Brighton Rock (19 page)

She belonged to him like a room or a chair: the Boy fetched up a smile for the blind lost face, uneasily, with obscure shame.

PART FIVE

1

Everything went well: the inquest never even got on to the newspaper posters: no questions asked. The Boy walked back with Dallow, he should have felt triumphant. He said, ‘I wouldn’t trust Cubitt if Cubitt knew.’

‘Cubitt won’t know. Prewitt is scared to say a thing—and you know I don’t talk, Pinkie.’

‘I’ve got a feeling we’re being followed, Dallow.’

Dallow looked behind. ‘No one. I know every bogy in Brighton.’

‘No woman?’

‘No. Who are you thinking of?’

‘I don’t know.’

The blind band came up the kerb, scraping the sides of their shoes along the edge, feeling their way in the brilliant light, sweating a little. The Boy walked up the side of the road to meet them. The music they played was plaintive, pitying, something out of a hymn book about burdens: it was like a voice prophesying sorrow at the moment of victory. The Boy met the leader and pushed him out of the way, swearing at him softly, and the whole band hearing their leader move shifted uneasily a foot into the roadway and stood there stranded till the Boy was safely by, like barques becalmed on a huge and landless Atlantic. Then they edged back feeling for the landfall of the pavement.

‘What’s up with you, Pinkie?’ Dallow said. ‘They’re blind.’

‘Why should I get out of my way for a beggar?’ but he hadn’t realized they were blind, he was shocked by his own action. It was as if he were being driven too far down a road he only wanted to travel a certain distance. He stood and leant on the rail of the front while the mid-week crowd passed and the hard sun flattened.

‘What’s on your mind, Pinkie?’

‘To think of all this trouble over Hale. He deserved what he got, but if I’d known how it would go maybe I’d have let him live. Maybe he wasn’t worth killing. A dirty little journalist who played in with Colleoni and got Kite killed. Why should anyone bother about him?’ He looked suddenly over his shoulder. ‘Have I seen that geezer before?’

‘He’s only a visitor.’

‘I thought I’d seen his tie.’

‘Hundreds in the shops. If you were a drinking man I’d say what you needed was a pick-up. Why, Pinkie, everything’s going fine. No questions asked.’

‘There were only two people could hang us, Spicer and the girl. I’ve killed Spicer and I’m marrying the girl. Seems to me I’m doing everything.’

‘Well, we’ll be safe now.’

‘Oh yes,
you
’ll be safe. It’s me who runs all the risk.
You
know I killed Spicer. Prewitt knows. It only wants Cubitt and I’ll need a massacre to put me right this time.’

‘You oughtn’t to talk that way to me, Pinkie. You’ve been all bottled up since Kite died. What you want’s a bit of fun.’

‘I liked Kite,’ the Boy said. He stared straight out towards France, an unknown land. At his back beyond the Cosmopolitan, Old Steyne, the Lewes Road, stood the downs, villages, cattle round the dewponds, another unknown land. This was his territory, the populous foreshore, a few thousand acres of houses, a narrow peninsula of electrified track running to London, two or three railway stations with their buffets and buns. It had been Kite’s territory, it had been good enough for Kite, and when Kite had died in the waiting-room at St Pancras, it had been as if a father had died, leaving him an inheritance it was his duty never to leave for strange acres. He had inherited even the mannerisms, the bitten thumb nail, the soft drinks. The sun slid off the sea and like a cuttle fish shot into the sky the stain of agonies and endurances.

‘Break out, Pinkie. Relax. Give yourself a chance. Come out with me and Cubitt to the Queen of Hearts and celebrate.’

‘You know I never touch a drink.’

‘You’ll have to on your wedding day. Whoever heard of a dry wedding?’

An old man went stooping down the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food. The gulls which had stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade. The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack and a gull dropped from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half-vulture and half-dove. In the end one always had to learn.

‘All right. I’ll come,’ the Boy said.

‘It’s the best road-house this side of London,’ Dallow encouraged him.

They drove out in the old Morris into the country. ‘I like a blow in the country,’ Dallow said. It was between lighting-up time and the real dark when the lamps of cars burn in the grey visibility as faintly and unnecessarily as the night lights in nurseries. The advertisements trailed along the arterial road: bungalows and a broken farm, short chalky grass where a hoarding had been pulled down, a windmill offering tea and lemonade, the great ruined sails gaping.

‘Poor old Spicer would have liked this ride,’ Cubitt said. The Boy sat beside Dallow who drove and Cubitt sat in the dicky. The Boy could see him in the driving mirror bouncing gently up and down on the defective springs.

The Queen of Hearts was floodlit behind the petrol pumps: a Tudor barn converted, a vestige of a farmyard left in the arrangement of the restaurant and bars: a swimming pool where the paddock had been. ‘We ought to ’ave brought some girls with us,’ Dallow said. ‘You can’t pick ’em up in this gaff. It’s real class.’

‘Come in the bar,’ Cubitt said and led the way. He stopped on the threshold and nodded towards the girl who sat and drank alone at the long steel bar under the old rafters. ‘We better say something, Pinkie. You know the kind of thing—he was a real good old pal, we sympathize with what you feel.’

‘What are you clapping about?’

‘That’s Spicer’s girl,’ Cubitt said.

The Boy stood in the doorway and took her reluctantly in: hair fair as silver, wide vacuous brow, trim little buttocks shaped by the high seat, alone with her glass and her grief.

‘How’s things, Sylvie?’ Cubitt said.

‘Awful.’

‘Terrible, wasn’t it? He was a good pal. One of the best.’

‘You were there, weren’t you?’ she said to Dallow.

‘Frank ought to ’ave mended that stair,’ Dallow said. ‘Meet Pinkie, Sylvie, the best one in our mob.’

‘Were you there, too?’

‘He wasn’t there,’ Dallow said.

‘Have another drink?’ the Boy said.

Sylvie drained her glass. ‘I don’t mind if I do. A Sidecar.’

‘Two Scotch, a Sidecar, a grape-fruit squash.’

‘Why,’ Sylvie said, ‘don’t you drink?’

‘No.’

‘I bet you don’t go with girls either.’

‘You got him, Sylvie,’ Cubitt said, ‘first shot.’

‘I admire a man like that,’ Sylvie said. ‘I think it’s wonderful to be fit. Spicie always said you’d break out one day—and then—oh gosh, how wonderful.’ She put down her glass, miscalculated, upset the cocktail. She said, ‘I’m not drunk. I’m upset about poor Spicie.’

‘Go on, Pinkie,’ Dallow said, ‘have a drink. It’ll jerk you up.’ He explained to Sylvie, ‘He’s upset too.’ In the dance hall the band was playing, ‘Love me tonight, And forget in daylight, All our delight. . . ’

‘Have a drink,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’ve been awful upset. You can see I’ve been crying. Aren’t my eyes awful. . . Why, I hardly dared show myself. I can see why people go into monasteries.’ The music beat on the Boy’s resistance: he watched with a kind of horror and curiosity Spicer’s girl friend; she knew the game. He shook his head, speechless in his scared pride. He knew what he was good at: he was the top: there was no limit to his ambition: nothing must lay him open to the mockery of people more experienced than he. To be compared with Spicer and found wanting. . . his eyes shifted miserably and the music wailed its tidings—‘Forget in daylight’—about the game of which they all knew so much more than he did.

‘Spicie said he didn’t think you’d ever had a girl,’ Sylvie said.

‘There was plenty Spicer didn’t know.’

‘You’re awful young to be so famous.’

‘You and me had better go away,” Cubitt said to Dallow. ‘Seems we’re not wanted. Come an’ lamp the bathing belles.’ They moved heavily out of sight. ‘Dallie just knows when I like a boy,’ Sylvie said.

‘Who’s Dallie?’

‘Your friend, Mr Dallow, silly. Do you dance—why, I don’t even know your proper name?’ He watched her with scared lust. She had belonged to Spicer: her voice had wailed up the telephone wires making assignations: he had received letters in mauve envelopes, addressed to him: even Spicer had had something to be proud of, to show to friends—‘my girl’. He remembered some flowers which had come to Frank’s labelled ‘Broken-hearted’. He was fascinated by her infidelity. She belonged to nobody—unlike a table or a chair. He said slowly, putting his arm round her to take her glass and pressing her breast clumsily, ‘I’m going to be married in a day or two.’ It was as if he were staking a claim to his share of infidelity: he wasn’t to be beaten by experience. He lifted her glass and drank it. The sweetness dripped down his throat, his first alcohol touched the palate like a bad smell: this was what people called pleasure—this and the game. He put his hand on her thigh with a kind of horror: Rose and he: forty-eight hours after Prewitt had arranged things: alone in God knows what apartment—what then, what then? He knew the traditional actions as a man may know the principles of gunnery in chalk on a blackboard, but to translate the knowledge to action, to the smashed village and the ravaged woman, one needed help from the nerves. His own were frozen with repulsion: to be touched, to give oneself away, to lay oneself open—he had held intimacy back as long as he could at the end of a razor blade.

He said, ‘Come on. Let’s dance.’

They circulated slowly in the dance hall. To be beaten by experience was bad enough, but to be beaten by greenness and innocence, by a girl who carried plates at Snow’s, by a little bitch of sixteen years. . . 

‘Spicie thought a lot of you,’ Sylvie said.

‘Come out to the cars,’ the Boy said.

‘I couldn’t, not with Spicie dead only yesterday.’

They stood and clapped and then the dance began again. The shaker clacked in the bar, and the leaves of one small tree were pressed against the window beyond the big drum and the saxophone.

‘I like the country. It makes me feel romantic. Do you like the country?’

‘No.’

‘This is
real
country. I saw a hen just now. They use their own eggs in the gin slings.’

‘Come out to the cars.’

‘I feel that way, too. O gosh, wouldn’t it be fine? But I can’t, not with poor Spicie. . . ’

‘You sent flowers, didn’t you, you been crying. . . ’

‘My eyes are awful.’

‘What more can you do?’

‘It broke my heart. Poor Spicie going off like that.’

‘I know. I saw your wreath.’

‘It does seem awful, doesn’t it? Dancing with you like this and him. . . ’

‘Come to the cars.’

‘Poor Spicie,’ but she led the way, and he noticed with uneasiness how she ran—literally ran—across the lit corner of what had once been a farmyard towards the dark car-park and the game. He thought with sickness, ‘In three minutes I shall know.’

‘Which is your car?’ Sylvie asked.

‘That Morris.’

‘No good to us,’ Sylvie said. She darted down the line of cars. ‘This Ford.’ She pulled the door open, said, ‘Oh, pardon me,’ and shut it, scrambled into the back of the next car in the line and waited for him. ‘Oh,’ her voice softly and passionately pronounced from the dim interior, ‘I love a Lancia.’ He stood in the doorway and the darkness peeled away between him and the fair and vacuous face. Her skirt drawn up above her knees she waited for him with luxurious docility.

He was conscious for a moment of his enormous ambitions under the shadow of the hideous and commonplace act: the suite at the
Cosmopolitan,
the gold cigar-lighter, chairs stamped with crowns for a foreigner called Eugeen. Hale dropped out of sight, like a stone thrown over a cliff; he was at the beginning of a long polished parquet walk, there were busts of great men and the sound of cheering, Mr Colleoni bowed like a shopwalker, stepping backwards, an army of razors was at his back: a conqueror. Hooves drummed along the straight and a loud-speaker announced the winner: music was playing. His breast ached with the effort to enclose the whole world.

‘You’ve got the doings, haven’t you?’ Sylvie asked.

With fear and horror he thought: next move, what is it?

‘Quick,’ Sylvie said, ‘before they find us here.’

The parquet floor rolled up like a carpet. The moonlight touched a Woolworth ring and a plump knee. He said in a painful and bitter rage, ‘Wait there. I’ll get Cubitt for you,’ and turned his back on the Lancia and walked back towards the bar. Laughter from the bathing-pool deflected him. He stood in the doorway with the taste of the alcohol on his tongue watching a thin girl in a red rubber cap giggle under the flood lighting. His mind tracked inevitably back and forth to Sylvie like a model engine electrically driven. Fear and curiosity ate at the proud future, he was aware of nausea and retched. Marry, he thought, hell, no; I’d rather hang.

A man in a bathing-slip came running down the highboard, jumped and somersaulted in the pearly brilliant light, struck the dark water; the two bathers swam together, stroke by stroke, towards the shallows, turned and came back, side by side, smooth and unhurried, playing a private game, happy and at ease.

The Boy stood and watched them, and as they came down the pool a second time he saw in the floodlit water his own image shiver at their stroke, the narrow shoulders and the hollow breast, and he felt the brown pointed shoes slip on the splashed and shining tiles.

2

Cubitt and Dallow chattered all the way back, a little lit; the Boy stared ahead into the bright core of the darkness. He said suddenly with fury, ‘You can laugh.’

‘Well, you didn’t do so bad,’ Cubitt said.

‘You can laugh. You think you’re safe. But I’m tired of the lot of you. I’ve a good mind to clear out.’

‘Take a long honeymoon,’ Cubitt said and grinned, and an owl cried with painful hunger swooping low over a filling station, into the headlights and out again, on furry and predatory wings.