‘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.
7
‘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 a 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 come after Fred’s death—Spicer and Dallow and Cubitt. Dallow was right, of course: they were safe—Spicer dead and Prewitt 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—and the prison record of 1923 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; in the wild and noisy darkness he 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 grape-fruit 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 self-starter 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 up hill 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 gaol, 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 make—rolled smoothly past them. He said, ‘What’s the hurry?’ He took his hand out of his pocket and laid on his knee a paper she recognized. 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 outdated 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 speed: 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 learnt 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 only capable 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 Frank’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 embrace, 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: pipe-dream architecture: up on the downs 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 realize 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. Siphons stood about on blue-topped tables, and on the stained-glass windows medieval 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 the upstair 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 atmospherics. 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 siphons 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,’ but then she stopped—she was in mortal sin: it was no good praying. Her prayers stayed here below with the siphons and 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 r
ain. 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 directions, 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 men 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, he would say, because 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.