Hale crossed the road away from the front. There were fewer people there: he could walk faster and go further. They were drinking cocktails on the terrace of the Grand, a delicate pastiche of a Victorian sunshade twisted its ribbons and flowers in the sun, and a man like a retired statesman, all silver hair and powdered skin and double old-fashioned eyeglass, let life slip naturally, with dignity, away from him, sitting over a sherry. Down the broad steps of the Cosmopolitan came a couple of women with bright brass hair and ermine coats and heads close together like parrots, exchanging metallic confidences. ‘“My dear,” I said quite coldly, “if you haven’t learnt the Del Rey perm, all I can say—”’ and they flashed their pointed painted nails at each other and cackled. For the first time for five years Kolley Kibber was late in his programme. At the foot of the Cosmopolitan steps, in the shadow the huge bizarre building cast, he remembered that the mob had bought his paper. They hadn’t needed to watch the public house for him: they knew where to expect him.
A mounted policeman came up the road, the lovely cared-for chestnut beast stepping delicately on the hot macadam, like an expensive toy a millionaire buys for his children; you admired the finish, the leather as deeply glowing as an old mahogany table top, the bright silver badge; it never occurred to you that the toy was for use. It never occurred to Hale watching the policeman pass; he couldn’t appeal to him. A man stood by the kerb selling objects on a tray; he had lost the whole of one side of the body: leg and arm and shoulder, and the beautiful horse as it paced by turned its head aside delicately like a dowager. ‘Shoelaces,’ the man said hopelessly to Hale, ‘matches.’ Hale didn’t hear him. ‘Razor blades.’ Hale went by, the words lodged securely in his brain: the thought of the thin wound and the sharp pain. That was how Kite was killed.
Twenty yards down the road he saw Cubitt. Cubitt was a big man, with red hair cut en brosse and freckles. He saw Hale, but he made no sign of recognition, leaning carelessly against a pillar-box watching him. A postman came to collect and Cubitt shifted. Hale could see him exchanging a joke with the postman and the postman laughed and filled his bag and all the time Cubitt looked away from him down the street waiting for Hale. Hale knew exactly what he’d do; he knew the whole bunch; Cubitt was slow and had a friendly way with him. He’d simply link his arm with Hale’s and draw him on where he wanted him to go.
But the old desperate pride persisted, a pride of intellect. He was scared sick, but he told himself, ‘I’m not going to die.’ He jested hollowly, ‘I’m not front page stuff.’ This was real: the two women getting into a taxi, the band playing on the Palace Pier, ‘tablets’ fading in white smoke on the pale pure sky; not red-haired Cubitt waiting by the pillar-box. Hale turned again and crossed the road, made back towards the West Pier walking fast; he wasn’t running away, he had a plan.
He had only, he told himself, to find a girl: there must be hundreds waiting to be picked up on a Whitsun holiday, to be given a drink and taken to dance at Sherry’s and presently home, drunk and affectionate, in the corridor carriage. That was the best way: to carry a witness round with him. It would be no good, even if his pride allowed him, to go to the station now. They would be watching it for certain, and it was always easy to kill a lonely man at a railway station: they had only to gather close round a carriage door or fix you in the crush at the barrier; it was at a station that Colleoni’s mob had killed Kite. All down the front the girls sat in the twopenny deck-chairs, waiting to be picked, all who had not brought their boys with them; clerks, shop-girls, hairdressers—you could pick out the hairdressers by their new and daring perms, by their beautifully manicured nails: they had all waited late at their shops the night before, preparing each other till midnight. Now they were sleepy and sleek in the sun.
In front of the chairs the men strolled in twos and threes, wearing their summer suits for the first time, knife-edged silver-grey trousers and elegant shirts; they didn’t look as if they cared a damn whether they got a girl or not, and among them Hale went in his seedy suit and his string tie and his striped shirt and his inkstains, ten years older, and desperate for a girl. He offered them cigarettes and they stared at him like duchesses with large cold eyes and said, ‘I don’t smoke, thank you,’ and twenty yards behind him, he knew, without turning his head, that Cubitt strolled.
It made Hale’s manner strange. He couldn’t help showing his desperation. He could hear the girls laughing at him after he’d gone, at his clothes and the way he talked. There was a deep humility in Hale; his pride was only in his profession: he disliked himself before the glass—the bony legs and the pigeon breast, and he dressed shabbily and carelessly as a sign—a sign that he didn’t expect any woman to be interested. Now he gave up the pretty ones, the smart ones, and looked despairingly down the chairs for someone plain enough to be glad of even his attentions.
Surely he thought, this girl, and he smiled with hungry hope at a fat spotty creature in pink whose feet hardly touched the ground. He sat down in an empty chair beside her and gazed at the remote and neglected sea coiling round the piles of the West Pier.
‘Cigarette?’ he asked presently.
‘I don’t mind if I do,’ the girl said. The words were sweet like a reprieve.
‘It’s nice here,’ the fat girl said.
‘Down from town?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ Hale said, ‘you aren’t going to sit here alone all day, are you?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the girl said.
‘I thought of going to have something to eat, and then we might—’
‘We,’ the girl said, ‘you’re a fresh one.’
‘Well, you aren’t going to sit here alone all day, are you?’
‘Who said I was?’ the fat girl said. ‘Doesn’t mean I’m going with you.’
‘Come and have a drink anyway and talk about it.’
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, opening a compact and covering her spots deeper.
‘Come along then,’ Hale said.
‘Got a friend?’
‘I’m all alone.’
‘Oh then, I couldn’t,’ the girl said. ‘Not possibly. I couldn’t leave my friend all alone,’ and for the first time Hale observed in the chair beyond her a pale bloodless creature waiting avidly for his reply.
‘But you’d like to come,’ Hale implored.
‘Oh, yes, but I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Your friend won’t mind. She’ll find someone.’
‘Oh, no. I couldn’t leave her alone.’ She stared pastily and impassively at the sea.
‘You wouldn’t mind, would you?’ Hale leaned forward and begged the bloodless image, and it screeched with embarrassed laughter back at him.
‘She doesn’t know anyone,’ the fat girl said.
‘She’ll find somebody.’
‘Would you, Delia?’ The pasty girl leant her head close to her friend’s and they consulted together: every now and then Delia squealed.
‘That’s all right then,’ Hale said, ‘you’ll come?’
‘Couldn’t you find a friend?’
‘I don’t know anyone here,’ Hale said. ‘Come along. I’ll take you anywhere for lunch. All I want—’ he grinned miserably—‘is for you to stick close.’
‘No,’ the fat girl said. ‘I couldn’t possibly—not without my friend.’
‘Well, both of you come along then,’ Hale said.
‘It wouldn’t be much fun for Delia,’ the fat girl said.
A boy’s voice interrupted them. ‘So there you are, Fred,’ and Hale looked up at the grey inhuman seventeen-year-old eyes.
‘Why,’ the fat girl squealed, ‘he said he hadn’t got a friend.’
‘You can’t believe what Fred says,’ the voice said.
‘Now we can make a proper party,’ the fat girl said. ‘This is my friend Delia. I’m Molly.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ the boy said. ‘Where are we going, Fred?’
‘I’m hungry,’ the fat girl said. ‘I
bet you’re hungry too, Delia?’ and Delia wriggled and squealed.
‘I know a good place,’ the boy said.
‘Do they have sundaes?’
‘The best sundaes,’ he reassured her in his serious dead voice.
‘That’s what I want, a sundae. Delia likes splits best.’
‘We’ll be going, Fred,’ the boy said.
Hale rose. His hands were shaking. This was real now: the boy, the razor cut, life going out with the blood in pain: not the deck chairs and the permanent waves, the miniature cars tearing round the curve on the Palace Pier. The ground moved under his feet, and only the thought of where they might take him while he was unconscious saved him from fainting. But even then common pride, the instinct not to make a scene, remained overpoweringly strong; embarrassment had more force than terror, it prevented him crying his fear aloud, it even urged him to go quietly. If the boy had not spoken again he might have gone.
‘We’d better get moving, Fred,’ the boy said.
‘No,’ Hale said. ‘I’m not coming. I don’t know him. My name’s not Fred. I’ve never seen him before. He’s just getting fresh,’ and he walked rapidly away, with his head down, hopeless now—there wasn’t time—only anxious to keep moving, to keep out in the clear sun; until from far down the front he heard a woman’s winey voice singing, singing of brides and bouquets, of lilies and mourning shrouds, a Victorian ballad, and he moved towards it like someone who has been lost a long while in a desert makes for the glow of a fire.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘if it isn’t lonely heart,’ and to his astonishment she was all by herself in a wilderness of chairs. ‘They’ve gone to the gents,’ she said.
‘Can I sit down?’ Hale asked. His voice broke with relief.
‘If you’ve got twopence,’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’ She began to laugh, the great breasts pushing at her dress. ‘Someone pinched my bag,’ she said. ‘Every penny I’ve got.’ He watched her with astonishment. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s not the funny part. It’s the letters. He’ll have had all Tom’s letters to read. Were they passionate? Tom’ll be crazy when he hears.’
‘You’ll be wanting some money,’ Hale said.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m not worrying. Some nice feller will lend me ten bob—when they come out of the gents.’
‘They your friends?’ Hale asked.
‘I met ’em in the pub,’ she said.
‘You think,’ Hale said, ‘they’ll come back from the gents?’
‘My,’ she said, ‘you don’t think—’ She gazed up the parade, then looked at Hale and began to laugh again. ‘You win,’ she said. ‘They’ve pulled my leg properly. But there was only ten bob—and Tom’s letters.’
‘Will you have lunch with me now?’ Hale said.
‘I had a snack in the pub,’ she said. ‘They treated me to that, so I got something out of my ten bob.’
‘Have a little more.’
‘No, I don’t fancy any more,’ she said, and leaning far back in the deck-chair with her skirt pulled up to her knees exposing her fine legs, with an air of ribald luxury, she added, ‘What a day,’ sparkling back at the bright sea. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘they’ll wish they’d never been born. I’m a sticker where right’s concerned.’
‘Your name’s Lily?’ Hale asked. He couldn’t see the boy any more: he’d gone: Cubitt had gone. There was nobody he could recognize as far as he could see.
‘That’s what they called me,’ she said. ‘My real name’s Ida.’ The old and vulgarized Grecian name recovered a little dignity. She said, ‘You look poorly. You ought to go off and eat somewhere.’
‘Not if you won’t come,’ Hale said. ‘I only want to stay here with you.’
‘Why, that’s a nice speech,’ she said. ‘I wish Tom could hear you—he writes passionate, but when it comes to talking—’
‘Does he want to marry you?’ Hale asked. She smelt of soap and wine: comfort and peace and a slow sleepy physical enjoyment, a touch of the nursery and the mother, stole from the big tipsy mouth, the magnificent breasts and legs, and reached Hale’s withered and frightened and bitter little brain.
‘He was married to me once,’ Ida said. ‘But he didn’t know when he was lucky. Now he wants to come back. You should see his letters. I’d show them to you if they hadn’t been stolen. He ought to be ashamed,’ she said, laughing with pleasure, ‘writing such things. You’d never think. And he was such a quiet fellow too. Well, I always say it’s fun to be alive.’
‘Will you take him back?’ Hale asked, peering out from the valley of the shadow with sourness and envy.
‘I should think not,’ Ida said. ‘I know all about him. There’d be no thrill. If I wanted a man I could do better than that now.’ She wasn’t boastful: only a little drunk and happy. ‘I could marry money if I chose.’
‘And how do you live now?’ Hale said.
‘From hand to mouth,’ she said and winked at him and made the motion of tipping a glass. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Fred.’ He said it automatically: it was the name he always gave to chance acquaintances. From some obscure motive of secrecy he shielded his own name, Charles. From childhood he had loved secrecy, a hiding place, the dark, but it was in the dark he had met Kite, the boy, Cubitt, the whole mob.
‘And how do you live?’ she asked cheerfully. Men always liked to tell, and she liked to hear. She had an immense store of masculine experiences.
‘Betting,’ he said promptly, putting up his barrier of evasion.
‘I like a flutter myself. Could you give me a tip, I wonder, for Brighton on Saturday?’
‘Black Boy,’ Hale said, ‘in the four o’clock.’
‘He’s twenty to one.’
Hale looked at her with respect. ‘Take it or leave it.’
‘Oh, I’ll take it,’ Ida said. ‘I always take a tip.’
‘Whoever gives it you?’
‘That’s my system. Will you be there?’
‘No,’ Hale said. ‘I can’t make it.’ He put his hand on her wrist. He wasn’t going to run any more risks. He’d tell the news-editor he was taken ill: he’d resign: he’d do anything. Life was here beside him, he wasn’t going to play around with death. ‘Come to the station with me,’ he said. ‘Come back to town with me.’
“On a day like this,’ Ida said. ‘Not me. You’ve had too much town. You look stuffed up. A blow along the front’ll do you good. Besides, there’s lots of things I want to see. I want to see the Aquarium and Black Rock and I haven’t been on the Palace Pier yet today. There’s always something new on the Palace Pier. I’m out for a bit of fun.’
‘We’ll do those and then—’
‘When I make a day of it,’ Ida said, ‘I like to make a real day of it. I told you—I’m a sticker.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Hale said, ‘if you’ll stay with me.’
‘Well, you can’t steal my bag,’ Ida said. ‘But I warn you—I like to spend. I’m not satisfied with a ring here and a shot there: I want all the shows.’
‘It’s a long walk,’ Hale said, ‘to the Palace Pier in this sun. We’d better take a taxi.’ But he made no immediate pass at Ida in the taxi, sitting there bonily crouched with his eyes on the parade: no sign of the boy or Cubitt in the bright broad day sweeping by. He turned reluctantly back, and, with the sense of her great open friendly breasts, fastened his mouth on hers and received the taste of port wine on his tongue and saw in the driver’s mirror the old 1925 Morris following behind, with its split and flapping hood, its bent fender and cracked and discoloured windscreen. He watched it with his mouth on hers, shaking against her as the taxi ground slowly along beside the parade.
‘Give me breath,’ she said at last, pushing him off and straightening her hat. ‘You believe in hard work,’ she said. ‘It’s you little fellows—’ she could feel his nerves jumping under her hand, and she shouted quickly through the tube at the driver, ‘Don’t stop. Go on back and round again.’ He was like a man with fever.
‘You’re sick,’ she said. ‘You oughtn’t to be alone. What’s the matter with you?’
He couldn’t keep it in. ‘I’m going to die. I’m scared.’
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘They are no good. They can’t do anything.’
‘You oughtn’t to be out alone,’ Ida said. ‘Did they tell you that—the doctors, I mean?’
‘Yes,’ he said and put his mouth on hers again because when he kissed her he could watch in the mirror the old Morris vibrating after them down the parade.
She pushed him off but kept her arms round him. ‘They’re crazy. You aren’t that sick. You can’t tell me I wouldn’t know if you were that sick,’ she said. ‘I don’t like to see a fellow throw up the sponge that way. It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘long as you are here.’
‘That’s better,’ she said, ‘be yourself,’ and letting down the window with a rush for the air to come in, she pushed her arm through his and said in a frightened gentle way, ‘You were just kidding, weren’t you, when you said that about the doctors? It wasn’t true, was it?’
‘No,’ Hale said wearily, ‘it wasn’t true.’
‘That’s a boy,’ Ida said. ‘You nearly had me scared for a moment. Nice thing it would have been for me if you’d passed out in this taxi. Something for Tom to read about in the paper, I’d say. But men are funny with me that way. Always trying to make out there’s something wrong, money or the wife or the heart. You aren’t the first who said he was dying. Never anything infectious though. Want to make the most of their last hours and all the rest of it. It comes of me being so big, I suppose. They think I’ll mother them. I’m not saying I didn’t fall for it the first time. “The doctors only give me a month,” he said to me—that was five years ago. I see him regular now in Henekey’s. “Hullo, you old ghost,” I always say to him, and he stands me oysters and a Guinness.’
‘No, I’m not sick,’ Hale said. ‘You needn’t be scared.’ He wasn’t going to let his pride down as much as that again, even in return for the peaceful and natural embrace. The Grand went by, the old statesman dozing out the day, the Metropole. ‘Here we are,’ Hale said. ‘You’ll stay with me, won’t you, even if I’m not sick.’