‘That Morris.’
‘No good to us,’ Sylvie said. She darted down the line of cars. ‘This Ford.’ She pulled the door open, said, ‘Oh, pardon me,’ and shut it, scrambled into the back of the next car in the line and waited for him. ‘Oh,’ her voice softly and passionately pronounced from the dim interior, ‘I love a Lancia.’ He stood in the doorway and the darkness peeled away between him and the fair and vacuous face. Her skirt drawn up above her knees she waited for him with luxurious docility.
He was conscious for a moment of his enormous ambitions under the shadow of the hideous and commonplace act: the suite at the Cosmopolitan, the gold cigar-lighter, chairs stamped with crowns for a foreigner called Eugeen. Hale dropped out of sight, like a stone thrown over a cliff; he was at the beginning of a long polished parquet walk, there were busts of great men and the sound of cheering, Mr Colleoni bowed like a shopwalker, stepping backwards, an army of razors was at his back: a conqueror. Hooves drummed along the straight and a loud-speaker announced the winner: music was playing. His breast ached with the effort to enclose the whole world.
‘You’ve got the doings, haven’t you?’ Sylvie asked.
With fear and horror he thought: next move, what is it?
‘Quick,’ Sylvie said, ‘before they find us here.’
The parquet floor rolled up like a carpet. The moonlight touched a Woolworth ring and a plump knee. He said in a painful and bitter rage, ‘Wait there. I’ll get Cubitt for you,’ and turned his back on the Lancia and walked back towards the bar. Laughter from the bathing-pool deflected him. He stood in the doorway with the taste of the alcohol on his tongue watching a thin girl in a red rubber cap giggle under the flood lighting. His mind tracked inevitably back and forth to Sylvie like a model engine electrically driven. Fear and curiosity ate at the proud future, he was aware of nausea and retched. Marry, he thought, hell, no; I’d rather hang.
A man in a bathing-slip came running down the highboard, jumped and somersaulted in the pearly brilliant light, struck the dark water; the two bathers swam together, stroke by stroke, towards the shallows, turned and came back, side by side, smooth and unhurried, playing a private game, happy and at ease.
The Boy stood and watched them, and as they came down the pool a second time he saw in the floodlit water his own image shiver at their stroke, the narrow shoulders and the hollow breast, and he felt the brown pointed shoes slip on the splashed and shining tiles.
2
Cubitt and Dallow chattered all the way back, a little lit; the Boy stared ahead into the bright core of the darkness. He said suddenly with fury, ‘You can laugh.’
‘Well, you didn’t do so bad,’ Cubitt said.
‘You can laugh. You think you’re safe. But I’m tired of the lot of you. I’ve a good mind to clear out.’
‘Take a long honeymoon,’ Cubitt said and grinned, and an owl cried with painful hunger swooping low over a filling station, into the headlights and out again, on furry and predatory wings.
‘I’m not going to marry,’ the Boy said.
‘I knew a geezer once,’ Cubitt said, ‘was so scared he killed himself. They had to send back the wedding presents.’
‘I’m not going to marry.’
‘People often feel that way.’
‘Nothing’s going to make me marry.’
‘You’ve got to marry,’ Dallow said. A woman stared from a window of Charlie’s Pull-in Café waiting for someone: she didn’t look at the car going by, waiting.
‘Have a drink,’ Cubitt said; he was more drunk than Dallow. ‘I brought a flask away. You can’t say you don’t drink now: we saw you, Dallow and me.’
The Boy said to Dallow, ‘I won’t marry. Why should I marry?’
‘It was your doing,’ Dallow said.
‘What was his doing?’ Cubitt said. Dallow didn’t reply, laying his friendly and oppressive hand on the Boy’s knee. The Boy took a squint at the stupid devoted face and felt anger at the way another’s loyalty could hamper and drive. Dallow was the only man he trusted, and he hated him as if he were his mentor. He said weakly, ‘Nothing will make me marry,’ watching the long parade of posters going by in the submarine light: Guinness is Good for You, Try a Worthington, Keep that Schoolgirl Complexion: a long series of adjurations, people telling you things: Own Your Own Home, Bennett’s for Wedding Rings.
And at Frank’s they told him, ‘Your girl’s here.’ He went up the stairs to his room in hopeless rebellion; he would go in and say—I’ve changed my mind. I can’t marry you. Or perhaps—the lawyers say it can’t be managed after all. The banisters were still broken and he looked down the long drop to where Spicer’s body had lain. Cubitt and Dallow were standing on the exact spot laughing at something: the sharp edge of a broken banister scratched his hand. He put it to his mouth and went in. He thought: I’ve got to be calm, I’ve got to keep my wits about me, but he felt his integrity stained by the taste of the spirit at the bar. You could lose vice as easily as you lost virtue, going out of you from a touch.
He took a look at her. She was scared when he said softly, ‘What are you doing here?’ She had on the hat he disliked and she made a snatch at it as soon as he looked. ‘At this time of night,’ he said in a shocked way, thinking there was a quarrel to be picked there if he went about it in the right way.
‘You’ve seen this?’ Rose implored him. She had the local paper; he hadn’t bothered to read it, but there on the front page was the picture of Spicer striding in terror under the iron arches. Rose said, ‘It says here—it happened—’
‘On the landing,’ the boy said. ‘I was always telling Frank to mend those banisters.’
‘But you said they got him on the course. And he was the one who—’
He faced her with spurious firmness: ‘Gave you the ticket? So you said. Maybe he knew Hale. He knew a lot of geezers I didn’t. What of it?’ He repeated his question before her dumb stare with confidence: ‘What of it?’ His mind, he knew, could contemplate any treachery, but she was a good kid, she was bounded by her goodness; there were things she couldn’t imagine, and he thought he saw her imagination wilting now in the vast desert of dread.
‘I thought,’ she said, ‘I thought. . . ’ looking beyond him to the shattered banister on the landing.
‘What did you think?’
His fingers curled with passionate hatred round the small bottle in his pocket.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t sleep last night. I had such dreams.’
‘What dreams?’
She looked at him with horror, ‘I dreamed you were dead.’
He laughed, ‘I’m young and spry,’ thinking with nausea of the car-park and the invitation in the Lancia.
‘You aren’t going to stay here, are you?’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d have thought—’ she said, her eyes back again in their gaze at the banisters. She said, ‘I’m scared.’
‘You’ve no cause to be,’ he said, tickling the vitriol bottle.
‘I’m scared for you. Oh,’ she said, ‘I know I’m no account. I know you’ve got a lawyer and a car and friends, but this place—’ she stumbled hopelessly in an attempt to convey the sense she had of the territory in which he moved: a place of accidents and unexplained events, the stranger with a card, the fight on the course, the headlong fall. A kind of boldness and brazenness came into her face, so that he felt again the faintest stirring of sensuality: ‘You’ve got to come away from here. You’ve got to marry me like you said.’
‘It can’t be done after all. I’ve seen my lawyer. We’re too young.’
‘I don’t mind about that. It’s not a real marriage, anyway. A registrar doesn’t make any difference.’
‘You go back where you came from,’ he said harshly. ‘You little tart.’
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sacked.’
‘What for?’ It was as if the handcuffs were meeting. He suspected her.
‘I was rude to a customer.’
&n
bsp; ‘Why? What customer?’
‘Can’t you guess?’ she said and went passionately on. ‘Who is she, anyway? Interfering. . . pestering. . . you must know.’
‘I don’t know her from Adam,’ the Boy said.
She put all her fake experience—drawn from the twopenny library—into the question: ‘Is she jealous? Is she someone. . . you know what I mean?’ and ready there, masked behind the ingenuous question like the guns in a Q ship, was possessiveness. She was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you, too—by your finger-prints.
He laughed uneasily. ‘What, she? She’s old enough to be my mother.’
‘Then what does she want?’
‘I wish I knew.’
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘I ought to take this—’ she held out the paper to him—‘to the police?’
The ingenuousness—or the shrewdness—of the question shocked him. Could one ever be safe with someone who realized so little how she had got mixed up in things? He said, ‘You got to mind your step,’ and thought with dull and tired distaste (it had been the hell of a day): I shall have to marry her after all. He managed a smile: those muscles were beginning to work. He said, ‘Listen. You don’t need to think about those things. I’m going to marry you. There are ways of getting round the law.’
‘Why bother about the law?’
‘I don’t want any loose talk. Only marriage’ he said with feigned anger, ‘will do for me. We got to be married properly.’
‘We won’t be that whatever we do. The father up at St John’s—he says—’
‘You don’t want to listen too much to priests,’ he said. ‘They don’t know the world like I do. Ideas change, the world moves on. . . ’ His words stumbled before her carved devotion. That face said as clearly as words that ideas never changed, the world never moved: it lay there always, the ravaged and disputed territory between the two eternities. They faced each other as it were from opposing territories, but like troops at Christmas time they fraternized. He said, ‘It’s the same to you, anyway—and I want to be married—legally.’
‘If you want to. . . ’ she said and made a small gesture of complete assent.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘we could work it this way. If your father wrote a letter. . . ’
‘He can’t write.’
‘Well, he could make his mark, couldn’t he, if I got a letter written. . . I don’t know how these things work. Maybe he could come to the magistrate’s. Mr Prewitt could see about that.’
‘Mr Prewitt?’ she asked quickly. ‘Wasn’t he the one—the one at the inquest who was here. . . ’
‘What of it?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I just thought. . . ’ but he could see the thoughts going on and on, out of the room to the banisters and the drop, out of that day altogether. . . Somebody’s turned on the radio down below: some jest of Cubitt’s perhaps to represent the right romantic atmosphere. It wailed up the stairs past the telephone and into the room: somebody’s band from somebody’s hotel, the end of a day’s programme. It switched her thoughts away and he wondered for how long it would be necessary for him to sidetrack her mind with the romantic gesture or the loving act: how many weeks and months—his mind wouldn’t admit the possibility of years. Some day he would be free again. He put out his hands towards her as if she were the detective with the cuffs and said, ‘Tomorrow we’ll see about things: see your father: why,’ the muscles of his mouth faltered at the thought, ‘it only takes a couple of days to get married in.’
3
He was scared, walking alone back towards the territory he had left—oh, years ago. The pale sea curdled on the shingle and the green tower of the Metropole looked like a dug-up coin verdigrised with age-old mould. The gulls swooped up to the top promenade, screaming and twisting in the sunlight, and a well-known popular author displayed his plump too famous face in the window of the Royal Albion, staring out to sea. It was so clear a day you looked for France.
The Boy crossed over towards Old Steyne walking slowly. The streets narrowed uphill above the Steyne: the shabby secret behind the bright corsage, the deformed breast. Every step was a retreat. He thought he had escaped for ever by the whole length of the parade, and now extreme poverty took him back: a shop where a shingle could be had for two shillings in the same building as a coffin-maker’s who worked in oak, elm or lead: no window-dressing but one child’s coffin dusty with disuse and the list of hairdressing prices. The Salvation Amy Citadel marked with its battlements the very border of his home. He began to fear recognition and feel an obscure shame as if it were his native streets which had the right to forgive and not he to reproach them with the dreary and dingy past. Past the Albert Hostel (‘Good Accommodation for Travellers’) and there he was, on the top of the hill, in the thick of the bombardment—a flapping gutter, cracked windows, an iron bedstead in a front garden the size of a tabletop. Half Paradise Piece had been torn up as if by bomb bursts; the children played about the steep slope of rubble; a piece of fireplace showed houses had once been there, and a municipal notice announced new flats on a post stuck in the torn gravel and asphalt facing the little dingy damaged row, all that was left of Paradise Piece. His home was gone: a flat place among the rubble may have marked its hearth; the room at the bend of the stairs where the Saturday night exercise had taken place was now just air. He wondered with horror whether it all had to be built again for him; it looked better as air.
He had sent Rose back the night before and now draggingly he rejoined her. It was no good rebelling any more; he had to marry her: he had to be safe. The children were scouting among the rubble with pistols from Woolworth’s; a group of girls surlily watched. A child with its leg in an iron brace limped blindly into him; he pushed it off; someone said in a high treble, ‘Stick ’em up.’ They took his mind back and he hated them for it; it was like the dreadful appeal of innocence, but there was not innocence; you had to go back a long way further before you got innocence; innocence was a slobbering mouth, a toothless gum pulling at the teats; perhaps not even that; innocence was the ugly cry of birth.
He found the house in Nelson Place, but before he had time to knock the door opened. Rose had spied him through the broken glass. She said, ‘Oh, how glad I am. . . I thought perhaps. . . ’ In the awful little passage which stank like a lavatory she ran quickly and passionately on, ‘It was awful last night. . . you see I’ve been sending them money. . . they don’t understand everyone loses a job some time or another.’
‘I’ll settle them,’ the Boy said. ‘Where are they?’
‘You got to be careful,’ Rose said. ‘They get moods.’
‘Where are they?’
But there wasn’t really much choice of direction: there was only one door and a staircase matted with old newspapers. On the bottom steps between the mud marks stared up the tawny child face of Violet Crow violated and buried under the West Pier in 1936. He opened the door and there beside the black kitchen stove with cold dead charcoal on the floor sat the parents. They had a mood on: they watched him with silent and haughty indifference: a small thin elderly man, his face marked deeply with the hieroglyphics of pain and patience and suspicion: the woman middle-aged, stupid, vindictive. The dishes hadn’t been washed and the stove hadn’t been lit.
‘They got a mood,’ Rose said aloud to him. ‘They wouldn’t let me do a thing. Not even light the fire. I like a clean house, honest I do. Ours wouldn’t be like this.’
‘Look here, Mr—’ the Boy said.
‘Wilson,’ Rose said.
‘Wilson. I want to marry Rose. It seems as she’s so young I got to get your permission.’
They wouldn’t answer him. They treasured their mood as if it was a bright piece of china only they possessed: something they could show to neighbours as ‘mine’.
‘It’s no use,’ Rose said, ‘when they got a mood.’
A cat watched them from a wooden box.
‘Yes or no,’ the Boy said.
‘It’s no good
,’ Rose said, ‘not when they’ve got a mood.’
‘Answer a plain question,’ the Boy said. ‘Do I marry Rose or don’t I?’
‘Come back tomorrow,’ Rose said. ‘They won’t have a mood then.’
‘I’m not going to wait on them,’ he said. ‘They oughter be proud—’
The man suddenly got up and kicked the dead coke furiously across the floor. ‘You get out of here,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any truck with you,’ he went on, ‘never, never, never,’ and for a moment in the sunk lost eyes there was a kind of fidelity which reminded the Boy dreadfully of Rose.
‘Quiet, father,’ the woman said, ‘don’t talk to them,’ treasuring her mood.
‘I’ve come to do business,’ the Boy said, ‘If you don’t want ‘to do business—’ He looked round the battered and hopeless room. ‘I thought maybe ten pounds would be of use to you,’ and he saw swimming up through the blind vindictive silence incredulity, avarice, suspicion. ‘We don’t want—’ the man began again and then gave out like a gramophone. He began to think: you could see the thoughts bob up one after another.
‘We don’t want your money,’ the woman said. They each had their own kind of fidelity.
Rose said, ‘Never mind what they say. I won’t stay here.’
‘Stop a moment. Stop a moment,’ the man said. ‘You be quiet, mother.’ He said to the Boy, ‘We couldn’t let Rose go not for ten nicker—not to a stranger. How do we know you’d treat her right?’
‘I’ll give you twelve,’ the Boy said.
‘It’s not a question of money,’ the man said. ‘I like the look of you. We wouldn’t want to stand in the way of Rose bettering herself—but you’re too young.’
‘Fifteen’s my limit,’ the Boy said, ‘take it or leave it.’
‘You can’t do anything without we say yes,’ the man said.
The Boy moved a little away from Rose, ‘I’m not all that keen.’
‘Make it guineas.’
‘You’ve had my offer.’ He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn’t done right to get away from this, to commit any crime. . . When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire. . . He turned to Rose, ‘I’m off,’ and felt the faintest twinge of pity for goodness which couldn’t murder to escape. They said that saints had got—what was the phrase?—‘heroic virtues’, heroic patience, heroic endurance, but there was nothing he could see that was heroic in the bony face, protuberant eyes, pallid anxiety, while they bluffed each other and her life was confused in the financial game. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ and made for the door. At the door he looked back: they were like a family party. Impatiently and contemptuously he gave in to them, ‘All right. Guineas. I’ll be sending my lawyer,’ and as he passed into the evil passage Rose was behind him panting her gratitude.