinea now for the consultation, there are one or two little purchases for the spouse..."

"Are you married?" the Boy said with sudden eagerness. It had never occurred to him that Drewitt...

He gazed at the smile, the yellow teeth, the lined and wasted and unreliable face as if there possibly he might learn...

"It's my silver wedding next year," Mr. Drewitt said. "Twenty-five years at the game." Cubitt put his head in at the door and said: "I'm going out for a turn." He grinned. "How's the marriage?"

"Progressing," Mr. Drewitt said, "progressing," patting the portfolio as if it had been the plump cheek of a promising infant. "We shall see our young friend spliced yet."

Just till it all blows over, the Boy thought, leaning back on the grey pillow, resting one shoe on the mauve eiderdown: not a real marriage, just something to keep her mouth shut for a time. "So long," Cubitt said, giggling at the bed end. Rose, the small devoted Cockney face, the sweet taste of human skin, emotion in the dark room by the bin of harvest burgundy; lying on the bed he wanted to protest "not yet" and "not with her." If it had to come some time, if he had to follow everyone else into the brutish game, let it be when he was old, with nothing else to gain, and with someone other men could envy him. Not someone immature, simple, as ignorant as himself.

"You've only to give the word," Mr. Drewitt said.

"Well fix it together." Cubitt had gone. The Boy said: "You'll find a nicker on the washstand."

"I don't see one," Mr. Drewitt said anxiously, shifting a toothbrush.

"In the soap dish under the cover."

Dallow put his head into the room. "Evening," he said to Mr. Drewitt. He said to the Boy: "What's up with Spicer?"

"It was Colleoni. They got him on the course," the Boy said. "They nearly got me too," and he raised his bandaged hand to his scarred neck.

"But Spicer's in his room now. I heard him."

"Heard?" the Boy said. "You're imagining things."

He was afraid for the second time that day: a dim globe lit the passage and the stairs; the walls were unevenly splashed with walnut paint. He felt the skin of his face contract as if something repulsive had touched him. He wanted to ask whether you could do more than hear this Spicer, if he was sensible to the sight and the touch. He stood up: it had to be faced whatever it was, passed Dallow without another word. The door of Spicer's room swung in a draught to and fro.

He couldn't see inside. It was a tiny room; they had all had tiny rooms but Kite, and he had inherited that.

That was why his room was the common room for them all. In Spicer's there would be space for no one but himself and Spicer. He could hear little creaking leathery movements as the door swung. The words, "Dona nobis pacem," came again to mind; for the second time he felt a faint nostalgia, as if for something he had lost or forgotten or rejected.

He walked down the passage and into Spicer's room.

His first feeling when he saw Spicer bent and tightening the straps of his suitcase was relief that it was undoubtedly the living Spicer, whom you could touch and scare and command. A long strip of sticking plaster lined Spicer's cheek; the Boy watched it from the doorway with a rising cruelty; he wanted to tear it away and see the skin break. Spicer looked up, put down the suitcase, shifted uneasily towards the wall.

He said: "I thought I was afraid Colleoni had got you." His fear gave away his knowledge. The Boy said nothing, watching him from the door. As if he were apologising for being alive at all he explained: "I got away..." His words wilted out like a line of seaweed, along the edge of the Boy's silence, indifference, and purpose.

Down the passage came the voice of Mr. Drewitt: "In the soap dish. He said it was in the soap dish," and the clatter of china noisily moved about.

"Fin going to work on that kid every hour of the day until I get something." She rose formidably and moved across the restaurant, like a warship going into action, a warship on the right side in a war to end wars, the signal flags proclaiming that every man would do his duty. Her big breasts, which had never suckled a child of her own, felt a merciless compassion. Rose fled at the sight of her, but Ida moved relentlessly towards the service door. Everything now was in train, she had begun to ask the questions she had wanted to ask when she had read about the inquest in Henneky's, and she was getting the answers. And Fred too had done his part, had tipped the right horse, so that now she had funds as well as friends: an infinite capacity for corruption: two hundred pounds.

"Good evening, Rose," she said, standing in the kitchen doorway, blocking it. Rose put down a tray and turned with all the fear, obstinacy, incomprehension, of a small wild animal who will not recognise kindness.

"You again?" she said. "I'm busy. I can't talk to you."

"But the manageress, dear, has given me leave."

"We can't talk here."

"Where can we talk?"

"In my room if you'll let me out."

Rose went ahead up the stairs behind the restaurant to the little linoleumed landing. "They do you well here, don't they?" Ida said. "I once lived in at a pubPARTFOUR lie, that was before I met Tom Tom's my husband," she patiently, sweetly, implacably explained to Rose's back. "They didn't do you so well there. Flowers on the landing!" she exclaimed, with pleasure, at the withered bunch on a deal table, pulling at the petals, when a door slammed. Rose had shut her out, and as she gently knocked she heard an obstinate whisper: "Go away. I don't want to talk to you."

"It's serious. Very serious." The stout that Ida had been drinking returned a little; she put her hand up to her mouth and said mechanically: "Pardon," belching towards the closed door.

"I can't help you. I don't know anything."

"Let me in, dear, and I'll explain. I can't shout things on the landing."

"Why should you care about me?"

"I don't want the innocent to suffer."

"As if you knew," the soft voice accused her, "who was innocent."

"Open the door, dear." She began, but only a little, to lose her patience--her patience was almost as deep as her goodwill. She felt the handle and pushed; she knew that waitresses were not allowed keys; but a chair had been wedged under the handle. She said with irritation: "You won't escape me this way." She put her weight against the door and the chair cracked and shifted, the door opened a slit.

"I'm going to make you listen," Ida said. When you were life saving you must never hesitate, so they taught you, to stun the one you rescued. She put her hand in and detached the chair, then went in through the open door. Three iron bedsteads, a chest of drawers, two chairs, and a couple of cheap mirrors: she took it all in and Rose against the wall as far as she could get, watching the door with terror through her innocent and experienced eyes, as if there was nothing which mightn't come through.

"Don't be silly now," Ida said. "I'm your friend. I only want to save you from that boy. You're crazy about him, aren't you? But don't you understand he's wicked?" She sat down on the bed and went gently and mercilessly on.

Rose whispered: "You don't know a thing."

"I've got my evidence."

"I don't mean that" the child said.

"He doesn't care for you," Ida said. "Listen, Fin human. You can take my word I've loved a boy or two in my time. Why, it's natural. It's like breathing.

Only you don't want to get all worked up about it.

There's not one who's worth it leave alone him. He's wicked. I'm not a Puritan, mind. I've done a thing or two in my time that's natural. Why," she said, extending towards the child her plump and patronising paw, "it's in my hand: the girdle of Venus. But I've always been on the side of Right. You're young.

You'll have plenty of boys before you've finished.

You'll have plenty of fun if you don't let them get a grip on you. It's natural. Like breathing. Don't take away the notion I'm against Love. I should say not.

Me. Ida Arnold. They'd laugh." The stout came back up her throat again and she put a hand before her mouth. "Pardon, dear. You see we can get along all right when we are together. I've never had a child of my own and somehow I've taken to you. You're a sweet little thing." She suddenly barked: "Come away from that wall and act sensible. He doesn't love you."

"I don't care," the childish voice stubbornly murmured.

"What do you mean, you don't care?"

"I love him."

"You're acting morbid," Ida said. "If I was your mother I'd give you a good hiding. What'd your father and mother say if they knew?"

"They wouldn't care."

"And how do you think it will all end?"

"I don't know."

"You're young. That's what it is," Ida said, "romantic. I was like you once. You'll grow out of it. All you need is a bit of experience." The Nelson Place eyes stared back at her without understanding; driven to her hole the small animal peered out at the bright and breezy world: in the hole were murder, copulation, extreme poverty, fidelity, and the love and fear of God; but the small animal had not the knowledge to deny that only in the glare and open world outside was something which people called experience.

The Boy looked down at the body, spreadeagled like Prometheus, at the bottom of Billy's stairs. "Good God," Mr. Drewitt said, "how did it happen?"

The Boy said: "These stairs have needed mending a long while. I've told Billy about it, but you can't make the bastard spend money." He put his bound hand on the rail and pushed until it gave. The rotten wood lay across Spicer's body, a walnut-stained eagle couched over the kidneys.

"But that happened after he fell," Mr. Drewitt protested--his insinuating legal voice was tremulous.

"You've got it wrong," the Boy said. "You were here in the passage and you saw him lean his suitcase against the rail. He shouldn't have done that. The case was too heavy."

"My God, you can't mix me up in this," Mr. Drewitt said. "I saw nothing. I was looking in the soap dish, I was with Dallow."

"You both saw it," the Boy said. "That's fine. It's a good thing we have a fine respectable lawyer like you on the spot. Your word will do the trick."

"I'll deny it," Mr. Drewitt said. "I'm getting out of here. I'll swear I was never in the house."

"Stay where you are," the Boy said. "We don't want another accident. Dallow, go and telephone for the police and a doctor, it looks well."

"You can keep me here," Mr. Drewitt said, "but you can't make me say "

"I only want you to say what you want to say. But it wouldn't look good, would it, if I was taken up for killing Spicer, and you were here looking in the soap dish. It would be enough to ruin some lawyers."

Mr. Drewitt stared over the broken gap at the turn of the stairs where the body lay. He said slowly: " You'd better lift that body and put the wood under it.

The police would have a lot to ask if they found it that way." He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. "I've got a headache," he said, "I ought to be at home." Nobody paid him any attention. Spicer's door rattled in the draught.

"I've got a splitting headache," Mr. Drewitt said.

Dallow came lugging the suitcase down the passage; the cord of Spicer's pyjamas squeezed out of it like toothpaste. "Where was he going?" Dallow said.

"The Blue Anchor, Union Street, Nottingham," the Boy said. "We'd better wire them. They might want to send flowers."

"Be careful about finger prints," Mr. Drewitt implored them from the washstand without raising his aching head, but the Boy's steps on the stairs made him look up. "Where are you going?" he asked sharply. The Boy stared up at him from the turn in the stairs. "Out," he said.

"You can't go now," Mr. Drewitt said.

"I wasn't here," the Boy said. "It was just you and Dallow. You were waiting for me to come in."

"You'll be seen."

"That's your risk," the Boy said. "I've got things to do."

"Don't tell me," Mr. Drewitt cried hastily and checked himself, "don't tell me," he repeated in a low voice, "what things..."

"We'll have to fix that marriage," the Boy said, sombrely. He gazed at Mr. Drewitt for a moment the spouse, twenty-five years at the game with the air of someone who wanted to ask a question, almost as if he were prepared to accept advice from a man so much older, as if he expected a little human wisdom from the old shady legal mind.

"It had better be soon," the Boy went softly and sadly on. He still watched Mr. Drewitt's face for some reflection of the wisdom twenty-five years at the game must have given him, but saw only a frightened face, boarded up like a store when a riot is on. He went on down the stairs, dropping into the dark well where Spicer's body had fallen. He had made his decision j he had only to move towards his aim; he could feel his blood pumped from the heart and moving indifferently back along the arteries like trains on the inner circle. Every station was one nearer safety, and then one farther away, until the bend was turned and safety again approached, like Netting Hill, and afterwards receded. The middle-aged whore on Hove front never troubled to look round as he came up behind her: like electric trains moving on the same track there was no collision. They both had the same end in view, if you could talk of an end in connexion with that circle. Outside the Norfolk bar two smart scarlet racing models lay along the kerb like twin beds. The Boy was not conscious of them, but their image passed automatically into his brain, released his secretion of envy.

Snow's was nearly empty. He sat down at the table where once Spicer had sat, but he was not served by Rose. A strange girl came to take his order. He said awkwardly: "Isn't Rose here?"

"She's busy."

"Could I see her?"

"She's talking to someone up in her room. You can't go there. You'll have to wait."

The Boy put half a crown on the table. "Where is it?"

The girl hesitated. "The manageress would bawl hell."

"Where's the manageress?"

"She's out."

The Boy put another half-crown on the table.

"Through the service door," the girl said, "and straight up the stairs. There's a woman with her though "

He heard the woman's voice before he reached the top of the stairs. She was saying: "I only want to speak to you for your own good," but he had to strain to catch Rose's reply.

"Let me be, why won't you let me be?"

"It's the business of anyone who thinks right."

The Boy could see into the room now from the head of the stairs, though the broad back, the large loose dress, the square hips of the woman nearly blocked his view of Rose, who stood back against the wall in an attitude of sullen defiance. Small and bony in the black cotton dress and the white apron, her eyes stained but tearless, startled and determined, she carried her courage with a kind of comic inadequacy, like the little man in the bowler put up by the management to challenge the strong man at a fair. She said: "You'd better let me be."

It was Nelson Place and Manor Street which stood there in the servant's bedroom, and for a moment he felt no antagonism but a faint nostalgia. He was aware that she belonged to his life, like a room or a chair: she was something which completed him; he thought: "She's got more guts than Spicer." What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn't get along without goodness. He said softly: "What are you worrying my girl about?" and the claim he made was curiously sweet to his ears, like a refinement of cruelty. After all, though he had aimed higher than Rose, he had this comfort: she couldn't have gone lower than himself.

He stood there, with a smirk on his face, when the woman turned; "between the stirrup and the ground," he had learned the fallacy of that comfort j if he had attached to himself some bright brassy skirt, like the ones he'd seen at the Cosmopolitan, his triumph after all wouldn't have been so great. He smirked at the pair of them, nostalgia driven out by a surge of sad sensuality. She was good, he'd discovered that, and he was damned: they were made for each other.

"You leave her alone," the woman said. "I know all about you." It was as if she were in a strange country: the typical Englishwoman abroad. She hadn't even got a phrase book. She was as far from either of them as she was from Hell or Heaven. Good and evil lived in the same country, spoke the same language, came together like old friends, feeling the same completion, touching hands beside the iron bedstead. "You want to do what's Right, Rose?" she implored.

Rose whispered again: "You let us be."

"You're a Good Girl, Rose. You don't want anything to do with Him."

"You don't know a thing."

There was nothing she could do at the moment but threaten from the door: "I haven't finished with you yet. I've got friends."

The Boy watched her go with amazement. He said: "Who the hell is she?"

"I don't know," Rose said.

"I've never seen her before." The vaguest memory pricked him and passed.

"What did she want?"

"I don't know."

"You're a good girl, Rose," the Boy said, pressing his fingers round the small sharp wrist.

She shook her head. "I'm bad." She implored him: "I want to be bad if she's good and you "

"You'll never be anything but good," the Boy said.

"There's some wouldn't like you for that, but I don't care."

"I'll do anything for you. Tell me what to do. I don't want to be like her."

"It's not what you do," the Boy said, "it's what you think." He boasted. "It's in the blood. Perhaps when they christened me, the holy water didn't take. I never howled the devil out."

"Is she good?" She came weakly to him for instruction.

"She?" The Boy laughed. "She's just nothing."

"We can't stay here," Rose said. "I wish we could."

She looked round her, at a badly foxed steel engraving of Van Tromp's victory, the three black bedsteads, the two mirrors, the single chest of drawers, the pale mauve knots of flowers on the wallpaper, as if she was safer here than she could ever be in the squally summer night outside. "It's a nice room." She wanted to share it with him till it became a home for both of them.

"How'd you like to leave this place?"

"Snow's? Oh, no, it's a good place. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else than Snow's."

"I mean marry me."

"We aren't old enough."

"It could be managed. There are ways." He dropped her wrist and put on a careless air. "If you wanted. I don't mind."

"Oh," she said. "I want it. But they'll never let us."

He explained airily. "It couldn't be in church, not at first. There'd be difficulties. Are you afraid?"

"I'm not afraid," she said. "But will they let us?"

"My lawyer '11 manage somehow."

"Have you got a lawyer?"

"Of course I have."

"It sounds somehow grand and old."

"A man can't get along without a lawyer."

She said: "It's not where I always thought it would be."

"Where what would be?"

"Someone asking me to marry him. I thought in the pictures or maybe at night on the front. But this is best," she said, looking from Van Tromp's victory to the two looking glasses. She came away from the wall and lifted her face to him; he knew what was expected of him; he regarded her unmade-up mouth with faint nausea. Saturday night, eleven o'clock, the primeval exercise. He pressed his hard puritanical mouth on hers; and tasted again the sweetish smell of the human skin. He would have preferred the taste of Coty powder or Kissproof lipstick, of any chemical compound. He shut his eyes and when he opened them again, it was to see her waiting, like a blind girl, for further alms. It shocked him that she had been unable to detect his repulsion. She said: "You know what that means?"

"What means?"

"It means I'll never let you down, never, never, never."

She belonged to him like a room or a chair: the Boy fetched up a smile for the blind lost face, uneasily, with obscure shame.

PART FIVE

EVERYTHING went well: the inquest never even got onto the newspaper posters; no questions asked. The Boy walked back with Dallow, he should have felt triumphant. He said: "I wouldn't trust Cubitt if Cubitt knew."

"Cubitt won't know. Drewitt is scared to say a thing and you know I don't talk, Pinkie."

"Fve got a feeling we're being followed, Dallow."

Dallow looked behind. "No one. I know every bogy in Brighton."

"No woman?"

"No. Who are you thinking of?"

"I don't know."

The blind band came up the kerb, scraping the sides of their shoes along the edge, feeling their way in the brilliant light, sweating a little. The boy walked up the side of the road to meet them; the music they played was plaintive, pitying, something out of a hymn book about burdens; it was like a voice prophesying sorrow at the moment of victory. The boy met the leader and pushed him out of the way, swearing at him softly, and the whole band, hearing their leader move, shifted uneasily a foot into the roadway and stood there stranded till the boy was safely by, like barques becalmed on a huge and landless Atlantic.

Then they edged back, feeling for the landfall of the pavement.

"What's up with you, Pinkie?" Dallow said.

"They're blind."

"Why should I get out of my way for a beggar?"

But he hadn't realised they were blind; he was shocked by his own action. It was as if he was being driven too far down a road he wanted to travel only a certain distance. He stood and leant on the rail of the front while the midweek crowd passed and the hard sun flattened.

"What's on your mind, Pinkie?"

"To think of all this trouble over Hale. He deserved what he got, but if I'd known how it would go maybe I'd have let him live. Maybe he wasn't worth killing.

A dirty little journalist who played in with Colleoni and got Kite killed. Why should anyone bother about him?" He looked suddenly over his shoulder. "Have I seen that geezer before?"

"He's only a visitor."

"I thought I'd seen his tie."

"Hundreds in the shops. If you were a drinking man I'd say what you needed was a pick-up. Why, Pinkie, everything's going fine. No questions asked."

"There were only two people could hang us, Spicer and the girl. I've killed Spicer and I'm marrying the girl. Seems to me I'm doing everything."

"Well, we'll be safe now."

"Oh, yes, you'll be safe. It's me who runs all the risk. You know I killed Spicer. Drewitt knows. It only wants Cubitt and I'll need a massacre to put me right this time."

"You oughtn't to talk that way to me, Pinkie.

You've been all bottled up since Kite died. What you want's a bit of fun."

"I liked Kite," the Boy said. He stared straight out towards France, an unknown land. At his back beyond the Cosmopolitan, Old Steyne, the Lewes Road, stood the downs, villages and cattle round the dewponds, another unknown land. This was his territory: the popillous foreshore, a few thousand acres of houses, a narrow peninsula of electrified track running to London, two or three railway stations with their buffets and buns. It had been Kite's territory, it had been good enough for Kite, and when Kite had died in the waiting room at St. Pancras, it had been as if a father had died, leaving him an inheritance it was his duty never to leave for strange acres. He had inherited even the mannerisms, the bitten thumb nail, the soft drinks. The sun slid off the sea and like a cuttlefish shot into the sky the stain of agonies and endurances.

"Break out, Pinkie. Relax. Give yourself a chance.

Come out with me and Cubitt to the Queen of Hearts and celebrate."

"You know I never touch a drink."

"You'll have to on your wedding day. Whoever heard of a dry wedding?"

An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack, and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half vulture and half dove. In the end one always had to learn.

"All right, I'll come," the Boy said.

"It's the best roadhouse this side of London," Dailow encouraged him.

They drove out in the old Morris into the country.

"I like a blow in the country," Dallow said. It was between lighting-up time and the real dark when the lamps of cars burned in the grey visibility as faintly and unnecessarily as the night lights in nurseries. The advertisements trailed along the arterial roadj bungalows and a broken farm, short chalky grass where a hoarding had been pulled down, a windmill offering tea and lemonade, the great sails gaping.

"Poor old Spicer would have liked this ride," Cubitt said. The Boy sat beside Dallow, who drove, and Cubitt sat in the rumble. The Boy could see him in the driving mirror bouncing gently up and down on the defective springs.

The Queen of Hearts was floodlit behind the petrol pumps: a Tudor barn converted, a vestige of a farmyard left in the arrangement of the restaurant and bars, a swimming pool where the paddock had been. u We ought to 'ave brought some girls with us," Dallow said. "You can't pick 'em up in this gaff. It's real class."

"Come in the bar," Cubitt said and led the way.

He stopped on the threshold and nodded towards the girl who sat and drank alone at the long steel bar under the old rafters. "We better say something, Pinkie. You know the kind of thing he was a real good old pal, we sympathise with what you feel."

"What are you clapping about?"

"That's Spicer's girl," Cubitt said.

The Boy stood in the doorway and took her reluctantly in: hair fair as silver, wide vacuous brow, trim little buttocks shaped by the high seat, alone with her glass and her grief.

"How's things, Sylvie?" Cubitt said.

"Awful."

"Terrible, wasn't it? He was a good pal. One of the best."

"You were there, weren't you?" she said to Dallow.

"Billy ought to 'ave mended that stair," Dallow said. "Meet Pinkie, Sylvie, the best one in our mob."

"Were you there too?"

"He wasn't there," Dallow said.

"Have another drink?" the Boy said.

Sylvie drained her glass. "I don't mind if I do. A sidecar."

"Two Scotch, a sidecar, a grapefruit squash."

"Why," Sylvie said, "don't you drink?"

"No."

"I bet you don't go with girls either."

"You got him, Sylvie," Cubitt said, "first shot."

"I admire a man like that," Sylvie said. "I think it's wonderful to be fit. Spicie always said you'd break out one day and then oh, gosh, how wonderful!"

She put down her glass, miscalculated, upset the cocktail. She said: "I'm not drunk. I'm upset about poor Spicie."

"Go on, Pinkie," Dallow said, "have a drink. It'll jerk you up." He explained to Sylvie: "He's upset too." In the dance hall the band was playing: "Love me tonight, And forget in daylight, All our delight..."

"Have a drink," Sylvie said. "I've been awful upset. You can see I've been crying. Aren't my eyes awful?... Why, I hardly dared show myself. I can see why people go into monasteries." The music beat on the boy's resistance; he watched with a kind of horror and curiosity Spicer's girl friend: she knew the game.

He shook his head, speechless in his scared pride. He knew what he was good at: he was the top: there was no limit to his ambition: nothing must lay him open to the mockery of people more experienced than he.

To be compared with Spicer and found wanting... his eyes shifted miserably and the music wailed its tidings "forget in daylight" about the game of which they all knew so much more than he did.

"Spicie said he didn't think you'd ever had a girl,"

Sylvie said.

"There was plenty Spicer didn't know."

"You're awful young to be so famous."

"You and n*e had better go away," Cubitt said to Dallow. "Seems we're not wanted. Come an' lamp the bathing belles." They moved heavily out of sight.

"Dallie just knows when I like a boy," Sylvie said.

"Who's Dallie?"

"Your friend, Mr. Dallow, silly. Do you dance why, I don't even know your proper name?" He watched her with scared lust: she had belonged to Spicer; her voice had wailed up the telephone wires making assignations; he had had signed letters in mauve envelopes, addressed to him; even Spicer had had something to be proud of, to show to friends "my girl." He remembered some flowers which had come to Billy's labelled "Brokenhearted." He was fascinated by her infidelity. She belonged to nobody unlike a table or a chair. He said slowly, putting his arm round her to take her glass and pressing her breast clumsily: "I'm going to be married in a day or two."

It was as if he were staking a claim to his share of infidelity: he wasn't to be beaten by experience. He lifted her glass and drank it; the sweetness dripped down his throat, his first alcohol touched the palate like a bad smell: this was what people called pleasure this and the game. He put his hand on her thigh with a kind of horror; Rose and he; forty-eight hours after Drewitt had arranged things; alone in God knows what apartment what then, what then? He knew the traditional actions as a man may know the principles of gunnery in chalk on a blackboard, but to translate the knowledge to action, to the smashed village and the ravaged woman, one needed help from the nerves. His own were frozen with repulsion: to be touched, to give oneself away, to lay oneself open he had held intimacy back as long as he could at the end of a razor blade.

He said: "Come on. Let's dance."

They circulated slowly in the dance hall. To be beaten by experience was bad enough, but to be beaten by greenness and innocence, by a girl who carried plates at Snow's, by a little bitch of sixteen years...

"Spicie thought a lot of you," Sylvie said.

"Come out to the cars," the boy said.

"I couldn't, not with Spicie dead only yesterday."

They stood and clapped and then the dance began again. The shaker clacked in the bar, and the leaves of one small tree were pressed against the window beyond the big drum and the saxophone.

"I like the country. It makes me feel romantic. Do you like the country?"

"No."

"This is real country. I saw a hen just now. They use their own eggs in the gin slings."

"Come out to the cars."

"I feel that way too. Oh, gosh, wouldn't it be fine?

But I can't, not with poor Spicie..,"

"You sent flowers, didn't you, you been crying..."

"My eyes are awful."

"What more can you do?"

"It broke my heart. Poor Spicie going off like that."

"I know. I saw your wreath."

"It does seem awful, doesn't it? Dancing with you like this and him..."

"Come to the cars."

"Poor Spicie," but she led the way, and he noticed with uneasiness how she ran literally ran across the lit corner of what had once been a farmyard towards the dark car park and the game. He thought with sickness: "In three minutes I shall know."

"Which is your car?" Sylvie said.

"That Morris."

"No good to us," Sylvie said. She darted down the line of cars. "This Ford." She pulled the door open, said: "Oh, pardon me," and shut it, scrambled into the back of the next car in the line, and waited for him. "Oh," her voice softly and passionately pronounced from the dim interior, "I love a Lancia." He stood in the doorway and the darkness peeled away between him and the fair and vacuous face. Her skirt drawn up above her knees she waited for him with luxurious docility.

He was conscious for a moment of his enormous ambitions under the shadow of the hideous and commonplace act: the suite at the Cosmopolitan, the gold cigar lighter, chairs stamped with crowns for a foreigner called Eugenie. Hale dropped out of sight, like a stone thrown over a cliff; he was at the beginning of a long polished parquet walk, there were busts of great men and the sound of cheering, Mr. Colleoni bowed like a shopwalker, stepping backwards, an army of razors was at his back: a conqueror. Hoofs drummed along the straight and a loudspeaker announced the winner--music was playing. His breast ached with the effort to enclose the whole world.

"You've got the doings, haven't you?" Sylvie said.

With fear and horror he thought: next move, what is it?

"Quick," Sylvie said, "before they find us here."

The parquet floor rolled up like a carpet. The moonlight touched a Wool worth ring and a plump knee.

He said in a bitter and painful rage: "Wait there. I'll get Cubitt for you," and turned his back on the Lancia and walked back towards the bar. Laughter from the bathing pool deflected him. He stood in the doorway with the taste of the alcohol on his tongue watching a thin girl in a red rubber cap giggle under the floodlighting. His mind tracked inevitably back and forth to Sylvie like a model engine electrically driven. Fear and curiosity ate at the proud future, he was aware of nausea and retched. Marry, he thought, hell, no; I'd rather hang.

A man in a bathing slip came running down the highboard, jumped and somersaulted in the pearly brilliant light, struck the dark water--the two bathers swam together, stroke by stroke, towards the shallows, turned and came back, side by side, smooth and unhurried, playing a private game, happy and at ease.

The Boy stood and watched them, and as they came down the pool a second time he saw in the floodlit water his own image shiver at their stroke, the narrow shoulders and the hollow breast, and he felt the brown pointed shoes slip on the splashed and shining tiles.

Cubitt and Dallow chattered all the way back, a little lit; the Boy stared ahead into the bright core of the darkness. He said suddenly with fury: "You can laugh."

"Well, you didn't do so bad," Cubitt said.

"You can laugh. You think you're safe. But I'm tired of the lot of you. I've got a good mind to clear out."

"Take a long honeymoon," Cubitt said and grinned, and an owl cried with painful hunger swooping low over a filling station, into the headlights and out again, on furry and predatory wings.

"I'm not going to marry," the Boy said.

"I knew a geezer once," Cubitt said, "was so scared he killed himself. They had to send back the wedding presents."

"I'm not going to marry."

"People often feel that way."

"Nothing's going to make me marry."

"You've got to marry," Dallow said. A woman stared from a window of Charlie's Pull-in Caf waiting for someone: she didn't look at the car going by, waiting.

"Have a drink," Cubitt said: he was more drunk than Dallow. "I brought a flask away. You can't say you don't drink now: we saw you, Dallow and me."

The Boy said to Dallow: "I won't marry. Why should I marry?"

"It was your doing," Dallow said.

"What was his doing?" Cubitt said. Dallow didn't reply, laying his friendly and oppressive hand on the Boy's knee. The boy took a squint at the stupid devoted face and felt anger at the way another's loyalty could hamper and drive. Dallow was the only man he trusted, and he hated him as if he was his mentor.

He said weakly: "Nothing will make me marry," watching the long parade of posters going by in the submarine light Guinness Is Good for You, Try a Worth*ngton, , Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion a jtong series of adjurations, people telling you things: Own Your Own Home, Bennett's for Wedding Rings.

And at Billy's they told him: "Your girl's here." He went up the stairs to his room in hopeless rebellion: he would go in and say I've changed my mind, I can't marry you. Or perhaps: The lawyers say it can't be managed after all. The bannisters were still broken and he looked down the long drop to where Spicer's body had lain. Cubitt and Dallow were standing on the exact spot laughing at something; the sharp edge of a broken bannister scratched his hand. He put it to his mouth and went in. He thought: I've got to be calm, I've got to keep my wits about me, but he felt his integrity stained by the taste of the spirit at the bar.

You could lose vice as easily as you lost virtue, going out of you from a touch.

He took a look at her. She was scared when he said softly: "What are you doing here?" She had on the hat he disliked and she made a snatch at it as soon as he looked. "At this time of night," he said in a shocked way, thinking there was a quarrel to be picked there if he went about it in the right way.

"You've seen this?" Rose implored him. She had the local paper; he hadn't bothered to read it, but there on the front page was the picture of Spicer striding in terror under the iron arches. They'd been more successful at the kiosk than he'd been. Rose said: "It says here it happened "

"On the landing," the boy said. "I was always telling Billy to mend those bannisters."

"But you said they got him on the course. And he was the one who "

He faced her with spurious firmness: "Gave you the ticket? So you said. Maybe he knew Hale. He knew a lot of geezers I didn't. What of it?" With confidence he repeated his question before her dumb stare: "What of it?" His mind, he knew, could contemplate any treachery, but she was a good kid, she was boundaried by her goodness; there were things she couldn't imagine, and he thought he saw her imagination wilting now in the vast desert of dread.

"I thought," she said, "I thought..." looking beyond him to the shattered bannister on the landing.

"What did you think?"

His fingers curled with passionate hatred round the small bottle in his pocket.

"I don't know. I didn't sleep last night. I had such dreams."

"What dreams?"

She looked at him with horror. "I dreamed you were dead."

He laughed. "I'm young and spry," thinking with nausea of the car park and the invitation in the Lancia.

"You aren't going to stay here, are you?"

"Why not?"

"I'd have thought " she said, her eyes back again in their gaze at the bannisters. She said: "I'm scared."

"You've no cause to be," he said, tickling the vitriol bottle.

"I'm scared for you. Oh," she said, "I know I'm no account. I know you've got a lawyer and a car and friends, but this place " she stumbled hopelessly in an attempt to convey the sense she had of the territory in which he moved: a place of accidents and unexplained events, the stranger with a card, the fight on the course, the headlong fall. A kind of boldness and brazenness came into her face, so that he felt again the faintest stirring of sensuality. "You've got to come away from here. You've got to marry me like you said."

"It can't be done after all. I've seen my lawyer.

We're too young."

"I don't mind about that. It's not a real marriage anyway. A register's doesn't make any difference."

"You go back where you came from," he said harshly, "you little buer."

"I can't," she said. "I'm sacked."

"What for?" It was as if the handcuffs were meeting. He suspected her.

"I was rude to a customer."

"Why? What customer?"

"Can't you guess?" she said, and went passionately on: "Who is she anyway? Interfering... pestering .., you must know."

"I don't know her from Adam," the boy said.

She put all her full experience drawn from the twopenny library into the question: "Is she jealous?

Is she someone... you know what I mean?" and ready then, masked behind the ingenuous question like the guns in a Q ship, was possessiveness: she was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you too by your finger prints.

He laughed uneasily. "What, she? She's old enough to be my mother."

"Then what does she want?"

"I wish I knew."

"Do you think," she said, "I ought to take this" she held out the paper to him "to the police?"

The ingenuousness or the shrewdness of the question shocked him. Could one ever be safe with someone who realised so little how she had got mixed up in things? He said: "You got to mind your step," and thought with dull and tired distaste (it had been the hell of a day): I shall have to marry her after all. He managed a smile those muscles were beginning to work and said: "Listen. You don't need to think about those things. I'm going to marry you.

There are ways of getting round the law."

"Why bother about the law?"

"I don't want any loose talk. Only marriage," he said with feigned anger, "will do for me. We got to be married properly."

"We won't be that, whatever we do. The father up at St. John's he says "

"You don't want to listen too much to priests," he said. "They don't know the world like I do. Ideas change, the world moves on...." His words stumbled before her carved devotion. That face said as clearly as words that ideas never changed, the world never moved: it lay there always the ravaged and disputed territory between the two eternities. They faced each other as it were from opposing territories, but like troops at Christmas time they fraternised. He said: 4 'It's the same to you anyway and I want to be married legally."

"If you want to..." she said and made a small gesture of complete assent.

"Maybe," he said, "we could work it this way. If your father wrote a letter..."

"He can't write."

"Well, he could make his mark, couldn't he, if I got a letter written?. *. I don't know how these things work. Maybe he could come to the magistrate's. Mr.

Drewitt could see about that."

"Mr. Drewitt?" she asked quickly. "Wasn't he the one the one at the inquest who was here?..."

"What of it?"

"Nothing," she said. "I just thought..." but he could see the thoughts going on and on, out of the room to the bannisters and the drop, out of that day altogether.... Somebody turned on the radio down below: some jest of Cubitt's perhaps to represent the right romantic atmosphere. It wailed up the stairs past the telephone and into the room, somebody's band from somebody's hotel, the end of a day's programme.

It switched her thoughts away and he wondered for how long it would be necessary for him to sidetrack her mind with the romantic gesture or the loving act, how many weeks and months his mind wouldn't admit the possibility of years. Some day he would be free again; he put out his hands towards hers as if she were the detective with the cuffs and said: "Tomorrow we'll see about things, see your father. Why" the muscles of his mouth faltered at the thought "it only takes a couple of days to get married in."

He was scared, walking alone back towards the territory he had left oh, years ago. The pale green sea curdled on the shingle and the green tower of the Metropole looked like a dug-up coin verdigrised with age-old mould. The gulls swooped up to the top promenade, screaming and twisting in the sunlight, and a well-known popular author displayed his plump, toofamous face in the window of the Royal Albion, staring out to sea. It was so clear a day you looked for France.

The Boy crossed over towards Old Steyne walking slowly. The streets narrowed uphill above the Steyne: the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast. Every step was a retreat. He thought he had escaped for ever by the whole length of the parade, and now extreme poverty took him back: Salome's shop where a shingle could be had for two shillings in the same building as a coffin-maker who worked in oak, elm, or lead; no window dressing but one child's coffin dusty with disuse and the list of Salome's prices. The Salvation Army Citadel marked with its battlements the very border of his home. He began to fear recognition and feel an obscure shame as if it were his native streets which had the right to forgive and not he to reproach them with the dreary and dingy past. Past the Albert Hostel ("Good Accommodation for Travellers") and there he was, on the top of the hill, in the thick of the bombardment. A flapping gutter, glassless windows, an iron bedstead in a front garden the size of a table top. Half Paradise Piece had been torn up as if by bomb bursts: the children played about the steep slope of rubble--a piece of fireplace showed houses had once been there, and a municipal notice announced new flats on a post stuck in the torn gravel and asphalt facing the little dingy damaged row, all that was left of Paradise Piece. His home was gone: a flat place among the rubble may have marked its hearth; the room at the bend of the stairs where the Saturday night exercise had taken place was now just air. He wondered with horror whether it all had to be built again for him--it looked better as air.

He had sent Rose back the night before and now draggingly he rejoined her. It was no good rebelling any more; he had to marry her; he had to be safe.

The children were scouting among the rubble with pistols from Woolworth's; a group of girls surlily watched. A child with its leg in an iron brace limped blindly into him; he pushed it off; someone said in a high treble: "Stick 'em up." They took his mind back and he hated them for it; it was like the dreadful appeal of innocence, but there was not innocence: you had to go back a long way further before you got innocence j innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats, perhaps not even that; innocence was the ugly cry of birth.

He found the house in Nelson Place, but before he had time to knock the door opened. Rose had spied him through the broken glass. She said: "Oh, how glad I am!... I thought perhaps..." In the awful little passage which stank like a lavatory she ran quickly and passionately on. "It was awful last night ... you see, I've been sending them money... they don't understand everyone loses a job some time or another. "

"I'll settle them," the Boy said. "Where are they?"

"You got to be careful," Rose said. "They get moods."

"Where are they?"

But there wasn't really much choice of direction: there was only one door and a staircase matted with old newspapers. On the bottom steps between the mud marks stared up the tawny child face of Violet Crow violated and buried under the West Pier in 1936. He opened the door and there beside the black kitchen stove with cold dead charcoal on the floor sat the parents. They had a mood on: they watched him with silent and haughty indifference a small thin elderly man, his face marked deeply with the hieroglyphics of pain and patience and suspicion; the woman middle-aged, stupid, vindictive. The dishes hadn't been washed and the stove hadn't been lit.

"They got a mood," Rose said aloud to him. "They [206] BRIGHTON ROCB. wouldn't let me do a thing. Not even light the fire. I like a clean house, honest I do. Ours wouldn't be like this."

"Look here, Mr. " the Boy said.

"Wilson," Rose said.

"Wilson. I want to marry Rose. It seems as she's so young I got to get your permission."

They wouldn't answer him. They treasured their mood as if it was a bright piece of china they alone possessed, something they could show to neighbours as "mine."

"It's no use," Rose said, "when they get a mood."

A cat watched them from a wooden box.

"Yes or no?" the Boy said.

"It's no good," Rose said, "not when they've got a mood."

"Answer a plain question," the Boy said. "Do I marry Rose or don't I?"

"Come back tomorrow," Rose said. "They won't have a mood then."

"I'm not going to wait on them," he said. "They oughter be proud "

The man suddenly got up and kicked the dead coke furiously across the floor. "You get out of here," he said. "We don't want any truck with you," he went on, "never, never, never," and for a moment in the sunk lost eyes there was a kind of fidelity which reminded the Boy dreadfully of Rose.

"Quiet, Father," the woman said, "don't talk to them," treasuring her mood.

"I've come to do business," the Boy said. "If you don't want to do business,.." He looked round the battered and hopeless room. "I thought maybe ten pounds would be of use to you," and he saw swimming up through the blind vindictive silence incredulity, avarice, suspicion. "We don't want " the man began again and then gave out like a gramophone. He began to think; you could see the thoughts bob up one after another.

"We don't want your money," the woman said.

They each had their own kind of fidelity.

Rose said; "Never mind what they say. I won't stay here."

"Stop a moment. Stop a moment," the man said.

"You be quiet, Mother." He said to the Boy: "We couldn't let Rose go not for ten nickers not to a stranger. How do we know you'd treat her right?"

"I'll give you twelve," the Boy said.

"It's not a question of money," the man said. "I like the look of you. We wouldn't want to stand in the way of Rose bettering herself but you're too young."

"Fifteen's my limit," the Boy said, "take it or leave it."

"You can't do anything without we say yes," the man said.

The Boy moved a little away from Rose. "I'm not all that keen."

"Make it guineas."

"You've had my offer." He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn't done right to get away from this, to commit any crime... when the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking; that figure in the corner was his mother--he bargained for his sister and felt no desire.... He turned to Rose, "I'm off," and felt the faintest twinge of pity for goodness which couldn't murder to escape.

They said that saints had got what was the phrase?

"heroic virtues," heroic patience, heroic endurance, but there was nothing he could see that was heroic in the bony face, protuberant eyes, pallid anxiety, while they bluffed each other and her life was confused in the financial game. "Well," he said, "I'll be seeing you," and made for the door. At the door he looked back; they were like a family party. Impatiently and contemptuously he gave in to them. "All right.

Guineas. I'll be sending my lawyer," and as he passed into the evil passage Rose was behind him panting her gratitude.

He played the game to the last card, fetching up a grin and a compliment: "I'd do more for you."

"You were wonderful," she said, loving him among the lavatory smells, but her praise was poison: it marked her possession of him--it led straight to what she expected from him, the horrifying act of a desire he didn't feel. She followed him out into the fresh air of Nelson Place. The children played among the ruins of Paradise Piece, and a wind blew from the sea across the site of his home. A dim desire for annihilation stretched in him, the vast superiority of vacancy.

She said, as she had said once before: "I always wondered how it'd be." Her mind moved obscurely among the events of the afternoon, brought out the unexpected discovery. "I've never known a mood go so quick. They must have liked you,"

Ida Arnold bit an Eclair and the cream spurted between the large front teeth. She laughed a little thickly in the Pompadour Boudoir and said: "I haven't had as much money to spend since I left Tom." She took another bite and a wedge of cream settled on the plump tongue. "I owe it to Fred too. If he hadn't tipped me Black Boy..."

"Why not give everything up," Mr. Corkery said, "and just have a bit of fun? It's dangerous."

"Oh, yes, it's dangerous," she admitted, but no real sense of danger could lodge behind those large vivacious eyes. Nothing could ever make her believe that one day she too, like Fred, would be where the worms... her mind couldn't take that track: she could go only a short way before the switch automatically shifted and set her vibrating down the accustomed line, the season ticket line marked by desirable residences and advertisements for cruises and small fenced boskages for rural love. She said, eyeing her Eclair: "I never give in. They didn't know what a packet of trouble they were stirring up."

"Leave it to the police."

"Oh, no. I know what's right. You can't tell me.

Who's that, do you think?"

An elderly Jew in glac6 shoes, with a white slip to his waistcoat and a jewelled pin, came padding across the Boudoir. "Distinguay," Ida Arnold said.

A secretary trotted a little way behind him, reading out from a list. "Bananas, oranges, grapes, peaches..."

"Hothouse?"

"Hothouse."

"Who's that?" Ida Arnold said.

"That was all, Mr. Colleoni?" the secretary asked.

"What flowers?" Mr. Colleoni demanded. "And could you get any nectarines?"

"No, Mr. Colleoni."

"My dear wife," Mr. Colleoni said, his voice dwindling out of their hearing. They could catch only the word "passion." Ida Arnold swivelled her eyes round the elegant furnishing of the Pompadour Boudoir. They picked out like a searchlight a cushion, a couch, the thin clerkly mouth of the man opposite her. She said: "We could have a fine time here," watching his mouth.

"Expensive," Mr. Corkery said nervously; a too sensitive hand stroked his thin shanks.

"Black Boy will stand it. And we can't have you know fun at the Belvedere. Strait-laced."

"You wouldn't mind a bit of fun here?" Mr. Corkery said. He blinked. Ydu couldn't tell from his expression whether he desired or dreaded her assent.

"Why should I? It doesn't do anyone any harm that I know of. It's human nature." She bit at her Eclair and repeated the familiar password. "It's only fun after all." Fun to be on the right side, fun to be human...

"You go and get my bag," she said, "while I book a room."

Mr. Corkery flushed a little. "Half and half," he said.

She grinned at him. "It's on Black Boy."

"A man likes " Mr. Corkery said weakly.

"Trust me, I know what a man likes." The Eclair and the deep couch and the gaudy furnishings were like an aphrodisiac in her tea. She was shaken by a Bacchic and a bawdy mood. In every word either of them uttered she detected the one meaning. Mr.

Corkery blushed, plunged deeper in his embarrassment. "A man can't help feeling," and was shaken by her immense glee.

"You're telling me," she said, "you're telling me?"

While Mr. Corkery was gone she made her preparations for carnival, the taste of the sweet cake between her teeth. The idea of Fred Hale dodged backwards like a figure on a platform when the train goes out; he belonged to somewhere left behind j the waving hand only contributes to the excitement of the new experience. The new and yet the immeasurably old.

She gazed round the big padded pleasure dome of a bedroom with bloodshot and experienced eyes: the long mirror and the wardrobe and the enormous bed.

She settled frankly down on it while the clerk waited.

"It springs," she said, "it springs," and sat there for quite a long while after he'd gone, planning the evetaing's campaign. If somebody had said to her then: "Fred Hale," she would hardly have recognised the name--there was another interest: for the next hour let the police have him.

Then she got up slowly and began to undress. She never believed in wearing much: it wasn't any time at all before she was exposed in the long mirror a body firm and bulky, a proper handful. She stood on a deep soft rug, surrounded by gilt frames and red velvet hangings, and a dozen common and popular phrases bloomed in her mind "A Night of Love,"

"You Only Live Once," and the rest. She bore the same relation to passion as a peep show. She sucked the chocolate between her teeth and smiled, her plump toes working in the rug, waiting for Mr. Corkery just a great big blossoming surprise.

Outside the window the sea ebbed, scraping the shingle, exposing a boot, a piece of rusty iron, and the old man stooped, searching between the stones. The sun dropped behind the Hove houses and dusk came, the shadow of Mr. Corkery lengthened, coming slowly up from Belvedere carrying the suitcases, saving on taxis. A gull swooped screaming down to a dead crab beaten and broken against the iron foundation of the pier. It was the time of near-darkness and of the evening mist from the Channel and of love.

The Boy closed the door behind him and turned to face the expectant and amused faces.

"Well," Cubitt said, "is it all fixed up?"

"Of course it is," the Boy said; "when I want a thing..." His voice wavered out unconvincingly.

There were half a dozen bottles on his washstand: his room smelt of stale beer.

"Want a thing," Cubitt said. "That's good." He opened another bottle, and in the warm stuffy room the froth rose quickly and splashed on the marble top.

"What do you think you're doing?" the Boy said.

"Celebrating," Cubitt said. "You're a Roman, aren't you? A betrothal, that's what Romans call it."

The Boy watched them: Cubitt a little drunk, Dallow preoccupied, one or two lean hungry faces he hardly knew hangers-on at the fringes of the great game who smiled when you smiled and frowned when you frowne

Billy's wife Judy put her head in at the door. She was wearing a dressing gown. Her Titian hair was brown at the roots. "Good luck, Pinkie," she said, blinking mascara'd lashes. She had been washing her brassiere: the little piece of pink silk dripped on the linoleum. Nobody offered her a drink. "Work, work, work," she moued at them, going on down the passage to the hot-water pipes.

A long way... and yet he hadn't made a single false step: if he hadn't gone to Snow's and spoken to the girl, they'd all be in the dock by now. If he hadn't killed Spicer... Not a single false step, but every step conditioned by a pressure he couldn't even place: a woman asking questions, messages on the telephone scaring Spicer. He thought: when I've married the girl, will it stop then? Where else can it drive mej and with a twitch of the mouth, he wondered what worse,,,?

"When's the happy day?" Cubitt said, and they all smiled obediently except Dallow.

The Boy's brain began to work again. He moved slowly towards the washstand. He said: "Haven't you got a glass for me? Don't I do any celebrating?"

He saw Dallow astonished, Cubitt thrown off his mark, the hangers-on doubtful whom to follow, and he grinned at them, the one with brains.

"Why, Pinkie..." Cubitt said.

"I'm not a drinking man and I'm not a marrying man," the Boy said. "So you think. But Fm liking one, so why shouldn't I like the other? Give me a glass."

"Liking," Cubitt said and grinned uneasily, "you liking..."

"Haven't you seen her?" the Boy said.

"Why, me and Dallow just lamped her. On the stairs. But it was too dark..."

"She's a lovely," the Boy said, "she's wasted in a kip. And intelligent. Don't make any mistake. Of course I didn't see any cause to marry her, but as it is " Somebody handed him a glass; he took a long draught; the bitter and bubbly fluid revolted him so this was what they liked he tightened the muscles of his mouth to hide his revulsion. "As it is," he said, "I'm glad," and eyed with hidden disgust the pale inch of liquid in the glass before he drained it down.

Dallow watched in silence and the Boy felt more anger against his friend than against his enemy: like Spicer he knew too much; but what he knew was far more deadly than what Spicer had known. Spicer had known only the kind of thing which brought you to the dock, but Dallow knew what your mirror and your bedsheets knew: the secret fear and the humiliation.

He said with hidden fury: "What's getting you, Dallow?"

The stupid and broken face was hopelessly at a loss.

"Jealous?" the Boy began to boast. "You've cause when you've seen her. She's not one of your dyed totsies. She's got class. I'm marrying her for your sake, but I'm laying her for my own." He turned fiendishly on Dallow. "What's on your mind?"

"Well," Dallow said, "it's the one you met on the pier, isn't it? I didn't think she was all that good."

"You," the Boy said, "you don't know anything.

You're ignorant. You don't know class when you see it."

"A duchess," Cubitt said and laughed.

An extraordinary indignation jerked in the Boy's brain and fingers. It was almost as if someone he loved had been insulted. "Be careful, Cubitt," he said.

"Don't mind him," Dallow said. "We didn't know you'd fallen...."

"We got some presents for you, Pinkie," Cubitt said. "Furniture for the home," and indicated two little obscene objects beside the beer on the washstand; the Brighton stationers were full of them: a tiny doll's commode in the shape of a radio set labelled: "The smallest A. I two-valve receiving set in the world," and a mustard pot shaped like a lavatory seat with the legend, "For me and my girl." It was like a return of all the horror he had ever felt, the hideous loneliness of his innocence. He struck at Cubitt's face and Cubitt dodged, laughing. The two hangers-on slipped out of the room. They hadn't any taste for rough houses. The Boy heard them laugh on the stairs. Cubitt said: "You'll need 'em in the home. A bed's not the only furniture." He mocked and backed at the same time.

The Boy said: "By God, I'll treat you like I treated Spicer."

No meaning reached Cubitt at once. There was a long time lag. He began to laugh and then saw Dailow's startled face and heard. "What's that?" he said.

"He's crazy," Dallow intervened.

"You think yourself smart," the Boy said. "So did Spicer."

"It was the bannister," Cubitt said. "You weren't here. What are you getting at?"

"Of course he wasn't here," Dallow said.

"You think you know things." All the Boy's hatred was in the word "know" and his repulsion: he knew as Drewitt knew after twenty-five years at the game.

"You don't know everything." He tried to inject himself with pride, but all the time his eyes went back to the humiliation. "The smallest A. I..." You could know everything there was in the world and yet if you were ignorant of that one dirty scramble you knew nothing.

"What's he getting at?" Cubitt said.

"You don't need to listen to him," Dallow said.

"I mean this," the Boy said; "Spicer was milky and I'm the only one in this mob knows how to act."

"You act too much," Cubitt said. "Do you mean it wasn't the bannisters?" The question scared himself: he didn't want an answer. He made uneasily for the door, keeping his eye on the Boy, Dallow said: "Of course it was the bannisters. I was there, wasn't I?"

"I don't know," Cubitt said, "I don't know," making for the door. "Brighton's not big enough for him.

I'm through."

"Go on," the Boy said. "Clear out. Clear out and starve."

"I won't starve," Cubitt said. "There's others in this town.., When the door closed the Boy turned on Dallow.

"Go on," he said, "you go too. You think you can get on without me, but I've only got to whistle..."

"You don't need to talk to me like that," Dallow said. "I'm not leaving you. I don't fancy making friends with Crab again so soon."

But the Boy paid him no attention. He said again: "I've only got to whistle..." He boasted: "They'll come tumbling back." He went over to the brass bed and lay down; he had had a long day; he said: "Get me Drewitt on the blower. Tell him there's no difficulty at her end. Let him fix things quick."

"The day after tomorrow if he can?" Dallow asked.

"Yes," the Boy said. He heard the door close and lay with twitching cheek staring at the ceiling; he thought: it's not my fault they get me angry so I want to do things; if people would leave me in peace...

His imagination wilted at the word. He tried in a halfhearted way to picture "peace" his eyes closed and behind the lids he saw a grey darkness going on and on without end, a country of which he hadn't seen as much as a picture postcard, a place far stranger than the Grand Canyon and the Taj Mahal. He opened them again and immediately poison moved in the vein--for there on the washstand were Cubitt's purchases.

He was like a child with haemophilia: every contact drew blood.

A bell rang muffled in the Cosmopolitan corridor--through the wall against which the bed end stood, Ida Arnold could hear a voice talking on and on: somebody reading a report perhaps in a conference room or dictating to a dictaphone. Phil lay asleep on the bed in his pants, his mouth a little open showing one yellow tooth and a gobof metal filling. Fun... human nature... does no one any harm... regular as clockwork the old excuses came back into the alert sad and dissatisfied brain nothing ever matched the deep excitement of the regular desire. Men always failed you when it came to the act. She might just as well have been to the pictures.

But it did no one any harm, it was just human nature, no one could call her really bad a bit free and easy perhaps, a bit Bohemian--it wasn't as if she got anything out of it, as if like some people she sucked a man dry and cast him aside like a cast-off threw him aside like a cast-off glove. She knew what was Right and what was Wrong. God didn't mind a bit of human nature what He minded and her brain switched away from Phil in pants to her Mission, to doing good, to seeing that the evil suffered...

She sat up in bed and put her arms round her large naked knees and felt excitement stirring again in the disappointed body. Poor old Fred the name no longer conveyed any sense of grief or pathos. She couldn't remember anything much about him now but a monocle and a yellow waistcoat and that belonged to poor old Charlie Moyne. The hunt was what mattered. It was like life coming back after a sickness.

Phil opened an eye yellow with the sexual effort and watched her apprehensively. She said: "Awake, Phil?"

"It must be nearly time for dinner," Phil said. He gave a nervous smile. "A penny for your thoughts, Ida."

"I was just thinking," Ida said, "that what we really need now is one of Pinkie's men. Somebody scared or angry. They must get scared some time.

We've only got to wait."

She got out of the bed, opened her suitcase, and began to lay out the clothes she thought were suitable for dinner in the Cosmopolitan. In the pink reading-lamp, love-lamp light spangles glittered. She stretched her arms; she no longer felt desire or disappointment j her brain was clear. It was almost dark along the beach; the edge of sea was like a line of writing in whitewash: big sprawling letters. They meant nothing at this distance. A shadow stooped with infinite patience and disinterred some relic from the shingle.

PART Six

WHEN Cubitt got outside the front door the hangers-on had already vanished. The street was empty. He felt in a dumb, bitter, and uncomprehending way like a man who had destroyed his home without having prepared another.

The mist was coming up from the sea, and he hadn't got his coat. He was as angry as a child: he wouldn't go back for it; it would be like admitting he was wrong. The only thing to be done now was to drink a strong whisky at the Crown.

At the saloon bar they made way for him with respect. In the mirror marked Booth's Gin he could see his own reflection: the short flaming hair, the blunt and open face, broad shoulders; he stared like Narcissus into his pool and felt better; he wasn't the sort of man to take things lying down; he was valuable.

"Have a whisky?" somebody said. It was the greengrocer's assistant from the corner shop. Cubitt laid a heavy paw across his shoulder, accepting, patronising: the man who had done a thing or two in his time chummy with the pale ignorant fellow who dreamed from his commercial distance of a man's life. The relationship pleased Cubitt. He had two more whiskies at the grocer's expense.

"Got a tip, Mr. Cubitt?"

"I've got other things to think of beside tips," Cubitt said darkly, adding a splash.

"We were having an argument in here about Gay Parrot for the two-thirty. Seemed to me..."

Gay Parrot... the name didn't mean a thing to Cubitt; the drink warmed him; the mist was in his brain; he leant forward towards the mirror and saw "Booth's Gin... Booth's Gin," haloed above his head.

He was involved in high politics: men had been killed; poor old Spicer; allegiances shifted like heavy balances in his brain; he felt as important as a prime minister making treaties.

"There'll be more killings before we're through," he mysteriously pronounced. He had his wits about him: he wasn't giving anything away; but there was no harm in letting these poor sodden creatures a little way into the secrets of living. He pushed his glass forward and said: "A drink all round," but when he looked to either side they'd gone; a face took a backward look through the pane of the saloon door, vanished; they couldn't stand the company of a Man.

"Never mind," he said, "never mind," and drank down his whisky and left. The next thing, of course, was to see Colleoni. He'd say to him: "Here I am, Mr.

Colleoni. I'm through with Kite's mob. I won't work under a boy like that. Give me a Man's job and I'll do it." The mist got at his bones: he shivered involuntarily; a grey goose... He thought: if only Dallow too... and suddenly loneliness took away his confidence: all the heat of the drink seeped out of him, and the mist like seven devils went in. Suppose Colleoni simply wasn't interested? He came down onto the front and saw through the thin fog the high lights of the Cosmopolitan; it was cocktail time.

Cubitt sat down chilled in a glass shelter and stared out towards the sea. The tide was low and the mist hid it: it was just a sliding and a sibilation. He lit a cigarette; the match warmed for a moment the cupped hands. He offered the packet to an elderly gentleman wrapped in a heavy overcoat who shared the shelter.

"I don't smoke," the old gentleman said sharply and began to cough: a steady hack, hack, hack towards the invisible sea.

"A cold night," Cubitt said. The old gentleman swivelled his eyes on him like opera glasses and went on coughing: hack, hack, hack, the vocal cords dry as straw. Somewhere out at sea a violin began to play: it was like a sea beast mourning and stretching towards the shore. Cubitt thought of Spicer, who'd liked a good tune. Poor old Spicer. The mist blew in, heavy compact drifts of it like ectoplasm. Cubitt had been to a seance once in Brighton; he had wanted to get in touch with his mother, dead twenty years ago. It had come over him quite suddenly the old girl might have a word for him. She had: she was on the seventh plane where all was very beautiful; her voice had sounded a little boozed, but that wasn't really unnatural. The boys had laughed at him about it, particularly old Spicer. Well, Spicer wouldn't laugh now. He could be summoned himself any time to ring a bell and shake a tambourine. It was a lucky thing he liked music.

Cubitt got up and strolled to the turnpike of the West Pier, which straddled into the mist and vanished towards the violin. He walked up towards the Concert Hall, passing nobody. It wasn't a night for courting couples to sit out. Whatever people there were upon the pier were gathered every one inside the Concert Hall; Cubitt turned round it on the outside looking in: a man in evening dress fiddling to a few rows of people in overcoats, islanded fifty yards out to sea in the middle of the mist. Somewhere in the Channel a boat blew its siren and another answered, and another, like dogs at night waking each other.

Go to Colleoni and say... it was all quite easy; the old geezer ought to be grateful.... Cubitt looked back towards the shore and saw above the mist the high lights of the Cosmopolitan, and they daunted him. He wasn't used to that sort of company. He went down the iron companionway to the Gents' and drained the whisky out of him into the movement under the piles and came up onto the deck lonelier than ever. He took a penny out of his pocket and slipped it into an automatic machine: a robot face, behind which an electric bulb revolved, iron hands for Cubitt to grip. A little blue card shot out at him: "Your Character Delineated." Cubitt read: "You are mainly influenced by your surroundings and inclined to be capricious and changeful. Your affections are more intense than enduring. You have a free, easy, and genial nature. You make the best of whatever you undertake. A share of the good things of life can always be yours. Your lack of initiative is counterbalanced by your good commonsense, and you will succeed where others fail."

He dragged slowly on past the automatic machines, delaying the moment when there would be nothing for him to do but go to the Cosmopolitan. "Your lack of initiative..." Two leaden football teams waited behind glass for a penny to release them; an old witch with the stuffing coming out of her claw offered to tell his fortune. "A Love Letter" made him pause. The boards were damp with mist, the long deck was empty, the violin ground on. He felt the need of a deep sentimental affection, orange blossoms and a cuddle in a corner. His great paw yearned for a sticky hand. Somebody who wouldn't mind his jokes, who would laugh with him at the two-valve receiving set. He hadn't meant any harm; the cold reached his stomach, and a little stale whisky returned into his throat. He almost felt inclined to go back to Billy's. But then he remembered Spicer. The boy was mad, killing mad, it wasn't safe. Loneliness dragged him down the solitary boards.

He took out his last copper and thrust it in. A little pink card came out with a printed stamp: a girl's head, long hair, the legend, "True Love." It was addressed to "My Dear Pet, Spooner's Nook, With Cupid's Love," and there was a picture of a young man in evening dress kneeling on the floor, kissing the hand of a girl carrying a big fur. Up in a corner two hearts were transfixed by an arrow just above Reg. No .745812.

Cubitt thought: It's clever. It's cheap for a penny. He looked quickly over his shoulder not a soul and turned it quickly and began to read. The letter was addressed from Cupid's Wings, Amor Lane. "My dear little girl. So you have discarded me for the Squire's son. You little know how you have ruined my life in breaking faith with me, you have crushed the very soul out of me, as the butterfly on the wheel; but with it all I do not wish anything but your happiness."

Cubitt grinned uneasily. He was deeply moved.

That was what always happened if you took up with anything but a buer; they gave you the air. Grand Renunciations, Tragedies, Beauty moved in Cubitt's brain. If it was a buer, of course you took a razor to her, carved her face, but this love printed here was class. He read on: it was literature; it was the way he'd like to write himself. "After all, when I think of your wondrous, winsome beauty and culture, I feel what a fool I must have been to dream that you ever really loved me." Unworthy. Emotion pricked behind his eyelids and he shivered in the mist with cold and beauty. "But remember, dearest, always, that I love you, and if ever you want a friend just return the little token of love I gave you and I will be your servant and slave. Yours brokenheartedly, John." It was his own name: an omen.

He moved again past the lighted Concert Hall and down the deserted deck. Loved and Lost. Tragic griefs flamed under his carrot hair. What can a man do but drink? He got another whisky just opposite the pier head and moved on, planting his feet rather too firmly, towards the Cosmopolitan plank, plank, plank along the pavement as if he were wearing iron weights under his shoes, as a statue might move, half flesh, half stone.

"I want to speak to Mr. Colleoni." He said it defiantly. The plush and gilding smoothed away his confidence. He waited uneasily beside the desk while a page boy searched through the lounges and boudoirs for Mr. Colleoni. The clerk turned over the leaves of a big book and then consulted a Who's Who. Across the deep carpet the page returned and Crab followed him, sidling and triumphant with his black hair smelling of pomade.

"I said Mr. Colleoni," Cubitt said to the clerk, but the clerk took no notice, wetting his finger, skimming through Who's Who.

"You wanted to see Mr. Colleoni?" Crab said.

"That's right."

"You can't. He's occupied."

"Occupied," Cubitt said. "That's a fine word to use.

Occupied."

"Why, if it isn't Cubitt," Crab said. "I suppose you want a job." He looked round in a busy preoccupied way and said to the clerk: "Isn't that Lord Heversham over there?"

"Yes, sir," the clerk said.

"I've often seen him at Doncaster," Crab said, squinting at a nail on his left hand.-He swept round on Cubitt, "Follow me, my man. We can't talk here," and before Cubitt could reply he was sidling off at a great rate between the gilt chairs.

"It's like this," Cubitt said, "Pinkie "

Half-way across the lounge Crab paused and bowed and, moving on, became suddenly confidential. "A fine woman." He flickered like an early movie. He had picked up between Doncaster and London a hundred different manners--travelling first class after a successful meeting he had learnt how Lord Hoversham spoke to a porter--he had seen old Digby scrutinise a woman.

"Who is she?" Cubitt said.

But Crab took no notice of the question. "We can talk here." It was the Pompadour Boudoir. Through the gilt and glass door beyond the boule table you could see little signboards pointing down a network of passages tasteful little chinoiserie signboards with a Tuileries air: "Ladies,"

"Gentlemen,"

"Ladies*

Hairdressing,"

"Gentlemen's Hairdressing."

"It's Mr. Colleoni I want to talk to," Cubitt said.

He breathed whisky over the marquetry, but he was daunted and despairing. He resisted with difficulty the temptation to say "sir." Crab had moved on since Kite's day, almost out of sight. He was part of the great racket now with Lord Heversham and the fine woman; he had grown up.

"Mr. Colleoni hasn't time to see anyone," Crab said. "He's a busy man." He took one of Mr. Colleoni's cigars out of his pocket and put it in his mouth; he didn't offer one to Cubitt. Cubitt with uncertain hand offered him a match. "Never mind, never mind/ 1 Crab said, fumbling in his double-breasted waistcoat.

He fetched out a gold lighter and flourished it at his cigar. "What do you want, Cubitt?" he asked.

"I thought maybe," Cubitt said, but his words wilted among the gilt chairs. "You know how it is," he said, staring desperately round. "What about a drink?"

Crab took him quickly up. "I wouldn't mind one just for old times' sake." He rang for a waiter.

"Old times," Cubitt said.

"Take a seat," Crab said, waving a possessive hand at the gilt chairs. Cubitt sat gingerly down. The chairs were small and hard. He saw a waiter watching them and flushed. "What's yours?" he said.

"A sherry," Crab said. "Dry."

"Scotch and splash for me," Cubitt said. He sat waiting for his drink, his hands between his knees, silent, his head lowered. He took furtive glances. This was where Pinkie had come to see Colleoni he had nerve all right.

"They do you pretty well here," Crab said. "Of course Mr. Colleoni likes nothing but the best." He took his drink and watched Cubitt pay. "He likes things smart. Why, he's worth fifty thousand nicker if he's worth a penny. If you ask me what I think,"

Crab said, leaning back, puffing at the cigar, watching Cubitt through black, remote, and supercilious eyes, "he'll go in for politics one day. The Conservatives think a lot of him he's got contacts."

"Pinkie " Cubitt began and Crab laughed. "Take my advice," Crab said. "Get out of that mob while there's time. There's no future..." He looked obliquely over Cubitt's head and said: "See that man going to the Gents'? That's Mais. The brewer. He's worth a hundred thousand nicker."

"I was wondering," Cubitt said, "if Mr. Colleoni..."

"Not a chance," Crab said. "Why, ask yourself what good would you be to Mr. Colleoni?"

Cubitt's humility gave way to a dull anger. "I was good enough for Kite."

Crab laughed. "Excuse me," he said, "but Kite..."

He shook his ash out onto the carpet and said: "Take my advice. Get out. Mr. Colleoni's going to clean up this track. He likes things done properly. No violence.

The police have great confidence in Mr. Colleoni."

He looked at his watch. "Well, well, I must be going.

I've got a date at the Hippodrome." He put his hand with patronage on Cubitt's arm. "There," he said, "1*11 put in a word for you for old times' sake. It won't be any good, but I'll do that much. Give my regards to Pinkie and the boys." He passed a whiff of pomade and Havana, bowing slightly to a woman at the door? an old man with a monocle on a black ribbon. "Who the hell?" the old man said.

Cubitt drained his drink and followed. An enormous depression bowed his carrot head, a sense of illtreatment moved through the whisky fumes somebody sometime had got to pay for something. All that he saw fed the flaine: he came out into the entrance hall; a page boy with a salver infuriated him. Everybody was watching him, waiting for him to go, but he had as much right there as Crab. He glanced round him, and there alone at a table with a glass of port was the woman Crab knew.

She smiled at him "I think of your wondrous, winsome beauty and culture." A sense of the immeasurable sadness of injustice took the place of anger. He wanted to confide, to lay down burdens ... he belched once... "I will be your servant and slave." The great body turned like a door, the heavy feet altered direction and padded towards the table where Ida Arnold sat.

"I couldn't help hearing," she said, "when you went across just now that you knew Pinkie."

He realised with immense pleasure when she spoke that she wasn't class. It was to him like the meeting of two fellow-countrymen a long way from home. He said: "You a friend of Pinkie's?" and felt the whisky in his legs. He said: "Mind if I sit down?"

"Tired?"

"That's it," he said, "tired." He sat down with his eyes on her large friendly bosom. He remembered the lines on his character. "You have a free, easy, and genial nature." By God, he had. He only needed to be treated right.

"Have a drink?"

"No, no," he said with woolly gallantry, "it's on me," but when the drinks came he realised he was out of cash. He had meant to borrow from one of the boys but then the quarrel... He watched Ida Arnold pay with a five-pound note.

"Know Mr. Colleoni?" he asked.

"I wouldn't call it know," she said.

"Crab said you were a fine woman. He's right."

"Oh Crab," she said vaguely, as if she didn't recognise the name.

"You oughta steer clear though," Cubitt said.

"You've got no call to get mixed up in things." He stared into his glass as into a deep darkness: outside innocence, winsome beauty, and culture unworthy, a tear gathered behind the bloodshot eyeball.

"You a friend of Pinkie's?" Ida Arnold asked.

"Christ, no," Cubitt said and took some more whisky.

A vague memory of the Bible, where it lay in the cupboard next the Board, the Warwick Deeping, The Good Companions, stirred in Ida Arnold's memory.

"I've seen you with him," she lied; a courtyard, a sewing wench beside the fire, the cock crowing.

"I'm no friend of Pinkie's."

"It's not safe being friends with Pinkie," Ida Arnold said. Cubitt stared into his glass like a diviner into his soul, reading the dooms of strangers. "Fred was a friend of Pinkie's," she said.

"What you know about Fred?"

"People talk," Ida Arnold said. "People talk all the time."

"You're right," Cubitt said. The stained eyeballs lifted--they gazed at comfort, understanding; he wasn't good enough for Colleoni--he had broken with Pinkie--behind her head through the window of the lounge darkness and the retreating sea; through a ruined Tintern picture postcard arch lay desolation.

"Christ," he said, "you're right." He had an enormous urge to confession, but the facts were confused.

He knew only that these were the times when a man needed a woman's understanding. "I've never held with it," he told her. "Carving's different."

"Of course, carving's different," Ida Arnold smoothly and deftly agreed.

"And Kite that was an accident. They only meant to carve him. Colleoni's no fool. Somebody slipped.

There wasn't any cause for bad feeling."

"Have another drink?"

"It oughta be on me," Cubitt said. "But I'm cleaned out. Till I see the boys."

"It was fine of you breaking with Pinkie like that.

It needed courage after what happened to Fred."

"Oh, he can't scare me. No broken bannisters..."

"What do you mean broken bannisters?"

"I wanted to be friendly," Cubitt said. "A joke's a joke. When a man's getting married, he oughta take a joke."

"Married? Who married?"

"Pinkie, of course."

"Not to the little girl at Snow's?"

"Of course."

"The little fool," Ida Arnold said with sharp anger.

"Oh, the little fool."

"He's not a fool," Cubitt said. "He knows what's good for him. If she chose to say a thing or two "

"You mean, say it wasn't Fred left the ticket?"

"Poor old Spicer," Cubitt said, watching the bubbles rise in the whisky. A question floated up: "How did you...?" but broke in the doped brain. "I want air," he said, "stuffy in here. What say you and I...?"

"Just wait awhile," Ida Arnold said. "I'm expecting a friend. I'd like you and him to be acquainted."

"This central heating," Cubitt said. "It's not healthy. You go out and catch a chill and the next you know "

"When's the wedding?"

"Whose wedding?"

"Pinkie's."

"I'm no friend of Pinkie's."

"You didn't hold with Fred's death, did you?" Ida Arnold softly persisted.

"You understand a man."

"Carving would have been different."

Cubitt suddenly, furiously, broke out: "I can't see a piece of Brighton rock without..." He belched and said with tears in his voice: "Carving's different."

"The doctors said it was natural causes. He had a weak heart."

"Come outside," Cubitt said. "I got to get some air."

"Just wait a bit. What do you mean Brighton rock?"

He stared inertly back at her. He said: "I got to get some air. Even if it kills me. This central heating ..." he complained. "I'm liable to colds."

"Just wait two minutes." She put her hand on his arm, feeling an intense excitement, the edge of discovery above the horizon, and was aware herself for the first time of the warm close air welling up round them from hidden gratings, driving them into the open. She said: "I'll come out with you. We'll take a walk..." He watched her with nodding head, an immense indifference as if he had lost grip on his thought as you loose a dog's lead and it has disappeared, too far to be followed, in what wood... He was astonished when she said: "I'll give you twenty pounds." What had he said that was worth that money? She smiled enticingly at him. "Just let me put on a bit of powder and have a wash." He didn't respond, he was scared, but she couldn't wait for a reply; she dived for the stairs no time for the lift.

A wash: they were the words she had used to Fred.

She ran upstairs, people were coming down, changed, to dinner. She hammered on her door and Phil Corkery let her in. "Quick," she said, "I want a witness."

He was dressed, thank goodness, and she raced him down, but immediately she got into the hall she saw that Cubitt had gone. She ran out onto the steps of the Cosmopolitan, but he wasn't in sight.

"Well?" Mr. Corkery said.

"Gone. Never mind," Ida Arnold said. "I know now all right. It wasn't suicide. They murdered him."

She said slowly over to herself: "... Brighton rock ..." The clue would have seemed hopeless to many women, but Ida Arnold had been trained by the Board.

Queerer things than that had spidered out under her fingers and Old Crowe's--with complete confidence her mind began to work.

The night air stirred Mr. Corkery's thin yellow hair. It may have occurred to him that on an evening like this after the actions of love romance was required by any woman. He touched her elbow timidly.

"What a night," he said. "I never dreamed what a night," but words drained out of him as she switched her large thoughtful eyes towards him, uncomprehending, full of other ideas. She said slowly: "The little fool... to marry him... why, there's no knowing what he'll do." A kind of righteous mirth moved her to add with excitement: "We got to save her, Phil."

At the bottom of the steps the Boy waited. The big municipal building lay over him like a shadow departments for births and deaths, for motor licences, for rates and taxes, somewhere in some long corridor the room for marriages. He looked at his watch and said to Mr. Drewitt: "God damn her. She's late."

Mr. Drewitt said: "It's the privilege of a bride."

Bride and groom: the mare and the stallion which served her j like a file on metal or the touch of velvet to a sore hand. The Boy said: "Me and Dallow we'll walk and meet her."

Mr. Drewitt called after him: "Suppose she comes another way. Suppose you miss her... I'll wait here."

They turned to the left out of the official street.

"This ain't the way," Dallow said.

"There's no call on us to wait on her," the Boy said.

"You can't get out of it now."

"Who wants to? I can take a bit of exercise, can't I?" He stopped and stared into a small newsagent's window two-valve receiving sets, the grossness everywhere.

"Seen Cubitt?" he asked, staring in.

"No," Dallow said. "None of the boys either."

The daily and the local papers, a poster packed with news: Scene at Council Meeting, Woman Found Drowned at Black Rock, Collision in Clarence Street; a Wild West magazine, a copy of Film Fun, behind the inkpots and the fountain pens and the paper plates for picnics and the little gross toys; the works of Marie Stopes: Married Love. The Boy stared in.

"I know how you feel," Dallow said. "I was married once myself. It kind of gets you in the stomach.

Nerves. Why," Dallow said, "I even went and got one of those books, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't know. Except about flowers. The pistils of flowers. You wouldn't believe the funny things that go on among flowers."

The Boy turned and opened his mouth to speak, but the teeth snapped to again. He watched Dallow with pleading and horror. If Kite had been there, he thought, he could have spoken but if Kite had been there, he would have had no need to speak... he would never have got mixed up.

"These bees..." Dallow began to explain and stopped. "What is it, Pinkie? You don't look too good."

"I know the rules all right," the Boy said.

"What rules?"

"You can't teach me the rules," the Boy went on with gusty anger. "I watched 'em every Saturday night, didn't I? Bouncing and ploughing." His eyes flinched as if he were watching some horror. He said in a low voice: "When I was a kid, I swore I'd be a priest."

"A priest? You a priest? That's good," Dallow said.

He laughed without conviction, shifted his foot uneasily, so that it trod in a dog's ordure.

"What's wrong with being a priest?" the Boy said.

"They know what's what. They keep away" his whole mouth and jaw loosened--he might have been going to weep; he beat out wildly with his hands towards the window: Woman Found Drowned, twovalve, Married Love, the horror "from this."

"What's wrong with a bit of fun?" Dallow took him up, scraping his shoe against the pavement edge.

The word "fun" shook the boy like malaria. He said: "You wouldn't have known Annie Collins, would you?"

"Never heard of her."

"She went to the same school I did," the Boy said.

He took a look down the grey street and then the glass before Married Love reflected his young and hopeless face. "She put her head on the line," he said, "up towards Hassocks. She had to wait ten minutes for the seven-five. Fog made it late from Victoria. Cut off her head. She was fifteen. She was going to have a baby and she knew what it was like. She'd had one two years before, and they could 'ave pinned it on twelve boys."

"It does happen," Dallow said. "It's the luck of the game."

"I've read love stories," the Boy said. He had never been so vocal before, staring in at the paper plates with frilly edges and the two-valve receiving set: the daintiness and the grossness. "Billy's wife read them. You know the sort. Lady Angeline turned her starry eyes towards Sir Mark. They make me sick. Sicker than the other kind" D allow watched with astonishment this sudden horrified gift of tongues "the kind you buy under the counter. Spicer used to get them. About girls being beaten. Full of shame to expose herself thus before the boys she stooped... It's all the same thing," he said, turning his poisoned eyes away from the window, from point to point of the long shabby street: a smell of fish, the sawdusted pavement below the carcasses. "It's love," he said, grinning mirthlessly up at Dallow. "It's fun. It's the game."

"The world's got to go on," Dallow said uneasily.

"Why?" the Boy said.

"You don't need to ask me," Dallow said. "You know best. You're a Roman, aren't you? You believe..."

"Credo in unum Satanum," the Boy said.

"I don't know Latin. I only know..."

"Come on," the Boy said. "Let's have it. Dallow's creed."

"The world's all right if you don't go too far."

"Is that all?"

"It's time for you to be at the registrar's. Hear the clock? It's striking two now." A peal of bells stopped their cracked chime and struck one, two The Boy's whole face loosened again; he put his hand on Dallow's arm. "You're a good sort, Dallow.

You know a lot. Tell me " his hand fell away. He looked beyond Dallow down the street. He said hopelessly: "Here she is. What's she doing in this street?"

"She's not hurrying either," Dallow commented, watching the thin figure slowly approach. At that distance she didn't even look her age. He said: "It was clever of Drewitt to get the licence at all, considering."

"Parents' consent," the Boy said dully. "Best for morality." He watched the girl as if she were a stranger he had got to meet. "And then, you see, there was a stroke of luck. I wasn't registered. Not anywhere they could find. They added on a year or two.

No parents. No guardian. It was a touching story old Drewitt spun."

She had tricked herself up for the wedding, discarded the hat he hadn't liked, a new mackintosh, a touch of powder and cheap lipstick. She looked like one of the small gaudy statues in an ugly church: a paper crown wouldn't have looked odd on her or a painted heart; you could pray to her but you couldn't expect an answer.

"Where've you been?" the Boy said. "Don't you know you're late?"

They didn't even touch hands. An awful formality fell between them.

"I'm sorry, Pinkie. You see" she brought the fact out with shame, as if she were admitting conversation with his enemy "I went into the church."

"What for?" he said.

"I don't know, Pinkie. I got confused. I thought I'd goto confession."

He grinned at her. "Confession? That's rich."

"You see, I wanted I thought "

"For Christ's sake, what?"

"I wanted to be in a state of grace when I married you." She took no notice at all of Dallow. The theological term lay oddly and pedantically on her tongue.

They were two Romans together in the grey street.

They understood each other. She used terms common to Heaven and Hell.

"And did you?" the Boy said.

"No. I went and rang the bell and asked for Father James. But then I remembered. It wasn't any good confessing. I went away." She said with a mixture of fear and pride: "We're going to do a mortal sin."

The Boy said, with bitter and unhappy relish: "It'll be no good going to confession ever again as long as we're both alive." He had graduated in pain: first the school dividers had been left behind, next the razor.

He had a sense now that the murders of Hale and Spicer were trivial acts, a boy's game, and he had put away childish things. Murder had only led to this this corruption. He was filled with awe at his own powers.

"We'd better be moving," he said and touched her arm with next to tenderness. As once before he had a sense of needing her.

Mr. Drewitt greeted them with official mirth. All his jokes seemed to be spoken in court, with an ulterior motive, to catch a magistrate's ear. In the great institutional hall from which the corridors led off to deaths and births there was a smell of disinfectant. The walls were tiled like a public lavatory. Somebody had dropped a rose. Mr. Drewitt quoted promptly, inaccurately: "Roses, roses all the way, and never a sprig of yew." A soft hollow hand guided the Boy by the elbow. "No, no, not that way. That's taxes. That comes later." He led them up great stone stairs. A clerk passed them carrying printed forms. "And what is the little lady thinking?" Mr. Drewitt said. She didn't answer him....

The bride and groom only were allowed to mount the sanctuary steps, to kneel down within the sanctuary rails with the priest and the Host.

"Parents coming?" Mr. Drewitt said. She shook her head. "The great thing is," Mr. Drewitt said, "it's over quickly. Just sign the names along the dotted line.

Sit down here. We've got to wait our turn, you know."

They sat down. A mop leant in a corner against the tiled wall. The footsteps of a clerk squealed on the icy paving down another passage. Presently a big brown door opened; they saw a row of clerks inside who didn't look up; a man and wife came out into the corridor. A woman followed them and took the mop.

The man he was middle-aged said: "Thank you," gave her sixpence. He said: "We'll catch the threefifteen after all." On the woman's face there was a look of faint astonishment, bewilderment, nothing so definite as disappointment. She wore a brown straw and carried an attach^ case. She was middle-aged too.

She might have been thinking: "Is that all there is to it after all these years?" They went down the big stairs walking a little apart, like strangers in a store.

"Our turn," Mr. Drewitt said, rising briskly. He led the way through the room where the clerks worked.

Nobody bothered to look up. Nibs wrote shrill numerals and ran on. In a small inner room with green washed walls like a clinic's the registrar waited: a table, three or four chairs against the wall. It wasn't what she thought a marriage would be like for a moment she was daunted by the cold poverty of a state-made ceremony.

"Good morning," the registrar said. "If the witnesses will just sit down would you two?" he beckoned them to the table. He was like a provincial actor who believes too much in his part: he stared at them with gold-rimmed and glassy importance; it was as if he considered himself on the fringe of the priestly office. The Boy's heart beat; he was sickened by the reality of the moment. He wore a look of sullenness and of stupidity.

"You're both very young," the registrar said.

"It's fixed," the Boy said. "You don't have to talk about it. It's fixed."

The registrar gave him a glance of intense dislike; he said venomously: "Repeat after me," and then ran too quickly on: "I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediments," so that the Boy couldn't follow him. The registrar said sharply: "It's quite simple. You've only to repeat after me..."

"Go slower," the Boy said. He wanted to lay his hand on speed and break it down, but it ran on: it was no time at all, a matter of seconds, before he was repeating the second formula: "My lawful wedded wife." He tried to make it careless, he kept his eyes off Rose, but the words were weighted with shame.

"No ring?" the registrar asked sharply.

"We don't need any ring," the Boy said. "This isn't a church," feeling he could never now rid his memory of the cold green room and the glassy face. He heard Rose repeating by his side: "I call upon these persons here present to witness..." and then the word "husband," and he looked sharply up at her. If there had been any complacency in her face then he would have struck it. But there was only surprise as if she were reading a book and had come to the last page too soon.

The registrar said: "You sign here. The charge is seven and sixpence." He wore an air of official unconcern while Mr. Drewitt fumbled.

"These persons," the Boy said and laughed brokenly. "That's you, Drewitt and Dallow." He took the pen and the government nib scratched into the page, gathering fur; in the old days, it occurred to him, you signed covenants like this in your blood. He stood back and watched Rose awkwardly sign his temporal safety in return for two immortalities of pain. He had no doubt whatever that this was mortal sin, and he was filled with a kind of gloomy hilarity and pride. He saw himself now as a full-grown man for whom the angels wept.

"These persons," he repeated, ignoring the registrar altogether. "Come and have a drink."

"Well," Mr. Drewitt said, "that's a surprise from you."

"Oh, Dallow will tell you," the Boy said, "I'm a drinking man these days." He looked across at Rose.

"There's nothing I'm not now," he said. He took her by the elbow and led the way out to the tiled passage and the big stairs; the mop was gone and somebody had picked up the flower. A couple rose as they came out: the market was firm. He said: "That was a wedding. Can you beat it? We're " He meant to say "husband and wife" but his mind flinched from the defining phrase. "We got to celebrate," he said, and like an old relation you can always trust for the tactless word his brain beat on: "celebrate what?" and he thought of the girl sprawling in the Lancia and the long night coming down.

They went to the pub round the corner. It was nearly closing time, and he stood them pints of bitter and Rose took a port. She hadn't spoken since the registrar had given her the words to say and Mr.

Drewitt took a quick look round and parked his portfolio. With his dark striped trousers he might really have been at a wedding. "Here's to the bride," he said with a jocularity which petered unobtrusively out; it was as if he had tried to crack a joke with a magistrate and scented a rebuff; the old face recomposed itself quickly on serious lines. He said reverently: "To your happiness, my dear."

She didn't answer; she was looking at her own face in a glass marked Extra Stout: in the new setting with a foreground of beer handles, it was a strange face. It seemed to carry an enormous weight of responsibility.

"A penny for your thoughts," Dallow said to her.

The Boy put the glass of bitter to his mouth and tasted for the second time the nausea of other people's pleasures stuck in his throat. He watched her sourly as she gazed wordlessly back at his companions; and again he was sensible of how she completed him. He knew her thoughts: they beat unregarded in his own nerves. He said with triumphant venom: "I can tell you what she's thinking of. Not much of a wedding, she's thinking. She's thinking it's not what I pictured. That's right, isn't it?"

She nodded, holding the glass of port as if she hadn't learned the way to drink.

"With my body I thee worship," he began to quote at her, "with all my worldly goods... and then," he said, turning to Mr. Drewitt, "I give her a gold piece."

"Time, gentlemen," the barman said, swilling not quite empty glasses into the lead trough, mopping with a yeasty cloth.

"We're up in the sanctuary, do you see, with the priest..."

"Drink up, gentlemen."

Mr. Drewitt said uneasily: "One wedding's as good as another in the eyes of the law." He nodded encouragingly at the girl, who watched them with famished immature eyes. "You're married all right. Trust me."

"Married?" the Boy said. "Do you call that married?" He screwed up the beery spittle on his tongue.

"Easy on," Dallow said. "Give the girl a chance.

You don't need to go too far."

"Come along, gentlemen, empty your glasses."

"Married!" the Boy repeated. "Ask her." The two men drank up in a shocked furtive way and Mr.

Drewitt said: "Well, I'll be getting on." The Boy regarded them with contempt; they didn't understand a thing, and again he was touched by the faintest sense of communion between himself and Rose she too knew that this evening meant nothing at all, that there hadn't been a wedding. He said with rough kindness: "Come on. We'll be going," and raised a hand to put it on her arm then saw the double image in the mirror (Extra Stout) and let it fall; a married couple, the image winked at him.

"Where?" Rose said.

Where? He hadn't thought of that you had to take them somewhere the honeymoon, the week-end at the sea, the present from Margate on the mantelpiece his mother 'd had; from one sea to another, a change of pier.

"I'll be seeing you," Dallow said; he paused a moment at the door, met the Boy's eye, the question, the appeal, understood nothing, and sloped away, cheerily waving, after Mr. Drewitt, leaving them alone.

It was as if they'd never been alone before in spite of the barman drying the glasses: not really alone in the room at Snow's, nor above the sea at Peacehaven not alone as they were now.

"We'd better be off," Rose said.

They stood on the pavement and heard the door of the Crown closed and locked behind them a bolt grind into place; they felt as if they were shut out from an Eden of ignorance. On this side there was nothing to look forward to but experience.

"Are we going to Billy's?" the girl said. It was one of those moments of sudden silence that fall on the busiest afternoon: not a tram bell, not a cry of steam from the terminus; a flock of birds shot up together into the air above Old Steyne and hovered there as if a crime had been committed on the ground. He thought with nostalgia of the room at Billy's he knew exactly where to put his hand for money in the soap dish; everything was familiar; nothing strange there; it shared his bitter virginity.

"No," he said, and again, as noise came back, the clang and crash and cry of afternoon: "No."

"Where?"

He smiled with hopeless malice where did you bring a swell blonde to if not to the Cosmopolitan, coming down by Pullman at the week-end, driving over the down in a scarlet roadster? Expensive scent and furs, sailing like a new-painted pinnace into the restaurant, something to swank about in return for the nocturnal act. He absorbed Rose's shabbiness like a penance in a long look. "Well take a suite," he said, "at the Cosmopolitan."

"No, but where really?*

"You heard me the Cosmopolitan." He flared up.

"Don't you think I'm good enough?"

"You are," she said, "but I'm not."

"We're going there," he said. "I can afford it. It's the right place. There was a woman called Eugeen used to go there. That's why they have crowns on the chairs."

"Who was she?"

"A foreign polony."

"Have you been there then?"

"Of course I've been there."

Suddenly she put her hands together in an excited gesture. "I dreamed," she said and then looked sharply up to see if he was only mocking after all.

He said airily: "The car's being repaired. We'll walk and send them round for my bag. Where's yours?"

"My what?"

"Your bag."

"It was so broken, dirty..."

"Never mind," he said with desperate swagger, "we'll buy you another. Where's your things?"

"Things...?"

"Christ, how dumb you are!" he said. "I mean..." but the thought of the night ahead froze his tongue.

He drove on down the pavement, the afternoon waning on his face.

She said: "There was nothing... nothing I could marry you in, only this. I asked them for a little money. They wouldn't give it me. They'd a right. It was theirs."

They walked a foot apart along the pavement. Her words scratched tentatively at the barrier like a bird's claws on the window pane: he could feel her all the time trying to get at him; even her humility seemed to him a trap. The crude quick ceremony was a claim on him. She didn't know the reason--she thought God save the mark he wanted her. He said roughly: "You needn't think there's going to be a honeymoon.

That nonsense. I'm busy. I've got things to do. I've got..." He stopped and turned to her with a kind of scared appeal let this make no difference. "I got to be away a lot."

"I'll wait," she said. He could already see the patience of the poor and the long-married working up under her skin like a second personality, a modest and shameless figure behind a transparency.

They came out onto the front, and evening stood back a pace; the sea dazzled the eyes--she watched it with pleasure as if it was a different sea. He said: "What did your Dad say today?"

"He didn't say a thing. He'd got a mood."

"And the old woman?"

"She had a mood too."

"They took the money all right."

They came to a halt on the front opposite the Cosmopolitan and under its enormous bulk moved a few inches closer. He remembered the page boy calling a name and Colleoni's gold cigarette case.... He said slowly and carefully, shutting uneasiness out: "Well, we oughta be comfortable there." He put a hand up to his withered tie, straightened his jacket, and set unconvincingly his narrow shoulders. "Come on."

She followed a pace behind, across the road, up the wide steps. Twa old ladies sat on the terrace in wicker chairs in the sun, wrapped round and round with veils--they had an absolute air of security j when they spoke they didn't look at each other, just quietly dropped their remarks into the understanding air.

"Now Willie..."

"I always liked Willie." The Boy made an unnecessary noise coming up the steps.

He walked across the deep pile to the reception desk, Rose just behind him. There was nobody there.

He waited furiously it was a personal insult. A page called: "Mr. Pinecoffin, Mr. Pinecoffin," across the lounge. The Boy waited. A telephone rang. When the entrance door swung again they could hear one of the old ladies say: "It was a great blow to Basil." Then a man in a black coat appeared and said: "Can I do anything for you?"

The Boy said furiously: "I've been waiting Her [ 253 ] PAUT sir "You could have touched the bell," the clerk said coldly and opened a large register.

"I want a room," the Boy said. "A double room."

The clerk stared past him at Rose, then turned a page. "We haven't a room free," he said.

"I don't mind what I pay," the Boy said. "I'll take a suite."

"There's nothing vacant," the clerk said without looking up.

The page boy returning with a salver paused and watched. The Boy said in a low furious voice: "You can't keep me out of here. My money's as good as anybody else's...."

"No doubt," the clerk said, "but there happens to be no room free." He turned his back and picked up a jar of Stickphast.

"Come on," the Boy said to Rose, "this gaff stinks."

He strode back down the steps, past the old ladies, tears of humiliation pricked behind his eyes. He had an insane impulse to shout out to them all that they couldn't treat him like that, that he was a killer, he could kill men and not be caught. He wanted to boast.

He could afford that place as well as anyone: he had a car, a lawyer, two hundred pounds in the bank....

Rose said: "If I'd had a ring..."

He said furiously: "A ring... what sort of a ring?

We aren't married. Don't forget that. We aren't married." But outside on the pavement he restrained himself with immense difficulty and remembered bitterly that he still had a part to play they couldn't make a wife give evidence, but nothing could prevent a wife except love, lust, he thought with sour horror, and turning back to her he unconvincingly apologised.

"They get me angry," he said. "You see I'd promised you "

"I don't care," she said. Suddenly with wide astonished eyes she made the foolhardy claim: "Nothing can spoil today."

"We got to find somewhere," he said.

"I don't mind where Billy's?"

"Not tonight," he said. "I don't want any of the boys around tonight."

"We'll think of a place," she said. "It's not dark yet."

These were the hours when the races were not on, when there was no one to see on business that he spent stretched on the bed at Billy's. He'd eat a packet of chocolate or a sausage roll, watch the sun shift from the chimney pots, fall asleep and wake and eat again and sleep with the dark coming in through the window. Then the boys would return with the evening papers and life would start again. Now he was at a loss: he didn't know how to spend so much time when he wasn't alone.

"One day," she said, "let's go into the country like we did that time...." Staring out to sea she planned ahead... he could see the years advancing before her eyes like the line of the tide.

"Anything you say," he said.

"Let's go on the pier," she said. "I haven't been since we went that day you remember?"

"NorVe I," he lied quickly and smoothly, thinking of the first time, Spicer, and the lightning on the sea the beginning of something of which he couldn't see the end. They went through the turnstile; there were a lot of people about; a row of anglers watched their floats in the thick green swell; the water moved under their feet.

"Do you know that girl?" Rose said. The Boy turned his head apathetically. "Where?" he said. "I don't know any girls in this place."

"There," Rose said. "I bet she's talking about you."

The fat stupid spotty face swam back into his memory, nuzzled the glass like some monstrous fish in the Aquarium dangerous a stingray from another ocean. Fred had spoken to her and he had come up to them upon the front; she'd given evidence he couldn't remember what she had said nothing important. Now she watched him, nudged her pasty girl friend, spoke of him, told he didn't know what lies.

Christ! he thought. Had he got to massacre a world?

"She knows you," Rose said.

"I've never seen her," he lied, walking on.

Rose said: "It's wonderful being with you. Everyone knows you. I never thought I'd marry someone famous."

Who next, he thought, who next? An angler drew back across their path to make his cast, whirling his line, dropped it far out; the float was caught in the cream of a wave and drove a line's length towards the shore. It was cold on the sunless side of the pier; on one side of the glass division it was day, on the other evening advanced. "Let's cross over," he said. He began to think again of Spicer's girl: why had he left her in the car? God damn it, after all, she knew the game.

Rose stopped him. "Look," she said, "won't you give me one of those? As a souvenir. They don't cost much," she said, "only sixpence." It was a small glass box like a telephone cabinet. "Make a record of your own voice," the legend ran.

"Come on," he said. "Don't be soft. What's the good of that?"

For the second time he came up against her sudden irresponsible resentment. She was soft, she was dumb, she was sentimental and then suddenly she was dangerous. About a hat, about a gramophone record. "All right," she said, "go away. You've never given me a thing. Not even today you haven't. If you don't want me why don't you go away? Why don't you leave me alone?" People turned and looked at them at his acid and angry face, at her hopeless resentment. "What do you want me for?" she cried at him.

"For Christ's sake..." he said.

"I'd rather drown," she began, but he interrupted her: "You can have your record." He smiled nervously. "I just thought you were crazy," he said.

"What do you want to hear me on a record for?

Aren't you going to hear me every day?" He squeezed her arm. "You're a good kid. I don't grudge you things. You can have anything you say." He thought: She's got me where she wants... how long? "You didn't mean those things now, did you?" he wheedled her. His face crinkled in the effort of amiability like an old man's.

"Something came over me," she said, avoiding his eyes with an expression he couldn't read, obscure and despairing.

He felt relieved but reluctant. He didn't like the idea of putting anything on a record: it reminded him of finger prints. "Do you really," he said, "want me to get one of those things? We haven't got a gramophone anyway. You won't be able to hear it. What's the good?"

"I don't want a gramophone," she said. "I just want to have it there. Perhaps one day you might be away somewhere and I could borrow a gramophone. And you'd speak," she said with a sudden intensity that scared him.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Just anything," she said. "Say something to me.

Say Rose and something."

He went into the box and closed the door. There was a slot for his sixpence, a mouthpiece, an instruction: "Speak clearly and close to the instrument." The scientific paraphernalia made him nervous; he looked over his shoulder and there outside she was watching him without a smile; he saw her as a stranger, a shabby child from Nelson Place, and he was shaken by an appalling resentment. He put in a sixpence and speaking in a low voice for fear it might carry beyond the box he gave his message up to be graven on vulcanite: "God damn you, you little bitch, why can't you go back home for ever and let me be?"; he heard the needle scratch and the record whir, then a click and silence.

Carrying the black disk he came out to her. "Here," he said, "take it. I put something on it loving."

She took it from him carefully, carried it like something to be defended from the crowd. Even on the sunny side of the pier it was getting cold--and the cold fell between them like an unanswerable statement you'd better be getting home now. He had the sense of playing truant from his proper work he should be at school, but he hadn't learned his lesson. They passed through the turnstile, and he watched her out of the corner of an eye to see what she expected now; if she had shown any excitement he would have slapped her face. But she hugged the record as chilled as he.

"Well," he said, "we got to go somewhere."

She pointed down the steps to the covered walk under the pier. "Let's go there," she said, "it's sheltered there."

The Boy looked sharply round at her; it was as if deliberately she had offered him an ordeal. For a moment he hesitated} then he grinned at her. "All right," he said, "we'll go there." He was moved by a kind of sensuality: the coupling of good and evil.

In the trees of the Old Steyne the fairy lights were switched on--it was too early, their pale colours didn't show in the last of the day. The long tunnel under the parade was the noisiest, lowest, cheapest section of Brighton's amusements: children rushed past them in paper sailor caps marked "I'm No Angel"; a ghost train rattled by carrying courting couples into a squealing and shrieking darkness. All the way along the landward side of the tunnel were the amusements; on the other little shops: Magpie Ices, Photoweigh, Shellfish, Rock. The shelves rose to the ceiling; little doors let you into the obscurity behind, and on the sea side there were no doors at all, no windows, nothing but shelf after shelf from the pebbles to the roof, a breakwater of Brighton rock facing the sea. The lights were always on in the tunnel--the air was warm and thick and poisoned with human breath.

"Well," the Boy said, "what's it to be winkles or Brighton rock?" He watched her as if something important really depended on her answer.

"I'd like a stick of Brighton rock," she said.

Again he grinned; only the devil, he thought, could have made her answer that. She was good, but he'd got her like you got God in the Eucharist in the guts.

God couldn't escape the evil mouth which chose to eat its own damnation. He padded across to a doorway and looked in. "Miss," he said. "Miss. Two sticks of rock." He looked around the little pink barred cell as if he owned it; his memory owned it, it was stamped with footmarks, a particular patch of floor had eternal importance; if the cash register had been moved he'd have noticed it. "What's that?" he said and nodded at a box, the only unfamiliar object there.

"It's broken rock," she said, "going cheap."

"From the maker's?"

"No. It got broken. Some clumsy fools " she complained.

He took the sticks and turned; he knew what he would see nothing; the promenade was shut out behind the rows of Brighton rock. He had a momentary sense of his own immense cleverness. "Good night," he said, stooped in the little doorway, and went out.

If only one could boast of one's cleverness, relieve the enormous pressure of pride...

They stood side by side sucking their sticks of rock; a woman bustled them to one side. "Out of the way, you children." Their glances met: a married couple.

"Where now?" he said uneasily.

"Perhaps we ought to find somewhere," she said.

"There's not all that hurry." His voice caught a little with anxiety. "It's early yet. Like a movie?" He wheedled her again. "I've never took you to a movie."

But the sense of power left him. Again her passionate assent "You're good to me" repelled him.

Slumped grimly in the three-and-sixpenny seat, in the half-dark, he asked himself crudely and bitterly what she was hoping for; beside the screen an illuminated clock marked the hour. It was a romantic film: magnificent features, thighs shot with studied care, esoteric beds shaped like winged coracles. A man was killed, but that didn't matter. What mattered was the game. The two main characters made their stately progress towards the bed sheets: "I loved you that first time in Santa Monica..." A song under a window, a girl in a nightdress, and the clock beside the screen moving on. He whispered suddenly, furiously, to Rose: "Like cats." It was the commonest game under the sun why be scared at what the dogs did in the streets? The music moaned: "I know in my heart you're divine." He whispered: "Maybe we'd better go to Billy's after all," thinking: we won't be alone there; something may happen; maybe the boys will have drinks; maybe they'll celebrate there won't be any bed for anyone tonight. The actor with a lick of black hair across a white waste of face said: "You're mine.

All mine." He sang again under the restless stars in a wash of incredible moonshine, and suddenly, inexplicably, the Boy began to weep. He shut his eyes to hold in his tears, but the music went on it was like a vision of release to an imprisoned man. He felt constriction and saw hopelessly out of reach a limitless freedom: no fear, no hatred, no envy. It was as if he were dead and were remembering the effect of a good confession, the words of absolution; but being dead it was a memory only he couldn't experience contrition the ribs of his body were like steel bands which held him down to eternal unrepentance. He said at last: "Let's go. We'd better go."

It was quite dark now; the coloured lights were on all down the Hove front. They walked slowly past Snow's, past the Cosmopolitan. An aeroplane flying low burred out to sea, a red light vanishing. In one of the glass shelters an old man struck a match to light his pipe and showed a man and girl cramped in the corner. A wail of music came off the sea. They turned up through Norfolk Square towards Montpellier Road; a blonde with Garbo cheeks paused to powder on the steps up to the Norfolk bar. A bell tolled somewhere for someone dead and a gramophone in a basement played a hymn. "Maybe," the Boy said, "after tonight we'll find some place to go."

He had his latchkey but he rang the bell. He wanted people, talk... but no one answered. He rang again.

It was one of those old bells you have to pull; it jangled on the end of its wire, the kind of bell that knows from long experience of dust and spiders and untenanted rooms how to convey that a house is empty. "They can't 'ave all gone out," he said, slipped in his latchkey.

A globe had been left burning in the hall--he saw at once the note stuck under the telephone: "Two's company"--he recognised the drab and sprawling hand of Billy's wife. "We gone out to celebrate the wedding. Lock your door. Have a good time." He crumpled the paper up and dropped it on the linoleum.

"Come on," he said, "upstairs." At the top he put his hand on the new bannister rail and said: "You see.

We've got it mended." A smell of cabbages and cooking and burnt cloth hung about the dark passage. He nodded. "That was old Spicer's room. Do you believe in ghosts?"

"I don't know."

He pushed open his own door and switched on the naked dusty light. "There," he said, "take it or leave. it," and drew aside to expose the big brass bed, the washstand and chipped ewer, the varnished wardrobe with its cheap glass front.

"It's better than a hotel," she said, "it's more like home."

They stood in the middle of the room as if they didn't know what their next move should be. She said: "Tomorrow I'll tidy up a bit."

He banged the door to. "You won't touch a thing," he said. "It's my home, do you hear? I won't have you coming in, changing things...." He watched her with fear to come into your own room, your cave, and find a strange thing there... "Why don't you take off your hat?" he said. "You're staying, aren't you?" She took off her hat, her mackintosh this was the ritual of mortal sin: this, he thought, was what people damned each other for... the bell in the hall clanged. He paid it no attention. "It's Saturday night," he said with a bitter taste on his tongue, "it's time for bed."

"Who is it?" she said, and the bell jangled again its unmistakable message to whoever was outside that the house was no longer empty. She came across the room to him; her face was white. "Is it the police?" she said.

"Why should it be the police? Some friend of Billy's." But the suggestion startled him. He stood and waited for the clang. It didn't come again.

"Well," he said, "we can't stand here all night. We better get to bed." He felt an appalling emptiness as if he hadn't fed for days. He tried to pretend, taking off his jacket and hanging it over a chair-back, that everything was as usual. When he turned she hadn't moved; a thin and half-grown child, she trembled between the washstand and the bed. "Why,"' he mocked her with a dry mouth, "you're scared." It was as if he had gone back four years and was taunting a schoolfellow into some offence.

"Aren't you scared?" Rose said.

"Me?" He laughed at her unconvincingly and advanced, an embryo of sensuality he was mocked by the memory of a gown, a back, "I loved you that first time in Santa Monica..." Shaken by a kind of rage, he took her by the shoulders. He had escaped from Paradise Piece to this; he pushed her against the bed.

"It's mortal sin," he said, getting what savour there was out of innocence, trying to taste God in the mouth: a brass bedball, her dumb frightened and acquiescent eyes he blotted everything out in a sad brutal now-or-never embrace: a cry of pain and then the jangling of the bell beginning all over again.

"Christ," he said, "can't they let a man alone?" He opened his eyes on the grey room to see what he had done: it seemed to him more like death than when Hale and Spicer had died.

Rose said: "Don't go. Pinkie, don't go."

He had an odd sense of triumph: he had graduated in the last human shame it wasn't so difficult after all. He had exposed himself and nobody had laughed.

He didn't need Mr. Drewitt or Spicer, only a faint feeling of tenderness woke for his partner in the act.

He put out a hand and pinched the lobe of her ear.

The bell clanged in the empty hall. An enormous weight seemed to have lifted. He could face anyone now. He said: "I'd better see what the bugger wants."

"Don't go. I'm scared, Pinkie."

But he had a sense that he would never be scared again: running down from the track he had been afraid, afraid of pain and more afraid of damnation of the sudden and unshriven death. Now it was as if he was damned already and there was nothing more to fear ever again. The ugly bell clattered, the long wire humming in the hall, and the bare globe burnt above the bed the girl, the washstand, the sooty window, the blank shape of a chimney, a voice whispered: "I love you, Pinkie." This was hell then; it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room. He said: "I'll be back. Don't worry. I'll be back."

At the head of the stairs he put his hand on the new unpainted wood of the mended bannister. He pushed it gently and saw how firm it was. He wanted to crow at his own cleverness. The bell shook below him. He looked down: it was a long drop, but you couldn't really be certain that a man from that height would be killed. The thought had never occurred to him before, but men sometimes lived for hours with broken backs, and he knew an old man who went about to this day with a cracked skull which clicked in cold weather when he sneezed. He had a sense of being befriended.

The bell jangled: it knew he was at home. He went on down the stairs, his toes catching in the worn linoleum he was too good for this place. He felt an invincible energy he hadn't lost vitality upstairs, he'd gained it. What he had lost was a fear. He hadn't any idea who stood outside the door, but he was seized by a sense of wicked amusement. He put up his hand to the old bell and held it silent: he could feel the pull at the wire. An odd tug of war went on with the stranger down the length of the hall, and the Boy won. The pull ceased and a hand beat at the door. The Boy released the bell and moved softly towards the door, but immediately behind his back the bell began to clap again, cracked and hollow and urgent. A ball of paper "Lock your door. Have a good time" scuffled at his toes.

He swung the door boldly open, and there was Cubitt, Cubitt hopelessly and drearily drunk; somebody had blacked his eye and his breath was sour: drink always spoiled his digestion. The Boy's sense of triumph increased: he felt an immeasurable victory. "Well," he said, "what do want?"

"I got my things here," Cubitt said. "I want to get my things."

"Come in and get 'em then," the Boy said.

Cubitt sidled in. He said: "I didn't think I'd see you..."

"Go on," the Boy said. "Get your things and clear out."

"Where's Dallow?"

The Boy didn't answer.

"Billy?"

Cubitt cleared his throat; his sour breath reached the Boy. "Look here, Pinkie," he said, "you and me why shouldn't we be friends? Lake we always was."

"We were never friends," the Boy said.

Cubitt took no notice. He got his back to the telephone and watched the Boy with his drunken and cautious eyes. "You and me," he said, the sour phlegm rising in his throat and thickening every word, "you and me can't get on separate. Why," he said, "we're kind of brothers. We're tied together."

The Boy watched him, standing against the opposite wall.

"You an' me it's what I said. We can't get on separate," Cubitt repeated.

"1 suppose," the Boy said, "Colleoni wouldn't touch you not with a stick, but I'm not taking his leavings, Cubitt."

Cubitt began to weep a little it was a stage he always reached; the Boy could measure his glasses by his tears: they squeezed reluctantly out, two tears like drops of spirits squeezed out of the yellow eyeballs.

"You've no cause to take on like that," he said, "Pinkie."

"You better get your things."

"Where's Dallow?"

"He's out," the Boy said. "They're all out." The spirit of cruel mischief moved again. "We're quite alone, Cubitt," he said. He glanced down the hall at the new patch of linoleum over the place where Spicer had fallen. But it didn't work: the stage of tears was transitory what came after was sullenness, anger....

Cubitt said: "You can't treat me like dirt."

"That how Colleoni treated you?"

"I came here to be friendly," Cubitt said. "You can't afford not to be friendly."

"I can afford more than you'd think," the Boy said.

Cubitt took him quickly up. "Lend me five nicker."

The Boy shook his head. He was shaken by a sudden impatience and pride: he was worth more than this this squabble on worn linoleum under the bare and dusty globe with Cubitt. "For Christ's sake," he said, "get your things and clear out."

"I've got things I could tell about you...."

"Nothing."

"Fred..."

"You'd hang," the Boy said. He grinned. "But not me. I'm too young to hang."

"There's Spicer too."

"Spicer fell down there."

"I heard you..."

"You heard me? Who's going to believe that?"

"Dallow heard."

"Dallow's all right," the Boy said. "I can trust Dallow. Why, Cubitt," he went quietly on, "if you were dangerous, I'd do something about you. But thank your lucky stars you aren't dangerous." He turned his back on Cubitt and mounted the stairs. He could hear Cubitt behind him panting; he had no wind.

"I didn't come here to give hard words. Lend me a couple of nicker, Pinkie. I'm broke."

The Boy didn't answer "For the sake of old times" turned off at the bend of the stairs to his own room.

Cubitt said: "Wait a moment and I'll tell you a thing or two, you bloody little geezer. There's someone'll give me money twenty nicker. You why, you I'll tell you what you are."

The Boy stopped in front of his door. "Go on," he said, "tell me."

Cubitt struggled to speak: he hadn't got the right words. He flung his rage and resentment away in phrases light as paper. "You're mean," he said, "you're yellow. You're so yellow you'd kill your best friend to save your own skin. Why" he laughed thickly "you're scared of a girl. Sylvie told me " but that accusation had come too late. He had graduated now in knowledge of the last human weakness.

He listened with amusement, with a kind of infernal pride--the picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ in the image of their own sentimentality. Cubitt couldn't know. He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read about in books statistics of imports and exports, tonnage and mineral resources and if the budget balanced when all the time it was a country the stranger knew from thirsting in the desert and being shot at in the foothills. Mean ... yellow... scared--he laughed gently with derision: it was as if he had outsoared the shadow of any night Cubitt could be aware of. He opened his door, went in, closed it, and locked it.

Rose sat on the bed with dangling feet like a child in a classroom waiting for a teacher in order to say her lesson. Outside the door Cubitt swore and hacked with his foot, rattled the handle, and moved off. She said with immense relief she was used to drunken men: "Oh, then it's not the police."

"Why should it be the police?"

"I don't know," she said, "I thought maybe "

"Maybe what?"

He could only just catch her answer. "Kolley Kibber."

For a moment he was amazed. Then he laughed softly with infinite contempt and superiority at a world which used words like innocence. "Why," he said, "that's rich. You knew all along. You guessed.

And I thought you were so green you hadn't lost the eggshell. And there you were" he built her up in the mind's eye that day at Peacehaven, among the Empire wines at Snow's "there you were, knowing."

She didn't deny it; sitting there with her hands locked between her knees she accepted everything.

"It's rich," he said. "Why, when you come to think of it you're as bad as me." He came across the room and added with a kind of respect: "There's not a pin to choose between us."

She looked up with childish and devoted eyes and swore solemnly: "Not a pin."

He felt desire move again, like nausea in the belly.

"What a wedding night!" he said. "Did you think a wedding night would be like this?"... the piece of gold in the palm, the kneeling in the sanctuary, the blessing... footsteps in the passage, Cubitt pounded on the door, pounded and lurched away, the stairs creaked, a door slammed. She made her vow again, holding him in her arms, in the attitude of mortal sin: "Nothing to choose."

The Boy lay on his back in his shirt sleeves and dreamed. He was in an asphalt playground: one plane tree withered; a cracked bell clanged and the children came out to him. He was new; he knew no one; he was sick with fear they came towards him with a purpose. Then he felt a cautious hand on his sleeve and in a mirror hanging on the tree he saw the reflection of himself and Kite behind middle-aged, cheery, bleeding from the mouth. "Such tits," Kite said and put a razor in his hand. He knew then what to do: they only needed to be taught once that he would stop at nothing, that there were no rules.

He flung out his arm in a motion of attack, made some indistinguishable comment, and turned upon his side. A piece of blanket fell across his mouth; he breathed with difficulty. He was upon the pier and he could see the piles breaking a black cloud came racing up across the Channel and the sea rose; the whole pier lurched and settled lower. He tried to scream; no death was so bad as drowning. The deck of the pier lay at a steep angle like that of a liner on the point of its deadly dive; he scrambled up the polished slope away from the sea and slipped again, down and down into his bed in Paradise Piece. He lay still thinking: "What a dream!" and then heard the stealthy movement of his parents in the other bed. It was Saturday night. His father panted like a man at the end of a race and his mother made a horrif ying sound of pleasurable pain. He was filled with hatred, disgust, loneliness; he was completely abandoned: he had no share in their thoughts for the space of a few minutes he was dead, he was like a soul in purgatory watching the shameless act of a beloved person.

Then quite suddenly he opened his eyes; it was as if nightmare couldn't go further; it was black night, he could see nothing and for a few seconds he believed he was back in Paradise Piece. Then a clock struck three, clashing close by like the lid of a dustbin in the backyard, and he remembered with immense relief that he was alone. He got out of bed in his half-drowse (his mouth was clotted and evil-tasting) and felt his way to the washstand. He took up his tooth mug, poured out a glass of water, and heard a voice say: "Pinkie?

What is it, Pinkie?" He dropped the glass and as the water spilt across his feet he bitterly remembered.

He said cautiously into the dark: "It's all right. Go to sleep." He no longer had a sense of triumph or superiority. He looked back on a few hours ago as if he had been drunk then or dreaming he had been momentarily exhilarated by the strangeness of his experience. Now there would be nothing strange ever again he was awake. You had to treat these things with common-sense she knew. The darkness thinned before his wide-awake and calculating gaze he could see the outline of the bedknobs and a chair. He had won a move and lost a move: they couldn't make her give evidence, but she knew.... She loved him, whatever that meant, but love was not an eternal thing like hatred and disgust. They saw a better face, a smarter suit... The truth came home to him with horror that he had got to keep her love for a lifetime--he would never be able to discard her; if he climbed he had to take Nelson Place with him like a visible scar; the registry office marriage was as irrevocable as a sacrament. Only death could ever set him free.

He was taken by a craving for air, walked softly to the door. In the passage he could see nothing--it was full of the low sound of breathing from the room he had left, from Dallow's room. He felt like a blind man watched by people he couldn't see. He felt his way to the stairhead and on down to the hall, step by step, creakingly. He put out his hand and touched the telephone, then with his arm outstretched made for the door. In the street the lamps were out, but the darkness no longer enclosed between four walls seemed to thin out across the vast expanse of a city. He could see basement railings, a cat moving, and reflected on the dark sky the phosphorescent glow of the sea. 'It was a strange world; he had never been alone in it before.

He had a deceptive sense of freedom as he walked softly down towards the Channel.

The lights were on in Montpellier Road--nobody about, and an empty milk bottle outside a gramophone shop; far down the illuminated clock tower and the public lavatories--the air was fresh, like country air. He could imagine he had escaped. He put his hands for warmth into his trouser pockets and felt a scrap of paper which should not have been there. He drew it out a scrap torn from a notebook big, unformed, stranger's writing. He held it up into the grey light and read with difficulty: "I love you, Pinkie. I don't care what you do. I love you for ever. You've been good to me. Wherever you go, 111 go too." She must have written it while he talked to Cubitt and slipped it into his pocket while he slept. He crumpled it in his fist ^ a dustbin stood outside a fishmonger's then he held his hand. An obscure sense told him you never knew it might prove useful one day.

He heard a whisper, looked sharply round, and thrust the paper back. In an alley between two shops, an old woman sat upon the ground j he could just see the rotting and discoloured face: it was like the sight of damnation. Then he heard the whisper: "Blessed art thou among women," saw the grey fingers fumbling at the beads. This was not one of the damned--he watched with horrified fascination: this was one of the saved.

PART SEVEN

IT SEEMED not in the least strange to Rose that she should wake alone she was a stranger in the country of mortal sin, and she assumed that everything was customary. He was, she supposed, about his business. No alarm clock dinned her to get up, but the morning light woke her, pouring through the uncurtained glass. Once she heard footsteps in the passage. and once a voice called "Judy" imperatively. She lay there wondering what a wife had to do or rather a mistress.

But she didn't lie long that was frightening, the unusual passivity. It wasn't like life at all to have nothing to do. Suppose they assumed she knew about the stove to be lit, the table to be laid, the debris to be cleared away. A clock struck seven: it was an unfamiliar clock (all her life she had lived in hearing of the same one till now), and the strokes seemed to fall more slowly and more sweetly through the early summer air than any she had ever heard before. She felt happy and scared: seven o'clock was a terribly late hour. She scrambled out and was about to mutter her quick "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys" while she dressed, when she remembered again.... What was the good of praying now? She'd finished with all that: she had chosen her side; if they damned him they'd got to damn her too.

In the ewer there was only an inch of water with a grey heavy surface, and when she lifted the lid of the soap box she found three pound notes wrapped round two half-crowns. She put the lid back: that was just another custom you had to get used to. She took a look round the room, opened a wardrobe and found a tin of biscuits and a pair of boots; some crumbs crunched under her tread. The gramophone record caught her attention on the chair where she'd laid it; she stowed it in the cupboard for greater safety. Then she opened the door not a sound or sign of life looked over the bannisters; the new wood squeaked under her pressure.

Somewhere down below must be the kitchen, the living room, the places where she had to work. She went cautiously down seven o'clock what furious faces! in the hall a ball of paper scuffled under her feet.

She smoothed it out and read a pencilled message: "Lock your door. Have a good time." She didn't understand it: it might as well have been in code she assumed it must have something to do with this foreign world where you sinned on a bed and people lost their lives suddenly and strange men hacked at your door and cursed you in the night.

She found the basement stairs; they were dark where they dropped under the hall, but she didn't know where to find a switch. Once she nearly tripped and held the wall close with beating heart, remembering the evidence at the inquest, how Spicer had fallen. His death gave the house a feeling of importance: she had never been on the scene of a recent death. At the bottom of the stairs she opened the first door she came to, cautiously, expecting a curse; it was the kitchen all right, but it was empty. It wasn't like either of the kitchens she knew: the one at Snow's clean, polished, busy; the one at home which was just the room where you sat, where people cooked and ate and had moods and warmed themselves on bitter nights and dozed in chairs. This was like the kitchen in a house for sale: the stove was full of cold coke; on the window sill there were two empty sardine tins; a dirty saucer stood under the table for a cat which wasn't there; a cupboard stood open full of empties.

She went and raked at the dead coke; the stove was cold to the touch; there hadn't been a fire alight there for hours or days. The thought struck her that she'd teen deserted; perhaps this was what happened in this world: the sudden flight, leaving everything behind, your empty bottles and your girl and the message in code on a scrap of paper. When the door opened she expected a policeman.

It was a man in pyjama trousers. He looked in, said: "Where's Judy?" then seemed to notice her. He said: "You're up early."

"Early?" She couldn't understand what he meant.

"I thought it was Judy rooting around. You remember me. I'm Dallow."

She said: "I thought maybe I'd better light the ^ stove."

"What for?"

"Breakfast."

He said: "If that polony's gone and forgotten "

He went to a dresser and pulled open a drawer. "Why," he said, "what's got you? You don't want a stove.

There's plenty here." Inside the drawer were stacks of tins: sardines, herrings.... She said: "But tea."

He looked at her oddly. "Anyone'd think you wanted work. No one here wants any tea. Why take the trouble? There's beer in the cupboard, and Pinkie drinks the milk out of the bottle." He padded back to the door. "Help yourself, kid, if you're hungry. Pinkie want anything?"

"He's gone out."

"Christ's sake, what's come over this house?'* He stopped in the doorway and took another look at her as she stood with helpless hands near the dead stove. He said: "You don't want to work, do you?"

"No," she said doubtfully.

He was puzzled. "I wouldn't want to stop you," he said. "You're Pinkie's girl. You go ahead and light that stove if you want. I'll shut up Judy if she barks, but Christ knows where you'll find the coke. Why, that stove's not been lit since March."

"I don't want to put anyone out," Rose said. "I came down... I thought... I'd got to light it."

"You don't need to do a stroke," Dallow said. "You take it from me, this is Liberty Hall." He said: "You've not seen a bitch with red hair rooting around, have you?"

"I haven't seen a soul,"

"Well," Dallow said, "I'll be seeing you." She was alone again in the cold kitchen. Needn't do a stroke...

Liberty Hall... she leant against the whitewashed wall and saw an old flypaper dangling above the dresser; somebody a long time ago had set a mousetrap by a hole, but the bait had been stolen and the trap had snapped on nothing at all. It was a lie when people said that sleeping with a man made no difference: you emerged from pain to this freedom, liberty, strangeness. A stifled exhilaration moved in her breast, a kind of pride. She opened the kitchen door boldly and there at the head of the basement stairs was Dallow and the red-haired bitch, the woman he'd called Judy. They stood with lips glued together in an attitude of angry passion: they might have been inflicting on each other the greatest injury of which either was capable. The woman wore a mauve dressing gown with a dusty bunch of paper poppies, the relic of an old November.

As they fought mouth to mouth the sweet-toned clock sounded the half-hour. Rose watched them from the foot of the stairs. She had lived years in a night. She knew all about this now.

The woman saw her and took her mouth from Dailow's. "Well," she said, "who's here?"

"It's Pinkie's girl," Dallow said.

"You're up early. Hungry?"

"No. I just thought maybe I ought to light the fire."

"We don't use that fire often," the woman said.

"Life's too short." She had little pimples round her mouth and an air of ardent sociability. She stroked her carrot hair and coming down the stairs to Rose fastened a mouth wet and prehensile, like a sea anemone, upon her cheek. 'She smelt faintly, stalely of Calif ornian Poppy. "Well, dear," she said, "you're one of us now," and she seemed to present to Rose in a generous gesture the half-naked man, the bare dark stairs, the barren kitchen. She whispered softly so that Dallow couldn't hear: "You won't tell anyone you saw us, dear, will you? Billy gets worked up, an' it don't mean anything, not anything at all."

Rose dumbly shook her head; this foreign land absorbed her too quickly no sooner were you past the customs than the naturalisation papers were signed, you were conscripted....

"There's a duck," the woman said. "Any friend of Pinkie's is a friend of all of us. You'll be meeting the boys before long."

"I doubt it," said Dallow from the top of the stairs.

"You mean...?"

"We got to talk to Pinkie serious."

"Did you have Cubitt here last night?" the woman asked.

"I don't know," Rose said. "I don't know who anyone is. Someone rang the bell and swore a lot and kicked the door."

"That was Cubitt," the woman gently explained.

"We got to talk to Pinkie serious. It's not safe,"

Dallow said.

"Well, dear, I'd better be getting back to Billy."

She paused on a step just above Rose. "If you ever want a dress cleaned, dear, you couldn't do better than give it to Billy. Though I say it who shouldn't. There's no one like Billy for getting out grease marks. An' he hardly charges a thing to lodgers." She bent down and laid a freckled finger on Rose's shoulder. "It could do with a sponge now."

"But I haven't got anything to wear, only this."

"Oh, well, dear, in that case" she bent and whispered confidentially "make your hubby buy you one"--then gathered the faded dressing gown around her and loped up the stairs. Rose could see a dead white leg, like something which has lived underground, covered with russet hairs, a dingy slipper flapped a loose heel. It seemed to her that everyone was very kind: there seemed to be a companionship in mortal sin.