Brighton Rock

Pride swelled in her breast as she came up from the basement. She was accepted. She had experienced as much as any woman. Back in the bedroom she sat on the bed and waited and heard the clock strike eight; she wasn't hungry; she was sensible of an immense freedom no time table to keep, no work which had to be done. You suffered a little pain and then came out on the other side to this amazing liberty. There was only one thing she wanted now to let others see her happiness. She could walk into Snow's now like any other customer, rap the table with a spoon, and demand service. She could boast... it was a fantasy, but sitting on the bed while time drifted by it became an idea, something she was really able to do. In less than half an hour they would be opening for breakfast. If she had the money... she brooded with her eyes on the soap dish. She thought: after all we are married in a way; he's given me nothing but that record; he wouldn't grudge me half a crown. She stood up and listened, then walked softly over to the washstand.

With her fingers on the lid of the soap dish she waited somebody was coming down the passage: it wasn't Judy and it wasn't Dallow perhaps it was the man they called Billy. The footsteps passed; she lifted the lid and unwrapped half a crown. She had stolen biscuits, she had never stolen money before. She expected to feel shame, but it didn't come only again the odd swell of pride. She was like a child in a new school who finds she can pick up the esoteric games and passwords in the cement playground, at once, by instinct.

In the world outside it was Sunday she'd forgotten that: the church bells reminded her, shaking over Brighton. Freedom again in the early sun, freedom from the silent prayers at the altar, from the awful demands made on you at the sanctuary rail. She had joined the other side now for ever. The half-crown was like a medal for services rendered. People coming back from seven-thirty Mass, people on the way to eightthirty Matins she watched them in their dark clothes like a spy. She didn't envy them and she didn't despise them; they had their salvation and she had Pinkie and damnation.

At Snow's the blinds had just gone up: a girl she knew, called Maisie, was laying a few tables the only girl she cared about, a new girl like herself and not much older. She watched her from the pavement and Doris, the senior waitress with her habitual sneer, doing nothing at all except flick a duster where Maisie had already been. Rose clutched the half-crown closer--well, she had only got to go in, sit down, tell Doris to fetch her a cup of coffee and a roll, tip her a couple of coppers she could patronise the whole lot of them.

She was married. She was a woman. She was happy.

What would they feel like when they saw her coming through the door?

And she didn't go in. That was the trouble. Suppose Doris should weep? How would she feel then, flaunting her freedom? Then through the pane she caught Maisie's eye; she stood there with a duster staring back, bony, immature, like her own image in a mirror. And she stood now where Pinkie had stood outside, looking in. This was what the priests meant by one flesh.

And just as she, days ago, had motioned, Maisie motioned a slant of the eyes, an imperceptible nod towards the side door. There was no reason at all why she shouldn't go in at the front, but she obeyed Maisie.

It was like doing something you'd done before.

The door opened and Maisie was there. "Rose, what's wrong?" She ought to have had wounds to show--she felt guilty at having only happiness. "I thought I'd come," she said, "and see you. I'm married."

"Married?"

"Kind of."

"Oh, Rose, what's it like?"

"Lovely."

"You got rooms?"

"Yes."

"What do you do all day?"

"Nothing at all. Just lie about."

The childish face in front of her took on the wrinkled expression of grief. "God, Rosie, you're lucky.

Where did you meet him?"

"Here."

A hand bonier than her own seized her by the wrist.

"Oh, Rosie, ain't he got a friend?"

She said lightly: "He's not got friends."

"Maisie," a voice called shrilly from the caf.

"Maisie." Tears lay ready in the eyes in Maisie's eyes, not Doris's she hadn't meant to hurt her friend.

An impulse of pity made her say: "It's not all that good, Maisie." She tried to destroy the appearance of her own happiness. "Sometimes he's bad to me. Oh, I can tell you," she urged, "it's not all roses."

But "not roses," she thought as she turned back to the parade, "if it's not all roses, what is it?" And mechanically, walking back towards Billy's without her breakfast, she began to think: What have I done to deserve to be so happy? She'd committed a sin; that was the answer--she was having her cake in this world, not in the next, and she didn't care. She was stamped with him, as his voice was stamped on the vulcanite.

A few doors from Billy's, from a shop where they sold the Sunday papers, Dallow called to her: "Hi, kid." She stopped. "You got a visitor."

"Who?"

"Your mother."

She was stirred by a feeling of gratitude and pity--her mother hadn't been happy like this. She said: "Give me a News of the World. Mum likes a Sunday paper." In the back room somebody was playing a gramophone. She said to the man who kept the shop: "Sometime would you let me come here and play a record I got?"

"O' course he will," Dallow said.

She crossed the road and rang at Billy's door. Judy opened it--she was still in her dressing gown, but underneath she now had on her corsets. "You got a visitor," she said.

"I know." Rose ran upstairs; it was the biggest triumph you could ever expect: to greet your mother for the first time in your own house, ask her to sit down on your own chair, to look at each other with an equal experience. There was nothing now, Rose felt, her mother knew about men she didn't know: that was the reward for the painful ritual upon the bed. She flung the door gladly open and there was the woman.

"What are you?" she began, then said: "They told me it was my mother."

"I had to tell them something," the woman gently explained. She said: "Come in, dear, and shut the door behind you," as if it were her room.

"I'll call Pinkie."

"I'd like a word with your Pinkie." You couldn't get round her: she stood there like the wall at the end of an alley scrawled with the obscene chalk messages of an enemy. She was the explanation it seemed to Rose of sudden harshnesses, of the nails pressing her wrist. She said: "You'll not see Pinkie. I won't have anyone worry Pinkie."

"He's going to have plenty to worry him soon."

"Who are you?" Rose implored her. "Why do you interfere with us? You're not the police."

"I'm like everyone else. I want Justice," the woman cheerfully remarked, as if she were ordering a pound of tea. Her big prosperous carnal face hung itself with smiles. She said: "I want to see you're safe."

"I don't want any help," Rose said.

"You ought to go home."

Rose clenched her hands in defence of the brass bed, the ewer of dusty water. "This is home."

"It's no good your getting angry, dear," the woman continued. "I'm not going to lose my temper with you again. It's not your fault. You don't understand how things are. Why, you poor little thing, I pity you," and she advanced across the linoleum as if she intended to take Rose in her arms.

Rose backed against the bed. "You keep your distance."

"Now don't get agitated, dear. It won't help. You see I'm determined."

"I don't know what you mean. Why can't you talk straight?"

"There's things I've got to break ^-gently."

"Keep away from me. Or I'll scream."

The woman stopped. "Now let's talk sensible, dear.

I'm here for your own good. You got to be saved.

Why " she seemed for a moment at a loss for words--she said in a hushed voice: "Your life's in danger."

"You go away if that's all "

"All!" The woman was shocked. "What do you mean, all?" Then she laughed resolutely. "Why, dear, for a moment you had me rattled. All, indeed! It's enough, isn't it? I'm not joking now. If you don't know it, you got to know it. There's nothing he wouldn't stop at."

"Well?" Rose said, giving nothing away.

The woman whispered softly across the few feet between them: "He's a murderer."

"Do you think I don't know that?" Rose said.

"God's sake," the woman said, "do you mean?"

"There's nothing you can tell me."

"You crazy little fool to marry him knowing that.

I got a good mind to let you be."

"I won't complain," Rose said.

The woman hooked on another smile, as you hook on a wreath. "I'm not going to lose my temper, dear.

Why, if I let you be, I wouldn't sleep at nights. It wouldn't be Right. Listen to me; maybe you don't know what happened. I got it all figured out now.

They took Fred down under the parade, into one of those little shops and strangled him least they would have strangled him, but his heart gave out first." She said in an awe-struck voice: "They strangled a dead man," then added sharply: "You aren't listening."

"I know it all," Rose lied. She was thinking hard she was remembering Pinkie's warning "Don't get mixed up." She thought wildly and vaguely: he did his best for me--1 got to help him now. She watched the woman closely: she would never forget that plump, good-natured, ageing face, it stared out at her like an idiot's from the ruins of a bombed home. She said: "Well, if you think that's how it was, why don't you go to the police?"

"Now you're talking sense," the woman said. "I only want to make things clear. This is the way it is, dear. There's a certain person I've paid money to who's told me things. And there's things I've figured out for myself. But that person he won't give evidence. For reasons. And you need a lot of evidence seeing how the doctors made it natural death. Now if you "

"Why don't you give it up?" Rose said. "It's over and done, isn't it? Why not let us all be?"

"It wouldn't be right. Besides he's dangerous.

Look what happened here the other day. You don't tell me that was an accident."

"You haven't thought, have you," Rose said, "why he did it? You don't kill a man for no reason."

"Well, why did he?"

"I don't know."

"Ask him."

"I don't need to know."

"You think he's in love with you," the woman saidj "he's not."

"He married me."

"And why? Because they can't make a wife give evidence. You're just a witness like that other man was. My dear" she again tried to close the gap between them "I only want to save you. He'd kill you soon as look at you if he thought he wasn't safe."

With her back to the bed Rose watched her approach. She let her put her large cool pastry-making hands upon her shoulders. "People change," she said.

"Oh, no, they don't. Look at me. I've never changed.

It's like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you'll still read Brighton. That's human nature." She breathed mournfully over Rose's face a sweet and winy breath.

"Confession... repentance," Rose whispered.

"That's just religion," the woman said. "Believe me. It's the world we got to deal with." She went pat pat on Rose's shoulder, her breath whistling in her throat. "You just pack a bag and come away with me.

I'll look after you. You won't have any cause to fear."

"Pinkie..."

"FU look after Pinkie."

Rose said: "I'll do anything anything you want..."

"That's the way to talk, dear."

"If you'll let us alone."

The woman backed away. A momentary look of fury was hung up among the wreaths discordantly.

"Obstinate," she said. "If I was your mother... a good hiding." The bony and determined face stared back at her; all the fight there was in the world lay there warships cleared for action and bombing fleets took flight between the set eyes and the stubborn mouth. It was like the map of a campaign marked with flags.

"Another thing," the woman bluffed. "They can send you to jail. Because you know. You told me so. An accomplice, that's what you are. After the fact."

"If they took Pinkie, do you think," she asked with astonishment, "I'd mind?"

"Gracious," the woman said, "I only came here for your sake. I wouldn't have troubled to see you first, only I don't want to let the Innocent suffer" the aphorism came clicking out like a ticket from a slot machine. "Why, won't you lift a finger to stop him killing you?"

"He wouldn't do me any harm."

"You're young. You don't know things like I do."

"There's things you don't know." She brooded darkly by the bed, while the woman argued on: a God wept in a garden and cried out upon a cross--Molly Carthew went to everlasting fire.

"I know one thing you don't. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn't teach you that at school."

Rose didn't answer; the woman was quite right; the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods Good and Evil. The woman could tell her nothing she didn't know about these she knew by tests as clear as mathematics that Pinkie was evil what did it matter in that case whether he was right or wrong?

"You're crazy," the woman said. "I don't believe you'd lift a finger if he was killing you."

Rose came slowly back to the outer world "greater love hath no man than this." She said: "Perhaps I wouldn't. I don't know. But perhaps..."

"If I wasn't a kind woman I'd give you up. But I've got a sense of responsibility." Her smiles hung very insecurely when she paused at the door. "You can warn that young husband of yours," she said, "I'm getting warm to him. I got my plans." She went out and closed the door; then flung it open again for a last attack. "You be careful, dear," she said. "You don't want a murderer's baby," and grinned mercilessly across the bare bedroom floor. "You better take precautions."

Precautions... Rose stood at the bed and pressed a hand against her body, as if under that pressure she could discover... That had never entered her mindj and the thought of what she might have let herself in for came like a sense of glory. A child... and that child would have a child... it was like raising an army of friends for Pinkie. If They damned him and her, They'd have to damn them too. She'd see to that.

There was no end to what the two of them had done last night upon the bed: it was an eternal act.

The Boy stood back in the doorway of the newspaper shop and saw Ida Arnold come out. She looked a little flushed, a little haughty sailing down the street} she paused and gave a small boy a penny. He was so surprised he dropped it, staring after her heavy and immaculate retreat.

The Boy gave a sudden laugh, rusty and halfhearted. He thought: She's drunk... Dallow said: "That was a narrow squeak."

"What was?"

"Your mother-in-law. "

"Her... how did you know?"

"She asked for Rose."

The Boy put down the News of the World upon the counter; a headline stood up "Assault on Schoolgirl in Epping Forest." He walked across to Billy's, thinking hard, and up the stairs. Half-way he stopped; she'd dropped an artificial violet from a spray; he picked it off the stair: it smelt of Calif ornian Poppy. Then he went in, holding the flower concealed in his palm, and Rose came across to him, welcoming. He avoided her mouth. "Well," he said and tried to express in his face a kind of rough and friendly jocularity, "I hear your Mum's been visiting you," and waited anxiously and avidly for her reply.

"Oh, yes," Rose said doubtfully, "she did look in."

"Not one of her moody days?"

"No."

He kneaded the violet furiously in his palm, "Well, did she think it suited you being married?"

"Oh, yes, I think she did.... She didn't say much."

The Boy went across to the bed and slipped on his coat. He said: "You been out too, I hear."

"I thought I'd go and see friends."

"What friends?"

"Oh at Snow's."

"You call them friends?" he asked with contempt.

"Well, did you see them?"

"Not really. Only one Maisie. For a minute."

"And then you got back here in time to catch your Mum. Don't you want to know what I've been up to?"

She stared stupidly at him; his manner scared her.

"If you like."

"What do ypu mean, if I like? You aren't as dumb as that." The wire anatomy of the flower pricked his palm. He said: "I got to have a word with Dallow.

Wait here," and left her.

He called to Dallow across the street, and when Dallow joined him, he said: "Where's Judy?"

"Upstairs."

"Billy working?"

"Yes."

"Come down to the kitchen then." He led the way down the stairs; in the basement dusk his feet crunched on dead coke. He sat down on the edge of the kitchen table and said: "Have a drink."

"Too early," Dallow said.

"Listen," the Boy said. An expression of pain crossed his face as if he was about to wring out an appalling confession. "I trust you," he said.

"Well," Dallow said, "what's getting you?"

"Things aren't too good," the Boy said. "People are getting wise to a lot of things. Christ," he said, "I killed Spicer and I married the girl. Have I got to have a massacre?"

"Was Cubitt here last night?"

"He was and I sent him away. He begged he wanted a fiver."

"Did you give it him?"

"Of course I didn't. D'you think I'd let myself be blackmailed by a thing like him?"

"You oughta have given him something."

"It's not him I'm worried about.*'

"You ought to be."

"Be quiet, can't you?" the Boy suddenly and shrilly squealed at him. He jerked his thumb towards the ceiling. "It's her I'm worried about." He opened his hand and said: "God damn it, I dropped that flower."

"Flower...?"

"Be quiet, can't you, and listen," he said low and furiously. "That wasn't her Mum."

"Who was it?" Dallow said.

"The buer who's been asking questions... the one who was with Fred in the taxi the day..." He put his head for a moment between his hands in an attitude of grief or desperation but it wasn't either. He said: "I got a headache. I got to think clear. Rose told me it was her Mum. What's she after?"

"You don't think," Dallow said, "she's talked?"

"I got to find out," the Boy said.

"I'd have trusted her," Dallow said, "all the way."

"I wouldn't trust anyone that far. Not you, Dallow."

"But if she's talking, why does she talk to her why not to the police?"

"Why don't any of them talk to the police?" He stared with troubled eyes at the cold stove. He was haunted by his ignorance. "I don't know what they're getting at." Other people's feelings bored at his brain; he had never before felt this desire to understand. He said passionately: "I'd like to carve the whole bloody boiling."

"After all," Dallow said, "she don't know much.

She only knows it wasn't Fred left the card. If you ask me she's a dumb little piece. Affectionate, I dare say, but dumb."

"You're the dumb one, Dallow. She knows a lot.

She knows I killed Fred."

"You sure?"

"She told me so."

"An' she married you?" Dallow said. "I'm damned if I understand what they want .99 "If we don't do something quick it looks to me as if all Brighton'll know we killed Fred. All England. The whole God-damned world."

"What can M;* do?"

The Boy went over to the basement window crunching on the coke: a tiny asphalt yard with an old dustbin which hadn't been used for weeks, a blocked grating, and a sour smell. He said: "It's no good stopping now. We got to go on." People passed overhead, invisible from the waist upwards; a shabby shoe scuffled the pavement wearing out the toecap; a bearded face stooped suddenly into sight looking for a cigarette end.

He said slowly: "It ought to be easy to quiet her. We quieted Fred an' Spicer, an' she's only a kid..."

"Don't be crazy," Dallow said. "You can't go on like that."

"Maybe I got to. No choice. Maybe it's always that way you start and then you go on going on."

"We're making a mistake," Dallow said. "I'd stake you a fiver she's straight. Why you told me yourself she's stuck on you."

"Why did she say it was her Mum then?" He watched a woman go by: young as far as the thighs; you couldn't see further up than that. A spasm of disgust shook him--he'd given way; he had even been proud of that what Spicer did with Sylvie in a Lancia. Oh, it was all right, he supposed, to take every drink once if you could stop at that, say "never again," not go on going on.

"I can tell it myself," Dallow said. "Clear as clear.

She's stuck on you all right."

Stuck j high heels trodden over, bare legs moving out of sight. "If she's stuck," he said, "it makes it easier she'll do what I say." A piece of newspaper blew along the street: the wind was from the sea.

Dallow said: "Pinkie, I won't stand for any more killing."

The Boy turned his back to the window and his mouth made a bad replica of mirth. He said: "But suppose she killed, herself?" An insane pride bobbed in his breast; he felt inspired j it was like a love of life returning to the blank heart: the empty tenement and then the seven devils worse than the first....

Dallow said: "For Christ's sake, Pinkie. You're imagining things."

"We'll soon see," the Boy said.

He came up the stairs from the basement, looking this way and that for the scented flower of cloth and wire. He could see it nowhere. Rose's voice said: "Pinkie" over the new bannister; she was waiting there for him anxiously on the landing. She said: "Pinkie, I got to tell you. I wanted to keep you from worrying but there's got to be someone I don't have to lie to.

That wasn't Mum, Pinkie."

He came slowly up, watching her closely, judging.

"Who was it?"

"It was that woman. The one who used to come to Snow's asking questions."

"What did she want?"

"She wanted me to go away from here."

"Why?"

"Pinkie, she knows."

"Why did you say it was your Mum?"

"I told you I didn't want you to worry."

He was beside her, watching her; she faced him back with a worried candour, and he found that he believed her as much as he believed anyone, his restless cocky pride subsided--he felt an odd sense of peace, as if for a while he hadn't got to plan.

"But then," Rose went anxiously on, "I thought perhaps you ought to worry."

"That's all right," he said and put his hand on her shoulder in an awkward embrace.

"She said something about paying money to someone. She said she was getting warm to you."

"I don't worry," he said and pressed her back.

Then he stopped, looking over her shoulder. In the doorway of the room the flower lay. He had dropped it when he closed the door, and then he began at once to calculate she followed me, of course she saw the flower, she knew I knew. That explains everything, the confession.... All the while he was down there below with Dallow she had been wondering what she had to do to cover her mistake. A clean breast the phrase made him laugh a clean tart's breast, the kind of breast Sylvie sported cleaned up for use. He laughed again; the horror of the world lay like infection in his throat.

"What is it, Pinkie?"

"That flower," he said.

"What flower?"

"The one she brought."

"What... where...?"

Perhaps she hadn't seen it then... maybe she was straight after all... who knows? Who, he thought, will ever know? And with a kind of sad excitement what did it matter anyway? He had been a fool to think it made any difference; he couldn't afford to take risks. If she were straight and loved him it would be just so much easier, that was all. He repeated: "I don't worry. I don't need to worry. I know what to do. Even if she got to know everything I know what to do." He watched her shrewdly. He brought his hand round and pressed her breast. "It won't hurt," he said.

"What won't hurt, Pinkie?"

"The way I'll manage things...." He started agilely away from his dark suggestion. "You don't want to leave me, do you?"

"Never," Rose said.

"That's what I meant," he said. "You wrote it, didn't you. Trust me, I'll manage things if the worst comes to the worst so it won't hurt either of us. You can trust me," he went smoothly and rapidly on, while she watched him with the dazed tricked expression of someone who has promised too much, too quickly. "I knew," he said, "you'd feel like that. About us never parting. What you wrote."

She whispered with dread. "It's a mortal..."

"Just one more," he said. "What difference does it make? You can't be damned twice over, and we're damned already so they say. And anyway it's only if the worst... if she finds out about Spicer."

"Spicer," Rose moaned, "you don't mean Spicer too...?"

"I only mean," he said, "if she finds out that I was here in the house but we don't need to worry till she does."

"But Spicer," Rose said.

"I was here," he said, "when it happened, that's all.

I didn't even see him fall, but my solicitor..."

"He was here too?" Rose said.

"Oh, yes."

"I remember now," Rose said. "Of course I read the paper. They couldn't believe, could they, that he'd cover up anything really wrong? A solicitor."

"Old Drewitt," the Boy said, "why" again the unused laugh came into rusty play "he's the Soul of Honour." He pressed her breast again and uttered his qualified encouragement. "Oh, no, there's no cause to worry till she finds out. Even then, you see, there's that escape. But perhaps she never will. And if she doesn't, why" his fingers touched her with secret revulsion "we'll just go on, won't we" and he tried to make the horror sound like love "the way we are."

But it was the Soul of Honour none the less who really worried him. If Cubitt had given that woman the idea that there was something wrong about Spicer 's death as well, whom could she go to but Mr. Drewitt?

She wouldn't attempt anything with D allow; but a man of law when he was as clever as Drewitt was was always frightened of the law. Drewitt was like a man who kept a tame lion cub in his house: he could never be quite certain that the lion to whom he had taught so many tricks, to beg and eat out of his hand, might not one day unexpectedly mature and turn on him; perhaps he might cut his cheek shaving and the law would smell the blood.

In the early afternoon he couldn't wait any longer; he set out for Drewitt's house. First he told Dallow to keep an eye on the girl in case... More than ever yet he had the sense that he was being driven further and deeper than he'd ever meant to go. A curious and cruel pleasure touched him he didn't really care so very much it was being decided for him, and all he had to do was to let himself easily go. He knew what the end might be it didn't horrify him: it was easier than life.

Mr. Drewitt's house was in a street parallel to the railway, beyond the terminus; it was shaken by shunting engines; the soot settled continuously on the glass and the brass plate. From the basement window a woman with tousled hair stared suspiciously up at him she was always there watching visitors from a hard and bitter face; she was never explained: he had always thought she was the cook, but it appeared now she was the "spouse" twenty-five years at the game.

The door was opened by a girl with grey underground skin an unfamiliar face. "Where's Tilly?" the Boy said.

"She's left."

"Tell Drewitt, Pinkie's here."

"He's not seeing anyone," the girl said. "This is a Sunday, ain't it?"

"He'll see me." The Boy walked into the hall, opened a door, sat down in a room lined with filing boxes; he knew the way. "Go on/ 7 he said, "tell him. I know he's asleep. You wake him up."

"You seem to be at home here," the girl said.

"I am." He knew what those filing boxes contained marked Rex v. Innes, Rex v. T. Collins they contained just air. A train shunted and the empty boxes quivered on the shelves; the window was open only a crack, but the radio from next door came in Radio Luxembourg.

"Shut the window," he said. She shut it sullenly. It made no difference; the walls were so thin, you could hear the neighbour move behind the shelves like a rat.

He said: "Does that music always play?"

"Unless it's a talk," she said.

"What are you waiting for? Go and wake him."

"He told me not to. He's got indigestion."

Again the room vibrated and the music wailed through the wall.

"He's always got it after lunch. Go on and wake him."

"It's a Sunday."

"You'd better go quick," he obscurely threatened her, and she slammed the door on Kim a little plaster fell.

Under his feet in the basement someone was moving the furniture about the spouse, he thought. A train hooted and a smother of smoke fell into the street.

Over his head Mr. Drewitt began to speak there was nothing anywhere to keep out sound. Then footsteps Mr. Drewitt's smile went on as the door opened.

"What brings our young cavalier?"

"I just wanted to see you," the Boy said. "See how you were getting along." A spasm of pain drove the smile from Mr. Drewitt's face. "You ought to eat more careful," the Boy said.

"Nothing does it any good," Mr. Drewitt said.

"You drink too much."

"Eat, drink, for tomorrow..." Mr. Drewitt writhed with his hand on his stomach.

"You got an ulcer?" the Boy said.

"No, no, nothing like that."

"You ought to have your inside photographed."

"I don't believein the knife," Mr. Drewitt said quickly and nervously, as if it was a suggestion constantly made for which he had to have the answer on the tongue.

"Don't that music ever stop?"

"When I get tired of it," Mr. Drewitt said, "I beat on the wall." He took a paperweight off his desk and struck the wall twice; the music broke into a high oscillating wail and ceased. They could hear the neighbour move furiously behind the shelves. "How now! a rat?"

Mr. Drewitt quoted. The house shook as a heavy engine pulled out. "Polonius," Mr. Drewitt explained.

"Polony? What polony?"

"No, no," Mr. Drewitt said. "The rank intruding fool, I mean. In Hamlet."

"Listen," the Boy said impatiently, "has a woman been round here asking questions?"

"What sort of questions?"

"About Spicer."

Mr. Drewitt said with sickly despair: "Are people asking questions?" He sat down quickly and bent with indigestion. "I've just been waiting for this."

"There's no need to get scared," the Boy said.

"They can't prove anything. You just stick to your story." He sat down opposite Mr. Drewitt and regarded him with grim contempt. "You don't want to ruin yourself," he said.

Mr. Drewitt looked sharply up. "Ruin?" he said.

"I'm ruined now." He vibrated with the engines on his chair, and somebody in the basement slammed the floor beneath their feet. "What ho, old mole!" Mr.

Drewitt said. "The spouse you've never met the spouse."

"I've seen her," the Boy said.

"Twenty-five years. Then this." The smoke came down outside the window like a blind. "Has it ever occurred to you," Mr. Drewitt said, "that you're lucky?

The worst that can happen to you is you'll hang. But I can rot."

"What's upsetting you?" the Boy said. He was confused as if a weak man had struck him back. He wasn't used to this the infringement of other people's lives. Confession was an act one did or didn't do oneself.

"When I took on your work," Mr. Drewitt said, "I lost the only other job I had. The Bakely Trust. And now I've lost you."

"You got everything there is of mine."

"There won't be any more soon. Colleoni's going to take over this place from you, and he's got his lawyer.

A man in London. A swell."

"I haven't thrown my sponge in yet." He sniffed the air tainted with gasometers and said: "I know what's wrong with you. You're drunk."

"On Empire burgundy," Mr. Drewitt said. "I want to tell you things. Pinkie, I want" the literary phrase came glibly out "to unburden myself."

"I don't want to hear them. I'm not interested in your troubles."

"I married beneath me," Mr. Drewitt said. "It was my tragic mistake. I was young. An affair of uncontrollable passion. I was a passionate man," he said, wriggling with indigestion. "You've seen her," he said, "now. My God." He leant forward and said in a whisper: "I watch the little typists go by carrying their little cases. I'm quite harmless. A man may watch. My God, how neat and trim!" He broke off, his hand vibrating on the chair arm. "Listen to the old mole down there. She's ruined me." His old lined face had taken a holiday from bonhomie, from cunning, from the legal jest. It was a Sunday and it was itself.

Mr. Drewitt said: "You know what Mephistopheles said to Faustus when he asked where Hell was? He said: 'Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it.' " The Boy watched him with fascination and fear.

"She's cleaning in the kitchen," Mr. Drewitt said, "but she'll be coming up later. You ought to meet her it'd be a treat. The old hag. What a joke it would be, wouldn't it, to tell her everything. That I'm concerned in a murder. That people are asking questions.

To pull down the whole damned house like Samson."

He stretched his arms wide and contracted them in the pain of indigestion, "You're right," he said, "I've got an ulcer. But I won't have the knife. I'd rather die. I'm drunk too. On Empire burgundy. Do you see that photo there by the door? A school group. Lancaster College. Not one of the great schools perhaps, but you'll find it in the Public Schools Year Book. You'll see me there cross-legged in the bottom row. In a straw hat." He said softly: "We had field days with Harrow. A rotten set they were. No esprit de corps."

The Boy didn't so much as turn his head to look--he had never known Drewitt like this before: it was a frightening and an entrancing exhibition. A man was coming alive before his eyes: he could see the nerves set to work in the agonised flesh, thought bloom in the transparent brain.

"To think," Mr. Drewitt said, "an old Lancaster boy to be married to that mole in the cellarage down there and to have as only client" he gave his mouth an expression of fastidious disgust "you. What would old Manders say? A great head."

He had the bit between his teeth; he was like a man determined to live before he died; all the insults he had swallowed from police witnesses, the criticisms of magistrates, regurgitated from his tormented stomach.

There was nothing he wouldn't tell to anybody. An enormous self-importance was blossoming out of his humiliation; his wife, the Empire burgundy, the empty files, and the vibration of locomotives on the line, they were the important landscape of his great drama.

"You talk too easily," the Boy said.

"Talk?" Mr. Drewitt said. "I could shake the world.

Let them put me in the dock if they like. I'll give them revelation. I've sunk so deep I carry" he was shaken by an enormous windy selfesteem, he hiccuped twice "the secrets of the sewer."

"If I'd known you drank," the Boy said, "I wouldn't have touched you."

"I drink on Sundays. It's the day of rest." He suddenly beat his foot upon the floor and screamed furiously. "Be quiet down there."

"You need a holiday," the Boy said.

"I sit here and sit here the bell rings, but it's only the groceries tinned salmon, she has a passion for tinned salmon. Then I ring the bell and in comes that pasty stupid I watch the typists going by. I could embrace their little portable machines."

"You'd be all right," the Boy said nervous and shaken with the conception of another life growing in the brain "if you took a holiday."

"Sometimes," Mr. Drewitt said, "I have an urge to expose myself shamefully in a park."

"I'll give you money."

* 4 No money can heal a mind diseased. This is Hell, nor are we out of it. How much could you spare?"

"Twenty nicker."

"It would go only a little way."

"Boulogne why not slip across the Channel?" the Boy said with horrified disgust. "Enjoy yourself" watching the grubby and bitten nails, the shaky hands which were the instruments of pleasure.

"Could you spare some small sum like that, my boy? Don't let me rob you--though, of course, 'I have done the state some service.' "

"You can have it tomorrow on conditions. You got to leave by the midday boat stay away as long as you can. Maybe I'll send you more." It was like fastening a leech onto the flesh he felt weakness and disgust. "Let me know when it's finished and I'll see."

"I'll go, Pinkie when you say. And you won't tell my spouse?"

"I keep my mouth shut."

"Of course. I trust you, Pinkie, and you can trust me. Recuperated by this holiday I shall return "

"Take a long one."

"Bullying police sergeants shall recognise my renewed astuteness. Defending the outcast."

"I'll send the money first thing. Till then you don't see anyone. You go back to bed. Your indigestion's cruel. If anyone comes round you're not in."

"As you say, Pinkie, as you say."

It was the best he could do. He let himself out of the house and, looking down, met in the basement the hard suspicious gaze of Mr. Drewitt's spouse; she had a duster in her hand and she watched him like a bitter enemy from her cave, under the foundations. He crossed the road and took one more look at the villa, and there in an upper window half concealed by the curtains stood Mr. Drewitt. He wasn't watching the Boy he was just looking out hopelessly, for what might turn up. But it was a Sunday and there weren't any typists.

He said to Dallow: "You got to watch the place. I don't trust him a yard. I can just see him looking out there, waiting for something, and seeing her..."

"He wouldn't be such a fool."

"He's drunk. He says he's in Hell."

Dallow laughed: "Hell. That's good."

"You're a fool, Dallow."

"I don't believe in what my eyes don't see."

"They don't see much then," the Boy said. He left Dallow and went upstairs. But, oh, if this was Hell, he thought, it wasn't so bad: the old-fashioned telephone, the narrow stairs, the snug and dusty darkness it wasn't like Drewitt's house, comfortless, shaken, with the old bitch in the basement. He opened the door of his room and there, he thought, was his enemy he looked round with angry disappointment at his changed room the position of everything a little altered and the whole place swept and clean and tidied. He condemned her: "I told you not to."

"I've only cleared up, Pinkie."

It was her room now, not his: the wardrobe and the washstand shifted, and the bed of course she hadn't forgotten the bed. It was her Hell now if it was anybody's he disowned it. He felt driven out, but any change must be for the worse. He watched her like an enemy, disguising his hatred, trying to read age into her face, how she would look one day staring up from his basement. He had come back wrapped in another person's fate a doubled darkness.

"Don't you like it, Pinkie?"

He wasn't Drewitt: he'd got guts; he hadn't lost his fight. He said: "Oh, this it's fine. It was just I wasn't expecting it."

She misread his constraint. "Bad news?"

"Not yet. We got to be prepared, of course. I am prepared," He went to the window and stared out through a forest of wireless masts towards a cloudy peaceful Sunday sky, then back at the changed room.

This was how it might look if he had gone away and other tenants... He watched her closely while he did his sleight of hand passing off his idea as hers. "I got the car all ready. We could go out into the country where no one would hear..." He measured her terror carefully and before she could pass the card back to him, he changed his tone. "That's only if the worst comes to the worst." The phrase intrigued him, he repeated it: the worst that was the stout woman with her glassy righteous eye coming up the smoky road to the worst and that was drunken ruined Mr. Drewitt watching from behind the curtains for just one typist.

"It won't happen," he encouraged her.

"No," she passionately agreed. "It won't, it can't."

Her enormous certainty had a curious effect on him it was as if that plan of his too were being tidied, shifted, swept until he couldn't recognise his own. He wanted to argue that it might happen 7 he discovered in himself an odd nostalgia for the darkest act of all.

She said: "I'm so happy. It can't be so bad after all."

"What do you mean?" he said. "Not bad? It's mortal sin." He glanced with furious disgust at the made bed as if he contemplated a repetition of the act there and then to thrust the lesson home.

"I know," she said. "I know, but still "

"There's only one thing worse," he said. It was as if she were escaping him; already she was domesticating their black alliance.

"I'm happy," she argued bewilderedly. "You're good to me."

"That doesn't mean a thing."

"Listen," she said, "what's that?" A thin wailing came through the window.

"The kid next door."

"Why doesn't somebody quiet it?"

"It's a Sunday. Maybe they're out." He said. "You want to do anything? The flickers?"

She wasn't listening to him--the unhappy continuous cry absorbed her; she wore a look of responsibility and maturity. "Somebody ought to see what it wants," she said.

"It's just hungryor something."

"Maybe it's ill." She listened with a kind of vicarious agony. "Things happen to babies suddenly. You don't know what it mightn't be."

"It isn't yours."

She turned bemused eyes towards him. "No," she said, "but I was thinking it might be." She said with passion: "I wouldn't leave it all an afternoon."

He said uneasily: "They haven't either. It's stopped.

What did I tell you?" But her words lodged in his brain "It might be." He had never thought of that; he watched her with terror and disgust as if he were watching the ugly birth itself, the rivet of another life already pinning him down, and she stood there listening with relief and patience, as if already she had passed through years of this anxiety and knew that the relief never lasted long and that the anxiety always began again.

Nine o'clock in the morning; he came furiously out into the passage; the morning sun trickled in over the top of the door below, staining the telephone. He called: "Dallow, Dallow!"

Dallow came slowly up from the basement in his shirt sleeves. He said: * 'Hallo, Pinkie. You look as if you hadn't slept,"

The Boy said: "You keeping away from me?"

"Of course I'm not, Pinkie. Only you being married I thought you'd want to be alone."

"You caU it," the Boy said, "being alone?" He came down the stairs; he carried in his hand the mauve scented envelope Judy had thrust under the door. He hadn't opened it. His eyes were bloodshot. He carried down with him the marks of a fever the beating pulse and the hot forehead and the restless brain.

"Johnnie phoned me early," Dallow said. "He's been watching since yesterday. No one's been to see Drewitt. We got scared for nothing."

The Boy paid him no attention. He said: "I want to be alone, Dallow. Really alone."

"You been taking on too much at your age," Dallow said and began to laugh. "Two nights..."

The Boy said: "She's got to go before she " he couldn't express the magnitude of his fear or its nature to anyone: it was like an ugly secret.

"It's not safe to quarrel," Dallow said quickly and cautiously.

"No," the Boy said, "it won't ever be safe again. I know that. No divorce. Nothing at all except dying.

All the same," he put his hand on the vulcanite for coolness. "I told you I had a plan."

"It was crazy. Why should that poor kid want to die?"

He said with bitterness: "She loves me. She says she wants to be with me always. And if I don't want to live..."

"Dally," a voice called, "Dally." The Boy looked sharply and guiltily round; he hadn't heard Judy moving silently above in her naked feet and her corsets.

He was absorbed, trying to get the plan straight in the confused hot brain, tied up in its complexity, uncertain who it was who had to die... himself or her or both....

"What you want, Judy?" Dallow said.

"Billy's finished your coat."

"Let it be," Dallow said. "I'll fetch it in a shake."

She blew him an avaricious, unsatisfied kiss and padded back to her room.

"I started something there all right," Dallow said.

"Sometimes I wish I hadn't. I don't want trouble with poor old Billy, an' she's so careless."

The Boy looked at Dallow broodingly, as if perhaps he knew from his long service what one did.

"Suppose," he said, "you had a child?"

"Oh," Dallow said, "I leave that to her. It's her funeral." He said: "You got a letter there from Colleoni?"

"But what does she do?"

"The usual, I suppose."

"And if she doesn't," the Boy persisted, "an' she began a child?"

"There's pills."

"They don't always work, do they?" the Boy said.

He had thought he'd learned everything now, but he was back in his state of appalled ignorance.

"They never work, if you ask me," Dallow said.

"Colleoni written?"

"If Drewitt grassed, there wouldn't be a hope, would there?" the Boy brooded.

"He won't grass. And anyway he'll be in Boulogne tonight."

"But if he did... or say I thought he had... there'd be nothing to do then, would there, but kill myself? And she she wouldn't want to live without me. If she thought... And all the time perhaps it wouldn't be true. They call it don't they? a suicide pact."

"What's got you, Pinkie? You're not giving in?"

"I mightn't die."

"That's murder too."

"They don't hang you for it."

"You're crazy, Pinkie. Why, I wouldn't stand for a thing like that." He gave the Boy a shocked and friendly blow. "You're joking, Pinkie there's nothing wrong with the poor kid except for liking you."

The Boy said not a thing--he had an air of removing his thoughts, like heavy bales, and stacking them inside, turning the key on all the world. "You want to lie down a bit and rest," Dallow said uneasily.

"I want to lie down alone," the Boy said. He went slowly upstairs--when he opened the door he knew what he would see; he looked away as if to shut out temptation from the ascetic and the poisoned brain.

He heard her say: "I was just going out for a while, Pinkie. Is there anything I can do for you?"

Anything... His brain staggered with the immensity of its demands. He said gently: "Nothing," and schooled his voice to softness. "Come back soon. We got things to talk about."

"Worried?"

"Not worried. I got things straight," he gestured with deadly humour at his head, "in the box here."

He was aware of her fear and tension the sharp breath and the silence and then the voice steeled for despair. "Not bad news, Pinkie?"

He flew out at her: "For Christ's sake, go!"

He heard her coming back across the room to him, but he wouldn't look up--this was his room, his life; he felt that if he could concentrate enough, it would be possible to eliminate every sign of her... everything would be just the same as before... before he entered Snow's and felt under that cloth for a ticket which wasn't there and began the deception and shame. The whole origin of the thing was lost: he could hardly remember Hale as a person or his murder as a crime it was all now him and her.

"If anything's happened... you can tell me...

I'm not scared. There must be some way, Pinkie, not to..." She implored him: "Let's talk about it first,"

He said: "You're fussed about nothing. I want you to go all right, you can go," he went savagely on, "to ..." But he stopped in time, raked up a smile, "... go and enjoy yourself."

"I won't be gone long, Pinkie." He heard the door close, but he knew she was lingering in the passage the whole house was hers now. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the paper "I don't care what you do.... Wherever you go, I'll go too." It sounded like a letter read in court and printed in the newspapers. He heard her feet upon the stairs going down.

Dallow looked in and said: "Drewitt should be starting now. I'll feel better when he's on that boat.

You don't think, do you, she'd get the police to hunt him out?"

"She hasn't got the evidence," the Boy said. "You're safe enough when he's out of the way." He spoke dully as if he'd lost all interest in whether Drewitt went or stayed it was something which concerned other people. He'd gone beyond that.

"You too," Dallow said. "You'll be safe."

The Boy didn't answer.

"I told Johnnie to see he got on the boat safe and then phone us. He'll be ringing up now almost any time. We oughta have a party to celebrate, Pinkie. My God, how sunk she'll feel when she turns up there and finds him gone!" He went to the window and looked out. "Maybe we'll have some peace then. We'll have got out of it easy. When you come to think. Hale and poor old Spicer. I wonder where he is now." He stared sentimentally out through the thin chimney smoke and the wireless masts. "What about you and me an* the girl, of course shifting off to some new place?

It's not going to be so good here now with Colleoni butting in." He turned back into the room. "That letter" and the telephone began to ring. He said: "That'll be Johnnie," and hurried out.

It occurred to the Boy that it wasn't the sound of feet on the stairs he recognised, it was the sound of the stairs themselves he could tell those particular stairs even under a stranger's weight; there was always a creak at the third and seventh step down. This was the place he had come to after Kite had picked him up he had been coughing on the Palace Pier in the bitter cold, listening to the violin wailing behind the glass; Kite had given him a cup of hot coffee and brought him here God knows why perhaps because he was out and wasn't down, perhaps because a man like Kite needed a little sentiment, like a tart who keeps a pekinese. Bate had opened the door of No .63 and the first thing he'd seen was Dallow embracing Judy on the stairs and the first thing he had smelt was Billy's iron in the basement. Everything had been of a piece: nothing had really changed; Kite had died, but he had prolonged Kite's existence not touching liquor, biting his nails in the Kite way, until she came and altered everything.

Dallow's voice drifted up the stairs: "Oh, I dunno.

Send some pork sausages. Or a tin of beans."

He came back into the room. "It wasn't Johnnie," he said. "Just the International. We oughta be hearing from Johnnie." He sat anxiously down on the bed and said: "That letter from Colleoni, what does it say?"

The Boy tossed it across to him. "Why," Dallow said, "you haven't opened it." He began to read: "Well," he said, "it's bad, of course. It's what I thought. And yet it's not so bad either. Not when you come to look at it." He glanced cautiously up over the mauve notepaper at the Boy, sitting there by the washstand, thinking. "We're played out here, that's what it comes to. He's got most of our boys and all the bookies. But he doesn't want trouble. He's a business man he says a fight like you had the other day brings a track into disrepute. Disrepute," Dallow repeated thoughtfully.

"He means," the Boy said, "the suckers stay away."

"Well, that's sense. He says he'll pay you three hundred nicker for the goodwill. Goodwill?"

"He means not carving his geezers."

"It's a good offer," Dallow said. "It's what I was saying just now we could clear out right away from this damned town and this phony buer asking questions, start again on a good line or maybe retire altogether, buy a pub, you an' me an' the girl, of course." He said: "When the hell's Johnnie going to phone? It makes me nervous."

The Boy said nothing for a while, looking at his bitten nails. Then he said: "Of course you know the world, Dallow. You've travelled."

"There's not many places I don't know," Dallow agreed, "between here and Leicester."

"I was born here," the Boy said. "I know Goodwood and Hurst Park. I've been to Newmarket. But I'd feel a stranger away from here." He claimed with dreary pride: "I suppose I'm real Brighton" as if his single heart contained all the cheap amusements, the Pullman cars, the unloving week-ends in gaudy hotels, and the sadness after coition.

A bell rang. "Listen," Dallow said. "Is that Johnnie?"

But it was only the front door. Dallow looked at his watch. "I can't think what's keeping him," he said.

"Drewitt oughta be on board by now."

"Well," the Boy said with gloom, "we change, don't we? It's as you say. We got to see the world....

After all I took to drink, didn't I? I can take to other things."

"An' you got a girl," Dallow said with hollow cheeriness. "You're growing up, Pinkie like your father."

Like my father... The Boy was shaken again with his nocturnal Saturday disgust. He couldn't blame his father now... it was what you came to... you got mixed up, and then, he supposed, the habit grew... you gave yourself away weekly. You couldn't even blame the girl. It was life getting at you... there even were the blind seconds when you thought it fine.

"We'd be safer," he said, "without her," touching the loving message in the trouser pocket.

"She's safe enough now. She's crazy about you."

"The trouble with you is," the Boy said, "you don't look ahead. There's years... And any day she might fall for a new face or get vexed or something... if I don't keep her smooth... there's no security," he said. The door opened and there she was back again; he bit his words short and smirked a welcome. But it wasn't hard she took deception with such hopeless ease that he could feel a sort of tenderness for her stupidity and a companionship in her goodness they were both doomed in their own way. Again he got the sense that she completed him.

She said: "I hadn't got a key. I had to ring. I felt afraid soon as I'd gone out that something might be wrong. I wanted to be here, Pinkie."

"There's nothing wrong," he said. The telephone began to ring. "There, you see, there's Johnnie now," he said to Dallow joylessly. "You got your wish."

They heard his voice at the phone shrill with suspense: "That you, Johnnie? Yes? What was that? You don't mean...? Oh, yes, we'll see you later. Of course you'll get your money." He came back up and at the right place the stairs creaked his broad brutal and innocent face bore good news like a boar's head at a feast. "That's fine," he said, "fine. I was getting anxious, I don't mind telling you. But he's on the boat now an' she left the pier ten minutes ago. We got to celebrate this. By God, you're clever, Pinkie.

You think of everything."

Ida Arnold had had more than a couple. She sang softly to herself over the stout "One night in an alley Lord Rothschild said to me..." The heavy motion of the waves under the pier was like the sound of bath water; it set her going. She sat there massively alone no harm in her for anybody in the world minus one--the world was a good place if you didn't weaken} she was like the chariot in a triumph behind her were all the big battalions right's right, an eye for an eye, when you want to do a thing well, do it yourself. Phil Corkery made his way to weirds he*. behind him through the long glass windows of the tea room you could see the lights of Hove; green copper Metropole domes lay in the layer of last light under the heavy nocturnal clouds slumping down. The spray tossed up like fine rain against the windows. Ida Arnold stopped singing and said: "Do you see what I see?"

Phil Corkery sat down; it wasn't like summer at all in this glass breakwater; he looked cold in his grey flannel trousers and his blazer with the old somethingor-other arms on the pocket; a little pinched, all passion spent. "It's them," he said wearily. "How did you know they'd be here?"

"I didn't," Ida said. "It's fate."

"I'm tired of the sight of them."

"But think how tired," she said with cheery relish, "they are." They looked across a waste of empty tables towards France, towards the Boy and Rose and a man and woman they didn't recognise. If the party had come there to celebrate or something, she had spoiled their fun. The Guinness welled warmly up into her throat; she had an enormous sense of wellbeing; she belched and said: "Pardon me," lifting a black gloved hand. She said: "I suppose he's gone too?"

"He's gone."

"We aren't lucky with our witnesses," she said.

"First Spicer, then the girl, then Drewitt, and now Cubitt."

"He took the first morning train with your money."

"Never mind," she said. "They're alive. They'll come back. An' I can wait thanks to Black Boy."

Phil Corkery looked at her askance: it was astonishing that he had ever had the nerve to send her to send that power and purpose postcards from seaside resorts--from Hastings a crab from whose stomach you could wind out a series of views--from Eastbourne a baby sitting upon a rock which lifted to disclose the High Street and Boots Library and a fernery; from Bournemouth (was it?) a bottle containing photographs of the promenade, the rock garden, the new swimming pool.... It was like offering a bun to an elephant in Africa. He was shaken by a sense of terrific force... when she wanted a good time nothing would stop her, and when she wanted justice... He said nervously: "Don't you think, Ida, we've done enough?..."

She said: "I haven't finished yet," with her eyes on the little doomed party. "You never know. They think they're safe; they'll do something crazy now." The Boy sat there silent beside Rose; he had a glass of drink but he hadn't tasted it; only the man and the woman chattered about this and that.

"We've done our best. It's a matter for the police or no one," Phil said.

"You heard them that first time." She began to sing again: "One night in an alley..."

"It's not our business now."

"Lord Rothschild said to me..." She broke off to set him gently right. You couldn't let a friend have wrong ideas. "It's the business of anyone who knows the difference between Right and Wrong."

"But you're so terribly certain about things, Ida.

You go busting in... Oh, you mean well, but how do we know the reasons he may have had?... And besides," he accused her, "you're only doing it because it's fun. Fred wasn't anyone you cared about."

She switched towards him her large and lit-up eyes.

"Why," she said, "I don't say it hasn't been exciting." She felt quite sorry it was all over now.

"What's the harm in that? I like doing what's right, that's all."

Rebellion bobbed weakly up "And what's wrong too."

She smiled at him with enormous and remote tenderness. "Oh, that. That's not wrong. That does no one any harm. That's not like murder."

"Priests say it is."

"Priests!" she exclaimed with scorn. "Why, even Romans don't believe in that. Or that girl wouldn't be living with him now." She said: "You can trust me.

I've seen the world. I know people," and she turned her attention heavily back on Rose. "You wouldn't let me leave a little girl like that to him? She's vexing, of course, she's stupid, but she don't deserve that."

"How do you know she doesn't want to be left?"

"You aren't telling me, are you, that she wants to die? Nobody wants that. Oh, no. I don't give up until she's safe. Get me another Guinness." A long way out beyond the West Pier you could see the lights of Worthing, a sign of bad weather; and the tide rolled regularly in, a gigantic white splash in the dark against the breakwaters nearer shore. You could hear it pounding at the piles, like a boxer's fist against a punchball in training for the human jaw, and softly and just a little tipsily Ida Arnold began to recall the people she had saved: a man she had once pulled out of the sea when she was a young woman, the money to a blind beggar, and the kind word in season to the despairing schoolgirl in the Strand.

"Poor old Spicer too," Dallow said, "he got the same idea he thought he'd have a pub somewhere some day." He slapped Judy's thigh and said: "What about me an' you settling in with the young people?"

He said: "I can see it now. Right out in the country.

On one of those arterials with the charabancs stopping: the Great North Road. Pull in here. I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't more money in the long run..." He stopped and said to the Boy: "What's up?

Take a drink. There's nothing to worry about now."

The Boy looked across the tea room and the empty tables to where the woman sat. How she hung on!

Like a ferret he'd seen on the down, among the chalky holes, fastened to the hare's throat. All the same this hare escaped. He had no cause to fear her now. He said in a dull voice: "The country. I don't know much about the country."

"It's healthy," Dallow said. "Why, you'll live to eighty with your missus."

"Sixty-odd years," the Boy said, "it's a long time."

Behind the woman's head the Brighton lamps beaded out towards Worthing. The last sunset light slid lower in the sky and the heavy indigo clouds came down over the Grand, the Metropole, the Cosmopolitan, over the towers and domes. Sixty years: it was like a prophecy a certain future, a horror without end.

"You two," Dallow said, "what's got you both?"

This was the tea room to which they had all come after Fred's death Spicer and Dallow and Cubitt.

Dallow was right, of course: they were safe Spicer dead and Drewitt out of the way, and Cubitt God knows where (they'd never get him into a witness box: he knew too well he'd hang he'd played too big a part the prison record of 1 923 lay behind him).

And Rose was his wife. As safe as they could ever be. They'd won out finally. He had Dallow right again sixty years ahead. His thoughts came to pieces in his hand: Saturday nights; and then the birth, the child, habit, and hate. He looked across the tables: the woman's laughter was like defeat.

He said: "This place is stuffy. I got to have some air." He turned slowly to Rose. "Come for a stroll," he said. Between the table and the door he picked the right thought out of all the pieces, and when they came out on the windy side of the pier he shouted to her: "I got to go away from here." He put his hand on her arm and guided her with terrible tenderness into shelter. The waves came breaking up from France, pounding under their feet. A spirit of recklessness took him; it was like the moment when he had seen Spicer bending by his suitcase, Cubitt begging for money in the passage. Through the glass panes Dallow sat with Judy by the drinks; it was like the first week of the sixty years the contact and the sensual tremble and the stained sleep and waking not alone j in the wild and noisy darkness the Boy had the whole future in his brain. It was like a slot machine: you put in a penny and the light goes on, and the doors open and the figures move. He said with agile tenderness: "This was where we met that night. Remember?"

"Yes," she said and watched him with fear.

"We don't want them with us," he said. "Let's get into the car an' drive" he watched her closely "into the country."

"It's cold."

"It won't be in the car." He dropped her arm and said: "Of course if you don't want to come I'll go alone."

"But where?"

He said with studied lightness: "I told you. In the country." He took a penny out of his pocket and slammed it home in the nearest slot machine. He pulled a handle, didn't look at what he did, and with a rattle the packets of fruit gums came dropping out a bonus lemon and grapefruit and liquorice all-sorts.

He said: "I've got a lucky hand."

"Is something wrong?" Rose said.

He said: "You saw her, didn't you? Believe me she's never going to leave go. I saw a ferret once out by the track." As he turned one of the pier lights caught his eyes: a gleam, an exhilaration. He said: "I'm going for a ride. You stay here if you want to."

"I'll come," she said.

"You needn't."

"I'll come."

At the shooting range he paused. He was taken with a kind of wild humour. "Got the time?" he asked the man.

"You know what the time is. I've told you before how I won't stand..."

"You needn't get your rag out," the Boy said.

"Give me a gun." He lifted it, got the sight firmly on the bull, then deliberately shifted it and fired he thought: "Something had agitated him, the witness said."

"What's up with you today?" the man exclaimed.

"You only got an outer."

He laid the rifle down. "We need a freshener.

We're going for a ride in the country. Good night."

He planted his information pedantically, as carefully as he had had them lay Fred's cards along the route for later use. He even turned back and said: "We're going Hastings way."

"I don't want to know," the man said, "where you're going."

The old Morris was parked near the pier. The selfstarter wouldn't work; he had to turn the handle. He stood a moment looking at the old car with an expression of disgust; as if this was all you got out of a racket... He said: "We'll go the way we went that day. Remember? In the bus." Again he planted his information for the attendant to hear. "Peacehaven.

We'll get a drink."

They swung out round by the Aquarium and ground uphill in second gear. He had one hand in his pocket feeling for the scrap of paper on which she had written her message. The hood flapped and the split discoloured glass of the windscreen confined his view.

He said: "It's going to rain like hell soon."

"Will this hood keep it out?"

"It doesn't matter," he said, staring ahead. "We won't get wet."

She didn't dare ask him what he meant she wasn't sure, and as long as she wasn't sure she could believe that they were happy, that they were lovers taking a drive in the dark with all the trouble over. She put a hand on him and felt his instinctive withdrawal; for a moment she was shaken by an awful doubt if this was the darkest nightmare of all, if he didn't love her, as the woman said... the wet windy air flapped her face through the rent. It didn't matter; she loved him; she had her responsibility. The buses passed them going downhill to the town: little bright domestic cages in which people sat with baskets and books; a child pressed her face to the glass and for a moment at a traffic light they were so close the face might have been held against her breast. "A penny for your thoughts," he said and caught her unawares "Life's not so bad."

"Don't you believe it," he said. "I'll tell you what it is. It's jail, it's not knowing where to get some money. Worms and cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking from the upper windows children being born. It's dying slowly."

It was coming now she knew it; the dashboard light lit the bony mind-made-up fingers; the face was in darkness, but she could imagine the exhilaration, the bitter excitement, the anarchy in the eyes. A rich man's private car Daimler or Bentley, she didn't know the makes rolled smoothly past them. He said: 4 'What's the hurry?" He took his hand out of his pocket and laid on his knee a paper she recognised.

He said: "You mean that don't you?" He had to repeat it: "Don't you?" She felt as if she were signing away more than her life Heaven, whatever that was, and the child in the bus, and the baby crying in the neighbour's house. "Yes," she said.

"We'll go and have a drink," he said, "and then you'll see. I got everything settled." He said with hideous ease: "It won't take a minute." He put his arm round her waist and his face was close to hers--she could see him now, considering and considering} his skin smelt of petrol; everything smelt of petrol in the little leaking out-dated car. She said: "Are you sure... can't we wait... one day?"

"What's the good? You saw her there tonight. She's hanging on. One day she'll get her evidence. What's the use?"

"Why not then?"

"It might be too late then" He said disjointedly through the flapping hood: "A knock and the next thing you know... the cuffs... too late..." He said with cunning: "We wouldn't be together then."

He put down his foot and the needle quivered up to thirty-five the old car wouldn't do more than forty, but it gave an immense impression of reckless speedy the wind battered on the glass and tore through the rent.

He began softly to intone: "Dona nobis pacem."

"He won't."

"What do you mean?"

"Give us peace."

He thought: there'll be time enough in the years ahead sixty years to repent of this. Go to a priest.

Say: "Father, I've committed murder twice. And there was a girl she killed herself." Even if death came suddenly, driving home tonight, the smash on the lamp post there was still: "between the stirrup and the ground." The houses on one side ceased altogether, and the sea came back to them, beating at the undercliff drive, a darkness and deep sound. He wasn't really deceiving himself he'd learned the other day that when the time was short there were other things than contrition to think about. It didn't matter anyway... he wasn't made for peace, he couldn't believe in it. Heaven was a word; Hell was something he could trust. A brain was capable only of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced; his cells were formed of the cement school playground, the dead fire and the dying man in the St. Pancras waiting room, his bed at Billy's and his parents' bed. An awful resentment stirred in him why shouldn't he have had his chance like all the rest, seen his glimpse of Heaven if it was only a crack between the Brighton walls?... He turned as they went down to Rottingdean and took a long look at her as if she might be it but the brain couldn't conceive he saw a mouth which wanted the sexual contact, the shape of breasts demanding a child. Oh, she was good all right, he supposed, but she wasn't good enough--he'd got her down.

Above Rottingdean the new villas began: pipedream architecture; up on the down the obscure skeleton of a nursing home, winged like an aeroplane. He said: "They won't hear us in the country." The lights petered out along the road to Peacehaven; the chalk of a new cutting flapped like white sheets in the headlight; cars came down on them, blinding them. He said: "The battery's low."

She had the sense that he was a thousand miles away his thoughts had gone on beyond the act she couldn't tell where--he was wise; he was foreseeing, she thought, things she couldn't conceive eternal punishment, the flames... She felt terror, the idea of pain shook her, their purpose drove up in a flurry of rain against the old stained windscreen. This road led nowhere else. It was said to be the worst act of all, the act of despair, the sin without forgiveness; sitting there in the smell of petrol she tried to realise despair, the mortal sin, but she couldn't; it didn't feel like despair. He was going to damn himself, but she was going to show them that they couldn't damn him without damning her too; there was nothing he could do she wouldn't do; she felt capable of sharing any murder. A light lit his face and left it; a frown, a thought, a child's face; she felt responsibility move in her breasts; she wouldn't let him go into that darkness alone.

The Peacehaven streets began, running out towards the cliffs and the downs; thorn bushes grew up round the To Let boards; streets ended in obscurity, in a pool of water and in salty grass. It was like the last effort of despairing pioneers to break new country.

The country had broken them. He said: "We'll go to the hotel and have a drink and then I know the right place."

The rain was coming tentatively down; it beat on the faded scarlet doors of Lureland, the poster of next week's Whist Drive and last week's Dance. They ran for it to the hotel door; in the lounge there was nobody at all white marble statuettes and on the green dado above the panelled walls Tudor roses and lilies picked out in gold. Syphons stood about on blue-topped tables, and on the stained-glass windows mediaeval ships tossed on cold curling waves. Somebody had broken the hands off one of the statuettes or perhaps it was made like that, something classical in white drapery, a symbol of victory or despair. The Boy rang a bell and a boy of his own age came out of the public bar to take his order; they were oddly alike and allusively different narrow shoulders, thin face, they bristled like dogs at the sight of each other.

"Piker," the Boy said.

"What of it?"

"Give us service," the Boy said. He took a step forward and the other backed and Pinkie grinned at him. "Bring us two double brandies," he said, "and quick." He said softly: "Who would have thought I'd find Piker here?" She watched him with amazement that he could find any distraction from their purpose; she could hear the wind on upstairs windows; where the steps curved another tombstone statuette raised its ruined limbs. He said: "We were at the school together. I used to give him hell in the breaks." The other returned with the brandies and brought, sidelong and scared and cautious, a whole smoky childhood with him. She felt a pang of jealousy against him because tonight she should have had all there was of Pinkie.

"You a servant?" the Boy said.

"I'm not a servant, I'm a waiter."

"You want me to tip you?"

"I don't want your tips."

The Boy took his brandy and drank it down--he coughed when it took him by the throat, it was like the stain of the world in his stomach. He said: "Here's courage." He said to Piker: "What's the time?"

"You can read it on the clock," Piker said, "if you can read."

"Haven't you' any music?" the Boy said. "God damn it, we want to celebrate."

"There's the piano. An' the wireless."

"Turn it on."

The wireless was hidden behind a potted plant; a violin came wailing out, the notes shaken by static. The Boy said: "He hates me. He hates my guts," and turned to mock at Piker, but he'd gone. He said to Rose: "You'd better drink that brandy."

"I don't need it," she said.

"Have it your own way."

He stood by the wireless and she by the empty fireplace; three tables and three syphons and a Moorish-Tudor-God-knows-what-of-a-lamp were between them--they were gripped by an awful unreality, the need to make conversation, to say: "What a night" or: "It's cold for the time of year." She said: "So he was at your school?"

"That's right." They both looked at the clock; it was almost nine, and behind the violin the rain tapped against the seaward windows. He said awkwardly: "We'd better be moving soon."

She began to pray to herself: "Holy Mary, Mother of God/ 7 but then she stopped she was in mortal sin; it was no good praying. Her prayers stayed here below with the syphons and the statuettes--they had no wings.

She waited by the fireplace in terrified patience. He said uneasily: "We ought to write something, so people will know."

"It doesn't matter, does it?" she said.

"Oh, yes," he said quickly, "it does. We got to do things right. This is a pact. You read about them in the newspapers."

"Do lots of people do it?"

"It's always happening," he said; an awful and airy confidence momentarily possessed him; the violin faded out and the time signal pinged through the rain.

A voice behind the plant gave them the weather report storms coming up from the Continent, a depression in the Atlantic, tomorrow's forecast. She began to listen and then remembered that tomorrow's weather didn't matter at all.

He said: "Like another drink or something?" He looked round for a Gents' sign "I just got to go an' wash." She noticed the weight in his pocket it was going to be that way. He said: "Just add a piece on that note while I'm gone. Here's a pencil. Say you couldn't live without me, something like that. We got to do this right, as it's always done." He went out into the passage and called to Piker and got his direction, then went up the stairs. At the statuette he turned and looked down into the panelled lounge. This was the kind of moment one kept for memory the wind at the pier end, Sherry's and the man singing, lamplight on the harvest burgundy, the crisis as Cubitt battered at the door. He found that he remembered it all without repulsion; he had a sense that somewhere, like a beggar outside a shuttered house, tenderness stirred, but he was bound in a habit of hate. He turned his back and went on up the stairs. He told himself that soon he would be free again they'd see the note: he hadn't known she was all that unhappy because he'd said they'd got to part; she must have found the gun in Dallow's room and brought it with her. They'd test it for finger prints, of course, and then he stared out through the lavatory window: invisible rollers beat under the cliff. Life would go on. No more human contacts, other people's emotions washing at the brain he would be free again: nothing to think about but himself. Myself: the word echoed hygienically on among the porcelain basins, the taps and plugs and wastes. He took the revolver out of his pocket and loaded it two chambers. In the mirror above the wash basin he could see his hand move round the metal death, adjusting the safety catch. Down below, the news was over and the music had begun again it wailed upwards like a dog over a grave, and the huge darkness pressed a wet mouth against the panes. He put the revolver back and went out into the passage.

That was the next move. Another statuette pointed an obscure moral with cemetery hands and a chaplet of marble flowers, and again he felt the prowling presence of pity.

"They've been gone a long while," Dallow said.

"What are they up to?"

"Who cares?" Jucly said. "They want to be" she fixed her plump prehensile lips against Dallow's cheek "alone" her red hair caught in his mouth a sour taste. "You know what love is," she said.

"He doesn't." He was uneasy conversations came back to him. He said: "He hates her guts." He put his arm half-heartedly round Judy it was no good spoiling a party, but he wished he knew what Pinkie had in mind. He took a long drink out of Judy's glass, and somewhere Worthing way a siren wailed. Through the window he could see a couple mooning at the pier end, and an old man got his fortune card from the witch behind glass.

"Why don't he get clear of her then?" Judy said.

Her mouth looked for his mouth down the line of his jaw. She drew herself indignantly up and said: "Who's that polony over there? What does she want lamping us all the time? This is a free country."

Dallow turned and looked. His brain worked very slowly, first the statement, "I never seen her," and then the memory. "Why," he said, "it's that damned buer who's been getting Pinkie rattled." He got cumbrously to his feet and stumbled a little between the tables. "Who are you?" he said. "Who are you?"

"Ida Arnold," she said, "for what it's worth. My friends call me Ida."

"I'm not your friend."

"You better be," she said gently. "Have a drink.

Where's Pinkie gone and Rose? You ought to 'ave brought them along. This is Phil. Introduce the lady friend." She ran softly on: "It's time we all got together. What's your name?"

"Don't you know what people get who poke their noses?"

"Oh, I know," she said. "I know all right. I was with Fred the day you finished him."

"Talk sense," Dallow said. "Who the hell are you?"

"You ought to know. You followed us all the way up the front in that old Morris of yours." She smiled quite amiably at him. He wasn't her game. "It seems an age ago now, doesn't it?"

It was true all right it seemed an age.

"Have a drink," Ida said, "you may as well. An' where's Pinkie? He didn't seem to like the look of me tonight. What were you celebrating? Not what's happened to Mr. Drewitt? You won't have heard that."

"What do you mean?" Dallow said. The wind got up against the glass and the waitresses yawned.

"You'll see it in the morning papers. I don't want to spoil your fun. And of course you'll know it sooner than that if he talks."

"He's gone abroad."

"He's at the police station now," she said with complete confidence. "They brought him right back," she went elaborately on. "You ought to choose your solicitors better, men who can afford to take a holiday.

They've got him for fraud. Arrested him on the quay."

He watched her uneasily. He didn't believe her but all the same... "You know an awful lot," he said. "Do you sleep at night?"

"Do you?"

The big broken face had a kind of innocence about it. "Me?" he said. "I don't know a thing."

"It was a waste giving him all that money. He'd have run anyway and it didn't look good. When I got hold of Johnnie at the pier "

He stared at her with hopeless amazement. "You got hold of Johnnie? How the hell...?"

She said simply: "People like me." She took a drink and said: "His mother treated him shameful when he was a kid."

"Whose mother?"

"Johnnie's."

Dallow was impatient, puzzled, scared. "What the hell," he said, "do you know about Johnnie's mother?"

"What he told me," she said. She sat there completely at her ease, her big breasts ready for any secrets. She carried her air of compassion and comprehension about her like a rank cheap perfume. She said gently: "I got nothing against you. I like to be friendly. Bring over your lady friend."

He glanced quickly over his shoulder and back again. "I better not," he said. His voice fell. He too began automatically to confide: "Truth is, she's a jealous bitch."

"You don't say? And her old man...?"

"Oh, her old man," he said, "he's all right. What Billy doesn't see, he doesn't mind." He dropped his voice still lower. "And he can't see much he's blind."

"I didn't know that," she said.

"You wouldn't," he said. "Not from his pressing and ironing. He's got a wonderful hand with an iron," then broke suddenly off. "What the hell," he said, "did you mean you didn't know that? What did you know?"

"There isn't much," she said, "I've not picked up here and there. The neighbours always talk." She was barnacled with pieces of popular wisdom.

"Who's talking?" It was Judy now. She'd come across to them. "An' what 'ave they got to talk about?

Why, if I chose to put my tongue round some of their doings... But I wouldn't like to," Judy said. "I wouldn't like to." She looked vaguely round. "What has happened to those two?"

"Perhaps I scared them," Ida Arnold said.

"You scared them?" Dallow said. "That's rich.

Pinkie's not scared that easy."

"What I want to know is," Judy said, "what neighbours said what?"

Somebody was shooting at the range--when the door opened and a couple came in they could hear the shots one, two, three. "That'll be Pinkie," Dallow said. "He was always good with a gun."

"You better go an' see," Ida gently remarked, "that he doesn't do something desperate with his gun when he gets to know."

Dallow said: "You jump to things. We got no cause to be afraid of Mr. Drewitt."

"You gave him money, I suppose, for Something."

"Aw," he said, "Johnnie's been joking."

"Your friend Cubitt seemed to think..."

"Cubitt doesn't know a thing."

"Of course," she admitted, "he wasn't there, was he? That time, I mean. But you..." she said.

"Wouldn't twenty pounds be of use to you? After all you don't want to get into trouble.... Let Pinkie carry his own crimes."

"You make me sick," he said. "You think you know a lot and you don't know a thing." He said to Judy: "I'm goin' to have a drain. You want to keep your mouth shut or this polony..." He stretched a gesture, hopelessly he couldn't express what she mightn't put over on you. He went uneasily out, and the wind caught him, so that he had to grab at his old greasy hat and hold it on. Going down the steps to the Gents' was like going down into a ship's engine room in a storm. The whole place shook a little under his feet as the swell came up against the piles and drove on to break against the beach. He thought: I oughta warn Pinkie about Drewitt if it's true.... He had things on his mind, other things besides old Spicer.

He came up the ladder and looked down the deck Pinkie wasn't to be seen. He went on past the peep machines not in sight. It was someone else shooting at the booth.

He asked the man: "Seen Pinkie?"

"What's the game?" the man said. "You know I seen him. An* he's gone for a ride in the country with his girl for a freshener Hastings way. An* I suppose you want to know the time too. Well," the man said, "I'm swearing nothing. You can pitch on someone else for your phony alibis."

"You're crackers," Dallow said. He moved away; across the noisy sea the hour began to strike in Brighton churches; he counted one, two, three, four, and stopped. He was scared suppose it was true, suppose Pinkie knew, and it was that mad scheme... what the hell was taking anyone for a ride in the country at this hour, except to a roadhouse, and Pinkie didn't go to roadhouses. He said softly: "I won't stand for it," aloud--he was confused, he wished he hadn't drunk all that beer; she was a good kid. He remembered her in the kitchen, going to light the stove. And why not? he thought, staring gloomily out to sea; he was shaken by a sudden sentimental desire which Judy couldn't satisfy; for a paper with your breakfast and warm fires. He began to walk rapidly down the pier towards the turnstiles. There were things he wouldn't stand for.

He knew the Morris wouldn't be on the rank, but all the same he had to go and see for himself. Its absence was like a voice speaking quite plainly in his ear. " Suppose she kills herself... A pact may be murder, but they don't hang you for it." He stood there hopelessly, not knowing what to do. Beer clouded his brain; he passed a harassed hand across his face.

He said to the attendant: "You see that Morris go out?"

"Your friend and his girl took it," the man said, hobbling between a Talbot and an Austin. One leg was gammy; he moved it with a mechanism worked from his pocket, lurching with an air of enormous strain to pocket sixpence, to say: "It's a fine night"; he looked worn with the awful labour of the trivial act.

He said: "They're goin' up to Peacehaven for a drink.

Don't ask me why." Hand in pocket he pulled the hidden wire and made his unsteady and diagonal way towards a Ford. "The rain won't hold off long," his voice came back, and: "Thank you, sir," and then again the labour of movement as a Morris Oxford backed in, the pulling at the wire.

Dallow stood there hopelessly at a loss. There were buses.., but everything would be over long before a bus got in. Better to wash his hands of the whole thing ... after all he didn't know--in half an hour he might see the old car coming back past the Aquarium, Pinkie driving and the girl beside him, but he knew very well in his heart that it would never come, not with both of them, that way. The Boy had left too many signs behind him the message at the shooting range, at the car park; he wanted to be followed in good time, in his own time, to fit in with his story. The man came lurching back. He said: "I thought your friend seemed queer tonight. Sort of lit up." It was as if he were talking in the witness box, giving the evidence he was meant to give.

Dallow turned hopelessly away... fetch Judy, go home, wait... and there was the woman standing a few feet away. She'd followed him and listened. He said: "God's sakes, this is your doing. You made him marry her, you made him..."

"Get a car," she said, "quick."

"I've not got the money for a car."

"I have. You better hurry."

"There's no cause to hurry/* he said weakly.

"They've just gone for a drink."

"You know what they've gone for," she said. "I don't. But if you want to keep out of this, you'd better get that car."

The first rain began to blow up the parade as he weakly argued. "I don't know a thing."

"That's right," she said. "You're just taking me for a drive, that's all." She burst suddenly out at him: "Don't be a fool. You better have me for a friend...."

She said: "You see what's come to Pinkie."

All the same he didn't hurry. What was the good?

Pinkie had laid this trail. Pinkie thought of everything, they were meant to follow in due course, and find... he hadn't got the imagination to see what they'd find.

The Boy stopped at the head of the stairs and looked down. Two men had come into the lounge; hearty and damp in camel hair coats they shook out their moisture like dogs and were noisy over their drinks. "Two pints," they ordered, "in tankards," and fell suddenly silent scenting a girl in the lounge. They were upperclass, they'd learned that tankard trick in class hotels; he watched their gambits with hatred from the stairs.

Anything female was better than nothing, even Rose; but he could sense their half-heartedness. She wasn't worth more than a little sidelong swagger, "I think we touched eighty."

"I made it eighty-two,"

"She's a good bus."

"How much did they sting you?"

"A couple of hundred. She's cheap at the price."

Then they both stopped and took an arrogant look at the girl by the statuette. She wasn't worth bothering about, but if she absolutely fell, without trouble ... one of them said something in a low voice and the other laughed. They took long swills of bitter from the tankards.

Tenderness came up to the very window and looked in. What the hell right had they got to swagger and laugh... if she was good enough for him? He came down the stairs into the hall; they looked up and moued to each other, as much as to say: "Oh, well, she wasn't really worth the trouble."

One of them said: "Drink up. We better get on with the good work. You don't think Zoe'll be out?"

"Oh, no. I said I might drop in."

"Her friend all right?"

"She's hot."

"Let's get on then."

They drained their beer and moved arrogantly to the door, taking a passing look at Rose as they went.

He could hear them laugh outside the door. They were laughing at him. He came a few steps into the lounge--again they were bound in an icy constraint. He had a sudden inclination to throw up the whole thing, to get into the car and drive home, and let her live. It was less a motion of pity than of weariness there was such a hell of a lot to do and think of: there were going to be so many questions to be answered. He could hardly believe in the freedom at the end of it, and even that freedom was to be in a strange place. He said: "The rain's worse." She stood there waiting; she couldn't answer; she was breathing hard as if she'd run a long way and she looked old. She was sixteen but this was how she might have looked after years of marriage, of the childbirth and the daily quarrel--they had reached death and it affected them like age.

She said: "I wrote what you wanted." She waited for him to take the scrap of paper and write his own message to the coroner, to Daily Express readers, to what one called the world. The other boy came cautiously into the lounge and said: "You haven't paid."

While Pinkie found the money, she was visited by an almost overwhelming rebellion she had only to go out, leave him, refuse to play. He couldn't make her kill herself--life wasn't as bad as that. It came like a revelation, as if someone had whispered to her that she was someone, a separate creature not just one flesh with him. She could always escape if he didn't change his mind. Nothing was decided. They could go in the car wherever he wanted them to go; she could take the gun from his hand, and even then at the last moment of all she needn't shoot. Nothing was decided there was always hope.

"That's your tip," the Boy said. "I always tip a waiter." Hate came back. He said: "You a good Catholic, Piker? Do you go to Mass on Sundays like they tell you?"

Piker said with weak defiance: "Why not, Pinkie?"

"You're afraid," the Boy said. "You're afraid of burning."

"Who wouldn't be?"

"I'm not." He looked with loathing into the past a cracked bell ringing, a child weeping under the cane and repeated: "I'm not afraid." He said to Rose: "We'll be going." He came tentatively across and put a nail against her cheek half caress, half threat and said: "You'd love me always, wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

He gave her one more chance: "You'd always have stuck to me," and when she nodded her agreement, he began wearily the long course of action which one day would let him be free again.

Outside in the rain the self-starter wouldn't work; he stood with his coat collar turned up and pulled the handle. She wanted to tell him that he mustn't stand there, getting wet, because she'd changed her mind they were going to live, by hook or by crook but she daren't. She pushed hope back to the last possible moment. When they drove off she said: "Last night ... the night before... you didn't hate me, did you, for what we did?"

He said: u No, I didn't hate you."

"Even though it was a mortal sin?"

It was quite true he hadn't hated her; he hadn't even hated the act. There had been a kind of pleasure, a kind of pride, a kind of something else. The car lurched back onto the main road; he turned the nose to Brighton. An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in, the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St. Pancras waiting room, Dallow's and Judy's secret lust, and the cold unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast whatever it was got in, God knows what it would do. He had a sense of huge havoc the confession, the penance, and the sacrament an awful distraction, and he drove blind into the rain. He could see nothing through the cracked stained windscreen.

A bus came up on them and pulled out just in time he was on the wrong side. He said, suddenly, at random: "We pull in here,"

An ill-made street petered out towards the cliff bungalows of every shape and kind, a vacant plot full of salt grass and wet thorn bushes like bedraggled fowls, no lights except in three windows. A radio played, and in a garage a man was doing something to his motor-bike, which roared and spluttered in the darkness. He drove a few yards in, turned out his headlights, switched off his engine. The rain came noisily in through the rent in the top and they could hear the sea battering the cliff. He said: "Well, take a look. It's the world." Another light went on behind a stained glass door, the Laughing Cavalier between Tudor roses--and looking out as if it was he who'd got to take some sort of farewell of the bike and the bungalows and the rainy street, he thought of the words in the Mass: "He was in the world and the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not."

It was about as far as hope could be stretched; she had to say now or never "I won't do it. I never meant to do it." It was like some romantic adventure you plan to fight in Spain, and then before you know it the tickets are taken for you, the introductions are pressed into your hand, somebody has come to see you off, everything is real. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out the gun. He said: "I got it out of Dallow's room." She wanted to say she didn't know how to use it, to make any excuse, but he seemed to have thought of everything. He explained: "I've put up the safety catch. All you need do is pull on this. It isn't hard. Put it in your ear that'll hold it steady."

His youth came out in the crudity of his instruction; he was like a boy playing on an ash heap. "Go on," he said, "take it."

It was amazing how far hope could extend. She thought: I needn't say anything yet. I can take the gun and then throw it out of the car, run away, do something to stop everything. But all the time she felt the steady pressure of his will. His mind was made up.

She took the gun; it was like a treachery. What will he do, she thought, if I don't... shoot? Would he shoot himself alone, without her? Then he would be damned, and she wouldn't have her chance of being damned too, of showing Them they couldn't pick and choose. To go on living for years... you couldn't tell what life would do to you in making you meek, good, repentant. Belief in her mind had the bright clarity of images, of the crib at Christmas; here goodness ended, past the cow and the sheep, and there evil began Herod seeking the child's birthplace from his turreted keep. She wanted to be with Herod if he were there; you could win to the evil side suddenly, in a moment of despair or passion, but through a long life the guardian good drove you remorselessly towards the crib, the "happy death."

He said: "We don't want to wait any longer. Do you want me to do it first?"

"No," she said, "no."

"All right then. You take a walk or better still I'll take a walk an' you stay here. When it's over, I'll come back an' do it too." Again he gave the sense that he was a boy playing a game, a game in which you could talk in the coldest detail of the scalping knife or the bayonet wound and then go home to tea. He said: "It'll be too dark for me to see much,"

He opened the door of the car. She sat motionless with the gun on her lap. Behind them on the main road a car went slowly past towards Peacehaven. He said awkwardly: "You know what to do?" He seemed to think that some motion of tenderness was expected of him. He put out his mouth and kissed her on the cheek; he was afraid of the mouth thoughts travel too easily from lip to lip. He said: "It won't hurt," and began to walk back a little way towards the main road. Hope was stretched now as far as it would go.

The radio had stopped; the motor-bicycle exploded twice in the garage, feet moved on gravel, and on the main road she could hear a car reversing.

If it was a guardian angel speaking to her now, he spoke like a devil he tempted her to virtue like a sin.

To throw away the gun was a betrayal; it would be an act of cowardice; it would mean that she chose never to see him again for ever. Moral maxims dressed in pedantic priestly tones remembered from old sermons, instructions, confessions "you can plead for him at the throne of Grace" came to her like unconvincing insinuations. The evil act was the honest act, the bold and the faithful it was only lack of courage, it seemed to her, that spoke so virtuously. She put the gun up to her ear and put it down again with a feeling of sicknessit was a poor love that was afraid to die.

She hadn't been afraid to commit mortal sin it was death not damnation which was scaring her. Pinkie said it wouldn't hurt. She felt his will moving her hand she could trust him. She put up the gun once more.

A voice called sharply: "Pinkie," and she heard somebody splashing in the puddles. Footsteps ran... she couldn't tell where. It seemed to her that this must be news, that this must make a difference. She couldn't kill herself when this might mean good news. It was as if somewhere in the darkness the will which had governed her hand relaxed, and all the hideous forms of self-preservation came flooding back. It didn't seem real that she had really intended to sit here and press the trigger. "Pinkie," the voice called again, and the splashing steps came nearer. She pulled the car door open and flung the revolver far away from her towards the damp scrub.

In the light from the stained glass she saw Dallow and the woman and a policeman who looked confused as if he didn't quite know what was happening.

Somebody came softly round the car behind her and said: "Where's that gun? Why don't you shoot? Give it me."

She said: "I threw it away."

The others approached cautiously like a deputation.

Pinkie called out suddenly in a breaking childish voice: "You bloody squealer, Dallow."

"Pinkie," Dallow said, "it's no use. They got Drewitt." The policeman looked ill at ease like a stranger at a party.

"Where's that gun?" Pinkie said again. He screamed with hate and fear: "My God, have I got to have a massacre?"

She said: "I threw it away."

She could see his face indistinctly as it leant in over the little dashboard light. It was like a child's, badgered, confused, betrayed--fake years slipped away he was whisked back towards the unhappy playground.

He said: "You little..." he didn't finish the deputation approached, he left her, diving into his pocket for something. "Come on, Dallow," he said, "you bloody squealer," and put his hand up. Then she couldn't tell what happened: glass somewhere broke, he screamed and she saw his face steam. He screamed and screamed, with his hands up to his eyes--he turned and ran--she saw a police baton at his feet and broken glass. He looked half his size, doubled up in appalling agony j it was as if the flames had literally got him and he shrank shrank into a schoolboy flying in panic and pain, scrambling over a fence, running on.

"Stop him," Dallow cried; it wasn't any good; he was at the edge, he was over; they couldn't even hear a splash. It was as if he'd been withdrawn suddenly by a hand out of any existence past or present, whipped away into zero nothing.

"It shows," Ida Arnold said, "you only have to hold on." She emptied her glass of stout and laid it down on Henneky's upturned barrel.

"And Drewitt?" Clarence said.

"How slow you are, you old ghost! I just made that up. I couldn't chase over France for him, and the police you know what police are they always want evidence.*'

"They had Cubitt?"

"Cubitt wouldn't talk when he was sober. And you'd never get him drunk enough to talk to them.

Why, this is slander what I've been telling you. Or it would be slander if he were alive."

"I wonder you don't feel bad about that, Ida."

"Somebody else would have been dead if we hadn't turned up."

"It was her own choice."

But Ida Arnold had an answer to everything. "She didn't understand. She was only a kid. She thought he was in love with her."

"An' what does she think now?"

"Don't ask me. I've done my best. I took her home.

What a girl needs at a time like that is her mother and dad. Anyway she's got me to thank she isn't dead."

"How did you get the policeman to go with you?"

"We told him they'd stolen the car. The poor man didn't know what it was all about, but he acted quick when Pinkie pulled out the vitriol."

"And Phil Corkery?"

"He's talking of Hastings," she said, "next year, but I have a sort of feeling there won't be any postcards for me after this."

"You're a terrible woman, Ida," Clarence said. He sighed deeply and stared into his glass. "Have another?"

"No, thank you, Clarence. I got to be getting home."

"You're a terrible woman," Clarence repeated; he was a little drunk, "but I got to give you credit. You act for the best."

"He's not on my conscience anyway."

"As you say, it was him or her."

"There wasn't any choice," Ida Arnold said. She got up ^ she was like a figurehead of Victory. She nodded to Harry at the bar.

"You've been away, Ida?"

"Just a week or two."

"It doesn't seem so long," Harry said.

"Well, good night, all."

"Good night. Good night."

She took the tube to Russell Square and walked, carrying her suitcase--let herself in and looked in the hall for letters. There was only one from Tom. She knew what that would be about, and her great warm heart softened as she thought: "After all, when all's said, Tom an' I know what Love is." She opened the door onto the basement stairs and called: "Crowe. Old Crowe."

"You, Ida?"

"Come up for a chat an' we'll have a turn with the Board."

The curtains were drawn as she had left them nobody had touched the china on the mantelpiece, but Warwick Deeping wasn't in the bookshelf and The Good Companions was on its side. The char had been in she could see that borrowing. She got out a box of chocolate biscuits for Old Crowe; the lid had not been left properly on and they were a little soft and stale. Then carefully she lifted out the Board, cleared the table, and laid it in the centre. SUICILLEYE, she thought. I know what that means now. The Board had foreseen it all Sui, its own word for the scream, the agony, the leap. She brooded gently with her fingers on the Board. When you came to think of it, the Board had saved Rose, and a multitude of popular sayings began to pass together into her mind. It was like when the switch shifts and the signal goes down and the red lamp changes to green and the great engine takes the accustomed rails. It's a strange world, there's more things in heaven and earth...

Old Crowe came peering in. " What's it to be, Ida?"

"I want to ask advice," Ida said. "I want to ask whether maybe I ought to go back to Tom."

Rose could just see the old head bent towards the grille. The priest had a whistle in his breath. He listened patiently whistling, while she painfully brought out her whole agony. She could hear the exasperated women creak their chairs outside waiting for confession. She said: "It's that I repent. Not going with him." She was defiant and tearless in the stuffy box; the old priest had a cold and smelt of eucalyptus.

He said gently and nasally: "Go on, my child."

She said: "I wish I'd killed myself. I oughta 'ave killed myself." The old man began to say something, but she interrupted him. "I'm not asking for absolution. I don't want absolution. I want to be like him damned."

The old man whistled as he drew in his breath; she felt certain he understood nothing. She repeated monotonously: "I wish I'd killed myself." She pressed her hands against her breasts in the passion of misery; she hadn't come to confess, she had come to think, she couldn't think at home when the stove hadn't been lit and her father had got. a mood and her mother she could tell it in her sidelong questions was wondering how much money Pinkie... She would have had the courage now to kill herself if she hadn't been afraid that somewhere in that obscure countryside of death they might miss each other mercy operating somehow for one and not for the other. She said with breaking voice: "That woman. She ought to be damned.

Saying he wanted to get rid of me. She doesn't know about love."

"Perhaps she was right," the old priest murmured.

"And you don't either!" she said furiously, pressing her childish face against the grille.

The old man suddenly began to talk whistling every now and then and blowing eucalyptus through the grille. He said: "There was a man, a Frenchman, you wouldn't know about him, my child, who had the same idea as you. He was a good man, a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life, because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul could suffer damnation."

She listened with astonishment. He said: "This man decided that if any soul was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He never took the sacraments, he never married his wife in church. I don't know, my child, but some people think he was well, a saint.

I think he died in what we are told is mortal sin I'm not sure; it was in the war--perhaps..."He sighed and whistled, bending his old head. He said: "You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the... appalling... strangeness of the mercy of God."

Outside the chairs creaked again and again people impatient to get their own repentance, absolution, penance finished for the week. . He said: "It was a case of greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his soul for his friend."

He shivered and sneezed. "We must hope and pray," he said, "hope and pray. The Church does not demand that we believe any soul is cut off from mercy."

She said with sad conviction: "He's damned. He knew what he was about. He was a Catholic too."

He said gently: "Corruptio optimi est pessima."

"Yes, Father?"

"I mean a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone. I think perhaps because we believe in him we are more in touch with the devil than other people. But we must hope," he said mechanically, "hope and pray."

"I want to hope," she said, "but I don't know how."

"If he loved you, surely," the old man said, "that shows... there was some good..."

"Even love like that?"

"Yes."

She brooded on the idea in the little dark box. He said: "And come back soon I can't give you absolution now but come back tomorrow."

She said weakly: "Yes, Father.... And if there's ababy...?"

He said: "With your simplicity and his force...

Make him a saint to pray for his father .1 '

A sudden feeling of immense gratitude broke through the pain it was as if she had been given the sight a long way off of life going on again. He said: "Pray for me, my child."

She said: "Yes, oh, yes."

Outside she looked up at the name on the confessional box it wasn't any name she remembered.

Priests come and go.

She went out into the street the pain was still there } you couldn't shake it off with a word; but the worst horror, she thought, was over the horror, of the complete circle--to be back at home, back at Snow's they'd take her back just as if the Boy had never existed at all. He had existed and would always exist.

She had a sudden conviction that she carried life and she thought proudly: Let them get over that if they can; let them get over that. She turned out onto the front opposite the Palace Pier and began to walk firmly away from the direction of her home towards Billy's. There was something to be salvaged from that house and room, something else they wouldn't be able to get over his voice speaking a message to her: if there was a child, speaking to the child. "If he loved you," the priest had said, "that shows..." She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all.

The End