Brighton Rock (14 page)

‘I don’t mind what things cost,’ the Boy said, rattling his pockets, showing how much cash he had.

‘We might ’ave been stuck up there,’ Rose said, halting at the photographer’s kiosk, at the pictures of the bathing belles and the famous comedians and the anonymous couples, ‘next—’ and exclaimed with surprise, ‘why—there
he
is.’

The Boy was staring over the side where the green tide sucked and slid like a wet mouth round the piles. He turned unwillingly to look and there was Spicer fixed in the photographer’s window for the world to gaze at, striding out of the sunlight into the shadow under the pier, worried and hunted and in haste, a comic figure at which strangers could laugh and say, ‘He’s worried right enough. They caught
him
unawares.’

‘The one who left the card,’ Rose said. ‘The one you said was dead.
He’s
not dead. Though it almost looks—’ she laughed with amusement at the blurred black-and-white haste—‘that he’s afraid he will be if he doesn’t hurry.’

‘An old picture,’ the Boy said.

‘Oh no, it’s not. This is where today’s pictures go. For you to buy.’

‘You know a lot.’

‘You can’t miss it, can you?’ Rose said. ‘It’s comic. Striding along. All fussed up. Not even seeing the camera.’

‘Stay here,’ the Boy said. Inside the kiosk it was dark after the sun. A man with a thin moustache and steel-rimmed spectacles sorted piles of prints.

‘I want a picture that’s up outside,’ the Boy said.

‘Slip, please,’ the man said, and put out yellow fingers which smelt faintly of hypo.

‘I haven’t got a slip.’

‘You can’t have the picture without the slip,’ the man said and held a negative up to the electric globe.

‘What right have you,’ the Boy said, ‘to stick up pictures without a by-your-leave? You let me have that picture,’ but the steel rims glittered back at him, without interest—a fractious boy. ‘You bring that slip,’ the man said, ‘and you can have the picture. Now run along. I’m busy.’ Behind his head were framed snapshots of King Edward VIII (Prince of Wales) in a yachting cap and a background of peep machines, going yellow from inferior chemicals and age; Vesta Tilley signing autographs; Henry Irving muffled against the Channel winds; a nation’s history. Lily Langtry wore ostrich feathers, Mrs Pankhurst hobble skirts, the English Beauty Queen of 1923 a bathing dress. It was little comfort to know that Spicer was among the immortals.

4

‘Spicer,’ the Boy called, ‘Spicer.’ He climbed up from Frank’s small dark hall towards the landing, leaving a smear of country, of the downs, white on the linoleum. ‘Spicer.’ He felt the broken banister tremble under his hand. He opened the door of Spicer’s room and there he was upon the bed, asleep face down. The window was closed, an insect buzzed through the stale air, and there was a smell of whisky from the bed. Pinkie stood looking down on the greying hair. He felt no pity at all; he wasn’t old enough for pity. He pulled Spicer round; the skin round his mouth was in eruption. ‘Spicer.’

Spicer opened his eyes. He saw nothing for a while in the dim room.

‘I want a word with you, Spicer.’

Spicer sat up. ‘My God, Pinkie, I’m glad to see you.’

‘Always glad to see a pal, eh, Spicer?’

‘I saw Crab. He said you were at the police-station.’

‘Crab?’

‘You weren’t at the station, then?’

‘I was having a friendly talk—about Brewer.’

‘Not about—?’

‘About Brewer.’ The Boy suddenly put his hand on Spicer’s wrist. ‘Your nerves are all wrong, Spicer. You want a holiday.’ He sniffed with contempt the tainted air. ‘You drink too much.’ He went to the window and threw it open on the vista of grey wall. A leather-jacket buzzed up the pane and the Boy caught it in his hand. It vibrated like a tiny watchspring in his palm. He began to pull off the legs and wings one by one. ‘She loves me,’ he said, ‘she loves me not. I’ve been out with my girl, Spicer.’

‘The one from Snow’s?’

The Boy turned the denuded body over on his palm and puffed it away over Spicer’s bed. ‘You know who I mean,’ he said. ‘You had a message for me, Spicer. Why didn’t you bring it?’

‘I couldn’t find you, Pinkie. Honest I couldn’t. And anyway it wasn’t that important. Some old busybody asking questions.’

‘It scared you all the same,’ the Boy said. He sat down on the hard deal chair before the mirror, his hands on his knees, watching Spicer. The pulse beat in his cheek.

‘Oh, it didn’t scare me,’ Spicer said.

‘You went walking blind straight to There.’

‘What do you mean—There?’

‘There’s only one There to you, Spicer. You think about it and you dream about it. You’re too old for this life.’

‘This life?’ Spicer said, glaring back at him from the bed.

‘This racket, of course I mean. You get nervous and then you get rash. First there was that card in Snow’s and now you let your picture be stuck up on the pier for anyone to see. For Rose to see.’

‘Honest to God, Pinkie, I never knew that.’

‘You forget to walk on your toes.’

‘She’s safe. She’s stuck on you, Pinkie.’

‘I don’t know anything about women. I leave that to you and Cubitt and the rest. I only know what you tell me. You’ve told me time and time again there never was a safe polony yet.’

‘That’s just talk.’

‘You mean I’m a kid and you tell me good night stories. But I’ve got so I believe them, Spicer. It don’t seem safe to me that you and Rose are in the same town. Apart from this other buer asking questions. You’ll have to disappear, Spicer.’

‘What do you mean?’ Spicer said. ‘Disappear?’ he fumbled inside his jacket and the Boy watched him, his hands flat on his knees. ‘You wouldn’t do anything,’ he said, fumbling in his pocket.

‘Why,’ the Boy said, ‘what do you think I mean? I mean take a holiday, go away somewhere for a while.’

Spicer’s hand came out of his pocket. He held out a silver watch towards the Boy. ‘You can trust me, Pinkie. Look there, what the boys gave me. Read the inscription. “Ten Years a Pal. From the
boys
at the Stadium.” I don’t let people down. That was fifteen years ago, Pinkie. Twenty-five years on the tracks. You weren’t born when I started.’

‘You need a holiday,’ the Boy said. ‘That’s all I said.’

‘I’d be glad to take a holiday,’ Spicer said, ‘but I wouldn’t want you to think I’m milky. I’ll go at once. I’ll pack a bag and clear out tonight. Why, I’d be glad to be gone.’

‘No,’ the Boy said, staring down at his shoes. ‘There’s not all that hurry.’ He lifted a foot. The sole was worn through in a piece the size of a shilling. He thought again of the crowns on Colleoni’s chairs at the Cosmopolitan. ‘I’ll need you at the races.’ He smiled across the room at Spicer. ‘A pal I can trust.’

‘You can trust me, Pinkie.’ Spicer’s fingers smoothed the silver watch. ‘What are you smiling at? Have I got a smut or something?’

‘I was just thinking of the races,’ the Boy said. ‘They mean a lot to me.’ He got up and stood with his back to the greying light, the tenement wall, the smut-smeared pane, looking down at Spicer with a kind of curiosity. ‘And where will you go, Spicer?’ he said. His mind was quite made up, and for the second time in a few weeks he looked at a dying man. He couldn’t help feeling inquisitive. Why, it was even possible that old Spicer was not set for the flames, he’d been a loyal old geezer, he hadn’t done as much harm as the next man, he might slip through the gates into—but the Boy couldn’t picture any eternity except in terms of pain. He frowned a little in the effort: a glassy sea, a golden crown, old Spicer.

‘Nottingham,’ Spicer said. ‘A pal of mine keeps the “Blue Anchor” in Union Street. A free house. High class. Lunches served. He’s often said to me, “Spicer, why don’t you come into partnership? We’d make the old place into a hotel with a few more nickers in the till.” If it wasn’t for you and the boys,’ Spicer said, ‘I wouldn’t want to come back. I wouldn’t mind staying away for keeps.’

‘Well,’ the Boy said, ‘I’ll be off. We know where we are now, anyway.’ Spicer lay back on the pillow and put up the foot with the shooting corn. There was a hole in his woollen stocking, and a big toe showed through, hard skin calcined with middle age. ‘Sleep well,’ the Boy said.

He went downstairs, the front door faced east, and the hall was dark. He switched on a light by the telephone and then switched it out again: he didn’t know why. Then he rang up the Cosmopolitan. When the hotel exchange answered he could hear the dance music in the distance, all the way from the Palm House (
thés dansants
three shillings), behind the Louis Seize lounge. ‘I want Mr Colleoni.’ ‘The nightingale singing, the postman ringing’—the tune was abruptly cut off, and a low voice purred up the line.

‘That Mr Colleoni?’

He could hear a glass chink and ice move in a shaker. He said, ‘This is Mr P. Brown. I’ve been thinking things over, Mr Colleoni.’ Outside the little dark linoleumed hall a bus slid by, the lights faint in the grey end of the day. The Boy put his mouth close to the mouth of the telephone and said: ‘He won’t listen to reason, Mr Colleoni.’ The voice purred happily back at him. The Boy explained slowly and carefully, ‘I’ll wish him good luck and pat him on the back.’ He stopped and asked sharply, ‘What’s that you say, Mr Colleoni? No. I just thought you laughed. Hullo. Hullo.’ He banged the receiver down and turned with a sense of uneasiness towards the stairs. The gold cigar-lighter, the grey double-breasted waistcoat, the feeling of a racket luxuriously successful for a moment dominated him: the brass bedstead upstairs, the little pot of violet ink on the washstand, the flakes of sausage-roll. His board school cunning wilted for a while; then he turned on the light, he was at home. He climbed the stairs, humming softly: ‘the nightingale singing, the postman ringing’, but as his thoughts circled closer to the dark, dangerous and deathly centre the tune changed: ‘Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi. . . ’ He walked stiffly, the jacket sagging across his immature shoulders, but when he opened the door of his room—‘dona novis pacem’—his pallid face peered dimly back at him full of pride from the mirror over the ewer, the soap-dish, the basin of stale water.

PART FOUR

1

It was a fine fine day for the races. People poured into Brighton by the first train. It was like Bank Holiday all over again, except that these people didn’t spend their money; they harboured it. They stood packed deep on the tops of the trams rocking down to the Aquarium, they surged like some natural and irrational migration of insects up and down the front. By eleven o’clock it was impossible to get a seat on the buses going out to the course. A negro wearing a bright striped tie sat on a bench in the Pavilion garden and smoked a cigar. Some children played touch wood from seat to seat, and he called out to them hilariously, holding his cigar at arm’s length with an air of pride and caution, his great teeth gleaming like an advertisement. They stopped playing and stared at him, backing slowly. He called out to them again in their own tongue, the words hollow and unformed and childish like theirs, and they eyed him uneasily and backed farther away. He put his cigar patiently back between the cushiony lips and went on smoking. A band came up the pavement through Old Steyne, a blind band playing drums and trumpets, walking in the gutter, feeling the kerb with the edge of their shoes, in Indian file. You heard the music a long way off, persisting through the rumble of the crowd, the shots of exhaust pipes, and the grinding of the buses starting uphill for the racecourse. It rang out with spirit, marched like a regiment, and you raised your eyes in expectation of the tiger skin and the twirling drumsticks and saw the pale blind eyes, like those of pit ponies, going by along the gutter.

In the public school grounds above the sea the girls trooped solemnly out to hockey: stout goal-keepers padded like
armadillos;
captains discussing tactics with their lieutenants; junior girls running amok in the bright day. Beyond the aristocratic turf, through the wrought-iron main gates they could see the plebeian procession, those whom the buses wouldn’t hold, plodding up the down, kicking up the dust, eating buns out of paper bags. The buses took the long way round through Kemp Town, but up the steep hill came the crammed taxicabs—a seat for anyone at ninepence a time—a Packard for the members’ enclosure, old Morrises, strange high cars with family parties, keeping the road after twenty years. It was as if the whole road moved upwards like an Underground staircase in the dusty sunlight, a creaking, shouting, jostling crowd of cars moving with it. The junior girls took to their heels like ponies racing on the turf, feeling the excitement going on outside, as if this were a day on which life for many people reached a kind of climax. The odds on Black Boy had shortened, nothing could ever make life quite the same after that rash bet of a fiver on Merry Monarch. A scarlet racing model, a tiny rakish car which carried about it the atmosphere of innumerable roadhouses, of totsies gathered round swimming pools, of furtive encounters in by-lanes off the Great North Road, wormed through the traffic with incredible dexterity. The sun caught it: it winked as far as the dining-hall windows of the girls’ school. It was crammed tight: a woman sat on a man’s knee, and another man clung on the running board as it swayed and hooted and cut in and out uphill towards the downs. The woman was singing, her voice faint and disjointed through the horns, something traditional about brides and bouquets, something which went with Guinness and oysters and the old Leicester Lounge, something out of place in the little bright racing car. Upon the top of the down the words blew back along the dusty road to meet an ancient Morris rocking and receding in their wake at forty miles an hour, with flapping hood, bent fender and discoloured windscreen.

The words came through the flap, flap, flap of the old hood to the Boy’s ears. He sat beside Spicer who drove the car. Brides and bouquets: and he thought of Rose with sullen disgust. He couldn’t get the suggestion of Spicer out of his mind; it was like an invisible power working against him: Spicer’s stupidity, the photograph
on
the pier, that woman—who the hell was she?—asking questions. . . If he married her, of course, it wouldn’t be for long: only as a last resort to close her mouth and give him time. He didn’t want
that
relationship with anyone: the double bed, the intimacy, it sickened him like the idea of age. He crouched in the corner away from where the ticking pierced the seat, vibrating up and down in bitter virginity. To marry—it was like ordure on the hands.