‘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.
5
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 shirtsleeves. 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 call 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 Prewitt. 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’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, tied up in its complexity, uncertain who it was who had to die. . . himself or her or both. . .
‘What you want, Judy?’ Dallow said.
‘Frank’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 Frank, 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, but he was back now in his state of appalled ignorance.
‘They never work, if you ask me,’ Dallow said. ‘Colleoni written?’
‘If Prewitt 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, ‘Prewitt 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 Prewitt 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 oughter 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 an’ 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 recognized, 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. Kite 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 Frank’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 oughter 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 phoney 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 weekends 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. ‘Prewitt oughter 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 weakly. You couldn’t even blame the girl. It was life getting at you. . . there 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.’
6
Ida Arnold had had more than a couple. She sang softly to herself over the Guinness—‘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 towards her—behind him through the long glass windows of the tea-room you could see the lights of Hove; green copper Metropole domes swam 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 something-or-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 recognize. 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 well-being; 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 Prewitt 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, Ida.’
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.’