Brighton Rock (26 page)

But the sense of power left him. Again her passionate assent—‘You’re good to me’—repelled him.

Slumped grimly in the three and sixpenny seat, in the half-dark, he asked himself crudely and bitterly what she was hoping for: beside the screen an illuminated clock marked the hour. It was a romantic film: magnificent features, thighs shot with studied care, esoteric beds shaped like winged coracles. A man was killed, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the game. The two main characters made their stately progress towards the bed-sheets: ‘I loved you that first time in Santa Monica. . . ’ A song under a window, a girl in a nightdress and the clock beside the screen moving on. He whispered suddenly, furiously, to Rose, ‘Like cats.’ It was the commonest game under the sun—why be scared at what the dogs did in the streets? The music moaned—‘I know in my heart you’re divine’. He whispered, ‘Maybe we’d better go to Frank’s after all,’ thinking: we won’t be alone there: something may happen:
maybe
the boys will have drinks: maybe they’ll celebrate—there won’t be any bed for anyone tonight. The actor with a lick of black hair across a white waste of face said, ‘You’re mine. All mine.’ He sang again under the restless stars in a wash of incredible moonshine, and suddenly, inexplicably, the Boy began to weep. He shut his eyes to hold in his tears, but the music went on—it was like a vision of release to an imprisoned man. He felt constriction and saw—hopelessly out of reach—a limitless freedom: no fear, no hatred, no envy. It was as if he were dead and were remembering the effect of a good confession, the words of absolution: but being dead it was a memory only—he couldn’t experience contrition—the ribs of his body were like steel bands which held him down to eternal unrepentance. He said at last, ‘Let’s go. We’d better go.’

It was quite dark now: the coloured lights were on all down the Hove front. They walked slowly past Snow’s, past the Cosmopolitan. An aeroplane flying low burred out to sea, a red light vanishing. In one of the glass shelters an old man struck a match to light his pipe and showed a man and girl cramped in the corner. A wail of music came off the sea. They turned up through Norfolk Square towards Montpellier Road: a blonde with Garbo cheeks paused to powder on the steps up to the Norfolk bar. A bell tolled somewhere for someone dead and a gramophone in a basement played a hymn. ‘Maybe,’ the Boy said, ‘after tonight we’ll find some place to go.’

He had his latchkey but he rang the bell. He wanted people, talk. . . but no one answered. He rang again. It was one of those old bells you have to pull: it jangled on the end of its wire: the kind of bell that knows from long experience of dust and spiders and untenanted rooms how to convey that a house is empty. ‘They can’t ’ave all gone out,’ he said, slipped in his latchkey.

A globe had been left burning in the hall. He saw at once the note stuck under the telephone—‘Two’s company,’ he recognized the drab and sprawling hand of Frank’s wife. ‘We gone out to celebrate the wedding. Lock your door. Have a good time.’ He crumpled the paper up and dropped it on the linoleum. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘upstairs.’ At the top he put his hand on the new banister rail and said, ‘You see. We got it mended.’ A smell of cabbages and
cooking
and burnt cloth hung about the dark passage. He nodded—‘That was old Spicer’s room. Do you believe in ghosts?’

‘I don’t know.’

He pushed open his own door and switched on the naked dusty light. ‘There,’ he said, ‘take it or leave it,’ and drew aside to expose the big brass bed, the washstand and chipped ewer, the varnished wardrobe with its cheap glass front.

‘It’s better than a hotel,’ she said, ‘it’s more like home.’

They stood in the middle of the room as if they didn’t know what their next move should be. She said, ‘Tomorrow I’ll tidy up a bit.’

He banged the door to. ‘You won’t touch a thing,’ he said. ‘It’s my home, do you hear? I won’t have you coming in, changing things. . . ’ He watched her with fear—to come into your own room, your cave, and find a strange thing there. . . ‘Why don’t you take off your hat?’ he said. ‘You’re staying, aren’t you?’ She took off her hat, her mackintosh—this was the ritual of mortal sin: this, he thought, was what people damned each other for. . . The bell in the hall clanged. He paid it no attention. ‘It’s Saturday night,’ he said with a bitter taste on his tongue, ‘it’s time for bed.’

‘Who is it?’ she asked, and the bell jangled again—its unmistakable message to whoever was outside that the house was no longer empty. She came across the room to him, her face was white. ‘Is it the police?’ she said.

‘Why should it be the police? Some friend of Frank’s.’ But the suggestion startled him. He stood and waited for the clang. It didn’t come again. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we can’t stand here all night. We better get to bed.’ He felt an appalling emptiness as if he hadn’t fed for days. He tried to pretend, taking off his jacket and hanging it over a chair back, that everything was as usual. When he turned she hadn’t moved: a thin and half-grown child she trembled between the washstand and the bed. ‘Why,’ he mocked her with a dry mouth, ‘you’re scared.’ It was as if he had gone back four years and was taunting a schoolfellow into some offence.

‘Aren’t you scared?’ Rose said.

‘Me,’ He laughed at her unconvincingly and advanced: an embryo of sensuality—he was mocked by the memory of a gown, a back, ‘I loved you that first time in Santa Monica. . . ’ Shaken by
a
kind of rage, he took her by the shoulders. He had escaped from Nelson Place to this: he pushed her against the bed. ‘It’s mortal sin,’ he said, getting what savour there was out of innocence, trying to taste God in the mouth: a brass bedball, her dumb, frightened and acquiescent eyes—he blotted everything out in a sad brutal now-or-never embrace: a cry of pain and then the jangling of the bell beginning all over again. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘can’t they let a man alone?’ He opened his eyes on the grey room to see what he had done: it seemed to him more like death than when Hale and Spicer had died.

Rose said, ‘Don’t go. Pinkie, don’t go.’

He had an odd sense of triumph: he had graduated in the last human shame—it wasn’t so difficult after all. He had exposed himself and nobody had laughed. He didn’t need Mr Prewitt or Spicer, only—a faint feeling of tenderness woke for his partner in the act. He put out a hand and pinched the lobe of her ear. The bell clanged in the empty hall. An enormous weight seemed to have lifted. He could face anyone now. He said, ‘I’d better see what the bugger wants.’

‘Don’t go. I’m scared, Pinkie.’

But he had a sense that he would never be scared again. Running down from the track he had been afraid, afraid of pain and more afraid of damnation—of the sudden and unshriven death. Now it was as if he was damned already and there was nothing more to fear ever again. The ugly bell clattered, the long wire humming in the hall, and the bare globe burnt above the bed—the girl, the washstand, the sooty window, the blank shape of a chimney, a voice whispered, ‘I love you, Pinkie.’ This was hell then; it wasn’t anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room. He said, ‘I’ll be back. Don’t worry. I’ll be back.’

At the head of the stairs he put his hand on the new unpainted wood of the mended banister. He pushed it gently and saw how firm it was. He wanted to crow at his own cleverness. The bell shook below him. He looked down: it was a long drop, but you couldn’t really be certain that a man from that height would be killed. The thought had never occurred to him before, but men sometimes lived for hours with broken backs, and he knew an old man who went about to this day with a cracked skull which
clicked
in cold weather when he sneezed. He had a sense of being befriended. The bell jangled: it knew he was at home. He went on down the stairs, his toes catching in the worn linoleum—he was too good for this place. He felt an invincible energy—he hadn’t lost vitality upstairs, he’d gained. it. What he had lost was a fear. He hadn’t an idea who stood outside the door, but he was seized by a sense of wicked amusement. He put up his hand to the old bell and held it silent: he could feel the pull at the wire. An odd tug of war went on with the stranger down the length of the hall, and the Boy won. The pull ceased and a hand beat at the door. The Boy released the bell and moved softly towards the door, but immediately behind his back the bell began to clap again, cracked and hollow and urgent. A ball of paper—‘Lock your door. Have a good time’—scuffled at his toes.

He swung the door boldly open, and there was Cubitt, Cubitt hopelessly and drearily drunk. Somebody had blacked his eye and his breath was sour: drink always upset his digestion.

The Boy’s sense of triumph increased: he felt an immeasurable victory. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do
you
want?’

‘I got my things here,’ Cubitt said. ‘I want to get my things.’

‘Come in and get ’em then,’ the Boy said.

Cubitt sidled in. He said, ‘I didn’t think I’d see you. . . ’

‘Go on,’ the Boy said. ‘Get your things and clear out.’

‘Where’s Dallow?’

The Boy didn’t answer.

‘Frank?’

Cubitt cleared his throat: his sour breath reached the Boy. ‘Look here, Pinkie,’ he said, ‘you and me—why shouldn’t we be friends? Like we always was.’

‘
We
were never friends,’ the Boy said.

Cubitt took no notice. He got his back to the telephone and watched the Boy with his drunken and cautious eyes. ‘You an’ me,’ he said, the sour phlegm rising in his throat and thickening every word, ‘you an’ me can’t get on separate. Why,’ he said, ‘we’re kind of brothers. We’re tied together.’

The Boy watched him, standing against the opposite wall.

‘You an’ me—it’s what I said. We can’t get on separate,’ Cubitt repeated.

‘I suppose,’ the Boy said, ‘Colleoni wouldn’t touch you—not with a stick, but I’m not taking his leavings, Cubitt.’

Cubitt began to weep a little. It was a stage he always reached: the Boy could measure his glasses by his tears: they squeezed reluctantly out, two tears like drops of spirits oozed out of the yellow eyeballs. ‘You’ve no cause to take on like that,’ he said, ‘Pinkie.’

‘You better get your things.’

‘Where’s Dallow?’

‘He’s out,’ the Boy said. ‘They’re all out.’ The spirit of cruel mischief moved again. ‘We’re quite alone, Cubitt,’ he said. He glanced down the hall at the new patch of linoleum over the place where Spicer had fallen. But it didn’t work: the stage of tears was transitory—what came after was sullenness, anger. . . 

Cubitt said, ‘You can’t treat me like dirt.’

‘That how Colleoni treated you?’

‘I came here to be friendly,’ Cubitt said. ‘You can’t afford not to be friendly.’

‘I can afford more than you’d think,’ the Boy said.

Cubitt took him quickly up. ‘Lend me five nicker.’

The Boy shook his head. He was shaken by sudden impatience and pride: he was worth more than this—this squabble on worn linoleum under the bare and dusty globe with Cubitt. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said, ‘get your things and clear out.’

‘I’ve got things I could tell about you. . . ’

‘Nothing.’

‘Fred. . . ’

‘You’d hang,’ the Boy said. He grinned. ‘But not me. I’m too young to hang.’

‘There’s Spicer too.’

‘Spicer fell down there.’

‘I heard you. . . ’

‘You heard me? Who’s going to believe that?’

‘Dallow heard.’

‘Dallow’s all right,’ the Boy said. ‘I can trust Dallow. Why, Cubitt,’ he went quietly on, ‘if you were dangerous, I’d do something about you. But thank your lucky stars you aren’t dangerous.’ He turned his back on Cubitt and mounted the stairs. He could hear Cubitt behind him—panting; he had no wind.

‘I didn’t come here to give hard words. Lend me a couple of nicker, Pinkie. I’m broke.’

The Boy didn’t answer—‘For the sake of old times’—turned off at the bend of the stairs to his own room.

Cubitt said, ‘Wait a moment and I’ll tell you a thing or two, you bloody little geezer. There’s someone’ll give me money—twenty nicker. You—why you—I’ll tell you what you are.’

The Boy stopped in front of his door. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘tell me.’

Cubitt struggled to speak. He hadn’t got the right words. He flung his rage and resentment away in phrases light as paper. ‘You’re mean’ he said, ‘you’re yellow. You’re so yellow you’d kill your best friend to save your own skin. Why’—he laughed thickly—‘you’re scared of a girl. Sylvie told me’—but that accusation had come too late. He had graduated now in knowledge of the last human weakness. He listened with amusement, with a kind of infernal pride. The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. Cubitt couldn’t know. He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read about in books: statistics of imports and exports, tonnage and mineral resources and if the budget balanced, when all the time it was a country the stranger
knew
from thirsting in the desert and being shot at in the foothills. Mean. . . yellow. . . scared: he laughed gently with derision. It was as if he had out-soared the shadow of any night Cubitt could be aware of. He opened his door, went in, closed it and locked it.

Rose sat on the bed with dangling feet like a child in a classroom waiting for a teacher in order to say her lesson. Outside the door Cubitt swore and hacked with his foot, rattled the handle and moved off. She said with immense relief—she was used to drunken men, ‘Oh, then it’s not the police.’

‘Why should it be the police?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I thought maybe—’

‘Maybe what?’

He could only just catch her answer. ‘Kolley Kibber.’

For a moment he was amazed. Then he laughed softly with infinite contempt and superiority at a world which used words like innocence. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘that’s rich. You knew all along. You
guessed.
And I thought you were so green you hadn’t lost the eggshell. And there you were’—he built her up in the mind’s eye that day at Peacehaven, among the harvest wines at Snow’s—‘there you were, knowing.’

She didn’t deny it: sitting there with her hands locked between her knees she accepted everything. ‘It’s rich,’ he said. ‘Why, when you come to think of it—you’re as bad as me.’ He came across the room and added with a kind of respect, ‘There’s not a pin to choose between us.’