Brighton Rock (18 page)

‘I can’t help you. I don’t know anything.’

‘Let me in, dear, and I’ll explain. I can’t shout things on the landing.’

‘Why should you care about
me
?’

‘I don’t want the Innocent to suffer.’

‘As if you knew,’ the soft voice accused her, ‘who was innocent.’

‘Open the door, dear.’ She began, but only a little, to lose her patience: her patience was almost as deep as her good will. She felt the handle and pushed; she knew that waitresses were not allowed keys, but a chair had been wedged under the handle. She said with irritation, ‘You won’t escape me this way.’ She put her weight against the door and the chair creaked and shifted, the door opened a crack.

‘I’m going to make you listen,’ Ida said. When you were life-saving you must never hesitate, so they taught you, to stun the one you rescued. She put her hand in and detached the chair, then went in through the open door. Three iron bedsteads, a chest of drawers, two chairs and a couple of cheap mirrors: she took it all in and Rose against the wall as far as she could get, watching the door with terror through her innocent and experienced eyes, as if there was nothing which mightn’t come through.

‘Don’t be silly now,’ Ida said. ‘I’m your friend. I only want to save you from that boy. You’re crazy about him, aren’t you? But don’t you understand—he’s wicked.’ She sat down on the bed and went gently and mercilessly on.

Rose whispered, ‘You don’t know a thing.’

‘I’ve got my evidence.’

‘I don’t mean
that
,’ the child said.

‘He doesn’t care for you,’ Ida said. ‘Listen, I’m human. You can take my word I’ve loved a boy or two in my time. Why, it’s natural. It’s like breathing. Only you don’t want to get all worked up about it. There’s not one who’s worth it—leave alone
him
. He’s
wicked.
I’m not a Puritan, mind. I’ve done a thing or two in my time—that’s
natural
. Why,’ she said, extending towards the child her plump and patronizing paw, ‘it’s in my hand: the girdle of Venus. But I’ve always been on the side of Right. You’re young. You’ll have plenty of boys before you’ve finished. You’ll have plenty of fun—if you don’t let them get a grip on you. It’s natural. Like breathing. Don’t take away the notion I’m against Love. I should say not. Me. Ida Arnold. They’d laugh.’ The stout came back up her throat again and she put a hand before her mouth. ‘Pardon, dear. You see we can get along all right when we are together. I’ve never had a child of my own and somehow I’ve taken to you. You’re a sweet little thing.’ She suddenly barked, ‘Come away from that wall and act sensible. He doesn’t love you.’

‘I don’t care,’ the childish voice stubbornly murmured.

‘What do you mean, you don’t care.’

‘I love
him
.’

‘You’re acting morbid,’ Ida said. ‘If I was your mother I’d give you a good hiding. What’d your father and mother say if they knew?’

‘
They
wouldn’t care.’

‘And how do you think it will all end?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re young. That’s what it is,’ Ida said, ‘romantic. I was like you once. You’ll grow out of it. All you need is a bit of experience.’ The Nelson Place eyes stared back at her without understanding. Driven to her hole the small animal peered out at the bright and breezy world; in the hole were murder, copulation, extreme poverty, fidelity and the love and fear of God, but the small animal had not the knowledge to deny that only in the glare and open world outside was something which people called experience.

3

The Boy looked down at the body, spread-eagled like Prometheus, at the bottom of Frank’s stairs. ‘Good God,’ Mr Prewitt said, ‘how did it happen?’

The Boy said, ‘These stairs have needed mending a long while. I’ve told Frank about it, but you can’t make the bastard spend money.’ He put his bound hand on the rail and pushed until it gave. The rotten wood lay across Spicer’s body, a walnut-stained eagle couched over the kidneys.

‘But that happened
after
he fell,’ Mr Prewitt protested; his legal voice was tremulous.

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ the Boy said. ‘You were here in the passage and you saw him lean his suitcase against the rail. He shouldn’t have done that. The case was too heavy.’

‘My God, you can’t mix me up in this,’ Mr Prewitt said. ‘I saw nothing. I was looking in the soap-dish, I was with Dallow.’

‘You both saw it,’ the Boy said. ‘That’s fine. It’s a good thing we have a respectable lawyer like you on the spot. Your word will do the trick.’

‘I’ll deny it,’ Mr Prewitt said. ‘I’m getting out of here. I’ll swear I was never in the house.’

‘Stay where you are,’ the Boy said. ‘We don’t want another accident. Dallow, go and telephone for the police—and a doctor, it looks well.’

‘You can keep me here,’ Mr Prewitt said, ‘but you can’t make me say—’

‘I only want you to say what you want to say. But it wouldn’t look good, would it, if I was taken up for killing Spicer, and you
were
here—looking in the soap-dish. It would be enough to ruin some lawyers.’

Mr Prewitt stared over the broken gap at the turn of the stairs where the body lay. He said slowly, ‘You’d better lift that body and put the wood under it. The police would have a lot to ask if they found it that way.’ He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. ‘I’ve got a headache,’ he said, ‘I ought to be at home.’ Nobody paid him any attention. Spicer’s door rattled in the draught. ‘I’ve got a splitting headache,’ Mr Prewitt said.

Dallow came lugging the suitcase down the passage: the cord of Spicer’s pyjamas squeezed out of it like tooth-paste. ‘Where was he going?’ Dallow asked.

‘The “Blue Anchor”, Union Street, Nottingham,’ the Boy said. ‘We’d better wire them. They might want to send flowers.’

‘Be careful about finger-prints,’ Mr Prewitt implored them from the washstand without raising his aching head, but the Boy’s steps on the stairs made him look up. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked sharply. The Boy stared up at him from the turn in the stairs. ‘Out,’ he said.

‘You can’t go now,’ Mr Prewitt said.

‘I wasn’t here,’ the Boy said. ‘It was just you and Dallow. You were waiting for me to come in.’

‘You’ll be seen.’

‘That’s your risk,’ the Boy said. ‘I’ve got things to do.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Mr Prewitt cried hastily and checked himself. ‘Don’t tell me,’ he repeated in a low voice, ‘what things. . . ’

‘We’ll have to fix that marriage,’ the Boy said sombrely. He gazed at Mr Prewitt for a moment—the spouse, twenty-five years at the game—with the air of someone who wanted to ask a question, almost as if he were prepared to accept advice from a man so much older, as if he expected a little human wisdom from the old shady legal mind.

‘It had better be soon,’ the Boy went softly and sadly on. He still watched Mr Prewitt’s face for some reflection of the wisdom the game must have given him in twenty-five years, but saw only a frightened face, boarded up like a store when a riot is on. He
went
on down the stairs, dropping into the dark well where Spicer’s body had fallen. He had made his decision; he had only to move towards his aim; he could feel his blood pumped from the heart and moving indifferently back along the arteries like trains on the inner circle. Every station was one nearer safety, and then one farther away, until the bend was turned and safety again approached, like Notting Hill, and afterwards receded. The middle-aged whore on Hove front never troubled to look round as he came up behind her: like electric trains moving on the same track there was no collision. They both had the same end in view, if you could talk of an end in connection with that circle. Outside the Norfolk bar two smart scarlet racing models lay along the kerb like twin beds. The Boy was not conscious of them, but their image passed automatically into his brain, released his secretion of envy.

Snow’s was nearly empty. He sat down at the table where once Spicer had sat, but he was not served by Rose. A strange girl came to take his order. He said awkwardly, ‘Isn’t Rose here?’

‘She’s busy.’

‘Could I see her?’

‘She’s talking to someone up in her room. You can’t go there. You’ll have to wait.’

The Boy put half a crown on the table. ‘Where is it?’

The girl hesitated. ‘The manageress would bawl Hell.’

‘Where’s the manageress?’

‘She’s out.’

The Boy put another half-crown on the table.

‘Through the service door,’ the girl said, ‘and straight up the stairs. There’s a woman with her though—’

He heard the woman’s voice before he reached the top of the stairs. She was saying, ‘I only want to speak to you for your own good,’ but he had to strain to catch Rose’s reply.

‘Let me be, why don’t you let me be?’

‘It’s the business of anyone who thinks right.’

The Boy could see into the room now from the head of the stairs, though the broad back, the large loose dress, the square hips of the woman nearly blocked his view of Rose who stood back against the wall in an attitude of sullen defiance. Small and
bony
in the black cotton dress and the white apron, her eyes stained but tearless, startled and determined, she carried her courage with a kind of comic inadequacy, like the little man in the bowler put up by the management to challenge the strong man at a fair. She said, ‘You’d better let me be.’

It was Nelson Place and Manor Street which stood there in the servant’s bedroom, and for a moment he felt no antagonism but a faint nostalgia. He was aware that she belonged to his life, like a room or a chair: she was something which completed him. He thought: She’s got more guts than Spicer. What was most evil in him needed her: it couldn’t get along without goodness. He said softly, ‘What are you worrying my girl about?’ and the claim he made was curiously sweet to his ears, like a refinement of cruelty. After all, though he had aimed higher than Rose, he had this comfort: she couldn’t have gone lower than himself. He stood there, with a smirk on his face, when the woman turned. ‘Between the stirrup and the ground’—he had learnt the fallacy of that comfort: if he had attached to himself some bright brassy skirt, like the ones he’d seen at the Cosmopolitan, his triumph after all wouldn’t have been so great. He smirked at the pair of them, nostalgia driven out by a surge of sad sensuality. She was good, he’d discovered that, and he was damned: they were made for each other.

‘You leave her alone,’ the woman said. ‘I know all about you.’ It was as if she were in a strange country: the typical Englishwoman abroad. She hadn’t even got a phrase book. She was as far from either of them as she was from Hell—or Heaven. Good or evil lived in the same country, spoke the same language, came together like old friends, feeling the same completion, touching hands beside the iron bedstead. ‘You want to do what’s Right, Rose?’ she implored.

Rose whispered again, ‘You let us be.’

‘You’re a Good Girl, Rose. You don’t want anything to do with
him
.’

‘You don’t know a thing.’

There was nothing she could do at the moment but threaten from the door. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet. I’ve got friends.’

The Boy watched her go with amazement. He said, ‘Who the hell is she?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rose said.

‘I never seen her before.’ A memory pricked him and passed: it would return. ‘What did she want?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re a good girl, Rose,’ the Boy said, pressing his fingers round the sharp wrist.

She shook her head. ‘I’m bad.’ She implored him, ‘I want to be bad if she’s good and you—’

‘You’ll never be anything but good,’ the Boy said. ‘There’s some wouldn’t like you for that, but I don’t care.’

‘I’ll do anything for you. Tell me what to do. I don’t want to be like her.’

‘It’s not what you do,’ the Boy said, ‘it’s what you think.’ He boasted. ‘It’s in the blood. Perhaps when they christened me, the holy water didn’t take. I never howled the devil out.’

‘Is
she
good?’

‘She?’ The Boy laughed. ‘She’s just nothing.’

‘We can’t stay here,’ Rose said. ‘I wish we could.’ She looked round her at a badly foxed steel engraving of Van Tromp’s victory, the three black bedsteads, the two mirrors, the single chest of drawers, the pale mauve knots of flowers on the wallpaper, as if she were safer here than she could ever be in the squally summer night outside. ‘It’s a nice room.’ She wanted to share it with him until it became a home for both of them.

‘How’d you like to leave this place?’

‘Snow’s. Oh no, it’s a good place. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than Snow’s.’

‘I mean marry me?’

‘We aren’t old enough.’

‘It could be managed. There are ways.’ He dropped her wrist and put on a careless air. ‘If you wanted. I don’t mind.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I want it. But they’ll never let us.’

He explained airily, ‘It couldn’t be in church, not at first. There’d be difficulties. Are you afraid?’

‘I’m not afraid,’ she said. ‘But will they let us?’

‘My lawyer’ll manage somehow.’

‘You got a lawyer?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘It sounds somehow—grand—and old.’

‘A man can’t get along without a lawyer.’

She said, ‘It’s not where I always thought it would be.’

‘Where what would be?’

‘Someone asking me to marry him. I thought—in the pictures or maybe at night on the front. But this is best,’ she said, looking from Van Tromp’s victory to the two looking-glasses. She came away from the wall and lifted her face to him. He knew what was expected of him; he regarded her unmade-up mouth with faint nausea. Saturday night, eleven o’clock, the primeval exercise. He pressed his hard puritanical mouth on hers and tasted again the sweetish smell of the human skin. He would have preferred the taste of Coty powder or Kissproof Lipstick or any chemical compound. He shut his eyes and when he opened them again it was to see her waiting like a blind girl, for further alms. It shocked him that she had been unable to detect his repulsion. She said, ‘You know what that means?’

‘What means?’

‘It means I’ll never let you down, never, never, never.’